Hello All, I’m writing with some announcements and upcoming events and opportunities, which are listed below. Graduation If you plan to graduate this semester, make sure that you apply for graduation on CUNYfirst by March 1, which is the end of this week. Reading/ Discussion Talking about Translation: Sarduy and Beyond! Are you interested in learning more about literary translation and/or Caribbean writers? This Wednesday February 26 at 12.30 on Zoom, Translator Alex Verdolini talks with QC MFA alums Jacqui Cornetta and Leo Grossman about translating and being inspired by Cuban writer Severo Sarduy<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severo_Sarduy>. Register here<https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/VZVNmXl0R_SnUi2eZ3q3DA>! Flyer attached. Watermark: A Graduate Student Journal Attached you’ll find a call for papers for a graduate student journal at California State University, Long Beach. The journal provides opportunities for MA students in English to publish their work, something that is good to build your CV and to bring the research and writing you did in classes to larger publics. MA Student Conference The MA Student Conference, Alone Together, will happen on March 10. More information will about this will be coming your way soon. We still have room for a few more presenters. If you are interested, please contact me by Friday, 2/28. Summer Registration Summer registration will begin on March 10. Course codes and further information will be available next week. Below are the course descriptions. In the first four-week session (which runs in June): * English 719/ Medieval Epic Literature with Edward Currie (online asynchronous) The epic is generally taken to be one of the oldest and most venerable genres, a literary form used by ancient cultures to represent their legendary origins and martial achievements. This course, a survey of medieval ‘epics’ (i.e., quasi-epics with epic features and pretensions) from the eighth century to the thirteenth, explores the diversity of forms and purposes that can be found in epic productions of the medieval period and the difficulty of bringing these extremely varied texts under one denominator. Although works within this genre have much in common, they are also diverse enough that it is hard to speak of them as belonging to one tradition. A heroic epic may include narrative elements—varying in number and type—derived from myth, legend, and folklore. The text may center on a single hero, or a group of warriors (e.g. a dynasty), exemplifying virtues we expect in literature of this sort, but also qualities particular to a certain culture and foreign to modern notions of ‘heroism.’ We will read texts composed in medieval England, France, Scandinavia, and Carolingian Germany; namely, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Saga of the Volsungs, and The Nibelungenlied. Some of our texts share the ‘same’ heroes and narrative situations, represented very differently according to the purposes of particular authors, the periods when they were composed, and the audiences for whom they were intended. The literature will be read in translation. Students will submit daily responses and write two papers: the first requires close readings of a text; the second is a research paper that involves engagement with scholarship. This online course will be asynchronous. Class discussions will occur on our Brightspace site, where required lectures and other course materials will also be available. * English 781/ Special Seminar (American Women Playwrights) (online synchronous MTWTh 645 to 825 pm) This special topics course will focus on American women playwrights, some of whom have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and some who are significant for other reasons. We will explore themes and approaches of these women dramatists and what their plays reveal about American culture. Among the topics considered are the relationship between women writers and their cultural and social backgrounds, conditions affecting women’s literary production, including their struggle for gender parity in the theatre world, the influence of female and male precursors, the impact of race and class, and the continuities and breaks with the dominant literary traditions; additionally, we will explore how contemporary theatre is connected to Greek tragedy and to Ibsen’s realistic social dramas of the 19th century. We will begin with the mother of American drama—Susan Glaspell, writing plays before women could vote—and end the course with the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama—Eboni Booth. Some of the other women playwrights we will discuss are Lillian Hellman, Lorraine Hansberry, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Paula Vogel, Rebecca Gilman, Sarah Ruhl, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Lynn Nottage, and Martyna Majok. In the second summer 7-week summer session (which runs from the last week of June to mid-August): * English 732 Latinx Literature (Latinx Childhood) with William Orchard (online synchronous MW 6:00 to 8:05 pm) In the heart-wrenching stories of migrant families torn asunder at the US-Mexico border, the Latinx child has emerged a key figure in contemporary political discourse. Although we are often inclined to think of childhood as a universal experience or a time of innocence, childhood is affected by a host of historical, economic, social, political, and cultural factors. In this class, we will examine the experience of Latinx childhood in three ways. First, we will consider the ways in which Latinx coming of age narratives have to rework the conventions of the bildungsroman in order to account for the roles that race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality play in a Latinx child’s growing understanding of their social roles. Second, we will read recent works in young adult and children’s literature to examine how Latinx childhood is being represented to young readers. Finally, we will consider the various ways in which childhood has been invoked and deployed in contemporary debates in the United States about immigration. Likely text include Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Tomas Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied, and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, and the film Coco. * English 781 Special Seminar (20th Century Poetry: Modernism to Postmodernism) with James Richie (online synchronous T/Th 6:00 to 8:05 pm) While new work is continually being done to re-examine the claims, terms, and historical contexts for modern poetry, there’s a general critical consensus on what poetic modernism entails and what works may be considered modern. Postmodern poetry, which both emerges and diverges from the tenets of modernism, is another story. Parameters are starting to emerge, but for the most there’s still debate on what counts as postmodern or if there even is (or was) such a thing as a “postmodernism.” This course is going to examine modern and postmodern American poetry with a historicizing lens to understand how poets from the early part of the century developed poetic strategies to account for the feeling of overwhelming, rapid, and unprecedented historical change and how the poets of the mid part of the 20th century drew from and critiqued those strategies to account for their own historical moment. It will also conclude by analyzing a few poets whose work emerged much later in the 20th century (or beginning of the 21st) to think through how these writers may be dealing with their own inherited dual legacy. Fall 2025 Registration Pre-registrations for Fall 2025 will start in March. More information on that will be send in the coming weeks. Below is a preview of fall’s offerings: MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY 4:40 742/ Victorian Lit (Schaffer) 642/ The Genre of Children’s Literature (Schanoes) 701/ Grad Methods (Miller) 781/ Detective Fiction (Ferguson) ONLINE 6:40 731Black Aliveness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Faherty) 636/ Literary Theory (Cassvan) ONLINE 663/ Studies in Race and Ethnicity (Weekes) 781/ Italian American Modernism (Gardaphe) ONLINE I hope your semester is going well. Please feel free to contact me of Professor Mak if you have any questions. Best, Bill