It appears that registration for both summer and fall 2015 semesters is going to open at the same day and time this year. That’s really odd but that’s what they’re telling me. So, that means that fall registration opens on March 4th, just like summer. As I wrote in the summer-schedule post, it usually opens at 9am Eastern. Those of you who know that you MUST enroll in this fall’s running of 500 because you’re nearing the end of your time in the program should be online at 9am on the 4th in order to secure a seat in that course, a course which all students must take (consult the Graduate Student Handbook which you can download in the left-hand menu or refer to the post on the degree audit to see what courses you need for the MA degree). We’re running six courses in the fall, and here they are:

• ENGL 500 Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism.

Dr. David Kilpatrick

This course offers an introduction to major movements and figures of the theory of criticism. The question “what is literature?” is the 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. This course is a core course and so is required of all students in the program. 3 credits.

• ENGL 506 History of Poetic Forms

Dr. Alison Matika

This course investigates the relationship between meaning and form. We are concerned with developing the depth of understanding afforded by close reading, precise writing, and shared discussion, and we will develop a coherent overall context that problematizes the consideration of poetic forms through both creative and critical engagements using full class and small group reading and workshop. This course fulfills the Writing & Literary Forms group requirement, or can count as an elective. 3 credits.

• ENGL 515 Working Women’s Literature in the US: 1865 to Present

Dr. Miriam Gogol

• ENGL 522 Humanism in Renaissance Texts

Dr. David 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. This course fulfills a Literature Group 1 requirement or an elective. 3 credits.

• ENGL 524 From Reason to Imagination

Dr. Boria Sax

This course looks at the tension between reason and imagination in representative literature from cultural movements such as neo-Classicism, Enlightenment and Romanticism.  This course fulfills a Literature Group 1 requirement or an elective. 3 credits.

• ENGL 560 Modern Cryptography: Hemingway

Dr. Christopher Loots

This course follows Ernest Hemingway, through his writings, from his early days in Paris to his final moments in Ketchum, Idaho. Readings will include many of his major novels and short stories, and some non-fiction. The course will consider the interrelated effects of Hemingway’s self-engineered celebrity status—as the rugged bearded world traveler—which coincided precisely with the rise of modern media technology, and exceeded his literary fame even within his lifetime. The concept by which we’ll angle into our semester of study is that Hemingway’s writing, written in a then-groundbreaking style of seeming simplicity, might be considered a modernist code. Like any code, his method seeks to communicate hidden meanings which are not readily apparent upon casual read. Students will work to critically decipher Hemingway’s modern crytography so to interpret/intuit what meanings lurk in the writings of this giant of 20th-century American literature, arguably the most influential American writer of all time. This course fulfills a Literature Group 2 requirement or an elective. 3 credits.

As a final note, students who took the 514 Hemingway course a few years ago are not eligible to take this 560 Hemingway course.

This summer we have four graduate literature courses on the schedule. Three are summer standards and the fourth, Magical Realism, is a new offering being run by a professor who is an expert in Latino literature and Magical Realism. Registration for summer courses opens on March 4. The administration hasn’t sent out the specific time registration opens on this date but in the past it has been 9:00am Eastern. The four summer courses are:

•  ENGL 509 Perspectives on the Essay

The course will study the essay as a distinct literary genre; its characteristics and types; its history; and its role in reflecting authorial consciousness. This course will examine the taxonomy of the essay in terms of its medium (verse or prose), its tone and level of formality, its organizational strategies, and its relationship to its audience and to particular modes of literary production (speech, manuscript, pamphlet, book, magazine, newspaper). It will trace the development of the essay from its origins to the modern era. 3 credits.

• ENGL 510 Theory & Practice of Expository Writing

The course is encouraged for any student who is a teacher or who aspires to teach secondary school or community college English, or to adjunct at senior colleges. But the course is also encouraged for anyone who simply wants to focus in on exploring and developing his or her own critical, expository writing. The course will address the techniques of expository writing as reflected in academic discourse. Ideally, students will learn the general practices of critical writing, but focus their work in their individual fields of interest. These interests may include aesthetic approaches, feminist approaches, deconstructive approaches, research in culture, education, etc. The course will specifically address techniques of analytic organization, and will consider the pedagogy and andragogy of writing. 3 credits.

• ENGL 517 Advanced Creative Writing

This course is intended for writers with some background or preparation in creative writing. “Some background” could simply be that you’ve worked in private on poems, essays, or stories; or that you’ve attended courses or workshops; or that you’ve been published. The idea is that each of you in the room will be continuing to develop whatever is your personal stage of creative writing prowess, rather than starting out from absolute zero. The course continues to develop each student’s creative writing ability through a close study of various writing styles and techniques, matched with assignments and workshops which encourage the students to further develop their own creative writing informed by such literary study. The emphasis of the course will shift depending on the expertise of the professor running it, and could emphasize or involve poetry, narrative, creative non-fiction, or other forms. 3 credits.

• ENGL 560 Magical Realism

A fuller description of this course will be forthcoming. In brief, though, it will explore Latino literature and in particular literature of Magical Realism, and will be taught by Dr. Celia Reissig-Vasile, an expert in this field.

The spring schedule is fully up and corrected in the online system. You will be able to enroll in any courses you wish starting at 9:00am eastern on 11/5. You will see some new catalog numbers and of course might have questions about what courses you should take. Please direct all such inquiries to me over the next weeks and months. I am here to advise all of you. Your academic advisors will help as best as they can, but this new structure will be new for them too. I am at cloots@mercy.edu.

I will post the day and time that registration opens for the spring whenever I receive that information. For now, here is a look at the seven courses schedule to run in the spring, along with the professors running them:

ENGL 508: History of Drama in English:

• Dr. Richard Medoff

This course will study selected dramatic works from the vantage of the cultures of the historical epochs they are embedded in. It will use a chronological approach, beginning with the drama in England: the medieval mystery cycles and morality plays; the emergence of secular drama in the 16th century and earlier 17th century, focusing on the precursors and contemporaries of Shakespeare; Restoration drama; the development of sentimentalism and the adaptation of drama to an increasingly middle class audience in the 18th Century; the closet drama of the Romantic era; 19th-century melodrama in Britain and America; and the emergence of the modern theater in the United Kingdom and the United States. 3 credits.

ENGL 514: James and Lawrence:

• Dr. Sean Dugan

I have long been interested and intrigued by the question of how one attains personal and social freedom in a society that seems to reward conformity. Is it possible? Or, does one pay a price, social, professional, emotional, for such attempts? Two writers from two different worlds–the American Henry James, the son of a wealthy philosopher, and the English D.H. Lawrence, the son of a coal miner and a factory worker–differ in writing style and subject yet explore the complexities of an industrialized society and personal relationships. We will read novels and short stories by each, including Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love, James’s The Ambassadors and Portrait of a Lady, as well as selected short stories. We will explore the stylistics, the characterization, and the themes in order to answer the question of how one resolves, if at all, conflicting demands of society’s expectations and the an individual’s quest for an understanding of self and of happiness. 3 credits.

ENGL 515: Sport Literature:

• Dr. David Kilpatrick

ENGL 521: Themes and Genres of Medieval Literature:

• Dr. David Fritz

This medieval literature course lays the foundation of the underpinnings of Western society’s literature for centuries after the first utterances of Anglo-Saxon literature became written. This class examines the literature of both women and men from The Book of Marjorie Kempe to The Canterbury Tales. We will see how the influence of the church is seminal in preserving and in perpetuating the literature of this time. That said, medieval literature offers today’s student a foundational knowledge of literature as well as an exploration into oft-neglected authors whose works didn’t make it into the canon. 3 credits.

ENGL 540: Magic in Literature:

• Dr. Boria 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. Readings include works by Hesiod, Ben Johnson, Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffmann, J. R. Rowling and others. Textbooks include The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances Yates. 3 credits.

ENGL 545: Literature of the Left Bank, Paris:

• Dr. Christopher Loots

This course will examine the people, culture, and modernist writings of the expatriate community of the Parisian Left Bank during the early and mid twentieth century. This will include an exploration of the significance of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore and lending library, and of intellectual and artistic salons such as those of Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. The course will additionally consider the doings and writings of expatriate authors moving through or closely associated with the Left Bank’s modernist enterprise: e.g., Edith Wharton, Mina Loy, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Breton, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, H.D., Janet Flanner, and James Baldwin. An emphasis will be placed on studying the cultural geography of this location which attracted many of the world’s great artists and gave rise to numerous works now considered twentieth century literary masterpieces. In addition to reading primary sources of our authors, we’ll read throughout the semester from Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. 3 credits.

ENGL 560: Afropolitanism:

• Dr. Donald Morales

The term “Afropolitanism,” a word coined by Taiye Selasi in a 2005 essay, is generally defined as young, well-educated African, and by extension, Caribbean artists with global and multicultural sensibilities who have settled in a number of cosmopolitan capitals in Europe and North America. In the literary world, these artists have produced intriguing works that describe their hybrid status and identity but also defy categorization–Selasi argues, “the practice of categorizing literature by the continent from which its creators come is past its prime at best.” “Afropolitanism,” has also engendered a lot of criticism and controversy. Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, labels it an “empty style and culture commodification.” This course tackles the concept of “Afropolitanism” in a variety of ways. In addition to introducing the student to a new generation of African/Caribbean writers–Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [Americanah], Zadie Smith [On Beauty], Edwidge Danticat [Dew Breaker], Teju Cole [Open City], Taiye Selasi [Ghana Must Go], there is also the opportunity to include transplanted dramatists [Roy Williams, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Debbie Tucker Green, Bola Agbaje] in London who have created a number of powerful dramas around the same subject. 3 credits.