B0706 Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Prof. Andras Kisery
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (38860)
ONLINE

This semester, we will probably be reading William Shakespeare’s Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, as well as Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, John Webster’s The White Devil, and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling. Rather than examining our materials from a single perspective, our intellectual approach will be characterized by poaching and bricolage. We will sample some current as well as old fashioned ways of looking at these texts, and try 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. Throughout, our primary goal will be to make sense of these complicated, sometimes baffling, sometimes captivating texts.

András Kiséry works on 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.

B1210 Haunting Books- mourning and afterlife in literature

Prof. Elazar Elhanan
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (57170)
ONLINE

In this course we will look at a selection of texts, some very familiar, others rarer, drawn from the Bible and Greek tragedy, Sci-fi and Yiddish modernist ghost stories, French post-structuralism and Polish cinema, in order to examine the writing of grief and the representation of mourning in literature.
We will look at grieving as a social practice, a prescribed behavior that is supposed to achieve certain results and in which one can fail. Grieving is a powerful tool of social control which offers social acceptance and comfort for those who follow the prescriptions,  or exclusion for the rest. Naturally, society’s need to reintegrate the grieving and put boundaries between life and death creates tension between the personal, and often political, reality of unacceptable loss, a tension which leaves people “stuck”, unable to work through their loss.
The interest of this class is in these “stuck” characters, in art that manifestly fails to process, a position that is often viewed as opposition on personal and political grounds to the normalization of loss. We will read a selection of moving and daring texts, in which the failure of be consoled and move on is manifested as a principled resistance. Assisted by Freud’s and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on mourning and melancholia, Judith Butler’s discussion of grievability and Judith/Jack Halberstam ideas on failure, these readings will animate a discussion of what alternative technologies of comfort and what social possibilities come alive when one “fails” to do the work prescribed for mourning.

Readings will include:

• Genesis: the selling of Josef
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Shakespeare: Hamlet
• George Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood,
• Marguerite Duras: “The Death of the Young British Pilot”
• Sholem Aleichem, Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, The Writings of an Orphan Boy
• S. An-sky, The Dybbuk
• Krzysztof Kieślowski Three Colours: Blue (1993)

Elazar (Elik) Elhanan is a literary scholar, essayist  and activist. He teaches Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the Jewish studies program, City College New York. Elik received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Middle East studies from Columbia University. He works mainly on modernist poetry and cinema and studies the relations between language and politics, identity and nation-building.  Dr. Elhanan work was published inn various venues in the US, Israel and France, and his book entitled The Path Leading to the Abyss: Hebrew and Yiddish in Yaakov Steinberg’s poetry is forthcoming next year.

B1974 Global Autobiography

Prof. Harold Veeser
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (40172)
ONLINE

This course will allow for experiments in criticism and memoir. We will read a sampling of popular memoirs, recovery narratives, ethnic-identity stories, substance-abuse sagas, trauma memoirs, conversion narratives, and coming-of-age stories. We will read a range of memoirs drawn from the Americas and the middle east. By the end of the course, I hope we will have some thoughts as to whether memoirs simply reflect pre-existing conditions, or whether they actually help to shape the personalities, beliefs, and gender norms of societies.

Required Texts:

• Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
• Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
• Tupac Shakur, The Rose that Grew from Concrete
• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
• Suad Amiry. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law
• Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone
• Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

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). His publications include four volumes he has edited on literary theory and theorists, 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. He has recently published The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism: Scholars Discuss Intellectual Origins and Turning Points, a book based on original interviews with eighteen contemporary literary theorists. He drew illustrations for the book. A second volume of interviews is now underway. He is also writing his memoir.

B1985 Literature of the Diaspora: belonging,
estrangement, ambivalence

Prof. Dalia Sofer
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (45159)
ONLINE

This course will examine the plural identities revealed in the works of European, Middle Eastern, and North-African writers of Jewish descent, including Italo Svevo, Giorgio Bassani, Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, Walter Benjamin, Imre Kertész, Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Eva Hoffman, Fernando Pessoa, Albert Memmi, Naïm Kattan, Samir Naqqash, and Lucette Lagnado. 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 advanced writing 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)—selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, published in sixteen countries, 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.  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.

