Fall 2021 Undergrad Courses

During the Fall 2021 semester, different courses may be taught in-person, online, or as a hybrid of both. Please consult the online class schedule to confirm the teaching method for the classes you intend to take.

Gateway Course Required for the Beginning Major

Engl 25000
Introduction to Literary Study
       22809            sec. C                 Daniel Gustafson                     M, W 11:00 – 12:15pm
       22909            sec. M               Gordon Thompson                   T, TH 11:00 – 12:15pm
       22831            sec. S                Tyson Ward                               T, TH 5:00 – 6:15pm
       

This course offers an introduction for beginning English majors to the practices and concepts in the study of literature. We will think carefully about literature as a form of representation – about what literary texts mean as well as how they mean. The course will help students to develop a critical vocabulary and method for reading and writing about literature, as well as introduce them to the cultural contexts and backgrounds of various literary traditions. Our readings will explore a variety of genres and styles – short fiction, the novel, narrative poetry, lyric poetry, and forms of drama. Above all, this is a class in reading and (frequent) writing which will emphasize close reading techniques, interpretive approaches, the making of arguments, and the development of individual critical voices in order to prepare students to succeed in advanced English elective courses.

       22796            sec. D                   Harold Veeser                        M, W 12:30 – 1:45pm

  Introduction to Literary Study is intended as a Gateway course for English Majors. As such, it seeks to provide Literature and Creative Writing majors with a basic frame of knowledge that will enable them to read other works intelligently and a basic conceptual vocabulary in which to write about writing. Introducing you to this basic framework is the learning objective of the course. The course is also attractive to non-English majors, who are very much welcome.
Everyone will have to write four two-page papers: these will make up 40 points of your course grade. Your weekly quizzes will make up 20 points of your course grade. In addition, everyone will have to write during each live Zoom meeting (one meeting weekly), and these writings will make up 20 points of your course grade. The final examination will make up the remaining 20 points of your course grade.

Literature Courses
200- Level courses

Please note: These 200-level courses are designed to introduce beginning students to literary history, critical approaches, and formal terminology. They typically have a minimum of 3-5 shorter assignments, a variety of in-class writing tasks, and assume no prior background in the discipline. For this reason, majors are not permitted to take more than four (4) 200-level classes.

Engl 26102
Studies in Genre: Novel
46485                   sec. C                     Robert Higney                      M, W 11:00 – 12:15pm

“I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think.” –Teju Cole, author of Open City (2013). Novels are at the center of English-language literary culture and have been for over two hundred years. But why is this the case? Where does the novel as an art form come from, how has it developed, and how can we approach novels critically and better understand how they affect us? And what exactly is a novel? This course will begin to answer these questions through a set of novels primarily from the English tradition spanning the 17th century to the present day. The course is bookended by two very recent works, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2013) and NW by Zadie Smith (2012). In between, we’ll go back to the origins of the English-language novel, reading Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to see some of the founding issues of the form and the historical “rise of the novel.” From the 19th century, we’ll read Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (1813) with an eye to the development of the novel’s heroine and Austen’s innovations in narrative style (and watch screen adaptations). Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway returns us to London in the 20th century, raising questions about how novels represent memory and the passage of time along with violence and mental illness. Throughout the course, we will work to develop a critical vocabulary for discussing novelistic character, narration, plot structure, themes, symbolism, and other aspects of the form. And if, at the course’s conclusion, we still aren’t sure what to think about some of the problems the novel form raises, we will hopefully have made progress in how to think about it.

Engl 26106
Shakespeare’s Othello
38859                   sec. P                      Andras Kisery                     T, TH 2:00 – 3:15pm

This class is devoted to Othello, the Moor of Venice, one of the most widely known works of English literature. In addition to reading and discussing Shakespeare’s play in detail, we will explore the world of the theater it emerged from, the ideas that informed it, and we will also be looking at how ideas about religion, gender, race, and politics were changing the way people understood, debated, adapted Othello through the ages. The class can serve as an introduction to studying Shakespeare. 

