FALL 2018 GRADUATE FLYER

GRADUATE FLYER
FALL 2018

ENG.110: Introduction to the Profession (72061)
M. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course introduces students to graduate work in English. We will explore tools and techniques for scholarly research, practice strategies for successful academic writing, and discuss pedagogical models and methods.
For more information contact Dr. Jennifer Travis, travisj@stjohns.edu

ENG. 120: Composition Theory and the Teaching of Writing (75079)
W. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
This course will be an overview to the field of composition studies, introducing students to major trends in the research and teaching of writing. Students will examine key debates and historical movements that have influenced the teaching of writing at the university, including theories of process, social constructionism, translingual writing, genre, and new media. Students will also focus on pedagogical methods for examining and assessing writing, grounded in strategies for classroom practices. Readings for the course will include journal articles from College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Composition Forum, Enculturation, Written Communication, College English, and Literacy in Composition Studies.

ENG. 141: Writing in the Academy (75083)
W. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Anne Geller
In Writing in the Academy, we will explore students’ experiences writing beyond composition courses. What are students’ experiences writing across all of their years of higher education — from community college through college and graduate school (in the disciplines and/or professions)? We will consider the history and current status of English’s involvement in this teaching and learning by reading about how English departments took, and sometimes continue to take, the lead in developing US writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs and writing in the disciplines (WID) programs. We will study various philosophies and pedagogies of WAC/WID programs and critiques of WAC/WID. We will also work toward an understanding of how WAC and WID programs (as well as literacy across the curriculum and literacy coaching initiatives at the high school level) must ask questions of identity, language, community, disciplinarity, access, and exclusion that are both similar to and different from those questions composition scholars struggle with around first year writing. In addition to immersing ourselves in these histories of – and challenges to – writing instruction across academic disciplines and professions, we will read case studies, stories, and counterstories of students’ experiences as writers, including descriptions of what students face as they write across and within disciplines and across all of their communities (within and beyond school). Our opening text for the semester will be Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities.

ENG. 646: American Poetics (75081)
The Rhetoric of Modernization
R. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This class will examine some key texts in the American discourse of modernization, ranging from Ben Franklin’s Autobiography to Nicholson Baker’s postmodern novel, The Mezzanine. Modernization tends to emphasize technological development over philosophy (ie: modernity, or modernism) and the United States is often cited as one of the engines of technological development that brought commercial prosperity to the world. Much of American literature and culture was shaped by, and reflective of the modernization of expressive technology, from Ben Franklin’s prose to Marshall McLuhan’s theories about television and today’s social media. Although western historians and social scientists tend to celebrate modernization, this course will also examine that discourse critically and rhetorically.

ENG. 761: Caribbean Literature Culture and Theory (75080)
Caribbean Literature: The Circum-Caribbean and Caribbean Studies
R. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
This course serves as an introduction to issues and problems at the nexus of Caribbean Cultural Studies and Caribbean Literary Studies. We will engage literary works that present historical and cultural issues in the circum-Caribbean region, complemented by multidisciplinary essays approaching the very question of the Caribbean as a region of literary and cultural study. The course will work from theorists from across the Caribbean that approach the region as a unit of analysis, including Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant, Shalini Puri, and Silvio Torres-Saillant. These theories will ground our discussions across the rest of the semester, which will maintain a commitment to intra-Caribbean comparison. After a jaunt through late 19th century anti-imperial and anti-racist writing by José Martí, Antenor Fermin, and J. J. Thomas, we will read short prose fiction, poetry, theater, and short essays organized under topical units: 1) New Negro, Negrismo, Négritude; 2) Anti-colonial Revolutionary Politics; 3) Caliban’s Nation Language; and 4) Sisters Outside.

ENG. 836: Modernism & The Fascist Aesthetic (75084)
Fascist Discourse and Representation in the Age of Trump
T. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
On November 18, 2016, just ten days after Donald Trump’s shocking electoral triumph, in a large conference room in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., Richard Spencer, the self-proclaimed “thought criminal” who coined the term “alternative right” or “alt-right,” spoke before a celebratory gathering of white nationalists. At the conclusion of his speech, Spencer lifted his right arm and shouted “Hail Trump,” “Hail Our People,” and “Hail Victory” (the latter being an exact English translation of “Sieg Heil,” the ubiquitous greeting in Nazi Germany). These cries brought the audience to its feet and many joined Spencer in making ecstatic, upraised Nazi salutes. As startling as it was to hear these chants and to see these gestures 71 years after the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s regime (an effort which cost more than a million U.S. casualties, killed and wounded, not to mention the deaths of over 25 million Soviet citizens, and the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust), on August 11, 2017, dozens of white supremacists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate icon General Robert E. Lee. Along their route, the polo-shirted and tiki torch-bearing young men chanted slogans that reflected their “white dispossession” narrative—“White Lives Matter” and “The South Will Rise Again”—as well as the haunting Nazi catch-phrase, “Blood and Soil” (“Blut und Boden”). Most chilling of all, these young anti-Semites also shouted, repeatedly, “Jews will not replace us.” The next day, in the midst of the massive “Unite the Right” demonstration of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, neo-Confederates, and armed militiamen, one person was killed and many others injured when a Nazi sympathizer deliberately drove his car into the crowd of counter-demonstrators.

