200-01: Analysis and Interpretation
Rachel Rigolino
200-02: Analysis and Interpretation
Mary Fakler
210-01: Great Books: Western
TBA
211-01: Great Books: Asian Classics
Andy Schonebaum
224-01: Expository Writing
Mary Fakler
226-01: Practical Grammar
Joan Perisse
230-01: Women in Literature
Kathena DeGrassi
231-01: 20c American Women
Claire Hero
302-01: English Literature II
Nancy Johnson
302-02: English Literature II
Nancy Johnson
307-01: The Novel
Rachel Rigolino
331-01: American Literature I
Erin Newcomb
366-01: Contemporary US Ethnic Lit
Pauline Uchmanowicz
423-01: 20c Literary Criticism
Matthew Newcomb
440-01: The Beats
Fiona Paton
Summer I (classes run 5/26 through 6/29)
308-01: Short Story
Dennis Doherty
310-01: Studies in Drama
Kathena DeGrassi
327-01: Dev of Modern English
Daniel Kempton
332-01: American Literature II
Dennis Doherty
345-01: Creative Writing I
Larry Carr
435-01: Early American Literature
Stephen Mercier
445-01: Creative Writing II
Larry Carr
493-01: Special Topic: Women, Religion, Lit
Erin Newcomb
493-02: Special Topic: Transatlantic Gothic
John Langan
560-01: Forms of Autobiography
Daniel Kempton
593-01: Special Topic: Cont. Short Fiction
Pauline Uchmanowicz
Summer II (classes run 7/6 through 8/7)
255-01: Contemporary Issues in Lit
Jan Schmidt
301-01: English Literature I
Tina Iraca
308-01: Short Story
Robert Singleton
309-01: American Humor
Peggy Hach
406-01: Shakespeare I
Tina Iraca
436-01: 19th-C American Literature
Stephen Mercier
505-01: Shakespeare MTR
Ava Zilberfain
535-01: Realism and Naturalism MTWR
Fred Anderson
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Online
ENG 200-01: Analysis and Interpretation
Instructor: Rachel Rigolino
Course Description
Analysis and Interpretations of Literature is intended to help students develop their abilities to study and understand literary texts. Students will read poems, short stories, and plays as well as non-fiction. Over the course of the semester, students will explore various critical approaches to analyzing literature and learn to use the terminology of literary analysis.
Required Text
Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction (Paperback) by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt (Author), Carley Rees Bogarad (Author). Publisher: Heinle; 4th edition (Edition is important.)
226-01: Practical Grammar
Instructor: Joan Perisse
Course Description
This course's objective is to help students understand traditional grammar to gain use of contemporary, standard American writing for an effective and graceful writing style. The course will familiarize students with parts of speech and their grammatical functions and kinds of sentences. The class will discuss proper use of punctuation and mechanics and examine other grammatical and stylistic concerns in good writing. In addition, the course will support those students whose careers would benefit from good grammatical practices as in the fields of education or business. The course will expose students to grammar from a creative and practical standpoint.
Required Text
Troyka, Lynn Quitman. Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2007.
ENG 230-01: Women in Literature
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. 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 on the Blackboard Discussion Board (via creative writing and critical responding). In our on-line dialogue, 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 (But Are Not Limited To)
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
Instructor: Claire Hero
Course Description
The twentieth century was a time of exciting and far-reaching changes for American women, from winning the right to vote in 1920 to the women's liberation movement of the 1970s to today's "post-feminism." In this course we'll be looking at a wide variety of texts that track the changing roles for women in the United States during the past century. We will examine the ways in which women's writing challenges notions of power, gender, race, regionalism, identity, and motherhood. We will also consider how the writer's political, economic, and social background affects her literary production. Throughout our on-line dialogue we will keep in mind the notion of a "women's literature" and what features would define such a tradition. This course fulfills the GE III diversity requirement.
Texts will likely include
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison Muse
Drudge by Harryette Mullen
Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong
Short texts from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Grace Paley, Jhumpa Lahiri, Eve Ensler and Miranda July will be available on Blackboard.
ENG 307-01: The Novel
Instructor: Rachel Rigolino
Course Description
The aim of this course is to give students an overview of representative novels from the late 19th century on. In this course, students will examine novels from various schools or movements, focusing primarily on short American texts. Historical and literary contexts of each work will be analyzed in order to arrive at a more complete understanding of the texts.
Required Texts (List Is Subject to Change)
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson
Sula by Toni Morrison
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
These works share many of the same themes, most notably the theme of alienation. In their final papers, students will be expected to find connections among these works and to analyze how specific authors develop the same theme.
Professor Erin Newcomb: newcombe@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
American Literature 1 introduces students to the breadth of North American literature from the pre-colonial period through 1900. Students will read a range of authors, genres, and texts to experience a grand scope of the formative years of the United States. Major themes for the literature and the course include religious freedom; slavery and abolitionism; native and colonial rights and land ownership; democracy, civil liberties, and the formation of national identity. We will examine these major issues within the literature itself as well as within the broader social, historical, and political contexts-ultimately looking at the trajectory and development of these ideas over time.
Required Texts
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 7th Edition. Vol. 1. (anthology); Short stories and poetry, to be determined, available online via Blackboard.
ENG 366-01: Contemporary US Ethnic Lit
Professor Pauline Uchmanowicz
Course Description
This course surveys contemporary multiethnic literatures by United States authors, whose diversity of styles, visions, voices, and outlooks represent the cultural legacies that comprise our collective heritage. In reading these creative works, we will think critically and write about their historical contexts, themes, and literary styles, posing questions about cultural diversity and difference in US society. Topics will include literary canon formation, the rise of postmodern themes and stylistic devices in multiethnic literatures, the influence of emerging voices on literary forms, the politics of post-ethnic literature, representations of dominant US models of race interaction (e.g., assimilation, pluralism, melting pot, etc.) in literary works, and the meaning of US citizenship in the twenty-first century. As course instructor, I will introduce literary, historical, and cultural ideas; serve as a discussion leader, and act as a writing coach.
Required Texts
Dorris, Michael. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: Warner, 1988.
Espada, Martín. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982-2002.
Fenkl, Heinz Insu. Memories of My Ghost Brother. New York: Plume, 1996.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Mariner, 1999.
Packer, ZZ. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. New York: Riverhead, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
---. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
423-01: 20c Literary Criticism
Professor Matthew Newcomb
Course Description
This course offers undergraduate students a broad introduction to different schools of literary theory in the 20th century and an introduction to applying literary theory to the reading of texts. Some ability in the close reading of texts will be assumed for this course. Students will read numerous primary sources in literary theory, seeking to understand the uses and disadvantages of each.
Approaches to literary criticism that we will explore include (but are not limited to) historicism, new historicism, cultural studies, neo-marxist, reader-response, feminist theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, new criticism, postcolonial criticism, and deconstruction. The course will explore the relationships between some of these approaches and the arguments between them. Students will develop a series of reading tools from these theories that can be used for future cultural and literary texts. Students will apply these critical approaches to literary texts in the course and will begin to develop their own preferred critical reading strategies. Students will be expected to carefully work through theoretical texts and to post responses to numerous readings and to other students' comments.
Required Texts
The main text will likely be Texts and Contexts by Steven Lynn. Students also will need a critical edition of a novel (probably Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man). Numerous other short readings will be available through Blackboard postings and links.
Summer I
ENG308-01: Short Story
MTWR 1:30-3:25
Professor Dennis Doherty: dohertyd@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
Students will read short stories from the nineteenth century "prose tale" to the contemporary. Through lecture, class discussion, and examination, students will learn to analyze and evaluate similarities and differences in content and form, use of the form as a social and historical tool and moral gauge, and the workings of the story as a literary device.
Required Text
James H. Pickering's FICTION 100
ENG 310-01: Studies In Drama
MTWR 8:30-10:25 a.m.
Instructor: Kathena Hasbrouck DeGrassi
Course Description
Studies in Drama will delve into drama as a literary genre by analyzing a number of different authors ranging from William Shakespeare to David Mamet. The hope is to encourage you to look at plays as more than mere vehicles of entertainment and escapism. This course will teach you how to approach drama with a critical eye and a keen understanding of themes, devices, and styles.
Texts May Include (But Are Not Limited To)
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Lillian Hellman: The Children's Hour
David Mamet: Oleanna
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House
Rebecca Gilman: Boy Gets Girl
MTWR 10:45A-12:40P
Daniel Kempton kemptond@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
This course will provide an introduction to the history of the English language from its Indo-European roots through the eighteenth century, when the language had largely achieved its modern form. Attention will also be given to the political and cultural context in which the language developed and to the literature produced at each major stage of language development. The course will cover the following topics:
The Indo-European family of languages and the distinctive features of the Germanic languages, to which English belongs.
Old English phonology (or the sound of the language), inflectional forms, vocabulary, and literature.
Middle English phonology, inflectional forms, and literature.
The early modern period and the language of Shakespeare.
The eighteenth century and the first dictionaries.
Note that the course satisfies the English language requirement for the Adolescence Education-English major track (443) and is one of the eight courses of which three must be chosen in the Early Childhood (609)/Childhood (641) Education-English major tracks.
Texts:
Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Cable, Thomas. A Companion to Baugh & Cable's A History of the English Language. 3rd ed.
ENG332-01: American Literature 2
MTWR 10:45-1:25
Professor Dennis Doherty: dohertyd@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
This is an American Literature survey course covering major authors from the turn of the 20th century to the contemporary. The course will explore important trends, developments, and movements of American fiction and poetry to the present time. Students will learn the traditions in this period and familiarize themselves with the works and authors considered necessary for a rounded understanding of the period's literature. Students will learn forms and formal innovations in fiction and poetry of this period. Students will write and revise a thesis paper based on suggested topics or in consultation with the instructor.
ENG 435-01: Early American Literature
MWR 5:00-7:40p.m.
Professor Mercier: Stephen.Mercier@marist.edu
Course Description
In this course you will consider the intersections between texts of early American literature and United States culture. You will examine a range of literary genres, from Native American Trickster tales, to first-hand exploration accounts, an autobiography, and two novellas. You will discover interactions between literary, political, and cultural concerns. We will deal with major issues in the context of early America: the Puritan experiment, westward expansion, slavery, and experiences of indigenous peoples. How does each author imagine what it means to be "American." How do these texts argue for individual rights and liberties? Where do tensions arise between differing ideologies? What defines good citizenship?
Required Texts
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. [ISBN: 0-394-32602-4]
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy [ISBN: 13-978-1845880552]
Equiano, Olaudah. Equiano's Travels. [ISBN: 0-435-90010-2]
Radin, Paul. The Trickster: American Indian Mythology [ISBN: 0-8052-0351-6]
Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple [ISBN: 0-19-504-238-7]
ENG 493-01: Women, Religion, and Literature
MWR 5:30-8:10 p.m.
Professor Erin Newcomb: newcombe@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
English 493 hones in on a special topic relating to literary studies-in this case, women, religion, and literature. Texts for the course take up issues of gender and religions in different ways, allowing us to see a broad (though by no means exhaustive or universal) array of experiences through literary lenses. We will explore different religions and multiple perspectives to discover the differences and connections between and within women and religions.
Required Texts
Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Louise Erdrich's Tracks
Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
Anita Diamant's The Red Tent
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Poems are yet to be determined.
ENG560.01 Forms of Autobiography
TF 4:30P-8:30P
Daniel Kempton kemptond@newpaltz.edu
Course Description:
This course will provide a historical overview of autobiographical writing, with an emphasis on texts written before 1800 and on two important twentieth-century interrogations of the autobiographical genre. We will study changes in the theory of the human subject and changes in the way that the subject has been represented, and constructed, in language.
Note that the course fulfills one of the pre-1800 distribution requirements in the MA program.
Texts:
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Kempe, Margery. Book of Margery Kempe. Trans. and Ed. Lynn Staley. New York: Norton, 2000.
Letters of Heloise and Abelard. Trans. Betty Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
ENG 593-01: Contemporary Short Fiction
MWR 5:30-8:10 p.m.
Professor Pauline Uchmanowicz
Course Description
This course surveys contemporary short fiction (including graphic-lit) by United States authors from the postmodern period. In reading and analyzing the assigned short stories, we will think critically and write about their contexts, themes, and styles, using literary theory as an interpretative tool. We also will explore approaches to teaching short fiction. As course instructor, I will introduce authors, themes, movements and trends in short fiction as well as genre-specific literary concepts; serve as a discussion leader; and act as a writing coach. I also am available to discuss course materials during office hours.
Abel, Jessica. Mirror, Window. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000; 2004.
Canin, Ethan. Emperor of the Air. New York: Mariner, 1988; 1999.
Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Vintage, 1981; 1989.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Mariner, 1999.
Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Packer, ZZ. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. New York: Riverhead, 2003.
Straub, Peter, ed. Poe's Children: The New Horror. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Summer II
ENG 308-10: Short Story I
MTWR 10:45-12:40
Professor Robert Singleton: singletr@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
The aim of this course is to help students gain insight into the close reading and interpretation of the genre of short fiction. The course will concentrate on the reading and analysis of texts from a variety of time periods and cultural perspectives and will follow a chronological format from traditional to contemporary texts. While discussions and lectures will touch on many biographical, cultural, historical, and critical perspectives, the primary center of the course while be the student's analysis and close reading of texts. The connection between evidence, interpretation, and "meaning" will be stressed first and foremost. There will be three short papers assigned based on the analysis of individual stories.
Required Text
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction 7th ed. Selected handouts given by the instructor.
ENG 309-01: American Humor
Instructor: Peggy Hach
Course Description
American Humor investigates types of humor, including satire, wit, and irony that are seen in literature, cartoons and television of the 20th and 21st centuries. This class introduces the students to American humorists from Mark Twain to Woody Allen, including Kurt Vonnegut, and Dave Barry, and comedians such as George Carlin, Lewis Black, Jerry Seinfeld among others. We also consider sitcoms and and explore comparisons with British humorists. Films and skits will supplement the required reading.
Required Texts
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
The Terrible Twos by Ishmael Reed
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
ENG 436-10: 19th-Century American Literature
MWR 5:00-7:40p.m.
Professor Mercier: Stephen.Mercier@marist.edu
Course Description
You will an examination of a diverse range of literature including poetry, short stories, a novella, and nature writing. We will consider what various works tell us about their cultural and historical contexts. What are authors' views toward the natural world, industrialization, and modernization? How do these writers attempt to foster sympathy for marginalized groups? To what experiences do these texts bear witness? To what extent did nineteenth-century literature hold the power to transform the nation? How do they imagine national identity? How do these texts represent the movements of Transcendentalism, Romanticism, Regionalism, Realism, and Naturalism?
Required Texts
Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. [ISBN: 13-9780393950243]
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. (The First [1855] Edition). [ISBN: 0-14-042199-8]
Twain, Mark. The Great Short Works of Mark Twain. [0-06-083075-1]
Burroughs, John. Signs and Seasons. [ISBN: 0-8156-0875-6]
Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest. [ISBN: 0-316-18415-2]
ENG 505 - SHAKESPEARE
MTR 4:30-7:10 p.m.
Instructor: Ava Zilberfain
Course Description
The graduate level class will combine lecture format, discussion format, group work and student presentations to develop multiple readings of the Shakespearean dramas. Although we will examine historical, aesthetic, ideological, theological, mythical and socio-political factors, the focus of the course is not on assigning definitive readings to specific works, nor necessarily agreeing with ideas presented, but on developing independent analytic stances. With this in mind, I have designed the course to first lay out the theoretical basis, mimetic structures and modes of expression frequently utilized; then to move to application and deviation of principles; and finally to determine the more revolutionary and experimental element within the texts. The course will juxtapose formal criticism (close readings of the works as literary objects), establish context (including an examination of historical, theological and mythical factors) and discuss cultural studies (attending to the relationship of the works to the dominant and oppositional discourses of the time and of our present time). Because of the hybridity of the Shakespearean dramas, the underlying assumption is that all elements discussed can be applied in varying degrees and in different ways to all the works. We will begin with the tragedies (histories being a subset of this category), then work on the comedies and end with the romances. Each class will focus on a different play and a different area of thought. Because, for some students, this will be their only graduate course dealing with Shakespearean literature, a wealth of material and ideas will be introduced in this course.
ENG 308-10: Short Story
MTWR 10:45-12:40
Professor Robert Singleton: singletr@newpaltz.edu
Course Description
The aim of this course is to help students gain insight into the close reading and interpretation of the genre of short fiction. The course will concentrate on the reading and analysis of texts from a variety of time periods and cultural perspectives and will follow a chronological format from traditional to contemporary texts. While discussions and lectures will touch on many biographical, cultural, historical, and critical perspectives, the primary center of the course while be the student's analysis and close reading of texts. The connection between evidence, interpretation, and "meaning" will be stressed first and foremost. There will be three short papers assigned based on the analysis of individual stories.
Required Text
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction 7th ed.
Selected handouts given by the instructor.
ENG 535-01: Realism and Naturalism
Instructor: Fred Anderson
Course Description
American Literary Realism, with its offspring, Naturalism and Literary Impressionism, may be considered a literary revolution as significant as the American Renaissance and the Modernism of the nineteen twenties. It can also be seen as a link between the two, with strands of the earlier flowing into Realism and strands of Realism flowing into Modernism. In other words, the process may have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In this course we will study several representative works of Realism and Naturalism, as well as a number of the sub-genres such as Regionalism or Local Color, the International Novel, Southern Literature, Western Literature, the Novel of Manners, and the Urban Novel as they appeared on the scene and developed during the years between the end of the War between the States (1865) and the end of the nineteenth century, with attention to societal, intellectual, and other forces which contributed to the rise of these genres as presented in the fiction of such writers as Adams, Clemens, Cable, Howells, Crane, James , Jewett, Chopin, and Frederic
