Yeshiva College Syllabi -- 2021 - 2022 courses (past versions for reference ONLY) -- ENG (English)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12202/7010

Syllabi are provided for general information about course scope and content. Syllabi are subject to change.

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FYWR1020: First Year Writing
(2022-08) Stewart, E
We will be writing about our lives, the world, and our lives within the world today—for better or for worse. In this class students will be asked to reflect on themselves, on their own humanity, on events occurring in the “real world” (which includes the city of New York), on their own reading and writing habits and on their own perceptions and observations, and to shape those thoughts and feelings into various kinds of writing. The hope is that students will emerge from the course with increased confidence in their writing abilities and in their ability to continue to learn to write-- specifically for the academy, but also just for their own capacity to think and to be well.
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FYWR1020: First Year Writing
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Trimboli, Brian
This course will challenge writers to develop a personal approach to writing and the revision process. We will explore the importance of communication, which begins with articulating our thoughts to ourselves. Through conversation, readings, and written assignments, we’ll begin to examine the connection between ideas and the language we use to communicate them. Writers will be expected to establish a personal appreciation for their own process of writing, and we will tether this appreciation to the practical applications inside, and outside, of the classroom.
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FYWR1020: First Year Writing
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Puretz, David
What is “good writing”? As Robert Masello’s quote above illustrates, good writing is more than just an introduction, body, and conclusion. Writing is nothing if it doesn’t mean something, for the writer and for the reader. Good writing is intimate, and it is surprising. It reveals deep truths about the self, about one’s local and global communities, about one’s place and responsibilities therein. Good writing elucidates the human experience. Ideas are the foundation, but a strong piece of writing also has organization that is logical and effective, a voice that is individual and appropriate, word choice that is specific and memorable, sentence fluency that is smooth and expressive, and it follows writing conventions (punctuation, spelling, grammar, and mechanics) that are correct and communicative. All these elements have a symbiotic relationship and converge through a process that involves brainstorming and free writing, gathering and evaluating information, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. In every academic major and in the world beyond college, your success will depend in part on your ability to effectively navigate through this process to produce “good writing.” This semester we will build on these core writing concepts and work toward making all these different pieces fit together.
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FYWR1020: First Year Writing
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Fitzgerald, Lauren
Welcome to YU! This course is aimed at ensuring your success in writing for college and beyond, first and foremost by helping you develop as a writer. Luckily, developing as a writer involves many of the skills college students use: reading and understanding other people’s writing; managing time and planning ahead; taking stock and improving; communicating and working with others; thinking, rethinking, and even thinking about thinking—and much more!
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ENG1800: Reading/Writing Poetry
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Trimboli, Brian
This course will examine the contemporary landscape of poetry, and assess on a global scale some of the different voices that have contributed over the last hundred years. While going through the textbook, The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry by J.D. McClatchy, students will be exposed on a country by country basis to a spectrum of writers from the previous century while concurrently writing their own poetry. We will examine the role of influence in our work, and have class discussions to workshop our creative writing in audience-based ways. This course will prioritize your voice and subjective understanding of poetry, but also expect you to grow and learn more objective skills regarding revision and critical reading.
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ENG3005: ADVANCED SEMINAR: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Mesch, Rachel
This advanced level seminar is meant to build on the work you have done in English 2010, while preparing you for the student-led senior colloquium in your final Spring semester. As we approach a variety of texts and ideas together, we will work on sharpening your close reading skills, increasing your comfort with different kinds of texts, working with secondary sources, and exploring your individual creative voices.
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ENG2453H: The Jew in the Western Literary Imagination
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Trapedo, Shaina
From medieval blood libels to Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom, the figure of the Jew has loomed large in the Western literary imagination. This course will examine how authors through the ages have represented Jewishness in poetry and prose for their predominantly Christian readers. How are Jews positioned in relation to law, commerce, community, morality, sexuality, wisdom, and faith in the fictional worlds they inhabit? What technical or thematic purpose do Jewish characters serve in the construction of text as a whole? Through deep engagement with a variety of texts, we’ll consider to what extent these works reflect, reinforce, challenge, and/or change the existing archetypes and assumptions about Jews in their respective historical and cultural moments, and how these characterizations reverberate in the social history of antisemitism (and philosemitism). We’ll also briefly consider the literary afterlives of these characters in the hands of Jewish writers, such as Will Eisner’s graphic novel Faygin and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Taught under the auspices of both the English department and the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, this course will feature occasional guest lectures by affiliated humanities faculty.
