All writing is constructed within a complex social matrix shaped by economic, political, and cultural factors. These same factors contribute to the creation of business documents, or "workplace texts." This course will not only provide an overview of the various genres of workplace writing, such as correspondence (memos and letters), proposals, and formal reports, but also analyze the discourse features that separate workplace writing from other genres.

In this course we will be writing together at the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, in the hybrid form often referred to as the "fourth genre." At that boundary, self-consciously literary strategies (narrative, imagery, point of view, dialogue, etc.) traditionally associated with fiction, poetry and drama are used to treat subjects that have, traditionally, been thought of as the province of non-fiction; as obligated to "facts." Our particular focus will be the sub-categories of the personal essay and memoir: non-fiction art written in the first person.
Class sessions will consist of:

Students will be expected to:

Shakespeare II: Ten plays, including the major tragedies and the best of the late romances.
This course can be used to fulfill the 2nd semester of the two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College.

This course is a broad survey of American literature from 1870 to the present. We will study the works of literature within the context of the aesthetic movements (particularly modernism and postmodernism) of which they were a part, in the process gaining a sense of the ideas, styles, and influences of those movements. We will also examine how various broader political, social, and cultural forces shaped American literature. The works we’ll be reading are likely to include Twain, Puddin’ Head Wilson; Wharton, House of Mirth; Hemingway, In Our Time; Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; selected Modernist poetry (Eliot, Stevens, Williams, etc.); the Beats (selections from Kerouac and Ginsberg); Plath (excerpts from The Bell Jar); selections from Pynchon, Vonnegut, Vizenor, Cha, O’Brien, Cantor, Reed, and Auster in Postmodern American Fiction.
This course can be used to fulfill the 2nd semester of the two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College.

Examination of the genre of short fiction through close readings and detailed analyses of stories and novellas by a wide variety of English-language writers from all over the world as well as non-English

language writers in translation. Authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Amy Tan, Naguib Mahfouz, Philip Roth, Anton Chekov, Andre Dubus, James Joyce, Hanif Kureishi, Jorge Luis Borges, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Alice Munro, Gish Jen, and others. Requirements include all readings, response journals, two essays, a midterm and a final, and class participation.
This course can be used to fulfill the 2nd semester of the two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College.

In this course, we will study the development of the British novel from its early eighteenth-century origins to the great fictions of the mid-nineteenth century. In our reading, we will encounter a rich array of characters: felons and saints, orphans and children of privilege, aristocrats and ordinary folk, hypocrites and moralists.

One concern will be to examine the formal aspects of the art of fiction: plotting, characterization, description, language, point-of-view. Another will be to explore the novel’s evolving generic conventions: (Auto)biography and verisimilitude, the picaresque, the epistolary novel ("straight" and in parody), the Gothic, the novel as comedy of manners and as social satire. In addition, we will investigate various theoretical issues, among them questions of rhetoric and performance, representation and reality, and sexual and class politics.

The texts for the course are: Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Samuel Richardson, Pamela (excerpts); Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, William Makepiece Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.

Course requirements are:

The primary goal of the semester will be to gain a greater understanding and appreciation for some of the masterpieces of Western literature. The reading will span the later Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods, as well as the Realism/Naturalism of the 20^th century. Active and attentive reading of the texts will be stressed as the content, form, and style will be closely examined. Each text will be placed within its historical, philosophical, and cultural context. Students will be encouraged to think, read, discuss, and write critically about the literature. The readings will be selected from the New Testament, and the works of St. Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, Achebe, and 20^th century American poets. In addition to the readings, course requirements will include a mid-term and a final exam as well as a long paper on one full-length work outside of the syllabus.
This course can be used to fulfill either the first or 2nd semester of the two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College.

This course explores the evolution of 20th-century cognitive science as an interdisciplinary project. Course readings pair selections from the most important philosophical, psychological and linguistic theorists in cognitive science with works of science fiction (novels and films) that explore the cultural implications of developments in technology and artificial intelligence. Through our readings we will discuss such questions as what it means to have a mind, what it means to think, to be conscious, and finally to be human. We will debate whether machines could ever have these traits, and what would happen if they did.

The course begins with a Western philosophical perspective from Plato, Aristotle and Descartes. Just as these thinkers influenced all scholarly Cognitive Science, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a touchstone for all science fiction about robots. Our approach to fiction begins there. We move quickly to thinkers like Turing, Searle, Lakoff and Johnson, who helped lay the foundations for modern thinking on mind and consciousness. Science fiction classics like Powers’ Galatea 2.2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Clarke and Kubrick attack these questions through fiction, giving us a chance to gain new perspective by asking, "What if…?" Explicit discussion of consciousness follows with a look back to Freud and modern conceptions by Dennett, Chalmers and others. Asimov’s I Robot and the film Bladerunner tie nicely to these themes. The final section of the course considers a future in which our definitions of humanity have expanded, as conceived by academics Haraway and Hales, and fiction writers like William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

Course requirements include: short (1-2 page) weekly response papers, a creative or practical written exploration of Turing machines (using such online Turing bots as ALICE or ELIZA, experiments, interviews, short fiction, or the like), a shorter (7-9 page) analytical paper, a longer (12-15 page) analytical paper, midterm and final exams.
Prerequisites: All students must have taken at least one literature course in the English Department and Introduction to Psychology. Enrollment is limited to those in the Honors program, and to others with permission of the instructors.

The colonization of many areas of the world by European powers brought with it tumultuous disturbances in previously "authentic" personal and cultural identities. While the conquest of one society by another and the resulting cultural confusion was certainly a traumatic event, the various cultural mixings have also produced a fascinating creative explosion in the literature of what some call the "postcolonial" era.

This course will focus on such problems--and often wondrous complications--of identity and on the workings--and wonders--of memory in the wake of the traumatic conquests of nations and cultures. We will see that the unfolding and deployment of memory is both a necessary and creatively redemptive event; we will also see that memory in conjunction with the imagination can transform a catastrophic and traumatic history into a highly productive and redemptive face-to-face among various cultures. Many of the texts are either famous examples of, or are in some way related to, the literature of magic realism. All are works of staggering beauty, imaginative richness, and emotional intensity. (Authors include Marquez, Coetzee, Rushdie, Naipaul, Hulme, Fanon, Morrison, Harris.)
This course can be used to fulfill the 2nd semester of the two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College.