Queens Campus
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(13021)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course is intended as a first course for English majors, a
practical introduction to the discipline of literary
interpretation. It will introduce students to the written
practices and theoretical means with which scholars create
meaning. We will begin the class by asking some important
general questions about the nature of the “author,” “literature,”
and the “English Department.” The course will then turn to a
few short works of prose, poetry, and drama that introduce students
to issues of genre, literary history, and basic theories of
literary interpretation. Course reading will be minimal,
however: the purpose of the course will be to develop critical
writing and research skills in the discipline of English
studies. The course will offer concrete training in
proposing, researching, and drafting papers for English
courses.
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(13453)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
Students frequently ask how professors work their way through what
seems a morass of metaphor and symbol to arrive at the meaning of a
poem or prose work. This course will introduce students to a
variety of literary theory techniques, such as New Criticism,
mythic-psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic and structuralist, reader
response, feminist, queer theory, post-structural and postmodern.
The course will also consider research methods, both traditional
and online, and students will produce a series of critical essays
and a final research essay.
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (13454)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
So many isms, so little time: new criticism, practical criticism,
functionalism, formalism, reader-response, structuralism, new
historicism, feminism (1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave), psychoanalytic
criticism, Marxism (classical and neo), poststructuralism,
deconstruction, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism—and now,
most recently, a series of arguments for the death of theory, or
life after theory (post-theoryism?). And of course there are
the different theories of education: perennialism, essentialism,
existentialism, progressivism, recontstructionism, critical
pedagogy. And let’s not forget the different theoretical
approaches to writing instruction: current-traditonal,
expressivist, social constructivist, post-process. . . . Anyway,
we’ll focus on all of these (mostly the schools of literary
criticism, but a little bit too on these latter categories).
By semester’s end you’ll feel more comfortable navigating this
terrain, dipping into the theory toolbox, and eventually finding
out which of these camps speak to you, and which don’t.
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (13019)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
In this introductory course on reading methodologies, we will learn
about the major schools of twentieth-century critical theory
(post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist,
new-historicist, and postcolonial) in two ways: by reading some of
their seminal founding documents, and also by applying them to a
play (Shakespeare’s Tempest), a poem (Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner)
and a novel (Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy). Requirements will include
a presentation, midterm and final exams, and several short response
papers.
ENG 3110: Chaucer (13893)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
The fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer lived before
Shakespeare, wrote in the London dialect of Middle English (a
language different and older than modern English), and served the
royal court as warrior, diplomat, civil servant, and also court
poet. From these basic facts about Chaucer, we know the poet
lived in a very different time and culture from ours, and we will
study the writer’s works in the context of his major cultural and
social concerns: language, especially the vernacular, his
“international” outlook and interest in major European authors,
gender relations, and the ideal of “nobility.” What makes a
person noble? Related to such a question, what is a peasant
or a churl? We will tackle these and other questions on
gender, the vernacular, and literary community in Chaucer’s
writings, from major works such as the Canterbury Tales and Troilus
and Criseyde to minor poems. While the readings will be
mostly in modern English translation, we will study the basic
elements of Middle English and read a few poems in the
original.
ENG 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays
(11556)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
The Ends of Theater
It’s easy to tell the difference between comedies and tragedies:
one kind of play ends with marriage, the other with dead bodies
strewn across the stage. But when William Shakespeare, known
in the Elizabethan period for romantic comedies (A Midsummer
Night’s Dream) and providential histories (Henry V), focused on
tragedy after King James I took the throne, the shift seems to have
larger artistic and philosophical significance. This course
will investigate the “ends of theater” in an inclusive sense,
looking both at how dramatic plots end and at what the theater
means in the social world. Why do we enjoy watching fictional
characters die on stage, and why do we think tragedy is a “higher”
genre than comedy? During the eight years of James’s reign in
which Shakespeare was an active writer, he created the major
tragedies that cemented his artistic reputation. He became
not just a popular playwright but the King’s personal dramatist and
the leading figure in English national literature. Taking its
focus from the title of what may have been Shakespeare’s first
Jacobean play, All’s Well that Ends Well, this course will focus on
theatrical endings and what they mean. We will begin with
All’s Well, continue with four major tragedies, Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth, and Antony & Cleopatra, and finish with two late
romances, Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale.
ENG 3200: Eighteenth Century British
Literature (13900)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
Satire, Sexuality, and Sentiment in the “Age of Reason”
Many of our modern ideas about sexuality and commerce began to
circulate in the eighteenth-century. Brace yourselves,
English students! This course is far more than a study
of dead men. Sure, we will read Pope, Swift, and some of
Samuel Johnson. But we will put them in conversation with
their male and female contemporaries, including Richardson, Behn,
and possibly Fielding, and the sparks will fly. We will
emphasize gender, race, class, sexuality, and cultural difference
in an eighteenth-century England that embraces capitalism and
imperialism.
ENG 3240: Romantic Literature
(12215)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
No English curriculum is really complete without the
Romantics. These authors, writing from the French Revolution
in 1789 to the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837, expand
literary consciousness by focusing on the centrality of the
writer. We will study the famous “big six” poets: Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, plus a
number of other important writers. We will examine the
creative imagination, heroism, class issues, slavery, the marriage
market and other gender topics, and even drug abuse.
