ENG 505.01 - Shakespeare

T 5:00-7:50 p.m.

Professor Thomas Olsen: olsent@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:Shakespeare and the Creative Continuum

This course is a graduate-level introduction to Shakespeare and the many issues related to literary authorship and creativity. We will explore the ways Shakespeare used prior sources to create his own “original” works, and in turn how he became a “source” for later authors and artists. We will read some of Shakespeare's known sources, study some of his plays, and trace his influence in several literary and cinematic adaptations of his works.

The plays read for this course will depend in part on the class's previous experience with the plays of Shakespeare. To determine that level, I will send out a survey soon after the pre-registration period in November. Not long after that I will be able to construct a list of texts and distribute it to registered students. We will also read several critical essays as part of the course; they will be posted to Brightspace.

Course requirements will probably include one short paper (3-5 pp.), a presentation, and a research paper of medium length (12-15 pp.) in which you work with a Shakespeare play and its source(s) and/or adaptations made from the play.

Required Texts (ordered @ College Bookstore, but available elsewhere, new and used):

You will need a high-quality edition of the works of Shakespeare. I have ordered the 3^rd edition of Stephen Greenblatt et. al, eds. The Norton Shakespeare, in the easier-to-carry 2-volume format (Norton, 978-0-393-26402-9). However, any prior edition in any format of The Norton Shakespeare is acceptable, as are any high-quality 1-volume or single-play critical editions (Arden, Cambridge, Norton, Oxford, Riverside, etc.). Please contact me before making a major purchase; some budget editions will not serve you well for this course and are false economies. Please do not plan to read for this course on a phone or tablet.

Additional readings and materials will be announced over the winter break and will appear on the final syllabus, distributed a week or so before the start of the spring semester.

ENG 536.01 - American Fiction in the Twentieth Century to 1945

M 5:00-7:50 p.m.

Professor Fiona Paton:  patonf@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:

The twentieth century was a dynamic period for American literature: no longer suffering from an inferiority complex in relation to Old World culture, American writers embraced their culture in all of its opportunities and contradictions. The American novel came to dominate world literature, with Nobel prizes being awarded to Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. We will embrace the diversity of creative energy on display in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, reading appreciatively and critically with careful attention to the major political events of the period. 

American Fiction to 1945 is course that was created by the late Professor Harry Stoneback, and it is one that he taught every year for over three decades, in the process influencing many graduate students who went on to participate in academic conferences and enroll in PhD programs. This version of ENG536 both honors his legacy and expands the canon he established. The reading  list is presented below. Students enrolled in this class will have the opportunity to present their final research papers at the English department’s 2023 Graduate Symposium in April, directed by Professor Paton.

Course Requirements

Midterm and Final Exams

Oral Presentation

Research Paper

Required Texts

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Hemingway, In Our Time

Hemingway, The Sun also Rises

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Roberts, The Time of Man

Cather, My Antonia

Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Wright, Native Son

ENG 542.01 - Graduate Workshop in Fiction and Memoir                                                          
R 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                             
Mr. Kristopher Jansma: jansmak@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:                                                                                                                         

In this workshop course, students will share and critique original works of fiction in a constructive environment dedicated to discovering, or rediscovering, the “fun” in our writing process. Through conversation and readings emphasizing the role of “work as play” in fiction, you will, “go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see […] precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel.” We will also engage in weekly constructive critiques that will help each writer to create and revise such stories. Our discussions will revolve around close readings of student work, with readings and exercises chosen to suit the particular nature of the class's projects. One-on-one conferences will be held biweekly to give more personal feedback.

Required Text:                                                                                                                        
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison

ENG 543.01 - Graduate Workshop in Poetry                                                            
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                          
Professor Timothy Liu: liut@newpaltz.edu                                                                              

Course Description:                                                                                                                          

This graduate-level poetry writing seminar will focus on contemporary poems published mostly in the past decade. We will consider texts that question the status quo, texts that face injustices, texts that take on power relations, texts that are not too sure about solutions but seething with questions, texts that go beyond good/evil us/them, poems that implicate the self (and the all-too-knowing ego), texts that surprise both writer and reader with their observations and discoveries. We will give close readings of assigned poems. Exercises, prompts and ideas for new poems and narratives will be suggested. Each week, you will complete the reading assignment in advance of class. We will also be discussing your own original poems. You are responsible for reading the texts and submitting work to be workshopped. Plan on writing one or two new poems per week. Feel free to experiment! Try out new forms, new strategies. You will have plenty of opportunities to revise your work.

Required Text:                                                                                                                               

The Best American Poetry 2022 (Zapruder and Lehman, eds.)

ENG553 - Career Seminar (Hybrid)

W 3:30-4:30

Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu

What career opportunities are available for students with an advanced degree in the humanities? How do I describe the skills I have acquired in graduate school? How can I best present myself as a candidate for jobs in a range of fields? Do I need to continue to a Ph.D. or other graduate program in order to accomplish my goals? This practicum is designed to help MA students answer these fundamental questions as it provides crucial professional development and career discernment. The practicum will provide hands-on activities, collaborative exercises, and close mentorship from the instructor and others at the college to assist students not only in finding a job once they graduate, but also in identifying meaningful career paths. NOTE: The majority of coursework will be done asynchronously, but there will be 3-4 scheduled in-person meetings over the course of the semester at the assigned class time.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. (Knopf, 2016. ISBN: 1101875321)

Additional reading materials to be provided in class or linked through the schedule of readings.

