"The Problem of the University" is a (largely) open education syllabus that marries a criticality of/with the university as a site and space of knowledge making and knowledge suppression with a metacognitive writing approach for undergraduate students. The syllabus' contents include texts from bell hooks, Paolo Freire, Derrida, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, among others.
Complete and updated syllabus available at https://waboutw.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

We will explore the notion of creativity as it pertains to new ways of engaging familiar topics and carving out frameworks for exploring uncharted territory. We will actively read and respond to works of creative nonfiction to enrich our understanding of structure, style, and language. Assigned readings will demonstrate how creative nonfiction can encompass a variety of forms (think: reportage, braided essay, erasure, visual essay) and draw from both research and experience to offer a unique perspective and elicit an emotional response. We will develop our own creative nonfiction toolbox through a series of reflections, creative exercise, and projects. We will provide our classmates with thoughtful feedback to ensure collective growth.

This is an introductory creative writing class. There are two parts:

1. The reading. In order to write good, you need to read good!
We will read and analyze (mostly) contemporary, bold, explosive writing in five categories: essays on craft, short stories, novels, poetry, and plays. These writers’ works will help you understand how to play with conventions to create truly original pieces.

2. The writing. In which, you guessed it, you write! And also listen. And also share. And also support. And also rewrite.
Throughout the semester you will complete writing exercises and tap into your creative voice. You will write 3 creative assignments and present 1 of them to the class. You will also provide verbal and written feedback to classmates throughout the semester, and participate in class discussions.

Which is worse: having a family, or not having a family? When Shakespeare’s powerful male protagonists fret over their legacies, they worry about children dying, disappearing, or disappointing them, or the corollary problem of not having children in the first place. Many of the plays feature bitter family disputes, and many feature terrible losses; some also feature mysterious reappearances, reunions, and reconciliations. This class will explore how questions of success, succession, heredity, and inheritance shape parent-child relations in Shakespeare’s plays.

This is a syllabus for an OER version of a Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature undergraduate course.

This collection includes five of Wharton's early short stories written, but not always published in the 1880's and 90's. These short stories show the range of Wharton's fiction beyond the society novels that she is best known for, as they include "Mrs. Manstey's View," which relates the story of a woman living in a tenement, as well as "The House of the Dead," which was one of Wharton's first ghost stories.

An examination of eighteenth-century English writers in their historical context. Authors vary but all address issues of capitalism and class mobility; romantic love and the re-definition of femininity and masculinity; the beginnings of mass culture; colonialism and international travel.

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is a multidisciplinary Open Educational Resource that showcases ekphrastic poems in the public domain alongside the artworks that inspired them. Collections of resources about each poem and the associated artwork both complement and supplement the poems. Resources include biographical information about the poet, and the artist where applicable, as well as articles, videos, audio files, presentations, and podcasts illuminating the historical significance of each work of literature and piece of art.

Esta lectura se enfoca en lo que se omite de la historia chilena, aquella conflagraciÌ_n de cultura contra barbarie, su legado de opresiÌ_n. En el contexto de la obra de Bola̱o, la literatura del continente cobra un significado que rompe con las ideas tradicionales de los fundamentos de la naciÌ_n, para revelar la opresiÌ_n colectiva y aquÌ_, en particular, se revela al narrador como personaje en tanto su papel dentro de la novela y de la historia, su conciencia homofÌ_bica y racista dentro del paisaje literario.

This is a Manifold edition of John Ruskin's 1907 The Elements of Drawing. The E-text was prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net).

Provides a new account of the emergence of Irish gothic fiction in mid-eighteenth century. This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the ‘beginnings’ of Irish gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland. The main argument the book makes is that the Irish gothic should be read in the context of the split in Irish Anglican public opinion that opened in the 1750s, and seen as a fictional instrument of liberal Anglican opinion in a changing political landscape. By providing a fully historicized account of the beginnings of the genre in Ireland, the book also addresses the theoretical controversies that have bedevilled discussion of the Irish gothic in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The book gives ample space to the critical debate, and rigorously defends a reading of the Irish gothic as an Anglican, Patriot tradition. This reading demonstrates the connections between little-known Irish gothic fictions of the mid-eighteenth century (The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and Longsword), and the Irish gothic tradition more generally, and also the gothic as a genre of global significance. Key Features * Examines gothic texts including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, (Anon), The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and Thomas Leland's Longsword * Provides a rigorous and robust theory of the Irish Gothic * Reads early Irish gothic fully into the political context of mid-eighteenth century Ireland This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

This project provides the text of Jane Austen's novel Emma, prepared by Standard Ebooks, for annotation by students in Elizabeth Weybright's Spring, 2019 Introduction to Literary Study course.

