Literature (LIT)

This course prepares students to understand literature and to articulate their understanding in essays supported by carefully analyzed evidence from assigned works. Major genres and the literary terms and conventions associated with each genre will be explored. Students will be introduced to literary criticism drawn from a variety of perspectives.

An introduction to cinema study through the viewing and analysis of a variety of films with emphasis on film technique (editing, camera work, composition), directorial style, genre.

This course will meet every Tuesday night at the Jacob Bums Film Center in downtown Pleasantville to see a contemporary film. The Jacob Burns Film Center is a world-class cultural arts center dedicated to presenting the best of independent, documentary, and world cinema and making film a vibrant part of the Westchester community. The class will meet in two ways: online in Blackboard for assignments and submissions of class work and at the Bums Center on Tuesday nights for film screenings. Students will research, experience and write about lndie, foreign, and first-run films plus documentaries, screened each week in this state-of-the-art complex in downtown Pleasantville. Whenever possible, we will take advantage of discussions with filmmakers, critics and people from the industry following some screenings. Students must make their own arrangements for travel to the Burns Center. Campus busses go to the Pleasantville train station, which is a 1-minute walk from the Burns Center.

This course focuses on reading, interpreting and writing about early Celtic myths, the legends of Celtic, Anglo Saxon and later English heroes such as Beowulf and King Arthur. It will also consider the elements of magic in the literature that infused the religious and cultural beliefs of these early people.

A comprehensive and comparative study of reading in a variety of Eastern and Western cultures beginning with classical Greece and Rome.

This course explores a selection of literary works representing a variety of historical periods and cultural traditions relating to the theme of the individual and society.

Studies the origins of American Literature beginning with the indigenous peoples and conquistadors who made first contact, and continuing up until the Civil War. Touches on Colonial and Puritanical writings from key figures such as Anne Bradford and Cotton Mather, moving on to the Revolutionary War writings of founding members such as Jefferson, Franklin, and John Jay. Literary movements to be examined include Transcendentalism (Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau) and the American Renaissance (Hawthorne, Poe, Alcott, and Melville). Debates on feminism and slavery will also be explored.

Diaspora has come to refer to mass dispersions of people with common roots. This course examines the Asian diaspora through readings of contemporary literature. In the course, we discover and define a growing body of contemporary writing, which includes immigrant/migrant histories, memories of exile and refuge, as well as the fiction of imagined homelands. We will study books against their historic, political, economic, geographic, and social backdrops, with a focus on gender, class, and national origins. Authors to be studied Maxine Hong Kingston, Ha Jin, Jumpha Lahiri, Kazim Ali, Haruki Murakami, Craig Santos Perez, Chang-Rae Lee, Nam Le, Lan Cao, and Amy Tan.

This course will study selected comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare, from the early 1590s through the late period of 1608-10. Written as popular commercial entertainment, Shakespeare plays were meant to be performed as theater, not only read as literary texts. Accordingly, the course will include updated film versions such as Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 Romeo and Juliet and the 2006 adaptation of Twelfth Night, She’s the Man. Since the cultural realities of Tudor England are unfamiliar to most, the course will provide contemporary parallels to enhance comprehension. Students will write critical essays and create visual presentations.

This course surveys British literature during the period 1400 to 1660. Possible works and authors could include the following: Beowulf, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, More's Utopia, plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and poetry by Donne, Marvel, and Milton. This is a writing­ enhanced course.

A study of American ethnic literature from the Latino community: these ethnic Americans write about their personal journeys in trying to fit into the U.S., as immigrants. The course will explore and introduce immigration studies in order to better comprehend the novel, short story or poem written by authors who have encountered different issues on their way to becoming Americans. The universal appeal of ethnic literature is coupled with many kinds of migratory issues.

This course will explore attitudes to sexuality, gender roles, and various interpretations of the meaning of love as they are reflected in a variety works from early world cultures, including the Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, South America, and the West. Students will observe and analyze how different geographies, histories, and traditions might affect attitudes toward sex, gender, and love.

This course examines the early literature of magic and the supernatural, key themes in medieval romances, from classical references through the plays of Shakespeare. Students will learn about Anglo-Saxon charms and curses, and medieval beliefs about astrology, magical objects (amulets, magic rings, potions), and herbal lore, some of which form the basis for more modern medical practice. They will also study the differences between white (healing) magic and "necromancy," the black magic practiced by Morgan le Faye and Merlin, among other mages. Literary works may include Tristan and lsolt, selected stories of Marie de France, Robert de Boron's Merlin stories, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Franklin's Tale and Canon Yeoman's Tale, selections from Sir Thomas Malory's Morie Darthur, and early modern plays (Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, and William Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest).

This course surveys short stories and poems by writers of African descent.

course will study texts from ancient world (e.g. Greece, Rome) but also texts written 1,000 years later from Japan, China, and India. Study will focus on current relevance and application to problems in our society.