Of all the remarkable developments in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, none was perhaps as unsettling as the refusal of the new U.S. president to condemn the Charlottesville rally. Equally disturbing, Trump insisted on assigning moral equivalency to the white nationalists and their opponents. But this behavior has been shown to be consistent with the Administration’s travel bans, immigration round-ups, and the new style of political leadership represented by Trump, which is based on a myth of national regeneration and the exploitation of culture to achieve political ends.

This course traces the current incarnation of politicized racism and cultural anxiety—Trumpism and the associated phenomenon of Bannonism—back to its origins in twentieth-century discourses and manifestations of fascism and white nationalism in Italy, Germany, France, Norway, Great Britain, and the United States. In particular, we will examine representative examples of transhistorical, reactionary, neo-romantic literary forms, ideas, and iconographies that express nostalgia for pre-modern agrarian primitivism and European ethnocentrism, and are presupposed by a belief in the decline and decadence of Western civilization. In addition, this course will investigate the appeal exerted by fascism over leading Modernist intellectuals and artists, consider the nature of their engagement with fascism, and seek to chart this activity across a spectrum of behavior that ranges from mere flirtation with fascism to overt and enthusiastic collaboration with fascist regimes. These figures will include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Gottfried Benn, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Leni Riefenstahl, Carl Schmitt, Knut Hamsun, Giovanni Gentile, F.T. Marinetti, Robert Brasillach, and Céline. The course will culminate with analysis of tropes and images embedded in the modes of discourse and representation associated with the Trumpist political movement.​

ENG 850: Jazz and Literature (75092)
M. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. John Lowney
This course concentrates on the intersection of jazz with twentieth-century literature. Of all of the African American musical forms, jazz had had the greatest impact on literary forms of expression. In considering the significance of jazz for literature, especially African American literature, we will examine literary representations and adaptations of jazz from the early twentieth century to the present. Through the study of exemplary literary texts that feature jazz as a social discourse as well as a mode of artistic expression, we will investigate how jazz has been represented as both a distinctive mode of African American cultural expression and a complex medium of interculturalism. We will discuss as well how jazz intersects with other forms of popular African American music, from the blues and ragtime to soul and hip hop. Readings will include James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Claude McKay, Banjo; Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music; Ann Petry, The Street; James Baldwin, Another Country; Paule Marshall, The Fisher King; and poetry by Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Jayne Cortez. Expertise in jazz or African American literature is not expected: we will also have a jazz history to supplement these primary sources.

ENG. 878: Workshop in Poetry & Poetics (75082)
T. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Professor Lee Ann Brown
This is a creative / critical workshop in which students will explore and develop their own individual and collaborative poetry writing practices as well as practice active listening and support for others in the group. No prior experience with poetry writing is required. We will look at poetry as an alternative model for investigation and play with multiple disciplines and how it can engage with current identity, social and cultural issues.
Texts include anthologies Women : Poetry : Migration, Tender Omnibus: 25 Years of Tender Buttons Press and Ecopoetics. Students are responsible for an extended poetry project to be revised throughout the semester as well as a critical essay on a topic to be arranged. Further readings will be assigned according to individual projects and presentations. Participation is a key element of the course as is a willingness to engage in collaborative reading, writing and roundtable discussion.

ENG. 975: Doctoral Research Essay Workshop (71739)
M. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Amy King
This research workshop is designed to support ABD students embarking on their dissertations, emphasizing the creation of a shared community to support our own individual scholarship and research. We are a faculty-supervised and peer-review based workshop, one which is designed to jumpstart the dissertation process and provide a structure for continued progress towards completion. The course will emphasize prospectus writing, techniques for revision, and strategies for completion. Students will meet weekly for a two-hour workshop that will include peer-editing, in-class writing exercises and brainstorming, and discussion of relevant issues in dissertation-writing. This course guides students through the early stages of project formation: what texts or subjects do I care most about? What research question most pressingly needs answering? how will my dissertation constitute me as an academic professional? how will this dissertation contribute an original idea to research and scholarship? Once the dissertation topic has been chosen and refined, we will write and workshop a dissertation prospectus, which will include an overview of the project and brief chapter summaries. Our goal by the end of the semester is an approved dissertation prospectus, as well as work on one chapter. If a student begins ENG 975 with an approved prospectus then they will use our regularly scheduled peer-review workshops in order to draft and revise significant portions of the dissertation.

Eng. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Masters (73724)
Course designation for for MA students in their last semester of coursework if they choose the Portfolio option rather than the M.A. thesis.

Eng. 105Q: Doctoral Qualifying Exam (73726)
Preparation for and oral examination in three scholarly fields of the doctoral student’s devising, in consultation with three faculty mentors/examiners.

Eng. 900: Master’s Research (70626)
M.A. thesis; capstone project of the M.A. student’s devising, written in consultation with a mentor and several faculty readers.

Eng. 901: Readings and Research (70627)
Independent readings and research supervised by, and in conversation with, a faculty mentor.

Eng. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70095)
Designation for M.A. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature; a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.

Eng. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70094)
Designation for Ph.D. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature; a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.

Eng. 975: Doctoral Research Essay (DA) Workshop (71740) (1 credit)
This is the one-credit version of Eng. 975, only to be taken after the student has completed one semester of the three-credit version of Eng. 975.

Doctoral research colloquium or independent doctoral research supervised by doctoral committee.