Spring 2008

Queens Campus

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (14997)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This course introduces the interpretive reading and writing practices that constitute the English major.  Through the reading, interpretation, and criticism of mostly modern and contemporary prose fiction, poetry, drama, and literary nonfiction, it will foster an understanding of the methodologies of literary and cultural studies.  While the course will introduce important theoretical problems and terms, it will emphasize the practical experience of writing within the English major, from the composition of brief essays to the development of a final research paper.  Writing assignments will include informal creative exercises as well as formal papers.           

E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (15332)
TR 7:35-9:00 a.m.
T/B/A
A foundation course introducing English majors and minors to the disciplinary practices of the English major.  Required of all majors and minors in their sophomore or junior years.
 
E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m. (12169)
TR 3:05-4:40 p.m. (14994)
Dr. Gregory Maertz
An immersion in the history of criticism and theory from classical antiquity to the early twenty-first century.  Through discussion and analysis of assigned texts, we will examine fundamental antagonisms in Western thought--between art and life, freedom of expression and political control, tradition and originality, classic and romantic, the pursuit of pleasure and didacticism, canonical elitism and the recovery of marginalized texts.

E. 3000: Medieval Romance (14998)
MW 3:35-5:00 p.m.
Prof. Susan Nakley
Medieval romance is known for its fascinations with magic, monsters, ill-fated love, vengeance and pagans of motley stripes.  These fascinations secure romance’s place among the most entertaining literature that the English literary tradition has to offer.  In addition, romance is arguably the most sophisticated narrative form of all medieval literature.  Yet, it defies strict generic categorization and simultaneously has come to epitomize the entire Middle Ages, a long and dynamic historical moment. This course will consider the possibilities and impossibilities of romance as a generic classification. We will consider romance’s entertainment value alongside its political and ideological force, focusing particularly on chivalry, xenophobia and nationhood in the Middle English romance tradition. Ultimately, this course approaches romance as a tradition of re-imagining history by putting reality in touch with fantasy.  Readings will include, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative Morte Arthure, King Horn, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain in English translation, and selections from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.  We will read all Middle English texts in the original, and there will be frequent translation quizzes to help improve your understanding of Middle English. We will supplement out primary readings with frequent critical readings, which will acquaint you with significant philosophical and historical contexts.  Students will be evaluated on one 3-5-page formal paper, a final 6-8-page paper, and several shorter, less formal papers and assignments. Active class participation is required and attendance is necessary for success in this course.

E. 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays – Honors (14996)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
Shakespeare and the Islamic World
Beginning with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s epic drama about the consolidation of Western political unity through a mixture of war and love with an Eastern power, this courses uses Shakespeare’s plays to consider the long-term cultural relationship between the European West and the Islamic Middle East.  Shakespearean plays will include Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Pericles.  We’ll also read some non-Shakespearean plays including Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Robert Greene’s Selimus, and Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk.  We’ll see a new production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Theatre for a New Audience in Manhattan, and (if it appears on time) we’ll also read the upcoming issue of the new British academic journal Shakespeare on the topic of Shakespeare and Islam in spring 2008.  This course is cross-listed with the Honors Program.  All English majors are encouraged to register.  If you have any questions, please contact Steve Mentz at mentzs@stjohns.edu.

E. 3220: The Eighteenth-Century English Novel (14976)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will examine one of the most central developments of eighteenth-century English literary culture: the emergence of the novel as a genre.  Though we take it for granted as a coherent form today, the novel resulted from a process of exploration and experimentation on the part of prose-fiction writers throughout the 1700s. Among the writers we’ll study are Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Austen.  Our discussions will be based both on close textual analysis and on broad historical questions involving gender, social status, and print culture during the period.  Ultimately, we will be concerned with tracing these issues through close attention to formal innovation and narrative technique in the emergent novel. Evaluation will be based on: attendance, frequent reading quizzes, participation, papers totaling 12-15 written pages, and a final exam. Expect 150-200 pages of reading per week.

