Queens Campus Undergraduate Flyer
Spring 2019
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15052)
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
The aim of this course is to teach you the skills that you will need to succeed as an 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 heavily on class participation, so it is imperative that you attend class punctually and regularly. Some of the skills to be covered include identifying genres and literary techniques, analyzing passages, developing a thesis, drafting and revising essays, and conducting supplementary research.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (13935)
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
This course introduces analytical, writing, and research methods critical for the English major. Making poetry our focus, we will learn to scrutinize poetic language, learning key terms for analysis and working to connect close readings to larger arguments. We will pay particular attention to the material forms of poetry, from manuscripts to digital editions. The course includes several written assignments of varied lengths, each incorporating different skills and methods. These will include, among others, a group project on Walt Whitman’s manuscripts and a final paper on Gwendolyn Brooks. We will make a sustained effort to link careful reading with clear writing, using homework exercises, paper drafts, and peer review workshops.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (15056)
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course is an undergraduate introduction to the key concepts, thinkers, and intellectual movements called literary theory. What we term “theory” is a diverse a group of texts drawn from various disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, anthropology and sociology. The goal of this course is less about mastery than familiarity with a set of thinkers and their key concepts. Since this course takes the position that theory is not a set of formulas to be applied to various texts but a critical way of thinking, our emphasis will be on understanding these thinkers and comprehending their relationship to the conversations that preceded them. Our ultimate goal will be to try to understand theory as a way of thinking about the activity of thinking itself. 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, society. 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.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (13930)
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course is an undergraduate introduction to the key concepts, thinkers, and intellectual movements called literary theory. What we term “theory” is a diverse a group of texts drawn from various disciplines like philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, anthropology and sociology. The goal of this course is less about mastery than familiarity with a set of thinkers and their key concepts. Since this course takes the position that theory is not a set of formulas to be applied to various texts but a critical way of thinking, our emphasis will be on understanding these thinkers and comprehending their relationship to the conversations that preceded them. Our ultimate goal will be to try to understand theory as a way of thinking about the activity of thinking itself. 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, society. 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.
ENG. 3000: Medieval Romance (15050)
*DIVISION I*
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
In this course, we will study one of the most popular literary forms of the Middle Ages, the romance, and its development from twelfth-century France to fifteenth-century England and beyond. 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 contested meanings 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. 3140: Jacobean Shakespeare: Shakespeare and the Modern Novel (15046)
*DIVISION I*
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Steven Mentz
Shakespeare didn’t write novels, but in the early years of the twenty-first century his works have inspired a flood of literary narratives that respond, critique, and explore his plays. This course juxtaposes four of Shakespeare’s canonical masterpieces – Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – with four (or possibly five) novels written in dialogue with them: John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000); Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2018); Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (2015); and Margaret Atwood’s Hagseed (2017). (If time allows, we may also read Ian McEwan’s Nutshell [2017].) Reading contemporary novels in dialogue with Shakespeare, as well as seeing a live production of “Hamlet” at the Queens Theater, will help us put this 400-year old writer in modern contexts.
ENG. 3230: Nineteenth Century Novel (15051)
*DIVISION II*
TF 10:40 – 12:05
PM Dr. Gregory Maertz
This course will examine major sub-genres of nineteenth-century fiction, including the Gothic novel, the novel of social realism, and science and detective fiction. Special emphasis will be placed on the impact of contemporary politics, technology, and ideas on literary production. Texts to include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Stoker’s Dracula.