This course explores the tragic and comic vision of the human condition in literary works.

This course offers an introduction to Latina/o writing in the United States from its foundations in Spanish-language communties of print during the nineteenth century through recent innovations in print and on the web. As we consider a range of texts - including essays, manifestos, novels, poetry, films, radio programs, and web sures - we will investage their roles in shaping notions of Latina/o identity and in articualting experiences of migration, immigraton, and exile. We will consider some of the ways in which thise experiences differ among the many communtiies brough together by the term "Latina/o". We will also consider shifts in media practices since the nineteenth century and their influence on the ways Latina/o writers have made use of ltiterature to conceptualize, engage with, and give voice to their communties throughout the Americans.

"On these battlefields," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "my lovely, safe world blew itself up." In this course we will explore works of literature and film about World War I (1914-1918), known at the time as "The Great War," as well as works that portray the return to peace and the turn to materialism in the 1920s. Among the works we will study are The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; poetry by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Own; the play Journey's end by R.C. Sheriff; and the films Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick and Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.

This course surveys literature by and about women before 1900.

Greece: A Modern Odyssey integrates the study of mythology, literature, architecture, archeology, philosophy, history, sports and geography in an attempt to recreate the lifestyle of the Classical Greeks. The seminar students cruise the Greek islands and experience the same ambiance that Plato and Aristotle described and are taught how to implement the ancient values and activities into their lives.

Those Western and Eastern mythologies that have had the greatest impact on the Western tradition will be studied in this course. Greek and Norse mythology in Europe and Hebrew, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian mythology in the ancient Near East will be discussed with the goal of learning how myth functions in societies and cultures.

This course surveys British literature written after 1900 by various authors.

Study of key writers from the 17th and 20th centuries. Authors to be studied may include Moliere, Mon’zaemon, Rousseau, Equiano, Voltaire, Blake, Goethe, Kafka, Jacobs, Tagore, Borges, Mahfouz, Achebe, and Brecht.

This course explores such themes and subjects as race, gender, class, ethnicity, identity, family relationships, and the individual vs. the community in selected works of American Literature from the mid 1800s through the late 20th century through analysis, discussion, and critical writing.

How individuals face change in their societies is dependent upon both the individual personality and the values and tensions of his and her society. This course will cover literature from a range of traditions, principally non-Western (India, Nigeria, Senegal, Japan), but with a sampling of European and North American works. The course will focus on how societies and individuals confront change, sometimes adapting, sometimes resisting, and how they face cultural challenges that come from inside their culture or from the outside, as cultures collide.

This course is designed to help students gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the diversity of the Native American experience today and in the past. We will pay particular attention to literature written by contemporary American Indian women and to issues of culture, gender and identity as they surface in the poetry, fiction, autobiography we read. From creation stories, to the book acclaimed as the first Native American novel (Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko), to the controversial essays of Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, and spoken word of John Trudell, students will explore the meaning and significance of community, ceremony, healing and storytelling. Other authors include Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Muscogee), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee), and Linda Hogan (Choctaw).

In Studies in the Short Story students will study many exceptional masterpieces of the short story genre from a variety of cultures and nations and historical periods. Through reading, discussion, group work, presentations, and written analyses, students will hone their abilities to think and write critically and comprehend issues from a variety of perspectives.

This course will survey a selection of major genres (and subgenres) of Popular Fiction since the nineteenth century: crime, romance, western, horror, and young adult. While the serious study of popular fiction is now well-established, popular fiction is sometimes still disparaged by critics, scholars, and readers themselves {who among us hasn't tried to hide the cover of "50 Shades of Gray" on the subway?). Yet even if not always taken seriously, popular fiction is "read", and at greater rates than "serious" literary fiction. This course assumes that popular fiction is an important and meaningful literary genre, and will encourage student readers to begin to ask important questions about the cultural work performed by the books they read (especially the books they read, they think , solely for "pleasure"). Questions motivating our study of these pleasurable and readable literary genres include: what makes a genre "popular"? What do readers get out of popular fiction? Why has (and is) popular fiction been so often dismissed as "unserious"? Are there meaningful differences between "popular" and "literary" genres of fiction? What cultural work does popular fiction perform? What do we mean by "pleasure" reading? What other kinds of reading are there?

The subject of this course is the variety of US cultural response to the events of September 11th, 2001, with a particular emphasis on the culture of memorialization. Aside from the political and military consequences of the attacks of that day, how has US culture been affected and how has culture been produced in the wake of 9/ 11? Leaving aside discussion of the global military events that followed September 11th, 2001 , except insofar as they have had cultural effects, the course will consider how poets, musicians, visual and graphic artists, filmmakers, novelists, and others have responded to what was quickly named "9/11" and will consider several critiques of that response. In addition, the course examines the way the events of 9/ 11 have been memorialized.