E. 3240: Romantic Literature (14989)
TR 4:40-6:05 p.m.
Dr. Gregory Maertz
 An introduction to the poetry, drama, prose fiction, and non-fiction prose of the Romantic Period with consideration, also, of aesthetic philosophy and art. Featured authors will include Goethe and Schiller, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworth siblings, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys.

E. 3250: Victorian Literature (15003)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
A detailed critical reading of texts from the central literary genres— especially the novel and poetry, as well as non-fiction prose— of the Victorian age (1838-1901) in Britain.  We will learn to read these texts in context as we explore and define the sort of society out of which these texts arose.  Our own middle-class, economic, mobile, complex and interwoven world, increasingly urbanized and organized, was first described and mapped in this period— hence, perhaps, our moment’s continuing interest in these aesthetic objects.  We will come to an understanding of why the decisions and techniques of writers from the Victorian period such as Charles Dickens or Charlotte Brontë continue t o influence our ideas of what modern society is, and how it can be represented.Ultimately we will explore the ways in which these texts mark the complex inauguration of our own modern consciousness:  this will be our theme, tracked through various texts, various genres, and various geographical sites (London, the suburbs, and the country).  Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gerard Manley Hopkins, EB Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

E. 3310: Antebellum American Literature (14990)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This is a course focusing on a key period in American history which centered on social reform. It is a remarkable literary era because it was propelled by mainstream middle class Americans who were re-evaluating their culture’s longstanding beliefs about God, slavery, women’s rights, education, social welfare, diet, industry, and even sexual conduct. The literature of the period is often associated with the major Transcendentalist authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman) and the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. This course will study these writers in detail, but it will also read them in context with equally important writing about slavery, such as the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

E. 3350: American Women Writers (15005)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
The ideal woman in Nineteenth Century America was submissive to men.  Her position was marginalized; she was expected to be an obedient daughter, wife, or other relative, under the control of a male.  Women writers’ responses to traditional female roles vary from passivity and confusion to cynicism, despair, anger, and defiance.  We will examine various cultural phenomena that affect these women: the Cult of True Womanhood; the woman’s suffrage movement; slavery, emancipation, and black male enfranchisement; industrialization; and the continuing fight for recognition of gender equality within a middle-class male world.  Using many genres – novels, short stories, prose, autobiography, poetry, and film, we will examine women’s representations of their own struggles by focusing on the following authors: Rebecca Harding, Emma Lazarus, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hannah W. Foster, Fanny Fern, Charlotte Gilman, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, and Emily Dickinson.   These people change the dynamics of womanhood so that instead of being victims, women now become questioners and challenge the status quo.  Their writings show that they envision life in varied, complicated, and powerful ways —which, of course, we shall take great pleasure in analyzing this semester.

E. 3450: Modern Drama (14974)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
A study of the major playwrights of the modern era who revolutionized the stage for our age. Each dramatist will be studied with a view to determining each’s individual vision, relation to other works of the time, and success in influencing the dramatists of the 20th and 21st centuries to follow. Consideration will be given to the innovative works of such significant dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.
 
E. 3490: Special Topics in Twentieth Century Literature (15181)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This special topics course will concentrate on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.  The Harlem Renaissance (or New Negro Renaissance) was a remarkably prolific period of African American literature, music, art, and scholarship that followed World War I and lasted into the 1930s.  In this course we will examine the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural movement in relation to both international modernism and African American literary history.  The primary emphasis of the course is on intensive study of important African American writers, with attention to parallel developments in music and the visual arts.  Readings include W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Jean Toomer, Cane; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children; and selected poetry by McKay, Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson.

E. 3500 = CLS 3500, Classical Literature in Translation (15345)
MWF 8:00-8:55 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
This course is an introduction to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.  It is suitable for majors in English, minors in classical studies, as well as for those with interests in the arts and humanities.  It includes selections from Homer, the Greek lyric poets and tragedians was well as the Virgilian transformation of Homeric epic through the Aeneid and Augustinian transformation of the Aeneid in his Confessions.  Our method attempts to demonstrate continuity of tradition with illustrations of its modern and contemporary modifications.