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ENG2083: Postmodern Fiction: Memory, History, and the Novel
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Geyh, Paula
In the age of competing “histories from below” and from the margins, of docudramas and historiographic metafiction, and of technologies that render historical evidence increasingly falsifiable and suspect, the traditional idea of history as an objective chronicle of the past has been challenged as never before. In this course, we’ll explore how postmodern novelists have participated in and responded to these challenges through their depictions of World War II and 9/11.
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ENG2037: Shakespeare and Film
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Lavinsky, David
A study of Shakespeare’s principal plays and their adaption into modern and contemporary media, especially film. Emphasis on transnational and non-Anglophone cinema, the idea of a “global” Shakespeare, and the construction of cultural identity in both playwriting and filmmaking. Intended for anyone interested in Shakespeare, film and media studies, and creative writing (assignments include collaborative work on film scripts and storyboards).
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ENG1822: Writing Fiction
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Puretz, David
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ENG1023: Authorship: Plato to Wikipedia
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Fitzgerald, Lauren
Welcome to YU! This course explores a topic that you might be surprised to learn will come up frequently in your work as a college student, representations of authorship over the last ~2500 years. From a historical perspective, and because depictions of this process have changed significantly over the centuries, we’ll consider how famous authors have described where ideas for writing come from: Is it divine inspiration? The world around them? Imitation of previous authors? Hard work and craftsmanship? An expression of who we are? Collaborations with others? We’ll also address more recent perspectives on who gets to be called an author: For instance, why is there a debate about whether Shakespeare authored his works? Are women writers part of the authorial tradition? What about Artificial Intelligence? Most important, we’ll look at why this topic matters to you, right now. Ever wonder why, as a student, you must produce original writing, usually on your own, when the writing that people do on the job and/or the internet can be anonymous, collaborative, imitative, and even, strictly speaking, plagiarized? We’ll tackle this question too and raise many others about the far-reaching topic of authorship.
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ENG1013/INTC1013: Words to Live By: Literature, Morality, and Entertainment
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Lavinsky, David
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The didactic and moral content of English literature often seems in conflict with modern notions of reading as a form of entertainment or imaginative escape. What happens, for instance, if we derive pleasure or enjoyment from a text meant instead to reform our behavior or provide examples of how to act? And what does it mean if we discover moral or ethical models in literature we expected instead to amuse us or divert our attention from serious topics? Does literature have ennobling effects? By the same logic, can artifice inspire immorality, or distract us from what truly matters? And what becomes of the reader who resists or is already estranged, because of religious or cultural identity, from a text?s prescriptive intent? We will approach these questions from different cultural and aesthetic vantage points, all variously concerned with how certain literary and artistic forms inscribe their audiences in the stories they tell, scripting a specific moral response in the process. Our investigation will ground itself in readings from classical antiquity before considering the interrelation of artistic form and moral meaning in specific contexts. We will track anxieties about the spiritual consequences of imaginative diversion and departure; reconsider the relationship between religious art and secular forms of entertainment, and the utility of the sacred/secular distinction more generally; explore the different ways in which visual, textual, and performative mediums exert a hold on our minds (and bodies); and assess how these concerns are implicated in contemporary debates about the problematics of reading and moral exemplification. Many of our readings will be drawn from early English poetry, prose, and drama, though no previous exposure to this period or its literature is assumed, and a wide range of critical and theoretical texts will help students situate unfamiliar material. Requirements include informed class participation, ungraded response papers, regular postings to an online discussion forum, a short critical essay, and a final project. “Interpreting the Creative” (INTC) courses within the Yeshiva College core curriculum provide students with foundational tools for appreciating, understanding, and interpreting works from various domains of the creative arts—literary, visual, musical, theatrical and other performing arts.¶ INTC courses teach students to: ▪ Understand how creative works shape and enhance our perception and understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. ▪ Apply multiple interpretive frameworks to analyze and compare different kinds of creative works. ▪ Write and defend theses about works of art, and in some cases create works of art.
