Staten Island Campus Undergraduate Flyer
Spring 2019
ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (15099)
ONLINE
Dr. Melissa Mowry
This class explores the way English speaking people thought about the rapidly expanding world in the earliest decades of colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean colonies of Barbados and Surinam.
ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (15096)
W 7:30 – 10:20 AM
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
This course will use the lens of comedy to study literature and film in a global context. Students will read Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson concerning humor and laughter, in addition to writers such as Salmon Rushde, Muriel Spark, and Milan Kundera. Within this context, students will consider films directed by South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, Iran’s Asghar Farhadi, Italy’s Lina Wertmüller, Israel’s Joseph Cedar, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Frances’ Jean Luc Goddard, German-Americans Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, and Americans Preston Sturges and Charles Burnett.
ENG 2100: Literature and Culture (14938)
Inventing Race in America
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Race is a social construct, not a biological category. Then how has it been constructed? This course uses literature, film, history, and media studies to rediscover how Americans became white, black, Latinx, and Asian. Planned course topics cover the racial transformations of Irish and Italians; white liberalism; the representation of blackness; and the role of student movements and universities in creating “diversity.” Texts include Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (11627)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Melissa Mowry
This class is designed to introduce you to Literary and Cultural Theory, an important and dynamic body of work that is still very active and cuts to the very heart of what we think literature is, the way it interacts with other disciplines, and they we read imaginative writing. Borrowing from disciplines like philosophy, psychology, history, and sociology, literary theory is undeniably challenging. It is also richly rewarding and will open up new ways of thinking and talking about literature specifically and representation generally.
ENG. 3140: Shakespeare: The Roman and Greek Plays (14935)
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
*DIVISION I*
Dr. Brian Lockey
This course will consider Shakespeare’s Roman and Greek plays within the context of their ancient sources, especially Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. In addition, we will read some of Shakespeare’s early modern contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, alongside their Greek and Latin sources. (We will read such source material in English translation). We will consider how Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights adopted Roman historical and fictional sources to their own culture. Among the questions we will be asking: How did a Christian culture like Protestant England adopt pagan values associated with ancient Rome and Greece? How do Shakespeare and other authors during this period “Christianize” ancient Rome, and to what extent do Shakespeare and his contemporaries preserve or even celebrate the pagan virtues associated with the ancient world? To what extent do Shakespeare and his contemporaries see ancient Rome as alternatively a republic or an empire on which the future English polity should be based? Finally, how did ancient icons of real-life and fictional womanhood such as Cleopatra and Dido influence representations of women and “femininity” on the Renaissance stage? We will read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage, and Marlowe’s narrative poem, Hero and Leander.
ENG. 3590: Literature & The Other Arts (12858)
W 1:50 – 4:40 PM
Dr. Stephen Miller
This course encourages interdisciplinary thinking. Considering history as an “art,” we will read history alongside contemporary fiction by Eugene Lim and others, poetry by poets such as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, contemporary drama by Paula Vogel, Spalding Gray, and others. In addition we will discuss several films and visual arts movements, such as Magical Realism.
ENG. 3710: Introduction to Creative Writing (15095)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W 10:40 – 1:30 PM
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
This course asks you to use your imagination, memory, perceptions, and sensitivities to write creatively in all creative forms. We will use models in several genres, in addition to techniques such as focused and unfocused free-writing and many different prompts to unlock your creativity and ability to convey the breadth and depth of you inner and outer experiences.
ENG. 4991: Seminar in British Literature (14932)
The Origins of Science Fiction
*SENIOR SEMINAR*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Brian Lockey
Literary scholars have tended to view the genres of science fiction and fantasy fiction as secondary or marginal to the tradition of serious literature. It will be the premise of this course that, in reality, such works of fiction have always been central to the corpus of English literature. We will begin this course by reading excerpts from the work that perhaps more than any other launched the tradition of fantasy and science fiction within the English literary tradition—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—which has inspired countless later writers of fiction. We will then explore Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, which are traditionally seen as the first works of science fiction in the English language. From there we will explore novels by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. We will also explore novels by Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde that incorporate science fiction tropes into traditional literary narratives. We will end the semester by considering a number of Nobel Laureates and mainstream contemporary fictional writers including Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and J. M. Coetzee’s whose influential novels incorporate stylistic and narrative tropes from the genre of science fiction. This course is open to any third or fourth year majors or minors.