Creative Writing
B3000 Fiction Workshop
Prof. Cleyvis Natera
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (21960)
ONLINE
The act of writing requires courage and vulnerability especially in these challenging times. What are you passionate about? What keeps you awake at night? This fiction workshop will focus on critiques of your submitted manuscripts. Students will submit once or twice depending on class size during the semester. The discussions will examine the essential elements of fiction and storytelling in your work. During each session there will be some discussion on short assigned readings on craft, voice, language, the business of being a writer and developing and maintaining a creative practice. Assigned readings will include articles on craft, contemporary fiction and excerpts from a range of genres to stretch your imagination and a sense of what is possible in fiction. The goal of the workshop is to support each student as a writer, both your process and development, through writing, reading and the study of craft.
Cleyvis Natera is the author of the debut novel Neruda on the Park. She was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York City. She’s received honors from PEN America, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). Her fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration, TIME, The Rumpus, Gagosian Quarterly, The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, Aster(ix) and Kweli Journal, among other publications. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University. Cleyvis teaches creative writing in New York City. She lives with her husband and two young children in Montclair, New Jersey.
https://cleyvisnatera.com/
B3000 Fiction Workshop
Prof. Salar Abdoh
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (21953)
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.
Salar Abdoh’s latest book (2020) is Out of Mesopotamia.
B3000 Fiction Workshop
Prof. Lyn Di Iorio
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (21965)
In this workshop, graduate students will focus on writing and revising two or three self-contained works of short fiction and critiquing the work of fellow writers (through both written and oral comments). Using the technical terms of the craft (such as characterization, structure, conflict, desire line, point of view, dialogue, beats, tone, setting, epiphany, etc.), we will discuss what each workshop submission is trying to accomplish and suggest ways to help the writer strengthen the work. When useful, we’ll also discuss selected chapters from Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2nd edition, by Renni Browne and Dave King, a book which students should purchase.
In order to prepare for future submissions to literary journals or magazines, each student will also be assigned to read several issues of one literary journal and write and deliver an oral report assessing the type of work the journal tends to publish. I may also ask students to distribute a story for the class to read that embodies the journal’s preferences and expectations. This assignment will help us develop a mini archive of different publications appropriate for the diverse works written by our class.
Lyn Sandín Di Iorio is A 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 2021-22 Rifkind Center Faculty Fellow currently working on Hurricanes and Other Stories, a short story collection. Her novel Outside the Bones was a top-five finalist for the 2012 John Gardner Fiction Prize and her book of literary criticism Killing Spanish focused on Latinx literature. Her story “By the River Cibuco” (Kenyon Review Online July/August 2020) was named a “Distinguished Story of 2020” in Best American Short Stories 2021. She also teaches at CUNY Graduate Center.
B3200 Poetry Workshop
Prof. David Groff
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (21943)
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 received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He also has an MA in English and Expository Writing from the University of Iowa. His two books of poetry are Clay (Trio House Press, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002). He has co-edited the anthologies Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners.
B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop
Prof. Irvin Weathersby Jr.
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (22406)
During the fall semester, students will submit two manuscripts up to twenty-five pages each, and learn to critique the work of their peers. Students will also explore exemplars of creative nonfiction and discuss the publication process from writing query letters, soliciting representation, and working with publishers. This class will nurture writers looking to expand their understanding of creative non-fiction as it relates to other forms including memoir, narrative non-fiction, feature writing, journalism, the personal essay and others, including fiction and poetic forms. While each of us has a story to tell, if not more, this workshop will give students the tools to determine not what to say, but how their stories will be told.
Irvin Weathersby is the author of In Open Contempt (Viking), a forthcoming memoir-in-essays that mediates on expressions of racism in art, museums, and public spaces in New Orleans and throughout the world. He has written for Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and other outlets. His work has received funding and support from the Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation, the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where he was named the 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction. He has earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and a master’s in education from Morgan State University. He teaches composition and creative writing at Queensborough Community College.
B4501 Special Topics: Screenwriting Workshop
Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (21978)
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 assistant professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries: www.theplayis.com), 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). He has published twice in Fiction, as well as the Global City Review and (Re) An Ideas Journal, and in numerous anthologies for Applause/Limelight Books and Smith & Kraus Inc. 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 SAG- AFTRA and Actors Equity.BA Wake Forest, MA, MFA CCNY. www.marcpalmieri.com
This course is also available under Critical Practice.
Critical Practice
B1707 Prosody
Prof. Michelle Valladares
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (21889)
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggest they
are about to die
Basho, translated by Sam Hamill
This critical practice workshop is an exploration of poetic structure and form. It is part exploration of traditional forms, an examination of traditional and contemporary versions of the form and writing in form. You will consider the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku, ghazal and others. We will read poems by Shakespeare, Bishop, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, WS Merwin and Anne Carson. You will use this rigorous study of form to invigorate your own language and poems. We will use The Making of a Poem, A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.
Michelle Yasmine Valladares is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and an MFA Lecturer in Poetry. She is a poet, essayist and an independent film producer. She is the author of Nortada, the North Wind (Global City Press) and several chapbooks. She has collaborated on artists books. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been published in literary journals and her work has been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, (Norton) and other anthologies. She was awarded “The Poet of the Year” by the Americas Poetry Festival of NY. She is the poetry editor for Global City Press and has co-produced three award winning independent films. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her BA from Bryn Mawr College. You can check out her work at michelleyasminevalladares.com.
Her graduate courses include Poetry Workshop, Prosody and The Conversation between Poetry and Art.
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 Literature.
B2160 On Climate: Environmental Writing
Prof. Emily Raboteau
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (22405)
(This course not to be taken by students who previously took it.)
The climate crisis is already changing the way each of us lives and experiences the world. This course will give students a space to reflect on the effects of climate change and shifting baselines in their own communities. We’ll explore the science, make connections to New York City, learn of and share opportunities for activism, and examine writing from others at the frontlines of the crisis. Students will submit their own chronicles of a world in transition—which can include stories about migration, conflict, ecological loss, man-made disasters, resilience, and solutions. Climate writing is emerging as a genre at a time when the narratives we tell can determine how our planet meets the challenges ahead. And that, in turn, will shape physical, political, social, and cultural environments for ourselves and for generations to come. Students will read and process recent exemplary literary nonfiction on the subject of the climate crisis, and write a research-driven 2,000-4,000 personal essay on the effects of global warming in their individual communities, to be workshopped by their peers.
Emily Raboteau is a novelist, essayist, and cultural critic. She is a contributing editor at Orion Magazine, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her last book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, won a 2014 American Book Award. She is also the recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Nonfiction Literature Fellowship. Her next book, Lessons for Survival, focusing on the intersection of climate change and environmental justice through the lens of motherhood, will be published by Holt. Bylines include The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, and Best American Travel Writing.
B3605 The Mechanics of Editing
Prof. Yahdon Israel
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (23447)
“Editing,” Robert Gottlieb says, “requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book.” Though workshops depend largely on the participants’ ability to provide useful insight about what they’re reading with possible methods of how to address the issues that arise, because editing is an entirely separate enterprise from writing, writers in workshop often find themselves: (1) not knowing what or how to help fellow writers; or (2) attempting to rewrite the story for the writer. The Mechanics of Editing is a class devoted to providing students with the language, methods and techniques that enable them to effectively workshop their peers’ work, and edit their own.
Yahdon Israel is a Senior editor at Simon Schuster and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books accessible. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, LitHub, Poets and Writers and Vanity Fair. He teaches creative writing at City College, and hosts the Literaryswag Book Club, a Brooklyn-based subscription service and book club that meets every last Wednesday of the month.
B3608 Craft of Creative Nonfiction
Prof. Amir Ahmadi Arian
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (21979)
In this course we focus on the craft of nonfiction. Each class will be divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to a craft element such as structure, style, voice, etc. In this part we examine various technics and strategies that enable the writers to hone that particular aspect of their work. In the second part of the class, each week we will talk about one or two essays or book chapters that, in my view, provide a good example for how the lesson of the day can be executed in practice. Our readings will cover the wide range of the genres that have come under the rubric of creative nonfiction, such as personal essay, journalism, memoir, travel essay, etc. As the semester progresses, the students develop an essay week by week, implementing the technics they learn through the course.
Amir Ahmadi Arian is an Iranian writer, the author of Then The Fish Swallowed Him (Harper 2020). His essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Guernica, and elsewhere.
B4501 Special Topics: Screenwriting Workshop
Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (21978)
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 assistant professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries: www.theplayis.com), 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). He has published twice in Fiction, as well as the Global City Review and (Re) An Ideas Journal, and in numerous anthologies for Applause/Limelight Books and Smith & Kraus Inc. 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 SAG- AFTRA and Actors Equity.BA Wake Forest, MA, MFA CCNY. www.marcpalmieri.com
This course is also available under Creative Writing.
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 Language and Literacy.
Literature
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 10th through 17th 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).
Language and Literacy
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.