English Department Course Descriptions Fall 2008

Fall 2008 Undergraduate (for graduate courses click here)

ENG 11-1 Survey of British Literature I (WAC)
Margaret Hallissy
This course introduces students to the major authors of British literature from the earliest Anglo Saxon poetry to the eighteenth century. Students will read and discuss works by such writers as Geoffrey Chaucer, the Wakefield Master, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Webster, John Donne, and John Milton. We will concentrate mainly, but not exclusively, on poetry and drama and will discuss each writer in terms of the social and cultural values of the time period in which the work was written. This course fulfills the requirements of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program.

ENG 11-2, -3 Survey of British Literature I
Edmund Miller
This is the first half of a year-long survey of British literature. Students will read major works and become familiar with the literary and historical forces shaping the development of the national literature. They will learn to identify key genres in this development, including epic poetry, lyric poetry, drama, and satire. Although the Old English works will be read in translation, the course will explore the difference between the poetics of Old English literature and that of later English literature. There will be an introduction to Middle English language through a reading of two Chaucer tales in the original language. Authors studied will probably include Cædmon, the Beowulf poet, the Pearl poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, the Wakefield Master, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope.

Text: Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. I. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN 0-393-92531-5

ENG 21-1 Shakespeare Comedy and History
James Bednarz
What made William Shakespeare the greatest writer in the English language? This course attempts to answer this question by providing an introduction to Shakespeare’s early career that focuses primarily on the two important genres (comedy and history) he perfected during his first decade of involvement with London’s thriving commercial theater. Its sequence of readings (which consists of seven plays) is arranged chronologically to demonstrate the continuing evolution of his dramaturgy from his earliest apprenticeship to his remarkable commercial success in the Elizabethan period. Its broadest aim is to provide students with a theatrical, literary, philosophical, historical, and social framework for understanding Shakespeare’s comedies and histories in relation to both their original context and to our own contemporary perspectives as readers. It will explore, on its most abstract level, how Shakespeare became relevant both to his own age and for all time by analyzing the complexities of human identity and the forms theater employs to represent it. To this end, readers will be not only invited to examine the brilliant nuances of his language, characterization, and plot, but also be challenged to come to terms with a Shakespearean worldview that defies ordinary logic and reason to trace the subtle contradictions of the human condition.

ENG 30-1 Grammar and Usage (WAC)
Richard McNabb
This course will examine the systematic nature of the rules of grammar, using both prescriptive and descriptive grammars. Topics will include defining grammar, sentence patterns, expanding sentence patterns and style, word classes, parts of speech, usage, and diction.

ENG 42-1 Art of Autobiography
Suzanne Nalbantian
This course examines the art of autobiography in a comparitist context from its origins in St. Augustine's Confessions to recent expressions in such a work as the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's Aké: The Years of Childhood. In tracing the landmarks of this genre, we will read such works as Cellini's Life, Franklin's Autobiography, Rousseau's Confessions, Gosse's Father and Son, Sartre's The Words, and Anaïs Nin's early diary Linotte. Paradigms are studied as they emerge in the evolution of the genre. Standards of authenticity and that "they claim" are also evaluated. Various critical approaches are considered with respect to the genre of "life-writing" along with the different cultural contexts which have affected its development.

ENG 44-1 Post-Colonial Literature (WAC)
John Lutz
Through a close reading of both European and non European literary and theoretical works, this course will explore the central economic, political, and psychological problems engendered by the period of colonization. Issues addressed in the class will include: the impact of colonialism upon the psyches of colonizer and colonized alike, the debate between essentialist and non essentialist theories of cultural identity, the representation of colonized cultures in European consciousness along with post colonial literary and philosophical challenges to those representations, the instrumental role of paradigms of masculinity and femininity in patterns of colonial domination, the interrelationship between racist, sexist, and economic forms of oppression, and the issue of cultural authenticity as it relates to language and emergent post colonial identities. Authors covered in class will include: Achebe, Roy, Rushdie, Armah, Ngugi, Ousmane, and Salih.

ENG 48-1 Freak Show in America
Thomas Fahy
This course will examine freak shows as literary metaphors in twentieth century America. We will look at novels, short fiction, photography, and films that use freak shows as essential thematic tools for raising questions about the ways society interprets bodies and difference (physical, racial, gender). What does it mean to put bodies on display for their physical or racial otherness? What compels us to stare? What social and personal needs are being negotiated in these exhibits?

We will also look at the ways disabled bodies have been socially constructed as something freakish. How, for example, does society rely on “difference” to define normalcy? In the 1930s and 1940s, the grotesque and freakish can be seen as reflecting cultural and social anxieties about the Depression (poverty, unemployment, and hunger). And in many ways, we can interpret disabled and grotesque bodies in works of this period as critiques of the American Dream.

Finally, we will conclude the course by considering the metaphoric use of freak shows at the end of the twentieth century. What cultural and social evaluations are being made through freak imagery in these works? How are the images different from those of the 1930s and 1940s? What do these things say about contemporary American society?

Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, William Gresham, Nathanael West, Elizabeth McCracken, and Katherine Dunn are authors likely to be covered.

ENG 61-1 Modern British Literature
Jonna Semeiks
In our reading of various British novels, plays, and poetry written between 1899 and 2002, we will be looking for the emergence near the beginning of the last century of a distinctly modern experimentation with some of the traditional components of literature–the use of myth, the rendering of consciousness, the reordering of form, particularly in the work of the great modernists like Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. The art produced during this period is rich, provocative, and challenging. Curiously, much of it seems as if it might have been written yesterday. As we read, these are some of the themes we will explore: the value of the past and the collapse of traditional sources of meaning and authority; changing gender roles; the bitter legacy of World War I (the first war of mass destruction) in both poetry and fiction; sex as a liberating–yet sometimes destructive–force; and the brutal exploitation that colonialism and capitalism engendered. In all of the work, we can see both the terror and excitement of change, the shock of the new.

ENG 71-1, -2 Major American Writers I
Arthur Coleman
A survey of American Literature from the Colonial Period to the mid-nineteenth century. While the works of minor figures such as Irving, Cooper, and Longfellow are studied, the emphasis will be on the major figures of the period, including Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman.

ENG 73-1 African American Literature
Sheila McDonald
This is a survey course in African American Literature. We begin with Negro Spirituals, Gospel, The Blues, Jazz, and Sermons. The Literature of Slavery is next, followed by Reconstruction, The Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism. Writers include Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Jamaica Kincaid, August Wilson, and Toni Morrison.

ENG 81-1 Creative Writing I
Dan Levin
Geared toward the dynamics of the short story and poetry, this course requires regular submission of original material and of reviews of other students’ work. Writing is commented on in the workshop class by both peers and instructor—with a view to helping the writer and with a view to developing the critical abilities of class members. There will be additional reading assignments in the genres.

ENG 83-1 Creative Non-Fiction (WAC)
Wendy Ryden
This course will introduce participants to the personal essay and other genres of creative nonfiction. Students will read essays and study theory about these genres to help them produce their own writing for workshop critique and to become effective critics of others' work. Requirements include submission of a final portfolio of writing, completion of weekly writing and reading assignments and small group presentations.

We will begin by exploring questions such as the following. What is the essay? How do its open ended form and exploratory principles distinguish it historically from other types of writing, such as the academic, thesis driven article? What cultural niche does the essay fill? What kind of knowledge does it produce? What historical/cultural conditions gave rise to the form? Where does the personal essay intersect with other types of non fiction life writing that rely on personal narrative and the creation of a credible first person persona?

After this introduction, the class will focus on student writing. Students will learn how to respond productively in a workshop environment to each other’s writing; how to pose questions as well as receive commentary that can lead to worthwhile revision. Students will also apply their new found knowledge of the genre in order to select and present professional essays to the class for discussion.

ENG 85-1 Disciplinary Literacy in the English (WAC)
John Lutz
In this course we will explore the basic elements that contribute to insightful scholarship. Drawing mainly on book length sources and the MLA International Bibliography, we will examine various critical methods for approaching the required texts. For each research paper you will be expected to create an annotated bibliography and present some of your research to the class. Throughout the course, we will discuss how to apply various methods of analysis to the explication of literary texts, the basic features of clear and effective writing, and effective methods of research. This course will approach the close reading of literary texts through a detailed examination of the tools of serious literary analysis and emphasize the process of writing, rereading and revision as central to the construction of a well researched work of literary analysis.