ENG 572.01 - Studies in Middle English Literature                                                                            
R 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                        
Professor Usha Vishnuvajjala: vishnuvu@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:                                                                                                                           
This course will focus on Arthurian romance, with a particular focus on gender, power, friendship, and nation. This course will investigate the ways in which gender structures and power structures function in medieval Arthurian romance, including the role of women in community building, the tension between friendship and knightly/political identities, international exchange and warfare, the construction of masculine identities through expressions of emotion, and the development of ideas about blood-based ethnicity. Through readings in Middle English and (and those in contemporary languages in translation) that cover the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, we will build a vocabulary for understanding the trajectory of this very influential body of literature before it developed into what we know today.

ENG 585.01 - Studies in Contemporary Criticism                                                                       
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                                
Professor Mary Holland: hollandm@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:                                                                                                                      
This course provides a survey of movements of theory and criticism from the last century or so through today, from Marxism to posthumanism and pretty much everything in between. Our goal in this course is not to grasp main concepts and terms and move on, but to analyze each theorist’s arguments in depth, place theories in conversation with each other, note shifts and connections, and interrogate the wider cultural and historical contexts in which each intellectual trend emerges. Thus, while many students in this class will have taken a theory survey before, this course will provide an opportunity to deepen and widen their comprehension of theory, and gain a richer understanding of the larger network of intellectual currents surrounding the various theoretical movements. To that end, the course is organized in four sections: subjectivity; language; culture; and nation/world/human. We will focus our attention on the theory itself, while placing it in relation to Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus, and reading criticism of that novel in order to recognize and appreciate what critics—including you—can bring to literary study using theory.

Texts:

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. (W. W. Norton)

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus. Penguin, 1984.

ENG 593.01 - Literature of the First World War                                                                         
M 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                                       
Professor Vicki Tromanhauser: tromanhv@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:                                                                                                                      
The industrial production of death begins with the First World War. The measure of its impact has tended to turn upon watershed theories of the war as a kind of fulcrum or cataclysmic event in modern history that caught everyone and everything in it. If on the other side of that parenthesis is a new modernity marked by a fractured and ironic consciousness, the experience of the front also bred what trench-poet Isaac Rosenberg called “cosmopolitan sympathies” that could forge attachments across cultural and national differences. Remaining true to its modernist roots, we’ll explore the war from multiple perspectives, expanding the literary canon beyond the well-known combatant-poets to include VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurses and ambulance drivers, psychiatrists, and civilians. An occasion for tremendous creative production in literature, the war also inspired innovations in the visual arts (photography, painting, sculpture, and film), which we’ll examine alongside the war’s written record. Part of the aim of the seminar will be to resist the effort to totalize the war or to think it into a singularity, and instead to appreciate the continuities between the Great War and our own moment of long armed conflicts. As we do so, we’ll visit themes that cross wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: sacrifice and bodies in pain, memory and memorialization, PTSD and temporality, and the plasticity of flesh and medical prosthetics.

The Texts (provisional):

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929)

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)

David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937)

Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)

M. J. Hegar, Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front (2017)

They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson, 2018)

1917 (dir. Sam Mendes, 2018)

Selected poems by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others; selected stories and diaries by Ellen LaMotte, Katherine Mansfield, and Enid Bagnold; and a selection of theoretical writing on pain, abjection, trauma and recovery, and disability by Elaine Scarry, Julia Kristeva, W.H.R. Rivers, and Maren Linet

ENG 593.02 - Jane Austen & the Culture of Fiction   

3 Credits

W 5:00-7:50pm  

Professor Jackie George: georgej@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:

 This seminar will be devoted to a critical study of late-18^th and early 19^th-century works of fiction, with special attention given to the novels of Jane Austen. We will dive deeply into one of the most important periods in the history of the English novel and consider how the formal and thematic concerns of this period continue to shape the production and reception of texts today. In addition to Austen, we will read a range of authors whose works engage with race, gender, class, and other major social, historical, and political issues. Students will be responsible for active participation in the planning and carrying out of seminar discussions, as well as the development of individual research projects. 

Anticipated Texts:

Anonymous, The Woman of Colour

Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma

Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World  

ENG 593.03 - African American Print Culture                                                                                  
T 5:00-7:50 p.m.                                                                                                                     
Professor Crystal Donkor: donkorc@newpaltz.edu

Course Description:                                                                                                                          
This course will explore the longstanding tradition of the Black Press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From its early overt political demands of abolition, African American citizenship, and voting rights; to its establishment of the African American literary tradition and various forms of cultural expression and influence, this course encourages inquiry beyond simple questions of authorship and proposes more complex interrogations of readership, circulation, collaboration, dissemination, innovation, and representation. Undoubtedly, the Black press has had profound impacts on African American life and American print culture, more broadly. Students in this course will trace these impacts through the use of a wide range of digital archives of African American newspapers and print culture materials, alongside recent scholarship. Students will also have the opportunity to virtually access special collections with the Associate Curator of the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.