B1616 Bible, Myth and Contemporary Literature

Prof. Mark J. Mirsky
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (20044)

This course is designed to introduce graduate Creative Writing students, and students in the Literature M.A., to the way questions of good and evil, belief or non-belief in an afterlife, and the idea of the hero or heroine, are expressed both in contemporary fiction and major texts of the past. We will read chapters from major texts of Antiquity as well as from writers in the Twentieth Century. The course starts with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, then alternates with stories of the Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, readings from The Book of Genesis, The Book of Job, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Max Frisch’s Homo Faber. Among the contemporary writers whose books are included are William Faulkner, Milan Kundera, Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Bruno Schulz, Isak Dinesen, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme and Joyce Carol Oates. The latter will be a guest speaker during the semester.
The instructor requires the submission of two questions about the reading assigned for that week. At the end of the course students must submit either a creative response or critical paper on one or two of the books from the syllabus. This final paper should number between nine and ten pages or 2,500 words.
In addition to the books and stories that students are required to read, the instructor will provide further reading as background to the class discussion and speak about them. These will include pages from Hesiod’s Theogony, chapters from The Book of Samuel 2, (the story of King David and Absalom), The Gospel of Matthew, work by Flannery O’Connor, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Unamuno and Robert Musil in pdf or e-pub versions. These readings, however are optional.

Tentative Reading List:
The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2nd Norton Crit. Ed.
The Odyssey, Richard Lattimore translation
Genesis: King James Bible
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (PDF)
The Book of Job, Edward Greenstein trans. digital or hardback
The Trial, Franz Kafka, Breon Mitchell trans.
“Sorrow Acre” Isak Dinesen (PDF)
Homo Faber, Max Frisch
Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates.
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Andrew Hurley
Sixty Stories of Donald Barthelme.

Professor Mark Jay Mirsky was the founding editor of the magazine Fiction in 1972, together with Donald Barthelme, and Max and Marianne Frisch. It still publishes from offices at The City College. Professor Mirsky is the author of five novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, The Red Adam, Puddingstone, and Blue Hill Avenue (the last, listed among the 100 Essential Books of New England—by The Boston Globe.) He has published a collection of novellas, The Secret Table, as well as five books of criticism and journalism, My Search for the Messiah, The Absent Shakespeare, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets—”A Satire to Decay,” Dante, Eros and Kabbalah, and A Mother’s Steps in addition to numerous stories and articles. He is the editor of the Diaries of Robert Musil, co-editor of the two volume History of Pinsk (Stanford University Press), and Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Washington Post, Book World, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

This course is also available as Literature.

B1988 From Stanza, to Body, to Country: Crafting Place in Poetry

Rosanna Young Oh
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (code: 20822)

The poet David St. John observed, “Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one’s imagination about that place – what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.” How does place, in other words, reveal more than the physical setting itself, and the writer’s interiority and obsessions? In this craft class, we will consider the ways in which writing about place enables intimate conversations with the self, communities (both personal and public), and history. Each week, we will read poems and supplementary texts that foreground our discussions of place in a variety of contexts, such as the pastoral, the body, and architecture, to name a few.

Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Editions, 2023), which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award. It was also named a “must-read” by Shondaland and a best poetry book of 2023-2024 by Ms. Magazine. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub, among other publications. She has received support and residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Hudson Valley Writing Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence. A graduate of Yale (B.A.), the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.F.A.), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.), Rosanna lives and writes on Long Island.

B2099 The Gothic and Otherness

Prof. Lyn Di Iorio
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (20051)

Presently, there is a reawakened interest in “Gothic”—the aesthetic discourse of terror and horror created by Horace Walpole in 1764.  This seminar weaves together the primary critical approaches to the Gothic: British/Irish Gothic; American Gothic (and its subcategories of Southern and African American Gothic); Female Gothic; Queer Gothic; the sublime; the uncanny; and Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection.  The course also proposes that the contemporary Gothic aesthetic focuses increasingly on environmental issues, and so we will also discuss Ecogothic.  Finally, propelled by the assertion by Latin American writers that the Gothic has replaced magical realism as an aesthetic vehicle for exploring legacies of state-sponsored violence and inequality, as well as other social problems, we will examine Latin American and Latinx Gothic texts with special interest.
How do Gothic monsters reveal and revel in social tensions?  Do Gothic tropes improve or worsen through so many repetitions?  How do fear, horror, mutilation, melancholia, and loss constitute a vital aesthetic structuring of the human psyche, linking Freud’s vision of the psyche to the dynamics of Gothic villainy and victimization?  From Frankenstein to Get Out, from Shirley Jackson’s haunted houses to Mariana Enriquez’s sinister Argentina, why are we so drawn to the Gothic?
Requirements: An oral presentation based on a short paper; and a final paper or creative work (such as a short story) addressing any aspect of the Gothic covered in class.  Because this is both a literature and craft class, I will also occasionally ask you to write brief creative riffs on certain Gothic tropes.
Texts we may read include:
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales by Chris Baldick (ed.);
Gothic (2nd edition) by Fred Botting;
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke;
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu(critical edition ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan);
We Have Always Lived in the Castle or by Shirley Jackson;
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez; 
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle;
Dark Museum by Mariana Negroni;
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova;
Fever Dream by Samantha Shweblin.

