UNDERGRADUATE FLYER
SPRING 2017
ENG. 2060: Study of American Literature (12048)
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 by Washington Irving, 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 imagination. 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. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (14457)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
This is a workshop class that focuses on developing the fundamental skills – close critical reading and clear, well-organized writing – that ensure success in the English major. We will read a small number of texts of various genres and historical periods at a fairly slow pace, collectively generating critical analyses and essay topics. Grading will be based almost exclusively on class participation, so it is imperative that you attend class punctually and regularly. Some of the topics to be covered include identifying genres and literary techniques, analyzing quotes, developing a thesis, drafting and revising essays, and conducting supplementary research.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (14491)
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Anne Geller
What does it mean to read and write within – and beyond – English studies? We will begin the semester with Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy to think about the balance of reading and writing in the 21st century. Then we’ll turn our attention to the St. John’s College English Department – our faculty and their scholarship and the courses and requirements of our English major and minors – as a way of exploring reading, writing and research across the sub-disciplines of English. Using what we learn from our local context, we’ll engage with some of the big debates facing English studies: What should English majors learn and know as readers and writers? How have – and how do – writing and creative writing fit within an English major? How does a major or minor in English studies inform graduates’ professions and lives? To answer this last question, we’ll develop and carry out a collaborative research project in which we will survey alumnae/i of the SJC English department’s undergraduate major.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (14488)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Steven Mentz
Literary theory can help explain our media-saturated world. The core truth about literary theory is that it’s very useful for anyone who wants to be a successful English major – but it’s required reading for all of us who watch TV or surf the internet. This required course for English majors and minors introduces students to major trends and techniques in literary and critical theory. Our reading will explore influential schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-structural feminism, New Historicism, and ecocriticism. We will be paying special attention to how theorists question and challenge conventional thinking. We will read and write together with two equally important goals in mind: 1) how to use literary theory to write better English papers, and 2) how to use literary theory to understand the modern world.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism (13398)
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
Through discussion of the work of major figures, this course will examine fundamental antagonisms that have shaped literary representation in the Western tradition. Authors to include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Said.
ENG. 3000: Medieval Romance (14461)
DIVISION I
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
In this course, we will study one of the major literary forms of the high Middle Ages, the romance, and its development from twelfth-century France to fifteenth-century England. No previous knowledge of medieval literature is required. Some of our main topics will include the legend of Arthur; the nature of kingship and the meaning of knighthood; the chivalric ideal and the concept of “refined love”; and the romance’s representation of the public arena and the private self.
ENG. 3190: Special Topics: Poetry and Imitation (14467)
DIVISION I
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Steven Mentz
This hybrid literary and creative writing course explores and participates in the culture of imitation characteristic of Renaissance poetry. We will read selections from the literary careers of four pairs of Renaissance poets: Isabella Whitney paired with Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney paired with Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth paired with John Donne, and Aemelia Lanyer paired with Andrew Marvell. For each group, we’ll combine literary and historical analysis of poems with creative imitations written and workshopped by our students. This course is recommended for Creative Writing minors as well as anyone interested in poetry.This course also counts toward a Creative Writing minor.
ENG. 3230: The Nineteenth-Century Novel (14493)
DIVISION II
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Gregory Maertz
This course will examine major sub-genres of nineteenth-century fiction, including the Gothic novel, the novel of social realism, science and detective fiction, and the novel of adventure. Special emphasis will be placed on the impact of modernity (politics, technology, and philosophy) on literary production. Texts to include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hamsun’s Hunger, and Stoker’s Dracula.
