200-level Courses 
ENG 200-1: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
Rudolf Kossmann
ENG 200-2: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
Marlis Paffenroth
ENG 200-3: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
Marlis Paffenroth
ENG 200-4: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
Robert Singleton
ENG 200-5: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
John Langan
ENG 206-1: General Honors English 2
Harry Stoneback
ENG 206-2: General Honors English 2
Donna Baumler
ENG 206-3: General Honors English 2
Rudolf Kossman
ENG 206-4: General Honors English 2
ENG 206-5: General Honors English 2
Rudolf Kossmann
ENG 210-1: Great Books Western
Kenneth Moss
ENG 210-2: Great Books Western
Fred K. Anderson
ENG 210-3: Great Books Western
Vianney-Benca
ENG 210-4: Great Books Western
Landan Gross
ENG 211-1: Great Books Asian Classics
Andrew Schonebaum
ENG 211-2: Great Books Asian Classics
Heinz Insu Fenkl
ENG 224-1: Expository Writing
Stauffer-Merle
ENG 224-2: Expository Writing
Mary Fakler
ENG 224-3: Expository Writing
Mary Fakler
ENG 224-4: Expository Writing
Robert Singleton
ENG 226-1: Practical Grammar
Doris McCabe
ENG 230-1: Women in Literature
Heather Hewett
ENG 230-2: Women in Literature
Stella Deen
ENG 230-3: Women in Literature
Marystella Deen
ENG 230-4: Women in Literature
Nicholas Wright
ENG 230-5: Women in Literature
Kathena DeGrassi
ENG 231-1: American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Amelia Rose
ENG 231-2: American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Amelia Rose
ENG 231-3: American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Rhonda Shary
ENG 231-4: American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Sarah Wyman
ENG 231-5: American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Sarah Wyman
ENG 255-1: Contemporary Issues and Literature
Peggy Hach
ENG 255-2: Contemporary Issues and Literature
Rhonda Shary
ENG 255-3: Contemporary Issues and Literature
Lauren Yanks
ENG 255-4: Contemporary Issues and Literature
Lauren Yanks
ENG 299-1: Contemporary Asian Film
Heinz Insu Fenkl
ENG 301-1: English Literature 1
Thomas Festa
ENG 301-2: English Literature 1
Cyrus Mulready
ENG 301-3: English Literature 1
Michelle Woods
ENG 302-1: English Literature 2
Vicki Tromanhauser
ENG 302-2: English Literature 2
Jed Mayer
ENG 302-3: English Literature 2
Jackie George
ENG 302-4: English Literature 2
Mary Holland
ENG 307-1: The Novel
Jackie George
ENG 308-1: Short Story
Dennis Doherty
ENG 331-1: American Literature 1
Andrew Higgins
ENG 331-2: American Literature 1
Matt Newcomb
ENG 331-3: American Literature 1
Jan Schmidt
ENG 332-1: American Literature 2
Robert Waugh
ENG 332-2: American Literature 2
Fiona Paton
ENG 332-3: American Literature 2
Harry Stoneback
ENG 345-1: Creative Writing Workshop 1
John Langan
ENG 345-2: Creative Writing Workshop 1
Laurence Carr
ENG 345-3: Creative Writing Workshop 1
Laurence Carr
ENG 345-4: Creative Writing Workshop 1
Dennis Doherty
ENG 345-5: Creative Writing Workshop 1
Claire Hero
ENG 345-6: Creative Writing Workshop 1
James Richards
ENG 355-1: The Bible
Christopher Link
ENG 355-2: The Bible
Christopher Link
ENG 372-1: Fiction into Film
Christopher Link
ENG 393-1: Australasian Literature
Claire Hero
ENG 393-2: Folklore and Myth
Heinz Insu Fenkl
ENG 393-3: Mythic Modernism
Kenneth Moss
ENG 406-1: Shakespeare 1
Tina Iraca
ENG 406-2: Shakespeare 1
Tina Iraca
ENG 407-1: Shakespeare 2
Cyrus Mulready
ENG 407-2: Shakespeare 2
Daniel Kempton
ENG 413-1: 18th Century English Lit
Nancy Johnson
ENG 420-1: Literary Criticism
Thomas Festa
ENG 423-1: 20th Century Criticism
Andrew Schonebaum
ENG 427-01: British and American Literature since 1945
Mary Holland
ENG 436-1: 19th Century American Literature
Fred Anderson
ENG 445-1: Creative Writing Workshop 2
Laurence Carr
ENG 445-2: Creative Writing Workshop 2
Dennis Doherty
ENG 445-3: Creative Writing Workshop 2
Heinz Insu Fenkl
ENG 450-1: Seminar in Poetry
Robert Waugh
ENG 451-1: Senior Seminar
Marystella Deen
ENG 451-2: Senior Seminar
Cyrus Mulready
ENG 453-1: The Craft of Poetry
Dennis Doherty
ENG 455-1: The Craft of Dramatic Writing
Laurence Carr
ENG 460-1: Classic Juvenile Fantasy Literature
Jed Mayer
ENG 470-1: Major Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Robert Waugh
ENG 470-2: Major Authors: Sylvia Plath
Fiona Paton
ENG 476-1: Graphic Literature
Pauline Uchmanowicz
ENG 493-1: Holocaust Literature
Jan Schmidt
ENG 493-2: Irish Literature
Michelle Woods
ENG 493-3: American Renaissance
Andrew Higgins
ENG 493-4: Philosophies on Writing
ENG 493-5: 18th Century and Empire
Nancy Johnson
Graduate Courses
ENG 500-1: English Proseminar
Vicki Tromanhauser
ENG 501-1: Intro to Old English
Daniel Kempton
ENG 509-1: 18th Century English Literature
Nancy Johnson
ENG 517-1: English Romantic Literature
Jackie George
ENG 519-1: Studies in Victorian Literature
Jed Mayer
ENG 539-1: 20th Century American Fiction after 1945
Fiona Paton
ENG 574-1: Studies in Shakespeare
Thomas Olsen
ENG 579-1: Studies in 19th Century American Literature
Andrew Higgins
ENG 581-1: Studies in 20th Century American Fiction
Harry Stoneback
ENG 585-1: Studies in Contemporary Criticism
Thomas Festa
ENG 586-1: Studies in Contemporary American Literature
Mary Holland
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
200-level courses
ENG 200-01: Analysis and Interpretation of Literature
TF 10:50-12:05Instructor: Dr. R. R. Kossmann
Course Description
In this course we will study poetry, prose and drama. We will do close readings of selected works and write both in-class and out-of-class brief papers on assigned topics.
Required Texts
The Portable edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature (2006)
Edith Hamilton -- Mythology (Little, Brown-- 1998)
A college-level dictionary (not a paperback)
Standards & Style:Writing for English Studies
Dr. R.R. Kossmann
Course Description
To perfect composition skills and analysis of literary texts through the frequent writing of essays on selected short stories. To (re)acquaint oneself with the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th ed.
A college-level dictionary (not a paperback)
Standards and Style: Writing for English Studies
The Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers
Edith Hamilton -- Mythology
Dr. R.R. Kossmann
Course Description
This course will focus on perfecting composition skills and analysis of literary texts through the frequent writing of essays on selected short stories.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th ed.
A college-level dictionary (not a paperback)
Standards and Style: Writing for English Studies
The Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers, 8th edition
Edith Hamilton -- Mythology
ENG 210-01: Great Books Western
TF 3:05-4:20
Professor Ken Moss: mossk@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
Offered as a compendium of the great works of Western civilization from the earliest surviving written record through early Christian writings, the course is presented chronologically so the student can understand the historical context for each new idea and the genres which develop with them. The course is divided into sections beginning with recently translated poetry from Goddess cultures in Mesopotamia, and proceeding to the Old Testament, Greek and Roman writings and early Christian conceptions. In this way the class provides a unique vehicle for understanding of the roots of our culture today and the literary works that both reflect and promulgate the fundamental concepts and choices of the past 4500 years -- the values they endorse and the metaphors for understanding life they offer. Students should be prepared for considerable reading and an adventuresome and lively class. Successful students will be able to see themselves as part of the continuum of human development rather than as isolated beings who came from nothing two decades ago. Increased knowledge of Western Mythological references, etymological vocabulary expansion, familiarity with famous classical literary works and authors, and rational discussion of the basic choices and values of western civilization are some of the outcomes expected from students in this course.
