First please note that the annual Graduate English Symposium will again this year be held on Zoom, in order to accommodate our students at a distance. The date hasn’t been finalized yet but it will likely be near the end of April, and likely on a Saturday. A post with further information and details, including the call for presenters, will be coming soon, so stay tuned to this blog for more on that.
The fall (and summer) 2024 schedules will be appearing soon in Mercy Connect. Many of our students don’t take summer courses, whereas all of our students take fall and spring courses, which is why I’m privileging fall here in my phrasing. It’s also why we offer just a few summer courses. Fall and summer registration will open for veterans on Monday, March 11. General registration will open for all students on Monday, March 18. Registration normally opens at or around 9am, eastern (it begins when the Registrar’s Office opens and they activate the reg system).
Specific book info will be coming later, and some of these descriptions will change as professors refine their courses over the months ahead.
The five fall 2024 course offerings are:
- ENGL 500 Theory and Practice of Lit Criticism1 (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. Fulfills the requirement for ENGL 500.
- ENGL 505 Transformations of the Epic (Dr. Sax)
This course is based on the conception of the epic as an encyclopedic narrative of substantial length featuring a central figure who reflects the values of a particular culture. It will proceed chronologically, studying the taxonomy and transformations of the epic, from its earliest Classical manifestations, through its emergence in Medieval and Renaissance texts, to its incorporation after the Renaissance into modern writing. Fulfills the Writing & Literary Forms requirement or an elective.
- ENGL 525 Victorian Age in Literature (Dr. Dugan)
If one were asked to define the timeline of Victorian literature, one might be hard-pressed to do so. As literary genres are fluid, it is hard to determine when the Romantic Period ends and the Victorian Period begins; and when the Victorian Period ends and Modernism begins. Whatever the dates, a defining characteristic of Victorian England would be change, change matched with a belief in progress: societal, religious, economic, and artistic. While some benefited from these changes, others did not. The semester we will look closely, through Victorian literature, at issues that challenge the notions of change and progress, notably the role of women, industrialism, gender roles, and poverty as shown in fiction, poetry, and drama of the Victorian age. Fulfills a Literature Group 1 requirement or an elective.
- ENGL 543 American Renaissance (Dr. Loots)
This course will study representative American writings from “The American Renaissance,” a period during the mid-nineteenth century (roughly 1832 to 1865) which saw the rise of the first truly non-Colonial, non-Revolutionary body of national literature; a literature which no longer concerned itself with European precedent, engagement, or approval. When F.O. Matthiessen coined the term “The American Renaissance” in 1941 he did so in light of five monumental American works by five different writers, all produced within five years (1850-55): Emerson (Representative Men), Thoreau (Walden), Melville (Moby Dick), Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), and Whitman (Leaves of Grass). Since Matthiessen’s time the notion of an American Renaissance has expanded to encompass a greater diversity of representative works, writers, and perspectives from this era. In this course we’ll study selections from across the American Renaissance, most likely engaging works by: Harriett Jacobs; Frederick Douglass; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Frances Harper; Sojourner Truth; Margaret Fuller; Sara Willis (Fanny Fern); as well as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. Fulfills a Literature Group 2 requirement or works as an elective.
- ENGL 560 Tilting at Windmills: Riding with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza though 16th century Spain2 (Dr. Reissig-Vasile) [Note: if you use the Mercy schedule-planning tool, the title for 560 will show as “Topics in American Literature.” Ignore that title, it’s just a generic place-holder title in the planning tool. The real title is the one in Mercy Connect, Tilting at Windows]
It is often said that the long and tangled history of the modern novel begins in Europe, and it begins with Cervantes. Through a close reading and analysis of Cervantes’ literary masterpiece, Don Quixote de la Mancha (which many readers, including many authors, consider to be among the greatest works ever written), we will explore this issue and many others. The course will focus on questions of literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical heterogeneity in Don Quixote. We will seek to understand why so many celebrate Cervantes for teaching us “to comprehend the world as a question.” We will explore the polemics of 16th century Spain and how Cervantes used Don Quixote to raise ethical issues relevant to his time. Fulfills a Literature Group 2 requirement or works as an elective.
And for those nearing the end of the program, note that ENGL 599 Master’s Thesis is a one-on-one tutorial that needs to be taken during your final semester. You don’t enroll in 599 as you do a normal class. Check out this page on the blog for more about 599 and how you enroll in it.
The two summer 2024 course offerings are:
- 509 Perspectives on the Essay (Dr. Keckler)
[Updated description 2/26] The course will study of the essay as a distinct literary genre; its characteristics, types, and structures; its history; and its role in reflecting authorial consciousness. This course will focus in particular on the personal essay and sub-genres such as nature writing, cultural criticism, travel writing, and academic-personal essay hybrid forms. Fulfills the Writing & Literary Forms requirement or an elective; can work in other ways, as needed, for the degree, by request.
- 540 Monsters2 (Dr. Dugan)
In this course we will read classic and contemporary literary works to explore notions of monsters and monstrosities from the perspectives of the monster and the creator. Historical, societal, political, and cultural issues will be explored and addressed. Types of monsters and monstrosities will also be considered: e.g. human, beast, and scientific. Fulfills a Literature Group 1 field requirement or an elective by default; can work in other ways, as needed, for the degree, by request.
1 ENGL 500 runs once a year, in the fall, and because it’s a requirement for the MA degree seats are locked and reserved for students who are on track to graduate prior to fall 2025. Students who have not taken it already, and are on track to graduate prior to fall 2025, can get a seat by contacting the program director at cloots@mercy.edu. Students who are on track to graduate in fall 2025 or later can still contact the program director requesting a seat in the fall 2024 instance, but will be prioritized behind students who must have the course this fall to graduate on time.
2 ENGL 540 and 560 are numbers by which we run a variety of new or experimental coursework. Students can take multiple instances of ENGL 540 and 560, as long as they’re not taking the same course with the same title twice. So for example a student who took 540 Fairy Tales last summer can take 540 Monsters this summer because those are different courses, even though they both use the 540 number; likewise, students who took 560 African and Caribbean Lit last fall can take 560 Tilting at Windmills this fall.
Program Director's Blog for the Mercy University MA in English Literature Program 