Crafting Stronger Sentences: Conventions of English Grammar English 3001 Prof. B. Schreiber Tue/Thu 4:10 – 5:25PM	This course examines how sentences are put together, how they function, how writers engage the rules–and how they resist them. In the first part of the course, students will learn about the structure of English sentences, including formal names for parts of speech and grammatical constructions. Students will reflect on their experiences with grammar instruction and usage and will be assessed on knowledge and application of grammatical concepts. The second half of the course explores complex issues related to English grammar, such as prescriptivism as a social justice issue, inclusive language and political correctness, and the past, present, and future of grammar education. Students will complete an empirical research project drawing on original data examining a grammatical question discussed in the class.
Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. L. Silberman Mon/ Wed 10:45-12:00 PM	Find out what inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  See how Satan first became a glamorous anti-hero.  In this course, we will be reading representative works of English literature from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Other readings will include selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—the romantic, the bawdy, and the moral–one of the plays of Shakespeare, a Renaissance epyllion—a short, erotic narrative–and selected Renaissance love lyrics.  There will be two short, critical essays, a midterm and a final exam.
Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. R. Hinds Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM
Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM	What if we consider the idea of America’s greatness (often symbolized by the image of the “city upon a hill”) from the perspective of the citizens of the city underground: the colonized, scapegoats, outlaws, slaves, women, immigrants, the poor? How might such a shift in viewpoint impact our understanding of the nation’s founding concepts and ideals: utopia, community, citizenship, equality, fellowship, democracy, liberty, and other life pursuits?   In addition to the survey’s focus on representative texts and genres, our course will tap American literature’s utopian vein and engage in a critical and imaginative assessment of writers invested in thinking about workable alternatives to the status quo. Among the writers considered will be Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Michel de Montaigne, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Anne Hutchinson, Salem’s witch hunters and their victims, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, David Walker, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, John Rollin Ridge (“Yellow Bird”), Walt Whitman, and Hannah Crafts.
Survey of American Literature II English 3025 Prof. E. Richardson Tue/Thu 5:50-7:05 PM	In this class, we will explore a swath of classic and unconventional American literature and culture from 1865 to the present, focusing on protest, civil rights, and social change. We will interpret texts by close reading formal literary strategies related to the narrative plot, character formation, imagery, rhetoric, and tone. We will also analyze material attending to the expression meaning of freedom and citizenship, labor and class, government regulations, afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and LGBTQ rights. These topics pose a series of intriguing questions in this course:  How does the individual protagonist tell a larger story of America and society? How might collaborative writing substantiate and detail our conception of democracy? To what extent are the aesthetics (or artistry) of literature shaped or determined by a protest? What’s the difference between art and protest? And above all else, when there is tension, conflict, cultural shifts, reactionary responses, revolution, and resolutions achieved and unrealized America, what can literature do? Throughout the course, we will engage with these questions and more as we explore the power of literature to shape our understanding of the world around us. Authors include Upton Sinclair, W.E.B Du Bois, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Georgia Douglas, Claude McKay, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, John Okada, Rachel Carson, Joy Harjo, and Raquel Salas Rivera.
Asian American Literature English 3032 Prof. E. Chou Tue/Thu 10:45-12:00 PM	The key events for Asian American literature were the key events of modern America: World War II, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act. These events will guide the content of this course, including right up to the literature and films of today. We will begin with World War II and the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans in internment camps as “enemy aliens” and study both the internment and its significance up to today. Creative works will include short stories, a novel No-No Boy, drawings, and artwork. Primary documents will include the Executive Order for internment, Supreme Court decisions about it, and the redress and apology by President Reagan in 1982. Student contributions will include biographical profiles and newspaper accounts.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act together make up the key legislation that give us the large immigration population of America today, including in New York and at Baruch. We will use this diverse group as the context for our focus on its Asian-Americans. Through short stories, a novel, a graphic novel, film segments, and perhaps an invited speaker, we will raise and discuss thoughtful questions about Asian American-ness today.
