ENG 501: Introduction to Old English
M 5-7:50 p.m. (Online Synchronous)
Daniel Kempton
This course will have two options that will run simultaneously; you may choose either option:
1)An introduction to Old English language and literature. The primary focus of the course will be the Old English language itself, but we will learn the language by reading literary texts. A secondary focus will be modern English translations and adaptations of Old English literature, with special attention to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
Books:
Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney, Norton, 2001.
ISBN: 978-0393320978
A Guide to Old English. Edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, 8th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
ISBN: 978-0470671078
2)An introduction to Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in translation. The main literary document will be Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, and the main cultural document will be Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. We will read other secular and religious texts with special attention to Anglo-Saxon notions of heroism. These texts will include poems such as “The Battle of Maldon,” “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “Judith,” “Dream of the Rood,” and “Genesis A” as well as prose works such as Æfric’s “Life of St Edmund” and other hagiographies.
Books:
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price and R. E. Latham, Penguin, 1990.
ISBN: 978-0140445657
Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney, Norton, 2001.
ISBN: 978-0393320978
(An)other book(s) tbd.
I will be in touch with enrollees after the registration period has closed to discuss the options in more detail. At that time, you will have the opportunity to tell me which option you prefer.
ENG 505: Shakespeare and the Creative Continuum
T 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Thomas Olsen: olsent@newpaltz.edu
In this seminar we will delve into what I call the “creative continuum” surrounding Shakespeare’s works. We will study four plays, two comedies and two tragedies, beginning each unit by reading the source story or stories Shakespeare is known to have used to develop the narrative structure of his play. A close reading of each play will follow, and then on to a modern film adaptation. Two of these films could be considered “straight” productions, while two others are adaptations derived from Shakespeare’s play. As we will see, however, the line between a “straight” production and an adaption is not always a clear one.
In addition to reading literary works and studying cinematic treatments of them, we will also use the semester to theorize the ways that creativity and adaptation operate across human culture. A number of secondary readings will extend our understanding of these questions and the works we study. A list of secondary readings will be included on the syllabus, which will be distributed to registered students a week or two before the first session.
Requirements for the course will include one short paper (5-6 pp.), a presentation to the class, and a final research project (12-15 pp.) on a topic of your choosing. Research topics are not limited to the four plays we will study over the semester.
Major Readings and Required Texts:
William Shakespeare*: Much Ado About Nothing
The Merchant of Venice
Othello
King Lear
Films:** Kenneth Branagh, dir., Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Michael Radford, dir., The Merchant of Venice (2005)
Tim Blake Nelson, dir., O (2001)
Akira Kurosawa, dir., Ran (1985)
Source Stories Tales for Shakespeare: Stories That Inspired the Plays, ed. Thomas G. Olsen (Cambridge Scholars, ISBN 978-1527571563). I will share information on ordering this edition with registered students closer to the start of the semester.
* any good student or scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s plays will be sufficient. I have ordered the 3rd edition of Stephen Greenblatt et. al, eds. The Norton Shakespeare, in the easier-to-carry 2-volume format (Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-26402-9), but you are free to use any edition that serves our purposes. Please feel free to contact me before making a purchase other than The Norton Shakespeare.
** as of this writing, all films are available through Amazon Prime and in some cases also other streaming services. Details will be on the syllabus.
ENG 542-01: Fiction & Memoir Graduate Workshop
T 5:00-7:50 p.m. (Online Synchronous)
Professor Heinz Insu Fenkl: fenklh@newpaltz.edu
The contemporary novel and memoir are curious things—both commodity and literary form—and the culture of their production is often outright contradictory. In this course we will explore the distinctions between the “literary” and the “commercial” novel/memoir with the ultimate goal of producing a publishable work that maintains literary merits even if it is intended for the commercial trade book market. We will engage with the literary aspect of the works through a range of readings and we will also engage pragmatically with the nuts-and-bolts real world aspects of how a novel/memoir (i.e. “long-form content”) is bought and published in the commercial world. By the end of the course, you will have a finished proposal packet, having workshopped its contents with your peers under the guidance of your professor.
NOTE: This is a workshop on writing a memoir or novel, which means you will be expected to do a significant amount sustained writing and reading of fiction and nonfiction during the semester.
Required Texts: (to be determined)
ENG577: Wild Romanticism
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Jackie George
In this course, we will examine the “wildness” of Romanticism in terms aesthetic, ethical, and ecological. Drawing upon a variety of texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including poetry, fiction, travelogues, and aesthetic treatises, we will explore how British Romantic discourses of the “wild” engage with those of race, gender, nature, and nation. We will discuss how the Romantics imagined the wild as well as how their notions continue to inform present-day conceptions of the human and non-human world. Authors read will include (but are not limited to) Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and James Hog
Anticipated Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. D (The Romantic Period)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
ENG581: Studies in Twentieth Century American Fiction to 1945
Thursday 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Dr. Andrew Higgins
Despite its title, this course makes no claims about American fiction or even twentieth century fiction. Instead, we will explore the writings of Henry James and Edith Wharton, two writers who were of the nineteenth century as much as the twentieth century and were as much of the cosmopolitan world that included Gustav Flaubert, George Eliot, and Ivan Turgenev as they were of the United States. (Both writers were born in the United States, but James spent most of his adult life in England and Wharton lived in France for the last thirty years of her life.)
What makes these writers so interesting is their attention to the ways that the upper classes employed language to police class boundaries. The world of Wharton and James’ fiction is a world in which the ability to read signs—things said, things unsaid—was crucial to success, and even survival. The central conflict of almost all of James and Wharton’s fiction, then, is between the imperative to read the intentions behind other people’s words and actions—one had to read the signs and currents correctly in order to lay a safe course in the upper-class worlds their character’s navigated—and the inevitable impossibility of knowing what someone else actually thinks and feels. (And, indeed, the difficulty of knowing what one’s own self thinks and feels.) As such, both of these writers developed a fiction of immense psychological subtlety, narrative daring, and stylistic virtuosity.
In this course, we will alternate between James and Wharton, beginning with some of their shorter works and then moving on to sample their major novels.
Texts
Henry James, “Daisy Miller: A Study” (1878)
-----, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
-----, Washington Square (1880)
-----, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
-----, What Maisie Knew (1897)
-----, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
-----, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)
Edith Wharton, “The Other Two” & “The Reckoning” (1904)
-----, The House of Mirth (1905)
-----, Ethan Frome (1911)
-----, The Age of Innocence (1920)
Note: exact texts to be announced later. We will be reading the New York Edition versions of James’ writings.
ENG 585: Studies in Contemporary Criticism and Theory—Anthropocene Nonhumanities
R 5:00-7:50 p.m. (Online Synchronous)
Professor Jed Mayer: mayere@newpaltz.edu
The mark of humans may now be read in all earthly things, from the strata of the lithosphere to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. The Anthropocene, as many have proposed we call this too-human geological and climatological era, calls for a radical reconsideration of the nonhuman world and humanity’s place within it. Human-induced climate change and the sixth extinction have irreparably harmed nonhuman populations and ecosystems, yet humans must also reckon with the destructive climatic forces for which we are in large part responsible. The nonhuman is at once more vulnerable and more destructive than at any time within human history. And yet as we struggle to articulate the nonhuman, to speak responsibly for endangered species and ecologies, they continue to elude representation. Vaster than mega-hurricanes, smaller than microplastics, Anthropocene nonhumanities call for fresh approaches and new epistemologies. In this seminar we will study some of the more influential philosophical perspectives on the nonhuman, as well as the more generative recent developments in critical theory, and consider the ways in which modes of literary representation have attended to the nonhuman, and how they might offer us cognitive direction for our shared future.
Required Texts:
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
ENG 593-01: Transgressions: Contemporary Women’s Writing
W 5-7:50 p.m.
Professor Mary Holland: hollandm@newpaltz.edu
In this course, we will study the writing of a few contemporary women in depth by reading their most recent fiction and nonfiction, including novels, stories, essays, and memoirs. We will also read some reviews of their work so that we can consider public reaction to their writing and how it shapes their future writing, by limiting and by fueling it, in content and form. Our reading will thus transgress boundaries (fiction, nonfiction, reviews) while we witness all the transgressions imagined and committed by these unconventional writers. Taken together, our reading will make visible how women today use language to give voice to themselves and their characters, all aiming to tell uncomfortable truths about what it means to live as a woman in the early twenty-first century.
Texts (some may change):
Cusk, Rachel. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012); Transit (2016)
Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist: Essays (2014); Difficult Women: Stories (2017)
Levy, Deborah. Things I Don’t Want To Know: On Writing (2013); Hot Milk (2016); The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography (2018)
Machado, Carmen Maria. Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (2017); In the Dream House: A Memoir (2019)
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts (2015)
Smith, Ali. Artful (2012); How To Be Both (2014)
Taddeo, Lisa. Three Women (2019); Animal (2021)
ENG593-02: Object Studies
W 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Cyrus Mulready: mulreadc@newpaltz.edu
How do the objects in our lives shape our identities and our ways of thinking about the world? How do the things that surround us preserve a record of our history and what stories do they allow us to tell? Do objects make thought, discovery, and creativity possible? In this seminar and writing workshop we will explore these questions through a range of readings as well as critical and creative projects that focus on the study of material culture. This will include a series of memoirs that locate their inspiration in the material world; fiction that draws our attention to the material underpinnings of storytelling; and creative nonfiction that explores the intersections of commerce and human labor in the global capitalist economy. Students in the course will engage in their own experiments in these genres of “object studies” and develop final projects (memoirs, essays, short fiction) modeled on the projects we examine in the course.
Selected Texts:
The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Crying in H-Mart, A Memoir, by Michelle Zauner
Additional primary and secondary readings to be distributed during the semester.
ENG 593-03: Environmental Writing
T 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Professor Matthew Newcomb: newcombm@newpaltz.edu
Explores environmental writing as a broader term than nature writing through ecocritical lenses, public rhetorical work on environmental issues, and natureculture studies approaches. This course combines theoretical work with analysis of literature and the creation of environmental writing in fiction and non-fiction forms.
Texts (subject to change):
Being Ecological, Timothy Morton
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, eds. Alison Deming and Lauret Savoy
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor
Orion literary magazine website/collection
Overstory, Richard Powers
Environmental Writing book of your choice (from list provided in class)
Articles posted on Blackboard
ENG 593-04: Literature of the First World War
M 5-7:50 p.m.
Vicki Tromanhauser: tromanhv@newpaltz.edu
The industrial production of death begins with the First World War. The measure of its impact has tended to turn upon watershed theories of the war as a kind of fulcrum or cataclysmic event in modern history that caught everyone and everything in it. If on the other side of that parenthesis is a new modernity marked by a fractured and ironic consciousness, the experience of the front also bred what trench-poet Isaac Rosenberg called “cosmopolitan sympathies” that could forge attachments across cultural and national differences. Remaining true to its modernist roots, we’ll explore the war from multiple perspectives, expanding the literary canon beyond the well-known combatant-poets to include VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurses and ambulance drivers, psychiatrists, and civilians. An occasion for tremendous creative production in literature, the war also inspired innovations in the visual arts (photography, painting, sculpture, and film), which we’ll examine alongside the war’s written record. Part of the aim of the seminar will be to resist the effort to totalize the war or to think it into a singularity, and instead to appreciate the continuities between the Great War and our own moment of long armed conflicts. As we do so, we’ll visit themes that cross wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: sacrifice and bodies in pain, memory and memorialization, PTSD and temporality, and the plasticity of flesh and medical prosthetics.
The Texts (provisional):
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929)
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)
David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937)
Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)
M. J. Hegar, Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home
Front (2017)
They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson, 2018)
1917 (dir. Sam Mendes, 2018)
Selected poems by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others; selected stories and diaries by Ellen LaMotte, Katherine Mansfield, and Enid Bagnold; and a selection of theorical writing on pain, abjection, trauma and recovery, and disability by Elaine Scarry, Julia Kristeva, W.H.R. Rivers, and Maren Linett.
