UNDERGRADUATE FLYER
MAY 30, 2023 – JULY 6, 2023
SUMMER SESSION I
ENG. 1100C: LITERATURE IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT (30957)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Email: sicaris@stjohns.edu
As the only required literature course in the St. John’s core curriculum, Literature in a Global Context is meant to introduce students to literature in a way that is globally aware and responsible. Great literature is not only enjoyable and moving on a personal level, but also can bear social relevance and intellectual weight. We will be reading both to enjoy and to be responsible social critics.
I have chosen texts that are all written in English but not from either the U. S. or the U.K., the traditional places for gathering texts for English lit courses. I have broken the course into two units:
- A section on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Adiche’s Purple Hibiscus. Both authors are born and raised in Nigeria and write about the colonizing experience. Adiche is responding explicitly to Achebe’s novel, and they form a neat pair.
- Selections from Dohra Ahmad’s The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. These are either short stories or memoirs about the experience of immigration.
You will respond to daily discussion posts and write two essays.
ENG. 2060: STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (30997)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Granville Ganter
Email: ganterg@stjohns.edu
This is a completely online course where we will discuss several lively texts in American literature: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy; Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; and Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. Most of the reading is very short, dramatic, and lively. It is a project-based class where students pick a single text from the syllabus to study in the first week of class, and then do several research and writing exercises over the course of the next four weeks. Each assignment will be added together to generate the final project. The course format is designed for a flexible summer work schedule. Selections from the texts will be provided through Canvas—you will not be required to buy any books.
ENG. 2100: LITERATURE AND CULTURE (30955); BEACH READING!
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Steven Mentz
Email: mentzs@stjohns.edu
What is “beach reading”? Is there something special about reading on the beach? What is it about sand, surf, and sunshine that connects to words, ideas, and thinking?
This online Literature and Culture course uses the idea (and practice!) of beach reading to help us understand how reading for pleasure and intellectual recreation helps define our global literary culture. We’ll read sea poems and stories from medieval England to the present-day Caribbean, including Rivers Solomon’s sci-fi Afro-futurist novel The Deep (2019), written in dialogue with hip-hop music by Daveed Diggs; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Goth classic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and Monique Roffey’s Caribbean inter-species love story The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020). Since it’s an on-line course, we won’t meet physically, but each of us should make at least one trip to an actual beach and write about what sorts of reading they see (and experience) there.
UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH FLYER
JULY 10, 2023 – AUGUST 10, 2023
SUMMER SESSION II
ENG. 1100C: LITERATURE IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT (30958)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr, Jennifer Travis
Email: travisj@stjohns.edu
In this course we will read horror, ghost, and fantasy short fiction from around the globe and ask how these genres have shaped literary and cultural history. Please be in touch with any questions: travisj@stjohns.edu
ENG. 2210: STUDY OF BRITISH LITERATURE (30956)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Gregory Maertz
Email: maertzg@stjohns.edu
A course on three classic British novels and their representation in film and television, starting with James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and moving into the present. The novels we will examine, along with their transmutability and continuing cultural relevance, are Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
ENG. 3710: Creative Writing Across Genres (30996)
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS
Dr. Stephen P. Miller
Email: millers@stjohns.edu
This course asks you to use your imagination, memory, perceptions, and sensitivities to write creatively in all creative forms. We will use models in several genres, in addition to techniques such as focused and unfocused free-writing and many different prompts to unlock your creativity and ability to convey the breadth and depth of your inner and outer experiences. The course will enable students to experience literature from the “inside out.” Within the context of being working poets we will also consider canonical, modern, and contemporary poetry, in addition to other writing as models.