Spring 2014 - University at Albany [PDF]

Spring 2014 Schedule and Course Descriptions AENG102Z 1927 1928 4594 7190 8515 8952

MWF MWF TTH MWF TTH MWF

Introduction to Creative Writing [Open To Freshmen and Sophomores Only] 01:40PM-02:35PM Belflower,James K 09:20AM-10:15AM Giragosian,Sarah 08:45AM-10:05AM Whalen,Brian P 11:30AM-12:25PM Giragosian,Sarah 04:15PM-05:35PM Denberg,Kenneth R 01:40PM-02:35PM Cruz,Conchitina R

Introductory course in creative writing. Practice in the writing of poetry, fiction autobiography, and other literary forms. May be taken only by freshman and sophomores. AENG110Z 4907 4908 6871 6968

TTH TTH MWF MWF

Introduction to Analytical Writing [Open To Non-Freshmen Only] 08:45AM-10:05AM Mullen,Darcy 07:15PM-08:35PM Cove,Katelyn 12:35PM-01:30PM Frulla,Elaina A 01:40PM-02:35PM Massey,Barrett D

Introduction to the skills necessary for clear, effective communication of ideas through careful attention to the writing process, critical analysis, and argumentation. The course emphasizes a variety of rhetorical practices. Designed for non-English majors.

AENG 110Z 6761 6872 6969

TTH TTH MWF

Introduction to Analytical Writing [Open to New Freshman Only] 10:15AM-11:35AM Mullen,Darcy 11:45AM-01:05PM Chen,Evan 12:35PM-01:30PM Vincent,Aimee

Introduction to the skills necessary for clear, effective communication of ideas through careful attention to the writing process, critical analysis, and argumentation. The course emphasizes a variety of rhetorical practices. Designed for non-English majors.

AENG121 1929 TTH 1930 MWF 1931 TTH 1932 TTH

Reading Literature 08:45AM-10:05AM 12:35PM-01:30PM 02:45PM-04:05PM 01:15PM-02:35PM

Richards,Jonah K Mason,John T Anderson,Eric M Anderson,Eric M

Introduction to reading literature, with emphasis on developing critical skills and reading strategies through the study of a variety of genres, themes, historical periods, and national literatures. Recommended for first and second year non-English majors.

AENG144 1933 MWF

Reading Shakespeare 10:25AM-11:20AM

Schoel, Marta Josie

Introduction to Shakespeare, with emphasis on developing critical skills and reading strategies through

detailed study of the plays, from early comedies to later tragedies and romances. No prior knowledge of Shakespeare is required. Recommended for first and second year non-English majors.

AENG205Z 4656 TTH

Introduction to Writing in English Studies 10:15AM-11:35AM Carey,Tamika L

This course examines intersections of race, gender, and popular culture to introduce writing conventions for English majors. We will read a variety of primary and critical texts. In doing so, we will cultivate analytical reading techniques, invention and composing practices, processes for offering and negotiating peer review and instructor feedback, and strategies for revision.

AENG205Z

4667

TTH

Introduction to Writing in English Studies: Debts and Gifts of Gratitude: The Art of Writing Thank you 04:15PM-05:35PM Berman,Jeffrey

"Gratitude is one of the most neglected emotions and one of the most underestimated of the virtues," the late philosopher Robert Solomon observed. Gratitude also tends to be ignored in literature–though ingratitude rears its ugly head everywhere! In this course we will focus on reading and writing about gratitude, along with the many educational and psychological benefits of gratitude. We’ll be running the course as a workshop, with an essay and diary due every week.

AENG205Z 4704 MW 5065 MWF 5066 MWF

Introduction to English Studies 05:45PM-07:05PM Jacques,Christopher 09:20AM-10:15AM Wittmann,Aaron M 11:30AM-12:25PM Wittmann,Aaron M

Introduction to the forms and strategies of writing and close reading in English studies. The course emphasizes the relationship between writing and disciplinary context, and such concepts as genre, audience, and evidence.

AENG210 1934 TTH 1935 TTH

Introduction to English Studies 11:45AM-01:05PM Elam,Helen Regueiro 01:15PM-02:35PM Elam,Helen Regueiro

This course will not presume to “go” anywhere fast, on the premise that “literature” overwrites critical “approaches.” The course will deal with literature” as a “problem” that criticism cannot fully address. If you are a common-sense-bound, express-lane type, be prepared for something very different. Some readings will be difficult, others fun, all connected to a problem the nickname for which is "literature." Short paper, midterm, in-class essay (with questions given in advance), presentations, final paper.

AENG210 1936 TTH 8696 TTH

Introduction to Writing in English Studies 02:45PM-04:05PM Valentis,Mary B 05:45PM-07:05PM Valentis,Mary B

“Theory” has revolutionized literary studies over the past two decades, changing how we read and what we read in English studies. Some would say theory has liberated the discipline, pushing its boundaries, its methods and critiques into the other disciplines and enriching those fields and literary studies as well. Others contend that theory has destroyed English and undermined centuries of “truths.” For those, theory is a disease that needs to be eradicated with an inoculation of good old-fashioned literature and textual

practices that befit the long tradition. The theory debate has ripped apart departments, caused traditionalists to leave the profession, and factionalized English studies into armed camps. That’s the bad news. The good news is that as disciplinary boundaries started to fade, new areas of study have emerged. English students are reading and incorporating technology, science, and cyberculture, postmodern culture, film, architecture, media, philosophy, and psychology into their papers and projects. English professors are analyzing the Phish phenomenon along with the philosophy of Nietzsche or they are reading buildings such as fallen World Trade Center Towers along with the fall of Troy’s towers—even the Brad Pitt version. Every aspect of experience and culture is there to be read, interpreted, speculated on, and contested. Literacy and interpretative acts are no longer connected merely with the printed word (the book) but they have expanded to all aspects and artifacts of culture and contemporary life. This class introduces the student to literary theory in general and its specific concepts, movements, practices, and texts: you will learn what it is, how to do it, and how to recognize the various schools and figures within the contemporary debate. Classes will consist of lecture, discussion, theory group work, and oral presentations. We will read theory, films, traditional texts, buildings, new media, music, and culture in general.

