ENG 526-01: Twenty-first Century Literature

Professor Mary Holland: hollandm@newpaltz.edu

T 5-7:50 pm

3 Credits

Modality: Fully seated

Course Description:

Novels in the twenty-first century gather an unprecedentedly rich arsenal of literary tools and use and combine them in ways that feel new and fresh and productive. More striking still are the affirming uses to which these novels put their tools, in the wake of a postmodern literature that often felt flat, dead-end, nihilistic. What is happening to the novel in the twenty-first century? How does it address the problems defined by fiction at the end of the twentieth century? How do its attempts to solve these problems force it into new shapes, narratives, and imagined possibilities for fiction and its readers?

In this course, we will address these and other questions while we read novels by some of today’s most exciting writers. Informing our readings will be critical essays on the novels and novelists, as well as excerpts of cultural, sociological, and theoretical perspectives on the novel in the twenty-first century. Critics are beginning to ask, with increasing urgency, what happens after postmodernism? Have we indeed left postmodernism behind? What is this thing that’s happening now? Our own in-depth study of literature in the twenty-first century will allow us to begin to answer these questions ourselves, putting our class in the middle of what I think is one of the most exciting critical discussions happening today.

Texts (may change)

Danielewski, Mark. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000.

Lerner, Ben. 10:04. Picador, 2014.

Lockwood, Patricia. No One Is Talking About This. Riverhead, 2021.

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. Anchor Books, 2001.

Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. Daw Books, 2010.

Ozeki, Ruth. A Tale for the Time Being. Penguin, 2013.

Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Random House, 2017.

ENG 542-01: Workshop in Fiction & Memoir Graduate

Professor Heinz Insu Fenkl: fenklh@newpaltz.edu 
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.

3 Credits

Modality: Fully seated

Course Description: 

The contemporary novel and memoir are curious things—both commodity and literary form—and the culture of their production is often outright contradictory. In this course we will explore the distinctions between the “literary” and the “commercial” novel/memoir with the ultimate goal of producing a publishable work that maintains literary merits even if it is intended for the commercial trade book market. We will engage with the literary aspect of the works through a range of readings and we will also engage pragmatically with the nuts-and-bolts real world aspects of how a novel/memoir (i.e. “long-form content”) is bought and published in the commercial world. By the end of the course, you will have a finished proposal packet, having workshopped its contents with your peers under the guidance of your professor.

NOTE: This is a workshop on writing a memoir or novel, which means you will be expected to do a significant amount sustained writing and reading of fiction and nonfiction during the semester.

Texts for each semester to be announced.

ENG 544-01: Teaching Creative Writing

Mr. Kristopher Jansma: jansmak@newpaltz.edu

M 5:00-7:50

Credits: 3

Modality: In person

Course Description:

A seminar on various pedagogical approaches to instruction in creative writing. We’ll discuss issues related to teaching, how to effectively edit and critique the work of students, and ways to lead an effective workshop.

It is sometimes said that one might learn to be a great writer, but that great writing cannot be taught. But how did we learn? And can we, as writers, learn how to impart our skills and knowledge of craft to the next generation? In this course we will discuss pedagogical approaches to instruction in creative writing. We’ll discuss how to effectively edit the work of students, and how to model good critiquing as the head of your own creative writing workshop. We’ll practice handling real-world classroom situations as well as approaches to one-on-one conferences. We’ll discuss the differences between teaching at the primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels. We’ll look at the ways that great writers talk about how they write, and how this material can be best presented to new writers at all stages of development. We will plan sample lessons and discuss the process of getting a job teaching writing. We will explore how learning to teach creative writing well can improve our own creative writing in turn.

Invited guest speakers will include experienced writer/teachers, ready to discuss their approaches to get the best out of their students. We will respond to various pedagogical ideas through short written assignments as well as active class practice and training, with the goal of preparing graduate students to become effective instructors of creative writing.

Required Texts:

Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird

Charles Baxter – Burning Down the House

Betsy Lerner – The Forest for the Trees

The Art of Fiction – John Gardner

Matthew Salesses – Craft in the Real World

ENG 553: Career Seminar

Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu

W 3:30 PM-4:20 PM

1 Credit

Modality: Hybrid--there will be four course meetings over the term during the assigned time.

