UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLYER
SPRING 2020
http://stjenglish.com
ENG. 2060: The Study of American Literature (15085)
*DIVISION III*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. John Lowney
Email: lowneyj@stjohns.edu
This course is an introduction to selected American writers and literary movements, with an emphasis on 20 th -century literary texts that are concerned with U.S. national and international history. It will take a comparative approach to texts, writers, and cultures, drawing connections between literature and its various contexts: historical, cultural, social, political, philosophical, etc. In particular, the course will stress the ways in which cultural mythologies concerning gender, race, and class have affected both the writing of literature and the formation of literary traditions. Readings will include Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker; and Toni Morrison, Jazz.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15083)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
This course is designed to introduce and reinforce basic skills required to be successful English majors and minors, especially close reading and critical writing skills. The course will be broken into two halves. The first will focus on prose, as we will read J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus and short stories and memoirs from The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, edited by our own Dr. Ahmad. Both the novel and the shorter prose texts share the theme of migration and so will allow for some thematic analysis in addition to our primary attention on form and genre. The second half of the course will be devoted to reading poetry: we’ll read selections of Emily Dickinson’s poems from a collection called Final Harvest; and poems by Patricia Smith, who is on campus in the spring semester as the D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities. You will be writing a mix of formal essays and creative pieces, plus one major research assignment. Feel free to contact me at sicaris@stjohns.edu if you have any questions or concerns.
ENG. 2200: Reading and Writing for English Majors (15084)
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Lisa Outar
Email: outarl@stjohns.edu
In this class, you will gain a toolkit for the critical skills that you need to flourish as an English major, minor or concentrator. You will find that these skills will help you well beyond your English classes as you learn how to close read, how to construct persuasive arguments, how to use textual evidence to support your claims, how to do research, how to assess the reliability of different kinds of sources, how to approach different genres of writing, and how to draft and revise an essay. We will use a representative gathering of texts from the rich field of postcolonial literature to introduce you to the genres of poetry, drama, the short story and the novel. You will learn some of the ways writers from formerly colonized countries approach these forms and wrestle them into new transgressive shapes. You will also be introduced to approaches from various schools of literary criticism for how to read literary texts and some key concepts from literary theory.
ENG. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory (14952)
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. 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. 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays (13510)
*DIVISION 1*
Jacobean Shakespeare: Revenge Theater and Political Outrage
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Steven Mentz
Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu
Shakespeare’s presentation of revenge, politics, and outrage have made his plays central to political conversations for the past several centuries. This spring’s collection of Shakespeare plays, modern responses to Shakespeare, and new theatrical productions showcases the continuing relevance of the playwright and the ways that contemporary writers and actors continue to reimagine his work. The class will see three modern productions, including a meta- production about the first American all-black staging of Shakespeare before the Civil War, “The African Company Presents Richard III”; a production of Timon of Athens at Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn; and an experimental production of Romeo and Juliet in Queens. We’ll also read a late-twentieth-century postmodern novel that finds the key to American history in Jacobean revenge tragedy, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, as well as a new play, Lolita Chakrabarty’s Red Velvet, about the life of Ira Aldridge, the first African-American star
Shakespearean actor
ENG. 3190: Special Topics in Medieval Literature (15075)
*DIVISION 1*
Sex, Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature
TF 12:15 – 1:40 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, 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 women and men defined themselves and each other in literary conversation and struggle.
ENG. 3520: Modern World Literature (15068)
*DIVISION II*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
This course will look at literature around the significant historical events and movements that mark the start of a truly global modernity, including: the Enlightenment; the enormous upheavals brought by the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the clash of empires in East and West; and the emergence of realism (a newly urban, unheroic, global literary style). Rather than looking exclusively at the national literatures of Britain and America, this course will read a selection of writers in translation from the broad expanse of world literature, paying individual attention to the many kinds of modern literatures from various national contexts from the period of 1776 to 1900.
We will focus our course through the following rubric: freedom. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the question of freedom became an intense preoccupation worldwide. From debates about African slavery and the national independence from peoples under colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to freedom of thought and personal liberty, the question of what freedom entailed and who had a right to it shaped literary, philosophical, and political writers alike. We consider freedom in light of chattel slavery as well as the period’s interest in broad political and social freedoms, and who was entitled to them (citizens, women, factory workers etc, across a variety of national contexts). We will also take up the rubric of freedom through a study of the Romantic poets and their successors, as well as through various texts of nineteenth-century realisms. In our final unit, we consider the oral literature tradition in a world literary context, paying particular attention to the literature of the (majority illiterate) population at the mid-19 th century. More abstractly, we will always be returning to the following questions: how do various literary texts suggest what one should be free to do? What limits should there be on freedom? How does literature represent the question of human freedom, and how might certain literary forms break free of convention?