Required Texts
Western Literature in a World Context Volume One
Myths from Mesopotamia
Gilgamesh
Hamilton's Mythology
ENG 210-02 Great Books Western
TF 1:40-2:55
Instructor: Fred K Anderson, Permadjunct@aol.com
Course Description
In his essay The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson points out that all books were "new" at the time of their writing, and that we should use their ideas, some now old, as launching pads for our own ideas. Thoreau considered writing classical when it expressed "the noblest thoughts of man." William Faulkner considered good literature as that which, among other things, created "something that did not exist before." In this course, we will study a number of 'classical' writings, covering a period from about 2000 BCE to the middle of the twentieth century CE, the persistence and development of various themes and genres, inquire into the rationale for considering a writing 'classical;' and the value of such literature. We will, then, consider the ideas expressed in these works and their relevance to our own time and lives-do or should we read them as they might have been understood in the past. We will also consider whether a "classical" film can be thought of as classical literature.
Works read may include
Beowulf
The Book of Job
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Aristophanes. Lysistrata,
Camus, Albert. The Plague
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Casablanca
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Dante, The Inferno
Euripides, Medea
Homer, The Odyssey
Ibsen, Henrick. A Doll House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Voltaire. Candide
ENG 210-04 Great Books Western
TF 3:05-4:20
Instructor: Landan Gross, grosslg@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course is designed for students to engage with and scrutinize foundational texts (ancient creation stories and cultural epics through early Christian writings and the New Testament) that have influenced the Western literary (and general artistic) tradition. The material will be presented chronologically, and the class will begin to address not only the issues of "canonicity" and the attributes of "classic" literature, but ultimately, I am hopeful we can examine both why and where particular works pervade our contemporary political, social, and cultural landscapes.
Works May Include
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Mesopotamian creation myths
Homer, The Odyssey
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
Eurpides, Medea
David Simon, The Wire
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Irvine Welsh, The Acid House
Juvenal, the Satires
Dante, the Inferno
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The Hebrew Bible (selections-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Job, The Hebrew Prophets)
The New Testament (selections-The Gospels, Book of Revelation)
St. Augustine, City of God
D.H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died
ENG 211-01 Great Books: Asian Classics
Professor Andrew Schonebaum
Course Description
Great Books: Asian Classics is based on a shared reading and discussion of major works of literature, religion, and philosophy from a number of East Asian traditions. These texts have been selected because they have been recognized as classics within East Asia, setting the terms of an ongoing cultural conversation, and also because they speak to human concerns not necessarily limited to particular cultural or historical contexts. As a participant in this course you will be encouraged to join in this conversation, to confront these works directly, to read these classic texts so as to be able to reflect meaningfully about them in their own terms and in terms of your own traditions. That we read in order to talk back, is basic to our colloquium as well. As the colloquium is conceived as an extended conversation, your active participation is essential. This means that you are expected to attend every class having carefully read and thought about the assigned texts so as to be fully involved in the conversation. In order to contribute to this, weekly reading questions will be provided to help guide your readings and suggest possible starting points for our discussions. Because the works selected stretch across two and a half millennia and include translations from Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, the course aims less to transmit a comprehensive body of historical knowledge than to allow participants an initial but direct engagement with some of the more significant literary, intellectual, and religious texts of East Asia. The course usually covers The Analects, The Zhuangzi, The Tale of Genji, Love Suicides, Tang Poetry, The Journey to the West, The Story of the Stone, The Poetry of Basho, and some modern works.
ENG 211-2: Great Books Asian Classics
Professor Heinz I. Fenkl
Course Description
This course is an introduction to the ancient cultures of Asia through their seminal literature. By examining selected literary/religious texts, we will attempt to understand fundamental ideas that form the worldviews of some of the great cultures of Asia. Throughout the semester, we will be studying texts that give insight into Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism -- religious/philosophical systems that form the infrastructure of contemporary Asia and which have a profound influence even today. Although we will be reading "old" texts, a significant amount of our time will be spent in drawing comparative or illustrative examples from contemporary Asian and Western culture.
Required Texts (at the campus bookstore)
Eastern Philosophy for Beginners, Jim Power & Joe Lee
Bhagavad Gita, Juan Mascaro, ed.
Tao Te Ching, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, tr.
Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze, ed.
A Dream of Nine Clouds, James Gale, tr. (free online edition)
Monkey, Arthur Waley, tr.
Film: Little Buddha
ENG 230-1: Women in Literature
Professor Heather Hewett
Course Description
This writing intensive course will examine a selection of women's writing in English. In our reading of a range of genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama), we will explore the following questions: How do these authors write and rewrite the self and the family; sexuality, desire, and the body; history and cultural memory; migration, diaspora, and globalization; myth, religion, and ritual; language and literary tradition; and art and the figure of the artist? How do they represent gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, caste, culture, religion, and nationality? What literary choices do they make in pursuit of their artistic and political goals? In our discussion of these texts, we will pay special attention to their cultural and historical contexts, the aspects of their literary history (such as modernism, realism, magic realism), and the elements of their literary form (such as narrative, tropes, point of view, irony, etc.).
Texts may include
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Leila Aboulela, The Translator
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
Nadine Gordimer, Selected Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Monica Ali, Brick Lane
ENG 230-02 Women in Literature
TF 1:40-2:55
ENG 230-03 Women in Literature
TF 10:50-12:05
Professor Stella Deen: deenm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
In this writing-intensive class, students will read and write to understand, respond to, and critically analyze representations of women in Western literature, especially the English and American traditions. As we consider the representation of women from classical times to the twentieth century, we will compare the preoccupations and literary strategies of male authors representing women to those of female authors speaking in their own voices. As women enter the literary marketplace, we will investigate their conception of literary tradition. To what extent do women writers accommodate themselves to an existing literary tradition, and to what extent do they reshape the conventions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to express their own perceptions and beliefs? This course meets the Writing-Intensive and the General Education Humanities requirements at SUNY New Paltz.
Texts may include
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Gilbert and Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (third edition), volume 2
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Ibsen, A Doll's House
Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Sophocles, Antigone
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Woolf, A Room of One's Own
ENG 230-04: Women In Literature
TF 3:05-4:20
Professor Nicholas Wright: wrightn@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course offers undergraduate students exposure to representations of women in literary works from the story of Lilith to Doris Lessing's The Cleft. In between those two texts, we will read essays, novels, plays, poems, and short stories; each literary form will allow us the chance to discuss how these forms represent literary art and a window into women's history. The texts we analyze and we interpret will inform us on: (a) how to think, read, and write like feminist literary scholars; and (b) how to approach literary problems as trained feminist specialists in the field do. These skills will be practiced and assessed through writing and class discussions.
Required Texts
In order to make this topic of women in literature manageable, sexuality and gender will often appear. Upon reading the following texts, students will have a basis for further learning about women in literature. Madame de Lafayette's The Princesse de Clèves, Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and Doris Lessing's The Cleft will provide us with a perspective into the novel form. Euripides' Medea and Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues will give us with an angle into the dramatic form. Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and Katha Pollitt's Learning to Drive will offer us with a view into the essay form. Poems and short stories are yet to be determined. Seminal readings of feminist criticism--think Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and Betty Freidan--will also appear.
ENG230-05: Women in Literature Course Description
Instructor: Kathena Hasbrouck DeGrassi
Course Description
Women in Literature is a writing-intensive course that meets the General Education Humanities requirements at SUNY New Paltz and provides students with the opportunity to critically understand and write about representations of women in literature. We will focus on a variety of important thematic issues, such as the roles family, sex, violence, and society play in shaping identity. Please bear in mind, that although this is a class about women in literature, the issues that will be covered are ones that affect people universally, not just women. Both women and men can easily connect to the texts, though perhaps on different levels. That said, students will be responsible not only for reading works from different genres (including fiction, drama, poetry, and essays), but also for presenting their findings to the class in discussion seminars. Together, we will come to understand the changes women have seen, for better or for worse, in American and European literature and society over the course of the last few centuries.
Texts May Include
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Rebecca Gilman, Boy Gets Girl
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
ENG231-01: American Women Writers of the 20th Century
ENG231-02: American Women Writers of the 20th Century
Dr. Amelia Rose: Phone: (845) 417-1735 Email: amelia1717@aol.com
Course Description
In this course, we will read a variety of 20th century women writers - African American, Asian American, Native American, Latina, and European American - with attention to commonalities and differences among women, the social context of women's lives, and the formal thematic issues that make this literature such a rich and rewarding area of study. We will explore the possibilities of a "women's tradition" in American prose literature, emphasizing its diversity and intersections with other traditions. Students should come away from the course with the major trends in 20th century literature (the movement from modernism to postmodernism and the presence of realism). Students will also be introduced to the materials and methods of research in this area.
Students will use reading and writing to understand, respond to, and critically analyze diverse writing. Observation, description, interrogation, analysis, instructor and peer response and revision enable clear, logical, analytical thinking and writing about literature.
ENG 231-03: 20th Century American Women Writers (cross-listed with Women's Studies)
Professor Rhonda Shary
Course Description
The works written by women that we will study range widely in scope and subject, from intensely intimate, personal experiences to epic historical events that shape society and nations. The dates of the works to be studied span slightly more than the 20th century, from 1899 to 2007, allowing us to consider the historical development of women writers, and the central, often leading, roles they played, and continue to play, in the development of artistic and social movements.
Through poetry, short stories, novels, creative non-fiction, essays, drama, and film-and an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature-we will follow women's lives throughout the century into the present day. We will consider the political, social, economic, and artistic contexts affecting these writers as women and influencing their work; and we will discuss the contributions of these writers in re-defining fundamental assumptions about power, gender, identity, and women's artistic and political achievements.
Among the works from which I'll choose the final list of readings/viewings are
Novels, Essays, Poetry, Short Fiction:
The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin
The House of the Spirits (1982) by Isabel Allende
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (2005)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan (2001)
Poems by Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde
Short stories by Tillie Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O'Connor, ZZ Packer
Essays by Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde
Screenplays/Drama:
Juno (2007), screenplay by Diablo Cody
Uncommon Women and Others by Wendy Wasserstein (Film 1978, based on 1977 Play)
The Women (1939), dir by George Cukor, written by Clare Booth Luce
The Little Foxes (1941), dir. by William Wyler, screenplay by Lillian Hellman
You and Me and Everyone We Know (2007), written and directed by Miranda July
ENG-231-04 American Women Writers of the 20th Century
ENG 231-05: American Women Writers of the 20th Century
Professor Sarah Wyman
Course Description
"Classics" of the canon of U.S. Women's literature as well as more contemporary works map women's progress over the last century. We will look for the daring and experimental in the old, for signs of continuity and change in the new. We will study the way women authors have portrayed both male and female characters, how they have contributed to and/or dismantled cultural stereotypes of gender identity. Theoretical extracts (including essays and arguments crafted by bell hooks, Helene Cixous, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Alice Walker, and Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar) will clarify the major twentieth-century issues in North American feminism, These problems often play out in women's fiction and poetry. Students will have a good deal of practice writing both formal, analytic essays and more informal response papers. The classroom will be our site for lively discussion in a seminar setting. This writing intensive course also fulfills the GE III diversity requirement.
Required Texts
All short stories and poems will be provided on our blackboard. These include works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Ursula Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, Sylvia Plath and others.
We will read these novels:
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street. NY: Vintage, 1991.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening. Signet, 1976.
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John NY: Noonday, [1983] 1997.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior. NY: Vintage, 1976.
ENG 255-02: Contemporary Issues and Literature: Diversity and Identity in the 21st Century United/Untied States
Professor Rhonda Shary
Course Description
Contemporary American society seems to be in a "wanderland," finding ourselves in a time of sweeping change in the identity of this great democratic experiment, this evolving nation. While the past century or so seemed to solidify the country's identity as white male European Christian capitalist leaders of the free world, it is now apparent that this identity is changing radically and rapidly, seemingly on a daily basis. We find ourselves in economic crisis, in the aftermath of so-called terrorist attacks and in the midst of unpopular wars, of environmental stresses and cultural and societal conflicts over the most basic of human rights and issues. These forces have all converged to create a sense of a new, as yet unknown, America emerging from the old, and its identity, in flux, has become rich material for literary and cinematic artists.
We will study some works that have been created in this new century by a diverse range of artists whose visions reflect these anxieties and new realities. The final list of works to be studied will include the following, along with others to be determined:
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan (2001) - An eerily prescient novel about the culture of celebrity, reality TV, America's post-industrialist economy, "terrorist" attacks, and the fluid nature of identity and the permanent bonds of love
Short stories by Junot Diaz and ZZ Packer - Witty, hip, anguished, and compassionate stories about Latino and African American life in contemporary America
Crash (2004), written and directed by Paul Haggis - The Oscar-winning film about multi-cultural crises in Los Angeles and the ways in which we might not all get along
The Laramie Project (2002), written and dir. Moises Kaufman - The award-winning play, adapted to film by the playwright, about the effects on the people of a Wyoming town-and on the world-of the 1998 murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard
ENG 301-01: English Literature 1
MWR 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Professor Thomas Festa: festat@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course is an introduction to the major works of English literature from its inception to the age of Milton. Its primary focus is on the great works of the English canon in disparate literary genres including epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry as well as a variety of prose forms of writing. The course furthermore seeks to examine what it means for a work of literature to be "canonical," and we will therefore ask fortuitously throughout the term what makes a work literary, what makes certain works particularly important to a tradition, and what connections persist between this literature and our present culture. While emphasizing a contextual overview of the historical and social worlds from which these works emerged, we will work to establish a clear sense of the skills required to read closely and well regardless of literary period. We will also endeavor to develop the kinds of critical argumentation necessary for success in the English major.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 8th edition (2006). Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt et al.
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence Miller (Yale University Press, 2001).
ENG 301-02: English Literature I
TWF 9:25-10:40
Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu
Course Description and Objectives
This course covers nearly a thousand years of what could easily be the most rich and diverse literature in the English language: from medieval fairy tales and Chaucer's travelers' stories to Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare's sonnets, biblical allegory and erotic love poetry. Our study will explore the very foundations of both English and American literary traditions, as we study the period that produced many literary "firsts": the first published collection of English poetry, the first English epic, and the first professional theatrical productions in England. The course will introduce students to this literature, but also further familiarize them to the skills of literary analysis, critical writing, and research. Course requirements include four critical writing and research exercises, two group presentations, periodic quizzes, class participation, and a final exam.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th Edition, Volumes A & B)
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (Folger Edition)
Standards & Style
ENG-301-03 English Literature 1
TWF 12.15-1.30
Professor Michelle Woods: woodsm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course begins at the beginnings of English literature with Beowulf, an epic set in Iceland, written in a different language (Anglo-Saxon) and translated by an Irish poet, and ends with a memoir written by Equiano, a freed (possible African or possibly American) slave. It focuses on the transnational roots of what we perceive to be English literature and on the formation of a modern English identity through literature. It also focuses on women and women's writing. The course centers on six thematic areas: Mythic Kings (Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Morte d'Arthur, Lanval); Mythic Queens (Fairie Queene, Letters of Queens Elizabeth and Mary); Adam and Eve (Paradise Lost, Eve's Apology in Defense of Women); Everyman and Everywoman (Everyman, excerpts from Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and excerpts from Marjory Kempe's Book); Staging Identity (Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the first staged play by a woman, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam); and Travels (Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Behn's Oroonoko and Equiano's Interesting Narrative).
