UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLIER
FALL 2024
ENG. 2060: STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: (72872/75309)
MONSTERS, VAMPIRES, ZOMBIES
*PRE-1900*
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This online asynchronous course will examine how representations of witches, vampires, ghosts,
and monsters have shaped American cultural discourse and literary history. Reading may include
select works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, and Toni Morrison. We will ask why monsters
play such an important role in our cultural imaginations. How do individuals and societies define
themselves in relation to the monstrous? What is a monster and what can monsters tell us about
humanity, community, and our deepest fears and values? For questions, please email Dr.
Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu
ENG. 2100: RACE AND LITERARY CULTURE (75368)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@sstjohns.edu
Can we ever stop talking about race? Not if you study American culture. In every phase, period,
and form, American culture creates racial concepts, identities, and conversations. Our class uses
the methods and vocabulary of cultural studies and a wide variety of literature, film, and social
media to study our culture’s pivotal, enduring conversations. Topics include the birth of white
liberalism and white ethnicity through the 20th century US civil rights struggle; the story of Black
people’s representation in American mass culture from the 19th century and 21st century Black
media self-representation; and the changing symbols of American immigration and the cultural
identities of East Asian and Latina/o immigrants.
ENG. 2100: RACE AND LITERARY CULTURE (75305)
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@sstjohns.edu
Can we ever stop talking about race? Not if you study American culture. In every phase, period,
and form, American culture creates racial concepts, identities, and conversations. Our class uses
the methods and vocabulary of cultural studies and a wide variety of literature, film, and social
media to study our culture’s pivotal, enduring conversations. Topics include the birth of white
liberalism and white ethnicity through the 20th century US civil rights struggle; the story of Black
people’s representation in American mass culture from the 19th century and 21st century Black
media self-representation; and the changing symbols of American immigration and the cultural
identities of East Asian and Latina/o immigrants.
ENG. 2200: READING AND WRITING FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (71972)
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
This course is designed to introduce new English majors and minors, as well as students in the
School of Education concentrating in English, to some of the reading and writing practices of
students of English. We will practice what we call “close reading,” the careful and thoughtful
analysis of texts not only for their meaning but also for their rhetorical and aesthetic effects. The
texts that we will read will come from a broad range of historical periods, and will span a variety
of genres, including poetry, drama, narrative fiction, and multi-modal texts. Students will also be
introduced to secondary research in the discipline. The most important work of the course is to
improve students’ understanding of what constitutes meaningful and effective textual evidence in
the service of making analytical claims about literature. Through multiple short writing
assignments that will be revised, we will focus on developing topics and speculative claims
about literature that are meaningful to you. You will leave this class not only with a set of
practical skills that you’ll use as an English major, minor, or concentrator, but ideally also with
the ability to aesthetically appreciate, talk thoughtfully about, and interpret literary texts using
basic skills of analysis commonly used in the field of English studies.
ENG. 2200: READING AND WRITING FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (72291)
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
This course is designed to introduce new English majors and minors, as well as students in the
School of Education concentrating in English, to some of the reading and writing practices of
students of English. We will practice what we call “close reading,” the careful and thoughtful
analysis of texts not only for their meaning but also for their rhetorical and aesthetic effects. The
texts that we will read will come from a broad range of historical periods, and will span a variety
of genres, including poetry, drama, narrative fiction, and multi-modal texts. Students will also be
introduced to secondary research in the discipline. The most important work of the course is to
improve students’ understanding of what constitutes meaningful and effective textual evidence in
the service of making analytical claims about literature. Through multiple short writing
assignments that will be revised, we will focus on developing topics and speculative claims
about literature that are meaningful to you. You will leave this class not only with a set of
practical skills that you’ll use as an English major, minor, or concentrator, but ideally also with
the ability to aesthetically appreciate, talk thoughtfully about, and interpret literary texts using
basic skills of analysis commonly used in the field of English studies.
ENG. 2210: STUDY OF BRITISH LITERATURE (72292)
SONGS AND SONNETS
*PRE-1900*
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Nicole Rice
Email: ricen@stjohns.edu
This course offers a selective study of British poetry written from the fifteenth to the late twentieth
century. We will mainly be reading short lyric poems, working closely with the texts at a formal level.