ENG. 3300: Colonial American Literature (15082)
*DIVISION III*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Granville Ganter
Email: ganterg@stjohns.edu
This course will emphasize contact with aboriginal Americans, but it will also survey some of the basic texts of the New England literary tradition which influenced later writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Texts will include John Smith’s accounts of his interactions with the Natives of Virginia (is this a history, a land advertisement, or a novel?); early histories of the Plymouth colony and New England (the kindness of Squanto, and butchery of all other Indians); the actual court transcripts of the prosecution of the antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, who boldly challenged the Puritan orthodoxy over the interpretation of the Bible; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (her family killed, she is dragged along in the dirt behind a Wampanoag army for several months, eating bear fat and clinging to her Congregationalism); Ben Franklin’s Autobiography (the ur-text of American success); several treaties with the Delaware and Haudenosaunee Indians; and a hell-fire sermon of Jonathan Edwards that has come to represent a highly durable American literary form known as the “jeremiad.”
ENG. 3400: Modernist Literature (15086)
*DIVISION IV*
The Emergence of Modernism
12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
“Modernism” is one of those words that has come to stand for a period of literary history (roughly, the years between 1900 and the end of WWII) and so is a useful marker for dividing and arranging literary texts. But the word has come to have so many different possible meanings and emphases that it needs careful articulation and critique. That’s what we will try to do in this course: to pay attention to all the “isms” that come into being in the period and to broaden our understanding of the term and the period. We will have access to manifestoes and the various “isms” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents and through Peter Nicholls’ influential book called Modernisms: A Literary Guide. We will, of course, read literature: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats; and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Feel free to contact me at sicaris@stjohns.edu if you have any questions or concerns.
ENG. 3420: Contemporary Fiction (15025)
*DIVISION IV*
Harry Potter and Literary Theory
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
Email: ahmadd@stjohns.edu
In this upper-level course, we will be using J. K. Rowling’s 1997-2007 series to practice and refine the interpretive techniques that you already encountered in English 2300 (Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory) and elsewhere. In addition to closely analyzing the seven Harry Potter books, we will also consult a wide range of supplementary materials that will help us to approach them from the multiple perspectives of race, class, empire, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, genre, and literary influence, among others. There will be a significant amount of independent work, in the form of short essays, oral presentations, and a final research project. Please note that I will expect students to have read or reread all seven books carefully and recently before the beginning of the semester (ideally, over winter break) since class discussions will presume familiarity with the full series. Recommended prerequisite: English 2300.
ENG. 3440: Contemporary Poetry (14947)
*DIVISION IV*
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. John Lowney
Email: lowneyj@stjohns.edu
This course is an introduction to contemporary poetry, from the “New American Poetry” of the 1960s through the present. It will take a comparative approach to texts, writers, and cultures in the contemporary world. In doing so, it will emphasize how poetry engages theories of literature and its various contexts: in cultural, social, political, philosophical, etc. In particular, the course will stress the ways in which poetry and poetics have addressed and transformed theories of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Readings will include books by Frank O’Hara; Lawrence Joseph; Patricia Smith and Claudia Rankine; and selected poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks; and Adrienne Rich.
ENG. 3560: American Ethnic Literatures (15065)
*DIVISION IV*
Whiteness and the Asian American Subject
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
Email: tsoue@stjohns.edu
This course will introduce students to the “strange affinity” between whiteness and the Asian American subject. Drawing on key readings from whiteness studies, cultural studies and Asian American studies, we will examine the crucial role that the Asian American subject has played in consolidating different forms of whiteness. The Asian American subject occupies a unique position among racial minorities in the United States in that her relationship to whiteness—at least one aspect of it—is characterized by proximity and affinity rather than opposition and difference. This dynamic is expressed in the stereotype of the model minority and the perception that Asian Americans are “whitening” or have become white. In Asian American studies, this is known as “white racist love,” which is to be differentiated from “white racist hate,” the typical dynamic for race and racialization. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to this problematic relationship as it plays out in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and criticism, legal cases and popular culture.
ENG/CLS: 3610 Classical Drama in Translation (15064/15453)
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Robert Forman
Email: formanr@stjohns.edu
The course focuses on those plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that most closely reflect the social and political events of fifth-century Athens—and, surprisingly enough, the social and political events of contemporary America. These include the consequences of protracted war and weak leadership, religious extremism, and class and ethnic conflict. Readings will include the Trojan War plays of all three playwrights; the Theban Civil War plays of Sophocles and Euripides, and the Medea, Heracles, and Dionysus plays of Euripides.
ENG. 3700: The Teaching of Writing (14955)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Anne Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
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: Intro To Creative Writing (15077)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Professor Lee Ann Brown
Email: brownl@stjohns.edu
This class is perfect as either an introduction, or continuation of, an already established practice, in the myriad forms of creative writing and how they can be manifested and combined. We will begin by exploring traditional and experimental poetry forms including the ballad, the sestina, the sonnet, the list poem, free verse, and more, and then move to practice in other genres, such as short fictions, memoir or short works for performance (and song lyrics, if desired). Hybrid genre work continuum between creative and critical writing will be addressed as well.
We will discuss revision techniques such as additive revision, collage, text explosion, and useful terms, see them in practice, and respond to prompts to create our best possible new writing. Activities will also include understanding prosody, and “performing” poetry and other writing aloud to get a sense of its musical and performative nature. Students will work with instructor and together to revise their poems. Students will begin (and possibly complete and revise!) a poem or other short work in class each week, with “writing time” built into the class. They are then expected to hone their craft between classes to create a cumulative mid-semester and end of semester portfolio of new work. Each week there will be readings to help prompt new directions in our own writing such as excerpts from Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer, Olio by Tyehimba Jess, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, I Remember by Joe Brainard, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, rewritten fairy tales by Angela Carter, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Short Talks by Anne Carson and the short plays of Suzan-Lori Parks and more.
Cross references with St. John’s University Interdisciplinary Minors, Multicultural and Multiethnic Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. Interfaces with LGBTQIA Studies. Extra credit community service opportunities will be offered for those interested.
ENG. 3720: Creative Writing: Nonfiction (15121)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Professor Catina Bacote
Email: bacotec@stjohns.edu
In this course, you will learn to approach creative nonfiction writing as a mode of expression and also as a way of seeing—a means to access and understand the world around you. You will practice the writer’s gaze in your everyday lives and note the things that strike you as interesting, from an overheard conversation to a fragment of graffiti. Ultimately, you will give yourself over to your curiosities and obsessions and channel those impulses into riveting essays. To guide your writing, you will read a variety of nonfiction, such as lyric essays, documentary poetics, memoir, travelogue, oral histories, and immersion writing. You will catalog the craft choices writers make and learn how to recreate the past with authenticity. As a supportive writing community, we will give and receive feedback on ongoing creative work and delve into the ethical considerations that come into play when writing from real-life experience. You do not need any prior experience with creative nonfiction to take this course.
Please feel free to contact me with questions at bacotec@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 3730: Poetry Workshop (15026)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Professor Patricia Smith: 2020 D’Angelo Chair in the Humanities
About Patricia Smith:
Patricia Smith is four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history.She has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of a 2018 NAACP Image Award, the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was a finalist for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, Best American Poetry, and Best American Essays.
ENG. 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction (13508)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
Email: brownstg@stjohns.edu
This is an introduction to fiction writing, focusing mainly around the short story. Students will write regular exercises and 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’ stories—Jim Shepard, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—and we’ll consider the contemporary writers’ work in light of Chekhov’s storytelling practices. This study in turn will illuminate our own practice in writing.
ENG. 3880: English Studies in the Digital Age (15087)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
Writing for Money
T/ONLINE 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This course will look at how digital writing is produced, read, shared, and circulated. We will analyze and experiment with social media platforms like blogs, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, and we will explore theories about how we read, remix, and mash-up in digital spaces. In addition, students in the course will develop a professional online profile, explore career networking opportunities, and discover how the English major prepares students for complex and dynamic workplaces. Together we will learn how to put together strong resumes, cover letters and portfolios, and practice virtual and in person interview techniques. All students are welcome, but juniors and seniors might find the course particularly useful as they prepare for graduation. *Please note, this course is hybrid: we will meet on Tuesdays in class and workshop course materials/writing online on Fridays. For questions email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu
ENG. 3890: Topics in Film Genre (15069)
*DIVISION IV*
70s Hollywood
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
Email: combs@stjohns.edu
This course introduces students to four key figures in American cinema who came to prominence in the 1970s, a decade that deepened earlier shades of political unrest and social conflict . In particular we will focus on four auteurs whose work continues to be considered instrumental in the creation of a “new Hollywood” cinema, one maked by an investment in film history and a youthful rejection of mythic values of earlier Hollywood. Our four directors–Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Steven Spielberg–share an interest in isolation, social fragmentation, and abuses of power.
ENG. 4993: Senior Seminar (15076)
Taco Literacy: Writing Transnational Mexican Foodways
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 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, cultural appropriation, migrant labor, and the translation of indigenous cuisine for corporate consumption have also become topical. This course will examine foodways literacies from the angle of social justice, and how these foodways situate different literacies, rhetorics, and forms of cultural knowledge across borders. Readings will include Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City by Robert Lemon, Taco USA:How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano, Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico by Alyshia Gálvez, and Tortillas: A Cultural History by Paula E. Morton. For more about the class see @tacoliteracy on Twitter and Instagram.
ENG. 4994: Senior Seminar (14957)
Critical Issues in Digital Rhetoric and Media
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. LaToya Sawyer
Email: sawyerl@stjohns.edu
In recent years, hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have helped to bring awareness to critical issues of the day and mobilize people to bring about social change. The subsequent conversations on- and offline serve as contemporary examples of public and digital rhetoric and the agency that online identity performances and communities can provide. Inspired by this communal and rhetorical force, this senior seminar will examine the way digital writing and rhetoric is used in the creation of themed conversations and communities in online spaces, as well as, the affordances, constraints, and implications of such formations. Exploring emerging digital humanities scholarship, social media spaces and platforms, the seminar will look specifically at how social media users use discourse and rhetoric as part of their identity performances online to organize and have agency. We will explore the following questions: What is online community? How is it formed? What role does discourse, rhetoric, and technology play in forming communities online? Who does the work of forming community and to what end? Students will work throughout the semester to complete a digital media project based on a theme of interest from the course material.
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: Internship In English (11383) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: Internship In English (10804) 6 CREDITS
ENG. 4953: Independent Study (13823)