ENG. 3290: Special Topics 18th – 19th Century English Literature (14492)
The Matter of Black Lives in the Eighteenth Century
DIVISION II
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Kathy Lubey
This course will explore literary representations of black lives from the 1680s to 1790s, a period that includes the flourishing of the Atlantic slave trade and English colonization of the Caribbean as well as the emergence of Christian anti-slavery protest and the political rise of abolitionism. We’ll encounter a range of purposes and attitudes in these texts: clinical descriptions of slave labor, theological humanitarianism, sentimental exoticism, anti-imperial critique, the autobiographical abolitionism of freed slaves. We will think about the modes of argument available to writers representing blackness in an era when the concept of rights extended only to property-owning Christian European men. When equal rights could not yet be claimed as a persuasive logic for ceasing the trade in black bodies, how was the sovereignty of black life imagined? What discourses were available to English writers arguing for the value of these lives? Alternately, on what grounds was their value diminished? How was black freedom imagined? To what degree did black writers absorb or reject English abolitionist rhetoric? The course will conclude by jumping forward to our present moment to examine parallels to contemporary socio-political practices such as racialized mass incarceration and police brutality. Can these be understood as an inheritance of the imperial commerce of this historical period? Texts will include fictional narratives like Aphra Behn’s Oronooko and The Woman of Colour (anonymous); travel narratives and colonial accounts by Richard Ligon, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift; autobiographical writing such as Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; poetry by Hannah More, James Grainger, Anna Barbauld, Phyllis Wheatley, William Cowper, and William Blake; letters and essays by Joseph Addison, Ignatius Sancho, and Samuel Johnson.
ENG. 3310: Antebellum American Literature (14468)
DIVISION III
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This is a course focusing on a key period in American history which centered on social reform. It is a remarkable literary era because it was driven by mainstream middle class Americans who were re-evaluating their culture’s longstanding beliefs about God, slavery, women’s rights, education, social welfare, diet, industry, and even sexual conduct. The literature of the period is often associated with the major Transcendentalist authors—Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman. This course will study these writers in detail, but it will also read them in context with a broad array of authors interested in social reform, such as William Apess and Frederick Douglass.
ENG. 3375: Environmental Literature (14466)
DIVISION III
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
The course responds to anxiety about the environmental future of the planet, and it also looks at American views of nature as they emerged from the nineteenth century. Reading backwards from the contemporary wave of environmental concern initially provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the class will focus on nineteenth-century prose from Emerson to Muir, and selected poets and writers of the 20th century as well. As much as the class surveys creative writing about the environment, the class will also require a critical awareness of how to talk about nature and ask students to familiarize themselves with some of the basic arguments in current environmental discourse. We will examine four principal ideas: 1) Fear of End Times, the sense that man has destroyed environment and we will all die shortly; 2) Awe of Nature, the sense of beauty and sublime power nature represents—a Romantic heritage; 3) Humans are Natural, the idea that since all animals shape their environments, why not embrace man’s shaping of his environment? 4) Deanimation of Nature, a hypothesis developed by Lynn White Jr. (and others) that Christian and scientific thought have produced a generally anthrocentrist prejudice that we are most important, and we can do whatever we want to the earth. Central ideas that the course will explore will include key terms such as environmentalism, ecology, resource, conservation, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and sustainability; as well as literary terms like the pastoral, the sublime, and the picturesque.
ENG. 3450: Modern Drama (14780)
DIVISION IV
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Angela Belli
This course explores the unique nature of the theater to record the unprecedented changes to occur in American and European society from late 19th century to mid 20th century. The genius of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello will be studied in view of how their writings anticipated the world in which we live at present.
ENG. 3470: Twentieth-Century African American Literature (14489)
DIVISION IV
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. John Lowney
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Beginning with Du Bois’s prophetic statement, this introductory course will explore how selected African American fiction, drama, poetry, and essays have responded to and influenced issues of race and racism, nationalism and internationalism, and racial and gendered identity. The course will present an intensive overview of twentieth-century African American literary history, concentrating especially on the oral tradition (particularly music) and its impact on literary expression. Readings will include fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison; plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and August Wilson; and selected poetry from the Harlem Renaissance through the present.
ENG 3600/CLS 3600: Classical Epic in Translation (14487/14235)
DIV I
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Robert Forman
We will read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (the tale of Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece) complete and selections from Statius’ Thebaid (the story of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur).
The Homeric poems and Vergil’s Aeneid have continued to influence every period of Western literature from medieval to contemporary. Statius’ poem was particularly influential for Chaucer. He used portions of it in his Canterbury Tales as well as in Troilus and Criseyde. For this reason, we will parallel our study of the classical epics as often as possible selections from modern and contemporary works. (The instructor will supply this parallel material or will indicate the appropriate e-text websites.)