The major goal of the course is to become conversant with the terms of formal analysis and proficient
in the close reading and analysis of poetry. We will be focusing on the links between poetry and song,
and we will become experts in the lyric form known as the sonnet.
ENG. 2300: TOPICS IN THEORY (72290)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
Email: tsoue@stjohns.edu
This course is an undergraduate introduction to the key concepts, thinkers, and intellectual
movements called literary theory (sometimes just “theory”). What we term “theory” is drawn
from diverse disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, economics, anthropology
and sociology. The methods and objects of inquiry will differ from thinker to thinker and school
to school, but what is shared in common is an effort to reflect on how we think and what that
means: “theory” in other words is “thinking” about our thinking. Another shared tendency is the
attempt to expose, analyze and understand how “normative” ideas, practices, beliefs and values
(notions that we tend to accept as “just the way things are” or “natural”) come to be; that is, how
they have been constructed. In demonstrating how the “norm” or “natural” gets to be made that
way—how it is not inevitable or natural—one effect of theory is to expose alternative ways of
thinking, being, and meaning that have been foreclosed, viewed as deviant or devalued in light of
the “norm.” We will try to view theory as a series of questions about the activities of thinking,
interpreting, and meaning-making as they apply to different objects of study: the human subject,
literature, language, sex, gender, race, culture. In our readings, we will learn to think critically
and carefully about the object of our scrutiny, and to examine our ways of knowing that object,
and what that knowledge entails for us as knowing subjects. The goal of this course is less about
mastery than familiarity with a key set of thinkers and their major concepts with a special
emphasis on race. Theoretical schools we will cover: structuralism, poststructuralism,
deconstruction, theories of race, queer theory, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism.
ENG. 3130: SHAKESPEARE: ELIZABETHAN PLAYS (73129)
LOVE AND WAR
*PRE-1900*
T. 10:40 – 12:05 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
F. 10:40 – 12:05 PM ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Brian Lockey
Email: lockeyb@stjohns.edu
In 1983, singer and songwriter Pat Benatar had a chart-topping hit, “Love is a Battlefield,” and if
William Shakespeare had had a time machine, he certainly would have agreed. This course will
consider how the themes of love and war intersect in a selection of his plays. How does
Shakespeare define love, and what is its role within his dramatic works? How does love help to
resolve war and conflict, and how does love perpetuate conflict and forestall resolution? Why are
lovers often caught on opposite sides of various conflicts in Shakespeare’s plays? Most
importantly, why does Shakespeare present love and war as so often parallel to one another? In
other words, how is love a battlefield for Shakespeare? This course will address such questions
by considering how a selection of Shakespeare’s plays portrays war and conflict involving
competing familial, national, and ethnic identities. We will attempt to gain some sense of the
plays as historical artifacts which negotiate social, political, and cultural trends within the
context of Renaissance England, and we will also consider the plays from the standpoint of
performance. Readings will include Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Henry V, As You Like It, All’s
Well that Ends Well, and Antony and Cleopatra.
ENG. 3190: SPECIAL TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE (75269)
SEX, GENDER, AND GENRE IN MEDEVAL LITERATURE
*PRE-1900*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
TF 1:50–3:15 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
Email: ricen@stjohns.edu
This course introduces a range of texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, including
bawdy French tales (fabliaux), the life of holy woman Christina of Markyate, the lais of Marie de
France, the romance of the cross-dressed heroine Silence, and selected Chaucerian tales. We will
read the medieval works together with critical writings on medieval anatomical theory, misogyny,
masculinity, marriage, religion, and sexual practices. How did medieval writers use different
literary genres to define, confront, or subvert assumptions about sex difference and gender roles?
What forms of power were available to men and women in particular social, religious, and
political settings? Most fundamentally, we will investigate how medieval people defined
themselves and each other in literary conversation and struggle.
