Registration is now open for fall (and summer) 2025. I mention fall first only because the majority of our students don’t take summer courses. If anyone has questions about the courses below or your overall progress toward the degree, please contact cloots@mercy.edu

SUMMER 2025

• ENGL 506 – History of Poetic Forms (Dr. Kilpatrick)

The course will study the major forms and conventions of poetry that have developed from classical models to the present. Wherever possible, particular poems from different historical contexts will be compared and analyzed to demonstrate how these forms and conventions have developed and been adapted to specific personal, ideological, or cultural pressures and contexts. Fulfills the Writing & Literary Forms requirement or an elective, but can work as a Lit Group 1 or 2 requirement upon request.

• ENGL 517 Advanced Creative Writing (Dr. Sax)

Advanced Creative Writing, despite the name, is open to anyone in the MA English program no matter how much or little previous experience you’ve had with creative writing. If you are interested in expressing yourself creatively through words, you are welcome and encouraged to enroll. The form of writing emphasized in the course changes depending on the preferences of the instructor running it. Fulfills the Writing & Literary Forms requirement or an elective, but can work as a Lit Group 1 or 2 requirement upon request.

FALL 2025

• ENGL 500 – Theory & Practice of Literary Criticism (Dr. Kilpatrick)

An introduction to some of the major movements and figures of the theory of criticism. The question “what is literature?” is a primary concern of this course. Such an inquiry necessarily engages other, closely affiliated signifiers such as work/text, writing, reading, interpretation, and signification itself. After brief encounters with ancient antecedents and seminal moderns, influential contemporary approaches to the question concerning literature and its cultural significance are engaged. An assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of current trends in the practice of literary criticism, and their theoretical groundwork, is the ultimate objective of this course.

NOTE: All students must complete ENGL 500. The course runs once each fall semester, so if you’re aiming to graduate at the end of fall 2025, spring 2026, or summer 2026 and have not yet completed 500, you must enroll in this course for fall 2025. The next instance of the course will be fall 2026. For this reason this course is registration-locked and requires a permit (contact Lydia Yearwood in our PACT advising office at lyearwood@mercy.edu for help with a permit). Anyone not on pace to graduate in the semesters noted above can request a permit but will only be given one if seats remain after everyone who must have the course during this fall 2025 instance gets a seat.

• ENGL 515: Magic in Literature (Dr. Sax)

This course examines alchemy, together with related activities that now impress us as “magical,” as a virtually all-inclusive discipline which laid much of the foundation for later literature, art, and science. It looks at the beginnings of alchemy in the ancient world, and how these developed, along with the revival of Classical learning, in the Renaissance. Finally, it looks at the continuing influence of magic in Romantic, Modern, and Post-Modern literature and culture. Past readings have included works by Hesiod, Ben Johnson, Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffmann, J. K. Rowling; and the Frances Yates work The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Some or all of these writers/works might be included in this next instance of it, as might other authors and works. Fulfills an elective by default but can work for the Writing & Literary Forms requirement, upon request.

NOTE: The MA program cycles numerous different courses under the catalog codes of 514, 515, 540, and 560. Students can take multiple instances of 514, 515, 540, and 560 courses as long as the title of the course is not the same as before. So if you’ve taken other 515 courses, you can take this one too as long as you haven’t already taken a course specifically titled Magic in Literature.

• ENGL 522 Humanism in Renaissance Texts (Dr. Fritz)

This course will focus on humanism and the concepts arising from it in relation to the production and appreciation of literature during the Renaissance. The revival of interest in the arts and ideas of Greco-Roman antiquity and the dependence of Renaissance thought on classical themes will be among the issues discussed. Readings could include (but aren’t limited to) works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Machiavelli, More, Spenser, among others. 3 credits. Fulfills a Literature Group 1 requirement or an elective.

• ENGL 545 – Literature of the Left Bank, Paris (Dr. Loots)

This course examines some of the people, culture, and writings of the expatriate community of the Parisian Left Bank during the modernist movements of the early- and mid-twentieth century. Authors/figures covered could include Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, James Baldwin, Hilda Doolittle, Andre Breton, Richard Wright, Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, among others. In the course of our studies we will consider the significance of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore and lending library, of clubs such as Ada (Bricktop) Smith’s Chez Bricktop, and of intellectual and artistic salons such as those of Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. An emphasis will be placed on studying the historical context of modernism in Paris, as well as on the cultural geography of Paris which attracted so many of the world’s great writers and artists, and gave rise to some of the most profound writings ever created. Fulfills a Literature Group 2 requirement or an elective.