This course surveys short stories and poems written by authors of African descent after 1900.

Since S.E. Hinton's publication of The Outsiders in 1967, fiction about young adults has transformed into a literary genre unto itself (and a bestselling one at that.) Young adulthood has long been a subject of literary inquiry that asks authors and readers to explore the youthful intensities of emotional and physical longing, loss, sorrow, failure, and joy: that is, the intense work that goes into building lives and ethical perspectives. In this course, we will trace two histories: the development of the genre of young adult fiction as a distinct literary form, and the development of cultural ideas about young adulthood across time. To this end, we'll consider fiction about (and aimed at) young adults since the 18th century, within the following themes: Outsiders, Seductions, Fantasies, Queer Stories, and Re-Visions. We will read a lot in this class- basically a novel a week-- but it will be almost entirely "pleasure" reading (as if there were another kind!).

This course explores the development of romanticism as a literary and cultural phenomenon.

Comparative Modernisms introduces students to an important literary period. Spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the modernist period saw significant innovation and experimentation in literature and in the arts. While some periods are regionally or culturally specific, modernism is remarkable for its global reach. Writers in the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America were engaged in a simultaneous project of aesthetic, political, and psychological exploration. This course will introduce students to major texts from multiple regions of the world and will prepare them for upper level classes that focus on a particular aspect of modernism such as Latin American modernism, British modernism, the avant-garde, surrealism, psychoanalysis, etc.

Graphic literature is a fresh and fast-growing form in America today. However, unlike long-established literary forms, it is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Students will read and analyze comics and graphic novels for adults and teenagers and explore experimental forms of graphic storytelling in critically-acclaimed works such as Fun Home, March, and Radioactive, and in excerpts from other pieces. Guides such as the graphic manual How to Read Nancy will help students understand and evaluate graphic work as a literary form.

This course surveys literature by and about women written after 1900.

An introduction to a rich literary tradition that students are rarely exposed to in high school and even college curricula, this course will urge you to make connections between the contemporary moment – in which questions around the relations between contemporary institutions like the police and prison industrial complex, racism , and inequality are daily erupting into the mainstream new cycles – and the insights that Black writers and thinkers had into these questions starting in the eighteenth century.

This course will focus on American women writing from the late 19th century to the present. These writers, who come from a variety of social, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, might include the following: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Louise Erdrich, Grace Paley, Gish Jen, Bharati Mukherji, and Nicholasa Mohr.

This course explores the Renaissance as the first important period of globalization that saw the discovery of the New World and the rise of modern states and national languages. What links can we establish between the Renaissance period and the globalization of the 21st Century? How did people think of communication, travels, and languages several hundreds of years ago? How does the Renaissance worldview differ from our own? What is similar, and what can we learn from the past? Texts include Francis Petrarch’s Itinerary to the Holy Land, Christopher Columbus’ Four Voyages, Ibn Battuta’s Travels, Aztec poems in Nahuatl; Michel de Montaigne’s selected Essays, Sor Juana’s Divine Narciso, and Amerigo Vespucci’s Letters. This course is Writing Enhanced.

This course will study international literature that focuses on themes of peace, justice and sustainability. Possible texts include: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Vicki Mackenzie's Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo's Quest for Enlightenment, Bessie Head's A Question of Power; and RK Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma, studied in conjunction with selections from the DVD and text of A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non Violent Conflict as well as the Peace Studies Reader.

This course explores modern fiction from throughout the Americas that reflects on and imagines media technologies. We will consider the influence of electric media on late nineteenth-century print culture through readings of Jose Marti's "The Glossograph" and Henry James's "In the Cage." We will see fiction engage with the potentiality of still and moving images in Maria Cristina Mena's "The Gold Vanity Set" and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. We will grapple with varying dreams and nightmares of sound and inscription envisioned in texts by T.S Eliot, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Felisberto Hernandez, and Jorge Luis Borges. Considering these and other texts as sites in which writers imagined the possibilities of modern media, we wilt contemplate the diversity and complexity of modernism in the Americas and situate literature in relation to media history. Texts originally written in Spanish with be available in translation.

This course explores literature of the digital age. We will begin with a consideration of electronic literature from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and of notions of “participatory culture” from the same period. From there, we will investigate a wide range of recent efforts to redefine literature in terms of participation, including online fan fiction communities, literary video games, instapoetry, Twitterature, book clubs that promote novel reading, and various recent experiments with digital storytelling. As we consider these and other examples, we will locate and define the role of literature in today’s media system—especially as a means of circulating underrepresented stories from history and the present to pursue social justice. We will contemplate how literature of the digital age can help us to gain insight into the role of media past and present in enabling and inspiring notions of community, identity, and the possibilities for social and political change. We will also ask how recent literary innovations both converge with and offer alternatives to popular forms of storytelling in social media.