AENG222 4595 MWF

World Literature 10:25AM-11:20AM

Chou,Ping

Introduction to classics of world literature exploring national, historical and linguistic boundaries. Texts chosen will introduce students to literary traditions and provide a foundation for English literary studies.

AENG223 Short Story 6689 MWF 10:25AM-11:20AM Poole,Jessy J Analysis and interpretation of the short story as it occurs in one or more periods or places. Only one version of A ENG223 may be taken for credit.

AENG226 Focus on a Literary Theme, Form or Mode Exploration of a single common theme, form or mode using varied texts to promote fresh inquiry by unexpected juxtapositions of subject matter and ways of treating it. May be repeated once for credit when content varies. For Spring 2014 we will be presenting the following 3 topics: AENG226 1937

MWF

th

The World At War: War Literature of the 20 st and 21 Centuries 09:20AM-10:15AM Amrozowicz,Michael

The Iliad can be seen as the first example of war literature in the Western world, and the beginning of a long tradition of relating personal and national exploits, coming to terms with violence and the scars of war, and writing and storytelling as a process of healing and reconciliation. The opening of the twentieth century saw the deadliest war in the history of mankind up to that point, totaling 16 million deaths in a little over four years. Twenty years later, World War II cost the world over 2.5% of its total population, estimated at over 60 million deaths. The scale of these conflicts cannot even begin to be imagined, and the paradoxical nature of the utter inability and yet Herculean attempt to comprehend has contributed countless forms and genres to the world of artistic expression in the effort to represent the unrepresentable: the horror and experience of war. This course will examine some of the trajectories of innovation in twentieth-century American and European literatures that were direct results of the aftermath of conflict. The scope of this course will cover the literary production of World War I through that of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and will include works by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, James Jones, Tim O’Brien, Stephen Wright, Brian Turner, and John Crawford. Through a discussion of war literature, students will problematize

literature, writing, and artistic expression as modes of representation – what happens when a form of representation comes up against an event that absolutely resists accurate representation? What does it avail to represent an experience, to construct and reconstruct an experience, to which no other person can relate? What is the work of literature in cases like this? How can the human be represented amidst the impersonal, mechanized nature of the modern war of attrition? AENG226 8725 TTH

Jazz in Literature 01:15PM-02:35PM

Kiriyama,Daisuke

This course will study the figure of jazz that appears in fiction and literary criticism. Often regarded as the “American classical music,” or even as America’s only original art form, jazz becomes for some writers a symbol of the American culture and identity. Yet others are anxious to protect its “blackness” or African American identity from mass marketing and cultural exploitation, and still others conversely embrace its non-racial, universal applicability as cultural resource. Jazz, in short, has been a moot point in American and other literary traditions. Through reading texts that deal with jazz or in which jazz plays an important role, students are expected to address various questions such as: what is jazz as a cultural and literary concept?; how distant is jazz as music and its representation?; how does the image of jazz change according to time and place?; how is the issue of race related to the reception and conception of jazz?; and how does jazz in literature contribute to making, remaking and/or unmaking of identity? Possible authors: Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, Ishmael Reed, Leon Forrest, Donald Barthelme, Toni Morrison, Jean Paul Sartre, Julio Cortázar, and Haruki Murakami. AENG226 10439 TTH

Law and Literature 4:15-5:35

Craig, Randall

The course title “Law and Literature” refers, first, to representations law in the literature of four periods: Ancient Greece, Renaissance England, Victorian Britain, and Twentieth-Century America. Special attention will be paid to recurring themes such as divine versus human law, the power of the state versus the rights of the individual, and the demands of law versus the principles of justice. Second, the title signifies an exploration of the function of literature in the legal world. What role do elements typically thought of as literary—such as story telling, drama/performance, and rhetoric—have in the law? The study of the primary texts will be accompanied by readings in legal theory, cultural studies, and narratology.

AENG 240V 9554 9555 9556 9557 9558 9559 9560 9561 9562 9563 9564 9566

TTH MWF MW MWF TTH TTH TTH TTH MWF MWF TTH MW

Rewriting America [Writing-Intensive, Information Literacy 02:45PM-04:05PM Murata-Gomez,Melissa 12:35PM-01:30PM TBA 02:45PM-04:05PM Rizzo,Christopher B 10:25AM-11:20AM Mason,John T 01:15PM-02:35PM Izumi,Katsuya 04:15PM-05:35PM Izumi,Katsuya 10:15AM-11:35AM Martin,Luke S 08:45AM-10:05AM Martin,Luke S 01:40PM-02:35PM Whalen, William J 11:30AM-12:25PM Whalen, William J 11:45AM-01:05PM Barrett,Leann 05:45PM-07:05PM Rizzo,Christopher B

Working from a selection of texts that will provide both context and models, students will learn to write about the challenges of living in 21st century America. The course will focus, in particular, on issues of diversity and pluralism including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and citizenship.

AENG242 6690 TTH

Science Fiction 04:15PM-05:35PM

Henderson,Joseph C

The development of science fiction and the issues raised by it. Authors include such writers as Asimov,Clarke, Heinlein, Huxley, and LeGuin.

AENG243 7679 MWF

Literature and Film 12:35PM-01:30PM

Chou,Ping

Both films and literary works as outgrowths of their culture. From term to term the course focuses on different periods or themes. May be repeated once for credit when content varies.

AENG261 4793 MWF

American Literary Traditions 12:35PM-01:30PM Manry,Jessica

Representative works from the Colonial through the Modern period, with attention to necessary historical and intellectual background information as well as reflection upon the concepts of literary history, period and canons.