ENG 3350: American Women Writers
(14349)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course will investigate the constructions as well as the
challenges of the “Cult of True Womanhood”: the cult of purity,
piety, submissiveness, and domesticity that largely defined the
acceptable boundaries of female behavior from the nineteenth into
the early twentieth centuries. Written primarily by women in
the mid-nineteenth century, the sentimental novel sought to train
readers how to be good Christians; obedient daughters; selfless;
yet, self-reliant; as well as good consumers in a growing American
marketplace. Yet, domestic ideology and the literary
conventions that expressed that ideology often excluded working
women and women of color from the very definition of woman.
We will begin with the essayist Margaret Fuller who argues
precisely this case in her book
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845): “Those who think the
physical circumstances of Woman would make a part in the affairs of
national government unsuitable are by no means those who think it
impossible for negresses to endure field work, even during
pregnancy.” Fuller offers insights into the contradictions of
womanhood in antebellum America; we will carry the questions she
raises into our reading of the sentimental tradition as well as the
residual responses of several women writers of color through the
early twentieth century. The authors we will read include:
Zora Neal Hurston, Anzia Yezierska, Zitkala-Sa, Fanny Fern, Harriet
Wilson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
ENG 3390: Special Topics-American
Literature to 1900 (13902)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Willard Gingerich
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
This course will read intensely the key works of these two, most
influential American poets of the second half of the
nineteenth-century. We will consider them both individually
as innovative and unique voices and in juxtaposition with one
another as orphic and critical explorers of the practices of the
American democratic experiment, of human intimacy, of public vs.
private spheres of identity construction (and disguise), of the
meaning of the new sciences, of the function and applications of
poetry to an age of civil war. We will study the inventions
of poetic form they each introduced and the influence of those
forms. Since there are several recent biographies of both
poets, the relevance of biography to textual analysis will be a
sub-theme of the course
ENG 3450: Modern Drama (11555)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the major playwrights of the modern era who
revolutionized the stage for our time. Consideration will be
given to the innovative works of such significant dramatists as
Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Williams.
ENG 3470: Twentieth-Century
African/American Literature (13901)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the
problem of the Twentieth-Century is the problem of the
color-line.” Beginning with Du Bois’s prophetic claim, this
introductory course will explore how African American fiction,
drama, poetry, and essays have responded to and influenced issues
of race and racism, nationalism and assimilation, and racial and
gendered identity. The course will present an overview of
Twentieth-Century African American literary history, concentrating
especially on the oral tradition (particularly music) and its
impact on literary expression, from the Harlem Renaissance until
the present. Readings will include Zora Neale Hurston, Their
Eyes Were Watching God; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Toni
Morrison, Song of Solomon; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin on the Sun;
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman; and August Wilson,
Fences.
ENG 3520: Modern World Literature
(13894)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
This course will center on an examination of the development of
“humanism” and “the human” as terms in literary and cultural
history. We first will read literary texts from the Early
Modern period (by Erasmus, Thomas More, and Rabelais), when the
term “humanism” was first used to describe an attitude toward
knowledge and study; we will then jump ahead to the nineteenth
century, when the “human sciences” (psychology, naturals science,
sociology and eventually anthropology were “invented”), a
development in intellectual history that makes the “human” a highly
contested category; and then we move to the early twentieth
century, studying literary writers (Kafka, Mann, Borges, and
Wallace Stevens) whose texts reflect the precarious situation of
the human being.
ENG 3690: Special Topics in Cultural
Studies (13895)
MWF 2:30-3:25 p.m.
Dr. Michael Pettinger
The World According to Dante and Boccaccio
Italy in the Fourteenth-Century saw the beginning of the end of the
Medieval. A universe centered on God and legible as his book
gave way before the onslaught of religious scandal, political
turmoil and catastrophic plague. What replaced it was a less
certain world, but one that was more joyful and humane, focused on
the individual and his relationship to those around him.
Moderns often sum up this simple division in the figures of two
extraordinary writers: Dante Alighieri, who imagined a soul’s
pilgrimage to God in the Divine Comedy, and Giovanni Boccaccio, who
describes a sort of earthly paradise of narrative pleasure in his
Decameron. But Dante and Boccaccio resist any easy effort to
use them as spokespersons for their respective generations
precisely because their visions were eccentric even in their own
time. It is the process by which they took the materials that
already existed in their culture to construct visions of the
universe that, initially considered outrageous, would eventually
become canonical, that is the real subject of this course
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
(13897)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Adeena Karasick
Focusing on a wide range of poetic writing strategies, this course
will aim to both workshop poems and explore a variety of
contemporary experimental procedures and poetic praxes. With
particular attention to the construction of genre, form, analysis
and revision, we will track through some of the most significant
postmodern texts of poetic thinking, and ground them within a
historical-cultural framework. In addition, this course will
also provide students with continual information on upcoming
readings, performances, open mics, slams and other poetry-related
events in the city.
