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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. 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 can participate in course discussions).
Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors—This course borrows its title from Rudine Sims Bishop’s landmark 1990 essay in which she calls for more diverse representation in books for young people. “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful message about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” What is the role of educators in addressing this problem, and how do we ensure authentic representation versus tokenism? How can we transform our classrooms into spaces that affirm and empower all of our students? Can the books we choose to teach promote critical literacy while fostering empathy and hope? We will explore these questions while reading and discussing contemporary picture books, middle-grade, and YA titles by authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Elizabeth Acevedo, Marjane Satrapi, and Jason Reynolds. Registration preference to English education M.A. candidates. 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. Registration preference to English education M.A. candidates. This course will meet in person.
Love, Sex, and Gender in The Canterbury Tales. A seminal work of medieval literature, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has attracted a wide range of praise and critiques over the centuries for its presentation of love and sex. From mind-bendingly dutiful wives to loose and lusty wenches, the varied tales that compose this classic of English literature often intimately tie its conceptions of femininity and masculinity into sexuality in the most ribald of ways. Be it barely concealed extramarital affairs occurring in trees or accidental analingus out a window, Chaucer’s taste for the provocative often places his characters in the most problematic of places. This duality of The Canterbury Tales—being often humorous and horrifying at the same time—deeply troubles and complicates our understanding of consent, sexual violence, and gender in the medieval world, presenting a vision of the Middle Ages that is both impossibly foreign and eerily prescient to our contemporary moment. In this course, we’ll dive into the controversies and debates surrounding Chaucer and attempt to unravel the enigmatic visions of sex, gender, and love presented by the wide cast of characters. Along the way, you will learn to read Middle English, get hands-on practice working with digital manuscripts and archives, and develop a greater appreciation for these queer resonances across time that emerge from Chaucer’s magnum opus. This course will meet in person.
John Milton is arguably one of the two greatest poets in the English language. Moreover, Milton’s influence on other writers cannot be underestimated. His most accomplished work, Paradise Lost, was the poem against which all poets measured their work for the next 200 years after its publication in 1674. This course will examine Milton’s three major long poems, several of his shorter poems, and selected prose. Class work will focus on close reading and discussion; we will also address religion, historical context and contemporary critical approaches to Milton. Required texts are John Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. Hughes (Hackett, 2003), Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Rosenblatt (Norton, 2010), and The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost, ed. Schwartz (Cambridge, 2014). Writing will include discussion questions, an annotated bibliography, a final paper, and a final exam. This course will meet in person.
As Europe consolidated its global empires in the second half of the 19th century, writers in England, France, Austria, and Germany sensed an impending decline. Rejecting patriotic ideologies of progress, they reveled in the decadent, artificial, exotic, bizarre, and perverse. Flâneurs of seedy urban landscapes, they chased sex, drugs, and experimental music. Their decadent and aestheticist narratives came to represent the fin de siècle, French for “end of the century.” This is more than a calendrical idea, however; it is associated with a whole mood of ennui, excess, border-states, dirty pleasures, and monstrosities. We will enter this realm through authors and artists including Charles Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Flaubert, Sigmund Freud, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Thomas Mann, Gustave Moreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rachilde, Arthur Schnitzler, Bram Stoker, Richard Wagner, and Oscar Wilde. This course will meet in person.
Henry Luce, the co-founder of the Time magazine empire, spoke somewhat prematurely when he proclaimed the dawn of “The American Century” in February 1941. But by the end of World War II, President Harry Truman, running for re-election, said nothing politically controversial when he declared the United States to be “the greatest nation on earth . . . the greatest nation in history . . . the greatest that the sun has ever shone upon.” It may have been, as Philip Roth’s fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman called it, “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.” In this class, we are going to deploy some of the most significant works of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, to investigate this three-decade (or so) cultural moment and what it produced of lasting literary value. In doing so we will encounter the work of Roth, Saul Bellow, Toni Morison, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, and many, many others. Assignments will include a series of discussion questions to be brought to each class about the week’s reading, a research paper with a heavy emphasis on the word “research,” and a take-home essayistic final. This course will meet online.
Theater languished during the 19th century and then exploded in the 20th, with Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Bertolt Brecht, and Dario Fo: communist, anarchist, surrealist, modernist theater overthrew Aristotle’s theatrical canon, inviting us to explore new dramatic worlds, from The Cherry Orchard to Stoppard’s Travesties. Welcome to the merry-go-round! Carey Harrison is the author of more than 40 stage plays performed on both sides of the Atlantic (and farther afield), from Britain’s Royal National Theatre to Off-Broadway, and he has directed works by Mamet and Beckett as well as his own plays. This course will meet online.
