SUMMER 2018 UNDERGRADUATE FLYER

UNDERGRADUATE FLYER

MAY 29, 2018 – JULY 2, 2018

SUMMER SESSION I

ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (30411)
Online
Dr. John Lowney

This university core course is an introduction to the study of global literature in English.  Its primary purpose is to familiarize students with the practices of critical thinking, reading, and writing that inform the study of literature and culture.  While examining a variety of literary genres, especially narrative genres, this course emphasizes the power of literary texts to initiate as well as respond to debates about culture and cultural conflict.  The approach of the class is comparative and exploratory, as we will examine the relationship of literature to issues of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and language. We will concentrate specifically on the literature of travel, especially contemporary fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Sandra Cisneros, Paule Marshall, Teju Cole, and Mohsin Hamid.  Writing assignments will include personal narratives as well as brief analytical essays.

ENG. 1040: Writing for Business (30222)
Online
Dr. Stephen Sicari
This course will emphasize the particular skills necessary for clear and efficient communication in business environments. Surveying the diverse forms of professional writing, from emails and cover letters to executive summaries and proposals, students will focus on the role clarity, organization, revision, and research in producing strong and purposeful writing. By the conclusion of the course, students will have collected a portfolio of various forms of business communication. This course will be taught fully online, and will require extensive work with texts and with other students’ writing through peer review exercises.

ENG. 2060: Study of American Literature (30370)
American Literature and the Monstrous
Online
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This online course will examine how representations of witches, vampires, cannibals, and monsters have shaped American cultural discourse and literary history.  Reading texts Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and the contemporary novelist Seth Grahame-Smith, we will ask why monsters play such an important role in our cultural imaginations.  What is a monster?  How do individuals and societies define themselves in relation to the monstrous? What can monsters tell us about humanity, community, and our deepest fears and values?  For questions please email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.


ENG. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (31084)
Postcolonial Literature and Theory: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonialism in 20th Century African and Caribbean Literatures
Online
Dr. Raj Chetty
This course will introduce students to key topics and concepts in postcolonial studies. The course will also allow students to explore these key topics and concepts through a close study of literary works that fall under the purview of postcolonial literary studies. These literary texts range across form—novel, short story, poetry, drama, essay—and emerge from Caribbean and African contexts that span the twentieth century. The focus on Caribbean and African texts does not suggest that the Caribbean and Africa are exemplary sites for the questions framing postcolonial studies. In fact, the course could just as fruitfully focus on postcolonial literary studies in relation to such places as India, Ireland, and Southeast Asia. However, focusing on Caribbean and African postcolonial literary studies is intended to ground our conversations in the overlapping conditions that structure the particular experiences of imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism that faced much of the Caribbean and Africa in the twentieth century. These conditions include anti-black racism, mid-twentieth century national liberation movements, diaspora and exile, and pan-African internationalism.

The organization of the course readings follows a chronological timeline of sorts, moving from early twentieth century literary responses to racism in political and cultural colonialism, to mid-century anti-colonial and national liberation movements and accompanying literary production, and ending with literary reflections on the failures of postcolonial promises to live up to anti-colonial revolutionary aspirations. However, the readings across this chronological ordering trouble any clear linear progression from colonialism to anticolonialism to postcolonialism/neocolonialism.

 

UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLYER
JULY 9, 2018 – AUGUST 9, 2018

SUMMER SESSION II

 

ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (30345)
Refugee Stories
Online
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
As politicians around the world police their borders and negotiate the admission of refugees, global literature provides us with a long arc and deeper view of displaced peoples.  What drives people to leave their homes? What stories do they bring with them? Which ones do they leave behind? Rather than “sample” national literatures around the globe, this course studies the people who have no nations, in the spirit of St. John’s Vincentian mission to “welcome the stranger.”  Texts include new works such such as Dinaw Mengrestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizers as well as Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories from The Middleman and Chimimanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck.  

ENG. 1040: Writing for Business (30014)
Online
Dr. Kathleen Lubey

This course will emphasize the particular skills necessary for clear and efficient communication in business environments. Surveying the diverse forms of professional writing, from emails and cover letters to executive summaries and proposals, students will focus on the role clarity, organization, revision, and research in producing strong and purposeful writing. By the conclusion of the course, students will have collected a portfolio of various forms of business communication. This course will be taught fully online, and will require extensive work with one required course textbook and with other students’ writing through peer review exercises.

ENG. 2210: Introduction to British Literature (30824)
Online
Dr. Melissa Mowry
That’s a Laugh”—the perfect summer elective.  Come learn about British Literature through the great tradition of British Comedy.  We’ll start with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Tale, read a Shakespeare comedy, explore the satires of Swift and Pope, descend to the uproariously funny underworld of The Beggar’s Opera and finish with Monty Python’s Holy Grail.  Along the way we’ll think about how humor functions as social critique and tries to affect social cures.  Weekly discussion posts, a midterm, and a final.

ENG. 3710: Intro to Creative Writing (31260)
Online
Dr. Stephen Miller
This course will enable students to experience literature from the “inside out.” Within the context of the students experiencing themselves as working writers, students will consider canonical, modern, and contemporary literature as models.​