ENG. 3260: Women Writers of the 19th Century (15047)
*DIVISION II*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Amy King
The nineteenth-century is a particularly rich moment to study literature written by women; in England, the period saw the proliferation of women’s writing, including novels, poetry, social criticism, drama, and other forms of non-fiction prose. The late nineteenth century also saw the appearance of the “New Woman”— a shorthand phrase for various controversies about gender and women’s roles concentrated in the 1890s— and the commencement of the civil right struggle for women’s suffrage that culminated in the extension of limited (1894, 1918) and then full franchise (1928) in England. In this course we will study the aesthetic and cultural contributions of various women writers from England in the nineteenth-century. The course will be divided into three units: “The Angel in the House,” “Narrating Women’s Lives,” and “The 1890s, Suffrage, and the New Woman.” Our primary focus in this course will be to read and analyze the work of a set of exceptional women writers—including novelists, explorers, political activists, poets, missionaries, and housewifery consultants— and to understand them in their historical context as well as appreciate their aesthetic and political achievements. We will study the cultural phenomenon of the woman writer and the way in which various writers gave imaginative life to the situation of the modern woman. We also will be concerned with theorizing this body of work as a separate and gendered tradition of nineteenth-century British literature. Authors may include: Jane Austen, Anonymous, Mary Shelley, Mrs. Beeton, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sarah Grand, Mary Kingsley, Harriet Martineau, Mary Prince, and Christina Rossetti.
ENG. 3270: Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (15055)
*DIVISION II*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
In eighteenth-century Britain, the enterprise of writing poetry often was undertaken with gravity and precision. Considered the great literary form that was handed down to a “modern,” enlightened age from antiquity, poetry required that numerous and crucial decisions be weighed by writers. To what degree should modern poets imitate their ancient predecessors? Should poetry be written for publication, or only for discreet circulation among a private audience? What are the consequences of deviating from convention? What did it mean for a woman to compose in this genre, long characterized as the province of educated men? How did authors use public forms of poetry to explore private matters, like desire, sex, and gender identity? Such questions shape the composition of poetry in this period; we will learn its major formal and thematic conventions in this period and seek an understanding of its varied social, cultural, political, and aesthetic implications, covering topics from lady’s dressing rooms and genitalia to landscape aesthetics and abolitionism. We will read the major, and some minor, poets from 1660 to 1789, including Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Finch, Montagu, Pope, Swift, Thompson, Johnson, More, Gray, Barbauld, and Wheatley. Evaluation will be based on essays totaling 12-15 written pages, a final, attendance, and participation. The course will be essay-writing intensive, with emphasis on drafting, revising, and literary analysis. While the course is based in a historical period that privileges Englishness, whiteness, masculinity, and rank, I aim for it to be inclusive for thinkers interested in matters of social, sexual, and racial justice as well as for creative writers.
ENG. 3290: Special Topics in 18th- 19th Century English Literature (15060)
Female Virtue and the Novelistic Tradition
*DIVISION II*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Amy King
One of the reoccurring preoccupations of the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the question of female innocence. The courtship novel, the fallen woman novel, and the French adultery novel are three genres that take up the trope of the “girl” and the broader cultural subject of female innocence. And yet the novel hardly invented the category of innocence, the subjectivity of the young unmarried female character, or anxiety about female “virtue.” Since Eve took the determining bite, the relationship between knowledge and female chastity has been an overriding cultural preoccupation in the west. The novel tradition reflects that long-standing cultural anxiety around chastity (is she “pure” or fallen”?), spinning repeated novelistic plots that revolve around particularly modern concerns about the relationship between female identity and “dangers” to it, including flirtation, forwardness, “fallenness” (whether by seduction, sexual violence or choice). Ideas about the way in which culture depends upon an (always imperiled) white female virtue will be one (but not the sole) entranceway into a number of novels and excerpts from novels that revolve around what Henry James called the “formula” of that “charming creature”— “the girl.” We will likely read excerpts from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Fanny Burney’s Evelina, as well as a selection of the following possible novels: (Anonymous) The Woman of Color, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
ENG. 3370: International Dimensions of American Literature (15049)
*DIVISION III*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course breaks with the idea that American literature is an “exception” from other national traditions, distinct and different. In a series of paired readings with European authors such as Thomas Gray and Phillis Wheatley; Rousseau and Emerson; Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper; Hoffman and Poe; Stowe and Dickens, we will examine some pre-1900 American texts for their interrelations with other national literatures.