Great Britain is a country with a rich literary and artistic history. In this course, we will study how the country’s arts - literature, painting, architecture, landscape architecture, and music – were shaped by and, in turn, reflected the country’s history and culture. Using the arts as a mirror, we will see how the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution changed Great Britain from a rural, agricultural society to an increasingly urban, wealthy, socially mobile, technological one. We will watch the rise and fall of the global British Empire. Changing gender roles will be examined, along with the many other social changes that occurred as Great Britain transformed itself into a modern society. Writers to be studied include Wordsworth, Blake, Austen, Tennyson, Kipling, Wilde, and Woolf.

What does "belonging" mean in Eastern European literature? This course focuses on works produced by writers who worked before and after the fall of communism in countries such as: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Romania, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine. Our survey course will sample works by writers from 11 countries, including poetry, fairy tales, adaptation, short stories, experimental fable, and plays.

This class aims to give students an understanding of some of the major genres of Children's literature - including picture books, poetry, folk and fairy tales, fantasy and realistic fiction, and adventure and domestic fiction - as well as the history of children's literature and some of the issues that surround books for children such as censorship. Students will be exposed to some of the classics of children's literature written in English and made aware of other such classics to read on their own.

This course explores the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies through the dual methods of literary study and civic engagement. The disabled body was once considered to bear the mark of moral deficiency, and for most of the twentieth-century, disability was treated as a physical problem in need of a medical “cure.” Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, however, the movement for disability rights has gone on to produce a radical vision for human freedom and self-determination based on the insight that, given the nature of modern existence, anyone could become disabled at any time. Through the study literature, film, and performance, we will be exploring issues of subjectivity, perception, creativity, and self-expression within disability culture. These works are by and about people with disabilities, and their inclusion on our syllabus strives to honor the famous challenge issued by disability rights activists since the 1980s: “Nothing about us, without us.” In that very spirit, this course is designed to fulfill the Civic Engagement core requirement by giving students a semester-long service learning experience at a community-based organization that supports people with disabilities or an opportunity to engage in on-campus activism around issues of disability access.

This course looks at the way 20th and 21st century filmmakers from different countries has interpreted Shakespeare's plays. Students will read assigned texts and watch a wide range of film adaptations and interpretations of Shakespeare's ideas and plots.

Students in this course will study goddesses and goddess cults in mythology, history, art and literature, examining figures in world cultures from their ancient beginnings to their later appearances in Early Modern literary works. Goddesses were not only active in etiological myths but served as role models for and reflections of human nature; students will study the various interfaces between fiction, culture, and historical practice.

Students in this course will read famous fairy tales and study their earliest history, analogues, and later rewritings, along with related films. Stories to be considered may include "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "The Little Mermaid," "Red Riding Hood," and "Sleeping Beauty," among others. Students will learn about the history and cultural contexts of fairy tales. Assigned authors could Include the anonymous writer of "Perceforest," Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Reaid Dahl, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood, Marina Warner, and others. Films for study might include Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast'' and "Sleeping Beauty" directed by Catherine Breillat, with possible brief comparative clips from Disney. This course fulfills AOK 2 or 4, and WEC requirements and can also be used as an elective in the WGS major or minor.

Students in this course will explore the culture of India, a nation playing a central role in globalization. While focus of the course will be literature, students will begin by learning about formative events in modern Indian history and go on to explore Indian film culture (Hooray for Bollywood!), religions of India (including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and others), the development and role of Indian diasporic culture, and current social practices and issues regarding gender and class. The debate on IWE (Indian Writing in English) - e.g., what makes a work "Indian" -- will be central to discussions in the course. Texts will include writing in English (Midnights Children, Malgudi Days, The God of Small Things, etc.), translations from India's many languages, films, and essays. This class will be of special interest to students curious about post-colonial literature, concerned with social issues and globalization.

"Climate Change, Literature, and Slow Violence" explores the important contemporary field of ecocriticism with a specific focus on urgent issues surrounding climate change and how writers are responding to our shifting reality. We will look back to growing awareness in the twentieth century that we are living in the Anthropocene era and continue with twenty-first-century representations and responses to planetary ecological change. In particular, the course focuses on the extent to which climate change is a social justice issue that overlaps with historical structures of class, race, and gender-based inequalities; the theme of "slow violence" brings these issues into focus. In addition to reading a series of novels by Aminatta Forna, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Amitav Ghosh, and Nathaniel Rich, we will structure our conversation with a few works of non-fiction: Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Ghosh's "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable," and Rob Nixon's "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor."

