ENGLISH ELECTIVES
BARUCH COLLEGE
SPRING 2013
Survey of EnglishLiterature I
English 3010
Prof. L. Silberman
Mon/Wed 9:30AM-10:45PM / Find out what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. See how Satan first became a glamorous anti-hero. In this course, we will be reading representative works of English literature from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Other readings will include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Talesthe romantic, the bawdy, and the moral--one of the plays of Shakespeare, a Renaissance epylliona short, erotic narrative--and selected Renaissance love lyrics. There will be two short, critical essays, a midterm and a final exam
Survey of English Literature I
English 3010
Prof. J. Keiser
Mon/Wed 7:30-8:45PM / This course examines English literature from its earliest manifestation in the great epics of the eighth century to the rise of the novel in the early eighteenth century. Along the way we’ll encounter a dragon, a knight who happily cuts off his own head (and then reattaches it), a talking rooster, a king and his fool, a strangely heroic Satan, a love poem about a flea, and a race of super-intelligent horses bent on eradicating the human race. We’ll try to understand how magic and monsters persist in an increasingly rational world. We’ll consider the wit and wisdom of drunken, debaucherous, foolish, and mad characters. We’ll pay close attention to representations of sexuality and gender in courtly love poems, and we’ll carefully survey debates about national identity and the necessity for revolt. We’ll try to figure out how humans relate to the natural world and to other kinds of animals. Readings will include Beowulf, selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a play by Shakespeare, parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Haywood’s Fantomina and poems by Sidney, Donne, Marvell, Rochester, and Pope.
Survey of English Literature II
English 3015
Prof. G. Hentzi
Mon/Wed 11:10AM-12:25PM / This course offers an overview of more than three centuries of English, Irish, and Commonwealth literature in the major genres of fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry, and drama. Beginning in the Restoration, we will also read characteristic works from the eighteenth century, the Romantic and Victorian eras, the Modern period, and the second half of the twentieth century. Authors to be studied include John Dryden, William Congreve, Alexander Pope, Edward Gibbon, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Alan Hollinghurst, and Zadie Smith.
Survey of English
Literature II
English 3015
Prof. B. Gluck
Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM / This course surveys the development of English literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It will focus on themes such as the innocence – and misery – of childhood, the formation and growth of a person’s identity, and the often tortured relationships between men and women. Included are authors who revel in the real world (Charles Dickens, GreatExpectations) and those who create their own realm of Gothic science fiction (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein); the visionary and rebellious Romantic poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats); and modern writers who rejected conventional values in experimental literary forms (William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). Films will be shown when appropriate.
Survey of American Literature I
English 3020
Prof. S. Eversley
Mon/Wed5:50-7:05PM / The literature produced in the decades leading up to the U.S. Civil War represents some of the most compelling critiques, celebrations, and debates surrounding the ethics and ideals that many consider essential to the making of the United States. We will begin with the first colonists and Puritanism, manifest destiny, and then on to the American Revolution and its founding documents up to the Civil war. We will study the emergence of many of America’s defining myths and themes to explore the nation’s quest for a uniquely American individual, American ethics, and American destiny. The emphasis in this course will be the major writers of the 19th century: Hawthorne, Douglass, Twain, Melville, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickenson, Emerson and Whitman.
Survey of American Literature II
English 3025
Prof. T. Aubry
Tue/Thu9:30AM-10:45 PM / This course surveys American Literature from the Civil War to the present. We will examine how the literature of this period reflects and respond to major historical and social developments, including industrialism, urbanism, war, economic depression, racial tension, bureaucratization, the breakdown of traditional sex and gender norms, and technological innovation. We will examine naturalist, realist, and modernist literary techniques and the various artistic and political purposes they served. Among the authors we will study will be Twain, DuBois, Gilman, Wharton, Hughes, Hurston, Stevens, Faulkner, O’Connor, Plath, and Morrison.
Contemporary Literature from Asia, Africa, and Latin America
English 3030
Prof. E. Chou
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45PM / We hear a lot these days about the world being a smaller place, but does this mean that we automatically know more about the world? What role can literature play in understanding the difference and richness of world cultures? Does reading world literature provide alternative perspectives about how to comprehend globalization at this time? This course aims to present a variety of recent writing from the perspective of an emerging global culture. Much of our reading will be concerned with what a global culture might mean. Is it just “writing from other parts of the world,” or does it refer to a certain kind of exotic otherness (outside the United States)? By coming to terms with the different permutations of cultural globalization for contemporary literature from Asia, Africa, and Latin America we will begin to fathom why world literature provides some of the most exciting and provocative writing available today. There will be a minimum of three writing assignments, one of which will be in class. There will be plenty of reading and lively class discussion in abundance.