ENG. 3650: Caribbean Literature (14458)
DIV IV
The Sacred, the Spiritual, and the Social in Caribbean Fiction
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Raj Chetty
This course will examine how religion, spirituality, and the sacred emerge in 20th and 21st century Caribbean prose fiction from the English-, Spanish-, and French-speaking regions of the Caribbean (all works will be in English). The course will explore how questions of the sacred have animated Caribbean writers’ engagement with broader social and political issues. A central question will be: How have the sacred, the spiritual, the religious been mobilized in Caribbean fiction to oppose oppressive systems (racism/colorism, colonialism/imperialism, class, gender, sexuality) from across the last century and into this one?
Writers we will read include, tentatively: Eric Walrond (Barbados/Guyana/Panama), Una Marson (Jamaica), Erna Brodber (Jamaica), CLR James (Trinidad), Earl Lovelace (Trinidad), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Yanick Lahens (Haiti), Ana Lara (Dominican Republic/US), Daniel José Older (Cuba/US)
ENG. 3690: Special Topics in Pop Culture (14486)
DIV IV
Gender, Race, and Science Fiction
W. 10:40 AM – 1:30 PM
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls
This course takes seriously the work that science fiction and speculative works do in relation to constructions of gender and sexuality, race, and imaginary worlds and temporalities. This course considers how dystopian science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative categories render race and gender in the afterlife of structured society. Are race and gender metrics that register after civilization has been destroyed or radically altered? We consider such questions as: Who gets to lead in dystopian society? Who gets to have family and kinship and how are those portrayed? How is gender racialized and race gendered in post-apocalyptic worlds? And finally, can dystopic future renderings aid in undoing long-standing structural oppressions?
The class will focus on a series of objects and performances across genre, including: Octavia Butler’s Kindred in novel and its graphic novel adaptation; Joss Whedon’s television show Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity; the film Snowpiercer; novels by Andrea Hairston, NK Jeminsin, and Nalo Hopkinson; the Alien quadrilogy; Brian Vaughan’s and Pia Guerra’s graphic novel series Y: The Last Man; and Marjorie Liu’s graphic novel Monstress series. Through contemporary visions of the dystopic future, present, and past, this course seeks to explore how racial hierarchies—as well as patriarchy, heteronormative logic, cissexism, and corporate nation-states—are maintained or undone in fictional realities.
There are no prerequisites for this course but students will benefit from having taken a theoretical course in the humanities or social sciences. This course should appeal to students interested in English, cultural history, media studies, communication, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, art and aesthetics, queer studies, genre fiction, and critical race studies.
ENG. 3720: Introduction to Creative Writing (11723)
W. 1:50 – 4:40 PM
Prof. Thomas Philipose
This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot). We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and playwriting. We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be. You will be expected to attend public readings and performances (off campus and on your own time), and you will be urged to submit some of your work for possible publication in the SJU Literary Journal, Sequoya.
We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside of this workshop) to help us become careful readers and diligent writers. An experimental and non-traditional approach will be encouraged to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the individual writers in our workshop. The majority of our classwork will entail reading and discussing your writing (you will read and write in—and outside of—every class every week). You will receive feedback in class and via one-to-one meetings (outside of the workshop) that we will arrange to fit your schedule.
ENG. 3730: Poetry Workshop (14484)
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
In this poetry workshop, students will write in and out of class, share new work, revise and develop drafts of poems, culminating in a portfolio at the middle and end of the semester. Traditional, cross-cultural, experimental, and online forms will be addressed throughout the course. Students will also read and critically respond to poetry assigned from single author volumes, anthologies and contemporary poetry journals as well as respond in writing to at least one “live” poetry reading. Close readings and stagings of original works as well as the works of others are an essential part of this course. Bring an openness to exploring new forms of poetry, as well as to engage in extensive reading and writing about poetry and to develop a daily writing practice.
ENG. 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction (14644)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is an introduction to fiction writing, focusing on the short story. Students will write regular exercises, playing with notions like point of view, detail, character, conflict, and dialogue; these exercises will lead to the writing of original short fiction. The course readings will center on realism after Anton Chekhov. We’ll read and study Chekhov’s stories alongside some contemporary writers—among them Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Denis Johnson. We’ll consider Chekhovian realism’s influence on contemporary fiction, and contemporary challenges to realism. This study in turn will illuminate our own practice in writing.
