ENG 79.6: Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/material-modernism
Brooklyn College, Summer 2009 – Undergraduate seminar on modernist magazines, making a chronological survey of material in the Modernist Journals Project. Students performed a variety of collaborative research assignments in which they curated the MJP by means of an interactive timeline and then wrote criticism on the course website. Literary items and advertisements were examined with an eye toward how they comprised such discourses as gender, race, nationalism, and aesthetics. Along the way, students also gained advanced skills in research and critical methods for periodical studies and textual criticism, as well as an introduction to scholarly practices in digital humanities. We used the same course website as the graduate version of the course from the previous Summer so that it becomes a cumulative archive of student research. Further teaching materials such as the syllabus and assignments may be viewed in the course profile page at the Modernist Journals Project.
Eng 775.2X: Literature and Society – Modernism and Material Culture
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/material-modernism
Brooklyn College, Summer 2008 – A graduate seminar on Modernism and print culture, focusing on the avant-garde magazines housed at the Modernist Journals Project. This course grounded its research and reading methodologies in the “new modernist studies.” Through a series of structured reading and writing assignments, students read the magazines as a unified genre — paying attention to advertisements, graphics, book sale lists and other paratexts — in order to recontextualize literary Modernism. These methods were designed to gain a sense of how such discourses as gender, nation, empire, identity and social renewal were constructed in early 20th Century Britain and the United States. The first two assignments required students to collaborate in small groups, in the process of which they blended textual criticism and descriptive bibliography with analysis of literary texts and bibliographic codes.
Eng 794.X: Seminar in Textual Analysis: James Joyce’s Ulysseshttp://eng794.wordpress.com
Brooklyn College, Summer 2008 – I was asked to take over this graduate seminar after its first meeting due to a colleague’s sudden illness. We read through Ulysses in its entirety, discussing the Homeric basis of each episode and how Joyce’s narrative techniques operate. Secondary readings on the historical context of literary Modernism informed our daily discussion of the novel. As well, I introduced selections from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the novel and his concept of Dialogism as a way of exploring Joyce’s play on genre. Students selected chapters on which they gave presentations to start class discussion and then wrote follow-up posts on the course blog. The final assignment was a short (10-12 pp.) research paper.
Eng 41.2: Modern British Fiction to 1950http://eng41.wordpress.com
Brooklyn College, Summer 2008 – An undergraduate survey of modern British fiction that focused on the self and society. We covered representative short fiction by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. These were followed by three novels: E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,. We watched the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours as a way to expand on the themes and narrative techniques of Mrs. Dalloway. Students were required to comment on reading questions I posted to the course blog. A short midterm paper (5 pp.) required students to analyze one of the short stories, while the longer final paper (8pp.) required them to discuss one or two of the novels.
Eng 41.1: Modern Drama to 1950http://eng41-1.blogspot.com
Brooklyn College, Summer 2007 – I designed this undergraduate English seminar to focus on dramatic technique as a way of highlighting the shift from late 19th Century Realism to early 20th Century Modernism. During a session on Luigi Pirandello’s use of theater space in Six Characters in Search of an Author, a coordinated reading of Wylie Sypher’s essay “Cubist Drama” with a presentation of several synthetic cubist collages by Braque and Picasso helped to expand students’ awareness of the Modernist play on the frame as a border between art and reality. Since no women playwrights were included in our textbook, I assigned Susan Glaspell’s The Verge and designed several sessions around feminism and gender studies. This compressed and fast-paced Summer course used a blog to engage students with short, targeted questions preparatory to class discussions that also built cumulatively to the paper and exam topics.
Eng 700.1X: Literary Texts and Critical Methodshttp://eng700.blogspot.com
Brooklyn College, Summer 2006 – A graduate seminar on critical theory and methods. The departmental goal of the course is to prepare M.A. in English and Teaching students for their comprehensive examination — in a very compressed fashion. The main section of the exam requires students to analyze literary works according to various theoretical lenses. Due to the fast-paced schedule and the students’ lack of familiarity with theory, I used a blog for regular applied writing assignments on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Students eventually began posting topics of their own — without my direction — and used the blog to suggest exam study tips to each other.
Eng 120: English Composition II
Queens College, Fall 2003 – An intermediate writing class involving continued development of close reading and writing about various kinds of literary texts. The entire composition process, from writing to revising, editing, and proofreading, was practiced, discussed, and written about. Students critiqued each others’ work and performed meta writing in order to gain perspective on their practices. Methods of research and documentation were taught along with enhanced attention to rhetorical purposes and strategies.
Eng 110: English Composition I
Queens College, Fall 2003 & Spring 2004 (3 sections) – An introductory composition course covering the arts and practices of effective reading and writing. Students examined a variety of writing forms, including narration, description, and analysis, and refined grammar, syntax, punctuation, and diction. I used the discussion features of BlackBoard (course websites no longer extant) to run a very successful unit exploring the nature of reading and writing in digital versus print domains. BlackBoard was also effective in allowing students to post and discuss images as part of our textbook’s section on reading photographs. That Spring, one of my students won a college-wide essay contest with a piece on James Joyce’s short story “Araby.”
Eng 201: English Composition II
Borough of Manhattan Community College, Spring 2003 – An intermediate composition course in which students continue to focus on the writing process as they are introduced to literary genres such as the short story, play, poem or novel. Students completed research projects that involved documentation and the use of source material in thesis-centered essays.
Eng 101: English Composition I
Borough of Manhattan Community College, Fall 2002 & Spring 2003 (2 sections) – A basic composition course in which students wrote various types of essays in response to readings from disparate authors and genres. Students gained intensive practice in analytical and creative thinking, grammar, organization, style, and the stages of writing from drafting to revision and editing. My students scored consistently high in the departmental essay exam.