Publishing at SUNY Cortland

Though faculty and students in all disciplines publish, read one another's writing, and try to keep up with the new ideas in their field or major, the English department takes a special interest in the activity of publishing and writing. As teachers, we support the close study of texts, the authors who compose them and the audiences who interpret them. As writers ourselves, we know the difficulty and rewards of making a book, article, or syllabus say exactly what it is supposed to say. For these reasons and probably for others, we are deeply involved in the institutional support of writing, reading, publishing, and interpretation. Here are some examples:

The Faculty Writing Group: This is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and staff who are working on publication.

Parnassus: Dr. Joel Shatzky shepherds this yearly publication of Cortland's best non-fiction prose.

Transitions: Those interested in becoming involved in a new, online version of the college's literary magazine should contact Alex Reid.

College Writing Committee: Chaired by Mary Lynch Kennedy, this committee oversees Writing Intensive courses and the yearly writing contest.

Faculty Publications

Denise D. Knight

Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Summer, New Riverside Editions, forthcoming 2002. (The first comprehensive paired edition of two of Wharton’s most intriguing Berkshire novels, with a critical introduction, annotation, background materials, and interpretive essays.)

Approaches to Teaching Gilman’s Herland and “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, coedited with Cynthia J. Davis, Modern Language Association, forthcoming 2002. (As a volume in the MLA Approaches to Teaching series, this book offers a variety of techniques and strategies for teaching two of Gilman’s classic works.)

“Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Shadow of Racism,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Linda Pavlovski, Gale Group, 2002. (This essay traces the evolution of Gilman’s often blatantly racist social theories.)

“An `Amusing Source of Income’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Soapine Connection,” in The Advertising Trade Card Quarterly, Summer 2001. (In addition to being an author and lecturer, Gilman, as a young woman, was also a designer of Soapine advertising cards for the Kendall Manufacturing Company in the 1880s. The cards reflect Gilman’s innovative artistic imagination, illuminate her social and racial theories, and provide insight into her precarious financial condition.)

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Lost Book: A Biographical Gap," in ANQ, Winter 2001.
(This essay addresses why Gilman’s first book has been overlooked by biographers and scholars of Gilman and how its discovery changes our view of her well-documented nervous breakdown in 1887, the year before the book was published.)

Alexander Reid

“Panoptic Technologies and their Machinic Becomings.” Culture Machine 3 (2001). (This article discusses two science fiction novels, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's The Difference Engine and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, as they explore the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence.)

"Writing Radical Architectures: Freespaces in Technoculture." forthcoming in Pre/Text. (This article explores the application of conventional principles of rhetoric and architecture toward understanding the dimensions of virtual reality).

Joel Shatzky and Ellen Hill

The Thinking Crisis published by IUniverse Press in December, 2001. (A study of the current educational system in the U.S.)

Joel Shatzky

Iago's Tale published by Drybones Press in January, 2002. (A novel)