ENG 302-01: English Literature 2
TWF 1:40-2:55
Professor Vicki Tromanhauser: tromanhv@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course will introduce students to some of the major works of English literature from five distinct periods: Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, and Contemporary. Throughout our survey of these periods, we will examine writing from a range of genres including poetry, drama, the novel, and the short story as well as various forms of non-fictional prose. Along the way, we will consider what grants a particular work canonical or exemplary status, what makes it especially representative of a period, and how it asserts its place within a tradition. The course is also intended to give students the tools for understanding literature in the light of its social and historical contexts as well as to help them to develop their skills of reading texts closely and forming critical arguments about the works.
Texts (available at the Campus Bookstore)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th edition, volumes C, D, E, and F)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Gray, 3rd ed. (Norton Critical Edition, 2001)
ENG 302-02: English Literature 2
TWF 12:15-1:30
Professor Jed Mayer
Course Description and Objectives
This course will survey some of the major literary works from the last several hundred years, emphasizing connections between these works and the spread of British Empire and industry. We will explore the ways poets and novelists responded to these changes, and how literature provided an imaginative space for exploring ethical problems raised by the innovations of modernity. As the British Empire expanded its dominion, its literature came increasingly to address global concerns, and in this course we will consider these works as both critical of, and complicit with, British colonial attitudes. The environmental impact of industrialization provided a similar field for ethical speculation in British literature, and we will read a number of literary works which address concerns we continue to grapple with today.
This course will emphasize close readings of many of the era's most significant works of literature, making connections between literary form and historical context, style and substance. Students will learn to develop these close readings in classroom discussions and in formal essays that will help students in articulating complex issues, from the past to the present.
Texts
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
English Romantic Poetry Anthology
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Eng 302-03: English Literature 2 -- The Country and the City
TWF 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Professor Jackie George
Course Description
This course will survey some of the major literary works to emerge from Great Britain over the last several hundred years or so. Along the way, we will explore connections between the formal and thematic elements of each work, as well as the social, cultural, and political concerns of its era. Central to our concerns will be the changing cultural and literary relationships between the country and the city in Britain during this time, particularly within the context of imperialism and industrialization. Our readings will include poetry, nonfiction prose, drama, and prose fiction, all organized under five broad literary-historical categories: Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Contemporary. In addition to studying these works, the course will offer students tools for reading texts closely and practice in developing critical arguments about literature.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., volumes C,D,E and F
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.
ENG 302-04: British Literature 2
MWR 12:15-1:30
Professor Mary Holland
Course Description
This course will introduce students to more than three centuries of English literature in the context of the socio-historical moments out of which it sprang. Beginning with Neoclassical literature, we will move through Romanticism, the Victorian period, Modernism, Postmodernism, and contemporary literature, encountering along the way changing notions about politics and governmental rule, history, science, rationalism, empire, gender, and the nature of the individual and her role in society. As societal views change literature changes with them, adapting to reflect new ideas about what art is and what it can accomplish in the world. So we will also notice formal developments as we read four different genres (poetry, novel, play, essay) of literature. Our method of reading will be close textual analysis: looking carefully at textual form and language as the basis for drawing larger conclusions about the work as a whole. To this end, we will study poetic and narrative techniques and practice observing these techniques in poetry and prose as we craft our own critical essays about them. The course will also introduce and employ MLA style formatting and citation.
Required Texts
Norton Anthology of English Literature, volumes C, D, E, and F
Standards & Style
Text selections on electronic reserve.
Eng 307-01: The Novel -- Nerds in Fiction
TF 12:15-1:30
Professor Jackie George
Course Description
In this course, our primary objective will be to study the novel: What does it looks like? What does it do? What connections might we draw between a novel's formal features and its thematic content? Coursework will be devoted to reading texts closely and developing critical arguments about literature, taking as our subject the role of the nerd in fiction. The concept of the nerd emerges in a diverse collection of novels, and the nerd (like the form of the novel itself) is one that can take different forms under different circumstances. What is the difference, for example, between a "nerd" and an "outcast"? How do our understandings of nerds change within various cultural contexts? How have nerds found a home in fiction?
Required Texts
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
ENG 308-02: Short Story
T F 12:15 - 1:30
Dr. R.R.Kossmann
Course Description
A study of the short story as a literary genre through reading and analysis of selected short stories by 19th-21st-century authors, American, British & European. Also, acquainting/reacquainting oneself with the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Texts (available in the Campus Bookstore):
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th ed.
A college-level dictionary (not a paperback)
Standards and Style: Writing for English Studies
Edith Hamilton - Mythology
ENG 331-01: American Literature I
TWF 1:40-2:55
Andrew Higgins: higginsa@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course is an introduction to American literature through 1900. We will begin with the writings of Puritan New England and continue through to the naturalist writers of the late 1800s. By the end of this course, you should (1) be familiar with the works on the syllabus and the major voices of American literature through 1900, (2) have a rough understanding of the lives of these writers, (3) be able to identify and describe the major eras and movements of early American literature (including Puritan culture & theology, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Realism), and be able to show how particular works relate to those eras and movements, (4) be able to identify and describe significant genres and forms of early American literature, (5) be able to describe the development of poetry, fiction, and the memoir in American literature through 1900, and (6) know how the major historical events of early American history impacted American literature.
Texts
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th Ed. Vols. A, B, & C.
ENG 331-02: American Literature I
TWF 9:25-10:40 a.m.
Instructor: Matthew Newcomb
Course Description
American Literature 1 features texts from the colonial period through the Civil War years. Readings will include letters, essays, short stories, poetry, and at least one full-length novel. Pieces from within and beyond the traditional canon will be included to provide multiple perspectives on each historical period and literary movement. Students will be expected to recognize correlations between key texts and their historical, social, and political contexts; to examine critical themes like religious freedom, slavery and abolitionism, native and colonial land ownership, democracy and the formation of a new nation; and to discern the diverse approaches to founding national identity within pieces. The theme of writing/making new worlds will be prevalent throughout the course.
Required Text
W.W. Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 7th Edition (Volume 1-ISBN
0393930580).
Students will write multiple papers about the class readings.
ENG 331-03: American Literature I
MWR 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Course Description
This course is an introduction to American literature through 1900. We will begin with the writings of the early explorers and recorded Native American myths and continue through to the naturalist writers of the late 1800s. The authors chosen for this course represent only some of the many writers whose works reflect the cultural climate of this nation from the early colonial settlements through the Civil War and to the end of the nineteenth century. This course will help you to put some of America's national literature into an historical and social perspective that will add to your understanding of the "American" experience. In an attempt to understand how these texts have come to be defined as "American," we will examine their historical, social, and political contexts. We will approach selected canonical and non-canonical works as active agents that have participated in the creation of multiple visions of "American" identity. As we proceed through the class, we will entertain the following questions: How do these writers deal with the problem of "American" identity? What are the metaphors and images of "American" identity and the "American" experience that are represented in the texts? How have they been conceived and reconceived? What are visions of the American dream? What is the underside of the American dream?
The major texts for the course are Volumes A and B of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
ENG 332-01 American Literature 2
MWR 9:25 to 10:40
Professor Robert Waugh: waughr@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
We shall be reading the classic American authors of the twentieth century, such figures as Frost, Pound, Eliot, O"Neill, Faulkner, Hemingway, Bishop, Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath, as well as many others, figures who changed our perception of the world during a dangerous and accelerating century. Requirements will include a weekly response paper, quizzes, a three-page paper at the end of the semester, and a final.
Required texts:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed., vol. D and E.
ENG 332-02: American Literature 2
TWF 12.15-1.30
Professor Fiona Paton patonf@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This 4-credit survey course covers twentieth-century American literature from the perspectives of modernity and post-modernity. Important social, technological, and artistic changes are linked to some of the most influential and innovative writers of the past 100 years including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, and Toni Morrison. The multidisciplinary approach includes movie clips, painting, and music and makes extensive use of Blackboard for both online discussion and supporting materials. Through close analysis of texts in class we will test various interpretations and practice the skill of literary argument. Class time will be a combination of open discussion, small group activities, and in-class writing. You will take midterm and final exams consisting of short answer and essay sections, and you will write two papers, one short response piece and a longer research paper. Attendance is required and regular participation is expected.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Volumes D and E.
