UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLIER
FALL 2025
http://stjenglish.com
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ENGLISH MAJOR REQUIREMENTS
ENG. 2060: STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (72419 & 74294)
MONSTERS, VAMPIRES, GHOSTS
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This course examines how various writers use monsters and the supernatural to reflect cultural anxieties, moral questions, and the boundaries of human experience. Focusing on authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and Toni Morrison, we will investigate how the monstrous manifests in both literal and figurative forms, becoming a lens through which we can better understand society’s deepest fears and contradictions. Students will develop a deeper understanding of how the monstrous shapes American literary traditions and cultural discourse.
ENG. 2100: RACE AND LITERARY CULTURE (74342)
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 (74292)
TF 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 uncover the “racialization strategies” that circulate among us. Class case studies include the “white savior” complex; the history of Black people’s media representation and contemporary self-representation; and East Asian immigration stories. From these case studies, students learn to apply cultural studies analyses and tools to contemporary racial justice and media issues that impact them.
ENG. 2150: LITERATURE AND CULTURE (74566)
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. 2150: LITERATURE AND CULTURE (75420)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Stephen Miller
Email: millers@stjohns.edu
This course concerns in periodization as a means of relating all manner of literary, artistic, cultural, and political phenomena. We will consider the theories of Hegel, Benjamin, Foucault, Althusser, and Jameson to consider such notions as the zeitgeist, episteme, period, micro-period, and rippling epistemes. This will be a deeply interdisciplinary class. The World War II economy will be of special concern to postwar America. We will start by micro-periodizing the fifties and sixties through Beat, New York School, and Confessional Poetry, and then micro-periodizing the seventies through politics, poetry, painting, and film. Can the present be periodized? Students will be called upon to provide answers.
ENG. 2200: READING AND WRITING FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (71701)
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
In this class we will practice what we call “close reading,” the close and careful and focused attention to the text for its meaning but also for its rhetorical strategies and effects. We will then practice how to write about literature as English majors/minors/concentrators.
We will read Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, which is a collection of ten short stories joined together by a reader’s journey propelled by his reading. This book will allow us to practice the close reading of fiction, but also provoke us to question the nature of fiction.
We will be spending even more time on poetry, practicing in class and on our own the close reading of lyric poems. The textbook we will be using contains many poems worthy of that kind of attention, with examples of analysis and suggestions for reading strategies. It also describes ways to approach writing about the poems we are reading with such focused attention.
ENG. 2210: STUDY OF BRITISH LITERATURE (71977)
*PRE-1900*
M. 12:15 – 1:40 PM IN PERSON
AND
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Melissa Mowry
Email: ricen@stjohns.edu
English Literature has a rich poetic tradition of writing about nature. We will begin with Shakespeare’s sonnets in the late 16thc and conclude with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the late 19thc. Throughout the semester we will explore the ways nature was viewed as emblematic of beauty, wilderness, temptation, and freedom.
ENG. 2210: STUDY OF BRITISH LITERATURE (75035)
*PRE-1900*
T. 12:15 – 1:40 PM IN PERSON
AND 12:15 – 12:40 PM ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Brian Lockey
Email: lockeyb@stjohns.edu
This course will consider the question of how a number of fiction writers have conceptualized Eden and the Apocalypse, the mythical beginning and ending of the world. The past century has seen the emergence of a great deal of literature and film that expresses a heightened anxiety over the fear of world destruction. Some fear human-caused events such as nuclear holocaust, the creation of a bioweapon, or environmental catastrophe. Others experience a mixture of fear and hope for Biblical end-times that result in the return of a messiah. But in reality, people have thought about the end of the world for centuries, and it will be the point of this course to explore the history of this fear in a number of artistic works from the Renaissance to the contemporary period. We will read the following works of literature: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; George Orwell, 1984; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner; and William Shakespeare, King Lear.
ENG. 2300: TOPICS IN THEORY (71976)
BLACK: DIASPORA: THEORY
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
This course will introduce students to literary theories and theories of black life, cultures, and literatures that often exist at the margins of literary and cultural studies and yet produce some of the most consequential insights about concepts ranging from the human and life, to freedom and emancipation, to sexuality and gender, to poetics and aesthetics. This course will engage the field(s) of Black and African Diaspora Studies as they have developed over the past century or so and specifically in relation to literary and cultural studies. The intention is to help students gain a deep understanding of the debates within the field as it has constituted itself and as it is continuing to constitute itself today. Thus, the course will be focused around theoretical works that aim to conceptualize blackness, diaspora, and Africanness. Organized around the multiple and often competing visions of these contested terms, the course will include texts from major thinkers and writers from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In the latter portion of the course, we will read Kei Miller’s novel, Augustown, which engages a variety of theoretical concepts and produces important theoretical insights itself related to the course focus.
ENG. 2400: ENGLISH, LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES AND POWER (75416)
W. 10:40 – 1:30 pm
* MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE CORE REQUIREMENT FOR NON-MAJORS *
* COUNTS FOR ENGLISH MAJOR AND MINOR CREDIT *
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
St. John’s campus is located in the most linguistically diverse borough of New York City. In fact, census data shows a majority of Queens residents speak a language other than English at home. English 2400 will offer students (both monolingual and multilingual) the opportunity to develop new perspectives on how they have learned and use English in their own lives and to do the following: gain a deeper understanding of the relationship of English to linguistic diversity; learn about how language ideologies are formed and circulate through official and unofficial policies; think about language use and language access through the lenses of colonialism, raciolinguistics, translingualism, multilingualism. This course will be of interest to any student interested in English, language and language use locally and globally, as well as personally and professionally.
ENG. 2750: WOMEN AND LITERATURE (75036)
WOMEN AND LOVE
* MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE CORE REQUIREMENT FOR NON-MAJORS *
* COUNTS FOR ENGLISH MAJOR AND MINOR CREDIT *
* COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES MINOR *
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This course will explore the theme of love, examining how love shapes American women writers’ narratives, characters, and worldviews. We will investigate how women authors portray love in many forms: romantic, familial, self-love, and the love for country and community. Students will read a range of works by authors such as Hannah Webster Foster, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, and Carmen Maria Machado, analyzing how love is represented as both personal and political. This course encourages critical thinking and offers a space to discuss and explore literature and the transformative power of love.
ENG. 2750: WOMEN AND LITERATURE (75037)
* MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE CORE REQUIREMENT FOR NON-MAJORS *
* COUNTS FOR ENGLISH MAJOR AND MINOR CREDIT *
* COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES MINOR *
T. 1:50 – 3:15 PM
AND
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
At least since Sojourner Truth insisted on being recognized as a woman by white suffragettes in 1851, the category of “women” has been recognized as both politically meaningful and socially exclusive. An exploration of the categories of “women” and “literature,” this course will engage authors and artists who think critically about gender and its relationship to creativity, identity, and politics in both the past and present. In the first part of the course, we will read texts from “first wave feminism” from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and then we will turn to literature, theory, and criticism from the 1970s—the era of “second-wave feminism”—to see how women writers imagine and define their gender, and what it has to do with sex, race, and class. We’ll think about how literature attends to the particularities of individual experience while mobilizing collective politics, recognizing especially how trans women and women of color conceive of gender and demand its expansion as a category. Reading both literature and theory, we will ask whether certain genres of writing are especially equipped to articulate women’s experience, and we will explore those texts for the varied experiences of gender articulated through literature.
ENG. 2750: WOMEN AND LITERATURE (75178)
* MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE CORE REQUIREMENT FOR NON-MAJORS *
* COUNTS FOR ENGLISH MAJOR AND MINOR CREDIT *
* COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES MINOR *
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
At least since Sojourner Truth insisted on being recognized as a woman by white suffragettes in 1851, the category of “women” has been recognized as both politically meaningful and socially exclusive. An exploration of the categories of “women” and “literature,” this course will engage authors and artists who think critically about gender and its relationship to creativity, identity, and politics in both the past and present. In the first part of the course, we will read texts from “first wave feminism” from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and then we will turn to literature, theory, and criticism from the 1970s—the era of “second-wave feminism”—to see how women writers imagine and define their gender, and what it has to do with sex, race, and class. We’ll think about how literature attends to the particularities of individual experience while mobilizing collective politics, recognizing especially how trans women and women of color conceive of gender and demand its expansion as a category. Reading both literature and theory, we will ask whether certain genres of writing are especially equipped to articulate women’s experience, and we will explore those texts for the varied experiences of gender articulated through literature.
