Summer 2019 Graduate Course Flyer
Summer Session 1: June 3 – July 8, 2019
ENG. 310: Shakespeare’s Media: Shakespeare and Refugees (30878)
ONLINE
Dr. Steve Mentz
Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu
Performance: Twelfth Night, Shakespeare on the Sound, Rowaytan CT (June 20 – July 3)
Like today’s harrowing images of overfull refugee boats setting out into the Mediterranean, Shakespeare’s oceanic plays present dangerous and violent movements of humans by sea. The plays respond to the massive transoceanic expansion of European culture that brought English ships across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. They also respond to the early stages of the transatlantic slave trade. These oceanic elements speak to the abiding cultural presence of the great waters as sites of trade, travel, recreation, and migration. Taking as our focus the salt-water comedy Twelfth Night, which we’ll see in Shakespeare on the Sound’s outdoor production, this course will explore Shakespeare’s oceanic contexts and his portrayals of refugees, migrants, slaves, and sailors. In addition to Twelfth Night, we will read Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, a mash-up on the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” with the experience of Algerian refugees in the Mediterranean; several other Med-centric early modern plays including Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sir Thomas More, and The Winter’s Tale and Marlowe’s Dido; and current critical writing in the “blue humanities.”
Summer Session II: July 10 – Aug 13
ENG. 100: Modern Critical Theories (31215)
ONLINE
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
Email: fanuzzir@stjohns.edu
This course provides case studies of critical theories and scholarly practices that shape contemporary literary scholarship. Topics include race, capitalism and modernity, with readings from Sylvia Winter and Cedric Robinson; sexuality and heteronormativity, with readings from Michel Foucault and Michael Warner; culture, materialism, and language, with readings from Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Jacques Derrida; and feminism and gender theory, with readings from Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant.