Open Invite for the faculty and student gathering on Thursday 9/7, 6pm eastern

Earlier on the blog I announced that there will be an online Q&A and orientation for recently-admitted students on Thursday, 9/7, on Zoom, at 6pm eastern. We’re extending the invitation for this event to any and all students in the graduate program, no matter how far you are along in your studies, and no matter if you feel that you need info or answers about anything in particular. It will likely prove useful and interesting to meet your fall professors in person; to hear any Q&A about the upcoming courses; to hear some general advice and guidance about program-level support and resources; to meet some of the other students in the program; etc. So, anyone who is interested, please contact cloots@mercy.edu to receive the meeting info and links. We hope to see a big turnout! Thank you, all.

Blackboard Sections Now Visible But Are Still Works-in-Progress

Blackboard sections for your graduate courses were revealed today 8/23. Please note, though, that these sections are still works-in-progress and most of your professors will be tinkering with them prior to the first day of class on Wednesday 9/6. Although the overall Blackboard sections have been revealed, much of the particulars in each section might still be hidden from student view. This is purposeful. Again, these are all works-in-progress as professors prepare for the fall semester. All necessary parts will be visible and ready come the first day of the semester, 9/6.

Graduate Student Orientation: Thursday 9/7 at 6pm Eastern, on Zoom

We’re planning to hold a faculty-led orientation for recently-admitted graduate English students (and other continuing students who feel that they could benefit from such an orientation) on Zoom on Thursday 9/7 at 6pm eastern. Attendance by our incoming students is strongly recommended, though we understand that not everyone will be able to make that day or time. Some of the faculty teaching this fall, including the Program Director of MA in English Lit, as well as the Chair of the Department of Literature & Language, will be present. So you’ll get to meet some of your fall-semester professors in person (virtually speaking), will be able to ask questions about the program or specific fall courses, and will hear advice and info from faculty and others. We’ll be reaching out to incoming students soon via email with information for how to attend. Continuing students who are interested in attending should contact cloots@mercy.edu.

Book Order Info for Fall 2023

Below is some info regarding book orders for fall 2023 courses. This will be updated throughout August as professors finalize their courses. Note that in many cases professors will supplement these materials with links, PDFs, and other materials provided in Blackboard during the semester. So what you’re seeing here might not spell all of what you’ll be studying in any particular class. The college’s online bookstore is here. Books do not need to be purchased from the college store. The MA program recommends supporting your local bookseller, if one still exists; or using Powells.com for new books, or Alibris.com for used books. Books from the library are perfectly fine as well, though part of your graduate studies should involve marking up your books with notes and thoughts and building a personal library.

ENGL 500 – Theory & Practice of Lit Criticism (Dr. David Kilpatrick)

• Leitch, Vincent B., et al, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  3rd ed. Norton, 2018. ISBN: 9780393602951.

ENGL 507 – Narrative Strategies in the Novel (Dr. David Fritz)

• Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. ISBN 0099430894.
• Diaz, Herman. Trust. ISBN 9780593420317.
• Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. ISBN 1594483299.
• Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. ISBN 9781400032716.
• Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. ISBN 006112009X.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. ISBN 1784876437.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. ISBN 9798799065454.
• Wolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. ISBN 0156628708.

ENGL 515 – Latin American Literature (Dr. Celia Reissig-Vasile)

Only one book purchase will be required, the Campobello book listed below. Other works will be assigned, such as Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and the film Strawberry and Chocolate by Tomas Guiterrez Alea, but links or copies of those readings and media will be provided by the professor of the course during the semester.

• Campobello, Nellie. Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands. Translators Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews. University of Texas Press, 1988. ISBN: ‎ 9780274695508.

ENGL 540 – Literature by Women (Dr. Miriam Gogol)

More readings may be listed or shared in Blackboard, but as of now the following books are required:

• Oates,  Joyce Carol. Beasts. Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0786711035.
• Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time. Penguin Classics, ISBN 0140189521.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International, ISBN 9781400033416.

