Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

Antología Vol. Iii Crónica, Cuento, Microrrelato, Poesía Y Relato, Jose Higuera Lopez, Dejanira Alvarez Cardenas

CUNY Mexican Studies Institute

Creada por iniciativa del Instituto de Estudios Mexicanos de CUNY,

la Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York es el espacio

por antonomasia de la promoción del español en la ciudad más

vibrante y cosmopolita de los Estados Unidos. Un español que se

mantiene vivo y cambiante por las muchas migraciones que componen

el entramado de la metrópoli y cuya vitalidad se ve reflejada en

la expresión escrita de la lengua; no solo en el terreno de la literatura

sino también en los de la academia y el periodismo.

La literatura producida en español en la ciudad …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Be: The Summer Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

This season’s issue pays tribute to the #BlackLivesMatter summit at LaGuardia Community College (led by Kyle Hollar-Gregory, Esq., Jason Hendrickson, Rachel Romain, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Andre Ford, Sultan Jenkins, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wendy Nicholson, Charis Victory, Shaunee Wallace, Donniece Davis, and Jeffery Batts) and writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist.” We’re thinking about how to support each other, sustain commitment, and create change, while living with joy and complexity.

— The Editors: Ahmad Wright, Tara Christina, and Rochelle Spencer (LaGuardia Community College, English Department)

Word Into Idea Online -- User Guide For Group Activity, Stephen Fried, Sam Tamburri

Open Educational Resources

In response to feedback from classroom users, access is provided to a video guide for hosting the group version of Word into Idea Online, an activity currently available on CUNY Academic Works.

General Review Of Elements Quiz For "Write Or Left" Textbook, Kylee C. Pastore

Open Educational Resources

General Review of Elements Quiz for Write or Left: An OER Textbook for Creative Writing Courses. This quiz assesses students' knowledge of the key terms employed in the textbook and is intended for the opening weeks of the semester. Includes quiz questions and answer key.

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Engl 211w: Intro To Nonfiction (Points Of Entry And/Or Exit Wounds), Heather Simon

Open Educational Resources

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 …

Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theater by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville …

Eng 113: Writing About Literature, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An open-access course about writing and analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama.

T.R.A.S.H.:Trans-Relational-Affective-Stuff-Horde, Sg P

Theses and Dissertations

T.R.A.S.H. allies the moral confusion underlying (student) debt and the unregulated art market in order to establish a rigorous framework for “RED HOT SHAME”—an open edition contractual performance. In treating an art collector as a collections agency, the Debt Object becomes an Art Object.

Experimenting With History: Confronting The Archive Through Poetry And The Historical Graphic Novel, Gerina Xhiherri

Theses and Dissertations

While there is general agreement among scholars about the violence of archives and the danger in engaging with them, there is also dispute about how to challenge the power of official records—whether such a thing is possible—and how literature might be a means to recover some of the lost stories, experiences, and personal histories of enslaved people. The stakes involved in preserving the deepest truths of slavery are high, especially for people of color, who remain both under-represented and hyper visible in objectified terms, and for whom there is ever the threat of a collective erasure as subjects in both …

A Bird’S Eye View: Large-Scale Tonal Structures In Robert Schumann’S Four Song Cycles (Op. 42, 24, 39, And 48), Peter Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some of Robert Schumann’s most notable works are his Lieder for solo voice and piano accompaniment. Schumann's Lieder are considered some of the best compositions in this genre, engendering various interpretations by performers and exciting vigorous debate among musicologists and theorists. Robert Schumann’s early music was almost entirely composed for the piano alone; it wasn’t until 1840 that he started to compose almost exclusively Lieder and song cycles inspired by his predecessors Beethoven and Schubert. This was a prolific year for Schumann compositionally, in part due to his marriage to Clara Schumann who was one of Europe’s most preeminent piano …

Word Into Idea Online, Stephen Fried, Sam Tamburri

Open Educational Resources

This creative writing game, an online version of the pen-and paper activity "Word into Idea" -- https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_oers/24/ -- can be played solo or in a group. Proceeding through a series of screens with word-association prompts, players compose a downloadable poem within the game and obtain a player-generated constellation of their words for additional creative work.