A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams (8th edition)
ENG 355-01: The Bible
TF 4:30-5:45
ENG 355-02: The Bible
TF 12:15-1:30
Professor Christopher Link: linkc@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course is a formal introduction to the academic study of the Bible, a collection of diverse texts which function as the sacred Scriptures of Jewish and Christian religious traditions and which also stand significantly in the background of much Western (as well as non-Western) literature and culture. The aim of the course is to familiarize students-at least in part-with texts from both the Hebrew Bible (known, in different configurations, as Tanakh or as the Old Testament) and the New Testament. In addition to becoming acquainted with many of the significant narratives, characters, and themes of the Bible, students will also gain a basic understanding of the formation of the biblical canon(s) and will be introduced to the methods and problems of biblical interpretation. Intended to be much more than an "appreciation course," ENG 355 is designed to help students think critically about these profoundly influential ancient texts.
The primary focus of this course will be upon the literary (i.e., narrative, poetic, and rhetorical) dimensions of the Bible; this, however, is not to say that the religious, theological, social, and historical aspects of the Bible will be ignored or relegated to secondary considerations only. Rather, for religion or history or any other aspect of the Bible to become manifest for consideration at all, we must start with a close reading of the biblical texts. For this reason, students must be prepared to attend carefully and diligently to the assigned readings, both in the Bible itself and in the supplemental critical materials. Course grades are based on quizzes, analysis/exegesis papers, attendance and participation, and a final exam.
Required Texts
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (with the Apocrypha), 3rd Edition, New Revised Standard Version
(NRSV). Michael D. Coogan, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible, 7th Edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
ENG 372-01 Fiction into Film
W 6:00-8:40
Professor Christopher Link: linkc@newpaltz.edu
Course Description and Objectives
This course will provide a critical introduction to the relationships between written fictional narratives (novels, novellas, short stories) and the films derived from them. As such, the course should in no way be considered exhaustive in its survey of fiction or cinema. Nevertheless, students may expect to gain a stronger understanding of each art form through a study of the techniques they share (e.g., plot, characterization, symbolism, etc.) as well as those they do not (e.g., selective literary description, filmic montage, etc.). Students will also develop significant critical approaches to literary texts and motion pictures through close reading, in-class discussion, and written analyses. Course grades are based on quizzes, analysis/response papers, attendance and participation, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
Anticipated Texts (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. 1962; New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. (ISBN: 0393312836)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. 1899; Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. (ISBN: 0393926362)
Graham Greene, The Third Man. 1950; New York: Penguin, 1999. (ISBN: 0140286829)
James Joyce, Dubliners. 1914; Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. (ISBN: 0393978516)
Herman Melville, Billy Budd. New York: Pocket Books, 2006. (ISBN: 1416523723)
Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, Edited with introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr., New York, Vintage Books, 1991. (ISBN: 0679727299)
Additional Required Reading Online (Available on Blackboard)
Cornell Woolrich, "Rear Window"
Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers"
And course-related critical essays, including selections from:
John M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes, eds., Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th Ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Anticipated Required Films for Viewing* in Spring 2009 (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, 1949, 104 min.)
Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, 112 min.)
The Dead (dir. John Huston, 1987, 83 min.)
The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946, 105 min.)
Billy Budd (dir. Peter Ustinov, 1962, 123 min.)
Lolita (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1962, 152 min.)
Lolita (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1997, 137 min.)
Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, 153 min.)
A Clockwork Orange (dir., Stanley Kubrick, 1971, 136 min.)
*PLEASE NOTE: With just a few exceptions, all films will be screened on Tuesdays at 6:00 P.M. If you are unable to attend the group screening on Tuesday evening, or if you miss an in-class screening, it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to view the required film (at Sojourner Truth Library, as a rental, etc.) before the next class meeting.
ENG 393-01: Australasian Literature
Professor Claire Hero
Course Description
Peter Carey's recent novel True History of the Kelly Gang begins with an epigraph from William Faulkner which might be seen as an epigraph for all Australasian texts: "The past is not dead. It is not even past." From the penal colonies of Australia to the planned Protestant communities of New Zealand to the imagined tropical paradise of the Pacific Islands, Australasia has often been remade by Europeans in the image of their own culture, and yet native cultures and ecosystems have over and over challenged their assumed sovereignty. In this course we will explore the ways in which the colonial past remains present by juxtaposing colonial texts with postcolonial texts, examining the way the past is shaped by and in turn shapes each generation's, and each ethnicity's, sense of national identity. We will also consider the way in which gender, class and ethnicity impact upon traditional aspects of literature such as narration, form and genre. This course will begin with a firm foundation in a history of Australasia, but will come to emphasize literature as the most compelling historical record of this complex region.
ENG 393-02: Folklore and Myth
Professor Heinz I. Fenkl
Course Description
This course is an introduction to the study of comparative narrative folklore, focusing primarily on folktales, myths, and legends. We begin by looking at the Jataka Tales from India and Aesop's Fables from Greece, examining and comparing the way in which folk narratives carry moral and ethical commentary. Continuing with an introduction to methodologies and theoretical approaches for interpreting the folktale, we will look at diverse manifestations of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story type from across the world, tracing possible origins and transmission routes all the way from East Asian "Grandmother Tiger" stories to American music videos, cartoons, and perfume commercials now proliferating on Youtube. A significant proportion of the stories we read will come from Asia (India, China, Vietnam, Korea, Tibet, and Japan). Toward the end of the semester, we will examine the impact of folktales on the new genre of "revisionary fairytales" and the phenomenon of urban legends in various forms, including their expression on college campuses and in contemporary horror films. Class assignments will include the collection of local, regional, or campus legends.
Anticipated Texts (subject to change)
Dundes, Alan, ed., Little Red Riding Hood: a Casebook
Fenkl, Heinz Insu, Korean Folktales
Wi Ki-cheol, The Tiger & the Persimmons
J. Brunvand, ed., The Big Book of Urban Legends
Also online readings of public domain folktale and fairytale collections.
Films:
Empress Chung
Freeway
ENG 393-03: Mythic Modernism Oz to Potter
TF 12:15 -1:30
Professor Ken Moss: mossk@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
Mythic Modernism consists primarily of Bildungsroman (coming of age tales) presented chronologically, interspersed with supplemental material taken from psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual arts and literary criticism. By considering the effects of 20th century insights on classical perceptions of heroes growing up while making mythic life journeys, we examine the re-conceptions that give modern novels their unique twists, reflecting and reshaping consciousness in new generations. The selections bridge a wide range of protagonists and emergent aspects of maturation. Ultimately we consider the shifting archetypology of modern characters (like the return of Lilith, the renewed optimism of the puer eternis (boy wonder), and the emergent prevalence of the warrior woman to name a few) that have altered genderal, societal and individual aspirations. In class movies and excerpts there from will be interspersed with the literature to prompt and focus discussion. This will also lead to consideration of the effect of other media on persons growing up in modern times, and to what extent these more easily accessible characterizations shape our own perceptions, values and choices, often without considering them as carefully or consciously as we might with literature. Individualizes workbooks, shared formal papers and active discussions anticipated.
Texts
Baum , The Wizard of Oz
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hesse, Siddhartha
Woolf, Jacob's Room
Lucas, Star Wars
Rowling, Harry Potter
Eng 407-01: Shakespeare II
TF 1:40-2:55
Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu
Course Description and Objectives
This course will offer students an in-depth look at the drama and poetry of Shakespeare and the culture of his early modern England. We will read plays selected from each of the three major genres (comedies, tragedies and histories), including Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, I Henry IV, Henry V, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra as well as The Rape of Lucrece, one of Shakespeare's narrative poems. Lectures, discussions and writing assignments will focus on helping students gain a rich knowledge and comprehension of Shakespeare's language and how his plays were performed, but also on investigating the deeper social questions raised by his plays. How should a society treat criminals, foreigners, and other outsiders? Are gender roles and class positions like actors roles, parts to be learned and played? How does our history affect the present? When is vengeance (and the violence that inevitably accompanies it) morally justifiable? We will also look at modern performances of Shakespeare's plays as we consider the continued popularity and influence of Shakespearean drama on our own time. No previous coursework on Shakespeare is necessary or expected for students enrolled in the course.
