UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLYER SPRING 2024
ENG. 2060: STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: (11083)
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE MONSTROUS
*PRE-1900*
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This course will examine how representations of witches, vampires, ghosts, and monsters have
shaped American cultural discourse and literary history. Reading may include works by Edgar
Allan Poe, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, and Toni
Morrison. We will ask why monsters play such an important role in our cultural imaginations.
How do individuals and societies define themselves in relation to the monstrous? What is a
monster and what can monsters tell us about humanity, community, and our deepest fears and
values? For questions, please email Dr. Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 2100: RACE IN AMERICAN LIT & CULTURE (15524)
RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE
R 12:15 – 1:40 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS THE REST OF THE WEEK
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@sstjohns.edu
Race, scholars agree, is a social and cultural construct, not a biological fact. What racial
identities and hierarchies does American culture construct? With the help of the pioneering work
of cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall and “case study” approach, students see the impact of
literature, film, music, and pivotal moments in popular culture, and flashpoints in US political
culture on American realities of race. Areas of focus include representations of Asian-American
and Latina/o immigration and exclusion; politics of African-American performance; white
“colorblind” liberalism; and the racialization of urban “crises.”
ENG. 2200: READING AND WRITING FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (15433)
TF 1:50 – 3:15 PM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
This course is designed to introduce new English majors and minors, as well as students in the
School of Education concentrating in English, to the reading and writing practices necessary for
success as a student of English. We will practice what we call “close reading,” the careful and
thoughtful analysis of texts not only for their meaning but also for their rhetorical effects. While
we will read some fiction (Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler), we will place special
emphasis on the reading of poetry and become comfortable with the genre that often seems the
most intimidating. Your writing will be mainly short formal essays about our texts, but you will
also work on some “creative” pieces of your own inspired by our reading.
ENG. 2200: READING AND WRITING FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (14013)
MR 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Granville Ganter
Email: ganterg@stjohns.edu
This course is intended as a foundational course for English majors, a practical introduction to critical
writing about literature and the arts. The course will explore the written and theoretical means of art
interpretation and cultural history. Although we will practice interpreting short samples of poetry,
fiction, and tele-drama or film, course reading will largely be determined by student choice.
Furthermore, the course is addressed to students who don’t think of themselves egotistically as
“Readers” (at least with the weight that expression used to carry). In recent decades, students have
become skeptical of the value of interpreting literature as a basic human activity, and we will be asking
why we choose the texts we choose and what we think we might do with them, and what those texts
might do for us. Along the way, we will practice concrete exercises for proposing, researching, and
drafting academic papers for an epoch that doesn’t quite understand why the arts might still be valuable.
ENG. 2300: INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORY (15434)
ANTHROPOCENE THEORIES
TF 9:05 – 10:30 AM
Dr. Steven Mentz
Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu
The central concept of this Introduction to Literary Theory course will be the Anthropocene, the
geological era we live in today, when humans have become the drivers of global climate
disruption. Although the term was coined by a Nobel Prize-winning chemist in 2000, the
Anthropocene has reoriented literary and cultural theory in the twenty-first century. We will read
examples of literary theoretical texts from influential figures such as Foucault, Derrida, and
Irigaray through an Anthropocene lens and consider how categories such as race, gender, and
class signify under Anthropocene conditions. We will read widely in recent ecotheory, including
works by Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Cohen, and Amitav Ghosh. As a literary core,
we will read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of English literature’s most resonant portrayals of
damaged natural systems. Students will have the option to see a new, experimental production of
Macbeth at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn in April.
ENG. 3240: ROMANTIC LITERATURE (15818)
LOVE AND DEATH IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE
*PRE-1900*
M. 9:05 – 10:30 AM FACE TO FACE
AND
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS THE REST OF THE WEEK
Dr. Gregory Maertz
Email: maertzg@stjohns.edu
This course explores the themes of love and death in the literature of the Romantic Period.
Works to be read and discussed include a selection of Robert Burns’s love poetry; Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the internationally bestselling novella of
star-crossed lovers that ends in suicide; “The Sick Rose” and “London,” poems by William
Blake about 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”; Emma,
Jane Austen’s great Regency satire of marriage-minded young women; Latitia Elizabeth
Landon’s poem “Revenge” which celebrates erotic schadenfreude; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights, a Gothic romance in which love outlasts the grave; and the heartrending last poems of
the dying John Keats—“Ode on Melancholy,” “To Autumn,” and “Bright Star.”
ENG. 3280: EARLY ENGLISH FEMINISMS (15436)
*PRE-1900*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
Email: lubeyk@stjohns.edu
Prior to the cohesion of self-identified women’s movements, writers of the late seventeenth
through early nineteenth century questioned gender injustices by exploring how women were
treated in the realms of marriage, sex, and education and by shaping the directions of philosophy,
abolitionism, and the arts. We’ll read literature by British women across genres (drama, fiction,
poetry, philosophy, letters) to explore their various strategies—theological, philosophical,
scientific, political—for increasing their personal and collective autonomy. This period’s
historical record largely excludes the voices of colonized, enslaved, queer, and trans women, so
we will read the work of more recent scholars, such as Jessica Marie Johnson, Jennifer Morgan,
and Susan Lanser, to think about how to approach the past with a feminist methodology that
pushes against the limitations of whiteness and heteronormativity. Authors from the period will
range from philosophers (Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft) to literary critics (Elizabeth
Carter and Anna Barbauld) to novelists and poets (Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn). Attendance,
reading, participation, and 3-4 graded essays required. The course will include one on-site visit
to the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection, an archive containing first editions
and manuscripts by several of our authors.
ENG. 3400: MODERNIST LITERATURE (15441)
BEFORE AND AFTER
*POST-1900*
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
Literary modernism (the period roughly between 1900 and the end of the Second World War in 1945)
is characterized by radical experiments in form and theme. We will divide the literary works in this
iteration of the course into two parts, “before” the Great War (1914-1918) and works written in its
aftermath, to investigate the possible effects of that cataclysmic event upon literary production.
Before: we will read Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, all of which already show signs of the experimental responses
modernism is famous for. After: we’ll read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, selections from Ezra
Pound’s The Cantos, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
ENG. 3440: CONTEMPORARY POETRY (15778)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
MR 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Professor Lee Ann Brown
Email: brownl@stjohns.edu
Reading, discussion and creative / critical writing in response to a range of contemporary poetry.
Special emphasis on experimental, process-based and conceptual work as well as place, gender,
and race based exploratory writing.
We will practice close reading and listening practices from comparative contemporary poetry
and poetics from the last 60 years, with an emphasis on super new work and its roots.
ENG. 3560: AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE (15473)
LATINX WRITING
MR 10:40 – 12:15 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
Email: alvares1@stjohns.edu
This course will focus on texts produced by Latinx writers from different class, racial,
and national backgrounds who portray the diverse experiences and negotiations of Latinidad
from a variety of genres, focusing on themes of bilingual poetics, migration, colonialism,
blackness, and indigeneity. What can literature teach us about how Latinx people think, love,
dream, and rebel? What are some of the commonalities and differences in Latinxs’ lived
experiences? Always thinking at once as readers and writers, we will approach each book both as
a mirror of its time period and also as a model for Latinx literary achievement. Readings for the
course will include The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, The Book of Unknown Americans by
Cristina Henríquez, Guillotine by Eduardo Corral, Solito by Javier Zamora, The Holy Days of
Gregorio Pasos by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera,
and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa.
ENG. 3570: WOMEN AND LITERATURE (15779)
*PRE-1900*
*COUNTS FOR WOMEN’S, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES*
TF 12:15 – 1:40 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. 3590: LITERATURE & THE OTHER ARTS (15780)
SCHITT’S CREEK AND ITS NEIGHBORS
TF 12:15 – 1:40 PM
Dr. Scott Combs
Email: combss@stjohns.edu
This course tracks the sitcom Schitt’s Creek across its six-year run and, along the way, places the
series in a number of different critical contexts to consider its commentary on class, comedy, and
sexuality. We will address its Canadianness by looking at recent scholarly work on “global”
distribution, before moving on to its internal concerns. Two main themes will orient our
discussions. A family released or uprooted from its socioeconomic condition is of course not
new to television comedy (Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies), but Schitt’s Creek inverts and
critiques many earlier tropes of the “going poor” narrative. To that end, we will read in the fields
of class studies, comedy theory, and linguistics–the latter in order to study the play with
language and accent throughout. Second, the series reestablishes boundaries of how sexual
identity can be addressed in mainstream comedy, and how humor itself can structure new
formations of family, love, and desire. For this, we will read critical essays on Schitt’s Creek, but
we will also draw from certain works in queer theory. Each student will be expected to view the
entire series on their own as we move through the semester (Amazon Prime, Freevee, Hulu, etc.),
but all other supplemental clips will be shown in class. Course requirements include weekly
participation quizzes, a midterm exam, one expository paper that includes an adjacent source,
and a final project to be determined. Email me with any questions: combss@stjohns.edu.
ENG. 3615/ CLS. 3615: CLASSICS AND CLASS (16090)
TF 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Robert Forman
Email: formanr@stjohns.edu
Unfortunately, the word “classic” is too often identified as something of privileged value,
unchanging or timeless. Our course argues the opposite: that classic works evolve directly in
response to the class toward which they are directed.
We will begin with a selection from Thomas Bridges’ (1710-1775) A New Translation of
Homer’s Iliad, adapted to the Capacity of Honest English Roast Beef and Pudding Eaters, a
parodic attack on the expanding British Empire, then consider Elkanah Settle’s (1648-1724) The
Siege of Troy (1700), a mock epic response to John Dryden’s translation of Vergil’s Aeneid.
We will then read Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), his response to Aeschylus’ play
Prometheus. Shelley’s protagonist is not just a champion of the race of men (Zeus/Jupiter
creates the race of women), but a symbol of resistance to the arbitrary power of Jupiter, the king.
Our course concludes with selections from Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853),
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895); and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). All these works
harken back to the etymology of the Latin classis, the verb clamare, “to shout, to summon.”
