Creative Writing

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Dalia Sofer
Tuesday 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (20448)

In this course we will read and discuss your manuscripts—short stories or excerpts from longer works. Together we’ll explore the elements of craft, including point of view, character, setting, style, and language. We’ll talk about the possibilities of fiction—how, for example, conflict (internal and external) can create narrative tension, how subtext can reveal the complexity of a situation, how time can be collapsed or expanded, or how well-chosen details can evoke character. We will also consider structure and form, as well as editing and revision. Ideally, you’ll each submit two pieces for discussion throughout the course. In each class, we’ll discuss two students’ works, and fellow students will provide written notes and critiques; I will do the same.

My primary goal in this course is to focus on your intention, and on whether your manuscript manifests that intention. I’m less interested in the “formulas” of storytelling than in discovering what is unique to your vision. We’ll explore ways to sustain narrative tension while allowing a work of fiction the freedom to be what it wants to be, and we’ll talk about roadblocks and successes. Occasionally, time permitting, we may also take detours to read stories or essays that may fuel our conversations.

Dalia Sofer is the author of the novels Man of My Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)—a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of 2020, and The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco Press, 2007)—also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award, a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, and longlisted for several prizes. A recipient of a Whiting Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sirenland Fellowship, the Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship, and multiple residencies at Yaddo, Sofer has contributed essays and reviews to various publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Review of Books, The Markaz Review, and The Believer.

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Salar Abdoh
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (20447)

This course is a standard graduate workshop. Each student shares their work two times during the semester. Submissions can be segments of a novel or a short story. My focus in the workshop is entirely on the students’ own pieces. My style is not to do paragraph by paragraph edits of a work. Rather, I look at the overall arc of a piece, and address the fundamental elements of fiction within it – pacing, character, voice, dialogue, prose, transitions, et cetera. Another aspect of my style of workshop is to not be overly intrusive. In other words, I try to work within the context that the writer has created; I don’t believe in ‘hard intrusion’ into a writer’s intent, style and execution, unless on very rare occasions it is absolutely called for.

My realm is firmly literary realism, the psychological and/or historical. This can include various genre fiction such as the literary thriller, hardboiled and the noir – and even absurdist works, if executed well. YA fiction and fantasy are not my forte – with all due respect due those sub-genres. I am drawn to some but not all speculative fiction. And usually I have little to say about experimentation; I’m just not sure how to workshop the latter or comment on it.

That said, naturally I will try to accommodate students in any genre. But it’s good for you to know my disposition so that you can make a more informed decision about your choice of a workshop.

Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist and translator. His latest book, A Nearby Country Called Love, was published in 2023.

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Mayra Cuevas
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (55168)
ONLINE

This fiction workshop is led by Mayra Cuevas, a multi-published, award-winning author and journalist. It has been designed for writers wishing to prepare their work for publication and wide readership appeal. The workshop’s main goal is actionable revision feedback. The aim is to sharpen clarity, deepen narrative focus, and strengthen artistic intent.

Feedback is meant to be purposeful and intentional, drawing on anti-hierarchical and anti-racist pedagogical principles outlined in Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, and Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World.

Writers presenting their work are expected to articulate their own aesthetic priorities, cultural contexts, and goals for revision and publication. Peer feedback is structured to support these goals, while also exploring foundational elements of story such as character arc, plot, structure, tension and voice.

My publication and editorial experience centers around commercial and upmarket genre fiction for children, teens and adult readers. I am not a good fit for experimental, unstructured works or highly literary concepts.

As a workshop facilitator, my style is practical, encouraging, and anchored in real-world experience. Expect business of publishing concepts such as pitch, marketability and commercial viability, tropes and reader expectations, to also be addressed.

Each student will have the opportunity to share their work two (2) times during the semester in 45-minute slots. Submission should be no more than 25 pages in length, double spaced. Every week, non-presenting participants are expected to read and comment on no more than 50 pages. Writers are also expected to facilitate one workshop session during the semester. Time-permitting, we will incorporate generative writing prompts to inspire your creative flow.

Course objectives:

-Develop a collection of revised fiction
-The ability to interact with other writers’ creative work with sensitivity and respect
-Grow your own craft by identifying what works and what doesn’t in other’s work
-Experience taking, interpreting and incorporating editorial feedback
-Develop a self-directed revision strategy grounded in critical awareness, creative agency, and an expanded understanding of craft.