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ENG 3589: Literature & Psychology
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Stewart, Elizabeth
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course explores poetry and prose in relation to dreams, neurosis, psychosis, and the psychology of mystical experience and sexual difference; it also explores diagnostic narratives and narratives of recovery. These intersections of literature and psychology are structured along the following lines:¶ —Meaning-making and story-telling as the key to psychological coping with and perhaps recovery from trauma: the work of Viktor Frankl, psychologist and Holocaust survivor. Studies in individual and collective trauma and its aftermath. (Folman, Waltz with Bashir) —The psyche as “text”: literary analysis and psychoanalysis both work in language and attempt to make sense of “texts”: literary texts, on the one hand, and “psychic texts” (psychological make-up, symptoms) on the other. Freud showed us that psychoanalysis, like literature, is linguistically and narratively constituted. Language codifies and gives shape to our selves, and it is also through language that we develop and transform our lives toward freedom. In literary and psycho-analysis we “read closely” and interpret intuitively, but also concretely. Like literature, our psyches are verbal constructs open to interpretation; in both cases analysis may offer “relief.” (Freud, “Dora Case,” Lacan, tba) —Psyche and power; First-person narratives of insanity and recovery, and third-person “authoritative” narratives of “madness.” (Genet, The Maids; James, Turn of the Screw); Fromm on will-ing subjection to authoritarianism); (Sechehaye) Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl —Carl G. Jung’s work on collective unconscious experience in mythology and mystical texts: imagery, mythologems, and archetypes. (Shaffer, Equus; Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method [film])
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ENG2049: Romantic Revolutions
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Fitzgerald, Lauren
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course examines works by famous British Romantic authors—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, the Shelleys, and Austen—through the lens of revolution. Part of the “Age of Revolution,” this period (roughly 1780–1830) is marked by political upheavals in America, England, France, and elsewhere; by demands for the rights of man and woman; and by calls for the abolition of the slave trade. Due to developments in anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, medicine, meteorology, and physics, this was also the age of the “Second Scientific Revolution,” which in turn contributed to the rapid economic expansion and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution and its shift from agriculture in the country to manufacturing in the cities. We will explore how these key historical and cultural frameworks—what was called at the time “the spirit of the age”—informed some of the greatest literature of the period, including Songs of Innocence and Experience, Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, Frankenstein, and Emma.¶ However, these authors not only responded to this complex and rapidly changing milieu; they caused revolutions of their own. Writing itself underwent monumental transformations in what was written, published, and by whom, as well as in claims about how authors created their works. Such changes are all the more fascinating because most of these authors knew each other and were careful readers of each other’s works, which they critiqued, revised, and even collaborated on. And though this period later became known as “Romantic” because of its apparent kinship with a literary mode (romance), representations of romantic love and other emotions were dramatically altered too, due in no small part to literature published at this time. This period reminds us that we read literature not only for its own sake or as a window into the past but to understand who we are now and to imagine possible futures. As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote exactly 200 years ago, his contemporaries were “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” what he more famously called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”¶ STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES: This semester, you will develop your understanding of • Genres and modes important in this the period, especially different poetic forms but also novels, political prose, literary criticism, drama, autobiography, and letters • Ways that literary texts emerge from and respond to their historical and cultural contexts • How authors and texts respond to and revise the works of others • How literary movements are formed and identified • The notoriously slippery term “Romanticism” • How to read, interpret, and write convincingly about all of this.
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ENG1660H: Writing about Illness and Medicine
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Jacobson, Joanne
In this course, we will be exploring the imperatives and the challenges of writing about illness: first as readers, and then—our ultimate focus—as writers. Like other traumas, illness calls out to language and text-making—and, at the same time, pushes against the limits of language, narrative, and genre.¶ Susan Sontag’s famous distinction between the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick” frames the cognitive distance be-tween the experience of illness and the taken-for-granted realities of daily life. Language remains a precious resource for crossing that divide, for deepening our understanding of what it means to be ill, and even for improving medicine’s ability to care for patients.¶ This course fulfills the Writing requirement for the English major, and can be counted to-ward the Writing minor.
