ENG. 100: MODERN CRITICAL THEORIES (11894)
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Dr. Steven Alvarez
Email: alvares1@stjohns.edu
What is literary theory, and how can it help us think about the relationships among authors, readers, and texts? How can we understand the connections between literary texts and the social contexts in which they are produced? This course is an introduction to the key concepts and thinkers of the twentieth century in literary theory, from structuralism onward, with particular emphasis on narratology. We will take up questions such as those posed above, as well as examining how theories of language, history, society, the unconscious, social class, sexuality, and sexual difference contribute to the ways we read literature. We will read and discuss selections from the work of a range of influential and provocative critics and theorists, along with a few literary test cases that will help us practice critical applications and analyses.
ENG. 135: CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF WRITING (14587)
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Dr. Anne Ellen Geller
Email: gellera@stjohns.edu
From classrooms to department faculty meetings to campuswide planning committees and beyond (in the media), debates about the methods for, principles of, and approaches to learning and teaching literacies are ever present. These conversations always involve decision making that reflects collective, collaborative thinking in the context of a social-historic-political moment. What’s said (and unsaid) reveals whose interests, beliefs and experiences are foregrounded and whose are pushed to the margins. To speak into these debates, English’s professional organizations–and smaller professional collaboratives–produce reports and position statements that document an enormous range of issues and debates about literacies and the learning and teaching of English and writing.
In this semester of English 135, we’ll ask: What exactly does it mean to take a stand on literacy learning? How and why might a range of professional associations within a broader discipline offer profoundly different approaches? What sorts of disciplinary gatekeeping or normalization is happening? Whose perspectives and what ideas get marginalized? Where are students in these debates? Together, we’ll consider a range of critical issues, beginning with language rights and artificial intelligence. Individually, students will select additional issues for exploration.
ENG. 195: DIGITAL LITERARY STUDIES (14589)
W. 7:10 – 9:10 PM SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
This synchronous online course investigates how digital technologies affect the way we
read, study, teach, and understand literature. It introduces students to important debates in the digital humanities, and it prepares students to use digital tools and techniques in their own research and teaching. Exploring such topics as the role of AI in teaching and learning, the digitization of printed texts, editions, and archives, and the analysis of texts using machine algorithms, we will examine the ways in which technology poses significant challenges to familiar assumptions in literary study, from how we read to the meaning of authorship, collaboration, and accessibility. Please email Dr. Travis, travisj@stjohns.edu for more information.
ENG. 590: TOPICS 19TH CENTURY BRITISH (14561)
PLACE AND IDENTITY: NINETEENTH-CENTURE BRITISH & CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE NOVEL
T. 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Dr. Amy King
Email: kinga@stjohns.edu
How does a novel belong to a region or place? In this course we will explore how certain novels represent place, putting critical pressure on ideas such as place, space, region, and locality in relation to the concept of nation. Why is place so important to identity? Why do some novels conspicuously create a fictionalized geography for a real place? Reading across two robust novelistic traditions—the nineteenth century British novel, and the contemporary Global Anglophone novel—we will explore how the political realities of place shape the novelistic representation of person and community. Whether we reference Thomas Hardy’s English “Wessex” or Shani Mootoo’s Trinidadian imaginary, the question of what we mean when we analyze place and space in the novel will be central to this course.
We will explore these and other questions through various theoretical texts and six novels from the two traditions. From Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) to Anita Desai’s Rosarita (2025), we will read and discuss these texts as stand-alone works of art, but also within a long tradition of literature written in English that is especially committed to the intersection of place and identity. Readings will likely include the following: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Anita Desai’s Rosarita (2025), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996).
ENG. 700: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERNISM (14562)
T. 7:10 – 9:10 PM
Dr. Rachel Hollander
Email: hollanr1@stjohns.edu
This course will center on several of Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays as a focal point for exploring the emergence and development of Anglo-American modernism. As the daughter of a Victorian man of letters, center of the Bloomsbury group, co-founder of the Hogarth Press (which published T.S. Eliot and the first English translations of Freud, among many others), prolific essayist, and originator of the modern novel, Woolf is a crucial figure in any formulation of literary modernism. With an emphasis on the politics of gender, sexuality, and race, and the more recent considerations of modernism as a diverse global phenomenon, we will follow the trajectory of Woolf’s career to trace early twentieth-century experimentations (aesthetic, political, and cultural). In addition to Woolf, primary authors may include Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Amy Levy, E.M. Forster, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Olive Schreiner, and Gertrude Stein.
ENG. 810: LITERARY/VISUAL/TEXTS (14590)
ORIGINS OF SCIENCE FICTION
M. 3:25 – 5:25 PM
Dr. Brian Lockey
Email: lockeyb@stjohns.edu
Science fiction (i.e. speculative fiction) emerged as a major genre of popular and literary writing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This course will consider the origins of this tradition as well as relevant literary and historical contexts. In particular, we will consider two prominent traditions within speculative fiction writing. The first tradition emerges from the Greek myth of Prometheus, taking shape in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and involving prohibited knowledge or a human invention which threatens to destroy the world. The second, embodied in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and probably going back at least to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, involves the discovery of a new or parallel world. Among the questions we will ask are the following: How does speculative fiction emerge from the scientific revolutions of the early modern and Enlightenment periods? How does science fiction register the 20th century tensions between religion and science? How does speculative fiction reflect transforming gender roles of men and women, especially given how many prominent speculative fiction writers have been women? We will read the following fictional works and view some related films as well: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness; J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
ENG. 878: WORKSHOP IN POETRY & POETICS (13051)
R. 3:25 – 5:25 PM
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
Email: brownla@stjohns.edu
Exploratory graduate workshop in poetry and poetics using contemporary “seed texts” as well as a traditional and experimental poetic forms and procedures. Students will write weekly to compile a poetry chapbook-sized manuscript of at least twenty-two pages. Weekly in-class writing, discussions and workshops form the heart of the course. Students are encouraged to attend at least one New York City community poetry reading, and to plan and give an on-campus presentation of their own poems.
ENG. 105: Comprehensive Portfolio/Masters (11027)
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 (11042)
ENG. 105P: Doctoral Dissertation Defense (11768)
ENG. 105Q: Doctoral Qualifying Exam (11028)
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 (11137)
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 (10748)
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 (10347)
Independent readings and research supervised by, and in conversation with, a faculty mentor.
ENG. 906: English Internship (11030)
ENG. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (10047)
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.
Students who enroll for Maintaining Matriculation should be aware that MM does not keep their payment of student loans in forbearance
ENG. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (PhD) (10046)
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.
Students who enroll for Maintaining Matriculation should be aware that MM does not keep their payment of student loans in forbearance
ENG. 975: Doctoral Research (1 credit) (10649)
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 the doctoral committee.