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

Much will be provided in Blackboard in the form of PDFs (e.g. stories by Edith Wharton, selections from Joyce’s Ulysses, poetry by H.D., fiction by Zelda Fitzgerald, essays and poems by Richard Wright, etc.). But students should secure a copy of the follow required readings (any edition will do, it does not have to be the specific edition assigned here):

• Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. Vintage, 2013. ISBN: 9780345806567
• Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank Paris: 1900-1940. University of Texas Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780292790407. (This is out of print but there are dozens of used copies for sale on Alibris.com for cheap.)
• Breton, Andre. Nadja. Grove Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780802150264
• Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast – Restored Edition. Scribner, 2010. ISBN: 9781439182710. (If you have the original edition, that works fine too, and that’s actually the one I usually work from, though the two editions are significantly different.)
• Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. ISBN: 9780374525071
• Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Vintage, 1990. ISBN: 9780679724643. (We’ll be studying The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.)

Recommended additional materials for those who want to go even deeper into the lit and culture of this era, or who want to own copies of works from which I’ll be providing PDF exerpts:

• Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon, 2012. ISBN: 9780807006238. (We won’t be studying this directly but it’s relevant to our units on Baldwin and Wright.)
• Cunard, Nancy. The Poems of Nancy Cunard. Bodleian Library, 2005. ISBN: 9781842331071. (I will provide PDFs of what poetry in this we’ll be studying, but you might want to own the book.)
• H.D. Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod. New Directions, 1988. ISBN: 9780811213998. (I will provide PDFs of what poetry in this we’ll be studying, but you might want to own the book.)
• Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner, 2014. ISBN: 9781476764528. (We won’t be studying this directly but it’s highly relevant to our unit on Hemingway.)
• Fitzgerald, F Scott. Tender is the Night. Scribner, 1995. ISBN 9780684801544. (We won’t be studying this directly but it’s relevant to our unit on Zelda and will loom large in the unit lecture.)
• Fitzgerald, Zelda. The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. University of Alabama Press, 1997. (I will be providing a PDF of the Zelda work we’re studying, but if you’re interested in her you should own this.)
• Wright, Richard. Native Son. Perennial Classics, 2005. ISBN: 9780060837563. (We won’t be studying this directly but it’s relevant to our unit on Wright.)

ENGL 560 – African & Caribbean Literature (Dr. Donald Morales)

Partial book info is below; the professor is still building the reading list but so far this is for certain:

• Adichie, Chimamanda. Purple Hibiscus. Algonquin Books, reprint edition, 2012. ISBN 9781616202415.
• Coetzee. J.M. Disgrace. Viking, 1999. ISBN ‎ 978-0670887316. [South Africa]
• Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (The Toni Morrison Lecture Series). Vintage, 2011. Appears to be out of print but new or used copies are widely available online, and also it is available in some digital formats, e.g.. Apple Books, Kindle.
• Danticat, Edwidge. Dew Breaker. Vintage, 2005. ISBN  978-1400034291. [Haiti]
• Mafouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley. Anchor, Reprint edition, 1992. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0385264761. [Egypt]

Year-End Events and Honors: Symposium, Student Awards, and Commencement

We’ve reached the end of another academic year, which means it’s symposium season, awards season, and commencement season!

For our annual Graduate Student Symposium this past April, a good number of students, faculty, friends, family, and others in the graduate English community gathered on zoom to hear scholarly presentations from Abigail Collopy, Rayne Dolton, and Adrianne Gunter. Interpretations and insights were expressed; ideas were discussed; and much camaraderie and collegiality was had. Presenters earned a valuable line-item to list in the scholarship section of their curriculum vitae. The graduate faculty encourage all of our students to share some of your writing and ideas at next year’s symposium, which will likely be in late April 2024. Ask any of your professors or the Program Director about doing so, if you have any questions or need some guidance.

Three students were recognized recently for program year-end honors. The first of these honors is the Graduate English Christie Bowl, named for the late Joannes Christie who established and long chaired Mercy College’s English Program. The award, determined by the collective graduate faculty, recognizes one graduating student for their consistent academic excellence and classroom performance throughout their time in the graduate program, their other contributions to the program’s scholarly learning community, and their relevant accomplishments beyond the program’s coursework.

• The winner of the 2023 Graduate English Christie Bowl is Tim Brosnan 

Next is the Howard Canaan Thesis Award for Innovation. This award honors the late Dr. Canaan, a long-time and highly-esteemed professor of English at Mercy College who (among many other things) taught Shakespeare and Science Fiction, and advocated that the latter could be as meaningful an area of study, could be as “literary” and as significant, as the former. This award recognizes a thesis that does one or some of the following: approaches literary analysis in a unique, unexpected, or unusual way; reconsiders and otherwise treats with dignity genre fiction; or involves interdisciplinary studies.

• The winner of the 2023 Howard Canaan Thesis Award for Innovation is Casi Kapadia for her study “Fashion Statements: Fashion in Literature as a Social Mechanism in the Formation of Identity”

Finally, we have the Thesis of the Year Award. Selecting one study for this award, as much as for any of the other awards, is always extraordinarily difficult, as thesis students across the program regularly create excellent studies that are each worthy in their own right. The paper receiving this distinction stood out in all respects.

• The winner of the 2023 Thesis of the Year Award is Selana Scott for her study “Ulysses’ Bloom; The Embodiment of the Mechanisms and Benefits of an Internal Locus Of Control Mindset”

It is always a strange thing to announce such distinctions as when doing so one can’t help but think of the marvelous students and studies that are not the ones named. Again, it is extraordinarily difficult for faculty judges to locate any single person to honor for any of these awards out of the many exceptional students graduating each year from our program and the college overall. So as we recognize these honorees let us please also recognize all members of the graduating MA class of 2022-23 for their hard work and dedication that has gotten them to this moment of completing their MA degree in English Literature.

One last program-relevant thing to mention here is that for Mercy College’s School of Liberal Arts commencement ceremony, held last week on the western athletic field of the Dobbs Ferry campus (the 100-yard event tent is pictured below), the college selected one of our own to deliver the graduate-student commencement address: Tim Brosnan. Tim gave a wonderful speech in which he expressed many of things that he cherished most about his time in the graduate program, as well as his appreciation for many of the individual faculty with whom he studied during his time in the program. It was a heartening and laudable finish to the year.

Cheers to everyone in the MA English Literature program, to our alumni, and to all of your family and friends. Congratulations to our graduating class of 2022-23. Onward we go!

Grad Student Book Club (open to students and alumni)

There’s been some talk about students in the MA program forming up a book club, so to have a more casual, extra-curricular, and student-run venue at which to discuss books and socialize with other graduate students outside of the classroom and the program structure. This is a great idea, one worth pursuing and registering as a student club with the College. In order for this to get off of the ground, we need two things:

First we need to create a list of everyone interested in joining the book club (note that expressing interest doesn’t bespeak an obligation to attend, it’s just necessary for the college to verify how many students might join and attend the club if it launched).

Second we need at least one person to step forward here at the start and indicate that they would be willing to be the club president, or a co-president, from go. In the context of this book club, the club president would mostly be responsible for organizing the online discussion sessions (e.g. polling the club members on when would be the best time to meet, creating and disseminating the zoom links, hosting the zoom session, and in-between meetings taking point on correspondences from other grad students interested in joining the club.).

If multiple people are interested in being book-club president, that’s great: in that case different people can take turns organizing the discussion sessions and such. I sponsor an undergrad student club at Dobbs Ferry that has three co-presidents, and they enjoy taking turns at it. Note that the book-club president(s) wouldn’t be deciding the book that the club reads: that would need to be agreed upon by the club, as a group (or by using whatever method of deciding that the club decides is best).

So, if you’re interested in joining the grad-student book club, please send an email to cloots@mercy.edu with your name and CWID number. And if you’re willing to be listed as a club (co)president here at the start, please indicate that as well. Again we need at least one person to step forward for that, otherwise the club won’t launch, since college student clubs need to be student-run and student-managed. Thank you.

(Edit in: Also, let me add, that alumni are welcome to be a part of the book club too, so if any alumni reading this are interested, let me know.)