Mayra Cuevas is the award-winning author of books for readers of all ages. Her young adult novel Does My Body Offend You? (co-written with Marie Marquardt) was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Target Book Club selection, named a 2023 Book All Young Georgians Should Read and appeared in multiple “Best Books” lists. In 2023, she was named Georgia Author of the Year (YA category). Mayra’s debut picture book My Abuela is a Bruja earned three starred reviews and released to wide critical acclaim. Her debut adult romance How to Fake a Southern Gentleman (co-written with Marie Marquardt) releases in 2026. Mayra is also the author of the teen foodie romcom Salty, Bitter, Sweet, and the short story“Resilient,” published as part of the anthology Foreshadow: The Magic of Reading and Writing YA. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra is a former award-winning CNN producer, and now a creative writing professor. She also co-founded the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival and its Latinx Storytellers Conference. Mayra keeps her sanity by practicing Modern Buddhism and meditation. She splits her time between Atlanta and Puerto Rico. You can find Mayra on Instagram @Mayra.Cuevas and her website MayraCuevas.com.

B3200 Poetry Workshop

Prof. David Groff
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (20446)

Just as each of us humans has a distinctive voiceprint, so does every poet. In this workshop you’ll be encouraged to define and refine your particular poetic voice. We’ll use the reading aloud of our poems to make observations and insights about them that lead us into the adventure of revision. In class exercises and discussion, we’ll explore ways to liberate the imagination and take poems to the often-startling places they need to go, while writing in both received and organic poetic forms. We will also read poets of diverse nationalities, races, eras, genders, and aesthetics, to discover how we can better value their voices and find inspiration for our own poems.
In addition to writing and revising poems, we will explore where and how to send them out for publication, as part of a larger discussion about the voice of the emerging writer in a complex and rapidly changing American literary culture. Please be ready to submit a poem a week, do assigned reading of work by poets past and present, provide generous written responses to poems by other workshop participants, perform in-class and take-home poetry prompts, present the workshop with a written introduction to a poet you love, and create an end-of-semester chapbook of your poetry.

David Groff is a poet and independent book editor specializing in connecting new writers with their readers. Formerly a senior editor at Crown, he has edited novels and serious nonfiction published by publishers ranging from Random House to Bellevue Literary Press. David received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has an MA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. His first book, Theory of Devolution, was selected for the National Poetry Series; his second poetry collection, Clay, won the Louise Bogan Award; his third book of poems, Live in Suspense, appeared in 2023. He has co-edited two anthologies, Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS. He has taught poetry, nonfiction, and publishing in the City College MFA creative writing program since 2007.

B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop

Prof. Michael Archer
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20445)

This is a standard nonfiction graduate workshop where each student shares their work twice during the semester. Submissions may be in any of the nonfiction subgenres—essay, memoir, polemic, reportage, etc. And can be stand-alone pieces, book chapters, or segments of a longer memoir or reported project.

In workshops, we will focus on the key concerns of good nonfiction pieces—structure, voice, pacing, transitions, authority, clarity, etc.—with less emphasis on line-by-line editing.

Early in the semester, a selection of readings, across all forms of nonfiction, will be assigned. You will be asked to read and parse these pieces with a focus on the authors’ choices in terms of the key concerns mentioned above. In other words, “read as a writer.” At the beginning of the workshops, we will discuss these readings with an eye toward how those pieces and their authors’ choices might inspire your own work-in-progress.

Michael Archer co-founded Guernica Magazine, was its editor-in-chief for fourteen years, and honored with the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing. He currently serves as the magazine’s editorial advisor and board president. As a writer, Archer’s essays, commentary, reporting and fiction have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, Catapult, The Progressive, The New Yorker, Biography Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Woman’s Day, Men’s Fitness, and Epiphany, among others.

B4501 Special Topics: Screenwriting Workshop

Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (20444)

The good news is, these days one can move a script from page to screen faster and cheaper than ever before. While the possibility of selling a script to Hollywood is always real (seriously- it does happen), it is exciting and motivating to consider that thanks to how far digital technology has come, seeing one’s own work on the independent film circuit, festivals and the internet can happen without someone giving you lots and lots of money. Students will develop a screenplay for a film, television or the web. All are welcome to work in other variations such as television scripts and web series scripts. We will examine the storytelling possibilities of the form, its advantages and challenges – and no doubt stumble on important things we didn’t expect. Students will also offer critiques and participate in feedback discussions of classmates’ work.

