S.I. UNDERGRADUATE FLYER
FALL 2019
http://stjenglish.com/
ENG. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (71881)
MR 12:15-1:40 PM
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Email: mowrym@stjohns.edu
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. 2200: Reading and Writing for the English Major (71604)
Travel and Migration
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Brian Lockey
Email: lockeyb@stjohns.edu
How do we discuss and write about literature? This course will answer this question by introducing students to some of the modes of critical thought used in the academic discipline of English literature. Emphasis will be placed on learning traditional close-reading skills as well as contemporary literary critical approaches to literature. In addition, we will examine a number of fictional works, which explore intersections between the related themes of travel, migration, and human conflict. We will consider such questions as the following: what motivates people to travel? How does travel serve allegorically to represent an inner journey? What is the relationship between travel and the lack of resources? Why do so many depictions of travel involve the journeys of characters that are deprived of basic necessities? What about migration and resettlement? Do people migrate in order to escape the scarcity of resources or in order to enrich themselves with an overabundance of resources? What is the role of the exile and refugee, the individual who is forced to migrate against his or her own will? Along with these questions, we will consider a number of related themes, including the symbology of ships and islands, the fear of annihilation and the apocalypse, and how the topics of conquest, civilization, and barbarism are treated in these works. We will read works by William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee, and Cormac McCarthy among others.
ENG. 3290: Special Topics in 18th and 19th Century English Literature (75141)
The Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Gothic
*DIVISION II*
MR 10:40-12:05 PM
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Email: mowrym@stjohns.edu
This class will examine the 17thc roots of a genre that became one of the most popular forms of the eighteenth century—the Gothic. We will begin with Shakespeare’s supernatural tale of Scottish treachery, Macbeth, as a way of considering the way the Gothic treats the extra-rational and the geographically exterior. We will move on to consider the 17thc fascination with witches, including the Salem Witch Trials, and then venture into the 18thc form where we will read gothic novels by Horace Walpole, Anne Racliffe, and William Beckford. The course will conclude with Jane Austen’s brilliant parody of the Gothic: Northanger Abbey.
ENG. 3340: Realism and Naturalism (75139)
Are We Still Human?
*DIVISION III*
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@stjohns.edu
Instead of inspiring nationwide idealism, the victory of the United States over the Confederate States and its slaveholding regime brought about brutal realism in literature, culture, politics, and law. Authors dissected characters according to microscale measures of race, color, gender, wealth, poverty, accent, region, and ethnic origin, as well as newly discovered scales of sexual inclination. New scientific and sociological theories turned racial difference into a cultural obsession and represented all human being as competitive animals, driven by natural forces. Are the Realist and Naturalist writers of the late nineteenth century too real or just ahead of their time? In reading works by Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Theodore Dreiser, Charles Chesnutt, and Henry James, we see authors testing the boundaries of the human.
ENG. 3410/HON 3430: Modern Fiction (75140/75470)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Rachel Hollander
Email: hollanr1@stjohns.edu
This course will consider the development of the novel in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and America, focusing particularly on the theme of art and artists. We will discuss the shift from nineteenth-century realism to Modernism, paying close attention to narrative form (including stream-of-consciousness, non-linear temporality, multiple perspectives, and fragmentation), and thinking especially about the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Our readings take up questions of gender, sexuality, and race quite explicitly, but we will also talk a lot about identity, war, family, cities, class, and what we mean by “modern.” Authors may include Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Jean Rhys, or Nella Larsen.
ENG. 3440: Contemporary Poetry (75142)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W 1:50 – 4:40 PM
Dr. Stephen Miller
Email: millers@stjohns.edu
This class will focus on post-World War II poets, treating movements such as Confessional Poetry, New York School Poetry, Objectivism, Beat Poetry, Projective Verse, Deep Image Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, Flarf Poetry, Rap Poetry, Hip-Hop Poetry, and oral and performance poetry.
ENG. 4991: Seminar in British Literature (75138)
*SENIOR SEMINAR*
Home and Hospitality in the Long Twentieth Century
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Rachel Hollander
Email: hollanr1@stjohns.edu
This seminar will explore themes of home and hospitality in the fiction of the long twentieth century. Beginning with late Victorian anxiety about England’s status in the world, we will look at the ways in which ideas of home, family, and the encounter with the stranger develop in response to war, colonialism, and changing understandings of gender and sexuality. Reading novels, short stories, and at least one graphic novel, we will pair the literature with contemporary texts on hospitality, ethics, migration, queer theory, eco-criticism and post-colonialism. The final research paper will be an opportunity for each student to explore some aspect of the course in greater depth, and to connect it to other disciplinary interests (education, history, media studies, philosophy, etc.). Literary authors may include Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, J.M. Coetzee, Marjane Satrapi, Allison Bechdel, Jamaica Kincaid, and Chimamanda Adichie. Theory may include Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Timothy Morton, and Sara Ahmed.