B2030 The Evidence of Things Unseen: Art, Archives, and Harlem

Prof. William Gibbons
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (46491)
ONLINE

The Evidence of Things Unseen: Art, Archives, and Harlem is a hands-on course exposing students to the practice of archival and academic research.  The course will help students navigate archives and libraries while exploring the cultural, social, and political forces that influenced and defined the Harlem Renaissance and its writers. Students will work with primary and secondary archival materials related to Harlem’s role as an important artistic and political center housed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and other Harlem community and cultural organizations.  By the end of the course, students will understand the historical development of the field of archives, current issues, trends, and theories that shape the archival profession​.

Professor William Gibbons is a librarian and an archivist.  He teaches urban policy, library science, and archival research at The City College of New York (CCNY) and is the Curator of Archives & Special Collections in the City College Libraries.
He is a resource on Harlem and helps students and researchers become knowledgeable library users to use libraries and archives to their fullest potential.  His writing and research are focused on curating and preserving evidence of cultural heritage unseen.

This course is also available under Critical Practice.

B2055 Modern Literature, Illness, and Medicine

Prof. Keith Gandal
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (38863)
ONLINE

The meteoric rise of modern medicine that accompanied the “epidemiological transition,” starting in the late 19th century, with its strictly “materialist” approach to health—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 has both reflected and 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.  The standard course might, for example, “raise questions about ethical behavior in the face of sickness” (to quote a random course description at another university).  But, as this phrase indicates, it takes “sickness” as a given and doesn’t distinguish between different sorts of sicknesses; in other words, it doesn’t raise questions about the ethics of the modern medical construction of sicknesses themselves.  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.  To take perhaps the most important example, doctors have for centuries recognized cancer, but the conception of the cause of cancer is very different today from what it was even in the late 19^th century.
Warning: “Chronic” and “terminal” illness, perhaps especially cancer and now COVID-19 as well, 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 died of cancer or COVID; 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 and the American Cancer Society in the management of cancer. This course, by contrast, will not promote fear of cancer or COVID–in fact just the opposite. However, in this class, there is no getting around discussing cancer, heart disease, other chronic illnesses, including autoimmune disorders, and COVID; 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 or COVID–which is understandable–you should not take this course.

Tentative list of readings:

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
• Willa Cather, One of Ours (Book IV)
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (novella)
• William Burroughs, Junky
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness
• Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• Ivan Illich, “Medical Nemesis”
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction (excerpt on “biopower”)
• Robert Aronowitz, Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (excerpt)

Professor Keith Gandal’s publications have had three foci: urban poverty, war and mobilization, and modern medicine and illness. His 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), as well as the novel Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002).

C0851 Harlem Renaissance and the Principle of the Erotic

Prof. Gordon Thompson
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (40167)
ONLINE

This class is an interdisciplinary American Culture Studies course, concerned with the mores of Black creative culture. 
Prior to registering for this class, then, please note well: attendees should be prepared to discuss stories and poems alongside elementary issues of music and art—a combination of features that best reveals and privileges the African American attempt at self-definition. 
Also, be prepared to discuss erotic imagery of various kinds that undergird the narratives of the required texts. The erotic: a force behind our need to survive, to have sex and to propagate, but also to be life-sustaining and to induce creativity in general.  This definition lies at the heart of the philosophical dimensions of this course.   We will focus on images and tropes that speak directly to how artists depict the yearn to survive, to propagate, to maintain social relations conducive to the pursuit of happiness.
Coming out of slavery, Blacks had to discover the best means of surviving in a world anathema to their needs as African descendants.  As such, Black culture—its aesthetics—sought to embrace ways of living that challenged or was challenged by European expressivity.  With 300 years of assimilation, Blacks had internalized European aesthetics and in their challenge to it, discovered, as W. E. B. Du Bois would say, a double consciousness.  To a considerable degree, examining the signs of that double consciousness in the creative works of this artistic vanguard represents the overarching theme of this course.
In sum, we will focus on the literature, graphic images, and folk music created by African Americans during and around the period of the Harlem Renaissance—between, that is, WW I and the Great Depression.  Such writers may include Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer; alongside such artists as Aaron Douglas, William Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Palmer Hyden; jazz and Blues musicians such as Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, among others.

