Masters of Arts in English
Masters of Arts in English and Creative Writing
Fall 2009

Personal Essay Writing
CRWR243
T 4:30-6:20 Prof. Lopate
A graduate workshop in the writing of fiction (short story, novella, novel) and non-fiction (personal essay, memoir, philosophical meditation, etc.). The object is for each student to practice and perfect his or her chosen prose genre, fiction or non-fiction, or to experiment with working on the same material in both fiction and non-fiction. Students will be expected to write a minimum of fifty pages during the semester, and to make three presentations in class of their work. We will also be reading samples of exemplary prose for inspiration.

Chaucer
ENGL291C
W 6:30-8:20 Prof. Russell
The course will examine the Canterbury Tales and its criticism. The course will focus on seven major parts of Chaucer’s great poem: the General Prologue, the Knight’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Franklin’s Tale, and the Pardoner’s Tale. The class will spend two weeks on each of these works, the first week devoted to a consideration of the work itself and the second devoted to the more important critical responses to the works. Each student will write three short essays, prepare and give an oral presentation, and complete a critical literature review on one of the class readings for the end of the term. Expect to spend a couple of hours in the library every other week to complete the required secondary readings.

Milton
ENGL 291V
Section A R 4:30-6:20 Prof. S. Zimmerman
In this course, we shall read widely in Milton’s canon; however, we shall focus especially on his Paradise Lost – and we shall do so in relation not only to selections from his own body of work, but also to Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, the first epic poem to be written in English by a woman. For those who have studied or have an interest in studying Paradise Lost, for those with some background (or interest) in the epic form, and for those interested in early modern women’s writing, this graduate seminar will provide a space in which to examine in a leisurely fashion Milton’s greatest literary masterpiece; to explore Lucy Hutchinson’s equally biblical and equally republican epic (a post-Restoration poem that is, like Milton’s, deeply mindful of a revolution and a commonwealth that had failed); and to consider a poetic form that Milton and Hutchinson (each in his/her own way) might be said to have radicalized. Indeed, we shall study Paradise Lost in relation to a seventeenth-century English woman known for so long (and so much more limitedly) as the writer of a political biography of her husband–a woman now known increasingly for a groundbreaking and female-centered epic poem that seems in just so many ways to be in dialogue with Milton’s own.

During the semester, we shall do our best to make determinations about Hutchinson’s and Milton’s shared political views about monarchy and regicide; their championing of (and disappointments in) an emergent English republic that had, by 1660, completely lost its way; and their rather different approaches to the political and the civic, the sexual and the domestic. Indeed, we shall attend to these writers’ distinct treatments of the terms defining gender, female agency, and marriage; to their different ways of engaging with biblical precedent (e.g., Hutchinson brings into view the many women of Genesis, whereas Milton draws only on Eve); and to the possible relationships between gender and genre. Along the way, we shall consider other texts, composed by Milton and by Hutchinson (not only, say, Milton’s tracts on divorce and on regicide, but also Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius or her account of the life of her husband, who was one of Cromwell’s trusted officers and a signer of the King’s death warrant) – as these may provide useful contexts and points of departure for our study of the epic poems. Please note that individual research interests will be strongly encouraged.

Course requirements include weekly 1-2 page informal un-graded assignments; and a 15-page seminar paper, drafts of which students will be free to submit for ongoing feedback and suggestions for revision. This formal paper may focus on either epic or advance a comparative study of the two. Please come to the first class meeting having already read the first book of Paradise Lost. Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me directly at engsaz@hofstra.edu. This course may be used to satisfy the Shakespeare/Milton or a pre-1800 requirement.

Fiction Writing: Focus on the Story
CRWR 293D
M 4:30-6:20PM Prof. McPhee
A classic fiction workshop for graduate students, earning their MA. We will study the craft of fiction by looking closely at what makes for a good story. How do we find the small moment that becomes the larger story, the small desires of a person that lead to the bigger consequences of a life? We will be using essays on the subject by fiction writers such as E.M. Forester, Stephen King, Francine Prose, Jane Smiley and many others. We will be discussing the basic elements of fiction writing from character development to plot, tone, voice, point of view, while always attempting to excavate strong character driven narratives that realize the world through vivid detail and observation. Students’ stories will be read and analyzed in class and used as well as the jumping off point for discussions particular to the manuscript and to the craft in general.

Contemporary Life Writing
CRWR 294F
Section A M 4:30-6:20 Prof. Couser
“Life writing” is an umbrella term that refers to a wide (and expanding) variety of non-fictional narratives of actual persons’ lives--including diary and journal, biography (but not history), memoir and autobiography (in all its subgenres), personal essays, travel writing, genealogy, obituary, case history, and post-print forms like the biopic, documentary films, self-made video (see YouTube), and some blogs.
The emphasis in this course will be on life narratives produced in the last two decades. The course will be organized not as a chronological survey but as an exploration of trends, issues, or problems distinctive of recent decades. Among these may be the following: the emergence of "relational" narratives--narratives focusing neither on the author (as autobiography does) nor on another person (as biography does) but on the relation between the writer and a significant other; the use of life writing to reckon with experiences that may threaten identity, such as illness, disability, and trauma; the use of visual media for self-presentation (including video and graphic narrative); the emergence of minority voices; the significance of the recent "memoir boom" and the backlash against it. A pervasive concern will be with ethical issues peculiar to life writing genres.

Literature & Global Warming
ENGL 294J
Section A W 4:30-6:20 Prof. L. Zimmerman
We’ll take as a premise that anthropogenic global warming presents a threat so large that it seems to defy our capacity to describe it. Indeed, the problem of the gap between “unthinkable” catastrophe and the possibilities for representing it will be one of our recurrent concerns. Our central question, then, will be: how can (or does?) studying literature help us think about, represent, or address this threat? We’ll pursue this question by exploring some other ones: What are the cultural roots of climate change? How can we understand the cultural failure to respond to the threat climate change poses? What’s at stake in the difficulty of representing historical or prospective trauma?

First, we’ll review the problem of global warming itself, reading Ross Gelbspan’s Boiling Point, or perhaps some more recent similar text. The rest of the course will intertwine theoretical readings with literary ones. That is, we’ll draw from object relations psychoanalysis, from trauma theory, from poststructuralism, and from a variety of more explicitly ecocritical and environmental discourses to help us explore how studying literature might help us think about our current dilemma. (The use of “our” in that sentence might seem to evade questions about who is most responsible for climate change and who has so far suffered its most serious consequences. The course itself won’t evade such questions.) A list of possible literary texts we ’ll read includes: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Wordsworth’s poems, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Emerson’s essays, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Robert Frost’s poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We won’t read all of those texts, and we may read some others, but this gives you a general idea.

Research Methods
ENGL 299
M 6:30-8:20PM Prof. Bryant
The primary focus of this course is to provide students with the basic critical and scholarly tools for understanding literature. This will involve not only the work of interpretation, analysis, and criticism but also the development of a methodology for approaching texts as cultural commodities that are produced and disseminated within the literary marketplace. A text, whether it is a novel, a poem, or a play, is as much a product of the many shifts and changes within the literary marketplace as it is the mind of its author, and so we must be attentive to the ways in which texts are transformed over time in response to these different social and cultural contexts. With that in mind, we will engage in a series of projects intended to familiarize you with various topics and issues relevant to the work of literary scholarship, including biography and autobiography, manuscript source studies, book production, editing, print technology, the marketing of literature, popular and scholarly reviews, authorial intention, and copyright law. We will also touch on the history of the profession of literary studies, its origins, development and potential futures. In addition to the shorter research projects, written assignments will include an annotated bibliography and a 15-20 page essay.