ENG. 3110: CHAUCER (75051)
CANTERBURY TALES
*PRE-1900*
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
Email: ricen@stjohns.edu
This course introduces the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century poetic masterwork. This is a poem of tremendous variety, containing stories of chivalry and betrayal, fidelity and adultery, piety and blasphemy, romance and bawdy humor. We will study some of Chaucer’s most important and engaging tales, learning to read and pronounce the original Middle English. Chaucer lived during a period of major social, religious, and political upheaval. We will situate the tales in their historical contexts while considering some important recent critical approaches to Chaucer. No previous experience with Middle English is required.
ENG. 3130: SHAKESPEARE: ELIZABETHAN PLAYS (72562)
WILDMAN, BEAST, AMAZON
*PRE-1900*
T. 12:15 – 1:40 PM IN PERSON
AND 12:15 – 1:40 PM ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Brian Lockey
Email: lockeyb@stjohns.edu
From the Greek myth of the Amazons to television shows like “Game of Thrones,” the idea of the woman as warrior has fascinated writers and readers throughout history. The Wild Man, naked, savage and covered with hair, likewise resonates through the ages, from the ancient Satyrs to the “savage nation” portrayals of the Renaissance. In this course, we consider the monstrous figures of the Wild Man, the Amazon, and the Beast in a number of dramatic works written during the Renaissance. In addition, this course will survey some of Shakespeare’s plays that explore intersections between domestic spaces and spheres of violence. Our focus will be on the political and social place of the grotesque outcast in Renaissance society. We will ask the following questions: if public violence is mostly figured as opposed to the traditional domestic affairs of women and the family, where does the Amazon figure within such oppositions? How might gender issues be presented as violent or as parallel to warfare? In other words, how are “private” domestic spaces connected to, reflected in, affected by “public” acts of violence? Readings will include Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and John Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage.
ENG. 3240: ROMANTIC LITERATURE (75048)
LOVE AND DEATH IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE
*PRE-1900*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
Email: maertzg@stjohns.edu
In a foreshadowing of a leading theme of Modernist art and literature, this course explores the interlocking motifs of Eros and Thanatos—love and death—in the Romantic Period. Works to be read and discussed include a selection of Robert Burns’s love songs; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the internationally bestselling novella of star-crossed lovers that ends in suicide; William Blake’s ballads that examine the pathogens unleased by love; William Wordsworth’s cycle of love poems dedicated to a dead child; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lesbian vampire poem “Christabel”; Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which explores a range of emotional attachments, including the jealousy and murderous rage of filial bonds; and some of the heartrending love poems of John Keats, including “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Bright Star.”
ENG. 3590: LITERATURE & THE OTHER ARTS (75049)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Stephen Miller
Email: millers@stjohns.edu
This course considers chains of direct influence and useful interfacing within various literary, cultural, and artistic forms, implying them to issues that are relevant to students. For instance, the Korean film director Lee Chang-dong based his 2018 film, Burning, upon William Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning” and Japanese author’s Haruki Murakami’s fictive response to Faulkner’s story, “Burning.” The class will evaluate the three works’ treatments of work, youth, family, class, and other subjects. Similarly, Japanese director Akiru Kurosawa based his film Ikiru upon Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. How do the themes of the two works differ? Similarly also, how does Asghar Farhadi’s 2016 Irani film Salesman relate to Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman and Marjane Satrapi’s 203 graphic novel, Persepolis? A similar “chain of representation” also occurs among Allen Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” Robert Lowell’s poetic response, “For the Union Dead that also responded to sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ sculptural relief “Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The class may also consider the visual narrative techniques of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series, compare Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” and relate the film My Dinner with Andre with philosophical dialogues. Baldwin will be related to contemporaneous jazz. The class will be explorative, and students will also select interdisciplinary objects of study.
ENG. 3610/CLS 3610: CLASSICAL DRAMA IN TRANSLATION (75046)
*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
We will consider how the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides present fifth-century Greek history in the guise of ancient mythic tales, familiar even then to the Athenian audience.
The two Persian Wars (499-449) and the Peloponnesian War (431-404) spanned nearly the whole of the fifth century and paralleled the lifespans of its three Greek dramatists, Aeschylus (525-456), Sophocles (496-406), and Euripides (484-406). All three playwrights employ and modify the mythic tales their audiences knew from childhood to describe the events of their times.
Aeschylus presents a fictive, tragicomic Xerxes in his Persians. Aeschylus’ Orestes obtains vindication for the murder of his mother from the ancient Athenian murder court, the Areopagus. Athena herself casts the deciding vote in his favor. Sophocles describes the persecution that attends war in his Philoctetes, in which we find an utterly unscrupulous, un-Homeric Odysseus and resolution to the Theban Civil War in Oedipus at Colonus. Euripides repeatedly describes societies torn apart by war and bad leadership in his Phoenician Women, Trojan Women, Hecuba, Electra, and Hippolytus.
ENG. 3680/CRES. 1000: CRITICAL RACE & ETHNIC STUDIES (74282/ )
*POST-1900*
*COUNTS FOR CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES MAJOR AND MINOR*
*COUNTS FOR THE SOCIAL JUSTICE CORE REQUIREMENT*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
This course will introduce students to fundamental concepts and debates within the fields thatcan be collected under “critical race and ethnic studies.” Students will become familiar with theparticular ways in which these fields analyze the phenomena of racial formation, ethnic groupformation, racism and racial discrimination, ethnic life, and ethnic stratification as centralfeatures of global modernity. Students will explore the role that ethnic and racial stratificationsplay 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. Recently added is a unit of study on Palestine. We will read excerpts of works by mid-century 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 readalso contemporary scholars who take up those earlier thinkers, and the revolutionary movementsin 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. 3690: SPECIAL TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES (75044)
TACO LITERACIES: WRITING TRANSNATIONAL MEXICAN FOODWAYS
*POST-1900*
*COUNTS FOR CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES MAJOR AND MINOR*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
Email: alvares1@stjohns.edu
In recent years, there has been a steady increase of interest in the transnational migrations of Mexican food popularized by social media influencers, bloggers, television food shows, and travel journalists. In addition to the immense number of reviews, trade publications, and cookbooks, important social justice issues in regard to multilingualism, global trade, genetically modified foods, cultural appropriation, and migrant labor have also become topical. In line with these topics and more, this course will focus on Mexican foodways literacies, a study combining foodways, which describe the practices in the production and consumption of food, with the humanizing connections of critical literacies as transformative, liberatory knowledge. Readings will include scholarly articles, various websites centering around the themes of foodways and literacies, and works by Gustavo Arellano, José Ralat, Alyshia Gálvez, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Paula E. Morton, Eater, and the Southern Foodways Alliance, among others.
ENG. 3720: CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP (75047)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR
R 12:15 – 1:40 PM AND
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Anne Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
How much truth is in nonfiction? How much fiction can be in nonfiction? What does it mean to tell our own experiences and the experiences of others in writing? What is the relationship between storytelling and research? In this class, we’ll read and write our way to answers through a variety of nonfiction forms. We’ll be thinking about all sorts of nonfiction, from storytelling about people, places, events that feels like fiction (but is true) to researched and multimodal nonfiction. Students will develop their own non-fiction – writing shorter exercises in the early part of the semester and a longer text through the second half of the semester – and will regularly read and respond to one another’s work. Required reading will include texts about the craft and ethics of nonfiction. We’ll also be reading nonfiction to learn from it.