Women in Literature English 3720 Prof. L. Kolb Tues/Thu 4:10 -5:25 PM	This course surveys writing about and (mostly) by women, from the ancient world to 2021. Beginning with ancient Greek lyric verse, we will explore Medieval lais and spiritual autobiography; Renaissance poetry and plays; 18th-century prose fiction; and 20th- and 21st-century novels. Throughout the class, we will consider the links between masculinist ideas of femininity, on the one hand, and female and gender non-conforming authors’ and characters’ resistance to those ideas, on the other. Surveying a wide range of texts, we will ask: how do the tools required in order to perform normative gender roles become, for some people, instruments of resistance—of re-making self and world? Texts on the syllabus may include selections from the Book of Margery Kempe; Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.
The Structure and History of English English 3750 Prof. N. Lee Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05 PM
Contemporary Drama English 3780 Prof. S. Vella Thursday 10:45 – 12:00PM	In a world full of mass media options, why does live theatre continue to thrive? In this class we will study a selection of plays and theatrical productions produced around the world in the last 25 years. This will include selections from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and will range in scale from mega-musicals produced in international urban centers to works produced for culturally-specific, local communities. We will focus on the unique ways in which contemporary theatre allows artists and audiences to engage both locally and globally with the urgent social, political, ecological, and cultural issues in our lives. In addition to reading plays and watching video documentation of performances, this course will also take advantage of the vibrant New York City contemporary theatre scene, and will include field trips and guest speakers. Assignments will include short written assignments and a research project.
Law and Literature English 3850 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thurs 10:45 – 12:00 PM	This course explores both law in literature (how literary texts view enduring legal issues) and law as literature (how the methods of literary criticism provide new understandings of legal texts). We will investigate themes of justice, bias, and the limits of the law in literary texts by writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Godwin, Toni Morrison, and Valeria Luiselli. In addition, we will read writings by Supreme Court Justices, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, prison letters, and documentaries using the methods of literary interpretation and analysis. Selected topics for deeper engagement will include criminal responsibility, legal personhood, the form of the court case, human rights, and mass incarceration.
A History of Translation English 3880 Prof. A. Izquierdo Tue/Thu 2:30 – 3:45 PM	In the modern world, issues of translation and intercultural communication arise everywhere: in literary texts, on the Internet, on television, opera and film, in business, in law, in science, and in many other domains. Can a sonnet or a poem be translated? Why do we keep translating the Bible to this day? Were Cervantes and Shakespeare plagiarizers? What’s the relationship between translation, politics & ideology? Is Broadway’s West Side Story a translation of Romeo and Juliet? How are new technologies affecting translation today? How has Hamlet been adapted into film and theater in China? What’s the impact of literary translation practices in the world?   This course examines the development of translation ideas and practices and searches to develop a dialogue of diverse but related art forms such as literature, theater, music, film, opera, etc. through the concepts of translation, adaptation and imitation. The course is structured around the reading and analysis of key texts in translation theory (Cicero St. Jerome, Du Bellay, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Jakobson, Borges, Spivak, Octavio Paz, etc.) as well as case studies of the practices and roles played by translation and translators (Horace, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, Tyndale, Tobias Smollet, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Nabokov, Gregory Rabassa, Edith Grossman, etc.) in different historical contexts. No language other than English is required for this course.
