Course Description:
The Proseminar is the English Department's introduction to graduate studies, a required course designed to acquaint students early in their graduate careers with the fundamental principles and practices of advanced literary and cultural studies. The course is designed to provide rigorous exercise in the skills of close reading, critical analysis, oral presentations, primary and secondary research, and MLA style for properly documenting and formatting research papers. In this section of the Proseminar, will exercise this range of foundational skills as we explore literature’s role in shaping and expressing racial and national identities. Focusing on a group of texts taken from several periods of literary history, our inquiry will cross into historical questions (how have categories of “race” been defined in our past), theoretical (what is “identity”?), and even scientific (what does the study of genetics teach us about identity?). The Proseminar will thus allow for an integrated study of one of the most pressing scholarly topics in the field today, and provide students with the skills and methods to pursue a successful graduate career at SUNY New Paltz.
Required Texts:
(**A General Note: If you already own a complete works of Shakespeare (Norton, Riverside, etc.), you should certainly to use it for our class instead of purchasing the single-edition Othello listed below.
I have ordered the books from our campus bookstore, but you can certainly save money by shopping online. While Amazon is convenient and often has good prices, I use and recommend the website http://addall.com, which searches dozens of different bookseller websites to find the best price for you. Use the ISBN (a number used by booksellers and publishers to identify books) in the table below to make sure you have the right edition.**)
| Title | Author |
ISBN | Publication |
| A Glossary of Literary Terms | Abrams, M.H. | 1413033903 | Wadsworth Publishing (2008), Edition: 9, Paperback, 408 pages |
| MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers 7th Edition | Modern Language Association | 1603290249 | Modern Language Association of America (2009), Edition: 7th, Paperback, 292 pages |
| Oroonoko (Penguin Classics) | Behn, Aphra | 0140439889 | Penguin Classics (2004), Paperback, 144 pages |
| Six Degrees of Separation: A Play | Guare, John | 0679734813 | Vintage (1990), Edition: 1st Vintage Books Ed, Paperback, 120 pages |
| M. Butterfly: With an Afterword by the Playwright | Hwang, David Henry | 0452272599 | Plume (1993), Paperback, 100 pages |
| Tar Baby (Contemporary Fiction, Plume) | Morrison, Toni | 0452264790 | Plume (1987), Paperback, 305 pages |
| Othello (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) | Shakespeare, William | 1903436451 | Arden Shakespeare (1996), Edition: 3rd, Paperback, 442 pages |
| Philadelphia Fire: A Novel | Wideman, John Edgar | 061850964X | Mariner Books (2005), Paperback, 208 pages |