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.

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 577.02 - Studies in Romanticism – Wild Romanticism

Professor Jackie George: georgej@newpaltz.edu

M 5:00-7:50

3 Credits

Modality: fully seated

Course Description:

In this course, we will examine the “wildness” of Romanticism in terms aesthetic, ethical, and ecological. Drawing upon a variety of texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including, prose fiction, poetry, and nonfiction works, we will explore how British Romantic discourses of the “wild” engage with those of race, gender, nature, and nation. We will discuss how the Romantics imagined the wild and consider how their notions continue to inform present-day conceptions of the human and non-human world. 

ENG 585-01: Studies in Contemporary Criticism and Theory—Anthropocene Nonhumanities

Professor Jed Mayer: mayere@newpaltz.edu

R 5:00-7:50 PM

Modality: in person

Credits: 3

Course Description:

The mark of humans may now be read in all earthly things, from the strata of the lithosphere to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. The Anthropocene, as many have proposed we call this too-human geological and climatological era, calls for a radical reconsideration of the nonhuman world and humanity’s place within it. Human-induced climate change and the sixth extinction have irreparably harmed nonhuman populations and ecosystems, yet humans must also reckon with the destructive climatic forces for which we are in large part responsible. The nonhuman is at once more vulnerable and more destructive than at any time within human history. And yet as we struggle to articulate the nonhuman, to speak responsibly for endangered species and ecologies, they continue to elude representation. Vaster than mega-hurricanes, smaller than microplastics, Anthropocene nonhumanities call for fresh approaches and new epistemologies. In this seminar we will study some of the more influential philosophical perspectives on the nonhuman, as well as the more generative recent developments in critical theory, and consider the ways in which modes of literary representation have attended to the nonhuman, and how they might offer us cognitive direction for our shared future.

Required Texts:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

ENG593.01 James and Wharton

Dr. Andrew Higgins

Tuesday 5:00-7:50

3 Credits

Modality: Fully Seated

Course Description:

This course will explore the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton, two of America’s preeminent novelists. Both of these writers were border straddlers. They were of the nineteenth century as much as the twentieth century and were as much of the cosmopolitan world that included Gustav Flaubert, George Eliot, and Ivan Turgenev as they were of the United States. (Both writers were born in the United States, but James spent most of his adult life in England and Wharton lived in France for the last thirty years of her life.) Further, their careers stretch from realism to the modernist world.

What makes these writers so interesting is their attention to the ways that the upper classes employed language to police social boundaries. The world of Wharton and James’ fiction is a world in which the ability to read signs—things said, things unsaid—was crucial to success, and even survival. The central conflict of almost all of James and Wharton’s fiction, then, is between the imperative to read the intentions behind other people’s words and actions—one had to read the signs and currents correctly in order to lay a safe course in the upper-class worlds their characters navigated—and the inevitable impossibility of knowing what someone else actually thinks and feels. (And, indeed, the difficulty of knowing what one’s own self thinks and feels.) As such, both of these writers developed a fiction of immense psychological subtlety, narrative daring, and stylistic virtuosity.

Texts

James, Henry. Henry James: Selected Tales. Ed., John Lyon. Penguin, 2001. ISBN: 978-0-14-043694-5. (“Daisy Miller” and “In the Cage”)

-----. The Turn of the Screw. Ed., David Bromwich. Penguin, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-141-44135-1.

-----. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Michael Gorra. W. W. Norton, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-393-93853-1. $19.37. (New York Edition)

-----. Washington Square. Ed. Philip Horne and Martha Banta. Penguin, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-141441368. $9.00.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Ed. Michael Nowlin. Broadview, 2002. ISBN: 9781551113364. $16.25

-----. The House of Mirth. Ed. Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan. Broadview, 2005. ISBN: 978-1-55111-567-2. $15.25

-----. Ethan Frome. Ed. Carol Singley. Broadview, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-554810178. $15.25.