AENG270 9705 TTH 9706 TTH

Living Literature: Challenges in the 21st Century 11:45AM-01:05PM Thyssen,Christina 08:45AM-10:05AM Thyssen,Christina

Thinking critically about the relationship between the past and the present through literary texts. This course explores the persistence of the past in contemporary literature or the relevance of literary traditions to contemporary challenges.

AENG271 9707 TTH 9708 MWF

Literature & Globalization 04:15PM-05:35PM 11:30AM-12:25PM

Joh,Enuai Sarker-Hassan Al,Zayed

Examination of contemporary world literature in the light of the challenges of globalization.

AENG272 9709 MWF 9710 MWF

Media, Technology and Culture 09:20AM-10:15AM Sodano,Joel P 10:25AM-11:20AM Sodano,Joel p

Examination of how technology and media shape our experiences in the 21st century, through analysis of a range or texts including film, television and digital media alongside more traditional literary materials.

AENG292 4597

TTH

British Literary Traditions ll: The Restoration through The Modern Period 04:15PM-05:35PM Hill,Michael K

This course will survey representative works from the Restoration through the Modern period, with attention to necessary historical and intellectual background information as well as reflection upon the concepts of literary history, period and canons.

AENG295

Classics of Western Literature

4598

MWF

12:35PM-01:30PM

Shelly,Kathryn L

Introduction to classics of western literature from Antiquity through the Renaissance, with attention to necessary historical and intellectual background information.

AENG300W 1939 MWF 1940 MWF

Expository Writing 11:30AM-12:25PM 12:35PM-01:30PM

Peters,Michael J Peters,Michael J

For experienced writers who wish to work on such skills as style, organization, logic, and tone. Practice in a variety of forms: editorials, letters, travel accounts, film reviews, position papers, and autobiographical narrative. Classes devoted to discussions of the composing process and to critiques of student essays. Intended primarily for junior and senior English minors and non-majors.

AENG302W 5362

TTH

Creative Writing: Playwriting [This section will be devoted exclusively to playwriting] 01:15PM-02:35PM Yalkut,Carolyn

A workshop that introduces students to the techniques of dramatic writing. Each student functions primarily as a dramatist, but also as audience and actor. Students give onstage readings of and discuss each other's work, revise scenes and, for the final project, finish a short one-act play.

AENG302W 5363 MWF

Creative Writing 12:35PM-01:30PM

Belflower,James K

For experienced writers who wish to work on such skills as style, organization, logic, and tone. Practice in a variety of forms: editorials, letters, travel accounts, film reviews, position papers, and autobiographical narrative. Classes devoted to discussions of the composing process and to critiques of student essays. Intended primarily for junior and senior English minors and non-majors.

AENG305V 4794 MW

Studies in Writing About Texts 02:45PM-04:05PM Chu,Patricia E

Intensive study to the forms of the forms and strategies of writing in English studies. Students will engage with a variety of literary, critical, and theoretical texts. The course emphasizes students’ own analytical writing. Prerequisite: Eng 205Z.

AENG305V 4795 TTH

Studies in Writing About Texts: Critique and the Sonnet 11:45AM-01:05PM Cable,Lana

Through study of sonnets written from the Renaissance to the present day, this course explores sonnet form as a poetic practice and also as a critical idea. Our focus is on the many ways poets use sonnet form: as a tool for intellectual analysis or problem solving; as an aid to moral insight or spiritual inquiry; as an instrument of aesthetic expression or philosophical speculation; as a means of defining relationships or fashioning individual identity. By studying the sonnet’s infinitely varied uses, we learn why poets find the form so compelling. We examine from its Italian roots the history of sonnet form in English, and we explore critical perspectives on multiple sonnets and established sonneteers as well as trying our hand at our own sonnet writing. By the end of the course, students should have gained proficiency in reading and writing about sonnets with the appreciation, critical confidence, and self-awareness that comes of composing, revising and reflecting on both ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writing. REQUIRED

WRITING: Frequent short papers and presentations; an extended sonnet analysis; an original sonnet accompanied by a critical analysis; a final critical study of 10-12 pages. (NB: This course fulfills the General Education Critical Thinking Category by satisfying the following Objectives: identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments as they occur in the student’s own and others’ work; develop well-reasoned arguments.) Prerequisite: Eng 205Z.

AENG305V 4796 MWF

Studies in Writing About Texts 11:30AM-12:25PM Rozett,Martha T

This section will focus on three genres that emerged on the literary scene in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England: the sonnet, the informal essay, and secular drama based on English history. Readings will include sonnets by William Shakespeare and John Donne; Donne's love poetry; essays by Sir Francis Bacon; and Part 1 of Henry IV, one of Shakespeare's best-known plays. We will also read several kinds of criticism and literary scholarship, and each of the three units will have a research component. Assignments will include two major papers, each of which will be revised, occasional quizzes, and some shorter pieces of writing, including an in-class collaborative creative assignment. Students should expect to have some of their work read by classmates during writing workshops. Prerequisite: Eng 205Z.

AENG305V 4797 MWF 4948 MWF

Studies in Writing About Texts 09:20AM-10:15AM Hanifan,Jil E 11:30AM-12:25PM Hanifan,Jil E

This section of Eng 305 will trace the fairy tale as a literary genre and cultural motif through multiple perspectives and disciplinary approaches. Readings will include several versions of familiar fairy tales as well as selected critical and creative writing by literary critics, cultural theorists, social historians, and contemporary poets and fiction writers. Students will write and revise their own critical essays, including a long research paper, and will be asked to deepen their understanding of critical reading, rhetorical strategies and disciplinary conventions by analyzing and responding to the course materials in a rhetorical journal. Finally, students will be active as peer readers and editors, and will be asked to respond thoughtfully and in detail to the writing of their classmates. Required Texts: The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar; Transformations, Anne Sexton; Briar Rose, Jane Yolen. Prerequisite: Eng 205Z.