ENG. 3220: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (75273)
CRIMINALS, VAGRANTS, AND SEX WORKERS
*PRE-1900*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Email: lubeyk@stjohns.edu
This course will consider how class, race, and gender shaped the writing of British fiction across
the eighteenth century. Major shifts in social attitudes occur in this period: the value of
aristocratic privilege is scrutinized, marriage comes under tighter legal control, abolitionists
protest the slave trade, and urban poverty gains visibility as a social concern. We’ll explore how
these contexts—which foreground questions of autonomy, human value, and social
responsibility—shape character and narration in the novels of the time. What a “novel” is was
being invented in this period, so we will ask what distinguishes the novel (if anything) from
other kinds of writing it resembles, like criminal biography, slave narrative, and personal
correspondence. We’ll pay particular attention to how literary form tries to achieve two
seemingly opposed tasks: to describe the world as it really is (on Caribbean plantations, onboard
merchant vessels, in London brothels, among crowds on dangerous streets) and to animate
characters in extraordinary circumstances (freed Black men striving to remain unenslaved, sex
workers leaving the trade enriched by their labor, unemployed servants discovering wealthy
parentage). Why did eighteenth-century authors want to have it both ways, rooting their fiction in
stories of common people while rewarding those characters with social elevation? Authors will
include eighteenth-century writers like Olaudah Equiano, Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, John
Cleland, and Daniel Defoe; and we’ll end with the historical transgender novel by Jordy
Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (2018). We’ll also dip into literary criticism and social theory
with Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Sal Nicolazzo. Course writing will be varied,
ranging from close reading to creative options.
ENG. 3290: SPECIAL TOPICS – 18TH – 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (75371)
SAINTS, HEROES, AND TYRANTS
*PRE-1900*
M. 12:15 – 1:40 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
R. 12:15 – 1:40 PM ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Email: mowrym@stjohns.edu
In Chapter 1 of his 1789 autobiography, Olaudah Equiano frames his narrative as having limited
claim on public attention given that it is “the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.” In
the most obvious terms, Equiano’s disclaimer suggests that by the late 18thc readers did not
recognize the life of an enslaved person as having a legitimate claim on public attention. This
class begins by asking a simple question: How did the distance between enslaved people on the
one hand and “saints, heroes, and tyrants” come into being? Returning to the middle 1600’s when
slavery and tyranny were understood to define one another, this class integrates recent historical
work by Vincent Brown, Jennifer Morgan, and others with a wide range of literary works by
writers such as William Walwyn, Richard Overton, John Dryden, John Milton, Aphra Behn,
Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano and others.
ENG. 3330: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (75271)
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
*PRE-1900*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Granville Ganter
Email: ganterg@stjohns.edu
This course will examine early U. S. African-American literature, paying particular attention the
international aspects of black writing and culture across the “Black Atlantic.” Stretching from
African epic to DuBois, we will think about the uses of folklore and myth, and the role of
literature’s contribution to national consciousness (in both west African and U.S. contexts). For
example, does African epic help us understand early African American art in the US? We will
also consider the consequences of joint authorship, when a text is an explicit collaboration
between two or more people, or when elements of a text have been borrowed from other sources.
What do we do with the evidence that the author of a famous eighteenth-century slave narrative,
Olaudah Equiano, may have actually been born in South Carolina and not Africa? Or Lydia
Maria Child’s sentimental editing of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? In what
way is the slave narrative, often taken to be the ur-moment of African-American writing,
engaged with other anglo-literary traditions? How does gender shape early African-American
literature? And finally, in what way is a folktale a “literary” text?
ENG/CLS 3605: ANCIENT COMEDY IN TRANSLATION (75319/75017)
ANCIENT COMEDY
*COUNTS TOWARD AN ELECTIVE CREDIT IN THE ENGLISH MAJOR*
*COUNTS FOR THE MINOR IN CLASSICS OR ANCIENT STUDIES*
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Robert Forman
Email: formanr@stjohns.edu
Athenian women deny sexual favors to their husbands until they end the Peloponnesian War;
Socratic philosophy produces liars and corrupts the younger generation; birds declare war on the
human race—these are themes of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Clouds, and Birds. We will read all
three of these plays and discuss them in contemporary and ancient historical contexts.
Should one raise children strictly or liberally? To what extent can social chatter malign the
reputation of an innocent woman? How do some people psychologically torture themselves after
having harmed their relationship with a beloved child? These social concerns are the themes of
Menander, Plautus, and Terence in The Grouch, The Brothers, and The Woman of Andros. We
will read all three of these as examples of what we call today “situation comedy,” humorous
narratives with social significance.
