Fall 2008
(Click Here for Spring 2008)


ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis: Historicizing Gender and Sexuality
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Paying particular attention to the historical emergence of modern categories of gender and sexuality, this course will attend to some of the ways these categories operate in contemporary literary-historical and literary-critical scholarship. The modern sex/gender system emerged in the late seventeenth century and developed in relation to other indexes of identity: class and status, ethnicity and race. Paying attention to the relations among all these concepts, the course will trace relations among early and late modern notions of sex, gender, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity.


ETS 305-3 Critical Analysis: Introduction to Cultural Studies
TTH 2:00-3:20
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 "psychoanalytic" 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, listening to music, and going to the movies, to try to understand how we learn to make sense of the globalizing world and "live" a particular culture—or cultures—in the U.S. today. By comparing and contrasting the strategies of literary texts with these 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. By the end of the course, you should become a more sophisticated and critical reader of the world in which you live, as you learn to see how literature functions in, with, and against, that world.


ETS 310-3 Literary Periods: The Harlem Renaissance
TTh 12: 30-1:50
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to the texts and contexts of the Harlem Renaissance. We will read African American literary texts alongside newspaper journalism, memoirs, visual texts and historical and critical accounts in an effort to understand the various energies and tensions undergirding the cultural renaissance in Harlem during the 1920s. We will investigate such topics as the competing attempts to define the “New Negro,” the role played by African American literary production in political struggles against white terrorism and black disenfranchisement, the role African-American culture played in contemporary struggles to critique and transform Anglo-American culture and cultural dominance, literary efforts to absorb and reconcile rural and urban forms of African-American expression, struggles over the relationship posed between “the modern” and “the primitive” and related struggles over the commodification of blackness. Course readings will include work by Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Walter White, Alain Locke, Angelina Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond and Nella Larsen.


ETS 315-1 Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: Israeli Literature & Culture
TTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor : Ken Freiden
A study of modern Hebrew literature in the historical context of Zionism, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the continued Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  In addition to reading major Israeli fiction, we will analyze ways in which contemporary sources report news from the Middle East .  The course will include screenings of pertinent documentaries and feature films.


ETS 315-2 Ethnic Literature & Cultures:
Contemporary Arab-American Literature and Culture
TTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor : Carol Fadda-Conrey
This course is designed to familiarize students with the burgeoning field of contemporary Arab-American literature, highlighting the ways in which this literature portrays and complicates Arab-American identity and culture. Featuring a variety of Arab-American literary and cultural texts, including novels, short stories, poems, non-fictional essays, literary criticism, plays, stand-up comedy, and documentaries, this course aims at capturing the range of the Arab-American experience. By underscoring specific themes and issues prevalent in Arab-American literature and culture, including the effect of 9/11 and beyond, Arab-American transnationalism, Islam and feminism, and Arab-American stereotyping, this course aims to highlight various linguistic, religious, political, and historical factors that have shaped and continue to define Arab-America. Featured writers include Elmaz Abinader, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Suheir Hammad, Hayan Charara, Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, and Diana-Abu-Jaber, to name a few. Whether handling topics related to food, language, religion, culture, politics, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, these authors exemplify the ways in which Arab-Americans negotiate a place for themselves in the US while grappling with issues of belonging, in-betweenness, nostalgia, and homesickess that tie them to their original Arab homelands.