Modern Fantasy Literature ENG 3950 Prof. F. Cioffi Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	This is a course on fantasy fiction, namely narratives that invoke a fantastical other world, one not guided by or dependent on any known or even unknown scientific principles, nor necessarily an extrapolation of our own world. Fantasy literature often involves imaginary beings or extraordinary versions of humans. It is a literary genre peopled by elves, dwarfs, dragons, sea monsters, superhumans, and hobbits.   Much literature of this type has been written, and writers from as far back as the ancients have explored the genre’s boundaries and possibilities. There will be quite a lot of reading (about 170 pages/week), but it should be fun! We will try to construct together a theory of how fantasy operates and how it in some way creates as it caters to an audience. We also need to address the question, “Why fantasy?” What is it that fantasy can do for authors that realistic, “mimetic” fiction cannot?   Some of the texts will likely be familiar to you; some fall into the “YA” or young adult literature category. But I think all will be provocative and timely. We have on our reading list authors from Great Britain, the U.S., Japan, and Nigeria. Some are still writing today. And many of the books are the first in a series of books in which an author further explores the same fantasy “world.” Thus if you are really taken with a novel, you might go on to read the sequel or sequels! Two papers and a final exam will be required.   Required Texts: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) Natalie Bobbitt, Tuck Everlasting (1975) Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (1995) Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (1997) Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (2011) Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)
The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. K. Belmihoub Mon/Wed 7:45-9:00 PM	In this course, we will investigate the state of English in the world today – how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central in diverse speech communities. English today is part of new modes of literacy and discourse practices, and has dynamic relationships with other languages and cultures. These changes call for us to re-examine our understandings of language standards, speech communities, linguistic identities, and best practices for English language teaching.   We will begin by studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language. We then explore the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. We will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally.   Specifically, this course has the following objectives:   –          To develop a critical understanding of the interconnections between globalization and the English language; –          To analyze the ways a language changes from new communication technologies, plural speech communities, and transnational economic relationships; To explore the ways in which the changes in English impact business practices and language teaching in the 21st century.
Performing the Caribbean English 4050H Prof. H Ramdass & Prof. R. Robles Thu 2:30-5:25 PM	Performing the Caribbean explores various modes and genres of cultural performance across different societies in the Caribbean basin. A central animating question involves how collective public performances such as Carnival, Crop Over, Dancehall, Reggaeton, Dembow, and their constituent artistic expressions (music, song, film, art, fashion, theatre, dance) engage in the creation and negotiation of national narratives and trans-Caribbean identities. We will explore how such processes and representations are influenced and contested because of state involvement, tourism, evolving gender roles, and sexual identities, (im)migration and diasporic influences, social media, and climate change, and how the resulting Caribbean cultural products, in turn, influence global culture.
Chaucer English 4120 Prof. C. Christoforatou Mon/Wed 10:45-12:00PM	Knights, merchants, rogues, and self-proclaimed saints share fascinating stories of their travels and travails in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s masterpiece contains a series of stories ranging from the serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny.  The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims whose diversity spans the spectrum of late medieval society: a dashing knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a bookish young scholar, a dainty nun and a conniving pardoner, and a smart and domineering wife who compete with one another, trade insults and jokes, and share tales. This class will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres—from chivalric romance and bawdy fabliau to beast fables, saints’ lives, and etiological myths—frustrating and playing upon the expectations of the reader.  Against the diverse background of the tales, students will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, ask questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales, and reflect on medieval individual’s relationship to God, society and the foreign.  In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, students will discover how Chaucer illuminates and distorts social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is strangely familiar to the modern reader today. As a class, we will additionally have an opportunity to examine medieval manuscripts in digitized form through access to the collections of the British Library, the Cloisters, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art where additional other artifacts such as relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories are held. In this way, the class will delve more meaningfully into the material culture of the late Middle Ages.
Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. S. Swarbrick Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM	This upper-level literature course surveys some of William Shakespeare’s most enduring plays. We will investigate subjects such as tyranny and surveillance in Measure for Measure and Richard III; gender and performance in As You Like It; race and the construction of identity in Titus Andronicus; ecology and human-animal relations in King Lear; and jealousy and love in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. Students will have the opportunity to read Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their source materials, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and recent film adaptations. We will also reflect on the lasting importance of Shakespeare’s plays for addressing contemporary issues such as freedom, equality, environmental sustainability, and social justice.