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ENG1036: Frontiers and Borders: Travel Writing Through the Ages
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Lavinsky, David
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this class, we will explore “travel writing” within its changing cultural and historical contexts. Our investigation begins in classical antiquity, with material focused on the westward migration of refugees following the Trojan War. Turning to later periods, it then considers how geographic knowledge and practice were implicated in, or shaped by, events such as crusades, pilgrimages, mass expulsions, and explorations to the far reaches of the known world; key here is the work of Italian merchant adventurer Marco Polo. Next, we consider the so-called age of discovery, and the role maps and other geographic conventions played in early modern representations of the Atlantic, perhaps most notably in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. After considering these and other early modern iterations of the genre (e.g., Gulliver's Travels), the semester concludes with travel narratives that frame the experience of the refugee, the migrant, and the asylum seeker. The course follows a chronological pattern in order to facilitate comparison between roughly contemporaneous readings, and thereby to develop a sense for how large topics or themes take shape over time. In addition to critical essays and presentations, students will have the opportunity to write their own travel narratives.¶ NB: This class has no pre-requisites. It fulfills the CUOT core requirement.¶ COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES: --To compare different cultures of geographic knowledge and representation --To think critically about identity and selfhood within specific historical contexts --To recognize both continuity and change in a specific tradition of writing --To draw informed historical conclusions about the present
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ENG1009H: France and its Others
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Mesch, Rachel
“Cultures Over Time” (CUOT) courses allow students to explore the distinctiveness of the past and how it relates to the present through an investigation of values, traditions, modes of thinking, and modes of behavior of one or more cultures, beginning before 1900. CUOT courses will enable students to: --Understand the role of historical context in cultural production and the complex and multiple ways in which cultures evolve over time. --Analyze the cultural artifacts of pre-twentieth century societies using multiple kinds of sources. --Write and defend historically grounded arguments using both primary and secondary materials.¶ FRANCE AND ITS OTHERS While the notion of a cultural “melting pot” is central to American society, French society has been structured around a distinctly French notion of universalism: the idea that there are core universal values that must supersede those of any minority subculture. Thus, although Americans regularly embrace multiple identifications--as African-Americans, or Jewish Americans, for example--in France that double alliance is largely experienced as a tension.... This class traces the roots of that tension by examining ways that otherness has inspired and troubled the French imagination through literary, historical and philosophical readings by major French writers from the 1500s to the present day. From Montaigne’s cannibals to the noble savages of Enlightenment texts, from Zola’s “J’accuse!” to the story of Babar, from the female other to the other as Jew to the other as Jewish female, we will explore the myriad ways through which France’s imagined others serve as manifestations of a cultural fascination with and anxiety about difference in its many forms. As we analyze the various intellectual conflicts that have arisen from the quest to understand what is deemed different, foreign, exotic or strange, we will also trace a struggle to define and circumscribe notions of French identity, selfhood and authority. Finally, at the semester’s end, we will use what we have synthesized from these thinkers to consider contemporary debates in French society about the place of religious and ethnic difference in the public sphere.
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ENG1002: Diaspora Literature
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Stewart, Ellizabeth
This course explores literature about diaspora: “ as the abandonment of home, whether voluntary or enforced, and a search for a new home, new opportunities, and new beginnings, even as the home of the past lingers in the imagination, in memory, and in desire..... The twenty first century has been marked by massive and often chaotic displacements of peoples seeking refuge from violence, famine, and persecution in their homelands or opportunities for economic survival in an increasingly globalized and politically turbulent world. The twentieth century, the century of totalitarianism and genocide, had already seen seismic shifts in populations fleeing ethnic cleansing, political persecution, and specific events such as WWI and WWII, the Holocaust African decolonization, the Indian partition, various regime changes, and nation building. Literature and film in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have recorded the histories and fictionalizations of such diasporic experiences. The two oldest and far reaching global diasporas have been the Jewish and the African diasporas. Both were painful, both produced flowering cultural expression, and both continue to develop, centuries later, to this day.
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ENG1001: Books on Books, Films on Films
(Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2022-08) Geyh, Paula; 0000-0002-2720-3874
“Interpreting the Creative” (INTC) courses within the Yeshiva College core curriculum provide students with foundational tools for appreciating, understanding, and interpreting works from various domains of the creative arts—literary, visual, musical, theatrical and other performing arts... What do literature and film tell us about themselves and each other? What are the elemental forms and structures of literary and filmic narrative? What approaches might one use for the analysis of literature and film? How is reading a novel or short story different from “reading” a film? By addressing these questions, this course will help students to develop a deeper understanding of how narrative literature and film work and how they’re related (or aren’t)... The course will begin by considering the relationship between truth and fiction, and some ideas about what “art” is and does. We’ll examine the roles of readers, film viewers, authors, directors, and critics. We’ll explore the forms and structures of literary and cinematic storytelling, and how these elements come together to produce meaning. Finally, we’ll briefly survey various approaches used by scholars and critics to analyze literature and film. COURSE GOALS: The principal goal of this course is for you to become a more knowledgeable, insightful, and accomplished reader and interpreter of literature and film. More specifically, you’ll learn... - key conceptions of what art (including literature and film) is and does, including how it shapes our perception and understanding of ourselves and the world; - the essential elements of narrative form; - the different types of film shots, camera movements, editing techniques, sound and lighting, and special effects; - how the visual elements of the cinematic mise-en-scène and montage work together to create meaning and affect our emotions; - some ideas about the creative process and the roles of authors and directors; - what the audiences of literature and film actually do when they read or watch; - some of the current interpretive approaches used by scholars and critics; and - how to think and write critically about literature and film.
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ENG 4001: Senior Colloquium
(2021-01) Mesch, Rachel
This course provides students majoring in English with a culminating, “capstone” experience, which forges links between your previous courses while directing you towards new paths of inquiry. Concluding with a Senior Final Paper and Oral Presentation, this semester-long course explicitly links the gateway course (English 2010, Interpreting Texts) with other courses in the major by creating and following connections among texts, genres, cultural contexts, and critical perspectives. In this way, we hope you will consider your own stake in the ongoing conversation of literary studies, the questions the drive your interest in the field, and the ways in which you might carry your intellectual pursuits into the future. The course joins students and faculty in dialogue around texts and the interpretive practices that contextualize them, while enhancing community among English majors through its collaborative nature. Each student will have the opportunity to lead a session, also facilitated by a member of the English department faculty. OVERVIEW  We will meet as a group with English Department faculty to discuss primary texts, ranging in genre and media, period, and national literature. We will also read together a set of secondary, critical readings. This semester, many of our texts will be focused on race.  Each student will lead a face-to-face session, steering the discussion in a number of crucial ways, including by locating additional secondary sources and initiating and moderating discussions.  To prepare for, deepen, and extend face-to-face sessions, you will also participate in Online Discussions and Reflections about the primary and secondary sources using Canvas. We will not meet every week of the semester, but you will have assignments every week.  At the end of the semester, you will write a final paper of not more than ten pages, which you will present to two faculty members in your oral exam. Following your presentation, you will be asked questions relating to works from the course and beyond. This oral exam is an opportunity for you to reflect expansively on the entirety of your experience as an English major. ___ The revised Colloquium will be a 3-credit course for both Literary Studies and Creative Writing students, taking place in online and face-to-face sessions in a single semester. Each of the sessions will focus on a work of literature and at least one modern refashioning of it, whether through film, fiction, graphic novel, or another art form. Students will respond to these works through a variety of prompts that will elicit both traditional literary analysis and other forms of creative expression over the course of the semester. Students will also be responsible for leading discussion in at least one session. At the end of the semester, students will submit a written paper that they will then present to faculty examiners in a discussion in which they will be asked to reflect more synthetically on the work of the Colloquium. As with the other writing prompts, they will have a variety of options for the form that this final paper takes, from traditional literary analysis to other forms of creative writing. Required of all English majors with senior standing. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours