B0607 Roaring Girls

Prof. Elizabeth Mazzola
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (27840)

The writings of early women can be found nearly everywhere, but we have been instructed not to see them, not even to look. Once we start searching, however, the literary tradition in England begins to appear differently, with women of all classes handling the alphabet in unusual ways and imagining genres and audiences and interpretive practices from entirely new perspectives. We will explore the history of women’s writing in England from the 10^th through 17^th centuries and test the claim that later writers have their origins in the works of their literary foremothers. Related ideas about how to study manuscripts, how to consider “alternative” literacies, and how to distinguish women’s hands from men’s will be tested too, along with the premise that all women’s writing is feminist, or subversive, or roars.

Elizabeth Mazzola is a Professor of English at City College and the author of five books, including Women and Mobility on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge, 2017) along with essays on Spenser, Milton, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Margaret Cavendish. Her work is interdisciplinary, and frequently draws on art history, geography, feminist theory, and sociology to investigate how early modern writers mapped their world and arranged its claims. One current project focuses on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its explorations of ideas about belonging and intimacy, about where life begins and ends, about how communities come together and fall apart. Another project on early modern ballads considers the evidence these popular texts supply about women and street culture, orality, and contagion. 

B0710 After Shakespeare: The Plays and Modern Literature

Prof. Andras Kisery
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (21880)

This course provides an opportunity to re-familiarize ourselves with a couple of Shakespeare’s most influential plays through the lens of 19th, 20th, and 21st century literary texts and performances that engage with them critically and creatively. We will probably be focusing on Hamlet and The Tempest, reading works by such authors as J. W. Goethe, Aimé Césaire, Marina Tsvetaeva, or Margaret Atwood. We will think about tradition, adaptation, and appropriation, about borrowing and originality, and about the devastations of the Shakespeare industry.

András Kiséry workson early modern English literature, as well as on book history and media history. His recent publications include Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (2016, paperback 2018), and the 2020 special issue of Shakespeare Studies on “English among the Literatures of Early Modernity.” His current projects are a book about early modern English literature in Europe, another about the early twentieth century beginnings of media studies, and an edition of Christopher Marlowe’s works.

B1985 Literature of the Diaspora: belonging, estrangement, ambivalence

Prof. Dalia Sofer
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (21890)

This course will examine the plural identities revealed in the works of European, Middle Eastern, and North-African writers of Jewish descent, including Marcel Proust, Giorgio Bassani, Bruno Schulz; Danilo Kiš, Imre Kertész, Eva Hoffman, Samir Naqqash, and Joyce Zonana. Exploring autobiographical writings as well as works of fiction, we will address the complexities of acculturation, the pervasiveness of estrangement, and ambivalence toward Jewishness. We will pay attention not only to content but also to form, examining how, for many of these writers, innovation was a key aspect of self-expression.
In addition to the readings, students will undertake writing exercises and assignments, and will be asked to submit their work for class discussion.  The course is open to students of all backgrounds who wish to deepen their understanding of themselves in relation to the world.

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 the Year, 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 the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.  Her novels have been translated and published in 16 countries.
A recipient of a Whiting Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sirenland Fellowship, and multiple residencies at Yaddo, she has contributed essays and reviews to various publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Review of Books, and The Believer.​

This course is also available under Critical Practice.

B2020 Baroque and Neo-Baroque

Prof. Harold Veeser
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (22396)

Short works of elaborate fantasy and outlandish imagination. In Shakespeare’s day, short lyric poems expressed bizarre fantasies of the metaphysical poets, outrageous scenes of incest and cross-dressing enlivened the Elizabethan stage, wild fantasies peppered baroque sermons and religious writing. Baroque ideas of beauty next stormed back to center stage in the strange inventions of Modernism and the assaults of surrealism and DaDA. Examples of this Neo-Baroque revolution will include Nightwood. In our own day, the neo-baroque is known as bling: hip hop MCs, graffiti, professional wrestling, Flarf internet poetry, MTV videos, NFL and NBA fashionistas. Examples will include: “Lip Sync for Your Life” from Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Kehinde Wiley’s Renaissance portraits of Obama and gangstas, hallucinatory MTV videos, the painted “Cheerleader” series picturing high school squads as soaring Baroque angels, and the “post-soul” era’s move beyond conventional politics towards a politics of pleasure: bodily gratification, hedonism, and nihilism. Examples will include radical lesbian and trans style overpowering doctrinaire white feminism, Queer style bubbling along from Oscar Wilde’s cello coat to Wayne Koestenbaum’s Prada suit, T-treatments and top surgery, rappers with their grills, chains, rings, and Rolls Royces. 2022 demands a new understanding of beauty.

H. Aram Veeser is Professor at the City College of New York (English Department) and the CUNY Graduate Center (Middle East and Middle-Eastern American Center and Biography/Memoir Program). His publications include four volumes he has edited on literary theory as well as his own book, Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (2010). In addition, he has worked as a journalist and addressed, in print, a nonacademic readership. He has conducted interviews that were published in books and magazines. His latest book is The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism: Scholars Discuss Intellectual Origins and Turning Points (October 2020). He is working on a new book of critical interviews to be co-authored with Tau Battice, a professional photographer. He is guest editing the special issue entitled “Postcolonial Interviews” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.4 (forthcoming July 2024).

B2007 American Women’s Experimental Writing

Prof. Laura Hinton
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (21891)

[Note: Prof Hinton is currently on leave; this is taken from the description she provided when she taught the course in Fall 2019]

This course focuses upon the literary creativity of an American vanguard of women writers, particularly those whose work moves “off the page,” so to speak – in experimentation with hybrid literary and multi-media forms. Their work typically has been published in the literary “small press” of U.S. poetry, going back to the late ’60’s and ’70’s and associated with literary postmodernism; this work has continued today throughout the second decade of the new millennium, with newer generations of U.S. women experimenting in word and “hybrid” (mixed-media) forms. These works stretching the definition of literary form—radically experimental in a formal sense—also challenge cultural knowledge about gender, identity, and social positioning. They weave intersectional feminist critiques about society, language, community and cultural narratives into the fabric of their experimental texts. From Theresa Hak Kyong Cha’s video poems to Erica Hunt’s and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s artist book collaborations, to Anne Waldman’s chant and performance work, to the “spoken word” jazz poetics of Jayne Cortez, 20th and 21st century American women writers offer social and formal critiques within their texts that reconsider conventional perspectives on aesthetics and gender-racial politics within the contemporary U.S. literary scene.

Laura Hinton is a poet, literary critic, and editor, as well as an educator. Her poetry books include Ubermutter’s Death Dance and Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub), published by BlazeVox. Her critical books include The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (co-editor) and Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics and Performance in the U.S. Contemporary Women’s Poetics (editor). Her essays, poet interviews, and reviews have appeared in numerous books and journals including Contemporary Literature, Postmodern Culture, Textual Practice, Women’s Studies, Rain Taxi, Jacket2, Poetry Project Newsletter, and The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among many others. She often works in hybrid media, and her poetry with photography and or/ video have been published in several journals including Yew, Madhatter Review, Feminist Studies, Bird Dog, How2, Poetry Seen and Red Fez. She has performed her poetry in venues from Maine to Tucson to New York City. She is a Professor of English who teaches a range of subjects from feminist and critical literary theory, poetics, film studies, contemporary literature, and women’s literature.

B2023 US War and Mobilization in the 20th Century

Prof. Keith Gandal
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (21892)

The literature in this course includes war fiction and literature set during a war or in a postwar world, but this literature might better be categorized as mobilization or post-mobilization literature.  The unprecedented, meritocratic mobilizations for the World Wars and Vietnam effected dramatic social transformations in masculinity, the role of women, gender relations, sexual behavior, and the status of ethnic Americans and African-Americans. This course explores the representation of these mobilization-inspired transformations in modernist and post-modern literature, a brand new project in literary study.

Tentative Texts:
WWI 
Ernest Hemingway, “A Very Short Story,” The Sun Also Rises,
Farewell to Arms
William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
Willa Cather, One of Ours
Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War
Lawrence Stallings, Plumes
Victor Daly, Not Only War    
WWII
William Burroughs, Junky
Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz        
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns
Vietnam  
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
James Fallows, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”

Keith Gandal is Professor of English, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing.  His publications have had three foci: urban poverty, war and mobilization, and modern medicine and illness. His scholarly books include: War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Johns Hopkins, 2018); The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (Oxford, 2008); The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford, 1997). He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002).

B8105 Reading and Writing Autobiography

Prof. Barbara Gleason
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (52558)
HYBRID

It should perhaps come as no surprise that autobiography would become a central, even dominant, form of writing in a society devoted, at least in principle, to a notion of radical equality. — Jay Parini.

In The Norton Book of American Autobiography, Jay Parini presents a thoughtfully curated collection of texts composed by American writers. According to Parini, “Autobiography could easily be called the essential American genre, a form of writing closely allied to our national self-consciousness” (11). This claim will serve as a springboard for our reading of autobiographical essays, stories and memoirs, starting with selected authors from Parini’s anthology (Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Black Hawk, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Mark Twain, and Hellen Keller). We will then consider how writers represent ethnic identities and cultural realities in autobiographical essays and stories. For example, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria E. Anzaldúa uses two styles of English and six variations of Spanish to narrate stories focused on ethnicity, culture, sexuality and language. In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston presents a blend of mythic and true stories about immigrant, female, Chinese and American identities. And in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, Leslie Marmon Silko writes of growing up in a Laguna Pueblo community and of some realities of Native American experience.  Graduate students will be invited to share their favorite autobiographies, compose a personal essay or story, respond to each other’s drafts in workshops, and discuss the potential uses of autobiography by teachers of reading and writing.

Barbara Gleason is CCNY English Department professor and Director of the MA in Language and Literacy. She also is a member of the Council of Basic Writing Executive Committee and Editor of Basic Writing e-Journal. Her publications include two edited books, journal essays on basic writing, adult writers, curricula, and writing program evaluation, and The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Adult Learners (with Kimme Nuckles).  In the 1990s, she and Mary Soliday co-directed a three-year FIPSE-funded pilot project in mainstreaming basic writers. 

B8125 The Politics of Language

Prof. Missy Watson
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (23804)

In this course, we will study the politics of language and explore how and why teachers of language and literacy might better understand and address such interrelations. We will engage research that invites us to critically examine societal structures and attitudes surrounding language (including our own beliefs) that create and uphold social and racial hierarchies—a worthwhile inquiry for any student and all educators. We’ll examine an array of linguistic myths (e.g., the myth of non-accents, the myth of standard language, and the myth of nonstandardized varieties being inadequate), and we’ll study the systems, institutions, practices, and attitudes that perpetuate these myths. Then, we will practice pedagogically applying our new political understandings of language by developing curricular materials that aim to counter harmful linguistic myths in first-year college writing courses and other educational contexts.

Dr. Missy Watson is Associate Professor in the CCNY English Department. She serves as the Director of First-Year Writing Program, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, pedagogy, language, and literacy. Her research lies at the intersection of composition and second-language writing and revolves around seeking social and racial justice. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and Pedagogy.

C0862 The Teaching of Composition and Literature

Prof. Missy Watson
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (10360)

This course prepares graduate students to teach introductory college writing and humanities classes. We will study and practice approaches to teaching composition, course design, instructional strategies, writing assignments, writing assessment, classroom management. We also explore a range of approaches and technologies for teaching and learning in online environments, and we will examine print and online resources for college writing instructors. Additionally, we will consider how to tailor our teaching to best support a wide variety of students—with variable needs, motivations, abilities, and cultural, linguistic, racial, educational, and social backgrounds.

Dr. Missy Watson is Associate Professor in the CCNY English Department. She serves as the Director of First-Year Writing Program, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, pedagogy, language, and literacy. Her research lies at the intersection of composition and second-language writing and revolves around seeking social and racial justice. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and Pedagogy.

This course is also available under Critical Practice.