ETS 315-4 Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: 19 th Century Native American Literature
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Scott Lyons
This course surveys the major authors and genres of nineteenth-century Native American literary history, paying close attention to the historical events that gave rise to the writing and speeches. These years posed tremendous challenges to Native people, communities, and cultures—from warfare and ethnic cleansing (“removal”), to forced assimilation and land allotment—and they witnessed a proliferation of writing and oratory in English by Indian authors: sermons, political pamphlets, poetry, journalism, autobiographies, tribal histories, even a romantic adventure novel. In order to understand and appreciate these texts, however, we must read them alongside the literature of colonization to which they responded: U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Indian Bureau policy statements, academic studies of Indians, and of course other literary texts. Reading Native literature in the twin contexts of political and cultural history will immediately reveal the central lesson of this course: that nineteenth century Indian history was defined by colonization and resistance—and sometimes accommodation—and this general struggle is reflected in the literature. Authors will include Samson Occom, Elias Boudinot, William Apess, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, George Copway, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and more.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 315-6 Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: Latino Fiction
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant
This course introduces students to the predominant reading strategies deployed in current examinations of Latino fiction while also surveying the achievements of many of the most prominent American novelists and short fiction writers of Hispanic descent from the nineteenth century to the present. Among the writers covered in the course are Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, Maria Cristina Mena, Americo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Junot Diaz, José Yglesias, Julia Alvarez, Nicholasa Mohr, and Graciela Limon. Their texts will be read with an emphasis on their intrinsic value as works of literary art, their legitimate place in the national corpus of American literature, and the critical and theoretical paradigms they have elicited in Latino literary scholarship. Significant attention is paid to the tensions often discernible between the normative schemes of thought put forth by civil rights-inflected academic explications and the often fluid ideologies evinced by the texts they purport to explicate.


ETS 320-2 Authors: Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Michael Echeruo
We will read the major novels and short stories of Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, two Nobel Laureates and two of the best known white novelists from South Africa . We will examine their specific historical circumstances under Apartheid, the narrative strategies they adopt in their work, and the ideological positions they espouse as writers and citizens. The course will also attempt a comparative assessment of their work as texts of imperial and post-imperial (white) African literature.

Novels to read will include:

Gordimer: Burger's Daughter ; July's People; and A Sport of Nature.

Coetzee: In the Heart of the Country; Waiting for the Barbarians; and Dusklands.

One long Term Paper, one response paper, and two short reports will be required. Regular attendance is expected. There will be no End-of Semester examination.


ETS 325-2 History and Varieties of English
TTH 11:00-12:00
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 200 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 it 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 340-3 Theorizing Forms & Genres: No Such Thing
MWF 12:45-1:40
Instructor: Bob Gates
Although C.G. Jung's and Jacques Lacan's theories of the unconscious differ in important ways, they agree on one thing: that what we commonly understand as a sexual or romantic relationship between two people is an impossibility or an illusion. This is because human subjects, split and alienated as they are by the disjunction of conscious and unconscious, form such relationships not with other “real persons” but with what Jung calls projected aspects of their contrasexual unconscious selves (the shadow, anima, and animus) or with what Lacan calls a split-off part their own alienated subjectivity (the phallus, objet petit a, and the big Other). We will take up this question in a number of literary texts in which different aspects or versions of love and marriage are represented, from fairy tale and myth, to medieval romance, screwball comedies, and contemporary short fiction.


ETS 340-4 Theorizing Forms & Genres: “Ghetto Realisms”
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Greg Thomas
Although the literary genre known as “social realism” normally refers to the fiction of the novel form, specifically, this course will consider how the Black tradition in the Americas as a Global African tradition rearranges or reconfigures what could be thought of as “realist” across many different forms of literature. Those forms include poetry, plays and works defying conventional classification as well as works understood correctly or incorrectly to be “novels” themselves. We could read some of the plays of Amiri Baraka in this regard along with poetry by Jayne Cortez, Sapphire, Marlene Philip, and jessica Care moore ; and polemics of Malcolm X, George Jackson and Huey P. Newton in addition to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ann Petry's The Street , given the centrality of “colonization-as-ghettoization” to the Black experience. This is not to mention film works as wide ranging as Menace II Society and Gaston Kabore's Zan Boko , or musical works on the importance of “the real” as in Hip-Hop lyricism. As we reconsider realisms, “surrealism” and/or “super-surrealism” and how the Black tradition as a Global African tradition intervenes in these categorizations, we'll focus quite considerably on the neglected, Black ghetto-centered writings of Chester Himes and Donald Goines.


ETS 340-5 Theorizing Forms & Genres: Cinema and the Documentary Idea
MW 5:15-6:35
Film Screening
W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity's epistemological demand for empiricism and rational, scientific evidence. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for documenting the world, for capturing the “real.” This course investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film and video practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, fictional narrative cinema, essay films, autoethnographies, fake documentaries and docudrama. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological, and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the radical defamiliarization of the world in Soviet and 1960s political cinema to the subversive playfulness of the contemporary mockumentary, the course explores the relations between film and video practices from (often radically) different national, historical, and political contexts. Attendance at weekly screenings is required.


ETS 350-2 Reading Nation & Empire: 20 th Century Irish Drama: Playing Nationalism
TTH 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht
The Irish War of Independence (1918-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1921-1923) were rehearsed on the stage of the National Theatre of Ireland and later critiqued there. Through reading and analyzing selected plays of William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey and other writers, we will attempt to define the relationship between modern Irish dramatic literature and the development of the Irish independent state. Background lectures and discussions will investigate the roots of nationalism in nineteenth century political theorists like J. S. Mill and Karl Marx. Also, contemporary political/social critics like Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward W. Said will provide a post-modern reading of the Irish political and social experiment.


ETS 350-3 Reading Nation & Empire: South Asian Literature in English
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Iswari P. Pandey
This course introduces students to South Asian literature in English. Following the end of the colonial era, writing in English has burgeoned substantially in South Asia , and writers have won regional and global attention. But what makes this body of work distinctive in the global marketplace? How do South Asian writers handle the issues of language and representation when they write about local experiences in a “global” (English) language? And what kinds of South Asia do they re-create in their works? We will address these and similar questions as we read, discuss, and write about selected literary works in association with critical work in nationalism and postcolonialism. One consistent line of inquiry will be the way South Asian writers both domesticate and resist Anglophone cultural values by adopting some European forms such as the novel to critique empire and to (re)construct nations. Writers may include Ali, Desain, Ghosh, Nasrin, Sidhwa, Rushdie and West (Eds. Mirrorwork ), Thapa, and others. Students will write two papers and blog their responses. They can also expect to be paired with some readers in South Asia who will be reading the same texts and blogging their responses.


ETS 360-1 Reading Gender and Sexualities: Cinema and Sexual Difference
MW 2:15-3:35
Film Screening
W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Cohan
This course studies the representation of sexual difference in mainstream US film. The course's goal as a political mode of inquiry in the ETS curriculum is to examine how film as a cultural institution reproduces but also challenges the dominant ideology of a binarized heterosexual gender system. The films to be selected for close study will include older films along with more recent ones, as well as some independent films along with more commercial ones. Reading assignments, combining theoretical pieces and critical readings, will also be an important component of the course's content. Beginning with Laura Mulvey's famous essay on narrative cinema and visual pleasure, the syllabus will be sequentially organized around the problematics of femininity, masculinity, and hetero/homosexualities, although as the course progresses we shall rather quickly see that these categories are in fact interrelated. Along the way, topics to be discussed include (in the order in which the course will raise them): spectating, spectacle, and the gendered gaze; the (in)authenticity of the filmed body; gender as a performative masquerade; stardom and ideology; crossdressing and cultural subversions; queer identities and identifications.


ETS 360-3 Reading Gender & Sexualities: Queer Theory/Queer Cultural Texts
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Donald Morton
This course will trace the thinking by which the concept “queer” was developed against, and even to displace, the concept “gay” in the study of the sexual margins. It will show how the appearance of the notion of the “queer” is inextricably bound up with the appearance of (post)structuralist and (post)modernist modes of theory and allied modes of reading and cultural interpretation. It will trace how the “gay” person became the “queer” person and what is at stake in the difference between the two. The development of the “queer” is part of the history of how groups on the sexual margins have challenged the heterosexist hierarchy of the dominant sex/gender system by developing new knowledges, logics, and theories to describe, explain, and celebrate their alternative identities, practices, cultures.


ETS 401-2 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Poetry is the art of using language to make the writer's subtlest and most intense experience accessible to strangers. Students must use imagination and intelligence to help each other accomplish this task. Requirements include at least one new poem each week, as well as revision, reading, and written analysis of poems. The course is open to anyone who has taken the sophomore workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.


ETS 403-2 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction
TH 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
For aspiring writers with experience or indication of raw talent. Emphasis on development of craft, production skills , literary vision, and sophistication. Basic workshop format: 2 stories per workshop and analysis of various published stories. Submission of sample work and approval by instructor required.


ETS 405-1 Topics in Medicine & Culture: Medicine in Literature and Film
W 4:00-7:00
Instructors: Deidre Neilen and Joel Potash
The relationships between artistic creators and medicine will be explored through the study of novels, film, short stories, and essays about medical situations, characters, and themes. Thematic areas to be examined include the responsibility of medical research; the hospital as environment; relationships between health care workers and patients; illness as metaphor and as reality; and the experience of disease. Discussion on what writers/directors are communicating and how they do so will emphasize characterization, setting, tone, and point of view.


ETS 405-2 Topics in Medicine & Culture:
Representation of the Nurse in Literature, Film, and TV
T 4:30-7:30
Instructor: Rebecca Garden
How the nurse has been represented historically in literature, film, and television is explored, focusing specifically on relationships among images of nurses, ideologies of nursing, and the practice of nursing. Representations of nursing in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts are examined in relation to larger class and gender issues, including the ways in which the nurse threatened traditional notions of women. The social contexts of representations of nurses in late twentieth-century culture are analyzed, from Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to the gay male nurse, Belize , in Angels in America, and stereotypes and iconoclastic figures are identified. Focusing on more recent literature, film, and television, the figure of the nurse is considered in relation to contemporary concerns about the nursing profession, such as the relationship between nurses and physicians, the economy of the hospital and health care, and the nursing shortage. Professional nurses guest lecture in the course.


ETS 410 “What's Love Got to Do With It?” Medieval Romance
TTH 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Patricia Moody
Before the twelfth century, writings in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were held to convey the truth. During the second half of the twelfth century, however, a new genre emerged--the romance, which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed largely to break free from traditional presuppositions. This course offers an examination of medieval fictionality. Beginning with the o rigins, forms, and contexts of medieval romances, we examine the emergence of romance in its first formative period in the twelfth century, the role of magic and fantasy, and transformations of stories from ancient to modern times. Throughout we consider the difficulties of the genre and the kinds of sociological and cultural issues romance interrogates.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 410-2 Forms and Genres: The Eighteenth-Century British Novel
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Lauded as the representative genre of modernity, the novel in English took shape during the eighteenth century, but tracing the history of the eighteenth-century novel inevitably runs into obstacles. For example, early novelists such as Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding strenuously claim that their texts are not “novels.” And texts we call “novels” frequently appear disguised as other types of non-fictional prose narratives—biography and autobiography, collections of letters, travel writing—and bear an often repressed relation to other kinds of fictional prose narratives known as “romances.” This class, then, will examine various solutions to a set of questions relevant to the literary history of the novel: What relations does the novel bear to other fictional and non-fictional prose narratives and to other genres and modes such as drama and satire? How can the eighteenth-century novel be related to the political and socio-cultural history of its matrix? If the novel is the representative form of modernity, what sort of agency can be claimed for it as a determinate of that cultural condition?
Pre-1900 course

ETS 420-2 Cultural Production & Reception: Culture and Science of the Novel
TTH 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Jeanne Britton
This course studies the material, emotional, and cognitive aspects of reading fiction in Britain and France in the period 1760-1860. The focus of the course will be on novels (including Sterne's Sentimental Journey , Austen's Emma , Shelley's Frankenstein , Balzac's Lost Illusions , and Flaubert's Madame Bovary ), which we will read in conjunction with scholarship on print culture, theories of affect, and cognitive science. These approaches will help us consider how novels were read—materially, emotionally, and intellectually.

