Queens Campus
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(74036)
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
questions about the nature of the “author,” “literature,” and the
“English department.” The course will then turn to several
short works of prose, poetry, and drama that introduce students to
issues of genre, literary history, and basic theories of literary
interpretation. The course will offer practical training in
proposing, researching, and drafting papers for English
courses.
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(74048)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
“So You Want to be an English Major”
Writing summaries, analyses, arguments abstracts, and proposals;
conducting online, library, and ethnographic research; exploring
modes of reading literature, nonfiction, theory, cultural studies,
visual studies; investigating the profession, pedagogical
approaches, conferences, journals, the job market: all of this and
more.
ENG 2200: Introduction to English Studies
(74050)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
How do we prepare for the English major? We learn to read
closely, searching both for apparent and for less obvious meanings,
and we write about our insights. In this course, we will
examine the three p’s of genre – poetry, plays and prose fiction,
learning how to analyze texts like the “experts.” In
addition, we will expand our awareness of culture and gender and
their literary representations. Class assignments include several
short papers and one longer essay. We will develop valuable
methods for incorporating critical articles into the research
paper, whether the source is on-line or in the library. There
is a strong possibility that this class will change the way you
read, write, and even think!
ENG 2300 Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (74055)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course is designed as an introduction to the history of
literary criticism, with particular emphasis on contemporary
theories of literary interpretation (Psychoanalysis, Gender Theory,
New Historicism, Post Colonialism, and Cultural Studies).
ENG 2300: Introduction to Literary
Criticism & Theory (74058)
MWF 11:15-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
This course introduces students to major theoretical approaches to
literature. Besides the discussion of theoretical and
literary texts, we will work on individual and group projects to
analyze and apply theoretical ideas and issues about
literature.
ENG 3100: Medieval English Literature
(74040)
MWF 2:30-3:25 p.m.
Dr. Margaret Kim
Before novels and short stories, medieval readers and writers lived
in a literary world where they had access to diverse kinds of
writings and discussions that touched on poetic, fantastic, social,
political, religious, as well as personal issues. This course
introduces you to such a world before modern literature.
Readings will be on many different genres, ranging from the epic
and romance with heavy elements of fantasy in them, such as the
Tain, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Morte
D’Arthur, to visionary social and religious writings such as Piers
Plowman and Revelations of Divine Love, and Margery Kempe’s
religious personal testament.
ENG 3130: Shakespeare: Elizabethan Plays
(74049)
TR 9:10-10:35 a.m.
Dr. Steven Mentz
Drama and Shipwreck
This course traces Shakespeare’s development by choosing six plays
spread across his two decades as an active playwright. We’ll
start by pairing one of his earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors
(1592-4), with perhaps the last play written solely by him, The
Tempest (1611). These two plays are unusual in that they are
his only plays that obey the classical unities of time and place:
each lasts one afternoon and takes place in one location.
Each also revolves around the narrative device of shipwreck, which
Shakespeare drew from classical literature, Biblical stories,
sermons, and contemporary accounts of maritime exploration and
trade. Building from this pairing, the course traces the
extensive use Shakespeare made of the topos of shipwreck
throughout his career. This plot device was one of several to
which Shakespeare returned repeatedly, so that comparative readings
of the shipwreck plays can create a fuller sense of his literary
and theatrical project. Shipwreck functions as a lens through
which the plays focus on different models of human agency and
control, different notions of the theatrical process, and different
ideas of historical and literary continuity. We’ll read six
plays in which Shakespeare uses the shipwreck motif: The Comedy of
Errors, Twelfth Night, Othello, Pericles, The Tempest, and
Hamlet.
ENG 3220: The Eighteenth-Century English
Novel (74043)
MWF 1:25-2:20 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. We will examine some precursors to the
novel—Protestant Christian allegory and scandalous romance
specifically—and then look to those works through which we can
observe the gradual solidification of the genre. Among the
writers we’ll study are: Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding,
Sterne, 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, three 4-5 page papers, and a final
exam. The average reading assignment for each class meeting
will be 60-80 pages.
ENG 3260: British Women Writers of the
Nineteenth Century (74051)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Dr. Joanne Neff
Major Nineteenth Century British women writers have produced many
bizarre, sensational, or downright Gothic texts. The authors
generally represent innocent females as victims of violence or
corrupt oppression, although once in a while, the woman character
herself dominates – or seems to. Together, the texts raise
questions about sanity, social class, marriage, sexuality in
several varieties, and the attainability of true love. We
will study Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, Shelley’s
Matilda, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights, Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,
and Rossetti’s Goblin Market, plus a smattering of Nightingale,
Gaskell, and Barrett Browning. Critical readings will help us
expand our understanding of Gothic conventions. We will
derive a picture of suffering nineteenth-century British women and
examine why the writer repeatedly depicts them as under siege.