What is dramaturgy? If all the world’s a stage, comprehending and managing the art of life requires dramaturgy. At its core, dramaturgy is the theory and practice of play-making that is separate from directing, acting, and stage-managing. It involves holistic knowledge of dramatic literature and the process of bringing a play to the stage. In simpler terms, the dramaturg is the bridge between the audience and the performance, the bridge between content and style. The dramaturg is the audience educator, the in-house critic, the director’s collaborator, the art curator and advocate who considers the aesthetic and formal aspects of the play, and is the arbiter of the political and historical significance of the play and its reception. A dramaturg finds new plays for production, supports the creative and interpretative work with research, and attends to the cognitive and social needs of the audience. Dramaturging is radical collaboration with all aspects of the play to help achieve maximum connectivity between director, actors, managers, playwrights, audience. Additionally, the dramaturg helps the audience through the conflicts and trauma that the play reveals, and insists on diversity of playwrights, actors, directors and works to enhance the diversity and inclusiveness of audience. Dramaturgical approaches are not limited to plays— the holistic work of the dramaturg can be helpful for any interface between an audience and creative experience: gaming, film and television, dance, fine arts, athletic competition, or even for performative social or work situations—anything that involves a location, props, costumes, and reception.

Study in American Literature: The African American Literary Tradition is an introductory course that will examine common and diverging themes within the African American literary tradition through the study of diverse authors, genres, and literary movements from slavery through the late 20th century. The course will emphasize interpretive and critical analysis skills developed through close reading and consideration of historical and cultural contexts.

This course examines five minor genres from a wide variety of historical time periods in order to consider the context that creates and propagates a short-lived but impactful subgenre. In this class, students will read, write, and analyze some of the works that comprise the five genres and explore generic implications. Since every piece of writing is influenced by the context in which it is written, we will spend a significant amount of time considering the historical, biographical, socio-political, and cultural context that help to produce each literary work as well as our own understanding of the material. Class discussions will be framed by some of the following questions: what attracts one to write within a particular subgenre? What might be some reasons for pursuing genres that are new to a time period? What choices does one necessarily need to make when writing within a specific genre? And finally, what do these choices show us (the readers) about the text, the context, and our own perceptions of the two? This course sharpens students’ ability to think critically about texts that reflect viewpoints from a wide variety of time periods and locations, and therefore better understand the complexities of their own environments.

This course will focus on the literary genre known as "storytelling" and look at the ways the movement known as Photo Voice has created a kind of visual storytelling for disenfranchised communities. In addition to online class discussion and analysis of selected texts, Pace university students engage in the art of mentoring children at the Pleasantville Cottage School, helping these children to create verbal and visual stories of their own lives.

This course covers American literature written about and marketed to young adults (6th-12th grades). The writers to be studied may include the following: J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Mildred Taylor, S.E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier, Walter Dean Myers, Jerry Spinelli, Katherine Paterson, Sarah Dessen, and Laurie Halse Anderson. Restriction/Requirement: Permission of department.

A study of major British prose writers chosen to illustrate important phases of life and letters from 1900 to present with emphasis on the authors' ideas in relationship to their culture, and their forms of expressions.

This course introduces Cultural Studies as it is practiced in the U. S. and elsewhere. In addition to examining literature and popular culture, this course will explore cultural theory and criticism.

This course examines the literatures that have emerged following decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The course will also consider more popular forms and introduce postcolonial theory and criticism.

This class gives students an understanding of the history of children's literature and of some of its major genres, including picture books, fairy tales, fantasies, realistic fiction, and verse. Students will closely read a variety of key texts and will articulate their understanding of what they read in essays supported by carefully analyzed evidence from the primary sources. Throughout the term we will consider what texts from different periods say about the particular era's views of children. Among the classic texts to be studied are Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wind in the Willows, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Anne of Green Gables.

Studies of the novels reflecting the historical and cultural forces that shaped these texts and their authors. This course may focus on English, American, World, or comparative literatures. This course may be taken for credit more than once in versions A through C, focusing on different centuries or themes, such as the development of the novel, the novel and Realism, or the contemporary novel.

Sensation fiction is a popular and scandalous literary genre that developed in Victorian England in the mid-19th century. Works by authors such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others will be studied.

Study of Continental and British novels representative of the nineteenth century world and of the historical and cultural forces that shaped them and their authors.

Topics in literature reflecting the dominant influences of 20th century life and culture. Instructors may offer this course focusing on American, British, World, or comparative literatures. The course may be organized around a specific theme, movement, or genre, and may be taken for credit more than once. Topics may include existentialism, postmodern literature, and diasporic literatures.

"Topics in literature reflecting the dominant influences of twentieth-century life and culture. Instructors may offer this course focusing on American, British, World, or comparative literatures. The course may be organized around a specific theme, movement, or genre, and may be taken for credit more than once. Topics may include existentialism, postmodern literature, and diasporic literatures."