AENG309Z 9567 TTH 9568 MWF 9569 MWF

Professional Writing 08:45AM-10:05AM 12:35PM-01:30PM 10:25AM-11:20AM

Mallory-Kani ,Amy L Jung,Anne S Jung,Anne S

Practice in the kinds of writing particularly useful to students in business and in the natural and social sciences. Emphasis on clear, accurate, informative writing about complex subjects. Intended primarily for juniors and seniors.

AENG310 4798

TTH

Reading and Interpretation in English Studies: Terror and Literature 01:15PM-02:35PM Barney,Richard A

This course will examine fear or terror as one of the most contemplated emotional responses to literature since the Greeks. The arc of the course will consider both the theory and practice of terror in three phases. It will begin with Aristotle’s formulation of tragedy, before turning to study Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Euripides’s Electra. Next, it will consider the Enlightenment fascination with the aesthetics of terror, particularly the concept of the sublime as articulated by Edmund Burke, before focusing on texts

such as William Collin’s “Ode to Fear” and Anne Radcliffe’s gothic novel Romance of the Forest. From there, students will consider 20th- and 21st-century contexts by reading psychoanalytic theories of fear (including those by Freud and Slavoj Zizek) and by exploring their relevance to fiction and film, including Don DeLillo’s White Noise, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Students will explore the similarities and differences among these various accounts of terror, while concentrating on writing effective analytical essays about literary or cinematic texts. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210.

AENG310

5070

TTH

Reading and Interpretation in English Studies: Literary Affect—How We’re Shaped By Feeling When Reading 05:45PM-07:05PM Keenaghan,Eric C

Passion, feeling, affect. Pain, pleasure, longing, connection. How we feel when we engage art objects and texts is very much a part of our experience of aesthetic and literary encounter, yet very often we believe that a language of affect has no place in criticism. Supposedly, criticism—like citizenry and the body politic—is rational and depersonalized, even disembodied, engaging an emotionally and physically “neutral” language. However, such presumptions have been challenged by queer and feminist criticism, disability studies, race and ethnic studies, social ecology, and even political theory. Thinkers in such fields draw on longstanding traditions in philosophy and the arts that have asserted art communicates, acts, and even transforms because it affects readers and spectators as both thinking and feeling beings. This class will explore how the passions have been discussed in theory and criticism in relationship to art and literature, as well as society and politics. We will examine select theoretical and philosophical essays ranging from nineteenth-century Transcendentalism to early twentieth-century pragmatism and psychoanalysis to French post-structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary affect theory, political theory, and queer and gender theory. Each week, we will read such essays alongside texts from a variety of genres (fiction, poetry, manifestoes, performance art, text-based visual art, film, stage and radio drama) by American authors and artists from the years of interwar and postwar modernism (19141950). These artists, like the theorists and philosophers we’ll study, were concerned with how language interfaces with bodies, gesture, emotion, and experience in the production and reception of texts. Often stylistically challenging or topically inflammatory (or both), modernist art set often sets out to rub audiences the wrong way. For some of these artists, irritation and shock were great motivators, and affect was important to how they conceived of their work as changing others’ attitudes about and perceptions of identity groups (such as racial, gender, and sexual minorities, as well as the working classes). Some believed affect was critical for making their work politically effective. Emotional qualities might enable audiences to connect to literary and other aesthetic texts, thus permitting those texts to be better able to change audiences’ political or social consciousness, even prompt them to take action toward changing the world. How might we engage, adopt, and extend both the artists’ and the theorists’ critical vocabularies to generate our own original critical accounts about our encounters with the verbal and visual texts we read? How do we account for those texts’ continuing ability to affect us now, while respecting and accounting for our historical distance from the period when, and circumstances in which, they were originally created? How can we use that historical difference to develop a critical vocabulary about affect and feeling that is not overly personalized, not just based on taste (what we “like” or “don’t like”), and not based on the expression of our individual emotions in a way that disregards what is singular and specific about the text? Possible literary and aesthetic texts for study: Gertrude Stein’s long poem Patriarchal Poetry and her poetic opera (scored by Virgil Thomson) Four Saints in Three Acts; Dadaist performance poetry and sculpture by the Baroness Elsa Freytag von Loringhoven, read alongside the readymade sculptures of French Dadaist exile Marcel Duchamp; William Carlos Williams’ poetry-and-manifesto volume Spring and All; short stories by Kay Boyle, William Faulkner, and/or Sherwood Anderson; Archibald MacLeish’s Depression-era radio play The Fall of the City; Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times; James Agee and Walker Evans’s documentarian account of the Great Depression, Now We Praise Famous Men; Mina Loy’s feminist experimental poems and manifestos; Caribbean transplant Eric Walrond’s stories about racism,

imperialism, and the Panama Canal in Tropic Death; the blues and jazz of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, read alongside Harlem Renaissance poetry by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown; Jean Toomer’s Cane, a hybrid text representing the Great Migration of the 1920s; Popular Front-era leftist poems by Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Sol Funaroff, and others; the “Revolution of the Word” and poetics of “verticality” and “the language of the night” in the writings and editorship of Alsatian immigrant (and later emigrant) Eugene Jolas; the body-centered expressionism of Italian immigrant and disabled poet Emanuel Carnevali; Kenneth Patchen’s anarchist prose poetry and picture-poems from In Quest of Candlelighters; Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood, about lesbianism and transvestism in Paris’s bohemian Left Bank; a novel by John Horne Burns (The Gallery) or Christopher Isherwood (The World in the Evening) about pacifism, soldiery, homosexuality, and artists’ social responsibility; Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a novel about postwar alienation and postcolonial resistance in North Africa; Maya Deren’s short surrealist films that challenge constructs of femininity and the male gaze; the postwar sexual dystopia of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire. (Authors and titles are subject to change.) Requirements: Attendance and participation in class discussion and group work (only four absences allowed for the entire semester, non-negotiable); Critical summary of a theory essay (2-3 pages); Analysis of a text in dialogue with theory (5-6 pages); In-class mid-term exam; Final paper reading one aesthetic text in dialogue with theory essay (10-12 pages). Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210.