Marc Palmieri has taught dramatic writing in the MFA program at CCNY since 2010, and has taught Modern and Postmodern Drama, Shakespeare, Dramatic Writing for the stage, TV and film, fiction and other courses for the Undergraduate English Department since 2006. He is an associate professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy University, where has twice been awarded the Outstanding Research Award. Marc also teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts Summer Program. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries), stage plays include Waiting For The Host, Levittown (NY Times Critic’s Pick), The Groundling, Carl The Second and Poor Fellas (all published by Dramatists Play Service). Twelfth Night, a 90-Minute Adaptation (TRW). His collection of plays for middle schoolers, S(cool) Days, is published by Brooklyn Publishers. His memoir, She Danced With Lightning is published by Post Hill Press (August, 2022). Marc is a fully vested member of SAGAFTRA and Actors Equity. BA Wake Forest, MA, MFA CCNY.
www.marcpalmieri.com

This course is also available as Craft.

Craft Seminars

B1707 Prosody

Prof. Ladan Osman
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (code: 20453)

This is a generative workshop exploring poetic forms and their parameters in a larger study of the line, the lyric, and breath. Students will analyze ancient and contemporary forms including: ghazal, sonnet, sestina, classic verse, cento and erasure, as well as the golden shovel and the duplex. Our study will guide students in drafting original works, inviting them to expand their listening and their pacing. Explorations will include: The Art of Daring by Carl Phillips, the Norton anthology along with a selection of poems, blues and folks music, and Cree Myles’ breakdowns of rap foundations. Students will discuss, think, read aloud, and develop strategies to both accept and reject the boundaries of prosody.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. A 2021 Whiting Award winner, she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film Sam Underground profiles Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She’s the co-director/writer of Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor, Mansa Musa. Osman’s latest film work, The Ascendants, a music short documentary series is streaming now. She lives in New York.

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

Prof. Rosanna Young Oh
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (code: 20452)

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 North American Poetry Book Award. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Yale Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, 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 also 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.

B2046 Taste of the Archive: Oral History as Praxis

Prof. Janée Moses
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (code: 20451)

This seminar, which begins and ends with Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay, “The Taste of the Archive” bends genre with a simultaneous study of narrative, oral history, and archive to highlight aspects of the past that are “hard to pin down” or elusive. In the first part of the course, students will explore fiction and non-fiction texts in the African American literary canon that deal with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and belonging to highlight contradictory truths that “can’t quite be explained away,” and consider how methods of African American literature can be applied to narrative-based oral history projects that embrace, rather than bridle, complicated truths about our shared pasts.

In the second part of the course, students will merge African American literary methods, archival practices, and oral history methods and theory to create their oral history projects. These projects will include the development of oral narratives that move from the realm of spoken word to polished manuscripts. In addition to the manuscript, students will analyze their oral history practice by writing methodology statements that expand the field of oral history.

Janée Moses, Assistant Professor of English, specializes in African American Literature, 20th-century black expressive cultures, and oral history theory and methodology. Her current book project is an intertextual study of black women’s life writing and performances that combines extraordinary pursuits and ordinary experiences to highlight the fullness of their lives. Her writing appears in publications including Rejoinder and BOMB Magazine. An established oral historian, Moses serves as the Director of BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, preserving the narratives of black visual artists in America.

This course is also available as Literature.

B4501 Special Topics: Screenwriting Workshop

Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (20444)

The good news is, these days one can move a script from page to screen faster and cheaper than ever before. While the possibility of selling a script to Hollywood is always real (seriously- it does happen), it is exciting and motivating to consider that thanks to how far digital technology has come, seeing one’s own work on the independent film circuit, festivals and the internet can happen without someone giving you lots and lots of money. Students will develop a screenplay for a film, television or the web. All are welcome to work in other variations such as television scripts and web series scripts. We will examine the storytelling possibilities of the form, its advantages and challenges – and no doubt stumble on important things we didn’t expect. Students will also offer critiques and participate in feedback discussions of classmates’ work.