Labyrinths can be found all over the planet in a variety of forms: in nature (the inner ear, the brain, spiders’ webs, shells, snails, ammonite fossils, etc.), as buildings and cities, as sewers and subways, as visual representations, in mythology and literature, as architecture, as spiritual centers of cathedrals, in dances, in mandalas, in children’s games, in puzzles, in films and video games. Even the “World Wide Web” with its various links can be seen as a form of labyrinth. This course focuses on exploring why the symbol of the labyrinth is among the most fascinating, perplexing, and enduring as we read 20th-21st-century fiction and see films that draw on theme of the labyrinth as it has appeared in the mythology, art, literature, and popular culture of societies from around the globe. As we read surrealist, magic realist, and postmodern fiction by such authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, André Gide, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jennifer Egan and see several labyrinthine films, we’ll consider how each medium views and employs the symbol of the labyrinth or maze.

This course considers major developments in American literature from the beginnings to the end of the 19th century. Authors may include Hawthorne, Melville, Jacobs, Dickinson, Twain, Dreiser, and Chopin.

This course considers selected authors in American literature from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Authors may include Eliot, Anderson, Stein, Hemingway, Wright, Faulkner, Kingston, and Morrison.

Study in African-American thought and literature, focusing on specific time periods, topics, or themes. Authors may include Douglass, Jacobs, Du Bois, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Brooks, Ellison, Walker, Wideman, and Kincaid.

A study of the history and various theories of translation, focusing largely but not solely on literary translation.

Topics in American literature and culture, which may range from the beginnings to the present. This course may be taken for credit more than once, focusing on different centuries or themes, such as the American gothic or constructions of race in American literature.

This course will provide an intensive study of major American dramatist August Wilson and his plays, situating them within the larger contexts of history, race, culture, gender, and theater.

This course surveys African American authors whose writings published during the 1920's continue to hold relevance in the contemporary world. The PBS broadcast, A Walk Through Harlem cites James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan as a major source for the documentary. W.E.B. DuBois warned about the levees of New Orleans more than fifty years ago. Langston Hughes’ reputation is international. We have just seen a screen adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sterling a. Brown, Claude McKay, Dorothy West, James Vanderzee, Carter G. Woodson, Paul Robeson, Alaine Locke and many other writers and poets, visual artists and educators bring us a vital literature that is both local, Harlem based, and international since many of the authors traveled the world This course highlights the beauty and acknowledges the terror of the period in American history when Harlem was “in vogue”.

Topics in American literature and culture, which may range from the beginnings to the present.

Study of American writers, chosen to illustrate important phases of life and letters, as well as artistic, cultural, and historical forces, from 1945 to the present. Authors may include Okada, Roth, Doctorow, Lorde, Silko, and Cisneros.

A study of important works of authors with diverse class, racial, ethnic, and sexual identities.

A survey of American fiction which includes short stories and novellas.

A study of the relationships between literature and film. Through an analysis of significant films, prose, fiction, and plays, the course will examine film adaptations of literary works and/or the characteristic structures of literary and cinematic forms.

This course will examine African American literature that has been adapted to film or video. Selected novels, short stories and plays will be analyzed in relation to screen versions of the same works, focusing on the additions, deletions, and other changes made by the filmmakers in adapting the source material for the screen.

This course will focus on the study of selected plays by major African American dramatists from the early 20th century to the present and explore themes and developments in African American theatre related to issues of culture, performance, politics, race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Some playwrights whose works will be examined include Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Alice Childress, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller.

A study of major Old and Middle English texts in the context of continental drama, romance, epic, lyric, and narrative poetry. This course will be offered in A and B forms focusing on different time periods, themes, or bodies of work, both of which may be taken for credit.

This course explores literature by women of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

Study of English literature of the 18th century, with reference to the historical and cultural environment. Authors may include Swift, Pope, Dryden, Ann Radcliffe, and Aphra Behn.

A study of the literature of the Victorian period (1832-1900) with reference to the historical and cultural background. Authors may include Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Wilde. While the focus will be on English literature, instructors may offer a comparative approach with American authors of this time period.

This course will trace the development of the supernatural as a literary device and a vehicles for social concerns from the 18th century to the present in a variety of works, including novels and short stories, non-fiction and films.

In this course on the transition of texts in England from manuscript to print, students will develop an appreciation for book history, knowledge about early book production, and an understanding of the shaping of English literary culture from the medieval period through the mid-sixteenth century. They will gain insight into the culture and thought of earlier periods and their connections to our own.

The Female Gothic, a distinct category of Gothic fiction, explores key issues such as women's role in marriage, restrictions on female freedom, the maternal relationship, and the role of the woman writer. These and other concerns will be traced in several British and American works from the 19th century through the present.

A critical study of filmed versions of Shakespeare's plays alongside the original texts.

Study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, primarily in the original Middle English. Includes The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and selected minor poems.