Our main text will be Biddle et al., Global Voices (Prentice Hall, 1995). Other texts will include: Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, Zoe Wicomb’s David’sStory, Maryse Conde’s Crossing the Mangrove, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind. All of these books should be available at the Baruch College Book store.
English Voices from Afar: Post-Colonial Literature
English 3036
Prof. P. Hitchcock
Tue/Thu 11:10-12:25PM / This course examines literary works written in English in regions other that Great Britain and the United States, namely Africa, Australia, South Asia, Canada, and the Caribbean Islands. The focus is on different genres produced in the post-colonial period including works by such writers as Nuruddin Farah, Nadine Gordimer, Chris Abani, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Timothy Mo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jean Rhys, and Paule Marshall.
Survey of Caribbean Literature in English:
Caribbean Classics
English 3038
Prof. K. Frank
Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM / A "classic" serves as a standard of excellence and recognized value, and is considered authentic, enduring, and historically memorable, among other things. In this course, we will focus on some Caribbean literary classics by writers such as Peter Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Sylvia Winter. Do these classics represent authentic Caribbean people and experiences, or do they perpetuate myths or fantasies about the Caribbean and Caribbeanness not unlike those readily available from more popular Caribbean cultural productions such as reggae-dancehall and soca music? Do they inscribe historically memorable and valuable characters and themes that help us understand better today's Caribbean (place and people, the latter both at home and abroad)? In addition to novels, we will explore these matters by reading "classic" Caribbean essays, listening to and/or watching videos of some "classic" Caribbean music, and we will likely watch one "classic" Caribbean film.
Literature for Young Adults
English 3045
Prof. E. Dimartino
Mon/Wed 9:30-10:45 AM / Young adult literature includes books selected by readers between the ages of 12 and 18 for intellectual stimulation, pleasure, companionship and self-discovery. In this exciting course we will be reading literature that addresses the complexities and conflicts confronting adolescents during their journey to adulthood. Students will read fiction and nonfiction selections that deal with such themes as adapting to physical changes, independence from parents and other adults, acquiring a personal identity and achieving social responsibility. There will be ample opportunity to analyze and evaluate literary selections pertinent to the lives of young adults.
Topics in Politics and Literature: The Rhetoricof War
English 3201
Prof. C. Mead
Tue/Thu 7:30-8:45PM / This course will employ a combination of literature, nonfiction, and film to examine the language of the “war on terror,” and the way that rhetoric has been used to justify the global counter-terrorism offensive as a response to 9/11. We will discuss, in particular, how language has been used to manipulate public anxiety about terrorist threats to gain support for military action. Along the way we will visit such issues as: the rise of Al Qaeda; violence as a means of political change; and American foreign policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. The goal is to develop a shared understanding of our decade-long war against terrorism and its impact on American society.
Among the authors we will read are Lawrence Wright, George Orwell, Jane Mayer, Dexter Filkins, and George Packer.
Film and Literature
Hard-boiled Fiction and Film Noir
English 3270
Prof. C. Taylor
Tue/Thu 9:30AM-10:45AM / In the early 1930’s, a darker, leaner prose emerged on the American landscape. It evoked an underbelly of corruption and greed. Its heroes hardly seemed heroic at all. In this course, we will examine the writing and the films of the 1930’s through the 1950’s that created a new American idiom and a uniquely American art form. We will be reading and discussing authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson and David Goodis. We will also view a number of film noir classics and discuss their roots in German Expressionism.
Documentary Film
English 3280
Prof. C. Rollyson
Wed/Fri 1:15-4:35PM / What is the truth-value of documentaries? This is the basic question explored in this course through examining the genre’s historical development and the social and political activism of filmmakers. The filmmakers covered in this course include the Lumiere Brothers, Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Frank Capra, Humphrey Jennings, Jill Craigie, Michael Moore, and other contemporary directors of documentaries.
Workshop: Playwriting
English 3630
Prof. S. Tenneriello
Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 / The class is a workshop in playwriting. At its core, we will practice sequential exercises that help you learn the fundamentals of playwriting and develop a one-act play. We will practice creating characters, developing story or plot, dramatic conflict, and writing theatrical dialogue. In a highly participatory and collaborative setting, you will routinely receive peer feedback and support. Our focus will engage in-class writing, readings of assignments, and examination of well-known plays to gain understanding of the emotional and physical components of writing for live performance.
