Summer 2022 Graduate Seminars
ENG572 Studies in Middle English Literature
Professor Daniel Kempton kemptond@newpaltz.edu
Note: Course Fulfills Literature Before 1800 Requirement
Course Description
Our topic will be medieval romance. We will begin with one of the most important examples of the genre in English, the “Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Our major concern will be the way that the chivalric narrative represented and supported the military aristocracy of the period and the way that this narrative was challenged by counter-narratives originating in other social estates. This contest is played out in Canterbury Tales. As a spokesman for the aristocracy, the pilgrim Knight appropriately tells the first tale, but the pilgrim Miller, a spokesman for the peasantry, immediately offers a rebuttal to the Knight’s vision of social order, and other pilgrims, such as the Wife of Bath, the Squire, and the Franklin, subsequently join the debate. We will read all texts in the original Middle English.
Note: This is an online course, with a synchronous and asynchronous component.
Required Text
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Selected and edited by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson, 3nd ed., Norton, 2018. ISBN 978-1324000563
ENG593 Young Adult Literature
Summer Session 2
Online Asynchronous
Professor Fiona Paton
Course Description
In 2021, the American Library Association released the following statement:
In recent months, a few organizations have advanced the proposition that the voices of the marginalized have no place on library shelves. To this end, they have launched campaigns demanding the censorship of books and resources that mirror the lives of those who are gay, queer, or transgender or that tell the stories of persons who are Black, Indigenous, or persons of color. Falsely claiming that these works are subversive, immoral, or worse, these groups induce elected and non-elected officials to abandon constitutional principles, ignore the rule of law, and disregard individual rights to promote government censorship of library collections. Some of these groups even resort to intimidation and threats to achieve their ends, targeting the safety and livelihoods of library workers, educators, and board members who have dedicated themselves to public service, informing our communities, and educating our youth.
ALA strongly condemns these acts of censorship and intimidation.
This year, The New York Times article “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.” noted that while book censorship is nothing new, it is now becoming increasing tactical and politicized. In this seven-week course, we will embark upon a chronological study of banned young adult novels, decade by decade, beginning with 1960 and ending with 2020. Each of the novels has a history of censorship in the United States, but each also has an established reputation as quality literature. What can we learn from this historical survey? Are the issues the same or have they changed? What are the pros and cons of restricting access to controversial content? And what’s really at stake beyond the level of the school board?
Each week we will read one novel along with additional historical/critical materials relating to its censorship. You will do two blogs each week, your own post and a reply to a classmate. You will take weekly short multiple-choice quizzes on the readings. You will write a 6-8 research paper on a banned book that we have not read in class.
Blogs: 35%
Quizzes: 35%
Research Paper: 30%
Required Texts
Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Norton Critical Edition) ISBN: 978039392809
Morrison, The Bluest Eye ISBN: 9780307278449
Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale ISBN: 9780385490818
Hosseini, Kite Runner ISBN: 9781594480003
Walker, The Color Purple (Trade Size)ISBN: 978015602835
Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian ISBN: 9780316013697
Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir ISBN: 9781549304002
Fall 2022 Graduate Workshops and Seminars
ENG 507 English Literature of the Seventeenth Century
R 5-7:50
Professor Thomas Festa: festat@newpaltz.edu
Note: Course Fulfills Literature Before 1800 Requirement
Course Description
This class is designed as an exploration of the interrelatedness of two concepts that might at first seem to pull in opposite directions: on the one hand, “modernity,” holding out its promise of progress, technological advancement, and political liberation; on the other, “melancholy,” extending its gloomy, static worldview and antiquated science of the humours. Yet poets and artists, long before the modern age, always appreciated that melancholy holds within itself contrary forces and therefore confers the power to unleash “the wakeful anguish of the soul,” as John Keats called it. We will come to grips with these multiple and sometimes contradictory powers by reading poems, essays, meditations, travel journals, and medical treatises from the early modern period. We will additionally put our principal texts into dialogue with examples from the visual arts and will conclude with some examples from recent film engaged in perhaps analogous endeavors. Throughout, the course will move between and among two nodes or clusters of thought about our subject—early modern literature of melancholy, and modern philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic understanding of the experience.
Texts
John Donne, Poems and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
George Herbert, The Temple
Andrew Marvell, Poems
Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and other haibun
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urn Burial, or Hydriotaphia
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Terrius”
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
ENG 515 Modern Theories of Writing
Tuesday: 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Matthew Newcomb: newcombm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course will both prepare you to teach writing in a theoretically informed way and involve you in contemporary research and conversations about writing, composition, and rhetoric. While the course will cover some key historical figures for composition studies (Aristotle, Plato, Quintilian), the majority of the time will be spent on key debates and issues in the field of composition studies as it has existed since the first Conference on College Composition and Communication in the middle of the twentieth century. Those topics will likely include (but are not limited to) the rhetorical situation, theories of argument, the role of composition courses, assessment concerns, new technologies and writing, the role of the author, approaches to grammar and style, public and cultural aspects of writing, and writing across the curriculum. Many readings will be key journal articles and academic books from the last several decades. Students will also gain a larger historical understanding of the movements within composition studies and will be encouraged to develop and try alternative theories and strategies in their writing and in their teaching of writing. Students will enact their own research into the field of composition and will prepare materials for teaching writing as well (such as lesson plans, syllabi, textbook reviews, and/or assignment sheets). We will also spend time talking about our current composition courses and sharing ideas for immediate teaching.