Required Texts
The Norton Shakespeare (1st or 2nd Edition)
Standards & Style
Text selections on electronic reserve
Optional Text
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (2nd Edition)
ENG 407-02: Shakespeare II
MR 1:40-2:55
Professor Daniel Kempton
Course Description and Objectives
This course will address representative texts from the four dramatic genres, with a particular emphasis on the theme of British/English history. Plays will include Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, King Lear, Macbeth, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline.
Required Text
Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
ENG 413-01: Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Professor Nancy Johnson
Course Description
This course is an undergraduate-level survey of British literature and culture from the "long eighteenth century." We will begin with the Restoration (1660), and we will end with the transition to Romanticism (1790s). The primary goal of the course is to study the traditions of eighteenth-century literature through canonical and non-canonical texts that are drawn from a variety of disciplines and genres, such as political theory, satire, drama, poetry, and the novel. Another aim of the course is to examine the historical and critical contexts of eighteenth-century studies, and we will do so through selected secondary readings and research projects. Readings will include Aphra Behn's play The Rover, Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels, and Horace Walpole's Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.
ENG 420-01: Literary Criticism: Plato to Nietzsche
MWR 10:50-12:05
Professor Thomas Festa: festat@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This class is designed to introduce you to the history of literary criticism-but what is literary criticism? We will endeavor to discover the nature of critical thought about literature (and art more broadly) in order first to understand what literary criticism was for its first 2400 years or so. At times, such an undertaking will involve analyzing the age-old attacks upon literary art by the philosophical tradition; at other times, it will mean challenging the philosophical premises of an act of interpretation itself. One thing this course is not meant to do: teach readily applicable techniques for interpreting individual works of art. Although such an outcome seems the inevitable result of thinking about the nature of literary reflection, we will not pursue interpretations of specific poems, novels, etc. And while we will not read any primary sources written after 1900, this course will at all points assume that today's theory will and should inflect our historical enterprise, but that the intellectual history that underpins theory as it exists today has a value independent of its use for contemporary writing about literature. This is not a class in practical criticism so much as a course designed to stimulate thoughtful questions about the task of criticism itself.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in Sophocles I (U of Chicago P).
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (U of Michigan P).
ENG 427-01: British and American Literature since 1945
MR 3:05-4:20
Professor Mary Holland
Course Description
The "contemporary period" is a puzzling term, the literature signified and collected by it changing according to who defines it and when. Further complicating its canon-forming, the period of the contemporary constantly grows and shifts as we drag it along with our unfolding present. We will wrestle with various approaches to and understandings of the "contemporary" as we read novels, short stories, and poems written after 1945 by some of its most well-known and respected British and American authors. Along the way, we will consider how "contemporary" overlaps with and/or diverges from other currents within recent literature, including postmodernism, poststructuralism, and ethnic pluralism, while also revising earlier modes and movements such as realism and minimalism. We will do so in the context of cultural and historical forces that inform this literature, asking how the literature comments on them both. Whatever else it is, the contemporary period is certainly one of shocking upheaval, shattering change, and fiercely intellectual contemplation of a new linguistic landscape. But in the midst of these heady attempts to theorize a world never before conceived, we will find individual voices doing what they have always done in writing-describing and creating their own piercingly intimate visions of now.
Required Texts
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1958)
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
Electronic reserve: poetry (Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Eavan Boland), short stories (Salman Rushdie, Raymond Carver), essays (Joan Didion)
English 436-01: Nineteenth Century American Fiction
TF 10:50-12:05
Instructor: Fred K Anderson: Permadjunct@aol.com
Course Description and Objectives
The Nineteenth Century saw the ‘flowering' and maturation of American literature. We shook off our literary and intellectual dependence on Europe, and developed our own literature, based on American models and conditions. The first two thirds of the century saw the development of American Romantic literature, culminating in the American Renaissance. Following the War of Northern Aggression, American Literary Realism appeared on the scene, followed by its offspring, Naturalism and Literary Impressionism. In this course we will study representative fiction of Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, as well as a number of sub-genres such as the Gothic, Regionalism or Local Color, the International Novel, Southern Literature, Western Literature, the Novel of Manners, and the Urban Novel, as they developed during the years between the beginning of the century and the first War of American Imperialism.
Texts may include
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland
Chopin, Kate. At Fault
Clemens, Samuel( aka Mark Twain). A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
Crane, Stephen. Maggie
Garland, Hamlin. Main Traveled Roads
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables
Howells, William Dean, A Hazard of New Fortunes
James, Henry. What Maggie Knew
Jewett, Sarah Orne. Deephaven
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
ENG 450-01 Seminar in Poetry
MR 12:15 to 1:30
Professor Robert Waugh: waughr@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
After a survey of European and American poets during the nineteenth century and a discussion of their aesthetics, the course begins with a close reading of Eliot's The Waste Land. In the past we have read such poets as Geoffrey Hill, Marilyn Hacker, John Berryman, and James Merrill. This spring we will read Ashbery and some three or four other contemporary figures. The requirements include a midterm, a final paper some five pages long, and a final.
Required texts
Books by Eliot, Ashbery, et al.
ENG 451-01 Senior Seminar-The Double in Literature
W 3:05-5:45
Professor Stella Deen: deenm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This seminar is an advanced course for English Liberal Arts majors in their senior year. It offers extensive training and practice in literary analysis and research, seminar debate, and oral presentation of research. The most polished products of this training will be a formal seminar presentation and a high-quality research paper.
The seminar topic will be literature of "the double" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American literature, including stories of uncannily similar characters bound by affection or antagonism and gothic tales of demonic temptation by a strangely familiar other. To illuminate the explosion of interest in the figure of the double during this era, we will investigate the cultural and historical contexts in which literature of the double was written, focusing on psychological and moral issues surrounding selfhood as well as the perceived tension between public and private lives.
Texts may include
Dostoevsky, The Double
Shelley, Frankenstein
Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Conrad, "The Secret Sharer"
Poe, "William Wilson"
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
James, "The Private Life"
ENG 451-02: Senior Seminar: Adventure, Fantasy, and Magic: Romance from The Odyssey to Austen
W 12:15-2:55
Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
The genres of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, the Western, Harlequin Romance, and even vampire fiction all share the same literary ancestor: the romance, a centuries-old form that will be the focus of this seminar. We will explore a generous selection of the literature of knights, ladies, chivalry, and courageous deeds, from classical epic (Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid) and Arthurian legend to their latter-day successors: Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene), Aphra Behn (Ooronoko), Shakespeare (Pericles), and even Tolkien and George Lucas. Our seminar will consider romance as a genre that always invokes a past that is "long ago and far away," but also resonates deeply with concerns in the present, those problems arising, for instance, from religious conflict, colonization, commerce, and slavery. Ultimately, we will also find how the tradition of romance developed and transformed into the various cultural expressions we see in the popular film and fiction genres of today.
The senior seminar is designed to be an advanced course in literary research and critical writing. Your final project for this course will be a developed, well-refined critical essay. Throughout the semester we will discuss methods of critical research, how to use theory and secondary criticism in our writing, and developing, drafting, and revising research papers. In addition to the final project, requirements for the class will include short writing assignments, an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography, as well as frequent and rigorous participation in class discussion.
Required Texts
William Shakespeare, Pericles, (Pelican-Penguin)
Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, (Penguin)
Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, (Oxford)
The Song of Roland, (Penguin)
Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, (Oxford)
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, (Penguin)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, (Penguin)
Jane Austen, Persuasion, (Broadview)
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th Ed.)