British Poetry from 1900 English 4400 Prof. M. McGlynn Mon/Wed 2:30-3:45 PM	“World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural” (from Louis MacNeice, “Snow”)   An exploration of poetry of the British Isles from 1900 to the present, this course will balance a broader survey of the last century with close attention to individual poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Duffy, Heaney, and Boland. Students will learn vocabulary and analytical skills specific to the discussion of the poetic form. We will look at the way that poetry responded to modernity, World War I, and the Irish Revolution, before turning to the Thirties poets, and “The Movement,” as well as poets often excluded from such groups, including women, immigrants, people of color, and members of the working class, particularly those using nonstandard English. We will consider throughout the connections and disconnections among poets of Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland, noting how nation shapes their poems. We will return regularly to questions of how discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and race interact with the discourses of nationalism; of the ways in which poets construct ideas about place; and of the relationship between politics and language, particularly politics and literary form.
African Diasporas: U.S., Latin America, and the Carribbean English 4535 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 2:30 – 3:45PM	There’s an intriguing moment in African Americans Pt. 4 when Oprah celebrates not having any European ancestry, though still being mixed. The DNA test may be inaccurate, but that’s beside the point. The point is that despite her immense wealth even Oprah has to deal with what all people in the African diaspora confront, albeit in various ways: “race” and identity, with an underlying ontological conflict between creolization and authenticity. In this course we will examine that conflict and the politics of identifying fractionally, such as, “I’m half Puerto Rican and half ‘black.’” Works include Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, Is Just a Movie, and The Sellout.
Studies in American Poetry: The Long Poem English 4540 Prof. A Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50-7:05PM	With touchstones as famous as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, American long poems ambitiously have sought to offer sometimes loving, sometimes terrifying engagements with subjects as diverse as visions of world history and radical politics. What are the affordances of the long poem, and how does it mediate questions of history, identity, or desire? Who gets to write a long poem and publish it? With historical and cultural contexts in mind, we will investigate how poetry and politics intersect, and how factors such as race and gender inflect both poetic practice and cultural production in the American tradition of long poems. Readings will include poems that successfully dominated the US literary scene during its burgeoning developments in the nineteenth century, which made icons out of their authors, such as Leaves of Grass and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, as well as culturally forgotten epics such as the Black abolitionist George Boyer Vashon’s “Vincent Ogé” and parts of Herman Melville’s vast and bitter Clarel. Our materials will take us from the antebellum years and the Reconstruction era—as we examine how Reconstruction’s dislocations and disappointments influenced a poetics of dissent among Black radical writers—to the long poem’s trajectory into modernism with Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.
Mixed-Race Literature English 4560 Prof. R. Walker Tue/Thu 2:30-3:45PM	Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent has perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. We’ll pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, and court cases. Writers include Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Danzy Senna, among others.
Gothic Mysteries English 4740 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10-5:25 PM	Against a background of haunted castles, demonic predators, and victims who unconsciously collaborate in their own ruin, Gothic literature takes us on a journey into the dark recesses of the human psyche that fascinated Freud and examines its insatiable appetite for danger and forbidden pleasure. Through psychoanalytical and feminist lens, we will explore Gothic stories by both men and women. We will see how Victorian medical attitudes towards the female body forced the female writer of the Gothic novel to create erotically coded texts that scholars are still unraveling today. If you like spectacular settings, you will revel in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Gothic novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, about fatal passion, voodoo priestesses, sexual addiction, and mad Creole heiresses set in the lush islands of Jamaica and Dominica. You will love Sheridan Le Fanu’s thriller of voluptuous terror, Carmilla, which describes the seduction and possession of an innocent young woman by a tantalizingly beautiful female vampire who provides her victims with a taste of ecstasy before luring them into the world of the damned. Readings will include Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, that portrays one of the loneliest creatures in all of literature—the deformed offspring of an egotistical scientist, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, condemned as shocking and immoral when it was first published, but now recognized as one of the most daring and complex novels of its time.
Advanced Topics in Language, Literature, or Film English 4950 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 12:50-2:05 PM

        BARUCH COLLEGE – ENGLISH DEPARTMENT