Engl 27010
Literature of Diversity: Troubled Ecologies in Literature of the Americas
45896                   sec. D                  Kedon Willis                            M, W 12:30 – 1:45pm

This course surveys writers of different cultural backgrounds throughout the Americas to examine their portrayal of the natural world. The promise of new land was a key factor in European conquest of the so-called New World. This lure of terra nullius (nobody’s land) eventually gave rise to nature writings variously evoking the Americas as boundless, Edenic, awesome and transcendental. For Indigenous, enslaved and indentured populations, however, these lands were also sources of bondage or violent dispossession. This course therefore sets out to ask: what is the language of the landscape within the works of Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous writers conscious of this history? How do notions of the idyllic collide with realities of coerced labor and exile? And how do contemporary writers frame the ecological disasters that pose heightened risks to island and coastal territories? As a class, we will survey poems, shorts stories, novels and non-fiction excerpts moving us from the colonial period into the present and allowing us to visit locations throughout the American continent and the Caribbean. Possible writers include Olaudah Equiano, Gabriel García Márquez, Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison and Rita Indiana. Expect a number of short written assignments and quizzes in response to readings.                                                                                   

300- Level Courses

Please note: 300-level classes assume some background and prior experience at the 200-level. Students should complete two 200 level courses before embarking on 300 level work; however, they may register for a single 300 level course if they are still completing 200 level requirements. Generally, these classes require two shorter essays and one longer assignment or final paper involving research or reference to secondary materials.

ENGL 31173
Culture of Resistance in New York
Cross-listed with JWST 31713
47413                   sec. P                     Elazar Elhanan                        T, TH 2:00 – 3:15pm

From 1880 to the 1920 over two million Jewish immigrants arrived in New York from Eastern Europe. Faced with terrible conditions of exploitation and nativist racism, these immigrants created a rich and unique culture of resistance. Through this culture, expressed in their own language, Yiddish, they coped with the shock of immigration, with the reality of poverty, sweatshops, crime and discrimination they found in the “Golden Land”, and called to task the American Dream itself.                            

ENGL 31869
Dueling, Gambling and Love Affairs: Masterpieces of Russian Literature
52788                   sec. H                       Anna Linetskaya                         M W 6:30 – 7:45pm

An ambitious engineer, eager to gamble while avoiding risk, sells his soul to the devil for the secret of three magic cards. A clever womanizer challenges his friend to a duel because a young lady has shown him preference. A man pursues his runaway nose through the streets of St. Petersburg to find that it has transformed into a highly ranked official. A young noblewoman abandons her husband and son to run away with her lover. The devil and his retinue visit 20th century Moscow and wreak havoc upon the officials that govern its institutions while helping a writer and his beloved muse. These and other stories from the classics of Russian literature will inform and delight you, illustrate the nuances of their cultural and historical contexts, and explore broad social and psychological issues. The course will offer a survey of the most beloved canonical exemplars of 19th and 20th century Russian literature, focusing on texts by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, among others, in their broader social, artistic, and intellectual context. By the end of the term, you will have a sense of the overarching narrative of Russian literary history, uncover why Russian literature gained such popularity and became a formative influence in the West, discuss the major themes and questions that preoccupied Russian writers, and discover what these literary masterpieces can still teach us today. No knowledge of Russian required.

Engl 31951
High School in Film and Literature
22880                   sec. M                 Chester Kozlowski                      T, TH 11:00 – 12:15pm

Cliques, kings and queens, staying late for detention: the hierarchies established in high school resonate throughout our adult lives. This course examines their origins and shifting social motifs by screening movies set in high school and the books from which they are adapted. Films range from the classic (“Blackboard Jungle” 1955) to the lighthearted (“Clueless” 1995) to the dark (“Elephant” 2003) and cast a critical eye on an essential adolescent American experience. This is a literature class as well: expect quizzes and term papers.​

Engl 34200
Advanced Grammar
22825                   sec. G                     Nicole Treska                       M, W 5:00 – 6:15pm
22837                   sec. S                      Nicole Treska                       T, TH 5:00 – 6:15pm

Advanced Grammar reviews principles of traditional English grammar and usage (parts of speech, sentence structures, punctuation, pronoun/verb form/agreement, etc.) for English majors and minors, especially for those who plan to teach or work as tutors or editors.  It is not a remedial course for non-majors who struggle with writing problems, though many non-majors take it.  There is a custom-published workbook for the course and used copies of it are not allowed.