Additional Primary and Secondary Readings on Blackboard
ENG-460-01 Classic Juvenile Fantasy Literature
TF 4:30-5:45
Professor Jed Mayer
Course Description
While people have always told stories to children, children's literature as a distinct genre is a fairly recent phenomenon. Early stories for children emphasized morality and good behavior, but thankfully this changed in the nineteenth century when writers came to recognize the importance of fantasy in liberating the child reader's imagination. In this course we will focus on British children's fantasy literature of the last two hundred years, from fairy tales to Victorian Wonderlands to Hogwarts. We will consider the potential for fantasy literature to subvert traditional social values, providing an imaginative space from which children may question the world of adults. At the same time, we will also examine the ways in which adult authors may construct their fantasy worlds to indoctrinate child readers into moral and social structures. This course will help you to reconsider your childhood favorites through the looking glass of critical analysis.
ENG470-01 Major Authors: Thomas Pynchon
MR 3:05 to 4:20
Professor Robert Waugh: waughr@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
After a few short stories the reclusive American author Thomas Pynchon moved into his comic, erudite, scatological, and withering large-scale novels, which have entertained and disturbed readers for the past half-century. In this course we shall study Gravity's Rainbow, the novel by which he is best known, and his most recent work Against the Day. These are both large, so we will be reading approximately 150 pages a week, but the imaginative splendor is immense. Not for those readers of a weak stomach. The requirements will include a midterm of take-home essays, a final paper some ten pages long, and a final exam.
Required texts
Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day.
ENG 470-02 Major Authors: Sylvia Plath
Professor Fiona Paton
Course Description
This semester-long study of Sylvia Plath will include selections from her poetry, journals, and letters, plus her novel The Bell Jar. Her work will be placed in the context of confessional poetry, with some attention given to her friendship and rivalry with Anne Sexton. We will also consider her poetry in relation to that of her husband, Ted Hughes, whose last poetry collection Birthday Letters consists of poems written to his late wife. Close reading of the texts will be combined with the social history of the 50s and 60s, particularly the Women's Movement of the 60s and Plath's status as a feminist icon.
Does Plath's poetry speak for all women, regardless of class or ethnicity, and how do male readers position themselves in relation to her texts? Recent scholarship on Plath will be compared with that of the 1970s in order to study the change in Plath's status from feminist martyr to one of the most respected poets of the twentieth century.
The course requirements will include a short response paper, a long research paper, regular posts on Blackboard, and in-class essay exams for the midterm and final. Class time will include a combination of lecture, open dialogue, and small group discussion.
ENG 476-01: Graphic Literature
MR 9:25-10:40
Professor Pauline Uchmanowicz
Course Description
Graphic Literature explores the recent evolution of "literary" texts in which visual images and words converge, including mini-comics, graphic novels, graphic memoirs, and how-to manuals. In studying several of these creative works, we think critically and write about their historic contexts, themes, literary styles, and visual techniques, using genre-specific terms and concepts to guide our interpretation and analysis. Focused topics include genre formation, literary-canon formation, filmic and other adaptations, visual format and technique, visual ideology, and the subversive imagination. Assignments include short word-image analysis, midterm; critical or belletristic essay or creative project (e.g., mini-comic), and take-home final.
Required Texts
Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1993-98; 2005.
Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Reprint ed. New York:
Harper Collins, 1994.
Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
---. Persepolis II: The Story of a Return. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
---. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
Thompson, Craig. Blankets. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2003.
Yang, Gene. American Born Chinese. New York: Roaring Press, 2006.
Others: TBA
ENG 493-01: The Literature of the Holocaust (Special Topics Course)
MR 1:40-2:55
Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Course Description
The systematic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, commonly referred to as the Holocaust, is perhaps the most important and formative event of the twentieth century: an event that arguably signaled the end of modern Western civilization as we know it and that challenged and redefined our conceptions of human nature and good and evil. Fifty years later the fact of the Holocaust continues to elude rational understanding and imaginative comprehension. Despite such knowledge, historians, sociologists, philosophers, theologians, literary critics, artists and writers continue to probe its meanings and to try to understand an event in human history that defies interpretation and representation.
This course, drawing on perspectives from history, sociology, psychology, primarily will focus on literature and film as a lens to understand and to witness the Shoah. The course will be organized chronologically and will explore the literature of the Holocaust (testimony, diary and journals, autobiography and memoir, fiction, poetry, and film) within the context of the historical background. Some of the texts are oral testimonies of survivors, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, and Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl. The course also will satisfy the Young Adult Literature requirement because of the inclusion of Young Adult Literature about the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel's Night, children's diaries and journals, Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic, and Art Spiegelman's MAUS I and II. Students will be required to see at least two Holocaust films.
ENG-493-02 Irish Literature
TF 4:30-5:45
Professor Michelle Woods: woodsm@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course focuses on contemporary Irish fiction, playwriting and film in order to look at an evolving modern Irish identity and the role of literature and art in defining that identity and examining it. We will look at several related issues: the Irish as Europe's ‘other' in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments; Ireland's others (travelers, immigrants and women) in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, Anne Enright's The Gathering, Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats, Roddy Doyle's The Deportees and the film, Once; violence south and north in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Conor McPherson's Rum and Coke, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark and Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto (alongside Neil Jordan's film, Breakfast on Pluto) and the Irish abroad (Colm Toibin, Joseph O'Neill). You will write two research papers and have the option to do a third paper or a podcast review of one of the texts.
ENG 493-03: The American Renaissance
MR 9:25-10:40
Andrew Higgins: higginsa@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
In 1941, scholar F. O. Matthiessen named the years 1850-1855 "the American Renaissance" because of the startling number of American masterpieces written during these years. Since that date, the American Renaissance has been perhaps the focal point of American literary study. Scholars have generally taken one of two approaches to the literature of this era, both profitable. More recently, they have queried the very idea of an American Renaissance, and looked at the writing as a reflection of that particular historical and cultural moment in American history. The second and more traditional approach is to explore the major threads and themes of this literature, reading the works as foundational texts of American literature and culture. Though my own inclination and practice has been the former, in this course we will do the latter, looking at the period as a struggle between the idealism of the transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau) and the skepticism of the novelists (Hawthorne and Melville). As such, the subtitle for this course could be "transcendentalism and its discontents." So by the end of the course, you should be able to decide for yourself whether human beings are really gods in ruins, able to rise up if only we would acknowledge the divinity within us (as Emerson would have it), or fallen, earth-bound creatures, whose most refined skill is self delusion (as Hawthorne replies).
Texts
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: Prose and Poetry (Norton Critical Edition)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter (Penguin Classics)
---. Selected Tales and Sketches (Penguin Classics)
James, Henry. Henry James' Selected Tales. (Penguin Classics)
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (Penguin Classics)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin (Penguin Classics)
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (Norton Critical Edition)
ENG 493-05: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Empire
Professor Nancy Johnson
Course Description
In this course we will examine the language and ideology of empire in literature of the eighteenth century. Early literary texts by Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift engage with the discourses of Enlightenment philosophy to explore the concomitant movements toward shaping a British identity and building a British empire. By mid-century, authors show a fascination with the East, using it as terrain to explore exoticism, consumerism, and moral authority. Later literary texts by Isaac Bickerstaffe, Robert Bage, and Elizabeth Hamilton begin to struggle with the aims of empire in light of the British defeat in America, hopes and threats from Revolutionary France, and troubling self reflection resulting from the protracted Warren Hastings trial that forced Britain to confront the controversies of British rule in India. Readings will include Pope's poem of nationalism Windsor Forest, Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, and Isaac Bickerstaffe's play, The Sultan, Or A Peep into the Seraglio.
ENG 500-01: English Proseminar
M 6-8:40 p.m.
Professor Vicki Tromanhauser: tromanhv@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course is an introduction to graduate studies in English; as such, we will discuss a variety of literary forms-including poetry, prose, and drama-alongside works of criticism and applied literary theory. The seminar aims to develop your skills of close textual analysis, in preparation for the Comprehensive Examination, as well as supply you with a theoretically informed critical vocabulary through which you can understand and discuss primary texts. It will also introduce students to research methods and library resources essential for writing advanced literary analysis at the graduate level. In addition to shorter close-reading assignments, students will produce an annotated bibliography and prospectus leading to a final research paper. Oral presentations on both literary works and critical essays will give you an opportunity to put your knowledge of formal matters and theoretical positions into practice.