ENG. 3650: CARIBBEAN LITERATURE (75372)
THE SACRED AND THE SOCIAL IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE
*POST-1900*
*COUNTS FOR CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES MAJOR AND MINOR*
*COUNTS FOR THE AFRICANA STUDIES *
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
This course examines how religion, spirituality, and the sacred emerge in 20th and 21st century
Caribbean literature across prose fiction and drama, from the English-, Spanish-, and Frenchspeaking regions of the Caribbean (all works will be in English) and Caribbean diasporas. With a
specific focus on representations of Afro-Caribbean spiritual and religious life, the course
explores how questions of the sacred have animated Caribbean writers’ engagement with broader
social and political issues. A central question framing the course is: How have the sacred, the
spiritual, the religious been mobilized in Caribbean literature to oppose oppressive systems
(racism/colorism, colonialism/imperialism, class, gender, sexuality) from across the last century
and into this one? Authors whose works we may read include Kei Miller (Jamaica), Yanick
Lahens (Haiti), Pedro Cabiya (Dominican Republic/Puerto Rico), René Depestre (Haiti), Maryse
Condé (Guadeloupe), Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica/Canada), and Earl Lovelace (Trinidad). All
works will be read in their respective Englishes; however, students who are able are welcome to
read works in their original French, Kreyol, or Spanish languages.
ENG. 3680/CRES. 1000: CRITICAL RACE & ETHNIC STUDIES (75291)
*POST-1900*
*COUNTS FOR CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES MINOR*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
This course will introduce students to fundamental concepts and debates within the fields that
can be collected under “critical race and ethnic studies.” Students will become familiar with the
particular ways in which these fields analyze the phenomena of racial formation, ethnic group
formation, racism and racial discrimination, ethnic life, and ethnic stratification as central
features of global modernity. Students will explore the role that ethnic and racial stratifications
play in dominant economic and political systems and institutions, and the role they have played
throughout the world.
This course roots itself in Indigenous Studies and Black Studies as foundations for thinking
about global forms of racism, anti-racist struggle, and international solidarity movements. New
to this semester will be a unit of study on Palestine. We will also read excerpts of works by midcentury writers, thinkers, and activists whose works are now central to these interdisciplinary
fields: Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, the Combahee River Collective, June Jordan. We will read
also contemporary scholars who take up those earlier thinkers, and the revolutionary movements
in which they participated, which may include: Gary Okihiro, Angela Davis, Edward Said,
Rashid Khalidi, Vijay Prashad, Jean Casimir, Joseph Pierce, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robin D. G.
Kelley, among others.
ENG. 3710: CREATIVE WRITING ACROSS GENRES (75293)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
MR. 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
Email: brownl@stjohns.edu
This course is designed as a studio or laboratory where we explore modes and genres of creative
writing: poetry, poets theater, flash fiction, memoir, and cross-genre writing strategies like the
braided essay. We’ll put into practice how the creative and critical intertwine and inform each
other. We will collaborate and play generative writing games and respond to readings to sow
“seeds” for our own writing. This course can serve as an introduction to, or a continuation of, an
already established writing practice. Writing time is built into the class, with direction to expand,
share and revise work into finished pieces gathered in mid–semester and final portfolios.
Sample “seed” texts include excerpts from Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer, Olio by Tyehimba Jess,
Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, I Remember by Joe Brainard, rewritten fairy tales by Angela
Carter and Italo Calvino, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “Short Talks” by Anne Carson and
plays by Suzan-Lori Parks and Kevin Killian, and essays by Solnit, Bachelard, and Barthes.
Working in a range of traditional and experimental forms, students will develop original
portfolios of at least 20 pages by end of semester, as well as a short artist’s statement or letter to
the reader, and a short response to a “live” literary performance or event. Willingness to try out
new forms and modes of writing in a participatory setting is required.
ENG. 3770: WRITING A SHORT STORY (75294)
LOVE TROUBLE
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W 1:50 – 4:40 PM
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
Email: brownstg@stjohns.edu
In this class, we’ll work on the short story, and we’ll focus on stories about the difficulties of
love and sex and romance. Students will write a series of exercises and experiments,
culminating in original works of art, and they will present their writing to class for discussion
and critique.
We’ll think about storytelling not so much as invention, but as combination, the process the
Russian theorist Victor Shklovsky called “defamiliarization,” of bringing unlike things together,
so as to see them in unexpected ways.
“I believe that whatever talent I have,” writes Carmen Maria Machado, citing Shklovsky, “comes
not from some sort of muse or creative spirit, but from my ability to manipulate proportions and
time.”