Engl 35200
Representative British Writers of the Middle Ages
22865                   sec. T                  Paul Oppenheimer                  T, TH 6:30 – 7:45pm

Essential to English majors, but hardly only to them, this course introduces students to the most important and exciting medieval English authors who continue to exert powerful influences on literature, thought, culture and history straight into modern times. The exploration considers four major themes: those of ordered versus disordered worlds, of feminism versus anti-feminism, of sex and love, and evil versus salvation. All sorts of good stories, including folk tales, lyric and narrative poetry, and the medieval drama will be explored from stylistic and social points of view, with the student invited into alien yet strangely familiar and fun ways of seeing the modern world while acquiring a solid foundation for understanding later, and particularly Elizabethan, Romantic and modern literature. Texts include the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, various medieval mystery and allegorical plays, poems by the medieval English mystics, and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. – Two essays, one relatively short, the other longer.

Engl 35302
Shakespeare II
49113                   sec. B                    Estha Weiner                        M W 9:30 – 10:45am

Shakespeare II is a survey of Shakespeare’s later plays, beginning with Measure For Measure, a “problem comedy,” bursting genre boundaries, as all his genres defy boundaries. We’ll continue to three of his major tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, and, finally, to one of his finest romances, The Tempest.

The class will focus on Shakespeare’s language, on its physicality, as well as the physicality of his theatre, in light of the prevailing ideas and politics, secular and religious, in Early Modern England. We will never lose sight of his necessity to “put on a show.” We will always read the plays aloud, and students will memorize a monologue or scene of their choice to present. Some critical readings and movie viewings will illuminate our work: occasional in- class questions, short essays, the mid-term memorized pieces, and a final project chosen by each student, in consultation with the professor.​

Engl 35408
Love in the Time of Dragons
49996                   sec. D             Mark-Allan Donaldson               M W 12:30 – 1:45pm

This course will seek to familiarize students with the tremendous impact of the concept of love during and following the Middle Ages. It will begin with a look into C.S. Lewis’ argument in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936) that the focus on love popularized in the courtly romances of the 11th and 12th centuries was a more impactful ideological shift in human thought than that of the Renaissance. Once the course has built an understanding of love within this context, it will look at some of the most famous examples of the tradition across the medieval world: the potion induced affair of Tristan and Isolde; the Persian romance of Vis and Ramin; and the tortuously split desires of Lancelot as he struggles between his love for Arthur and Guinevere; and the sometimes satisfying, sometimes horrifying relationships of Marie de France. The class will compare the differences and similarities of these relationships as well as contrast them to famous relationships which precede the period (Penelope and Odysseus, Pyramus and Thisbe) and succeed it (Romeo and Juliet) to consider what elements of love captivate and endure, and what impact the medieval texts have had on our own culture. It will look at the relatable and the absurd aspects of love both within historical and contemporary contexts. The course will also look at the plight of the lovers, their emotional torture, and the necessary isolation of a courtly romance which has become even more relevant in a world where many have and are experiencing isolations of their own.
Aside from the primary materials the course will also utilize film and music to ensure that students become familiar with analyzing different media and have ample opportunities to pursue topics which interest them.
Tentative Texts:
Full Texts for students to procure
Tristan
Arthurian Romances
Vis and Ramin
The Lais of Marie de France
Partial Texts (scanned and uploaded to BB)
The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
The Odyssey
Metamorphosis
Romeo and Juliet ​

Engl 36200
Representative US Writers of the 20th Century
22821                   sec. R                      Keith Gandal                       T, TH 3:30 – 4:45pm

This course explores American literature during the course of what has been called “the American Century.”  W.E.B. Du Bois declared that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of race, and we can affirm that claim while adding some supplementary problems that have shaped American literature since 1900: the problems of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability.  The course will attempt to revise our traditional understandings of modernist and postmodern literature, based on an examination of America’s internal developments and rise to world prominence with the World Wars.
Tentative Reading List:

            F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
            Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
            Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (novella)
            Victor Daly, Not Only War (novella)
            Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
            Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land
            Michael Herr, Dispatches
            Toni Morrison, Sula
            Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
            Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
            Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks

Engl 36406
American Literature and Its Appearances
44956                   sec. E                    Joshua Barber                        M, W 2:00 – 3:15pm

In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared America to be “a poem in our eyes” that “will not wait long for metres,” giving voice to the idea—still reverberating today—that there is something poetic about the idea of America. In another of his essays, to this end, he calls for American writers to establish “an original relation to the universe” through “a poetry … of insight and not tradition.” Taken together, Emerson’s lines describe a vision for American literature in which American writers not only find new and “American” ways of writing literature but, furthermore, use literature to inspire new and more ethical ways of living in the so-called “New World.” But what place is there in American literature for those who suffered and continue to suffer from the New World project to speak to the full reality of America’s poetic ideals? This course introduces students to major figures in the American literary tradition: some who are blinded by America’s surface appearance and some who do everything in their literary power to address this blindness. Students in this course will consistently ask what makes a work of literature “American,” considering how different writers called “American” have used literature as a means of describing how America appears from their perspective as well as how America ought to be. Students who complete this course will have the tools to write fluently about different figures and genres in American literature as well as the space and time to compare representative works of American literature to the America that appears in their own eyes. 