Texts
Euripides, The Bacchae
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
Jane Austen, Emma
Henry James, selected short stories
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
A selection of lyric poetry and secondary readings on Blackboard
ENG 501-01: Introduction to Old English
M 6-8:40
Professor Daniel Kempton
Course Description and Objectives
This course is an introduction to Old English language and literature and to the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. A secondary theme of the course is the theory of translation, with special attention to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. The course fulfills the English language requirement of the MA program.
Required Texts
A Guide to Old English. Ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson. 7th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
The Anglo-Saxons. Ed. James Campbell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Eng 517-01: English Romantic Literature -- Revolutions in Romanticism
W 6:00-8:40
Professor Jackie George
The Romantic Era, 1780-1830 (or so), was one of great ferment, both politically and in the arts, and in this seminar we will look in detail at the philosophical ideas accompanying the great political and literary revolutions of this time. With an eye toward situating Romantic literature within its revolutionary context, we will examine the overturning of poetic conventions and turn to the "ordinary"; the ballad and sonnet revivals; politically radical fiction; the assault in literature on British colonialism and imperialism. At the same time, we will consider key works of British and American Romantic literary criticism, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, identifying and assessing the critical revolutions that have shaped and re-shaped the Romantic literary canon. Our driving questions in this course will include: How do formal and political innovations go together? What is the relationship between literature and subjectivity? What does it mean to call a piece of literature "Romantic"?
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed., volume D
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
As well as secondary readings available on electronic reserve.
ENG 519-01: Studies in Victorian Literature: Reading the Victorian Animal
W 6:00-8:40
Professor Jed Mayer
Course Description
In the nineteenth century animals came to play a variety of new and unexpected roles in British cultural life. Domestic pets proliferated in cities as never before, people of all classes flocked to zoos and menageries, physiologists experimented on animals, animal rights activists protested such experiments, and evolutionary theory revealed that humans are also animals. Victorian literature reflects this broad cultural interest in the nonhuman, and in this course we will trace animal presences in a variety of texts, from poetry to domestic fiction, social criticism to children's literature, scientific writing to horror, fantasy and science fiction. We will also consider the uncertain boundary between the human and nonhuman animal, examining the ways in which the Victorians considered issues of gender, class, and race with reference to the nonhuman world. By turns domesticated and wild, friendly and ruthless, the Victorian animal appears in many guises, and in this course we will develop strategies for reading these creatures in all their variety and complexity.
ENG 574-01: Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and His Sources
R 6-8:40 p.m.
Professor Thomas G. Olsen: olsent@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
Most students and lovers of theater know, at least generally, that Shakespeare "stole" or "plagiarized" the majority of his stories from previously published sources. While this assessment of his creative process is generally true, especially according to a modern set of definitions, examining Shakespeare's use of sources also opens up many fascinating questions concerning the nature and status of intellectual property in his time. Moreover, by considering his plays alongside the stories and accounts that inspired the plays, we stand to gain a great deal of concrete appreciation for the creative transformations that Shakespeare brought to his source materials: What kinds of stories inspired him? What did he feel the need to change? What happened to language, purpose, and character in the transformations? In this course we will read approximately 6-7 plays and their sources. Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale will almost certainly be on the syllabus. Other works might include Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV, Part I, and As You Like It. Requirements for the course will include one substantial presentation (done with a partner), a short essay of some 6-8 pages, and an extended research project of some 12-15 pages on a play not dealt with in class. This course is not recommended for students who have had little or no prior experience with Shakespeare; ENG 505, offered in the fall, is generally a better option for those fitting this description.
ENG 579-01: Studies in 19th-Century American Literature: Hawthorne and Longfellow
T 6:00-8:40
Andrew Higgins: higginsa@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This course will explore one of the least understood literary friendships of the nineteenth century, that between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though typically critics have viewed the popular, public Longfellow as the aesthetic opposite of the challenging, private Hawthorne, in fact they were not only close friends but had a significant artistic relationship. In this course, we will read the major works of both writers, as well as a recently discovered manuscript on their relationship written by the grandsons of the two writers. In particular, we will look at the way both authors participated in the construction of America's sense of itself and its past through their writings on American history (reading, for example, Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter and Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride"), and the way both writers struggled with and conceived of the role of the artist in the emerging market economy and nascent empire that was nineteenth-century America.
In addition, we will also discuss the significant presence both of these writers have had in the curriculum of secondary education in America, why they have figured so largely in it and what they have meant at different times over the course of the last century and a half.
Required Texts
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tales and Sketches (Library of America)
---. The House of Seven Gables. (Penguin)
---. The Scarlet Letter. (Penguin)
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. (Library of America)
ENG 585-01: Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Beauty, Judgment, Canon
R 6-8:40
Professor Thomas Festa: festat@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
What is taste? How does our critical perspective on a work of art or literature convey experience, thought, and feeling? Does theoretical reflection constitute a form of knowledge, and if so, is it knowledge about the work of art, about ourselves, or about the world at large? This course addresses the myriad questions that arise when one turn the critical lens on the phenomenon of beauty-particularly, but not exclusively, on the literary experience of beauty in relation to critical judgment. The readings will be grouped in clusters focused on varieties of taste and judgment from the most literal to the most metaphysical levels. Therefore we will address texts that concentrate on the physical sense of taste (readings on food and philosophy, a documentary film that surveys and appraises the recent effects of globalization on the production and consumption of wine); the formation of community around shared aesthetic pleasure and valuation (personal essays); the problematic relationship between culture and judgment (philosophical essays); the process of canon formation in literary studies (academic textbooks and syllabi).
Required Texts
1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
2. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (U of Chicago P)
3. Immanuel Kant, Critque of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge UP)
4. Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Blackwell)
Readings via Blackboard to include: Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (selections); Bloom, The Western Canon (selectons); Smith, ed., Questions of Taste (selections); essays by David Hume, Simon Jarvis, Alexander Nehamas, and others
ENG 586-01: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction:
Language as Solution to the Problem of Language
Mary Holland
Course Description
Postmodern fiction tends to get a bad rap: from academics, from casual readers, from nostalgic critics. Readers unversed in the particularly thorny problems of postmodern letters encounter it and think, Wtf? Absent of traditional notions of plot, character, development, and resolution, postmodern fiction often stymies rather than illuminating, and frustrates rather than cockle-warming. Much of postmodern fiction's belligerence comes from its fascination with twentieth-century linguistic theories, which hold that language is everything and can do many things but it cannot really mean, at least, not in the comforting ways we used to think it could, back in the good old days of Realism. What, then, can language do? What can fiction-made entirely of language-do, and be? How and why do we write and study novels when the usefulness of their only implement, language, has been theorized away? This course will examine some of the most exciting, fun, challenging, and-surprise-heart-warming fiction of the last twenty-five years, asking exactly these questions. It will begin in the high postmodernist 80s and 90s, when the novel's main role often was diagnosing the problem of language. But it will focus on literature of the past eight years, considering the variety of innovative ways in which twenty-first century fiction tries to solve the problem of language using language itself. One thing we will discover is that, while contemporary American fiction remains linguistically mindbending, it uses its postmodern, hypertextual, fragmented narrative structures to ask the same questions that literature has been asking throughout the ages: how do we communicate with each other and build viable communities in today's world? How do we live and love well? What does it mean to be human? It will also ask whether "postmodern" is even an accurate description of our literature today, or whether something so new is happening that we need another period designation entirely. At bottom, this course will ask what the novels itself are asking today: not what and whether can we know, but how do we believe?
Required Texts (available at bookstore)
Danielewski, Mark. Only Revolutions (2006)
DeLillo, Don. The Names (1982)
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated (2002) or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love (2005)
Tomasula, Steve. The Book of Portraiture (2006)
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (1996)
ENG 230-05
