*Note: This course was changed from R 5:30 to F 3:30.
Course #
Descriptions / Requirements / Instructor
ENGL 5002
Introduction to Critical Theory A broad sampling of recent critical approaches (from structuralism to queer theory), ground in selected “classic” readings from Plato to New Criticism. RequiredHoffman, A.
ENGL 5188
Postmodern Poetry: A Writing Workshop
Postmodern poetry and poetics covers the art of poetry from the 1930s right up to this nanosecond. It's an exciting realm, changing as we speak. Topics for study and writing will be drawn from the work of the Objectivists, LANGUAGE poetry and theory, elliptical poetry, hybrid texts, and other postmodern and contemporary streams. WritingKaplan, J.
ENGL 5200
Master Class: Writing Autobiography/Memoir It's been said that the memoir now has the authority once accorded to fiction. True or not, periodical publications have expanded the space they devote to personal writing, often contracting the space once accorded to the short story. It is increasingly common for fiction writers to write personal essays. This class is a workshop in the personal essay where we will spend most of our time critiquing your works in progress. Since the techniques of memoir are indistinguishable from those of fiction, we will concentrate on dialogue, exposition, scene, character, managing narrative time (past, present, future) and, most of all, the development of a persona. The course will include as models personal essays by writers such as Didion, Quindlen and Mamet, as well as by committed essayists such Sedaris. NOTE: This course is open to five undergraduate students with the instructor's permission and five graduate students for a total of ten students.
For more information on undergraduate application to the class, please click here: http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/
creative_writing/undergraduate/application_to_maste_73648.asp WritingStone, E.
ENGL 5255
Chaucer, Shakespeare & Uncertain Text
Chaucer and Shakespeare have long provided remarkable test cases for the thorniest questions of textual criticism and editorial theory. Do we aim for a text that we can vouch for the author having written, even if it seems flawed? Or do we aim for the most aesthetically pleasing text, even if there is evidence that not all of it was written by the author? Do we try to reconstruct a version that would have been known at a particular moment in history? Or do we try to present the best surviving witness without much editorial intervention, even if that witness survives only because almost no one ever read it? Is King Lear one play or two? Does the fourth fragment of The Canterbury Tales even exist? We’ll read some Chaucer, some Shakespeare, some textual criticism, some textual theory. And we’ll learn a little paleography and bibliography, so that we can try to do a little bit of all of this — editing, criticizing, and theorizing — for ourselves. British 1 Kelemen, E.
ENGL 5333
British Comedy 1660-1800 Major comic dramatists from Wycherley to O'Keeffe. Topics include: dynamic differences between plays and allied genres; comic theory; adaptation of stories developed for cynical court patrons for a newmiddle-class audience; women in the theater; critical approaches to Restoration comedy in more puritanical ages. British 2 Lamb, M.
ENGL 5343
Introduction to Shakespeare The course will trace the development of Shakespeare as a dramatist, focusing primarily on the tragedies. Among the plays covered will be Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra. British 2 Hallett, C.
ENGA 5634
Modernists/Victorians
This course examines landmarks of Victorian literature and transatlantic English modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between Vicotrian and Modernist writers. Covering major texts from the 1840s to the 1940s, the course will also consider theorectical arguments about the status of the “classic” in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity, and the classifications of “English” and “American” literature. American 2 or British 3 GoGwilt, C.
ENGL 5848
Violence & American Literature At least since Richard Slotkin's 1973 American Studies classic Regeneration Through Violence, “violence” has been a keyword in the study of American literature and culture. This course will trace a literary history of violence in 19th and early 20th-century writing, viewing violence primarily as a problem of representation. Is state-sanctioned violence
(e.g. war, Indian removal, suppression of slave revolts) represented differently than is non-state or anti-state violence (riots, strikes, lynchings)? Do collective forms of violence raise issues of literary form different from the depiction of individual violence? Is “violence” a sufficiently coherent and capacious category to cover all of these diverse practices? Readings may include some of the following: Ned Buntline (Mysteries and Miseries of New York, and/or a western dime novel); Charles Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition); Stephen Crane (“The Monster”); Anna E. Dickinson (What Answer?); Thomas Dixon (The Leopard's Spots or The Clansman); Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie); Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces); James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man); George Lippard (New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million); Herman Melville (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War; “Benito Cereno”); Frank Norris (McTeague and/or The Octopus); Walter Hines Page (The Southerner); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (The Squatter and the Don); Harriet Beecher Stowe (Dred); Frank Webb (The Garies and Their Friends). Grading will be based on in-class and on-line participation, in-class presentations, and a final research essay. American 1 Hendler, G.