The Craft of Poetry: Form and Revision
English 3645H
Prof. G. Schulman
Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05PM / Although this is the second of two poetry courses offered here, you may enroll in it without having had the other. Here you will be learning about form in poetry -- from the line to the stanza and beyond. You will be writing in freer forms and in set forms such as sonnets, villanelles, haiku. You will be learning how major poets, from William Shakespeare to Elizabeth Bishop, and from Robert Frost to Gwendolyn Brooks, write in such a way as to convey their thoughts and loves and passions. If you love good books, if you enjoy reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dickinson, if you have ever been moved or disturbed or frightened by the sounds of the language, if you have wanted to write but can’t get started, this course is all yours.
You will be practicing revision, which is at the heart of writing poetry. You will be sharing your poems with the class in a workshop, and soon you will be sharing your feelings in ways you never thought possible. You will be learning to use language in ways that will convey your wishes, fears, and dreams.
Your instructor, Grace Schulman, Distinguished Professor at Baruch, is a poet whose latest book of poems is The Broken String and whose latest prose collection is First Loves and Other Adventures.
If you have passed English 2150 or 2800/2850, you are eligible to enroll in this course. Poetry 3640 is not required. Departmental permission is not required.
Advanced Essay Writing
English 3680Prof. C. Smith
Wed 6:05-9:05PM / This course focuses on style in writing: what it is and how to get it. We will read the work of professional writers and discuss what kinds of choices they make and why. Who’s the intended audience of a piece? What’s its purpose? What kind of mood is the author trying to create? After discussing the choices writers make, students will have the chance to experiment with different options to develop their own distinctive writing style(s). Students will compose short pieces on topics of their choice that they will share with one another and the professor and, over time, develop into longer, more complete works. We will mostly write creative non-fiction essays (we will study and discuss this genre in class), but students are free to choose their own topics and write to any intended audience. Classes will be part lecture on issues of style, including sentence and paragraph construction, repetition, voice and tone, showing vs. telling, metaphor, humor, irony, vividness, and rhythm; part discussion of passages by major American essayists such as Thoreau, Twain, Hughes, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Walker, Didion, Tan, and Dillard; and part workshopping of student writing.
Literature and Psychology
English 3730Prof. E. Kauvar
Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM / Have you ever wondered what makes someone so enraged that someone else ends up dead? Do you speculate about the reasons why two people are attracted to each other? Do you question why families end up the way they do? When you read a story, have you ever tried to figure out why you dislike it? Whether we read to escape, to discover, or even to fulfill requirements, we have a purpose, a motive, and more than likely some expectations. Both psychology and literature are windows into human behavior. English 3730 examines the similarities and differences between literary and psychological treatments of various major human motivations and conditions. Which method--psychology or literature--is the most accurate way to explain human behavior? A major objective of this course is to analyze and interpret literature in the light of psychological theories of personality and human development. Our goals will to be to gain a deeper understanding of psychological theories of personality and development and to discover how these theories provide the reader insight into literary works. Our reading will range from Freud’s case histories and other more contemporary psychologic theorists to contemporary writers like the Japanese writer Murakami.
The Structure and History of English
English 3750Prof. Dalgish
Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM
Contemporary Drama: The New Theatre
English 3780Prof. H. Brent
Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05PM / What is misleading about advertising like "Campbell soup has one-third less salt"? How about "This car is engineered like no other car in the world"? What are characteristics of female speech that distinguish it from those typical of men's speech? How do we form new words in English, and where do they come from? How does a word get in the dictionary?
Are the "p" sounds in the words "pot," "spot" and "sop" really the same? Why can we say "whiten," "blacken," "redden," but not "*bluen?" Why does "New Yorker" (= a person from New York) sound correct, while "*Denverer" (= a person from Denver) does not? How many verb tenses are there in English: 3, 12, more, fewer?
Which should we say: "between you and I" or "between you and me"? How about: "She dated the man whom you ditched," or "She dated the man who you ditched"? Is there a rule in English not to end a sentence with a preposition? Or is that a rule up with which we should not put? English spelling seems different from Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Swahili, etc. For instance, in those languages, "a" is almost always pronounced the same way. Yet in English "a" is pronounced differently in each of these words: lame, pad, father, tall, many, above. Why are those languages so regular and English irregular?