You can contact the Director of Graduate Studies in English, Professor Talia Schaffer at talia.schaffer@qc.cuny.edu or go to the office hours of any member of the graduate committee (list available in English department).

Students admitted in September 2004 and later must use the new requirements for the M.A. and the M.S. in Education/English. Students admitted earlier may use either the old or the new requirements. To make sure you are taking the right sequence of courses, be sure to consult the department website here

636: History of Literary Criticism

E6W2A 0663 W 6:30-8:20 RZ 308 PANDYA

This class examines the various traditions of literary criticism in the 20th century. We will pay particular attention to the question of the “minority” and the “other.” How does literary criticism approach the concept of the other? How has minority literature been theorized? What is the relationship between minority criticism and the canonical tradition of literary criticism? We will consider these questions by examining both literary and theoretical texts.

673: English Grammar

E4R2A 2096 TH 4:30-6:10 EPSTEIN

701: Seminar: Graduate Methodology

E4W2A 0671 W 4:30-6:10 KP 333 SCHAFFER

When your graduate instructors tell you to do a research paper, what do they mean and how can you do it? This course will tell you. We’ll investigate which websites are reliable, discuss how to find useful on-line resources, and explore how to find the best printed articles and books. We’ll also look at how to dig up archival treasures, taking a trip to see manuscripts and rare books in the world-famous New York Public Library. Not only will we learn how to find the right sources, we will also study how to read and use them properly. We’ll figure out what makes an article good (and how to tell if it’s good at a glance), and we’ll discuss how criticism has changed over the last few decades. Finally, we will talk about how to develop your master’s thesis. You’ll design your own research project, and also do some shorter assignments to learn how to use various research techniques. This course will prepare you for all your graduate research and help you get ready to write your thesis.

702: Methodology for Education/English Studies

E6T2A 0859 T 6:30-8:20 KP 333 SPECTOR

As a course in the aims and methods of graduate research appropriate for secondary-school teachers, _Graduate Methodology for Education Students_ will consist of a combination of research methods and literary and cultural theory, designed to introduce students to the basic topics associated with the choice of an appropriate text for the curriculum. Covering such topics as copy text, bibliography, annotations, historical context, contemporary reception, (post)modern criticism, and pedagogical suitability, the course will focus on three distinct classroom editions of the same text – Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – using two different copy texts, and each approaching the purpose and contents of the edition from a different pedagogical perspective. Course work will consist of a series of regularly spaced assignments designed to provide experience with the various tools and methodologies required for the completion of the term project – a ten-page bibliographical essay on a text – first published before 1925 – either now in the secondary-school curriculum or one which might become part of such a list.

703: Composition Theory and Literary Study

E6W2A 0681 W 6:30-8:20 RZ 224 TOUGAW

Every course invents its discipline. In the humanities, this is more true than ever in an age when new technologies proliferate genres and academic inquiry is increasingly interdisciplinary. To complicate matters, both traditionalists and progressives claim the humanities are in crisis. Student-teacher interaction is shaped by (often unexamined) assumptions about what it means to study the written word, the visual arts, artifacts, music, history, religion, or popular culture. In this course, we will use our own experiences with classrooms and educational institutions as case studies for inventing the humanities. What kinds of literacy might the humanities foster? What contributions do humanities courses offer the curriculum? What has been the traditional role of the humanities? Have the humanities become irrelevant? What kinds of teacher practices--from K-12 to universities--are enlivening the humanities? We will survey theories of pedagogy, research on writing and learning, and manifestos on the future of the humanities written by critics as diverse as Marjorie Garber, Harold Bloom, Richard Miller, Azar Nafisi, Kurt Spellmeyer, and Gerald Graff. Their diverse proposals include a return to the canon; a rejection of the canon; a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries; a re-evaluation of institutional pressures to ape the sciences; a rejection of fine points of theory in favor of bold arguments and public debates; a closer connection to the artists, movements, traditions, and texts humanities scholars study; and new training for young scholars that emphasizes writing and oratory. We'll consider their diverse proposals in order to develop our own ideas about how the humanities might foster the kinds of literacy students need to succeed in the twenty-first century. Students will contribute oral presentations, proposing classroom practices in response to course readings, detailed course proposals, and a draft and revision of a final writing project (either a manifesto or an "institutional autobiography").

E4T2A 2094 T 4:30-6:10 BURGER

In this course we will study Chaucer’s most experimental work, The Canterbury Tales. We will be reading this text in its original Middle English and the first part of the course will give some intensive attention to Chaucer’s language (and to how it differs from our own). Throughout the course, we will emphasize historical, social, and political questions. How does Chaucer represent the relations and conflicts among the various classes of late-medieval society, and what effects does Chaucer’s own class position—as bourgeois civil servant with strong ties to the aristocracy—have on the production of the Canterbury Tales? What views of gender and sexuality do the Tales present and explore? To what extent are they shaped by Christianity, and how do they represent the relation between Christianity and other systems of belief (classical “paganism,” Islam, Judaism)? How does Chaucer treat the interimplication of such categories of identity as race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality? Finally, we will consider why—of all the writers of the English Middle Ages—it is Chaucer whom we are most likely to read. What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the “father of English poetry?”

721: 17th Century Literature

E6W2A 2142 W 6:30-8:20 MAROTTA

This course will examine the development of the seventeenth century lyric from late 1590’s through the 1660’s. We will read such poets as Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Wroth, Phillips, Cavendish, Crawshaw, Vaughan, Traherne, Campion, Milton and others. Our focus shall be on how the many varieties of lyric-- love, religious, song, secular, occasional, political and neo-classical—all add to the richness of a period in which the individuated voice of the poet asserts itself within poetic discourse. Trends such as the metaphysical, neo-classical, feminist, cavalier and anti-Petrarchan will help us understand how these voices shape the lyric as a genre of both personal and artistic reflection. There will be two ten page papers required as well as active class participation.