Professor Thompson has enjoyed a laudable career spanning nearly 30 years of teaching and service at City College, Louisiana State University, and Stanford University. His higher education credentials began with his studies at City College where he attained his B.A. in English in 1979 and was completed upon receiving his Ph. D. at Yale University in 1987. During his 30 years teaching at City College, he served as director of the Black Studies Program, and the Langston Hughes Festival. As professor of African American and American literature in the English Department, he demonstrated a strong publication record that includes two books: The Assimilationist Impulse in Representative African American Narratives (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011); and Black Music, Black Poetry: Genre, Performance, and Authenticity (Ashgate Press, 2014). He has chapters in other books such as Black America [Three Volumes]: A State-By-State Historical Encyclopedia, (co-author, William Gibbons}: edited by Alton Hornsby Jr. (ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2011}; and “Kindred Souls,” chapter in Black Gay Genius, editors, Joseph Beam and Charles Stephens (Vintage Entity Press, 2014).
At City College, he has endeavored to convey to his students the various interconnections between African American fiction, poetry, and biographical writings produced over the last two hundred and fifty years. Such connections are grounded in the culture and history of African Americans foregrounded in the scholarship of the great historian John Blassingame, among others. Professor Thompson also specializes in the various artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance Period, a syllabus he created for the completion of his doctorate degree under the tutelage of Robert Stepto and Henry Louis Gates, et. alia. He introduced the course to the City College community in the early 1990’s and has taught it off and on ever since. Currently, he is taking a great interest in the fiction of James Baldwin with relevant publications expected soon.

B6000 Introduction to Language

Prof. Qian Zhang Malkoff
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (40113)
ONLINE

This course will provide an overview of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, as well as an introductory look at origins, historic contexts, and evolution of selected English words and syntactic structures. A contrast of linguistic features between English and Mandarin Chinese will be offered as an example of language variation. In addition to reading texts by academic writers, we will read excerpts from The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, both delightful and informative books by Bill Bryson, American journalist and best-selling author. At the end of this course, students will have gained a comprehensive understanding of core topics studied by linguists (phonetics, morphology, syntax, discourse) and experience with analyzing various forms of language.
We will also explore several questions that have been hotly debated in the field of linguistics and language acquisition: How does first language acquisition differ from second language learning? What are some key factors that support or hinder language acquisition? What are “language errors”? What is the role of error correction in language teaching? What is an “interlanguage” and how does it impact second language acquisition? What do we know about language learning in multilingual communities vs. communities that are primarily monolingual?
Students will write reading responses and participate in class discussion at class meetings and on padlet (collaborative digital bulletin board). They will also conduct independent research that involves applying linguistic topics (presented in course texts) to their own analyses of language–both their own language and language produced by other people. Mid-term assessment will be a series of open-book short essay questions from the textbook and the final will be a research paper involving observing and analyzing language learning experiences of their own and/or others.
Textbook: The Study of Language by George Yule (7^th ed., 2020). Most of the excerpted readings will be provided to students free of charge in digital form.

Qian Z. Malkoff has taught basic writing courses, English as a second language and Mandarin Chinese as a native and foreign language at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels for over twenty years. She earned an MA in Language and Literacy from CCNY and  Ph.D.  in English Education, majoring in applied linguistics, from New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. She currently teaching Chinese language classes at Edward R. Murrow High School, where she has served as the coordinator for the New York State SEAL of Biliteracy program for since 2018.  She has presented her findings on remote teaching vs. in-person teaching at DCLT forum at NYU and has discussed her own teaching of poetry writing in advanced Chinese courses as a speaker at the 2018 International Conference of Chinese Teaching hosted by Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests are mainly in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, project-based learning (PBL), writing strategies and student-centered learning.