AENG310 Reading and Interpreting in English Studies 6855 TTH 10:15AM-11:35AM Shepherdson,Charles This course will explore the question of pity in the context of literary and cultural theory, including texts from Greek antiquity to the present. "Pity" is an emotion that is closely connected with a number of other concepts (justice, mercy, affect theory, the theory of moral sentiment, genocide, witnessing), and the Western tradition includes a series of famous pairings: pity and fear, pity and shame, pity and law, pity and suffering, pity and trauma or atrocity, etc. This course will explore these dynamics, starting in the ancient world and moving through the nineteenth century to contemporary cultural theory. Students will produce an annotated bibliography and a 20-page research paper. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210.

AENG334 19th Century British American Literature: Revisiting/Revising the British Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Popular Culture 10198 TTH 01:15PM-2:35PM Mallory-Kani,Amy L Spanning from the French Revolution (1789) to the beginning of World War I (1914), the long nineteenth century witnessed a variety of historical, political, and cultural transformations which continue to inform the present. This course will examine how contemporary and near-contemporary novels, films, and other media re-imagine, reinterpret, and revise literature and culture from that period. We will begin our exploration by considering the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of Britain in the period following the French Revolution, through selections of cultural and literary texts. The rest of the course will be structured by a series of units that will tackle specific issues related to cultural and literary studies of the period: 1) Romanticism and Poetic Composition (John Keats’s poetry and the film Bright Star); 2) Regency Sensibilities (Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, cinematic adaptations of the novel including its South Asian counterpart, Kandukondain Kandukondain [2000], and selections from Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters); 3) Gender and Class (Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a recent film adaptation, and Jean Rhys’s modern novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea); 4) Detective Literature (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the contemporary PBS series); 5) Steampunk (Victorian-era science fiction and Gibson’s and Sterling’s The Difference Engine). In the process, we will also discuss general issues and controversies relating to adaptation. Assignments will likely include reading responses, the completion of film worksheets, and a final project.

AENG337 9730 TTH

19th Century-American Literature 04:15PM-05:35PM Lilley,James D

This course traces the history of American romance from the early Republic to the Civil War. By examining how gothic tales, the sentimental novel, and the historical and frontier romance imagine the relationship between the singular and the common, we will explore how both the form and the content of these texts redefine what it means to belong in the emerging U.S. nation. With community and the common as our theme for the semester, the course will investigate how the literature of romance addresses such interconnected and interdisciplinary topics as dispossession, removal, representation, exclusion, and the state of exception. We will thus be interested in the ways that these texts work to both sustain and subvert the rules of membership governing specific racial, sexual, and national systems of community. Drawing on an assortment of cultural documents, we will study texts by authors such as Brockden Brown, Sansay, Neal, Irving, and Melville in a variety of contexts—from Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act to the science of phrenology, and from the Haitian revolution to the Amistad case. In addition to short response papers and a take home exam, students will prepare a final paper in which they identify and research a specific cultural context that informs one of the texts and its aesthetic strategies.

AENG343 9732 TTH

Study of Authors: Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence 01:15PM-02:35PM Berman,Jeffrey

This course will focus on the art and life of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, emphasizing psychoanalytic and feminist approaches. We will read Hardy’s The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There will be four five-page essays, constituting two-thirds of the final grade, and several reader-response diaries, constituting the remaining one-third of the final grade.

AENG346 4799 MW

Shakespeare's Tragedies and Romances 02:45PM-04:05PM Rozett,Martha T

This course is devoted to plays Shakespeare wrote after 1600, with an emphasis on character, language, theme, and performance. We will begin with Measure for Measure, although it is neither a tragedy or a romance. Other readings include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Assignments include short papers, exams, and a performance-based project. May be repeated once for credit when content varies.

AENG350 1942 TTH

Contemporary Writers at Work 04:15PM-05:35PM Schwarzschild,Edward

In this course we will read and discuss published work by the authors appearing on campus in the New York State Writers Institute Visiting Writers Series. We will meet, hear, and speak with the visiting writers in colloquia devoted to in-depth conversations not only about the authors' works, but also about the issues facing writers today. Some recent visitors have included Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Ayana Mathis, Marie Howe, Joy Harjo, J.M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, and many others. We will read from a wide variety of genres and, by the end of the semester, after a great deal of reading and writing and discussion, students will hopefully have a deeper, richer appreciation and understanding of what it means to work as a writer in our world. There will be frequent short papers, a midterm exam, and a final project.

AENG355 9733 TTH

Plays into Film 10:15AM-11:35AM

Yalkut,Carolyn

This course will study Western drama as it has been transformed from Biblical, folkloric, and mythological antecedents into live theatre and from thence into cinema. Considering the multiple perspectives of playwright, performer, director, audience, and reader, we will read plays and then watch movies (or scenes from movies) based on those plays, often in competing versions. The plays we study will be considered as literary texts, performance scripts, historical and cultural artifacts and – when revised and reinterpreted on film – as vehicles of popular culture.

