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.

In contemporary American culture, legal practice and literary studies share a commitment to careful use of language, rigorous interpretation, and a deep and imaginative engagement with meaning. Scholars and practitioners have been debating for decades how the two practices can reinforce each other, improve each other, critique each other, and refute each other. (As this debate shows, both communities also love to argue.) In this course, we will read and discuss a classic set of literary texts that speak to certain preoccupations within the legal tradition. We will also look at certain debates and controversies within legal discourse to see how the tools and insights of literary and cultural analysis can change our perspective. We won’t be focusing on literary history nor legal doctrine – no previous knowledge of either is required. Instead, we will look at texts where shared concerns – about interpretation, about evidence, about empathy, and about justice and fairness – allow us to use both literary and legal thinking to advance our own understanding of these ongoing debates.

How should we write the literary history of the 1990s—the decade in which history briefly died, the Internet arrived, and everything became “global”? The central gamble of this class is that the 1990s are now far enough away from us in time that a new sort of cultural and historical perspective is becoming possible. What kind of critical judgments can we make about the literature of the 1990s and how confident can we be about our objectivity? Can we identify trends that emerged, or ended, in the period? What body of texts, or group of authors or forms, should we use in writing the literary history of the 1990s – and what criteria should we use for their selection?

Our class meetings will feature extended discussion of significant literary works published in Britain and the US during the 1990s. Authors include major poets and novelists from the period: Thom Gunn, Harryette Mullen, Cormac McCarthy, Hanif Kureishi, Toni Morrison, W. G. Sebald, and Anne Carson. Literary discussion will be mixed with readings from criticism (academic and popular), literary theory, and literary sociology. Students will complete a variety of assignment types, including book reviews, short in-class essays, bibliographic projects, and creative options.

This seminar has two central goals: first, to teach you how to write a clear, indeed eloquent essay, a skill that will prove useful throughout your life.  Second, to read some of the greatest (or most interesting) examples of the literary genre of memoir, with the goal of creating at the end of the course a memoir (of some aspect of your life) that responds to the history of the genre (second goal) and is well written (the first).   

The seminar will read excerpts from Augustine, Cellini, Montaigne, Rousseau, Casanova, Wollstonecraft, Proust, Jacobs, Arenas, Erneaux, Lous, Knausgaard, Sebald, and Ferrante.   We will analyze the memoirs in terms of the creation, and transformation, of the genre of autobiography, and its relation to the novel form.   And as we shift from one assignment to other, more complex ones, we will emphasize clarity of expression as the beginning of a personal style.  

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.

Yaddo is an artists community located in Saratoga Springs, New York.  In the words of John Cheever, “the forty or so acres on which the studios and principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts that any other piece of ground in the English speaking community.”  Cheever, however, also described Yaddo’s menagerie of creatives as a group of, “lushes down on their luck, men and women at the top of their powers, nervous breakdowns, thieves, geniuses, cranky noblemen, and poets who ate their peas with a knife.”  In total this makes for spectacular drama.  

Historically speaking Yaddo is an idealized synergy of Gilded Age gender roles and is best understood as ½ Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park (“the Menlo Park factory was a loud, rowdy, and raucous place full of nightly sing-alongs around a large organ, gaming, practical jokes, and midnight feasts”) and one half Settlement House (a space where American women, “expropriated the previously male world of literature and the arts as their own, feeling they possessed a special humanistic sensitivity which provided an alternative to the acquisitive and the competitive goals of men in an industrializing America.”).   

Yaddo’s guest list is a “whose who” of American Art and letters.  We will, however,  study Yaddo as a compelling introduction to the shifts, evolutions, and challenges to American art across the 20th century; including: the study of politically radical art during the 1930s and a remarkable study of Cold War era political threats to American creativity with a special focus on the Lavender Scare. 

Because The Yaddo Records (Yaddo’s archive) are at NYPL, and because I served as project archivist for these records we will also spend a day at NYPL that will include introduction to Yaddo’s archive specifically but also to archives more generally.  Finally, we will be visited (either in person or online) from a variety of Yaddo alum who will share their experiences and impressions and answer student questions etc.

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?”