Engl 37506
Maternal Narratives
44951                   sec. C                      Destry Sibley                       M, W 11:00 – 12:15pm

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that maternity is “a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.” In this course we will explore that strange compromise through the nonfiction literature of motherhood, focusing especially on 20th- and 21st-century American essays and memoirs. We will pay particular attention to how writers have rendered the complexity, ambivalence, and contradictory nature of motherhood and the narratives that surround it. How have authors depicted in language what some have felt to be the indescribable? How have they fulfilled or resisted the ideologies and mythologies ascribed to the mother figure? What does it mean to queer the maternal? Such are just some of the questions we will consider. Primary texts may include selections from works such as The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Sister/Outsider by Audre Lorde, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and others, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille Dungy, Motherhood by Sheila Heti, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil by Lezley McSpadden (the mother of Michael Brown), and Breathe: A Letter to my Sons by Imani Perry. 

400-Level Courses

Please note: 400-level courses are designed for students who have completed at least two classes at the 300-level. Longer essays which involve research and work with secondary materials are typically required at the conclusion of the semester; and students are also expected to demonstrate their familiarity with a range of methodological approaches and critical perspectives.

Engl 46801
Global Autobiography
40173                   sec. E                     Harold Veeser                      M, W 2:00 – 3:15pm

This course offers an introduction to the life writing in a global frame. We will read a sampling of popular memoirs, recovery narratives, ethnic-identity stories, substance-abuse sagas, trauma memoirs, conversion narratives, and coming-of-age stories. Most of these required readings will be drawn from non-U.S. traditions and will include writings by memoirists from the Caribbean, the Middle East, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. You will complete the writing requirement by writing in response to prompts about the weekly required readings. The prompts will allow for experiments in criticism and memoir.

These courses are strongly recommended upon completing 24 credits in the major and can only be registered with an English Advisor.

Engl 49004
The Faust Legend
40168                   sec. 4PR               Paul Oppenheimer                TH 2:00 – 4:00pm

Few figures in Western literature have attracted as much continuous interest from as many important writers, artists, composers and film-makers as that of Doctor Faustus, the mysterious sixteenth-century physician and necromancer whose legendary pact with the devil granted him superhuman powers.  Starting with the earliest published version of the story, the famous Faust book dating from 1587 in Frankfurt (also available in translation), the course will explore strikingly different treatments of Faust’s career by Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, and the conflicting views of humanity’s relations to nature and the divine implied by their masterpieces.  Also investigated will be the influence of the Faust story on writers as diverse as Byron, Carlyle, Dostoyevski, Pushkin, Hawthorne, Paul Valéry, and Lawrence Durrell.  Films such as Mephisto, Hanussen, and Bedazzled, which approach the story and its motif of the devil pact in modern ways, will be considered and, where possible, shown; operatic and other musical treatments will be considered, along with the Faust legend’s impact on painting.

Engl 49016
Global Modernisms
40145                   sec. 3FG                   Vaclav Paris                      W 3:30 – 5:30pm

Modernism is the drive to find new ways to represent the world in line with the new ideas, new conditions, and new technologies associated with late modernity. Typically studies of modernism concentrate on its supposed emergence in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Such studies describe, for example, how Virginia Woolf’s narrative method in Mrs Dalloway (1923) responds to the discovery of shellshock during World War I (1914-1918). As recent scholars of the “new modernist studies” have shown, however, modernism emerged in many places and at various moments: it was always a global phenomenon. Modernism—or rather, modernisms—can be found in multiple cultural contexts. In this capstone seminar, we will explore some of the diversity of these modernisms. We will look at radical works that respond to the major changes of the 19th and 20th centuries by writers, artists, poets, filmmakers, and theorists from Harlem and Paris, Brazil and Japan, Russia, Africa, and elsewhere. By reading these works side by side we will also think about what they share. Our aim, in this way, is to come to a better understanding of our modernity as made up of many aspects: multifaceted yet also singular.

