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Courses that require registration permission from the English graduate deputy are noted with an asterisk (*). For questions about courses, or to request registration permission, send an e-mail, including your EMPLID. Note that permission to enroll in the department’s online courses will require that video be turned on during the entirety of class-time, and that classes are attended in an environment suitable for instruction (where, for example, you can hear the instructor and fellow students without distraction, and participate in course discussions).
Survey of literature written for children from preschool through adolescence; consideration of related issues such as developing approaches that will promote critical reading and thinking and selecting literature that is appropriate in our multicultural society. This course will meet in person.
This class will explore the ways in which the study of critical methodologies and rhetorical devices can provide tools for the teaching and textual analysis of literature. We will read a selection of literary works, and will also read works of literary criticism, theory, or philosophy, including samples drawn from major theoretical schools and theorists. Students will write a series of short response papers; give two presentations; and prepare a final project incorporating historical research, curriculum development, and/or creative writing. This course will meet in person.
Selected works in prose and verse drawn primarily but not exclusively from British and other European literatures of the 16th and 17th centuries. This course will meet online.
A survey of works by U.S. authors from the period between the start of the so-called American Renaissance in the 1830s, and the American Civil War of the 1860s. Course readings: selected essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and selected stories by Edgar Allan Poe; Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard; Walden by Henry David Thoreau; and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Editions to purchase will be announced at the first class meeting; readings for weeks 2 and 3 will be distributed via PDF. Assignments: a final research-based paper; a midterm paper that engages recent criticism from academic journals relevant to U.S. literature of the period; weekly responses to directed questions about course readings posted to Blackboard; and weekly participation in class round-table discussions of course readings. This course will meet online.
This course will focus on two forms of what some call “life writing,” the phrase coined by Virginia Woolf in her autobiographical “Sketches of the Past” (1939), exploring ways select works of memoir and autobiographical fiction are crafted to tell personal stories. We will look at the narrative strategies of such works as well as our expectations of each genre. If a work is presented as fiction or nonfiction, how does that shape our response to it and to its author? What generic conventions come into play? Is the line between fictional and nonfictional life writing always a clear one? We will also examine how personal and family narratives might be configured to serve political and aesthetic purposes, intersecting, for example, with poetry, history, philosophy, literary criticism, photography, and graphic rendition. Readings focus on twentieth-and twenty-first century authors, including works by James Baldwin, Tobias Wolff, Rachel Cusk, Naja Marie Aidt (translated from Danish), Tim O’Brien, Sherman Alexie, Maggie Nelson, Alison Bechdel, Sally Mann, Richard Ford, Joy Harjo, Sally Mann, and Jesmyn Ward, among others. * Course requirements include a weekly response paper, one class presentation, a term paper, and engaged class participation. Students are encouraged to develop their own creative as well as critical voices. This course will meet online.
“…‘evaluation’…no longer turns on whether a work is ‘good’ (after the fashion of an older aesthetic judgment), but rather tries to keep alive (or to reinvent) assessments of a sociopolitical kind that interrogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individual work of art, or hazard an assessment of the political effects of cultural currents or movements with less utilitarianism and a greater sympathy for the dynamics of everyday life than the imprimaturs and indexes of earlier traditions.” –Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism
Ulysses is the seminal work of 20th-century fiction (#1 on millennial lists of the best and most important). We will study the novel from the perspective of the writer’s craft, focusing on point of view, time, interior monologue, free indirect style, story arc, setting, inconclusivity. How did Joyce marshal these techniques to interrogate colonialism, race and anti-Semitism, nationalism, and capitalism? Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners and his novel Portrait of the Artist are preparation for exploring the novel. Students who enroll must commit to reading both before the course begins. Texts: James Joyce. Dubliners. Penguin Books, 1996. ISBN-10: 0140247742; James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin-Viking, 1977. ISBN-10: 0140155031; James Joyce. Ulysses. ed.: Hans Walter Gabler. Viking Books, 1986. ASIN: B004TQQCXK; Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2008. ISBN-10: 0520253973; Harry Blamires. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses. 3rd edition. Routledge, 1996. ISBN-10: 0415138582; and secondary texts (tbd).
This course will meet in person.
A general introduction to such major contemporary critical theories as structuralism, new criticism, Marxism, feminism, queer studies, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. This course will meet in person.
Literary and philosophical responses to European colonialism and its aftermath. Readings are drawn from around the world to suggest the global character of the postcolonial condition. This course will meet in person.
Introduces scholarship in the field of composition studies to enable students to use knowledge of developments in composition as they prepare to teach. Students become familiar with scholarly journals and read articles about major theoretical concepts and a variety of topics. Students also become familiar with textbooks and material available for teaching composition as well as draft a sample syllabus for a composition course. Each class meeting will include discussion of assigned reading and practical applications. Most students will be assigned a mentor (more experienced instructor) and observe the mentor’s composition course once a week over the semester. In general, the tutor-intern/mentor pair will be assigned by the first day of classes. Requirements will be explained. This course will meet in person.
How can we as writers, teachers and artists reconfigure our assumptions regarding what it means to compose a text in the secondary English classroom? How do the power dynamics of language and the writing process have an impact on what and how we learn? Furthermore, what does it mean to teach writing as the first generation of digital educators and learners, whilst simultaneously navigating a global health and civil rights crisis? This course will investigate the social, political and economic questions that define the teaching of writing in the 7 to 12 English classroom. By carefully examining theoretical texts in conversation with student centered methods, we will deepen our practice through the engagement of critical literacy and self-reflection. Poetics, visual culture, meditation and critical theories will ground our conversations throughout the course and will serve as an extension of our pedagogical approaches. We will read works by bell hooks, Juan Felipe Herrera, Thich Nhat Hanh, Octavia Butler, Bettina Love, Kieth Gilyard and others. The course will culminate with the development of a multimedia project and comprehensive writing teacher narrative. This course will meet online.
The English language, like the United States, and like Brooklyn in particular, is made up of countless languages and cultures. This course will explore the development of English from its earliest forms to the present day, with an emphasis on the cultural encounters that have kept it in a constant state of mobility and expansion. We will examine the language’s Anglo-Saxon beginnings and its early evolution in response to encounters with French, Latin, and Greek; we will then go on to explore some of the far-flung shores where England’s colonial and imperial ventures brought the language, and look at what they brought to it in return. We will consider the distinctive status of American English, and questions of when and how foreign words, neologisms, and slang terms become official components of the language: who decides, by what criteria, and how do dictionaries define their roles as gatekeepers? Other topics will include the politically and ethically complicated status of English as a dominant global language, alongside the phenomenon of mixed linguistic forms such as Spanglish, Franglais, Danglish, Singlish, Hinglish, Tanglish, and Globish. Students’ experiences with, and perspectives on, other languages and alternate forms of English will be welcomed into discussions. Assignments will include presentations, short papers, and a final research project. This course will meet in person.
Introduction to methods of research and scholarly procedure as preparation for the M.A. Thesis. Topics include: building a bibliography, using print and on-line research sources; incorporating secondary critical resources; and the varieties of criticism practiced in recent decades. The final assignment is to produce a thesis proposal. This course will meet in person.
This course is an independent study. Prior to registering, students should identify a thesis advisor, as the advisor will need to confirm registration for the course. Within the first two weeks of the semester, students will be required to submit a Thesis Title Form via the BC Portal.