ENG. 3390: Special Topics in Cultural Studies: Native American Literature (15062)
*DIVISION III*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
This is a course that largely focuses on Native-American fiction, ranging from John Rollin Ridge’s Life of Joaquin Murieta to Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie. It will also consider the wider sphere of Native literature that includes creation myth, oratory, and ritual. The course will ask what relationships there are between traditional folk literatures and modern fiction—including Ojibwe writer David Treuer’s controversial assertion that Native literature “doesn’t exist.” Many think it does, and in addition to reading some dynamic Native texts, this course will offer some theoretical avenues into broader discussions of the problematics of studying “ethnic” literature.
ENG. 3475: African American Women’s Rhetorics (15057)
*DIVISION IV*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. LaToya Sawyer
Over 150 Years after Sojourner Truth asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?” political movements like #metoo demonstrate that Black women are at the forefront of insisting that all women, their voices, and their bodies to be recognized in public spheres and conversations concerning and advocating for women. This course traces the stream (Royster 2000) of Black women’s rhetoric from historical figures such as Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Audre Lorde to more contemporary rhetors including Tarana Burke, Representative Maxine Waters, and your favorite YouTuber or IG celebrity in order to better understand Black women’s rhetorical traditions and resources and their value today.
This course goes beyond ethos, logos, pathos and other common understandings of rhetorical theory derived from Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in order to explore how African American women take up the productive arts of persuasion. The course will consider the intersections of race, gender, and other social categories in order to understand the specificity of rhetorical production of women of African descent in the U.S. We will examine how Black women use discourses, language, and literacies such as the use of ratchet language, hair styling and hand-clap games, and digital literacy practices in order to be, advance, protect, and celebrate themselves and the people and concerns they care about. Students will consider the social, political, economic, and educational implications of African American women’s rhetorics and have the opportunity to showcase their findings. Readings will include: Talking Back: Thinking
Black, Thinking Feminist by bell hooks, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn Pough, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop by Kyra Gaunt, and other selected texts and media.
ENG. 3590: Literature & The Other Arts (15061)
Race, Gender, and Science Fiction
*DIVISION IV*
W. 10:40AM – 1:30 PM
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls
This course takes seriously the work that science fiction and speculative fiction 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; the film Snowpiercer; the film The Train to Busan; novels by Tomi Adeyemi and NK Jeminsin; 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 literary studies, cultural history, performance studies, media studies, communication, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, art and aesthetics, queer studies, genre fiction, and critical race studies.
ENG 3600 / CLS 3600, Classical Epic in Translation (15054/15156)
TF 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 (15058)
The Sacred, the Spiritual, and the Social in Caribbean Literature
*DIVISION IV*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
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 French-speaking regions of the Caribbean (all works will be in English) and the Caribbean diaspora. 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? Writers we will read include Eric Walrond, Earl Lovelace, Nalo Hopkinson, René Depestre, and Maryse Condé.
ENG. 3700: Teaching of Writing (13948)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Anne Geller
Although we usually think of the teaching – and learning – of writing as something that happens within school, there are multiple contexts in which writing is used, practiced, learned and taught. In this course we will spend the semester considering these many contexts for writing. We will pay particular attention to how writing and literacy are sponsored (and self-sponsored) within organizations (religious, cultural, social, athletic, and/or activist) and spaces (homes, workplaces, libraries, hospitals, digital/online) and in families/households and communities.
By exploring these non-classroom contexts, and the people who learn, teach and mentor writing within them, we will question our conceptions of what it means to be a writer and a teacher of writing: What are the ways writing might be supported across our lifespans? What do we authorize as the teaching of writing and whom do we authorize to teach it and why? What aspects of writing and literacy and histories of writing and language are valued and performed in these varied contexts and why? What written or composed genres? What are the opportunities writers have to further develop their agency and identity in these varied contexts? How do the writing practices and processes of these other contexts differ from those experiences in school contexts and how might these differences inform how we critique the way writing is dominantly taught in institutionalized schooling?