Engl 49025
Bible, Myth, and Contemporary Fiction
38864                   sec. 2NP                 Mark J. Mirsky                    TU 1:00 – 3:00pm

This undergraduate class will begin by reading several of the earliest text of antiquity that ask questions about life and death, questions which occur in contemporary fiction as well. We will read contemporary fiction in parallel with the “classics” mentioned below.

Texts on Creation, Death and Justice
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Benjamin R, Foster editor, Norton Critical editions
Pages from Hesiod: Creation of the World, xerox
From The Old Testament, Genesis: Creation, pages on the expulsion from Paradise, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the crucifixion of Jesus from The New Testament, Book of Matthew. Download the King James Bible on the Project Gutenberg web site. In contemporary fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, “The Gospel According to Mark.”
The Re-telling of the Flood in Kaballah and in a contemporary text, Fiction 64, Pages 193-205

Texts on Justice and Punishment in the World, and The World Beyond
The Book of Job, Edward Greenstein’s translation, Yale paperback or Kindle edition
Franz Kafka, The Trial, Breon Mitchell Translation, Schocken Books, Kindle edition
Homer, The Odyssey, Books (chapters) 6 to 12), Richmond Lattimore translation, Kindle edition
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex [pdf]
Max Frisch, Homo Faber
Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Texts on Justice in the Recent Past
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Stories and narratives on the Boundary between the Real, the Surreal and the Magical
Donald Barthelme, “A Shower of Gold”; Jorge Luis Borges“The Aleph,” “The Circular Ruins”; Flannery O’Connor,“A Good Man is Hard to Find”; “ Isak Dinesen, “Sorrow Acre”; Cynthia Ozick, “The Pagan Rabbi”; Mark Mirsky, Dante, Eros and Kabbalah, Syracuse University Press.​

Creative Writing Courses

Engl 22000
Introduction to Creative Writing
22824                   sec. B                   Shamecca Harris                    M, W 9:30 – 10:45am
22823                   sec. F                     Salar Abdoh                          M, W 3:30 – 4:45pm
22829                   sec. R                  Kayle Nochomovitz                 T, TH 3:30 – 4:45pm

While studying various forms of creative writing, emphasis will be placed on the creative process of writing while encouraging students to find their writing voice.

22819                   sec. T                      Keith Gandal                       T, TH 6:30 – 7:45pm

Students in this course will begin to learn the art of writing and rewriting stories, poems, and one-act plays.  The requirements include participation in the writing workshop, weekly writing assignments, peer reviews of other students’ work, a presentation, a short story, a poem, a short one-act play, and a final exam. 
Tentative texts:
            Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry and Other Stories
            Daniel Halpern, ed., Plays in One Act
            Joel Conarroe, ed., Six American Poets
            Collection of short stories – in a reader

Engl 22100
Prerequisite: English 22000
Intermediate Creative Writing: Reading as Writers
22808                   sec. F                      Estha Weiner                       M, W 3:30 – 4:45pm

Reading and Writing go together.  This Intermediate Creative Writing class, Reading as a Writer, links reading and discussing poems, short fiction, and drama with improving your own writing in those three genres.  You will read the texts as readers and writers, becoming more aware of the tools of each genre, as you do so. 
In addition to the readings, our one required text is the aptly titled, Reading Like a Writer, by the aptly named, Francine Prose. The readings should act as a catalyst/prompt for your own work. Be prepared to discuss them.  Then comes presentation of your own first drafts in a workshop format, culminating in a final manuscript, and a required Reading Day.  If we are able to workshop or privately meet about your final drafts, we will.  And, of course, attend as many on-line, or, when possible, in-person readings as you can, within the College community or wherever, whenever!

22792                   sec. M                 Peter Jones                               T, TH 11:00 – 12:15pm

This intermediate creative writing workshop focuses on the continued improvement of student writing through reading and discussing models in literature.  These may include poems, short stories, essays and plays.  The emphasis of the course is on reading texts as writers, and discussion of craft, based on the work of a few published authors considered in-depth.  It operates with the belief that writers must read deeply and extensively in order to hone their work.

