FALL 2009
(Click Here for Spring 2009)

ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis:
Marxist Ideology Critique
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Donald Morton
"If the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be." —Karl Marx, Letter to A. Ruge, September, 1843

At the present time, literary/cultural studies are the scene of an ongoing contestation among—to simplify the issues—humanist, (post)structuralist, and Marxist theories. As against the other two ways of understanding social issues and problems, Marxism sees these matters not simply as problems of representation, prejudice, or personal attitudes, but rather as the effects of labor relations . . . This course will go "against the grain" of dominant forms of inquiry in the humanities by foregrounding the difference of class as a way of understanding developments in literary and cultural studies today and by focusing on the divergence of the Marxist understanding of "the material" from the understandings of that concept found in today's dominant forms of literary and cultural inquiry.  

ETS 305-3 Critical Analysis:
Cultural Studies
TTh 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
What does it mean to be a “cultural critic”? How does such a critic's reading practice differ (for example) from a “formal” or “psychological” or “deconstructive” approach to a literary text or other work of art or popular culture? This course will provide you with basic concepts and strategies to be able to answer such questions and begin to call yourself a cultural critic. We will study mass cultural forms such as advertising, television shows, and fashion as well as everyday practices, such as shopping, reading the newspaper, or going to the movies, to try to understand how we learn to make sense of a globalizing world and live a particular culture—or cultures—in the U.S. today. By comparing and contrasting the strategies of literary texts with other cultural forms and practices we can consider what makes literature particular as a mode of signification (meaning-making). We will also learn the importance of situating everything we study—and ourselves—historically. As the course progresses, you should become a more sophisticated, creative, and critical reader of the world in which we live as you learn to see how literature works in, with, and against that world.

ETS 310-1 Literary Periods:
The American Renaissance
TTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
By any measure, the early 1850s were tremendously fertile years for U.S. literary production. This “American Renaissance” produced famous novels (like Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ), short stories (like Herman Melville's “Benito Cereno”), orations (like addresses on the institution of slavery by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau) and long poems (like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha ) . We will be analyzing these seminal texts, and also studying the social, political, and cultural events of this period and how they influence its literature. Furthermore, as academic trends have shifted, critical interest in this period has moved from “classic” literature by white men to, for example, popular bestsellers written by women authors and abolitionist texts written by people of color. We will study the immense symbolic value of this period as a battleground on which these kinds of shifts in critical priorities are negotiated.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 310-3 Literary Periods:
Post-1945 American Fiction
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: David Yaffe
When the New York Times Book Review recently polled hundreds of writers and critics to determine the "best work of fiction" over the past 25 years, a debate ensued. We will use the resulting controversial list as a starting point for this course, while also looking back further to the beginning of the period after World War II in search of the best. As we do so, we will examine how the "best" is chosen and which texts are likely to remain relevant in the future. Readings may include works by Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Richard Yates, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Lorrie Moore, and Mary Gaitskill. Particular attention will be paid to bringing these novels and short stories to the "way we live now," but we will also put these works in their proper context. We will examine relevant developments in music and film (competing and complementary media in an era like no other) as well as attitudes about race, sex, and politics. How a cultural moment results in a particular literary style will also be important. Presentations will be on film adaptations of fiction on the syllabus—we will use an inquiry into filmmaking as a way to get closer to the text.  Two papers and a presentation are required.

ETS 315-1 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures:
Yiddish Literature in Translation
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Ken Frieden
This course will examine readings in translation of the major Yiddish writers from 1864 to 1939. After studying three classic authors––Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz––we will turn to modernists such as S. An-Ski, Sholem Asch, Dovid Bergelson, Moshe Kulbak, and Lamed Shapiro. In several instances, we will compare the fictional works to film adaptations such as The Dybbuk, Tevye, and Fiddler on the Roof . Klezmer wedding music is an incidental topic. The final section of the course turns to important Yiddish women writers of the twentieth century, especially Blume Lempel, Fradel Schtok, and Yente Serdatsky. Readins will include: Abramovitsh, Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler ; An-Ski, The Dybbuk; Bergelson, The Stories of David Bergelson; Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz . Ed. Ken Frieden; Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers. Ed. Frieda Forman, et al.; Aleichem, Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things; Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories; and A Treasury of Yiddish Stories . Ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg.