In “Time Management,” we will consider the restrictions imposed, and the escapes devised, by novelists and short-story writers faced with decisions about how to enlarge or limit, speed up or slow down, that is, manage, time. We will find that questions about time naturally bleed into those of point-of-view. From what vantage point in the time-space continuum, does the point-of-view character or narrator view the events of the story? What are the implications of this positioning? How do they affect the reader? How does the writer evade the restrictions he or she imposes? Are these evasions simply a matter of mimesis, of duplicating the ways in which the mind evades the present moment? Are they artful impositions used to break into the present, necessary for conveying information essential to the plot, to avoid fictional claustrophobia, or to create it, etc.? Why have conventions like the frame story fallen into disuse, or does the frame story live on in disguise? What does metaphor do to time? Or psycho-narration? What changes do we see in narrators’ “responsibilities” in 20th- and 21st-century fiction as compared with their roles in the 18th and 19th centuries? Or a bigger question: How do conventions of time management arise, get sustained, fade, disappear? Are writers at a cultural moment reacting to social, political, and economic forces, or are conventions a matter of imitating “strong” writers’ techniques? Does the mystery story come with a set of time conventions different from those observed in other genres? What does the writer gain by, or, conversely, what are the psychological effects on the reader of, introducing historical time into fiction? We will read Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, a mystery writer yet to be chosen, Jorge Luis Borges, Penelope Lively, Kamel Daoud, Edward P. Jones, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and a few theoretical/critical essays. For M.A. English and M.F.A. creative writing candidates. This course will meet in person.
This course will introduce scholarship in the field of composition studies as you prepare to teach. As we read and discuss scholarly articles about major theoretical concepts in composition studies, we will also consider strategies and techniques for the classroom, including approaches to teaching in times of crisis. We will also consider the challenges of adjunct labor. Each class meeting will include discussion of assigned readings (with students taking turns leading the discussion) and exercises in practical applications. You will develop assignments, lesson plans, and a syllabus. Students interested in teaching composition at Brooklyn College will be placed in a tutor-internship with a veteran composition instructor one class session per week. For M.A. English and M.F.A. creative writing candidates. 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, while simultaneously navigating the impact of 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 secondary 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. Through the practice of low-stakes writing exercises and creative exploration, we will consider methods that work against standardization and high-stakes accountability measures in the English classroom. We will read works by bell hooks, Juan Felipe Herrera, Thich Nhat Hanh, Octavia Butler, Bettina Love, Felicia Rose Chavez, Keith Gilyard, and others. The course will culminate with the development of a multimedia project and comprehensive writing teacher narrative. Registration preference to English education M.A. candidates. This course will meet online.
What is lyric? How does attending to this question affect our understanding and enjoyment of lyric poetry? Wherefore is lyric a question of itself? Placing lyric theory and poetry side by side (and on top of and inside each other), this course proposes to renew our understanding of lyric as a genre as well as provide the student a long and broad look into the history of lyric, from the Book of Psalms to Bad Bunny. Books to be read (in whole or part) include Johnathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric; Dante, Vita Nuova; Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries; Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus; Ibn Arabi, Interpreter of Desires; Leopardi, Canti; Hadewijch, The Stanzaic Poems; Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads; Lorca, Poet in New York; and more. Requirements: commentaries, presentation, research paper, final exam. This course will meet in person.
Examination of the various formulations of the interconnections among language, culture, and society. Focus on the interplay of language, society, and power with particular attention to issues of linguistic diversity based on gender and race, and to issues of multilingualism in education. Readings from the fields of linguistics, linguistic anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. This course will meet in person.
This course provides an introduction to the theory and practice of scholarly work in literary studies. More specifically, it prepares students for writing the master’s thesis by guiding them through a series of essential tasks: developing a viable thesis topic, conducting preliminary research and writing, building a bibliography, pursuing an argument, working with an adviser, and writing a polished thesis proposal. Opening weeks will be spent addressing readings in literary criticism and critical theory, analyzing the methods and aims literary study, and (re)acquainting ourselves with the practical elements of literary research. Then students will take turns presenting their research and responding to presentations by their peers. This course will meet online.
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.
In this course, we will explore short stories and novels that take risks in terms of subject matter, form, and/or language. These works destabilize the reader by proposing alternate realities; by redefining what constitutes a narrative arc; and/or by reinventing language through innovative usage. We will explore these works from the perspective of practicing writers, delving into matters of craft and exploring the interactions of form and content. Driving questions of the course include:
Registration preference to M.F.A. creative writing candidates. Limited enrollment via waitlist for other graduate students, depending on availability. This course will meet in person.
This course is designed for students to engage in the practice of translation while expanding their approach to the craft of writing, as well as to broaden their understanding of translation as process and alternate form of research. Walter Benjamin famously claimed that translation issues from a text’s afterlife, that it ultimately serves “the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationships between languages.” For Caribbean poet and theorist Édouard Glissant, translation is key to a new epistemology and to a poetics of relation—”one of the most important kinds of a new archipelagic thinking. It is an art of the flight.” For poet Rosmarie Waldrop, translation’s “ultimate task may be to bear witness to the essentially irreducible strangeness and distance between languages.” What is the task of the translator and what are the implications of one’s understanding of that task? What are the politics behind translation’s metaphors? How is translation linked with colonization, memory, and with the movement of diasporic bodies? Can we speak of an erotics of translation? In addition to reading translation theory, we will read works by a range of poets and fiction writers who translate, including, besides the abovementioned authors, Borges, Anne Carson, Don Mee Choi, Lydia Davis, Katrina Dodson, Langston Hughes, John Keene, Jack Spicer, Sawako Nakayasu, and others. Students will be required to work on straightforward and experimental translations on an ongoing basis as well as a self-directed final project. Knowledge of a language other than English is not required. Registration preference to M.F.A. creative writing candidates. Limited enrollment via waitlist for other graduate students, depending on availability. This course will meet in person.