ENG. 3730: POETRY WORKSHOP (75045)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 5:00 – 6:25 PM
Lee Ann Brown
Email: brownl@stjohns.edu
In this EXPERIENTIAL, GENERATIVE poetry writing course, we will “read poetry and imagine ourselves writing it” (Alice Notley). We will also explore the relationship of poetry to collage, song, sound, performance, poets theater, ritual and other visual work. Linked readings in contemporary poetry and poetics lead to the member’s new poems and individual statements of poetics.
Required texts include the Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, and Sleeping on the Wing by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell, plus other reserve readings.
Playing with a range of traditional and experimental poetic forms, students will develop original poetry manuscripts of at least 22 pages by end of semester, as well as a short poetics statement, and a response paper on a poetry performance or event.
Willingness to try out new forms and modes of writing in a participatory setting is required.
ENG. 3760: WRITING AS SOCIAL ACTION (75052)
DIGITal WRITING: WRITING TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL ACTION
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. LaToya Lydia Sawyer
Email: sawyerl@stjohns.edu
This course will be an overview to the field of literacy studies, focusing on the study of literacy as praxis informed by social theory. Literacy as praxis posits that individuals perform from their language repertoires to make existential changes in their sociohistorical circumstances. From this position, we will examine literacy not as decontextualized rote skills, but, rather, as transformative actions communities enact when forming liberatory solidarities in different situations. Readings for the course will include works by Pierre Bourdieu, bell hooks, Shirley Brice Heath, June Jordan, Valerie Kinloch, Paolo Freire, Ofelia García, and Anne Haas Dyson.
ENG. 3770: WRITING A SHORT STORY (74285)
LOVE AND 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. 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 books of short stories by some great writers. Machado, Claire Keegan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Anton Chekhov. Love plus trouble equals a story
ENG. 4991: SEMINAR BRITISH LITERATURE (75038)
SPECIAL TOPIC: NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENRE FICTION
*SENIOR CAPSTONE*
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
Few cultural forms have achieved such a balance between mass popularity and aesthetic complexity as the nineteenth-century novel. The novel of this period is extraordinarily diverse, ranging from the sensational serial fiction known as “penny dreadfuls” to the high-realist literary tradition of George Eliot. What we now popularly think of as “genre fiction”—crime, science-fiction, thriller, detective, coming-of-age, fantasy, dystopian/post-apocalyptic, and romance novels—flourished in the nineteenth century. This senior seminar offers the opportunity to read a broad range of nineteenth-century British fiction— including canonical as well as non-canonical novels and novellas— that anticipate our contemporary categories of genre fiction. The reading may include: Jane Austen, Persuasion (marriage plot/romance); Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (“coming of age”); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (sensation novel/crime); Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (ghost story); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (detective/mystery); Richard Jeffries, After London (dystopian/post-apocalypse); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (supernatural/gothic); H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (science fiction); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (supernatural/fantasy).
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (71733) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (71734) 6 CREDITS
ENG. 4953: INDEPENDENT STUDY (72145) 3 CREDITS
The English Major and
Minors in English and Writing
The major in English is a 36-credit program.
Core Courses (9 credits)
English 1100: Literature in a Global Context
English 2200: Reading/Writing for English majors
English 2300: Topics in Theory
Courses Prior to 1900:
Select any 3 courses.
Courses that qualify are indicated on the course description flier as (9 credits)
Pre-1900
Additional Electives
to be drawn from any SJC English courses (15 credits)
Senior Capstone (3 credits)
Total credits in the English major: (36 credits)
Please note: the credit requirements for the English and Writing Minors have changed from 18 credits to 15 credits for all students:
Minor in English: 15 credits
Students wishing to minor in English must 15 credits in English. Eng. 1100 may count toward the total number of credits.
Minor in Writing: 15 credits
Students who minor in writing must take the following courses:
* Four writing courses
* Any additional course in the SJC English Department. Eng. 1100 may count toward the total number of credits.
Note: English majors who minor in writing must take four writing courses plus one additional English course (fifteen credits in all) in addition to their major coursework.