ENG. 3690: SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES (15442)
BASEBALL, BLACK CULTURES, AND LITERATURE
*POST-1900*
*COUNTS FOR CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES MINOR*
MR 3:25 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
The course presumes no interest in baseball or sport, instead looking at baseball as a meaningful
cultural field where race, color, gender, and class are articulated and contested. We will engage
critical writings on the concepts of culture, race, and sport, drawing from Black Cultural Studies
to counter the idea that certain areas of cultural life, such as sport, are not sufficiently intellectual
or academic, not “cultivated” or “cultured” enough for serious reflection or study. We will
explore how this is a double dilemma for Black sporting cultures. The course includes a shortterm, embedded trip to the Dominican Republic during the university’s Spring Break (February
24-March 1). Students must apply through the Office of International Education to participate in
the study abroad component, and the study abroad component is a required part of the course.
Details are available through the link above.
The course centers Black cultural life in baseball, in the U.S. and the Caribbean. This class will
engage an array of cultural materials: novella, play, poetry, film, short fiction, and print and
visual media. To develop a set of tools to study baseball as culture, we will study the landmark
cultural study of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, by the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James. In
addition to James, we will engage critical studies of baseball and blackness by Rob Ruck, Adrian
Burgos, Andrew McCutchen, and José Bautista, and creative cultural productions by August
Wilson, Don DeLillo, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Yolanda Arroyo-Pizarro, Martín Espada,
and Alejandro Gautreaux.
ENG. 3720: CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP (15819)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
W. 1:50 – 4:40 PM
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
Email: brownstg@stjohns.edu
This is a class about a single word, the word “I,” which is a very peculiar word. It means a
different thing for every person who writes it, and once written down, it rapidly loses its
attachment to the person who wrote it. “I is another,” wrote Arthur Rimbaud, and maybe the
simplest way to understand that is that every time you put the word “I” on a page you’re putting
on a persona.
We’ll read work by a set of essayists who experiment with narrative persona—Vauhini Vara,
David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. The topics these
readings cover will include mourning, assimilation, boredom, creativity, racism, imperialist
violence, and the consciousness of insects.
Student writers will develop their own narrative non-fiction, and develop their own first-person
voice, to write about the topics that most interest them.
ENG. 3740: FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP (13522)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
T. 3:25 – 4:50 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS THE REST OF THE WEEK
Professor Gabriel Brownstein
Email: brownstg@stjohns.edu
“Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies,” that’s how Ovid begins
his Metamorphoses, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this fiction writing workshop: magic and
transformation. We’ll read mostly fiction from the US in the 1970s, but also writers who will
help us put those writers into some context—we’ll read Chekhov and Kafka and Garcia Marquez
in addition to Toni Morrison and Grace Paley and Anne Beattie and Ursula Leguin.
Students will develop their own works of fiction over the course of the semester, starting with
short exercises and building toward original finished works: stories, chapters, and experiments.
ENG. 3790: PROFESSIONAL WRITING (15474)
*COUNTS FOR WRITING MINOR*
R 3:25 – 4:50 PM FACE TO FACE
AND
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS THE REST OF THE WEEK
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
Every profession requires writing, even if that writing is not immediately visible to us, and in the
21st century writing is a more central part of professionals’ communicative lives than ever before.
In the first half of the semester, students will create (or strengthen) their online professional
presence, and we will explore the literacies and experiences of writers across a wide range of
professions, the expectations of and constraints on professional writers, the ways genre,
communities, and context shape professional writing, and the embodied experiences of
composing in professional settings. We will also think about how writers can (and should)
critique and revise professional writing and advocate through professional communication. In the
second half of the semester students will conduct research on the texts and visuals, genre systems,
and communicative relationships of a professional community/context related to their interests.
ENG. 4994: SEMINAR IN THEMES/GENRES (15440)
YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE
*SENIOR CAPSTONE*
MR 10:40 – 12:05 PM
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
Email: ahmadd@stjohns.edu
This senior seminar will provide an introduction to young adult literature and young adult
literary studies. Reading broadly in YA texts from the 1950s to the present, we will consider how
to define young adult literature; what locations and populations it has historically emphasized;
which genres and themes it encompasses; and whom it has represented, misrepresented, or failed
to represent. An equally important goal of the course will be to track the priorities and exclusions
of young adult literary studies as a growing area of scholarly inquiry. As a capstone course, Eng.
4994 will incorporate significant secondary reading and independent research.
*WITH PERMISSION OF CHAIR ONLY*
ENG. 4903: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (10989) 3 CREDITS
ENG. 4906: INTERNSHIP IN ENGLISH (10604) 6 CREDITS
ENG. 4953: INDEPENDENT STUDY (12153) 3 CREDITS
BUSINESS WRITING AND OTHER ENGLISH ONLINE COURSES
ENG. 1040: WRITING FOR BUSINESS (11294)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
ENG. 2100: RACE IN AMERICA (13523)
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS
Professor: TBD
ENG. 2210: STUDY OF BRITISH LITERATURE (11082)
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS
Professor: TBD