ENGL 5966
Creative Online--Exploring New Media This multi-genre writing workshop will take on the website as a performance space for creative avatars. What possibilities for creative projects lie in the malleability of the Internet — its multi-directional readability and possibilities for instant gratification editing? Students will design websites, workshop website content, generate multi-media through collaborative teams and make presentations. Writing Gambito, S.
ENGL 6222
Medieval to Early Modern The recent re-naming of the Renaissance (as “early modern”) highlights the status of the medieval period as the time before modernity: before the modern subject/ individual, capitalism, nationhood, historical consciousness, secularism, etc. This break is even more noticeable when it comes to religion. Even if we might question Renaissance claims to newness, the novelty of the Reformation seems unassailable, a radical disruption of “tradition.” This course will explore theories about the divide between medieval and Reformation/ early modern (Burkhardt, Marx, Foucault, Tawney, Weber, the new historicists) as well as some of the recent questioning of this divide (Aers, Simpson, Duffy). We will read texts considered representative of their period, and those that seem to disrupt conventional ideas about medieval and Renaissance/ early modern: William Langland’s Piers Plowman , Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, selections from medieval drama, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and various writings of the Reformation. Throughout the course we will return to the question of the extent to which periodization is a useful tool in literary studies. British 1 or 2 Little, K.
ENGL 6588
18C Novels in the Making of the Mind
This course will examine early modern English literature, focusing on the relationship between philosophical theories about the mind and the rise of the psychological novel. British 2 Greenfield, S.
ENGL 6598
The Romantic City
This course revisits the familiar association between British Romanticism and the natural world, while at the same redressing a lack of attention to the urban.Traditionally, the city is associated with the twinned phenomena of industrialization and urbanization. But the urban is also the literary in an era in which the modes of production and consumption have shifted decisively toward a London literary marketplace. British 2 Zimmerman, S.
ENGL 6914
Home, Exile & Diaspora in Asian American Literature This course will survey literature from the last century or so. Possible writers include the Angel Island poets, Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Monica Sone, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Gish Jen, Chang-rae Lee, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and Jhumpa Lahiri. As a way of focusing our discussion, we will examine the proposition that Asian American literary production can be understood as an attempt to interrogate the notion of belonging and to articulate a sense of place. Due effort will be made to situate the works in their historical, critical, and theoretical contexts. American 2 Kim, J.
ENGL 6944
Literatures of Black Transnationalism
African American and Africana studies have never been confined to national borders, but how has this sense of transnationalism been reflected in the popular imaginary in the U.S., other Black diasporic sites and Africa? This course locates itself in renewed, energetic debates around contemporary and deeper histories of transnationalism and diaspora studies. We also engage the interdisciplinarity of knowledge production in these studies. British 3 Christiansë, Y.
ENGL 7522
Deconstruction & Psychoanalysis
The influence of psychoanalysis has declined in psychology but it remains strong in literary criticism and theory, in part because of poststructuralist re-readings of Freud with special reference to questions of language and of meaning. Such readings are paramount in the work of Jacques Lacan and they have a prominent place in the writings of Derrida. We will study this development principally via a reading of several seminal texts: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and Lacan’s Seminars II and VII (on the ego and on ethics). These texts will be considered both as theoretical statements and as literature in their own right. Our treatment of them will be supplemented by readings of literary texts that they themselves read, notably Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and Sophocles’ Antigone (the latter with additional reference to Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim.) Adv. Theory (Prereq. Intro. Crit Theory or DGS Waiver) Kramer, L.
ENGL 7933
Modern American Fiction
A consideration of selected modern American fictions to see what we can make of them. American 2Giannone, R.
ENGL 8935
Dissertation Writing Seminar Open to all graduate students whose proposals have been approved. Students will present work in progress. In addition, the seminar will focus on bibliographic research, and writing techniques and exercises specific to large projects. Some attention will also be given to the process of getting published. Prerequisite: Post Ph.D. Comps Hassett, C.