ENG. 3750: Advanced Writing Workshop (14630)
W. 5:00 – 7:50 PM
Dr. Derek Owens
An intensive workshop for writers. Students will select their topics and the forms in which they wish to work. Depending on students’ interests, projects might include memoir, creative nonfiction, lyric essay, literary journalism, manifesto, photo essay, video essay, multimedia presentation, handmade chapbook, website, hybrid forms, and more. The course is designed as if it were a collective of independent studies. Each week all students upload their ongoing work; each week all students respond to the work of their peers. Most classes will begin with small group discussions organized around shared interests, followed by large group discussions on different forms, genres, and media. Student work will be evaluated and graded on a contract basis privileging input, not “talent” (i.e. do all the work and respond to instructor’s feedback = an A; don’t do all the work and the grade gets affected). Final portfolio and presentation due at the end of the semester.
ENG. 3820: The History of Sound Film to 1975 (14485)
DIV IV
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
This course covers major national schools and styles of filmmaking from the period of sound’s innovation to the New Hollywood of the mid-1970s. We will move chronologically through the following shifts and movements: the rise of sound in Europe and the United States; Hollywood style narration; Italian neo-realism; postwar Japanese cinema; the French New Wave; authorship and independent film production in the United States; and the New German Cinema. We will look at the history of film form as both a contribution to aesthetics and a prism through which to view more clearly the historical shifts and political climate of the postwar era. Weekly screenings will take place Wednesdays 10-12.
ENG. 3880: English Studies in the Digital Age (14455)
DIV IV
140 Characters (or less)? Redefining Writing and Reading for the Digital Age
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course investigates how the digital age has transformed the mediums we use to express ourselves, the communities and audiences with which we engage, and how web writing is produced, read, shared, and circulated. We will talk about and experiment with social media platforms like blogs, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, and we will explore theories about how we read, remix, and mash-up in digital spaces. The course does not require any technological experience, just a willingness to experiment and to think deeply about how we make meaning and communicate in digital spaces. For questions email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 4991: Seminar in British Literature (13397)
“Consciousness from Austen to Woolf”
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Amy King
Nicholson Baker’s novella The Mezzanine (1986) takes place as a man rides an office-building escalator from the lobby to the mezzanine, describing the thoughts that pass through his mind. These are fleeting observations of the kind that barely puncture consciousness, those which might run through a person’s mind in any given few moments.
Historically, how have novels and novellas represented characters’ thoughts? This course looks to the ways in which novelists evolved formal strategies for capturing their characters’ thoughts, a literary project that pre-existed the psychologist William James’ introduction of the term “stream-of-consciousness” in 1890. From Austen’s invention of free-indirect style, to Virginia Woolf’s full-blown inner monologues, prose fiction has been engaged with the formalist question of how to represent the thinking of its characters. These are not only technical innovations that we can trace but these fictions also help us understand how they evolve and capture a modern consciousness. The course may be framed by The Mezzanine, and will consider English, French, and Russian fictions, including: Jane Austen’s Emma, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” James Joyce’s “The Dead” (and excerpts from Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
ENG. 4992: Seminar in American Literature (14490)
American Literature and Culture of the 1930s
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. John Lowney
During the recent years of the “Great Recession,” there has been renewed interest in American literature and culture of the 1930s Great Depression. This seminar in American literature focuses on this decade of extraordinary social, political, and cultural change. The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism challenged writers to radically rethink their purpose and audience. While the Depression tends to evoke mythic images of social suffering and revolutionary struggle, the innovative arts of the 1930s have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Emphasizing the interaction of modernism with mass culture in the 1930s, this course examines the relationship of literature to film, popular music, and the visual arts. Among the topics we will explore are ideology and the relation of aesthetics to politics; gender, race, and class consciousness; the metropolis and modernity; and ethnographic and documentary practice. Readings will include fiction by Tillie Olsen, William Faulkner, Tess Slesinger, John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright; poetry by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks; selected documentary writing; and several feature films.
* WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: Internship in English (11831) 3 Credits
ENG. 4906: Internship in English (11046) 6 Credits
ENG. 4953: Independent Study (10267)