Issues of interest will include: the roles of libraries and periodicals in the dissemination of the novel, the novel in literary anthologies, publication history, journalism, novel-reading women; sentimentality, emotional response, sympathetic reading; the psychology of reading and the cognitive impact of literacy.
Pre-1900 course

ETS 420-2 Cultural Production & Reception:
The Nineteenth-Century Literary Transatlantic
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Sarah Russo
This course investigates transnational literature, specifically nonfiction prose and fiction, in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. We will situate the production and reception of our readings in the context of the comparative politics, social histories, and artistic cultures of America and Britain and some colonies. Readings will most likely include Harriet Martineau's Society in America , Charles Dickens's American Notes , Mary Seacole's Adventures , Henry James's Daisy Miller , Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun , Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Matthew Arnold's Civilization in the United States , and fiction by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and R.L. Stevenson. We will also read some nineteenth-century journalism as well as current scholarly work on transatlantic studies. Students will conduct archival research on the transatlantic production and/or reception of a literary text or two, present their research to the class, and develop an annotated bibliography. There will be short writing assignments and a final paper (thesis essay or research paper).
Pre-1900 course

ETS 440-1 Theorizing History & Culture: Politics and Poetics of the English Revolution
TTH 3:30-4:50
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This course offers a slow and in-depth reading of John Milton's major prose and his Paradise Lost in the context of the political, religious and social ferment of England in the seventeenth century. Because Milton was at first a propagandist for—and later a critic of—the revolutionary government of mid-century, his is an intriguing case for examining the relation of poetry and politics. Paradise Lost raises questions that are still with us: what does “freedom”—of religion, the press, speech, franchise, the individual—mean? How do we achieve a good society? What role does education play in forming a sustainable Republic? Why is it so difficult to make justice prevail in a “fallen” world? To what extent do people make their own histories? By situating Milton's work in the full range of discourses available—from the far left of the Diggers and the Ranters to the far right of the Monarchists and defenders of Church hierarchy—we can tease out not only the major debates of the period, but the relation of poetry to how these debates unfolded.
Pre-1900 course


ETS 460-2 Reading Class & Economic Materiality:
Reading and Writing U.S. Consumer Culture
TTH 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Amy Lang
This interdisciplinary course interweaves an examination of the history of the culture of consumption with an exploration of its literary expression in the United States . Beginning with the rise of the department store—the “ladies paradise”—in the nineteenth century and ending with the “malling” of America, we will trace changes in the way goods are marketed, advertised, bought and sold; changes in the way Americans think and feel about goods, their uses, and themselves; and accompanying changes in the stories we tell and how we tell them. We will explore the cultural and imaginative significance and the novelistic renderings of the new roles, attitudes, and states of being—“trying on,” “just looking,” “window shopping,” for example—that attend the emergence of the citizen as consumer over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


ETS 509-1 Senior Seminar: Assimilation and Its Discontents:
Representing American Indian Education
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Scott Lyons
This senior seminar will examine the history and legacy of American Indian education in the United States , a “social engineering” project that cannot be adequately comprehended without taking into account American imperialism and colonization. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the federal government established a system of off-reservation boarding schools designed to “assimilate” Native children into white society; it operated more or less unchanged until the mid-1930s. Historian David Wallace Adams calls this policy “education for extinction,” as it sought to destroy tribal languages, cultures, and political autonomy using methods that would today be considered violations of human rights. The students left a record of their experiences—autobiographies, novels, and oral histories—and as is often the case with history, their experiences were mixed. Some suffered while others enjoyed the schools. Most lost their tribal languages, yet a few became bilingual. The boarding school experience was never singular.

This seminar will be taught in two parts. First we will read histories, theoretical analyses, and narrative accounts of the boarding schools. The second part will be geared toward the production of original archival research, including a possible field trip to explore the New York State Archives in Albany .