ENG 3310: Antebellum American Literature
(74041)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Dr. Granville Ganter
This course will be a survey of the literature of the antebellum
period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller,
Whitman, Dickinson, Douglass, Stowe, Hawthorne, Poe, and
Melville. Although this is by no means an exhaustive list of
the figures who wrote in the very exciting period between
1836-1860, it will allow us to sample some of the principal texts
of the Transcendental movement, and the discourse on slavery.
Almost all of the texts on the syllabus reflect an interest in the
definition of an American national consciousness, and this course
will explore different attitudes towards emergent ideals of the
nation.
ENG 3390: Special Topics-American
Literature to 1900 (74052)
TR 4:40-6:05 p.m.
Dr. Willard Gingerich
Native American Literatures of North America
This course will survey the very extensive and diverse bodies of
traditional Native American literatures from Guatemala to Alaska,
the largest and richest collection of oral literatures in the
world. We will study the process of composition and
transmission by which all oral literatures generate and sustain
themselves (and from which “poetic” discourse itself historically
originates). We will read, view and discuss transcribed (and
videotaped) texts and performances of pre-Columbian, colonial and
contemporary narratives, songs, ritual chant and speeches from
Maya, Nahuatl (Aztec), Iroquois, Lakota (Sioux), Navajo, Apache,
Chinook, Nez Perce, Pueblo (Hopi, Zuni, Acoma), Ojibwe and Delaware
traditions, among others. Coyote tales, ritual speech, love
songs, hunting songs, shamanic practice and poetry. We will
conclude with a discussion of the continuing influence of these
literatures in contemporary American writing.
ENG 3430: Modern Poetry
(74042)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
Modernism in the arts is characterized by radical experimentation
in technique and form, and the poets of the period are no
exception. There is a world weariness at the end of the
nineteenth-century that marked the verse and posture of those we
call the Decadents or the Aesthetes, and no one expressed that
sense or posture better than W.B. Yeats in his early poems.
It seemed that everything had already been done that could be done,
and that the human spirit had become aged and withered.
Modernism in a sense begins with a sense of belatedness, of having
come onto the stage of human history late and as things were
winding down. We will begin with the poems of “the early
Yeats,” and then watch how he, and later how Ezra Pound, T.S.
Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, responded to the poetry of the late
Victorian period with a verse that is harder, more roughened, more
difficult, and more energetic. The poets in question each
engage in a complex poetic project intended to provide for the
twentieth-century a form and a theme capable of renewing the
culture, awakening it from the deadening effects of material
progress and the resultant degrading of human being.
ENG 3460: Contemporary Drama
(74046)
TR 3:05-4:30 p.m.
Dr. Angela BelliAn exploration of works by major dramatists in
the contemporary theater. The focus is on those playwrights
who have so transformed the stage as to enable it to transmit the
culture of our time. Playwrights such as Samuel Beckett,
Eugene Ionesco, John Osborne, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard will be
studied. Dramatists whose works are currently being produced
on Broadway will be highlighted. Significant movements of the
time such as the Theater of the Absurd will receive particular
attention.
ENG 3500 (CLS 3500): Classical Literature
(74642)
MWF 12:20-1:15 p.m.
Dr. Bernard Cassidy
A complete understanding of the origins of Western literature
includes understanding its debt to the writers of Greece and
Rome. Students in this course will study the major writers of
the Ancient Greek and Roman World, from Homer to St.
Augustine. We will examine the major types of literature,
beginning with epic, and including didactic and lyric poetry,
drama, history and philosophy.
ENG 3510: Medieval & Renaissance
European Literature (74057)
MWF 9:05-10:00 a.m.
Dr. Michael Pettinger
Vernacular: the rise of modern languages in medieval Europe
Which is better: to write in the language of learned scholars, or
to sound like the common people of the street? This is a
problem St. John’s students face every day. It is also a
problem faced by medieval writers. This course looks at the
way those writers dealt with those issues, starting with
Augustine’s advice to preachers in De Doctrina Christiana and
moving through English and French writers from the Anglo-Saxon
period to the age of Chaucer. Readings will include Old
English poetry, the Lais of Marie de France, bawdy French fabliaux,
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and finish with that strange
masterpiece of Middle English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
ENG 3720: Introduction to Creative Writing
(74056)
W. 3:35-6:20 p.m.
Prof. Thomas 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 playwrighting. 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 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.
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
(74047)
TR 1:30-2:55 p.m.
Prof. Lee Ann Brown
This Poetry Writing workshop will cover both traditional and new,
“experimenta;” forms for poetic practice, as well as responses to
others’ poetry both read and listened to in performance.