A brief history of conflicting ideas about mankind's relation to the natural environment as exemplified in works of poetry, fiction, and discursive argument from ancient times to the present. What is the overall character of the natural world? Is mankind's relation to it one of stewardship and care, or of hostility and exploitation? Readings include Aristotle, The Book of Genesis, Shakespeare, Descartes, Robinson Crusoe, Swift, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Darwin, Thoreau, Faulkner, and Lovelock's Gaia. This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the growth of ideas about nature and the natural environment of mankind. The term nature in this context has to do with the varying ways in which the physical world has been conceived as the habitation of mankind, a source of imperatives for the collective organization and conduct of human life. In this sense, nature is less the object of complex scientific investigation than the object of individual experience and direct observation. Using the term "nature" in this sense, we can say that modern reference to "the environment" owes much to three ideas about the relation of mankind to nature. In the first of these, which harks back to ancient medical theories and notions about weather, geographical nature was seen as a neutral agency affecting or transforming agent of mankind's character and institutions. In the second, which derives from religious and classical sources in the Western tradition, the earth was designed as a fit environment for mankind or, at the least, as adequately suited for its abode, and civic or political life was taken to be consonant with the natural world. In the third, which also makes its appearance in the ancient world but becomes important only much later, nature and mankind are regarded as antagonists, and one must conquer the other or be subjugated by it.

The nineteenth century was an era marked by unprecedented change, from the expansion of Britain’s empire, to the move from a rural to industrial economy, to developments in science, transportation and technology, to anxieties of class, gender, race, religion and marriage. It was also the era that saw the blossoming of the novel as an art form. In this course, we are going to ask the question: what motivated the rise of the nineteenth-century English novel, and its various genres? Why did Victorians love reading novels?

We are also going to consider the desires of the fictional bodies that populate the Victorian novel. What do the characters of these novels want – be it love, marriage, money, status, revenge, beauty, or power – and why? Which bodies are allowed to desire and how do these desires conform to, question or challenge Victorian beliefs and ideals? What are the consequences of these loves and desires, realized or unrealized? We will pay particular attention to raced, gendered and classed bodies – and bodies deemed mad, bad or dangerous – whose desires violate Victorian expectations and perhaps our own.

I also invite you to draw on the lived experience of your own bodies as you read. We are not living in the world of the Victorians, but we do live with its long history and our own complex desires and relationships as human beings. What do these texts push us to grapple with in our present moment? What do they leave us wanting?

Haunted spaces are occupied spaces, inhabited by some force or trace of the past. In this course we will explore the various ways in which authors have employed hauntings to understand our relation to place and to the past, to issues of time, memory, knowledge, culture, history, and mortality. How do ghosts function both as objects to fear and as historical subjects with ethical and political potential? Why does literature insist on keeping the dead (and the Gothic) alive? In focusing our course on haunted spaces we will consider the text itself as a haunted site, asking questions about how and why we read , and what happens when we do. Both real and phantasmatic, texts hover between life and death, operating as conduits through which authors communicate, through which characters and events appear, again and again and again. We believe in ghosts.
English 162 is a course for non-English majors that uses literature to deepen the understanding of the rich, complex, and varied engagement between human beings and the places they inhabit and imagine. We will examine how places, with their history, traditions, myths, customs, tensions, social structures, and physical form interact with people's daily lives. In this course, we will read texts from various literary genres--novels, short stories, essays, memoir, poetry, and drama--to think about the myriad functions of place in a rich, complex, and varied engagement between human beings and the places they inhabit and imagine. Throughout the semester students will develop their skills of literary analysis, building arguments, and making connections among various texts, and communicating ideas effectively. Students will have the opportunity to practice and share these developing skills by participating in our class discussions, informal writing responses to readings online and in class, as well as in a formal academic essay, a midterm and final.
This is a general education course that satisfies the Literature requirement for the Queens Core under the CUNY General Education structure called Pathways. The course also satisfies the Reading Literature requirement under the Perspectives curriculum that was in effect at Queens

Introduction to English Grammar and Syntax. Not open to students with credit for English 370. Analysis of English sentence structure, with focus on parts of speech, grammatical voice and mood, and written discourse. Students will examine real-world texts from a variety of genres, as well as their own writing practices. This is a Writing Intensive Course. This course may be offered in either online, hybrid, or face-to-face format.