E6R2A 0863 TH 6:30-8:20 KP 333 GEORGE

This seminar will investigate the cult of sensibility in eighteenth-century England, in particular its impact on the literature of the later part of the century. The idea of sensibility, which emphasized acute feeling, impassioned responses to literature and landscape, and a heightened sense of aesthetic beauty, pervaded British culture and was both celebrated and parodied by artists and writers of the period. Sensibility was associated with the gothic and sentimental traditions and especially with writing by women. We will focus on selected works of fiction and poetry in relation to the notion of sensibility, with particular reference to issues of gender and sexuality. Texts will include works by Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen.

724: Victorian Literature - “Victorian Empire”

E6T2A 0865 T 4:30-6:10 KP 332 MURRAY

During the Victorian era the British empire expanded to comprise more than one quarter of the territory on this earth. Approximately one fourth of the people on the planet were subject to British rule by 1890. In this class we will consider the ways in which empire affected the Victorians and their many subjects by looking at texts that produced, propagated, questioned, or resisted British rule. Paying close attention to contemporary discussions about labor, women’s rights, race, and democracy, circulated in the works of Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Engels, Darwin, and Macaulay, we will read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Elizabeth Barett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who would be King,” and Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life to think about how imperialism was experienced differently by various segments of British society. We will then consider what happens when we apply the domestic and heated discussions of worker’s rights, women’s liberation, and democracy that characterized the Victorian age to those who lived in the colonies by examining closely local responses to three nineteenth-century events that have resonance to this day: the transportation of prisoners to Australia, the rebellion of the Sepoys in India, and the operation of the Kimberly diamond mines in South Africa..

727: Contemporary Native American Novels

E6M2A 2103 M 6:30-8:20 WEIDMAN

Since the publication of House Made of Dawn, in 1968, there has been an outpouring of novels by writers drawing on their Native America heritages. In this class, we will read significant works of the last thirty-five years, discussing their blending of formal and thematic features of European and Native artistic traditions. We will set these novels in the contexts of Native American history, contemporary social, cultural and political issues, and wider theoretical discussions of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

727: Immigrant Literature

E6R2A 0626 TH 6:30-8:20 RZ 312 BUELL

In this course, we will focus on U.S. immigrant and ethnic literature against its historical and theoretical backgrounds. Readings will be drawn from a range of historical periods and from authors of a variety of different cultures of origin. A film will also be included. We will explore what it meant for different people at different times to become U.S. residents and/or citizens; what it has meant to experience in one life the intersection of two cultures; how attitudes toward immigrants in the U.S. have changed; how immigrants have changed the notion of U.S. identity; and how the very term “immigrant” has always been and still is a loaded one, an essential part of U.S. debates about power and peoplehood.

Readings may include texts like the following: Mike Gold, Jews Without Money; Pietro Di Donato, Christ In Concrete, Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior, Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow, Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories, and Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.

751: Fiction Workshop

E6W2A 0687 W 6:30-8:20 KY 283 VINTON

This class will be an in depth study in the art of fiction that explores, among other things, the intrinsic connection between character and plot, the effects of narrative and point of view choices, and the way that form informs content. Students will be expected to write two to three original pieces of fiction (short stories or excerpts of novels) along with revisions based on the class’s feedback.

Additionally there will be several writing assignments intended to help stretch and strengthen students’ fiction writing muscles and reading assignments designed to promote what writer Alan Cheuse describes as “that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the particularities of language, to the technical turns and twists of scene-making and plot, soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying the various approaches to the cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates.”

753: Poetry Workshop

E4M2A 0636 M 4:30-6:10 RZ 308 COOLEY

In this writing workshop, we will focus in particular on how the poetic “I” is constructed in order to ask: How does poetic voice sustain and structure a poem? How does voice generate vivid images? What is the relationship between a poetic and a personal voice? How is voice performative? Early in the semester, you will formulate a final project, which you will work on throughout the semester. The project might be a long poem, a thematically or formally related collection of poems, a cross-genre work, or any idea of your own devising that will also allow you to consider theoretical and practical problems of poetic form and structure. Most importantly, this project is a place for you to challenge yourself, to explore new modes and techniques of writing, and to receive comments on your work in progress from a community of other writers. There will also be substantial reading for the class, focused on a range of contemporary American poetry.

755: Drama Workshop

E6R2A 2097 TH 6:30-8:20 KP 304 SCHOTTER

759: Creative Writing Independent Project

Code 2821

The M.A. (Creative Writing) thesis project. See the Graduate Handbook for details. To register, see, phone, or email the Director of Graduate Studies: mamail@qc.edu

761: The Poetry and Poetics of Grief and Mourning: The American Experience

E6R2A 0867 TH 6:30-8:30 KP 708 ROTTENSTREICH

Over the course of the semester, we will examine the various ways American poets have articulated a response to some of those experiences that we tend to think of as ineffable, that is, as being so profound that they beggar the descriptive power of words: loss, longing, death. Beginning with Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” we will investigate the American elegiac lineage. We will explore the stylistic and thematic transformations that have taken place in this genealogy. In addition to Whitman, some of the poets we will examine include Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, May Swenson, James Schuyler, James Wright, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, and John Ashbery.

762: Drama in Theory and Practice

E6T2A 0652 T 6:30-8:20 KP 333 GREEN