Lyn Di Iorio is from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her novel Outside the Bones was shortlisted for the John Gardner Prize. A recent New York Foundation for the Arts artist fellow in fiction, her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2025; The Georgia Review; The Kenyon Review; Witness Magazine; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; and elsewhere. She has also published scholarly works on Latinx literature and magical realism. She studied at Harvard, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley and teaches literature and creative writing at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently completing a novel and short story collection.

This course is also available as Literature.

B6000 Introduction to Language Studies

Prof. Missy Watson
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20043)
HYBRID SYNCHRONOUS

This course offers an introduction to English language studies and unfolds over three phases. First, we will survey the complicated evolution of the English language. Students will research topics like the historical development of English (Old, Middle, Early Modern), the Great Vowel Shift, the roles of religion and the printing press, the origins of so-called Standard English, the introduction of dictionaries, dialect and vernacular studies, linguistic myths, English’s imperialist and colonizing impact, today’s Global Englishes, and more. Second, we will examine fundamental linguistic concepts, namely morphology, phonetics, phonology, and syntax. Students will investigate word formation and etymologies, learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, create their own (more intuitive) phonetic alphabet and use it in their writing, and nerd out on diagraming sentences using the syntactical knowledge gained. Third and finally, we will explore the teaching of grammar, taking into consideration how scholars across disciplines have studied, debated, and approached grammar instruction. Students will learn effective and ethical approaches to sentence-level feedback and get some practice providing such feedback on writing composed by City College first-year students.  
This is a zero-textbook-cost course which draws on open educational resources. All course materials will be shared in PDF form. Excerpts will be included from books like David Crystal’s English as a Global Language,Seth Lerer’s Inventing English, Alastair Pennycook’s The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill’s Language Myths,Joanne Cavallaro’s Everyday Linguistics, David and Yvonne Freedman’s Essential Linguistics, as well as a range of peer-review articles from scholars in applied linguistics, second language writing, and composition studies.

Dr. Missy Watson is Associate Professor in the English Department at City College of New York, CUNY. She serves as the Director of the First-Year Writing Program and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, pedagogy, multilingualism, and language studies. Her teaching and administration prioritize radical love, community building, and critical approaches to contesting systemic oppression. Her research lies at the intersection of composition and second-language writing and revolves around seeking social and racial justice. Her publications can be found in the College Composition and Communication, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and Pedagogy, as well as in edited collections like Plurilingual Pedagogies for Multilingual Writing Classrooms (Losey and Shuck), Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing (Silva and Wang), and the forthcoming Basic Writing in the 21^st Century (Gray-Rosendale and Gleason). 

B6400 Theories and Models of Literacy

Prof. Barbara Gleason
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (20041)
HYBRID SYNCHRONOUS

We will begin by exploring literacy from a historical perspective, focusing first on the importance of producing and distributing print documents, made possible by wood block printing ant the printing press. We’ll then take a deep dive into a contemporary transition from production and use of traditional print documents to digital reading and writing practices. How have our reading, writing and research practices been impacted by the introduction of personal computers and, more recently, cell phones; specific applications available for writers, such as Microsoft Word, Pages, and Google docs; and access to materials and information via the internet?
A second phase of our course will entail a close look at contemporary perspectives on literacy: an autonomous model, a socio-cultural perspective, and an ideological framework. These three perspectives begin with a focus on the experiences of individual readers and writers. How do children as well as adults learn to read and write, as understood within an autonomous model that focuses on individual experiences?  We will then examine theories and research informed by understanding literacy in social and cultural contexts, starting with the foundational ten-year study on literacy in three communities, Ways with Words by Shirely Brice Heath.  In this phase of the course, we will consider reasons why some people successfully become literate at a young age while other people grow into adulthood without strong literacy abilities, as explained by Victoria Purcell Gates in Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy.
In a third phase of our course, we will focus on literacy practices involving online learning and teaching, texting, social media, and multi-tasking, as described by numerous scholars, including Daniel Keller in Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration and Thomas Henry in “Post-Pandemonium—A Meditation on Livestreaming, Remote Learning, and Basic Writing Instruction (Laura Gray-Rosendale and Barbara Gleason, Volume Editors, Basic Writing in the 21st Century, Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2025). Additionally, we will investigate impacts of learning differences and disabilities on reading and writing while also exploring accessibility issues and assistive technologies that afford greater access to literacy in the 21st century.

Barbara Gleason is a CCNY English Department professor and Director of the MA in Language and Literacy. Her scholarship focuses on basic writing, adult learners, writing course curricula, and program evaluation. She published The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Adult Learners with Kimme Nuckles in 2014 (Bedford St. Martin’s Series in Macmillan). With Laura Gray-Rosendale, Barbara has recently edited a collection of 33 original essays for a book titled Basic Writing in the 21st Century (Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2025).