As we write, we’ll read a number of short stories by great (mostly US) writers. We’ll start with
contemporary stories and move backward in time, studying works by: Carmen Maria Machado,
Justin Torres, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Ernest Hemingway,
Dorothy Parker, and Anton Chekhov. All these writers will tell us love stories—usually unhappy
ones. Love plus trouble equals a story.
ENG. 3790: PROFESSIONAL WRITING (75444)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W 10:40 – 1:30 PM
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
Even if the writing being done in a profession is not immediately visible to us, every profession
requires writing. And, in the 21st century writing — and understanding available writing tools — is
a more central part of professionals’ communicative lives than ever before. During the first half
of the semester, in a collaboration with SJU Career Services, students will compose their own
professional identities, developing or strengthening bios and resumes. At the same time, we will
explore the literacies and experiences of writers across a wide range of professions, considering
the expectations of and constraints on professional writers, the ways communities and contexts
shape professional writing, and the embodied experiences of composing in professional settings.
We will also think about how writers can (and should) critique and revise professional writing
and advocate through professional communication. In the second half of the semester students
will research the texts, visuals, and communicative relationships of a professional
community/context related to their interests and compose in a range of professional writing
genres.
ENG. 3795: WRITING ABOUT SCIENCE (75311)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
T. 3:25 – 4:50 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
Email: brownstg@stjohns.edu
This is a creative writing class in which students can write in any form they choose—fiction,
personal essay, scholarly essay, activist journalism, poetry, screenplay—but must write in
response to the assigned readings, which this semester are going to be about the entwined
subjects of pandemic and hysteria. We’ll read Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Oliver Sacks
and Eula Biss, Claudia Rankine and Carmen Maria Machado, as well as sections from my new
book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim.
In Studies in Hysteria, Freud and Breuer seek the “pathogenesis” of hysteria, that is they
understand mental illness on the model of germ theory—as if it were caused by something like a
bacterium or virus infecting the mind. In On Immunity, Eula Biss writes about the way vaccine
hysteria has spread through the US like a virus, and the way both viruses and mass hysterias
demonstrate ways in which “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Rankine, in
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, explores the intersections of race and madness and representation, and
Machado, in the stories we will read, constructs mythic nightmares about pandemics and surgery
and sexuality, and the ways that madness can be written on the body. I’ve just written a book
about new neurological understandings of the condition that used to be called “hysteria,” and the
strange ways twentieth century medicine failed to acknowledge breakdowns between body in
mind.
In this class, students will work in collaborative groups and explore their own voices as they
develop their own meditations over the course of the semester—through the reading and the
writing, we’ll try to situate ourselves in the weird and confounding world of information and
bacteria, suggestion and infection and groupthink.
ENG. 4993: CAPSTONE SEMINAR IN SPECIAL AUTHOR (75303)
URSULA LE GUIN
*SENIOR CAPSTONE*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
In a career that spans five decades (she died in 2018), Ursula Le Guin created a fictional
universe in which she expanded the depth and range of the genre we call science fiction. In this
course we will read widely in her “Hainish” novels and stories, which present a confederation of
human colonies spread throughout the universe founded by the planet Hain. Unlike Tolkien,
whom she admired and who was an early influence, Le Guin did not plot out the entire galaxy of
different societies in advance of her writing; rather, novel by novel and story by story, she
developed an interconnected universe in perpetual growth and development. Part of the great fun
in reading these Hainish stories is watching the process of her world-building (actually, her
universe-building).
But what makes her fiction truly worthy of our attention is Le Guin’s subtle and profound
exploration of important issues of our world: the workings of power in the act of colonizing other
worlds; issues of racism and slavery; issues of sexuality and gender; the persistent hope for
liberation and peace; the effects of both secular and religious terrorism; the varieties of religious
experience; anxieties about the environment and ecological devastation; the ills of capitalism and
the nature of anarchy; to name just some of the themes we will confront in her universe. Never
does she become heavy-handed and didactic in her philosophical explorations, but like the
greatest writers she creates plots and characters capable of such depth and interest.
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (72015) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (72016) 6 CREDITS
ENG. 4953: INDEPENDENT STUDY (72505) 3 CREDITS
BUSINESS WRITING
ENG. 1040: WRITING FOR BUSINESS (73217/75267)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu