This course bridges scholarly and professional training by providing students with an intensive introduction to the world of contemporary literature: its writers, its communities, and its organizations and institutions. Built around the English Department’s Contemporary Literature Series (CLS), which brings noted authors who are on course syllabi that semester to the NYU campus, the focus of the CLS Lab varies each semester depending on the featured authors. Some of the topics to be explored include: literary publishing, forums for literary discussion and criticism, literary organizations and institutions, and the possibilities and challenges of writing scholarly literary criticism about contemporary literature. By the end of the CLS Lab, students will have a firm grasp of the contemporary literary landscape and they will be better prepared to translate their interests and skills as English majors into the intellectual and professional contexts of the literary world.
Gateway course to the major that introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of English literature. Develops the tools necessary for advanced criticism: close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and skill at a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. Also emphasizes frequent writing.
This course provides an introduction to the dramatic work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Students read and attend representative comedies, tragedies, and histories, their selection to be determined by the plays actually in production in and around London, particularly at the Barbican, New Globe, and Stratford to which at least one excursion will be made. Special attention will be given to the playhouses and the influence they had on the art of the theatre, actors’ companies, and modes of production and performance. Lectures and discussions will focus on the aesthetic quality of the plays, their relationship with the audiences (then and now), the application of the diverse attitudes and assumptions of modern critical theory to the Elizabethan stage, the contrasting structures of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, the new emphasis on selfhood and individuality, and the major themes of hierarchy, order, and justice, the conflict of Nature and Fortune, the role of Providence, the ideals of love, and the norms of social accord. Opportunities will be given to investigate the interrelations of the plays and other arts, including film, opera, and ballet.
Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
Readings from major modern American, British, and Irish poets from the middle of the 19th century to the 1920s?specifically, from Whitman?s Leaves of Grass (1855) to T. S. Eliot?s The Waste Land (1922). Poets considered generally include Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Eliot.
Examination of representative works by contemporary novelists. Authors generally include Barthelme, Bellow, Ellison, Gaddis, Hawkes, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Nabokov, Oates, Pynchon, Roth, Updike, and Walker.
Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s major poetry, with particular attention to The Canterbury Tales. General language training will be offered at the start of the course. Special attention will be given to Chaucer’s narrative skill, his techniques of characterization, style, varieties of formal invention, and particular thematic preoccupations. Students are also encouraged to explore Chaucer’s writing as a lens onto late medieval society and culture.
Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.
Examines the large variety of writing produced in North America between 1600 and 1800, from indigenous/European encounters through the American Revolution and its aftermath. Genres discussed in their cultural contexts include colonization, captivity, slave, and travel narratives; sermons; familiar correspondence; autobiographies; poetry; drama; and the novel.
Interdisciplinary introduction to late medieval culture, using Dante, its foremost literary artist, as a focus. Attention is directed at literature, art, and music, in addition to political, religious, and social developments of the time. Emphasizes the continuity of Western tradition, especially the classical background of medieval culture and its transmission to the modern world.
An introduction to the history of New York through an exploration of fiction, poetry, plays, and films about the city, from Washington Irving?s A History of New York to Frank Miller?s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Two lectures and one recitation section each week.
Considers contemporary science fiction as literature, social commentary, prophecy, and a reflection of recent and possible future trends in technology and society. Writers considered include such authors as Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clark, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.
Emphasis on the major poems (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) with some attention to the early poems and the prose. Traces the poet’s sense of vocation, analyzes the gradual development of the Miltonic style, and assesses Milton’s position in the history of English literature, politics, and theology.
Survey of major autobiographies, fiction, and poetry from the early national period to the eve of the New Negro Renaissance. Writers considered generally include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, and Harriet Wilson.
The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel. This course charts the evolution of the form during this period, exploring texts by major authors including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Close attention to narrative, questions of mimesis and publishing practices will combine with the exploration of a range of significant contemporary discourses relating to shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, science, class, and race. These varied contexts will help us to consider formal, stylistic and thematic continuities as well as discontinuities and innovations. Taking advantage of our local surroundings, we will also explore changing representations of London and trace the enduring legacy of this period in the twenty-first-century city.
Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Survey of major texts?fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama?from Du Bois?s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and its key figures, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison.
Intensive reading of six to eight plays of Shakespeare chosen from among the comedies, tragedies, and histories, with attention to formal, historical, and performance questions.
Introduction to the prose and poetry of the 17th century, an age of spiritual, scientific, and political crisis. Readings in Jonson, Donne, Bacon, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Browne, and others.
Study of theme and technique in the American short story through readings in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Porter, and others, including representative regional writers.
Major texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida, considered in relation to literary practice. The first half of the course focuses on four major types of critical theory: mimetic, ethical, expressive, and formalist. The second half turns to 20th-century critical schools, such as Russian and American formalism, archetypal criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, reader theory, deconstruction, and historicism.
This course examines the implications of ethical questions posed in works of poetry, drama, and fiction. Attention will be paid to historical context. This course satisfies HUSS elective requirements and 3000-level writing intensive requirements for all Poly majors. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements
In this seminar/workshop, students read a wide range of poetic forms or structures and practice making poems, focusing on the reading and composition of poems as forms of design. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements.
This online course examines how diverse authors of literature have approached and continue in critically evaluate developments in both science and technology. This course will introduce students to major works in the literary canon through the lens of scientific developments. The historical topics that we will address are the advent of the printing press, the Copernican revolution, Enlightenment thought, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of modern warfare, medical advances, and ultimately, the age of the Internet. In particular, we will study how writers portrayed the individual and society as well as examined social interactions in the scientific world. How did the introduction of literature of the “masses” ultimately transform plot, character development, and the objective of narrative fiction? Authors and works we will read include: Anonymous, Everyman, William Shaespeare’s Sonnets, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, George Orwell’s 1984, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. | Prerequisites: EXPOS-UA 1 or EXPOS-UA 4
This course examines the implications of medicine, mental or physical illness, and death in works of poetry, drama and fiction. Some attention will be paid to historical context. This course satisfies HUSS elective requirements and HUSS writing-intensive requirements. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements
The poems of John Ashbery and the art of Richard Serra confront the respective reader/viewer: find a methodology based upon the structural configuration of the poem and sculpture to enable a “reading” of the work. The works that will be addressed reject impressionistic, subjective commentary. The beauty of word or artifact is not applicable. Post-1900 non-referential sculptures and paintings will be juxtaposed with poems that disassociate themselves from narrative content, poems whose only subject matter is language configuration – even when there is apparent thematic material – poems of Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Amy Clampitt, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Louis Zukofsky. The poets so listed complement preoccupations of artists such as Mark di Suvero, David Smith, Richard Serra, Anthony Caro, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, and Marcel Duchamp. | Prerequisite(s): Completion of first year writing requirements
A site for IMA NY Students to find equivalent courses outside of IMA NY
For most students joining IMA in Fall 2022 and beyond, there is a new program structure that affects the categorization of courses on this site:
Any class in any IMA major elective category (ie "Art & Design") refers to the IMA program structure previous to those entering in Fall 2022. If you are in the class of 2026 (most entering Fall 2022 or later), any course in an IMA elective category are generic IMA electives in the new structure.