ENG 100-1 American Colonial Literature
John Scheckter
This course examines writing in America before 1800 (roughly the period between the European “discovery” and the first products of an officially independent United States). We will examine the written evidence to find who the settlers were, what they expected or wanted or demanded, how they reacted to what they found, and what models of expression they developed to record their experiences. Readings will emphasize the variety of viewpoints that described America life and the terrific energy that writers brought to their tasks; Puritans, Quakers, farmers, soldiers, grandmothers, disgruntled Natives, greedy adventurers, and confused explorers all get their say here. We will also examine critical models of interpretation in both historical and contemporary forms. No prerequisites; two papers and one exam.

ENG 100-2 Small World: Literature of the Academic Life
Margaret Hallissy
Borrowed from the title of a novel by David Lodge, the title of this course captures its focus on the college campus as microcosm. The life of the university is often contrasted with “real” life, the world to which students will graduate when they earn their degrees. For professional academics, however, the world of the campus is the real world; and for the students who pass through this world, its reality shapes their life for four years, and possibly for a lifetime. This course examines the academic life as it is depicted in literature. The works chosen will examine the way in which the university setting functions in various literary genes at various periods in history, but with special emphasis on the late twentieth century. The students and professors who populate these pages will enable the students enrolled in the course, and their professor, to engage in a discussion of their common enterprise: living and working, whether for four years or a whole career, in the universe of college. Pre requisites: ENG 303/304 or equivalents.

ENG 100-3 Telling Nature’s Story: Natural History Writing
Joan Digby
From the earliest sacred texts describing the origins of the world, there has always been an impetus to tell the story of life on earth how the world was formed, what species it contains, how they are older and what the ultimate meaning of nature might be.

Conducted in seminar format, this course will be sectioned into two essential components: Reading and Writing.

Section A. Students will read key selections from a history of Natural History writings. The course will begin with the ancients (including Aesop, Pliny, Aristotle and Virgil), move through the landmark authors including Darwin, Gilbert White, Audubon, Rev. Wood, and arrive at important contemporaries such as Rachel Carson, George Schaller, David Attenborough, Peter Mattheissen, Gerald Durrell, Farley Mowat, and Carl Safina. There will also be some selections from fiction writers. Selections will be short and focused, concentrating on the interpretation of various aspects of nature through history.

Section B. Students will write about nature from experience. Each student in the seminar will choose a natural place. This might be as close as a segment of campus, a back yard, a local beach or a city park. It might also be one of the many Nature Conservancy places on Long Island. The student will keep a journal of observations about plants, birds and other wildlife. Field guides will help the student learn the species and learn how to observe and record like a naturalist. Based on journal observations, students will write essays, stories, poetry as they choose, with Nature as the theme. Those who draw or do photography will be encouraged to illustrate their work. Particular individual interests in aspect of nature will be encouraged as topics for original work.

ENG 100-4 Bodies on Display: Perspectives on the Body in American Culture since 1820
Thomas Fahy
This course seeks to explore some of the rich historical materials treating aspects of the human body as it has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and objectified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine some key primary works, fiction, film, photography, and a selection of interpretive studies that consider the social and cultural construction of bodies in America. The readings in this course are intended not to add up to some neat thesis but to raise questions of interpretation and meaning. From the history of blackface minstrelsy and freak shows to more contemporary displays of female and male bodies, these readings—both primary and secondary—will challenge us to think about some of the forces that have shaped—and continue to shape—the ways in which we think about the body.

Required Texts:
Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995)
Wesley Brown’s Darktown Strutters: A Novel (1994)
Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988)
Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005)
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
John Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in American (2000)
David M. Lubin’s Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (2003)

ENG 101-1 Internship
Staff
Career-oriented course with placement and supervised work in a professional setting in law, publishing, public relations, or the like to provide direct practical experience in the application of skills from academic course work. Independent study, not a regular classroom course. Prerequisite: nine-credits of upper-level English. A student will usually be a participant in the COOP Program who has completed EEE-1. A student must arrange through the Department Advisor to work with a particular faculty member before registering for this course.

ENG 351-1 Edward Albee
Phyllis T Dircks
A study of the major works of one of America’s greatest living playwrights, three time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee. Since the production of “The Zoo Story” in 1959, Edward Albee has created excitement and controversy on stage. His audiences are captivated by his sophisticated characters, witty dialogue and comedy that borders on absurdity. Yet his plays challenge cultural icons such as romantic love and dignified dying. He has also probed the values of suburban living, the problems posed by the elderly, and the trials faced by both children and parents in the family structure, all done with a nimble sense of comedy. The course will consist of discussions of selected works, viewing them from both a dramatic and theatrical perspective. Readings will include “The Zoo Story,” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Women, and The Goat.

Pre requisites: ENG 303 304, ENG 11 12 or ENG 7 8

ENG 353 Literatures of Africa
John Lutz
The decolonization of Africa was accompanied by the development of a diverse body of national literatures focused upon the struggle for liberation from European control as well as the problems engendered by political independence. These national literatures frequently address the destructive legacy of colonialism even as they present tangible alternatives for a renewal of African culture and society. Through a close reading of several novels representative of distinct African cultures in confrontation with English, French, and Belgian imperialism, we will explore the struggle of former colonies to rediscover their cultural roots and assess the far reaching impact of colonial domination on African lives. Issues addressed in the class will include: the impact of colonization on the psyche of Africans, the interrelationship between racist, sexist, and economic forms of oppression, the issue of cultural authenticity as it relates to language and emergent post colonial identities, the role of political resistance in constructing new cultural forms and communities in the wake of colonialism, and the persistence of various forms of neo colonialism in African societies.

Fall 2008 Graduate Courses

ENG 510-1 Research and Criticism
Thomas Fahy
Special Topic: Understanding Horror in Art and Culture
Why do we enjoy being scared? What attracts us to the disturbing and horrifying? How can we be frightened by something that we know is false? Or, as Stephen King puts it in his nonfiction study Danse Macabre, “why are people willing to pay good money to be made extremely uncomfortable?” These types of philosophical questions have been raised since gothic fiction laid the foundation for the horror genre in eighteenth-century England. Many scholars consider Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) the starting point of horror. Along with the works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, these writers established the conventions that continue to shape horror fiction, film, and television. This course will investigate the philosophical themes and underpinnings of this genre. In addition to studying several novels and films, we will also read a range of criticism that explores the impressive scope and versatility of horror itself: philosophy, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, queer theory, film studies, and literary and cultural studies. Some of the texts include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.

ENG 512 Descriptive Linguistics
Richard Auletta
This course will provide an introduction to descriptive linguistics (structural) linguistics using English as a model and various other languages for comparison. The goal of the course is to describe the structure of language on three levels: phonological, morphological, and syntactical. There will be an outline of the sound system of English with a study of the speech organs and an inventory of the phonemes (minimum units of sound). There will also be a survey of the system of morphemes (minimum units of meaning) and a description of the syntax (sentence structure and word order).

ENG 531-1 Theories of Academic Literacy
Belinda Kremer
Intended for graduate students working in the Writing Center and as fellows in the WAC Program, this seminar focuses on alternative theories of reading, writing, and literacy to prepare writing tutors. The course will also examine definitions of intellectual work in various disciplines as well as the literacy needs of students from a range of cultures, language backgrounds, and life experiences.

558-1 Irish Renaissance
Margaret Hallissy
Writing in the early twentieth century, social and literary critic Douglas Hyde observed that “the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it. How can it produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is actuated by motives so contradictory?” The movement now called the Irish Literary Renaissance is an attempt to resolve that contradiction; its goal was to question the influence of English literature on Irish writers, and develop a specifically Irish literature for an independent Irish nation. This course will be a study in cultural context of the major Irish writers involved: John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. Regular attendance, class participation, a final examination, and a research paper are required.

Readings will be chosen from the following texts:
Harrington, John P., ed. Modern Irish Drama. Norton Critical edition. ISBN 0393960633.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Viking Critical Library edition. ISBN 0140247742.
—. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Viking Critical Library edition. ISBN 01401155031.
Pethica, James, ed. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical edition. ISBN 0393974979.