Study of Shakespeare as poet and playwright. This course uses performance-based activities to explore the plays in the terms of their original context and their possibilities for modern audiences.

Study of Shakespeare as poet and playwright. This course will be offered in A and B forms, both of which may be taken for credit.

Study of Shakespeare as poet and playwright in the plays written after 1600, with emphasis upon the great tragedies.

This course treats the law as literature and looks to literature as the source of theories about social justice. We will be using the literary method of close reading to analyze the logic and rhetoric of major civil rights decisions, as well as the literary method of historicization to analyze the impact or influence of legal concepts upon works of literature in order to ask, When it comes to envisioning a just society, how might fiction succeed where the law fails?

Jane Austen is perhaps the most beloved of all British novelists. Her fans read and reread, and the novels repay the effort with their curious mix of fairy-tale romance and biting social satire. In this course, we will study one of Austen's "lesser" novels--Lady Susan--five of Austen's major novels, all of which have been successfully adapted to film, and The History of England, which Austen wrote at the age of fifteen. We will we focus on content--style, voice, structure, genre, character development--and on context--the late 18th-/early 19th-century revolutionary period, the Napoleonic wars, Austen's contemporaries (from Ann Radcliffe to Walter Scott and Lord Byron), the English Regency, and Austen's own life.

The course will introduce students to works of literary modernism in English and may include such writers as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, Mina Loy, Rebecca West and others.

Where does “modern poetry” begin? What makes it “modern”? What forms does it take? This course begins with an examination of some of the major forerunners of “modern poetry” from an international perspective—the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry-- and continues by examining some of the major modern poets whose work we will read in translation, including Pablo Neruda (Chile), Rainer Maria Rilke (Czechoslovakia), Gabriel García Lorca (Spain), André Breton (France), Paul Éluard (France), César Vallejo (Peru), Anna Akhmatova (Russia), Marina Tsetayeva (Russia), and C.P. Cavafy (Greece). Students will also achieve an understanding of theories and problems of translation.

Study of major poets and poetic forms and their social and artistic influences. Focusing on American, English, World, or comparative literatures, this course may be organized around a particular time period, literary movement, or theme, such as the metaphysical poets, modernism, or contemporary American poetry. This course will be offered in A and B forms, both of which may be taken for credit.

Study of major poets and poetic forms and their social and artistic influences. Focusing on American, English, World, or comparative literatures, this course may be organized around a particular time period, literary movement, or theme, such as the metaphysical poets, modernism, or contemporary American poetry. This course will be offered in A and B forms, both of which may be taken for credit.

This course connects the student to the dynamic poets and writers of the 1960's, the decade which saw the deaths of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

This course recovers 246 years of literary history missing from the university curriculum. This study makes available the powerful voices calling us to a greater humanity as they give personal accounts of survival under American slavery.

Each time that the course is offered it will focus on a different topic such as Women, Culture and Fiction; Major Women Poets; Literature of American Ethnic Women; Feminist Theories and Criticism; Gender and Genre; etc. The course may be taken more than once.

Introduction to specialized study in selected areas of literature and the application of contemporary critical theory. Open to upper-division majors from any discipline.

This course will look at the fiction, criticism, visual art, philosophy, and lives of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential group of intellectuals whose work helped shape modern sensibilities in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In addition to Woolf, the Group included economist John Maynard, novelist E. M. Forster, art critic Roger Fry, and biographer Lytton Strachey.

In this course, students will close-read three Shakespeare plays and film productions thereof, examining them through the lens of contemporary literary theory, which includes new historicism, cultural materialism, postcolonial critcism, feminism, performance criticism, reader-response criticism and post-structuralism. In addition to studying plays, students will read a range of essays written by theorists in the above fields. Students can expect to write and edit at least four essays in which they adopt and apply literary theory to the Shakespeare playtexts.

This course examines the complex relationship between literature, technology, and culture. In addition to addressing the ways in which technological change affects the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural materials, including literacy texts, we will consider how cultural norms affect technological development. Although the course’s primary focus will be contemporary, we will consider early periods as well, considering, for example, how the advent of movable type and the printing contributed to the development of the novel and how film, radio, and television impacted existing genres. The course has both in-class and online components. In addition, to attending weekly class meetings, students are required to complete regular Blackboard assignments and utilize other electronic resources.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a modernist novelist, an essayist, critic, feminist, pacifist, and public intellectual active in England during the first half of the 20th century. A contemporary of writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner, Woolf also was an important publisher of others' writing through the Hogarth Press, which she co-founded with her husband, Leonard, in 1917. The course will focus primarily on Woolf's fiction, but also on a selection of her essays and autobiographical writings.

With the approval of the appropriate faculty member, the department Chairperson, and the academic dean, students may select a topic for guided research that is not included in the regular course offerings. The student meets regularly with the faculty member to review progress. A research project or paper must also be submitted. Restrictions/Requirements: Junior standing and a minimum CQPA of 3.00.