Tentative Required Texts
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Studies in American Colleges 1900-1985.
Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Miller, Susan. Ed. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. W.W. Norton, 2009.
Additional Readings on Blackboard as assigned (from Rhetoric and Composition journals)
ENG 524-01 Virginia Woolf
T 5:00-7:50
Stella Deen: deenm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
This seminar will immerse us in Virginia Woolf’s novels, essays, landmark works of feminist criticism, and memoirs. Our study will have several focal points: Woolf’s participation in literary traditions of the London flâneur; her awareness of daily life punctuated by visionary experiences; her essayistic attention to the common reader; her advocacy for women’s professionalism; her critique of Empire; and her contributions to the “new biography.”
ENG 542 Fiction & Memoir Graduate Workshop
R 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Heinz Insu Fenkl: fenklh@newpaltz.edu
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.
Required Texts (to be determined)
ENG 544 Teaching Creative Writing
M 5:00-7:50
Kristopher Jansma: jansmak@newpaltz.edu
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
Natalie Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones
Charles Baxter – Burning Down the House
Betsy Lerner – The Forest for the Trees
Matt Bell – Refuse to Be Done
Matthew Salesses – Craft in the Real World
ENG 552-01: Research Methods for MA Students
Online ASYNC / 1 credit
Prof. Jackie George
Course Description
This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the methods and tools of research in the study of literature. Working with both print and electronic resources, students will increase their knowledge and understanding of advanced research by locating and engaging with a variety of archives, bibliographies, databases, and materials.
Texts
All materials will be available on Blackboard.
ENG581 Studies in Twentieth Century American Fiction to 1945
Wednesday 5:00-7:50
Dr. Andrew Higgins
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.
ENG 585 Studies in Contemporary Criticism and Theory—Anthropocene Nonhumanities
M 5:00-7:50 PM
Professor Jed Mayer: mayere@newpaltz.edu
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
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
ENG 588 Studies in Comparative Literature
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Michelle Woods: woodsm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
In the 1980s, the Czech writer Milan Kundera warned the world that central and eastern Europe was a “laboratory of twilight”: a place where nations and people had been decimated and disappeared, along with basic human freedoms. For that reason, he argued there was a real urgency to reading literature and writing from that area of the world in order to understand not only what had gone wrong but also what might go wrong here. In this class, we will read novels, stories, poetry, plays and non-fiction from central and eastern Europe to think about the slide into totalitarianism and authoritarianism, genocide, what a nation might be, and whether we can even trouble the idea of what an imagined Europe is or might be (through cultural texts from the “other” Europe). We’ll be reading Karel Čapek’s early 20th century plays about automation (“RUR” – the play that introduced the word ‘robot’ into the English language) and pandemics leading to totalitarianism, “The White Plague,” through Kafka’s stories, to WWII and Cold War literature, including work by Anna Akhmatova, Vasily Grossman, Milan Kundera, Wisława Szymborska (Nobel Prize, 1996), Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, Czesław Miłosz (Nobel Prize, 1980), Magda Szabo, Crista Wolf, to contemporary writers such as Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Prize, 2019), László Krasznahorkai, the Belarusian-Ukrainian non-fiction writer, Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Prize, 2015), and the young Deaf Ukrainian poet, Ilya Kaminsky.
Possible Texts
Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
Karel Čapek, “RUR” and “The White Plague”
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Václav Havel, “Protest” and “The Power of the Powerless”
Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
Franz Kafka, Selected Stories
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
ENG 589 From Gutenberg to Google Books
T 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Thomas Olsen: olsent@newpaltz.edu
Note: With Consent of Instructor this Course may be used to fulfill Literature before 1800 Requirement
Course Description
This seminar is almost certainly going to be unlike any of your previous English courses. Neither a literature course nor a writing course, it will focus on the book as a material object and as the object of many theories concerning its history and the social practices that developed around it. Although I will teach to all interest areas, I anticipate that the course will be especially valuable for those hoping to enter some facet of the publishing industry.
We will actually begin before Gutenberg, before the printed book existed, but when Europe already had millions of manuscript books and a very robust, sophisticated book economy. Gutenberg’s new technology soon transformed how European society organized itself and it would eventually change the world, too. Our course will follow these changes through the later medieval period, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the age of European and North American Industrialization, the age of Empires, and into the post-imperial era. We will devote the second part of the course to the so-called Second Gutenberg Revolution: the rise of digital publishing, digital reading, the modern marketplace—in short, the information revolution we are living through.
As part of our inquiry, we will combine theoretical and hands-on encounters with books of all kinds, including several field trips and guest visits, on campus and off. We will also consider topics such as literacy and social change, the book as an instrument of political power, the book as a world economic force, the evolution of book design, the changing roles of libraries, and the cognitive dimensions of reading.
A short paper, presentation or presentations, and a final research paper on a topic of your choosing will make up the major requirement of the course.
Possible Books
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (Norton, 2010 ISBN 978-0393339758)
Solveig Robinson, The Book in Society (Broadview, 2104 ISBN 978-1-55481-074-1)
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think (Penguin, 2013 ISBN 978-1-101-63871-2)
(NOTE: this list will be finalized over the summer and communicated in advance to registered students)
Many of our readings will be articles, chapters, and web sites posted online on our course portal. These are all integral parts of the course, to be read with care and thought before the class meeting in which they are discussed. I also strongly recommend that you plan to print them out and read them on paper (our course will help you to see why).