ENG 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction
(12216)
W. 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Prof. Thomas Philipose
This fiction writing workshop will focus on your writing and your
thoughts. We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques
of others to help us become careful readers and diligent
writers. An experimental and non-traditional approach will be
encouraged to help elicit fresh, unique work that reflects the
individual writers in our workshop. The majority of our
classwork will entail reading and discussing your stories. We
will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of
what your voice/style can be.
ENG 4993: Seminar in Special Author(s)
(13898)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Separate Spheres? Gender and the Making of American
Literature
The identification of men with the public sphere and women with the
private sphere posed an artificial divide on American culture in
the nineteenth century: polarizing men and women, male spaces and
female spaces, romantic literature and domestic literature.
Nina Baym famously described this separation of the literary
landscape as the “melodrama of beset manhood”: the hypothesis that
American literature dramatized by definition man’s escape from the
feminine sphere of sentiment and intimacy. Together we will
complicate this framework. We will examine male and female
writers in the U.S. who command us to rethink the boundaries of
“separate spheres.”
ENG 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres
(13899)
MWF 9:05-10:00 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
New York Writers
The primary work of this seminar will be a close reading of six
prose writers writing specifically about New York at periods of its
history from colonial British town to the postcolonial
present. Tentatively, these six will be Washington
Irving (A History of New-York, 1809); Philip Hone (Diary,
1828-1851); Edgar Allan Poe (The Doings of Gotham, 1844); Edith
Wharton (The Age of Innocence, 1920); John Dos Passos (Manhattan
Transfer, 1925); and Paul Auster (New York Trilogy,
1985-1986). Our group interest will be in the role that place
has in these authors and whether, indeed, distinctive place remains
a concern for contemporary writers concerned with art.
Students enrolled in the seminar will work individually on the
role of New York as place as treated in a writer not being read by
the seminar. The instructor will consult with each member of
the seminar to assist in choosing an author and to monitor the
progress of research essays that will be presented to the entire
seminar at the conclusion of the semester.
Staten Island Campus
ENG 1100C: Literature In Global
Context
Dr. Diane Cady
MWF 10:10-11:05
In this course we will read texts from indigenous African,
Caribbean, Asian and South American writers that will invite us to
reevaluate western European constructions of their countries and
cultures. ENG 1000C is a prerequisite.
ENG 2100: Literature And
Culture
This course may be taken by non-majors for St. John’s College Core
credit and for majors as an elective. The course addresses
specific topics that place literature in the historical context of
its culture.
HONORS 2120: American Ethnic
Literature
Dr. Isabella Winkler
MWF 12:20-1:15
This course will explore racial, ethnic and other minority
literature that shapes a minority American literary
tradition. We will examine the “minority concept” as a power
relationship with dominant American culture, modulated by
historical, social and cultural influences. To this end, we
will explore representations of ethnicity gender and other
differences that register the minority dilemma of assimilation or
resistance to the mainstream culture.
ENG 2300: Intro To Literary Criticism And
Theory
Dr. Diane Cady
MWF 9:05-10:00
This course offers an introduction to contemporary literary theory,
beginning with structuralism and new criticism and ending with
gender and cultural studies. We will also discuss the
importance of literary theory to English studies and how to best
use it in our own work.
ENG 3130: Shakespeare: The Elizabethan
Plays
Dr. Diane Cady
MWF 1:25-2:20
In this course we will read some of Shakespeare’s earlier works in
their historical and social contexts. Texts will include the
Rape of Lucrece, The Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus, among
others.
ENG 3200: Intro To 17th And 18th Century
Literature
Dr. Melissa MowryTR 10:45-12:10
This course surveys the major themes and genres of the period
1660-1790 through writers like Dryden, Pope, Swift, Haywood and
Behn.
ENG 3430: Modern Poetry
Dr. Stephen Miller
TR 1:30-2:55
We will explore the generative and content, context, and form
producing aspects of modern poets like Eliot, Pound, Williams, and
Stein in relation to contemporary poets such as Bernstein and
Duhamel.
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
Dr. Stephen Miller
TR 10:45-12:10
We will use models such as Whitman, Appolanaire, Stevens, and
Mullen to write experimental poetry.
ENG 3570: Women and
Literature
Dr. Amy King
TR 9:10-10:35
A select survey from the range of British and American women
writers of the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth
centuries. We will consider these texts through the lenses of
several organizing categories, including: motherhood, reproduction,
and family; with and the woman writer; narratives of female
maturation; the problematic of the female artist and
intellectual. Authors to be chosen from among the following
authors of classic novels, children’s literature, and a non-fiction
prose: Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary
Shelley, Louisa Mae Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Frances Hodgson
Burnett, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Virginia Woolf.
ENG 4991: Seminar In British Literature:
“Out Of Work”
Dr. Melissa Mowry
TR 1:30-2:55
In this course we will examine the conventional wisdom that
starting in the 18th century women were isolated from public life
in the home. Among the questions we will seek to answer is,
“How did the late 17th century begin to imagine women “out of
work”? What were the new fictions that began to surround the
new lady of leisure as well as her laboring counterpart? We
will explore these questions through the work of writer like Defoe,
Swift, Pope and many others.