: This course approaches a number of classic and contemporary dramatic works using the techniques and strategies employed by directors and actors when they prepare to put on a production of a play. Using one-act plays and/or scenes from full-length plays, the course will explore the role of preparation, character development, and improvisation as ways to move the dramatic work from the page to performace. The course will include an end of term performance of selected scenes. This course is taught by actor, director and producer, Denise Bessette, of the Hudson Stage Company, a professional non-profit theatre in Westchester County.

Postmodernism, as a genre, explores pop culture, multiculturism, mass media, and other aspects of contemporary and mass culture. This course will look at specific contemporary novels, short stories, films and other texts that analyze and question the role and influence of mass and pop culture on contemporary life. Possible authors include Irvine Welsh, Martin Amis, Don Delillo, and Alex Garland. Possible films include Fight Club, Rent, Romeo and Juliet, and the Beach.

This service learning course will focus on the traditions of oral literature and oral history, including storytelling, folktales, and oral memoir. In addition to online class discussion and analysis of selected texts, students will serve elderly residents of nursing homes or lower-income housing by visiting them on a regular basis to record their memories and stories. Working with the professor, students will develop their own project by contacting local advocates for the elderly, finding a person to interview and scheduling visits. These visits will help students gain a hands-on experience in oral literature and history, while offering the elderly interviewee companionship and the opportunity to speak about his or her life to the larger world (through the Web archive we will create). The interview tapes will be transcribed to create an electronic archive of oral literature and history, which will be published on the Dyson college webpage, creating a resource for students, the elderly participants and anyone interested in oral history. Restrictions/Requirements: Junior or Senior standing (minimum 64 credits).

A study of the most representative and influential British and American poets from 1900 to the present.

The term “postcolonial” literally refers to a period “after colonization,” yet postcolonial literature explores not only the colonial past but its continuing legacy. We will therefore examine the relationship between the “post” and “the colonial” in our reading of literature by Caribbean authors. For 500 years, the Caribbean has been the site of cultural and historical connections to Europe, Africa, Asia, and various areas in the Americas. By approaching a regional literature through its global context, we will also discuss the ways in which the current phenomenon of globalization is informed by the post/colonial histories we have covered during the semester.

This course examines the formal significance of gender transition, cross-gender identification, androgyny , "gender-f"cking," and intersex embodiment in canonical and emergent Anglophone literature, as well as the impact of these on the historical construction of trans identity. We will be approaching "trans" as an umbrella term that includes subjects and writers who identify as transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming. This class will be presented as a mix of lecture-based and seminar-style instruction, with major emphasis on group discussion and opportunities for creative writing and reflection, as well. In addition to reading novels, short stories, poetry, dramatic literature, and life writing, we will also be studying works of feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural criticism in the field of Transgender Studies.

This course explores New York City’s long history as a media center that shaped readerships, genres, social movements, and media practices. Through site visits and walks through the city, explorations of digital and physical archives, experiments with digital mapping and data visualization, and discussions of understudied and familiar texts, we will contemplate the competing voices, ideas, and possibilities that circulated in New York City’s print culture in the past—and that can help us to gain insight into our own period of media change today. We will consider the technologies employed in early print shops at the Seaport and along Printing House Square. We will look for the ideas and innovations that powered the city’s nineteenth-century communities of print—which included the emerging mass press of Newspaper Row, as well as a thriving Black press and a Spanish-language publishing community with hemispheric reach. We will survey the range of literary institutions and news organizations since the twentieth century that have made their location in New York City part of their appeal to audiences large and small. Students will participate in place-based experiential learning and seminar-style discussions to develop new perspectives on New York City and its literature and other media of the past and present.

This course will focus on the ways select African writers use the supernatural as a literary device to pay critical attention to the sociopolitical dynamics of religion and spirituality in different contemporary contexts. Considering the complex historical trajectory that came out of colonial encounters with indigenous belief systems in Africa, this course will especially pay attention to how these African writers, filmmakers and visual artists grapple with gendered corporeality and embodiment, creaturely lives, specters of post/coloniality, and futures of queer after/lives. Texts read and discussed in this course may include Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching and Things They Lost; Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds and their other longform works; as well as the works of Nikyatu Jusu, Wangechi Mutu, and Akwaeke Emezi, among others; select short stories based on African folklore, and Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine.

A course designed to serve as a capstone for majors in the English Department. Emphasis is on analytical reading, advanced writing and research directed toward individual students' career goals or plans for advanced study. Restrictions/Requirements: Junior Standing or permission of the Department Chair.

A study of the "best of all possible worlds" as conceived by writers from Plato ("The Republic") and Sir Thomas More ("Utopia") to contemporary environmentalist and feminist visionaries such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula LeGuin.