Marc Palmieri has taught dramatic writing in the MFA program at CCNY since 2010, and has taught Modern and Postmodern Drama, Shakespeare, Dramatic Writing for the stage, TV and film, fiction and other courses for the Undergraduate English Department since 2006. He is an associate professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy University, where has twice been awarded the Outstanding Research Award. Marc also teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts Summer Program. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries), stage plays include Waiting For The Host, Levittown (NY Times Critic’s Pick), The Groundling, Carl The Second and Poor Fellas (all published by Dramatists Play Service). Twelfth Night, a 90-Minute Adaptation (TRW). His collection of plays for middle schoolers, S(cool) Days, is published by Brooklyn Publishers. His memoir, She Danced With Lightning is published by Post Hill Press (August, 2022). Marc is a fully vested member of SAGAFTRA and Actors Equity. BA Wake Forest, MA, MFA CCNY.
www.marcpalmieri.com

This course is also available as Creative Writing.

C0862 The Teaching of Composition and Literature

Prof. Missy Watson
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (20441)

This course provides an introduction to teaching college writing and humanities classes. We will study and practice theoretically grounded approaches to teaching composition, designing courses materials, developing writing assignments, assessing student writing, integrating technology, and managing college-level classrooms. Additionally, we will consider how to tailor our teaching to best support a wide variety of students—with variable needs, constraints, motivations, abilities, and cultural, linguistic, racial, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The course is designed so that each week we will attend both to theoretical insights from contemporary pedagogical theory as well as to practical strategies that we as teachers can apply immediately to our classrooms. Participants will leave this course having gained expertise in today’s most cutting-edge pedagogical approaches and will thus be well prepared to apply to teaching positions in higher education.

This course is also available as Language and Literacy.

C0910 The Short Stories of the Americas
A Graduate Seminar in Short Fiction with a Craft Focus

Prof. Lyn Di Iorio
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (20415)

SEMINAR OVERVIEW:
Exploring the art of the short story, this seminar pairs Latin American inventive flair with the character-driven narratives of the United States, examining how authors harness brevity to maximize dramatic tension. The class is conceived as a space equally welcoming to practicing creative writers and scholars—rigorous in its theoretical commitments, but equally alive to the pleasures and demands of making fiction.

The seminar opens with the tradition of the uncanny—an affect-based tendency in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Horacio Quiroga that decisively shaped the short story’s development across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues to inflect the genre in sophisticated, often unexpected ways. We will then interrogate Frank O’Connor’s foundational claim that the modern short story is structurally oriented toward the “lonely voice” of outsiders and the socially marginalized, asking how this idea accounts for contemporary forms of isolation and otherness—and where it fails to do so.

In subsequent sessions, we will dive into a range of theoretical and formal problems. We examine the double structure of the short story and the epiphany as both technique and ideology. From there, we explore how various modes—including magical realism, Afrofuturism and Gothic horror—engage with historical trauma and representations of violence. Finally, the course considers strategies for rendering disaffection through minimalism and dirty realism, the symbolic figure of the animal, and the linked story cycle as a formal response to the conventions of the novel.

Moving between canonical texts and emergent contemporary voices, we will approach the short story not merely as an aesthetic object but as a site of cultural negotiation, generic experimentation, and critical inquiry. Throughout, we will engage in craft exercises designed to sharpen technique and deepen attentiveness to style, symbolic architecture, and genre conventions.

REQUIREMENTS & GRADING:
Students are expected to arrive at each session having read carefully and prepared substantive observations. Grading is organized around three principal obligations:

— A seminar paper (approximately 2500–3,500words) advancing an original critical or theoretical argument, grounded in close reading, which engages meaningfully with the course’s themes and secondary literature.

Alternatively, creative writers may submit a short story (2500–3,750 words) accompanied by a critical reflection (250–500 words) situating the piece in relation to the seminar’s theoretical and formal concerns.

— A short paper (1,500 words) presented orally (for about 20 minutes) on a selected text or cluster of texts under discussion that day. The paper should model close reading and contribute a focused argument to the larger seminar conversation.

— Two or three shorter craft exercises, designed to cultivate attentiveness to voice, structure, and formal choice.

Active, substantive participation in seminar discussions is not incidental to the course—it is constitutive of it and will factor meaningfully into final assessment.

AUTHORS & TEXTS:
Primary and secondary readings will be drawn from the work of the following writers, among others:

Charles Baxter · Gina Berriault · Emma Binder · Roberto Bolaño · Jorge Luis Borges · Paul Bowles · Raymond Carver · Julio Cortázar · Edwidge Danticat · Junot Díaz · Ralph Ellison · Mariana Enriquez · Louise Erdrich · Sigmund Freud · Mary Gaitskill · Mavis Gallant · Gabriel García Márquez · Lauren Groff · Nathaniel Hawthorne · Ernest Hemingway · Felisberto Hernández · Denis Johnson · Clarice Lispector · William Lohier · Carmen Maria Machado · R.L. Maizes · Lorrie Moore · Ottessa Moshfegh · Flannery O’Connor · Frank O’Connor · Ricardo Piglia · Edgar Allan Poe · Horacio Quiroga · Julian Robles · George Saunders · Seamus Scanlon · William Pei Shih · Bryan Washington · Joy Williams · Alejandro Zambra.

Lyn Di Iorio is a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellow, Faulkner-Wisdom gold medal winner, and author of the award-winning novel Outside the Bones (Arte Público Press). A prominent scholar of Latinx literature, she authored Killing Spanish and co-edited the volumes Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures and Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism (all with Palgrave/Macmillan). Her short fiction—featured in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Witness, Big Other,andelsewhere—has earned high acclaim, including selection for Best American Short Stories 2025 and “distinguished story” designation in Best American Short Stories 2021. A graduate of Harvard, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley, she teaches literature and creative writing at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently at work on a short story collection and a darkly comic literary thriller.
https://lyndiiorio.com

This course is also available as Literature.

Literature

B0706 Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Prof. András Kiséry
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (20454)

We will be reading William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as, for contrast and context, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. (Although the exact line-up might be subject to change.) The question we will ask about each of them is the question fundamental to any tragedy: what do characters know and how do they know it?

Our exploration will be supported by a form of intellectual poaching and bricolage: we might sample some current as well as old fashioned ways of looking at the plays, and see how—for example—the history of political thought or network analysis, theories of textual transmission or critical race studies, psychoanalysis or the history of gender and sexuality can illuminate them. But throughout, our primary goal will be to make sense of these complicated, sometimes baffling, but always captivating texts.

András Kiséry teaches courses about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, adaptations, about early modern literature more broadly, as well as about book history and media history. His Hamlet’s moment was a finalist for the Globe Book Award. He is writing a new book about early modern and modern media, and he is also co-author of a substack about literary translation,
https://translationpatterns.substack.com

B2046 Taste of the Archive: Oral History as Praxis

Prof. Janée Moses
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (code: 20451)

This seminar, which begins and ends with Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay, “The Taste of the Archive” bends genre with a simultaneous study of narrative, oral history, and archive to highlight aspects of the past that are “hard to pin down” or elusive. In the first part of the course, students will explore fiction and non-fiction texts in the African American literary canon that deal with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and belonging to highlight contradictory truths that “can’t quite be explained away,” and consider how methods of African American literature can be applied to narrative-based oral history projects that embrace, rather than bridle, complicated truths about our shared pasts.

In the second part of the course, students will merge African American literary methods, archival practices, and oral history methods and theory to create their oral history projects. These projects will include the development of oral narratives that move from the realm of spoken word to polished manuscripts. In addition to the manuscript, students will analyze their oral history practice by writing methodology statements that expand the field of oral history.

Janée Moses, Assistant Professor of English, specializes in African American Literature, 20th-century black expressive cultures, and oral history theory and methodology. Her current book project is an intertextual study of black women’s life writing and performances that combines extraordinary pursuits and ordinary experiences to highlight the fullness of their lives. Her writing appears in publications including Rejoinder and BOMB Magazine. An established oral historian, Moses serves as the Director of BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, preserving the narratives of black visual artists in America.

This course is also available as Craft.

B2055 Modern Literature, Illness, and Medicine

Prof. Keith Gandal
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20450)

The meteoric rise of modern medicine, starting in the late 19th century, with its “materialist” model of the human being, in which physical diseases have physical causes—and its separation from what is now called psychology—has greatly transformed the very conception of the human being. From that period until now, literature, which is of course centrally concerned with characters and human experience, has not only reflected but also contested this modern medical understanding of human illness. We will consider representations of illness and doctors—and their relation to the medical versions of these—in American works, as well as a couple of European works that were immediately imported to the US, from the 1890s to the present.

This class initiates a new project in literary studies, which will involve discussions usually outside the purview of literature courses: about the nature of the scientific method and the history of science. This is not the typical course on “Literature and Medicine,” which, even when it focuses on modern literature and medicine, does so in an ahistorical way. Standard courses might, for example, “raise questions about ethical behavior in the face of sickness” (to quote a random course description at another university) or discuss “narratives or metaphors of illness.”

But, as these phrases indicate, such courses take “illness” as a given; in other words, they do not raise questions about the modern social construction of sicknesses themselves, which is to say about the unproven theory about what causes a sickness. Here I refer to noninfectious diseases, since sicknesses such as tuberculosis, cholera, polio, or influenza, which are curable or preventable by vaccine, are thereby understood and cannot be said to be socially constructed. Sicknesses for which we are still seeking a cure cannot be said to be fully understood. The treatments of sicknesses that have no cure have a significant social history because our medical ideas about such sicknesses are, by necessity, at an experimental stage, which is to say, they are not scientifically proven—as only a cure is scientific proof. Heart disease, cancer, and autoimmune disorders are all diseases for which we have no cure, and so their conceptions and treatments are in part socially constructed.

Warning: “Chronic” and “terminal” illness, perhaps especially cancer and autoimmune disorders, is a troubling subject for many people. It can be a source of fear and post-trauma; a lot of us know people who have had cancer or have an autoimmune disorder; many of us fear it. Fear of cancer is a serious social issue and one we will be discussing; arguably, in fact, the promotion of fear is a major tactic deployed by the medical profession in the management of cancer. This course, by contrast, will not promote fear of cancer, but just the opposite. However, in this class, there is no getting around discussing cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses; in fact, such discussions are central to the course. We can’t shy away from issues because they are disturbing. So, if you have a problem reading or talking about chronic illness—which is understandable—you should not take this course.

Tentative Texts: Literature (in order of publication date):
Herman Melville, excerpt from Moby Dick
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
Willa Cather, One of Ours (excerpt)
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
John O’Hara, “The Doctor’s Son”
William Burroughs, Junky
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (excerpt)
Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Commentary:
Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (excerpt)
Ivan Illich, “Medical Nemesis” (essay)
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Welcome to Cancerland” (essay)
Robert Aronowitz, Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (excerpt)

Keith Gandal is Professor of English at City College of New York, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing. He is the author of four scholarly books, a novel, and a memoir. His scholarly books are War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (Oxford UP, 2008), Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford, 1997). The novel is Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002). The Memoir is Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis while Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things (U of Michigan P, 2024).

B2140 Immigration Literature: On Place, Language, and Identity

Prof. Grazyna Drabik
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (20449)

The experiences of exiles, refugees, and immigrants represent various forms of dramatic displacement that has profoundly affected modern Western culture, in particular the notions of our personal and national identity. How do we define “Other” in our tangled, multicultural reality? Who are “outsiders” among “us”? Where do we belong and how do we navigate multiple cross-cultural or transnational connections?

The course will focus on the dialectics of place, language, and identity, as highlighted by the writers, our contemporaries, who speak with the “forked-tongue,” writing from the perspective of a marginal, bi-cultural, or transnational experience. They are particularly attuned to the impact of uprooting and the importance of language in the search for belonging. Their novels and short stories, plays, poems and personal essays do not fit comfortably within established versions of national histories, but they enrich and extend the American literary canon.

Our readings include short stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Viet Thanh Nguyen; novellas by Thomás Riviera and Julie Otsuko; novels by Cristina García and Chang-rae Lee; a play by Martyna Majok; and selection of poems and essays by Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Czeslaw Milosz. We will supplement our readings with two visually powerful films Songs My Brothers Taught Me dir. by Chloé Zhao and Persepolis dir. by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

The seminar is demanding in terms of the amount and diversity of reading materials, but leaves space for individual special interests, offering a wide range of choices for the term project.

Grazyna Drabik teaches World Humanities & Immigration Literature at City College and a seminar on Arts in New York City at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. Her areas of special interest are cross-cultural exchanges and challenges of literary translation. She has published the translation of poems by Wisława Szymborska and Anna Kamieńska, and of Andrzej Bobkowski’s Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940- 1944 (Yale University Press, 2018). She is currently preparing a large selection of poems by Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, to be published in Polish.