ENGL 515 Latin American Lit is moving to asynchronous (no weekly zoom requirement)

Due to lack of enrollment in the zoom-enhanced fall ENGL 515 Latin American Literature course, we’re changing the course to the standard asynchronous format. This means there will no longer be the Thursday night zoom requirement attached to the course. The change in modality will appear in Connect by the end of this week. Please contact cloots@mercy.edu with any questions.

Take a chance on 515 Latin American Lit and 560 African & Caribbean Lit

After one month of fall registration being open, one course is already full, and a few others have just a few seats left. There’s lots of time yet, all spring and summer long, but two courses with a lot of seats still available are 515 Latin American Lit and 560 African & Caribbean Lit; so I wanted to send this note out across the graduate student community and encourage you to consider these courses for your fall schedule.

515 Latin American Lit will include a live zoom discussion once a week, on Thursday nights, from 7:00-8:20pm eastern. We’re running this course in this way as an experiment, based on feedback from the program-wide survey in which a significant amount of students indicated that they wanted live-zoom choices added to the schedule. Whether or not we run courses in this modality in the future will depend much on whether or not this class draws students. So for any students who want there to be live-zoom options in the program, we need you to stand up for that by registering for this fall 515 course. The course is listed in Connect as running both on Tuesday and Thursday night on zoom, but in fact it will only be on zoom on Thursday nights.

The theme of the 515 Latin American lit course will be Protest and Resistance in Latin American Literature. Students will examine works by the Mexican writer Nellie Campobello, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela, and the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, among others.

The 560 African & Caribbean Lit course will explore works of writers from a variety of African and Caribbean nations. Students in previous instances of this course explored works by writers such as Naguib Mafouz [Egypt], Wole Soyinka [Nigeria], V.S. Naipaul [Trinidad], J.M. Coetzee [South Africa], Nadine Gordimer [South Africa], Derek Walcott [St Lucia], Chimamanda Adichie [Nigeria], Jamaica Kincaid [Antigua], Edwidge Danticat [Haiti], Mariama Ba [Senegal], Tsitsi Dangaremba [Zimbabwe], and Athol Fugard [South Africa]. Some of these writers will likely be included in the class this fall.

Both of these courses will offer students a unique and inspiring experience. On behalf of all of the faculty in the MA program, I hope that our graduate students find a way to fit one or both of these courses into your fall schedule. Please write to cloots@mercy.edu with any questions.

Reminder: 2023 Symposium is live-online, April 29; RSVP and CFP deadline extended to Friday 4/14

In hopes of gathering more attendance for this year’s Graduate English Symposium, which will be online/on zoom on Saturday 4/29 starting at noon eastern, we’ve extended the deadline for declaring as a presenter or audience member to this coming Friday 4/14. If anyone has any questions, or would like to present, or attend, please write to cloots@mercy.edu by the end of Friday 4/29. Thank you.

Registration Info and Updates

Registration opens today, 3/20. Below are a few registration notes. This list will be updated as necessary during the registration window:

• UPDATE: 506 History of Poetic Forms is now active on the summer schedule. The summer ENGL 506 History of Poetic Forms course is not appearing on the schedule. That is an error and will be fixed today, asap, so expect 506 to appear on the schedule soon.
• ENGL 500 is permit locked per the information shared in this earlier post. In order to receive a permit to register for the 500 course, you must (1) be on track to complete your MA degree prior to fall 2024, and (2) receive a permit from the program director by contacting cloots@mercy.edu.
• ENGL 599 Master’s Thesis doesn’t appear on the schedule, since the way you register for the tutorial is unique. Consult this post for instructions and guidance for getting into a 599. After reading that post, contact cloots@mercy.edu with any further questions.
• Summer registration has been brisk right from the start (one class is already full with registration having been opened for just two hours). The 506 course will appear soon to provide more options. Depending on demand, we might schedule another course. The way students can signal whether or not another course is needed is by getting on the waitlist for full courses. If those waitlists climb to the point where we can see that a lot of students are waiting for seats, then another course will appear. If those waitlists don’t fill, then that signals to us that the existing schedule is adequate and has absorbed the expected amount of summer students.