GRADUATE ENGLISH FLIER
SPRING 2025
http://stjenglish.com/
ENG. 100: MODERN CRITICAL THEORIES (12345)
R. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Elda Tsou
Email: tsoue@stjohns.edu This course presents that terrifying beast we call “theory,” with particular emphasis on race. This is a partial overview, not an exhaustive list, of the key movements and thinkers with contemporary relevance. Our primary goal is to sharpen our ability to think critically—that is, to sharpen our ability to ask better questions about whatever topic or issue under discussion. To that end, the course introduces an assortment of essays that either exhibit certain models of thinking or that display contemporary thinkers engaging with their theoretical antecedents. For the foundational thinkers, the selected essays offer a model of theorizing that depict a particular approach to thinking about a certain topic. You will find that many of these thinkers are grappling with a version of the question: why is it so important for us to claim that X is like “this”; what is at stake when we insist that X is like “this”?
ENG. 230: CHAUCER (14910)
CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES
T. 2:50 – 4:50 PM
Dr. Nicole Rice
Email: ricen@stjohns.edu
Geoffrey Chaucer has long delighted and shocked readers with his major work, The Canterbury Tales. This course considers selected tales in the context of the poem as a whole, while introducing some important recent critical approaches to the Tales. Chaucer lived during a period of major social, religious, and political upheaval, and his work engages fully with the complexities of late medieval English culture. In our readings of the Tales, we will reflect on issues including economic changes and controversies; gender roles, sexuality, and marriage; racial and religious pluralities and differences. No previous experience of Middle English is necessary. Students will learn to read and pronounce Chaucer’s Middle English.
ENG. 440: STUDIES IN RESTORATION & 18TH CENTURY (14912)
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SEXUALITIES AND GENDERS
M. 2:50 – 4:50 PM Dr. Kathleen Lubey Email: lubeyk@stjohns.edu This course will approach sexuality and gender as highly unstable categories in eighteenth-century Britain. Historians such as Lawrence Stone and Randolph Trumbach have influentially declared the eighteenth century to be one in which modern sexuality cohered, stigmatizing queerness, naturalizing heterosexuality, and fetishizing English whiteness. We’re going to work against the grain of this historical narrative. We’ll ask (rather than predict in advance) how literary texts figure sexuality and gender, embracing literature’s ambiguities and contradictions. Even as novels push their protagonists toward idealized heterosexual marriages, narratives of transgendering, chastity, sex work, queerness, colonialism, and sexual violence run counter to this normalizing impulse, providing ample evidence that eighteenth-century sexuality and gender were arenas of questioning rather than conclusiveness. How did British culture create, sustain, and reinvent sexual and gendered hierarchies, even as the period’s writing reveals so much resistance to heteronormativity? We’ll read across genres (poetry, novel, essay, medical treatise, pornography, travel writing, conduct literature), including works by Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Aphra Behn, Henry Fielding, and many anonymous authors. Theoretical grounding will come from histories of sexuality by Michel Foucault, Marisa Fuentes, Susan Lanser, Thomas Laqueur, and Ilaheva Tua’one. Content note: our class discussions will be centered on our readings, which candidly describe and discuss many kinds of sex. Comfort discussing and writing about this topic is required, and we’ll reflect together on how to do so inclusively and responsibly.
ENG. 730: LITERARY MODERNISM (14913) M. 5:00 – 7:00 PM Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu One of the best ways to approach the study of modern poetry is to observe how certain poets from the modernist period look to Dante for inspiration and guidance. In the Divine Comedy, Dante presented an enormously wide range of human experience and human history evaluated from the perspective of divine love and divine justice; as Eliot puts it so well, he finds that “point of intersection of the timeless with time.” Modern poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens sought to achieve for their own more scientific and skeptical age what Dante did for his. For Pound, it is writing an “epic of judgment” in which he can assess history and politics, including contemporary politics, from the vantage point of eternal justice. For Eliot, it is writing a poem detailing a journey in which one’s personal, purely secular experience can approach and achieve union with the Christ event. For Stevens, it is supplementing Dante’s poem of heaven and hell by writing “the great poem of earth” as experienced by what he calls his “necessary angel.”
ENG. 760: POSTCOLONIAL TOPICS (14914) CONTEMPORARY THEORIS OF BLACK/AFRICAN DIASPORA R. 2:50 – 4:50 PM Dr. Raj Chetty
Email: chettyr@stjohns.edu
This course will engage with the field(s) of Black and African Diaspora Studies as they have developed over the past ten years or so and specifically in relation to literary and cultural studies. The intention is to help students gain a deep understanding of the debates within the field as it has developed recently. Thus, the course will be focused around theoretical works that aim to conceptualize blackness, diaspora, and Africanness. Organized around the multiple and often competing visions of these contested terms, the course will include texts from major thinkers and writers from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
ENG. 878: WORKSHOP IN POETRY & POETICS (13840)
W. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Stephen Paul Miller
Email: millers@stjohns.edu
Through assignments, prompts, and our and others’ poetry, we will examine poetry’s potential for generating all manner of meaning, feeling, and communal, experiential, and literary belonging.
ENG. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Masters (11254)
Course designation for MA students in their last semester of coursework if they choose the Portfolio option rather than the M.A. thesis.
ENG. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Doctoral (11271)
ENG. 105P: Doctoral Dissertation Defense (12173)
ENG. 105Q: Doctoral Qualifying Exam (11255)
Preparation for and oral examination in three scholarly fields of the doctoral student’s devising, in consultation with three faculty mentors/examiners.
ENG. 105T: Master’s Thesis Defense (11404)
Placeholder designation for students who have written the M.A. thesis in the previous semester and who are in their last semester of coursework. Please only register for this class if you have already registered for ENG 900 in the previous semester and have completed or are intending to complete the thesis as your capstone project for the MA. Students who are pursuing the Portfolio as their capstone project should register instead for ENG 105.
ENG. 900: Master’s Research (10877)
M.A. thesis; capstone project of the M.A. student’s devising, written in consultation with a mentor and several faculty readers.
ENG. 901: Readings and Research (10393)
Independent readings and research supervised by, and in conversation with, a faculty mentor.
ENG. 906: English Internship (11257)
ENG. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10049)
Designation for M.A. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature; a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.
ENG. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (PhD) (10048)
Designation for Ph.D. students pausing studies for personal reasons not medical in nature; a zero-credit course, available for no more than two consecutive semesters.
ENG. 975: Doctoral Research (1 credit) (10741)
This is the one-credit version of Eng. 975, only to be taken after the student has completed one semester of the three-credit version of Eng. 975.
Doctoral research colloquium or independent doctoral research supervised by doctoral committee.