Fordham English to Offer Graduate Courses at Lincoln Center Campus

During the fall 2018 academic year, Fordham English is offering two graduate courses at our Lincoln Center campus (113 W. 60th St.) to make our course offerings more accessible to students from the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC). Doctoral students from the following schools are eligible to enroll in these courses: Columbia University, CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, The New School, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Stony Brook University. Students from IUDC institutions who wish to enroll in one of these graduate courses should contact John Bugg Director of Graduate Studies (bugg@fordham.edu).

FALL 2018 GRADUATE COURSES AT LINCOLN CENTER CAMPUS

ENGL 6888. Reading the Indian Ocean World.

Time: Fridays, 11:30am - 2 pm

Instructor: Fawzia Mustafa
 

Description: A new configuration of study has emerged in the last decade or so known as Indian Ocean Studies. It employs a robust interdisciplinarity to study the cultural flows and encounters over time of the peoples and traffic of the Indian Ocean and the formations of its vast littoral. This includes exchanges in trade, commerce, and war between the East African littoral and Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and the South East Asian archipelago including China. The migration of populations, the slave trades and slavery, establishment of overseas or expatriate settlements, the emergence of lingua franca (such as Kiswahili), maritime life, and the spread of technology and creation of empires and colonies are studied in their interrelation. This course will focus on the archives, the literature, writing (including histories) and expressive practices (including film, music and performance) that this confluence of peoples has created in over more than two (actually seven) millennia. Starting with the earliest extant documents from Antiquity, to the contemporary scholarly and creative work of writers such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Barlan Pyamootoo, Monique Agénor, Kuo Pao Kun, Isabel Hofmyer, Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nuruddin Farah and Yvette Christianse, we will spend the semester “reading” the Indian Ocean world.

ENGL 7001. Early Modern Lyric Poetry and Lyric Theory.

Time: Fridays, 2:30 - 5pm.

Instructor: Heather Dubrow

Description: What is lyric poetry? The course will explore the transhistorical and transcultural challenges of defining and analyzing lyric. What cultural and critical work is done when poets, critics, anthropologists and so on affix a generic label? Why is lyric distinctively tricky—and intriguing—to identify? What are the implications of this mode for cutting-edge questions about subjectivity, gender, affect, and the material text, as well as for more longstanding but recently contested concerns about the workings of genre and the relationship of poetry and song? And in what ways are all these questions also historically and culturally specific?

Our reading will focus on early modern English poetry, including about eight of the major poets of the period (e.g., Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and Phillips) and also some less known work like poetry from miscellanies. It will, however, also encompass some work on lyrics from other periods and countries. Students whose specialty is lyric from another era may write on it in their final paper; students engaged with creative writing can substitute a project in it for one of the shorter assignments (though not the seminar paper). We will deploy—and evaluate—a wide range of critical methods, including cultural critique, study of the material text, and the new formalisms.

As this description suggests, the course is tailored to students with a range of different backgrounds and interests. It is designed to be valuable for people interested in lyric poetry written in other eras and in form and genre in general.  It will also provide intensive work on the major English poets of the period for both specialists and non-specialists. As in all my graduate courses, we’ll work together on techniques of “professionalizing”—e.g., beginning to publish, delivering conference papers successfully.