ETS 320-2 Authors:
Three British Playwrights
TTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht
Modern drama is international. It had its origins in the Continental European intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic movement called Modernism. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw brought modern drama to Britain . Shaw adapted Ibsenism and social drama to comedy, but most other writers for the English stage followed Ibsen with realistic and naturalistic dramas that explored the political and social dynamics of their time. Modern British dramatists looked to Chekhov to learn how to portray psychologically tormented lives. Pirandello forced British playwrights to contemplate the relativity of reality. Brecht became the model for British radical epic drama. Finally, Beckett infused existentialism into the drama. His influence led to the popularity of British versions of the Theatre of the Absurd. Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett also influenced the work of the three most important living British playwrights: Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill. This course will study select dramas of these playwrights as works of art as well as philosophical and social documents.

Requirements: Three 1500 word essays, dates to be announced. Satisfactory attendance required.

ETS 325-2 History and Varieties of English
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Patricia Moody
This course aims to provide students with as much knowledge as possible, as interactively as possible, of the basic structures of the English language and representations of its history. For at least two hundred years, the story of English has been the story of Standard English triumphant. This course works against that deceptive hegemony, demonstrating through readings, exercises, and research into actual language use from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson and a lively range of contemporary speakers, that no standards of correctness have ever really contained the surging energy of English, in all its multiform varieties. Equally important, the course aims to develop critical awareness of contemporary language issues and the complex ways in which language embeds attitudes.

ETS 340-4 Theorizing Forms and Genres:
Black Prison Writing
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Greg Thomas
Nowadays, many in U.S. circles refer to the “prison-industrial complex,” a rhetoric which literally comes from The Wall Street Journal itself. But before imprisonment would be defined according to contemporary economics, it had already been defined by scholar-activists in the Black radical tradition in terms of enslavement. The large-scale transfer of Black persons from antebellum plantations to today's prisons (where “old” official slavery remains perfectly legal) can therefore be easily understood as an “internal slave trade” as opposed to slavery's actual “abolition.” This course confronts this Pan-African problematic of the politics of prison (and mass criminalization) without losing sight of this connection between imprisonment and enslavement, whether past or present. We'll focus on North America as a historic site of struggle for recent Black writing from and about prisons, confinement, incarceration, jailing, etc. Reading from Nat Turner to George Jackson and Assata Shakur, for example, students should in the end be able to think critically about incarceration; identify connections between old and new forms of captivity; analyze the cultural as well as socio-economic operations of jailing or imprisonment; and also interrogate established concepts of law, crime, order and the like, as encouraged by Black or African Diasporic movements of thought.

ETS 350-3 Reading Nation and Empire:
Hip-Hop Eshu: QUEEN B@#$H Lyricism
TTh 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Greg Thomas
This course on lyricism is all about Hip-Hop and, necessarily, Black life in Africa 's Diaspora. It is no less about certain “gender” and “sexuality” issues at the center of contemporary Black struggles, cultural and political. Our focus will be on the lyrical texts of one phenomenal figure: Lil' Kim, “Big Momma/Queen B itch.” In place of bourgeois literature and bourgeois criticism, there will be rap audio and lyrics, oral history, musicology, folklore and spoken word, magazine articles, interviews, film and video as well as Black Studies of all kinds: Toni Morrison on the Million Woman March, Angela Y. Davis on Blues women, Carolyn Cooper and Denise Noble on Dancehall Ragga, Cheryl Keyes on female rappers, E. Franklin Frazier on the brown middle-class elite, Sonia Sanchez on Black Puritans, various scholars on Yoruba trickster-god(desse)s, Sylvia Wynter on modern sexual categories, and Ifi Amadiume on African matriarchy and pre-colonial/flexible gender systems. We'll also seriously examine recent work on state repression and “Rap COINTELPRO,” state violence not covered by corporate media. All will be critically engaged to provide ample understanding of Lil' Kim's “Queen B itch” lyricism, her sexual revolution in rhyme, her very own work in the musical revolution that is Hip-Hop.

ETS 360-1 Reading Gender and Sexualities:
Queer Fictions
TTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Amy Lang
Gertrude Stein once said, “Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable.” Taking up the central role sex plays in the novel and the novel has played in the literary, cultural, and political representation of same sex desire, this course asks how Anglo-American culture has thought about sexuality and art, love and literature, and how we might think again. To explore the literary impact and cultural importance of the work of lesbian, gay, and queer writers demands new interpretive skills. While cultivating the close reading of texts, this course will require as well that students learn unfamiliar modes of reading attuned to a range of references that challenge or reconfigure our customary assumptions about the novel. The “heterosexual plot”—the apparently inexorable progress of Anglo-American narratives toward resolution in/through marriage—for example, or the conventions of gender representation, take on altered significance when queer writing is highlighted, when sex, “a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all,” in Stein's words, is central to literary discussion. This course requires that students commit themselves to close reading and that they bring with them a willingness to entertain the ambiguous, the difficult, the problematic.

ETS 360-2 Reading Gender and Sexualities
Gender and Sexuality in the Arab World
TTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey
This course explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are represented in an array of visual, historical, and literary texts from the Arab world and its diaspora, starting from the pre-Islamic era up till the contemporary period. Some of the main issues that will be addressed include the historical development of feminism in the Arab world, the construction of gender roles in the context of war and conflict, as well as the outspokenness of many of the region's writers on topics such as love, sex, and homosexual desire. In studying these issues, we will also be focusing on texts by writers of Arab descent living in the US who respond to and engage with their counterparts in the Arab world on some of the same topics but from a diasporic perspective, thus emphasizing a transnational and transcultural approach to our study of gender and sexuality.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 360-3 Reading Gender and Sexualities:
Other Women in Victorian Fiction
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
The domestic ideology that dominated the culture of bourgeois Victorian England dictated that in order to be good or “true,” a woman must be firmly rooted in and largely confined to the domain of the home. Her primary identity was to be that of a virtuous wife and mother, and before that a chaste and dutiful sister and daughter. Because of the rigidity of this ideology, almost any deviation from its ideals catapulted a woman from the status of “angel” to that of “demon,” or from “Madonna” to “Magdalene.”

Such “other” Victorian women—fallen, odd, evil, or perverse—occupy center stage in many nineteenth-century novels. Even when such novels impugn, punish, or banish these wayward women, their figures still trouble the snug domestic scenes with which the texts often conclude. In other novels, these figures play such a powerful role in the text as to make any such a turn toward a happy ending impossible.

In this course we will explore a number of nineteenth-century fictions of these “other” Victorian women, reading novels and short stories by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, George Gissing and others. We will supplement our readings of the novels with contemporary feminist theory and criticism, as well as with selected primary source material.
Pre-1900 Course

ETS 401-2 Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
T 9:30-12:15
Instructor: Mary Karr
This is an advanced course, so I assume you're all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to a) read, b) write, c) critique each other's work with utmost care and respect, d) rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Your notes on each other's poems should be detailed and serious. I'd also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. What I value first and foremost is a) clarity in communication and b) strong feeling (in the reader NOT the writer).  I expect everyone to rewrite based on workshop comments. You'll bring in poems as often as possible—once per week, or every two. You'll also memorize poems I bring in.

ETS 403-2 Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Workshop format. Craft. Vision. Professionalism. MFA preparation.  

ETS 405-1 Topics in Medicine and Culture:
AIDS in American Literature
W 4:00-7:00
Instructor: Deirdre Neilen
This course will examine attitudes (cultural, national, professional, medical, personal) towards those who have HIV/AIDS. The literature will present a combination of fictional and real characters; through their lives we will follow the progression of the disease from its initial incarnation as mysterious, frightening curse to its current status as a chronic illness that can be managed with proper treatment and medication. We will explore the ethical dilemmas AIDS brought to the forefront of medicine, law, and politics and analyze today's responses with those from the first days of the epidemic.

ETS 410-4 Forms and Genres:
Victorian Poetry of Love and Desire
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Kevin Morrison
Victorian love poems are often dismissed as embarrassingly mawkish and sentimental. Although we will read a representative selection of poems that have helped to establish this reputation, a central premise of this course is that Victorian poetry of love and desire frequently wrestles with the epistemology of love (how does one know love? how does one know the other through love?) as well as the phenomenology of love (how do we experience it?) and is therefore far more complex than critics have often assumed. Some of the likely poets we will encounter include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. Our discussions will be enriched by theories of emotion and human/nonhuman animal relations, as well as recent scholarly reappraisals of Victorian love poetry.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 410-5 Forms and Genres:
Styling the Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
The genre we use to publish our ideas in nearly every academic discipline is prose—specifically, the prose essay. Coined by Montaigne to describe a mode of writing that imagines itself as an attempt or trial, the ‘essay' as we know it was born at the end of the sixteenth century. Marking the wane of humanism and the rise of empiricism, the essay, and the prose styles it fostered, initiated a century of intellectual revolution centered on questions of individual sovereignty. This course will study the relationship between seventeenth-century prose and literary selfhood. We will consider how the development of English prose enabled writers to imagine their relation to their physical, spiritual, and political surroundings, asking the following questions: What suasory, consolatory, or incendiary aims did their prose aspire to? Who could write prose, when, and why? What were the conditions of writing and reading in the period that led us to think of its prose as the somber cousin of poetry and plays? We will read from key Continental texts translated into English at the start of the century as contexts for the theological, scientific, political, and autobiographical prose of John Donne, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, Lucy Hutchison, and others.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 420-2 Cultural Production and Reception:
The Shakespeare Industry
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Patricia A Moody
From Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996) to John Madden's Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), and with major contributions from Kenneth Branagh, the past ten years have seen numerous film versions of Shakespeare's plays. Why? This course examines issues of production and reception of Shakespeare's plays, particularly in their most recent film adaptations. We'll make case studies out of several plays (read in their entirety) to see how they are cast, staged, directed, and received.
Pre-1900 course 

ETS 420-4 Cultural Production and Reception:
The Bloody Argument: Jacobean Revenge Tragedy
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
In the Jacobean revenge play, illicit desire, jealous fury, and boundless ambition culminate in dizzying scenes of death and dismemberment: severed hands, skewered hearts, poisoned skulls, lycanthropy, and accidental suicide. Incest and necrophilia, body-swaps, bartered maidenheads, and all varieties of murder and madness feigned and real are commonplaces of the Jacobean stage. Were Ford, Webster, Middleton, and Tourneur the Tarantinos of their times? How might we compare contemporary dramas such as The Godfather and The Soprano s to the seething plots of corruption and retribution of the Italianate families on the Jacobean stage? What did violence ‘do' for the late-Renaissance playgoer? What did it enable playwrights and audiences to think and say? We will closely consider how the Jacobean plot stages contests for power over the possession and display of the female body. We will debate whether the Jacobean tragedy upholds or subverts the values and virtues of the late Renaissance church and court—carefully weighing the villain's highly seductive arguments against the blander virtues of the play's moral authorities. Studied plays and screenings of film adaptations will include The Revenger's Tragedy , ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore , The Atheist's Tragedy , Women Beware Women and The Duchess of Malfi.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 426-1 Literature, Culture, and Social Change:
Is Literatue Dying?
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Harvey Teres
Most of you read literature because it's assigned to you in school. Some of you will continue to read it once you graduate, but most of you won't. This is a course that will explore the literary life of the nation, both on and off the college campus, to determine just how vital or languid that life is. We will explore the reading experiences of people outside the academy, and a range of issues relevant to those experiences. We will look at literacy and literacy rates, how much and what people of different ages and demographic groups read, the impact of the internet, the changing publishing industry, book reviewing and the function of critics, how literary canons are made, multiculturalism and its impact on literary culture, “political correctness” and censorship, the pleasures of reading, and the moral and political impact of literature. We will relate these issues to the function of English departments and their changing relationship to the wider world with an eye toward the possibilities of developing stronger connections to the public. To this end, students will be encouraged to produce research papers (perhaps working as teams) based on their involvement with literary or cultural groups in the surrounding community—perhaps through the CNY Reads program, through some other of the many initiatives at S.U., or by creating their own project.

ETS 509-1 S enior Seminar:
Reading and Writing U.S. Consumer Culture
T 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Amy Lang
This senior seminar interweaves the history of the emergence of a “culture of consumption” in the United States with an exploration of its literary expression. Beginning with the rise of the department store—the “ladies paradise”—in the late nineteenth century and ending with the age of advertising in the 1920s, we will investigate changes in the way goods were marketed, advertised, bought and sold, the way Americans thought and felt about goods, their uses, and themselves, and attendant changes in the stories they told and how they told them. Keeping in mind the tension between the liberatory and the oppressive built into this history, we will explore the cultural and imaginative significance and the novelistic renderings of the new roles, attitudes, and states of being—“just looking,” “trying on,” “window shopping”—that accompanied the rise of what one historian has called a “consumer republic.”

In the first portion of this seminar, we will read the histories and historical documents that frame this dramatic change in U.S. culture alongside the fictions to which it gave rise. The second portion will be focused on original research on projects that might range across the wider history of consumer culture, from the post-World War II “malling” of America to current anti-consumerist and DIY subcultures. Instructor permission required.