AENG355 9734 MW

Studies in Film 05:45PM-07:05PM

Kuiken,Kir A

This class is a wide-ranging introduction to the film medium designed to expose students to both the history of cinema and to recent currents in filmmaking around the world. The main question that will guide the course is whether or not cinema might be said to develop its own language, and if so, how this development impacts the way film relates to other forms of art, to politics, and to the construction of subjectivity. The course will chart the development of the language of film from the early silent period to the contemporary avant–garde. Students will be introduced to central critical and theoretical concepts in film discourse, and will develop techniques to write in a sophisticated and informed way about the cinema they watch. Readings will be in electronic form, but will also include philosophical and theoretical texts that will develop and contextualize some of the issues addressed by film theory and film analysis. Viewing sessions in addition to regular classes may be required. Theoretical texts studied will include Benjamin, Barthes, Deleuze, Ranciere and others. Filmakers studied will include Lang, Bresson, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Weerasekathul and others. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG358 7244 TTH

Early American Poetry 11:45AM-01:05PM

Roberts,Wendy R

The most familiar narratives of American poetry begin with Puritan poets (Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor) and then move to the iconic poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. One would think that either eighteenth-century people living in British North America did not write poetry, that it was largely irrelevant to the culture, or that the period saw no significant aesthetic developments. All of these assumptions could not be farther from the truth. We will read, recite, perform, and experience poetry from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries to discover the rich variety of early American poetry, its various uses and interventions in the culture, and its relationship to tradition and innovation. We will consider the possible reasons for its exclusion from the usual accounts of American poetry and analyze the ways that these early poetic forms, practices, and traditions influenced nineteenth-century poets. Students can expect to write two analytic papers (one shorter, one longer) and complete a group project (creative, performance, or traditional).

AENG359 6692 TTH

Studies in Narrative: The Fiction of Disaster 10:15AM-11:35AM Barney,Richard A

This course will examine the theme of widespread disaster in British and American fiction from the 18th to the 21st century. We will begin by examining how the idea of being “modern,” a concept that emerges during the European Enlightenment, serves as context for fearing—while also fantasizing about—a complete breakdown of civilized life. We will begin with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1720), before turning then to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1824), Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), Frank Herbert’s The White Plague (1982), David

Palmer’s Emergence (1984), Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1995), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). Students will focus on ways to improve their ability to write analytical essays on fiction, while studying critical and theoretical essays related to the concept of modernity, the roots of science fiction, and traditional narratives about apocalypse. Note: several of the novels for the course are long, and will require reading at least two- to three-hundred pages per week.

AENG359 8517 TTH

Studies in Narrative: Hard Boiled Detective 01:15PM-02:35PM North,Stephen M

The form of detective fiction usually referred to as “hard-boiled” emerged in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. Appearing first in pulp magazines that targeted working class men, it moved fairly quickly into the mainstream, and eventually went on to become one of the most durable and, arguably, influential narrative forms in American literature. Our approach to it will consist of three units. In the first, we will sample work from the form’s early years: stories from Black Mask, and novels by such writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In the second unit, we will consider some of the excellent scholarship on those writings, exploring such issues as what gave rise to the form and what cultural functions it served. In the third and final unit, we will read contemporary descendants of the form by writers like Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Jonathan Lethem, and Ron Maclean, and—building on the work of the scholars from Unit II—assess what it might be doing in our time, how, and for whom.

AENG360Y 7191 MWF

Tutoring & Writing 11:30AM-12:25PM

[Permission of Instructor] Coller,Jonathan R

Course Description and Objectives: This course is primarily designed to train tutors to work in the University’s Writing Center, though those interested in exploring writing instruction, writing processes from brainstorming to revision, or rhetorical concerns of audience and purpose may also find this course of value. We will investigate our own and others’ writing processes, styles and purposes for writing in various academic disciplines, and the dynamics of giving and receiving useful feedback on writing as well as the role of a Writing Center on campus. (This course fulfills the University at Albany General Education Oral Discourse requirement.) Please Note: In order to enroll in this course you must provide the instructor, Jon Coller, with a reference (name/position/contact information) from a full-time faculty member employed at the University at Albany. References may be submitted via email ([email protected]). Once the instructor has received your reference, he will reply with a confirmation and the CPN needed to officially enroll in the course.

AENG374 8276 TTH

Cultural Studies: African American Rhetorical Traditions 01:15PM-02:35PM Carey,Tamika L

This course examines the distinct communication and argumentative strategies African Americans have created and modified in pursuit of full humanity since the enslavement era. We will read a collection of speeches, essays, book-length primary sources, and critical works from such figures as Ida B. WellsBarnett, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others. Through this work, we will determine how African Americans use rhetoric as a techne, or art, to meet their needs and how rhetoric functions as an analytical tool to critique and evaluate arguments.

AENG374 9737 MW

Cultural Studies: Varieties of Realist Experience 05:45PM-07:05PM Fretwell,Erica N

In the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century, American culture produced a variety of literary forms called “realism.” Traditionally, the genre has been associated with efforts by middle- and upper-class white men to preserve privilege (James, Howells). But more than any other preceding time in U.S. literary

production, the period was far more various and contested by communities traditionally denied access to publication. We will approach realism less as a coherent movement, and more as a series of responses to the historical, technological, political, and intellectual conditions that shaped the traumatic experience of war. Spanning the Civil War to the Great War, our readings will help us to consider the relationship between key historical events (Reconstruction; the closing of the frontier; the Spanish-American War) and distinctly stylized spaces and movements focused on “the real thing.” This course emphasizes the presence of social and aesthetic diversity, conflict, and turbulence—as well as exuberance, idealism, and celebration. If American realism means anything, then it means attention to multiple realities.

AENG390 1943

Internship in English [Permission of Instructor] F 01:40PM-02:35PM [Periodically] McKenna, Holly

Supervised practical apprenticeship of 10 - 15 hours a week in positions requiring skills relevant to English studies, including reading and critical analysis, research, writing, tutoring, curating and archiving. Interns are placed in a variety of positions based on their skills, interests and a consultation with the English internship director. The academic component includes a mid-term analysis of the internship; a self-review; an end-of-semester report; and a portfolio. Interns are required to meet as a group periodically through the semester with the internship director. Open to junior or senior English majors and minors with an overall grade point average of 2.50 and a minimum of 3.0 in English. To apply, contact the English internship director. S/U graded. Prerequisite: Permission of Instructor.

