English

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

This course will introduce some of the most fascinating texts of the first eight hundred years of English literature, from the period of Anglo-Saxon rule through the Hundred Years’ War and beyond—roughly, 700–1500 CE. We’ll hit on some texts you’ve heard of – Beowulf and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – while leaving time for some you may not have encountered – Marie de France’s Lais and Margery of Kempe’s Book. Along the way, we’ll also hone skills of reading, writing, and oral expression crucial to appreciating and discussing literature in nuanced, supple ways. 

If you take this course, you’ll discover how medieval literature is both a mirror and a foil to modern literature. You’ll explore the plurilingual and cross-cultural nature of medieval literary production and improve (or acquire!) your knowledge of Middle English. Plus, you’ll flex your writing muscles with two papers.

This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare through a combination of reading his plays and viewing them in performance. On the one hand, we approach each play as a written, published text: our in-class conversation consist primarily in close analysis of key passages, and, in one class period, we visit Rare Books to examine the earliest printed versions of the plays in light of English Renaissance print technology. On the other hand, we view performances of each assigned play, including the attendance as a group of at least one Shakespeare production on an NYC stage. Our semester’s through line is to trace, from his earliest plays to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s remarkable development of the techniques of characterization that have made generations of both playgoers and readers feel that his dramatis personae are so modern, real, human. We will also devote attention to exploring the value of each play in our present moment and on our local stages. We read 8 plays in all, including Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.

Walt Whitman was not the first to write about New York. But he was the first of many to let New York write him. By age 43, Whitman had composed most of his best poetry, published three editions of Leaves of Grass, and left New York only twice. How did the second son of an unsuccessful farmer, a grammar school dropout and hack writer become America’s greatest poet? This course offers a response to this perennial mystery of literary scholarship by proposing that “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” was indeed a product of his environment. Coming of age as a writer at the same time the city was emerging as a great metropolis, he received his education and inspiration from New York itself. Course time is equally divided between discussions of Whitman’s antebellum poetry, journalism, and prose (including the newly recovered Life and Adventures of Jack Engle) in their cultural and geographical contexts, and on-site explorations that retread Whitman’s footsteps through Brooklyn and his beloved Mannahatta. Experiential learning is further encouraged through assignments based in archives, museums, and at historic sites throughout the city.

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of [American] art in the last couple of decades."  The Wire combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city.  On a more macro level The Wire humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.

The Wire, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know.  But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end.  That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos.  Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order): The Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood; Madmen; and Breaking Bad.

This course will examine British women writers including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in the context of the (long-) nineteenth-century "Woman Question". Our inquiry will engage the controversy over a woman’s status in terms of the social and political debates of early feminism as well as the enigma of “woman’s nature” in light of the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the period. We will consider how women writers negotiate these current social and psychological discourses in the stories they tell about themselves and others: how do they portray a woman’s life, especially as it manifests the tension George Eliot articulates between “inward impulse and outward fact”? We will pay attention to representations of gender, subjectivity, interiority, desire, domestic affections, friendship, education, economic and professional experience, faith, and creativity as reflecting the struggle, rising influence, and emergent identity of woman. In addition to novels, poetry, and drama, we will read excerpts of critical essays from among our primary authors and other prominent thinkers of the period, such as Wollstonecraft, Martineau, Taylor Mill, and Freud, who, by the early twentieth century, still famously puzzles: “What does a woman want?”