ENG 643-1 Shakespeare
James Bednarz
The subject of this term's course will be "Shakespeare as Poet and Playwright." Although, Shakespeare's greatest work is usually thought to be his dramas and especially his tragedies, he achieved some of his brilliant writing in poetry. In fact, The Sonnets remain his most popular work, with more copies sold than any other of his creations. Indeed, his drama is saturated with all kinds of poetic forms, from elegant sonnets to bawdy songs. Our goal will be to explore the way in which Shakespeare's genius as a lyric and narrative poet complemented his skill as a dramatist. We will, accordingly, look at a wide range of his works, including Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, "The Phoenix and Turtle," and The Sonnets as well as Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale to examine the interweaving of these two imaginative and formal modes-lyric and drama-throughout his career. We will also consider the way in which his popularity generated a counterfeit collection, called The Passionate Pilgrim, that was published under his name in 1598/99 and corrected by England's Helicon during the following year. These works, will in turn, be read with reference to some of the work of his greatest contemporaries, such as Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Marston, Ben Jonson, and John Donne.

684-1 Hawthorne and James
Dennis Pahl
In this course, we will examine two major American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, writers whose works have much in common despite the fact that James attempts to mark out his own place within American literary history—a place quite different from the position of his most important literary precursor. In the first half of the class, we will read Hawthorne's work, starting with The Scarlet Letter, the story of an independent woman, Hester Prynne, trying to live within the oppressive confines of Puritan America. How, we will ask, does this novel speak to Hawthorne's own era in the middle of the nineteenth century, the era of Transcendentalism and early feminism? What kind of freedom is possible within the moral constraints of American society? Such questions lead to the issues dramatized in The Blithedale Romance, a novel that depicts experiments in communal living and in establishing a new morality outside the world of convention. In addition to reading these works, we will also examine a wide selection of Hawthorne’s most important short stories, which, blending history and romance, have implications for Hawthorne’s aesthetics as well as for his development of fiction portraying what James called the “deeper psychology.” In the second part of the course, we will read James’s Daisy Miller (a re writing of Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”), The Portrait of a Lady (where we meet a more sophisticated, more worldly version of Hester Prynne), and such other of James’s works of fiction as resonate with the life and writings of Hawthorne (for example, Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and The Aspern Papers). Along the way, we will look at James’s critical study Hawthorne, a work in which he pays tribute to Hawthorne’s early influence while trying to indicate more cosmopolitan directions for American literature (the “international novel”) and for his own brand of realism. This critical work, as well as James’s essay on the "art of fiction," will force us to consider questions about the profession of writing in America, about how authors en gender themselves (defining themselves in masculine or feminine terms), and about the degree to which American writing is socially conscious and engages the problems of history. These and other issues will be addressed through close readings of texts, and therefore students are encouraged to purchase the editions of the books that have been ordered through the bookstore. Class format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: two short papers, one longer research paper, some in class writing or take home questions for reflection, a final exam, regular attendance.

ENG 688-1 Erotica
Deborah Lutz
The representation of sexuality has almost always been caught up in politics. In our study of erotic poetry and prose from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will be attentive to themes of religion, gender, class, and race. We will trace the intertwining of sexuality with other intense experiences and emotions, such as spirituality, death, pain, and love. We will explore how and why sexual development became so enmeshed in identity formation, especially in the female erotic Bildungsroman so popular today (such as The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and The Surrender). While we will cover heterosexual "classics" (Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita) we will move beyond to non heteronormative works: gay, lesbian, bi , trans , and the unclassifiable. Other class texts will include prose by Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Jeannette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Pat Califia, and poetry by John Keats, Michael Field, A.C. Swinburne and D.G. Rossetti. There will be a short essay, a long essay, and a final exam.

ENG 688-2 Mythology
Wendy Ryden
This course will acquaint students with various approaches to myth (including the popular, literary, psychological, folkloric, and anthropological) and the theoretical conflicts and overlaps that exist among disciplines. Students will examine past and current trends in the study of mythology and consider the relevance of myth for ancient as well as contemporary peoples.

The study of myth is an international and interdisciplinary endeavor that has produced controversy with regard to what myth is and how or why it should be studied. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to this eclecticism and to trace the shift in theoretical orientation from the nineteenth century preoccupation with origins to the twentieth century concern over metaphoric content, structure and function. Selected myths, legends, and folktales, from within and outside of the Indo European group (including South Pacific and Native American), will be encountered as these issues are considered. To begin, the course will assume the familiar Jungian “archetypal” approach as popularized by Campbell and others and then, as students gain familiarity with their subject, will progress to other lesser known academic perspectives, including those inimical to Jung’s concepts, such as Malinowski’s functionalism and the performance oriented analysis of folklorists.