AENG399Z 4475

TTH

“Honors Seminar: Imagining Renaissance” [Permission of Instructor] 02:45PM-04:05PM Murakami,Ineke

The English Renaissance is a marvel of virtual reality. Defined in no small measure by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars like E.M.W. Tillyard and T.S. Eliot, this golden age actually began in the minds of fifteenth-century artists and thinkers who, in striving to fashion ideal identities, turned away from their immediate past to embrace an ancient one imagined as superior. The resulting surprises, violent changes, disappointments, and thrilling flashes of insight are what the Renaissance--or “rebirth” of a supposedly ancient commitment to the arts, sciences, world-exploration, and social programming--was all about. We now know that the tidy “Elizabethan World Picture,” once accepted by historians at face value, was less an historically accurate reflection of the period than one of its finest fictions. This course considers the constructedness of history, the unevenness of cultural development, and the power of imaginative work to engender reality. In this inaugural course of the English Department honors program, we shall examine some of the key imaginative texts of what is now called “early modernity”―from poetry by Donne and de la Cruz, paintings by Holbein and Gentileschi, dramatic works by Shakespeare and Ford, to discoveries in astronomy and overseas encounters that called the entire universe into question. As we explore our own archival projects, we shall encounter early versions of issues our current culture has yet to resolve: issues of gender, class, race, religion, and sovereignty. We will also ask how recent fantasies of the “Renaissance”—from films like Artemisia, to Renaissance fairs and blogs―inherit or expand upon a tradition of self-reflexive analysis and utopian dream work. In what ways does continuing to imagine a Renaissance enable or critique particular world views? Over the course of the semester, you will develop your proficiency in finding a topic and researching it, using advanced research strategies. You will also practice incorporating historical, theoretical, and scholarly materials into a sustained argument based on the close reading of a text, key abilities in the development of your future thesis project. Prerequisite: Permission of Instructor. AENG402Z Advanced Writing Workshop [Permission of Instructor] 4800 W 02:45PM-05:35PM Tillman,Lynne M This course is an advanced, intensive writing workshop. In order to be considered, each student will be expected to have already taken one writing course. Each student will write three pieces during the

semester. These will be read and discussed, constructively and thoroughly, by the workshop. The goal of our writing and reading is to make each student more sensitive to and aware of issues in writing -– as readers and writers –- and to make our efforts in writing more effective. To this end, in addition to writing stories and reading colleagues' work, students will read fictions by various authors -- Denis Johnson, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, George Saunders, Lydia Davis. Their stories will enable us to investigate fictional devices and all of the elements involved in writing stories. We will discuss the complexity of narrative; character; point(s) of view; time in narrative; word choice; order, and structure. Participation in the workshop is extremely important. This is a permission by instructor only course. To apply for entry, each student must submit a writing sample – prose fiction – of no more than three pages (750 words). Please email to: [email protected]. In addition, please indicate the writing courses you have taken; your year and major; and why you want to take this workshop. Prerequisite: Eng 202Z or 302Z and permission of Instructor.

AENG410Y 6694 MW

Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory 04:15PM-05:35PM Smith,Derik J

Reading poetry, novels and criticism, students will explore African-American literature in the decades following the Civil Rights/Black Power era. The course will focus on the way that authors have responded to inter- and intraracial tensions in an (African-)American era significantly influenced by increasing economic inequality and the expansion of the penal state. We may read novels by Percival Everett, Toni Morrison, Sapphire, Michael Thomas and Colson Whitehead, and poetry by Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Harryette Mullen and Saul Williams, among others. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG411Y 7197 TTH

Arthurian Legends 10:15AM-11:35AM

Scheck,Helene E

This course is designed to explore the various manifestations of Arthurian legend–medieval and modern. We will find the early seeds of Arthuriana in ancient historical texts and from there survey the appropriations and adaptations of the legend in Welsh, English, and French texts and traditions, remaining mostly in the Middle Ages for our course readings. Visual representations will be used wherever possible to broaden the area and types of inquiry. Some of the literature will be quite enjoyable and can certainly be read for pleasure; other pieces may challenge the modern reader’s patience. Reading carefully and thinking critically about Arthurian texts from magical to mundane, students will develop competence and confidence in moving between history and legend, early texts and late, and between different cultural constructions of the legend. Students should also come away from the course with a heightened awareness of transformations of fiction and fact in cultural, historical, literary, and visual media and, of course, a heightened appreciation for Arthurian legend–then and now. Students will demonstrate an advanced level of critical engagement with the course texts. Since this course fills the oral discourse requirement, students will also develop and improve communication and presentation skills, particularly the ability to state an argument clearly and persuasively and to share ideas effectively. Assignments include active participation, midterm and final examinations, presentations, and a substantial seminar paper. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of the instructor.