E. 3560: American Ethnic Literatures (15001)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course serves as an introduction to the Asian American literary tradition and its historical and political context. Since one of the hallmarks of the literature is the challenge of its diversity, we will cover a range of texts from various ethnicities and genres—poetry, drama, novels, short stories, autobiography—to explore how these texts pose different issues and themes, all relating to “Asian America.” Some of the authors we will be reading: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sui Sin Far, Carlos Bulosan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Li Young Lee, Janice Mirikitani

E. 3640: Vernacular Literature (15090)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Dohra Ahmad
In this class we will read novels, short stories, poems, and possibly a play written in various forms of non-standard English: slang, creole, patios, pidgin, and others.  In the United States, we are familiar with the vernacular tradition from the works of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner. We will begin the semester by re-examining some of those old standards, and will then move on to literature from the West Indies, Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, and Ireland.  While maintaining close attention to aesthetic matters, we will also consider these works in their particular historical contexts, examining the import of vernacular writing in an era of globalization.  Can we understand vernaculars as stubbornly local phenomena, expressions of transnational hybridity, or both?

E. 3690:  Special Topics in Cultural Studies (15004)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
Beginning with the late 19th century, the theater has been shaped by two intersecting currents—one scientific and one artistic. A scientific, rational view of the world has come to be centered on the human subject. Beginning with the naturalists, playwrights have brought a scientific view into the theater. Emile Zola, most notably, maintained that the drama could explore social realities by applying the scientific method to the study of human nature. By 1905 the new science of microbiology had influenced the cultural sphere, especially in the theater where the tropes of contagion and pathology received new currency and urgency. Simultaneously, a cult of the human body cognizant of its classical and aesthetic perfectibility gave rise to a physical culture movement that marginalized the impaired body. The object of this course is to review the response of modernism as a literary and cultural movement in fashioning a radical rethinking of the body, its boundaries and modes of pathology. The work of playwrights who use nontraditional constructs to bring their novel discourse before the public will be examined. Readings will include Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, Arthur Kopit’s Wings, Margaret Edson’s W;T, and Cheryl West’s Before It Hits Home.

E. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (15002)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Prof. LeeAnn Brown
This is a multi-genre writing workshop and writing lab in which we will practice poetry, flash fiction, playwrighting, memoir, non-fiction.  The course employs models of contemporary work in all genres.  Students will finish the semester with a final project in one of their chosen genres, or with one which incorporates multiple genres.  Readings from primary source texts as well as theory or writing will be included.  This course is intended as an introductory course in creative writing and also as an introduction to the Creative Writing Minor.

E. 3720: Intro to Creative Writing (13398)
W. 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Prof. Tom Philipose
This introductory creative writing workshop will focus on your writing and your thoughts (that means you will be writing a lot).  We will explore the creative aspects of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and playwriting.  We will use texts from various genres/media as guides for discovery of what your writing voice/style can be.  You will be expected to attend public readings and performances (off campus and on your own time).  We will not rely on the thoughts/styles/critiques of others (outside of this workshop) 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 writing (you will read and write in—and outside of—every class every week). 

E. 3740:  Fiction Writing Workshop (15373)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is a workshop for anyone interested in writing stories.  Students will explore their language and their imaginations first in a set of storytelling exercises and then in original short works.  In class students will read and critique each other’s work, and at the end of the semester they will put together a portfolio of their best revised writing.  As we work on our own fiction, we’ll read some great writers—a varied set of readings that will help us consider basic problems and difficulties that face writers of stories and novels.

E. 3760: Writing as Social Action (15087)
Online
Dr. Harry Denny
This online intensive writing course will build from the foundations of English 1000C and other college-level writing and literature courses.  We will use the analysis of historical social movements in the U.S. to push students to further explore and problem-pose their academic writing processes.  Students will survey the rhetoric of colonial & post-revolutionary Americans, slaves, abolitionists, anti-lynching activists, civil rights activists, environmentalists, and other agents for contemporary identity politics.  We will work to understand how and to what effect movements for social change and justice used writing and rhetoric as well as the cumulative history of national identity formation, ideals, and mythology to pursue change for the place and meaning of sustainability, people of color, women, the working poor and other minority identity formations.  After being introduced to a menu of approaches to analysis and applying them to specific common texts, students will develop their own substantive research into the rhetoric of a movement for social, cultural, or political change, ideally one which possesses activist appeal to them. Throughout the semester, students will workshop drafts of essays using Blackboard discussion spaces as well as writing center online tutorials.

E. 3780: Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop (15086)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Prof. LeeAnn Brown
This new course is intended for undergraduates who would like to develop and deepen their poetic practice, and who have already taken English 3730 (Poetry Writing Workshop).  Individual attention in shaping serial or extended works of poetry will be emphasized in context of a continuing exploration of modern poetry and poetics.  Students will be required to write and revise a chapbook-length manuscript or long poem.  Opportunities will be had to organize and attend poetry readings and performances on and off campus, to learn about the current state of print and web publishing, and to create our own publications and performances.  The goal is to allow students to enter the literary arena both on campus and in the larger culture.  Service learning components will be developed, and the place of “poet as citizen” will be examined and enacted.

E. 3810: The History of Silent Film
MWF 2:30-3:25 p.m.
Dr. Scott Combs
This course provides an advanced introduction to the history of the silent film, from its origins in late nineteenth-century visual culture to the emergence of synchronized sound in the late 1920s.  We will not assume that the silent film is merely the nascent or infantile form of the modern sound film we have come to think of as the “norm.”  Rather, we will proceed as though silent pictures constitute a unique art form.  These films demand from us new strategies for viewing and a new intensity of concentration.  We will move chronologically through film history, considering the following topics:  the rise of commercialized leisure in the nineteenth century;  the cinema of attractions;  early narrative film and the industrialization of filmmaking practice;  racial politics in American film of the teens;  Weimar cinema and German Expressionism;  Soviet montage;  French Impressionism, Surrealism, and the avant-garde;  the “international style” of the late twenties;  and the rise of sound in the United States and Europe.  Note that students who are interested in taking this course must agree to attend a mandatory weekly two-hour screening section.  Students may not substitute these screenings with private viewings

E. 4991:  Seminar in British Literature (14995)
MWF 1:25-2:20 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
“The Novel of Everyday Life”
The novel has been described by Hegel as “the prose of the world,” which gestures to the way in which the novel (1816-1925) has been understood as the literary form most adept at representing the experience of everyday life.  The seminar will explore how the novel’s status as the consummate genre of modernity depended upon its ability to express what we might call the “quotidian,” or that which occurs everyday and as such is considered commonplace and unexceptional.  A study of representative nineteenth-century English fiction, with one key foray into the early twentieth century, the common feature of these novels is their interest in capturing that which we generally do not have access to except through the form of fiction: the hidden features of others’ daily life.  We will consider the depiction of everyday and repetitive experiences of life: work (especially career-building), marriage, manners, and usual or recurrent conditions such as shopping, eating, and conversing.  The difficulty of building a narrative around repetitive experience, and the novel’s techniques for representing experience defined by ordinary, even banal, interactions, as well as potential connections between “everydayness” and nineteenth-century expansion of the reading public,  will be recurrent concerns. Individual novels will provide the opportunity to consider such topics as: realism and the “everyday”; the political implications of the depiction of the working-class “everyday.” Finally, we will consider the modernist novel’s narrowed temporal focus, in which the everyday becomes one day, and its preoccupation with presenting the interior of everyday experience.   Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf.

E. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (14999)
Ethnic American Literature: Literary Constructions of Race
M 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course will read from a range of ethnic American literary texts to investigate how difference is conceptualized as “race.” One of the aims of this class will be to reterritorialize American literature by placing “minority” texts in conversation with the canonical tradition. Although we will read seminal texts on theories of racial formation, we have not begun to truly theorize race. This class will make an attempt to do so by examining how the literary texts use highly stylized tropes, figures and devices to theorize and imagine difference. Weaving together literary stagings of race and theories of race, we will think about “race” as a signifier that takes on meaning differentially, specific to and constructed for a particular context.