ENG. 3710: Introduction To Creative Writing (15053)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
TF 5:00 – 7:50 PM
Professor Catina Bacote
This course will introduce you to the fundamentals of three genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. We will approach creative writing as a mode of expression and also as a way of seeing—a means to access and understand the world around us. To guide our writing and discussions, we will read work by innovative authors such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Jen Choi, Jesymn Ward, Jamaica Kincaid, Linda Hogan, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Our reading list will help us consider such questions as: How do writers mine the gritty, the sublime, and the comedic to tell their tales? What makes one worthy of the telling? How do writers recreate the past with authenticity? What can a poem do to us? Throughout the semester, you will experiment with different styles of creative writing as you generate new work and respond to the writing of your peers.
ENG. 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop (15042)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
“There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” -Joan Didion
This is an introduction to fiction writing. Students will write stories and share their work with their classmates. They will attempt to develop their power as storytellers. We’ll begin with exercises and build to original pieces of fiction. We’ll discuss notions like point of view, detail, character, conflict, and dialogue. As we write, we’ll also read. The class will also serve as an introduction to the contemporary US short story.
ENG 3820: History of Sound Film to 1975 (15063)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
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.
ENG. 3880: English Studies in the Digital Age (13932)
*DIVISION IV* *COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
Digital Writing and Reading
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course investigates how the internet 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 analyze and experiment with social media platforms like blogs, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter, and we will explore theories about how we read, remix, and mash-up in digital spaces. The course will also analyze the impact of social media on identity, relationships, activism, politics, and art. 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. 3890: Topics in Film Genre (13947)
The Horror Film
*DIVISION IV*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
In this course, we will trace screen horror from its earliest silent incarnations, through Expressionism, the sound-era monster movie, 50s sci-fi, the slasher film, and more recent independent and international pieces. We will work with a number of theoretical approaches to wrestle with the question of why people watch horror movies and what kind of cultural work horror movies perform.
ENG. 4993: Seminar in Special Authors (14131)
Approaches to James Joyce’s Ulysses
SENIOR SEMINAR
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Published in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses is a masterpiece, and perhaps the centerpiece, of literary modernism. It is also one of the most rewarding, and enjoyable, texts in the English language. To read it well, we will begin with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but our semester-long goal will be to read Ulysses well as a community of scholars. It is a text that requires and rewards collaborative reading.
In the title I am giving to the seminar, I emphasize “approaches” to Ulysses. Since a senior seminar is intended to be a capstone course for your English major (or minor), I will be inviting you to find your own approach to this complex text drawn from your course work. If you have been studying the ancient epic, you can approach Ulysses as an attempt to continue that tradition in the modern period. If you have been studying Shakespeare, you can follow how Joyce uses Hamlet as a shaping precursor. If you’ve read Dante, you can watch how the medieval epic influences Joyce. If you have been studying the eighteenth or nineteenth-century novel, you can
approach Ulysses as the epitome of that tradition. If you’ve been reading the modernists, how Joyce’s novel inaugurates and gathers up most of their themes and technical innovations. If you’re invested in Postcolonial studies, how Joyce recoils against the occupation of Ireland by the British Empire and the Catholic Church. In other words, you can bring your interests, especially those developed in your other courses, to this capstone course. We will share our approaches as part of our discussions. And in all of this we will never let it be forgotten that above all things Joyce is funny and hopeful, a true comic writer.
ENG. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (13929)
Writing Queens Foodways
SENIOR SEMINAR
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
This course will examine cultural, social, and economic practices in the production and consumption of food in New York City, focusing on the borough of Queens. Students will build a Queens Foodways documentary website that will house narratives as multimedia artifacts from the borough, producing an archive of primary sources for future researchers. Students’ writing projects will analyze how food literacies situate different spaces, identities, forms of knowledge, and ways of languaging within Queens and beyond. Readings will include Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico by Alyshia Gálvez; Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration by Hasia R. Diner; New York in a Dozen Dishes by Robert Sietsema; Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York by Robin Shulman; From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace by Valerie Imbruce; Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain; Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York by William Grimes; Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham; and The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty.
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: Internship In English (11498) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: Internship In English (10869) 6 CREDITS ENG. 4953: Independent Study (15451)