B6400 Theories and Models of Literacy

Prof. Barbara Gleason
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (38866)
ONLINE

This course provides a variety of perspectives on literacy practices, theory and research.  Starting with a historical perspective, we’ll explore forms of manuscripts, books and writing tools used in the past 1000 years, the shift from scribal literacy to print brought about by invention and use of printing presses, and the transition underway now from text-based print to digital and multimodal communication. Then, we will survey examples of alphabetic, logographic, and syllabic writing systems and consider their influences on readers’ experiences and reading fluency.Well-known models of literacy acquisition will also be discussed:  a cognitive & skills-based model, emergent literacy, a sociocultural framework and an ideological model. In the second half or our course, we will consider literate practices in a variety of social contexts–including rural and urban spaces, home environments, workplaces, schools and libraries. Finally, we will explore possible reasons for why some people experience lifetimes of positive reading/writing experiences while others live through adolescence and adulthood without gaining strong reading and writing competencies.
Digital copies of texts provided to students include “The Physiology of Reading” from Space between Words by Saenger (1997),  “Ch. 1 Prologue to Discovery” in A Short Hx of The Printed Word by Chappell & Bringhurst (1999), “Silent Readers” in A History of Reading by Albert Manguel (1996), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), “Blueprints and Borrowed Letters” in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1999), “Sponsors of Literacy” by Deborah Brandt (CCC 1998), “Reading from Paper Compared to Screens” by Virginia Clinton (J. of Research in Reading Vol. 42, No. 2, 2019), “Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal Framework by Steven Fraiberg (CCC, 2010), “Information Literacy in the Digital Age: Myths and Principles of Digital Literacy” by Bernd Becker (in School of Information Student Research Journal, 2018), and “Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age” (NCTE Position Statement, 2019).
Required Texts:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition (2000 Continuum) by Paulo Freire
Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates (Harvard UP, 1995)

Barbara Gleason is Director of the CCNY MA in Language and Literacy, Editor of Basic Writing e-Journal, co-author of The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Adults (2014), and co-editor of Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into a Field (1999) and Cultural Tapestry: Readings for a Pluralistic Society (1992). Her essays on basic writing, program evaluation, college writing curriculum and graduate education have been published in various books and journals, including The Journal of Basic Writing, where–with five contributing authors– she recently published “Forming Adult Educators: The MA in Language & Literacy at CCNY” (JBW Fall 2018).

C0862 The Teaching of Composition and Literature

Prof. Thomas Peele
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (38893)
ONLINE

This course will help to prepare you to teach introductory college writing and humanities classes. We will study approaches to teaching composition, course design, writing assignments, instructional strategies, writing assessment, and classroom management. We also explore a range of approaches and technologies for teaching and learning in online environments, including Blackboard, Academic Commons, Camtasia, and the Office 365 suite of tools. We will also consider the impact that teaching a wide variety of students, with variable needs, motivations, cultural and social backgrounds, and abilities, has on classroom practices and philosophy. We will also examine print and online resources for college writing instructors.

Course Learning Outcomes

Students who complete this course will be able to

• Develop and write assignments for college students
• Use Web-based platforms to facilitate teaching and learning
• Respond to first and second drafts of first-year students’ essays
• Facilitate college students’ reading development
• Plan class sessions, organize workshops, and lead discussions
• Meet the learning and literacy needs of diverse students
• Use professional resources for college writing instructors

Tom Peele is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Teaching and Learning Center. He served as Director of the First-Year Writing Program from 2014-2020 and continues in his appointment as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. Professor Peele was recently awarded an NEH Grant with co-PI Interim Dean Renata Miller that supports the development of a digital humanities minor at CCNY.

This course is also available under Critical Practice.