"The Battle Trumpet Blown!": Whitman's Persian Imitations In Drum-Taps, Roger Sedarat

Publications and Research

While Walt Whitman’s thematic use of the Orient continues to receive critical attention based on his explicit foreign references, aside from observations of specific Persian signifiers in “A Persian Lesson,” his engagement with the poetry of Iran has remained especially speculative and therefore analogical, with studies like J. R. LeMaster and Sabahat Jahan’s Walt Whitman and the Persian Poets showing how his mystical relation to his own religious influences tends to resemble the Sufism of Rumi and Hafez. A new discovery emerging from an examination of his personal copy of William Alger’s The Poetry of the East along with his …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

The Grid Elegies, Pamela A. Kallimanis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Immigrants are a key component in New York City’s pandemic. Historically, New York is a city of immigrants and their children. In the latter part of the 20th Century, more immigrants arrived due to changes in migration policy. There was also an increased outmigration through second and third generations, which mirrors an economic trajectory seen in previous points in history, mainly in the 1970s. At that time, there was the lure of government policies – from federal mortgage agencies that graded white suburban areas as safer areas for banks to make loans than racially mixed urban areas, to road construction …

A Difference In Rhythm: John Burroughs As Rhythmanalyst, Jennifer Macdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nature writer John Burroughs wrote about the rhythms of life in nature, people, and places, sharing his experiences of his surroundings for readers to learn from, get inspired by, or escape through. In this literature review, using Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, in which rhythm is the “interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 15), I explore some of Burroughs’ writing, asserting that Burroughs himself was a rhythmanalyst. Burroughs is typically read as a literary naturalist who hoped to relay any scene as it truly was (to perfect the “art of seeing things” or …

Introduction To Creative Writing, Shamecca A. Harris

Open Educational Resources

This introductory creative writing course asks students to explore their literary interests and proclivities through regular reading and writing activities designed to promote an in-depth understanding and appreciation for the craft of writing. Students will intellectually engage with both contemporary and classic authors within the main genres of creative writing and use the craft elements discussed in class to compose their own original poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction work. While studying various forms of creative writing, emphasis will be placed on the creative process of writing while encouraging students to find their writing voice. Student responsibilities include workshop participation, several …

21st Century Ecopoetics And Ecotheory, Robert Balun

Open Educational Resources

Ecopoetics is the study of literature that is concerned with ecology and nature. However, beyond just literature about nature, this course will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated in the 21st century, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the climate crisis and the 6th mass extinction (don’t worry, we will define these and other key terms).

In the 21st century, humans are now confronted with a growing awareness of their destructive impact on the earth, its environments, and its human and non-human inhabitants. In this class we will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated …

Contamine De Latour, Gimnopedista Desconegut, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Posats a triar quina de les excentricitats d’Erik Satie és la més simpàtica, la més memorable i la que, al cap i a la fi, resumeix les paradoxes de la seva essència com a artista, jo em quedaria amb la llegenda de la seva dieta. «Jo no menjo més que aliments blancs: ous, sucre, cocos...». D’extravagàncies, però, no en falten en la seva biografia, començant per la gran majoria de les seves composicions a on, no hi trobem com a títols ni «sonates» ni «simfonies», sinó «Embrions dissecats» o «Peces en forma de pera».

Word Into Idea: A Creative Writing Exercise, Stephen Fried

Open Educational Resources

This activity begins from an aleatory technique that creates a list of 104 associatively generated words to provide each participant with a field from which they improvise, first a free-form poem using twenty of the words and then an experimental prose piece that uses all 104 words. The poem is written as a workshop activity and optionally shared in a “poetry slam” segment, following which the prose piece is done as a home assignment. The activity takes 90-120 minutes. A version for synchronous online application is in development.

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

Flor Del Espinillo: Internacional Vii, Carlos Aguasaco, Diana Araujo

Publications and Research

Piedra del Guadalquivir Serie escrita leyendo el Arte Poética de Borges y siguiendo la numeración maya

21st Century Ecopoetics (Selected Topics In Literature And Science), Robert Balun

Open Educational Resources

Ecopoetics is the study of literature that is concerned with ecology and nature. However, beyond just literature about nature, this course will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated in the 21st century, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the climate crisis and the 6th mass extinction (don’t worry, we will define these and other key terms).

In the 21st century, humans are now confronted with a growing awareness of their destructive impact on the earth, its environments, and its human and non-human inhabitants. In this class we will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated …

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Great Books: Teaching Anne Carson’S Translation Of Sappho, Susan Lago, Alison Cimino, Susan Jacobowitz, Ilse Schrynemakers

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Engl 101 Discussion Questions On “Seeing” By Annie Dillard From Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Susan Lago, Alison Cimino, Ilse Schrynemakers, Susan Jacobowitz

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Through The Scholastic Looking Glass: The Pedagogical Potential Of Textual Deformation For Poetic Studies, Taylor Dietrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the pedagogical usefulness of the antithetical reading model of textual deformation for the study of poetic works. No formal pedagogical plan exists for the education of students in poetic studies through textual deformance. This thesis does not go as far as structuring one in its entirety. Rather, it surveys the digital humanities landscape, showing a collective affinity within a number of textual studies approaches that advocate for textual deformance as useful for interrogating texts, and aligns the overlapping symmetries within those working methodologies with pedagogical imperatives like those embedded in Ryan Cordell’s Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy Laboratory—the intent being …