As we swing into the fall semester, I’m going to profile briefly two of our most important courses, the First-Year Seminar in English. We offer two sections of this class this fall, taught by two of our star faculty. What’s interesting about these courses is how different they are from each other while still speaking to the core values and practices that define the English major.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad, one of our specialists in post-colonial and contemporary world literatures, is offering a version of the English Seminar called “Schools & Schooling,” that gets to the heart of the matter: what is it that we do in school, anyway? Exploring a wide range of texts from the 18th to the 21st centuries, from the United States and across the English-speaking world, Dr.Ahmad and her students will interrogate, unpack, and perform the key tasks and practices that the English major makes possible.
Dr. Nicole Rice, our department’s foremost specialist in Medieval English Literature, calls her version of the course “Visions and Revisions of King Arthur,” and yes, that’s Dev Patel, playing the role of Sir Gawain, on the top of her syllabus page. Dr. Rice and her students will dive deeply into one of the richest and most influential narrative cycles in the English language, looking not only at the medieval origins of Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the rest, but also at their modern mash-ups and representations.
These courses have widely different reading lists, but they share our department’s core values and practices. They are both courses that teach the core practice of writing, as all of our English courses are. They are courses that provide students will skills to create their own meanings and their own texts, through the cultivation of critical reading practices. They are also, in a fundamental way, classes about analysis and original thinking, including the intellectual pleasures of uncovering meanings that are not obvious at first glance.
These students, and these professors, are lucky to be in these small, seminar-style classes, with plenty of individual attention. It’s really the best way to join the community of the English major at St. John’s.
Leave a Reply