AENG411Y 9748 MW

British Literature and Culture 02:45PM-04:05PM Kuiken,Kir A

The period known as Romanticism generated a multitude of apparently conflicting attitudes towards

history. In an era that saw the beginning of the critique of enlightenment notions of historical progress, Romanticism found itself compelled to rethink the idea of history in relation to the construction of subjectivity, and as an explanatory model for social progress generally. The question remains, however: just what kind of rethinking of history did Romanticism produce? Some critics have suggested that Romanticism, which witnessed a wave of disillusionment after the “failure” of the French Revolution, simply retreated from history entirely, into the ahistorical realms of individual subjectivity or nature. This course will explore the more varied kinds of rethinking of history that took place in Romantic philosophical and literary texts, along with the question of the continued relevance of this rethinking for our own forms of historical consciousness. From the historical novel, to treatises on the nature of poetry, to Romantic poetry itself, Romanticism everywhere was gripped, fascinated and made anxious by the problem of history. Some of the questions that Romanticism raised include “What does it mean to have a historical consciousness?”, “What happens to subjectivity when history is no longer synonymous with progress?” and “What does it mean to perform or create a truly historical act?” We will explore not only specific Romantic- era constructions of history, but also Romantic responses to historical events, and the appeal and dangers of ahistorical thinking, with an eye towards the political stakes of these various attitudes towards history. We will then turn to the legacy of these notions in some post-Kantian philosophy of history. Readings will include poetic and prose texts by key Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, a novel by Scott, and philosophical/ theoretical texts by Kant, Hegel and Nancy. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG411Y 9749 TTH

Drama of Empire 02:45PM-04:05PM

Cable,Lana

The British Empire lasted for more than three centuries and at its height (from the late 19th century through WWI) ruled one quarter of the world’s population and land mass. Although the legal relationships between ruler and ruled were set out in various constitutions, the contradiction between cherished notions of Britons as liberty-loving people and the actual practices whereby Britons undermined the liberties of others could lead to popular ambivalence about empire. This ambivalence is reflected in a variety of plays performed from the late 16th through 20th centuries. We will explore a selection of these plays through questions attuned to the public debate over empire: What immediate cultural and political conditions inform each play, and what questions does each play raise in response to those conditions? Do playwrights intervene in the public debate over empire in order to influence it, or do they merely display recognized contours of the debate? In what ways do specific plays either reflect or alter how English audiences feared, aspired to, participated in, gained, or lost from the march toward empire? To what extent were public perceptions about empire influenced by race, class, gender or partisan politics? In what ways did ideas about empire affect long-held popular notions of what it meant to be English? In what ways did audiences think about the moral, ethical, and social as well as economic consequences that might result from imperial dominion? What evidence is there that stage plays contributed to popular understanding of the instrumentalities of empire and how such instrumentalities could alter the course of human civilization? Although a substantial number of our readings come from the English Augustan era (1660-1714), which consciously drew on models of philosophy, politics, art, and literature inherited from classical Rome, we will also examine the broad sweep of British empire drama, with perspectives from playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare to modern playwrights like Harley Granville Barker and Brian Friel. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG412Y 9735 TTH

Film and Psychoanalysis 01:15PM-02:35PM

Valentis,Mary B

Complex psychologies merged with cinematic landscapes and languages create multiple and layered meanings in film texts. This course, which explores the relations among psyche, text, and image,

encompasses three general areas of study: psychodynamic psychologies, visual culture, and film studies. This course will serve as an exploration of the central theories, practices, and history of film, visual culture, depth psychology, and spectatorship. The aim here is not to impose ways of seeing on anyone, but to equip the student with the fundamental ideas and multi-layered approaches to visual analysis and critical reading that have served the interpreters of the word so well. These modalities and the body of theoretical/critical literature associated with each area of study will inform and enlarge our investigation of the required films. Classes will consist of viewings, lecture, and discussion. Students are expected to produce a film journal at the end of the semester to document their notes and interpretations of each film along with their perceptions of the assigned readings. The film aspect of the course will introduce the student to film studies in general, the language of film, the reception of film, a brief history of production and the central critical issues and theories in film study. Lectures and discussions will cover Freud and beyond, and include critical readers Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, Mulvey, Gabbard, and Cohen. Our work on visual culture in relation to film will include theorists such as DeBord, Benjamin, Metz,and Baudrillard, The class will focus on but not be limited to the following required films:Spellbound, Fatal Attraction,The Talented Mr. Ripley,Notes on a Scandal, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,The Black Swan, Matchpoint, A Dangerous Method,The Great Gatsby. Texts: The Basics/Film Studies, Freud and Beyond, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG413Y 8277 MW

Sentimentality 02:45PM-04:05PM

Fretwell,Erica N

In this course we will examine the place of sentimentality in American literature of the long nineteenth century. Considering works of fiction, poetry, and performance, we will ask how and why certain kinds of feelings—and suffering in particular—have become central to the articulation of American national identity. By way of introduction, our readings will survey the migration of sentimental fiction to the United States in the 1780s, the rise of abolitionist and indigenous rights discourse in the 1830s, and the genre’s subsequent entwinement with the nascent consumer cultures and commodity forms of the early twentieth century. Our focus will then be on how sentimentality develops as an identifiable set of formal conventions, rhetorical poses, and political strategies from the mid-nineteenth century onward. We will pay particular attention to how sentimental literature, in its various guises, seeks to enable identification across boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and ability. What kinds of politics do spectacles of emotion enable? What kinds of politics do they foreclose? Other topics of concern will include sympathy, mourning, nostalgia, melodrama, the cultural logic of separate spheres, religion, protest, and historical memory. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.

AENG413Y 10199 TTH

The Literature of Evangelicalism and Enlightenment 08:45AM-10:05AM Roberts,Wendy R

The eighteenth century is widely known as the Age of Enlightenment, but it was equally an age of religious revivalism. The century birthed evangelicalism, a religious movement that transformed the direction of American culture and politics from its inception to today. To evangelicalism's innovative applications of new media, scholars have attributed major cultural shifts, including popular support of the American Revolution and abolition. This course will explore the popular literature of evangelicals (including revival magazines, sermons, slave and travel narratives, poetry, hymns, and novels) and responses to them by non-evangelicals to think through the complex relationship between religion and enlightenment in early America. How we imagine the relationship between these two co-emerging strains is crucial because such schema have structured the narratives of national identity that are pervasive in contemporary political discourse. Students will produce two papers, one shorter and one longer, and devise a non-traditional group project that explores the relevance of their research to current politics. Prerequisite: C or better in Eng 210, Eng 305, or permission of instructor.