Engl 23000
Prose Writing Workshop
22811                   sec. E                  Benjamin Swett.                        M, W 2:00 – 3:15pm
22794                   sec. L                   Brendan Costello                       T, TH 9:30 – 10:45am
22795                   sec. R                     Laura Yan                               T, TH 3:30 – 4:45pm

In this course prose will be explored through the study of nonfictional works such as critical texts, memoirs and various forms of essay writing. The course will include two major papers assigned. There will be reading and consideration of the strategies of established writers in the genre. Students may also be expected to write and revise several short papers, while receiving critiques from and responding to the works of their peers in the class.

Engl 32000
Prerequisite: English 22100
Workshop in Fiction
22884                   sec. E                  Stewart Sinclair                         M, W 2:00 – 3:15pm
22885                   sec. G                  Noelle Nagales.                          M, W 5:00 – 6:15pm
22798                   sec. M                  Felice Neals                                T, TH 11:00 – 12:15pm         

This workshop is designed for students seeking a launch pad and a community for writing fiction. It is only to be taken by those who have already completed English 220 and 221 — Intro. and Intermediate Creative Writing. Students will read a range of texts over the course of the semester using the critical vocabulary of the craft. This includes: characterization, point of view, point of entry, dialogue, pace, setting, tone, structure, and ending. There will be regular brief in-class writing exercises during the first half of the semester, as well as longer take-home exercises. In the second half of the semester, students will also read and evaluate each other’s submissions in a workshop model that includes writing critiques. ​

Engl 32100
Prerequisite: English 22100
Workshop in Poetry
22836                   sec. P            Michelle Valladares                      T, TH 2:00 – 3:15pm

“When we experience the world as alive, we share an intimate connection with all that exists. We can see the world as being made of a life-giving language, and our awareness of this language goes deep into our psyches and deep into the cosmos.”   Thomas Merton
Poetry is the experience of language coming alive.  In this course you will read contemporary poets, study the craft of elevating a line or a thought and write poems. Students will memorize and workshop poems.  One paper will be required at the end of the term on a poet of your choice.  You will, both in and out of class, immerse yourself in the poet’s experience, and observe the world through the eyes of a writer.  Texts include, A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove.​

List of Interdisciplinary Electives that will be counted toward major requirements
Only one literature course offered outside of the English Department will count toward the English major requirement

ASIA 31104: Modern Japanese Literature and Films
BLST 31175: AfroLatina/o Literature
BLST 31350: Black Power Women
BLST 31912: Literatures and Cultures of Lusophone Africa
FREN 28300: The Literature of Contemporary France
ITAL 31105: Writing the Self in Contemporary Italian Literature
JWST 31914: Literature of the Diaspora
THTR 31118: Queer Theatre and Performance
THTR 31126: Queer Theatre 

Publishing Courses

NOTE: Publishing courses do not count toward English major or minor requirements, but only toward fulfillment of the publishing certificate program, or as general electives. For more information, contact the Director of the program, David Unger at (212) 650-7925.

Engl 32501
Introduction to Publishing
22799                   sec. LM             Cherise Fisher                           TU 9:30 – 12:00pm

Introduction to Publishing introduces students to trade books (books for the general consumer) and their publishers. The course is designed to give an overview of the book business–from how manuscripts are made (role of the author, agent and acquiring editor); to how books are made (design, production and distribution of the finished book); to how books are sold (publicity and marketing).
An important aspect of the course is helping students find their potential niche in the publishing business, should they continue on for the Publishing Certificate. The course concludes with how to get a job, stressing resume preparation, writing query letters to publishers, and preparing for interviews. The course aims at inculcating professionalism in students as it prepares them for satisfying careers in book publishing.

Engl 32800
Fundamentals of Copyediting & Proofreading
22800                   sec. TU           Pamela R. Maines                        TH 6:30 – 9:00pm

Students will employ universal copyediting/ proofreading symbols in type-marking a variety of texts including fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks and references.  They will learn design coding; drafting of style sheets; querying; and preparing a manuscript for author review, etc. 

Engl 32801
Legal Issues in Publishing
22801                   sec. ST            Steven Weissman                        TU 5:00 – 7:30pm

A course covering the crucial clauses in an author-publisher contract; intellectual property issues; the First Amendment; general copyright matters; defamation; invasion of privacy; obscenity; and internet copyright issues.

Engl 31003
Independent Study (3 credits)

Students may register for a three-credit independent study that represents an internship in the Publishing field. Permission of the Director of the Publishing Program, David Unger, is required. Please fill out an independent study form with Mr. Unger and submit it to the English Advising Office (NAC 6/219) before registering through an English Advisor.