Written work will include daily notebook entries, specific poetic
assignments, critical response papers and in-class
presentations. Grades will be based on portfolio manuscripts
presented throughout the semester as well as participation in
collective workshopping, and attendance at on and off campus
events. No prior poetry experience necessary but be prepared
for an intensive writing and reading experience.
ENG 3740: Creative Writing: Fiction
(74044)
MWF 10:10-11:05 a.m.
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
Intensive writing workshop on fiction and fiction theory.
ENG 4991: Seminar in British Literature
(74038)
MWF 9:05-10:00 a.m.
Dr. Robert Forman
(Crusaders, Contemplatives, and Mystics)
Paradoxical as it seems, the matrix that ties crusaders,
contemplatives, and mystics is pilgrimage. The journey,
either literal or intellectual, has Jerusalem as its destination,
the golden city on the hill. We will begin by comparing
medieval pilgrimage, crusade, and static contemplation as
essentially similar aspects of religious experience.
The seminar will then explore both fictive and literal journeys,
as undertaken by British medieval writers. We will read the
anchoress Julian of Norwich and unhappy wife and brew-mistress
Margery Kempe. They were contemporaries, acquaintances, both
women, both mystics, and both very different. Then, we
will compare these English women mystics with the experiences of
the Spanish nun Egeria, the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, and
St. Brigitta of Sweden.
British and Norman crusader journals and accounts will follow,
specifically those of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Tyre,
as well as a translation of extracts from Itinerarium Peregrinorum
et Gesta Regis Ricardi, the account of King Richard the
Lionhearted.
Last of all, we will consider how these historical experiences
were transformed fictively in the Song of Roland, the Grail section
of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and ultimately parodied by
Miguel de Cervantes in his Don Quixote.
ENG 4992: Seminar in American Literature
(74039)
TR 10:45-12:10 p.m.
Dr. John Lowney
This seminar focuses on American literature and culture of the
1930s, a decade of extraordinary social, political, and cultural
change. The socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression and
the rise of fascism challenged writers to radically rethink their
purpose and audience. While the Depression tends to evoke
mythic images of social suffering and revolutionary struggle, the
innovative arts of the 1930s have also had a lasting impact on
American culture. Emphasizing the interaction of American
modernism with mass culture in the 1930s, this course examines the
relationship of literature to film, popular music, and the visual
arts. The approach will be exploratory and interdisciplinary,
open to various interests in 1930s American culture. Readings
will
include fiction by Mike Gold, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston,
Tess Slesinger, and Nathanael West; poetry by Sterling Brown,
Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston
Hughes; and documentary writing by James Agee and Walker Evans.
Staten Island Campus
Undergraduate Courses
ENG 2100: Literature And
Culture
MWF 11:15-12:10
TR 10:45-12:10
An interdisciplinary course focused on topics of the instructors’
choosing, such as film, autobiography, gender roles, and ethnic
identity. A creative approach to teaching and learning
literature is intended to let the class address larger cultural
issues.
ENG 2200: Intro To English
Studies
MWF 12:20-1:15
This class teaches the fundamentals of literary scholarship and
critical thinking through engaging examples and assignments.
A selective survey of world literature and independent research
projects help students gain confidence and skills for thinking on
their own. Required for English majors.
ENG 2300: Intro To Literary
Criticism And Theory
Dr. Melissa Mowry
TR 1:30-2:55
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 3140: Shakespeare: The Jacobean
Plays
TR 9:10-10:35
A close study of approximately seven plays representative of the
genres of tragedy, problem comedy and romance and expressive of
Shakespeare’s mature vision.
ENG 3240: Romantic Literature
Dr. Amy King
MWF 1:25-2:20
A broad survey of the literature of the Romantic era in Britain, a
period often understood in English literary history as bounded by
the French revolution in 1789 and the passage of the Reform Act in
1832. This is the moment that invents the idea of
“literature,” and the way we have come to use it. The
readings encompass selections from both the poetry and the fiction
of the Romantic era, which will allow us to range from the lyric
poems of John Keats to Mary Shelley’s gothic novel
Frankenstein. Readings from the poetry of Wadsworth, Keats,
Coleridge, Shelley, Byron; novels may include those by Austen,
Radcliffe, Inchbald, Shelley. We will be considering such
topics as nature and the imagination in a time marked by the
industrial revolution; the experience of history in a time of
extraordinary change; the role of art and the artist in the new
political world forged by the French revolution; the gothic novel
and the uses of the supernatural; gender and
“sensibility.”
ENG 3350: American Women Writers To
1900
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
MWF 11:15-12:10
Women writers have always been at the forefront of American
literary history, defining what our most popular stories and themes
are and even defining what fiction is. From the 18th to the
19th century, women in fact had a monopoly on America’s best seller
lists and seemed to understand more than men the special nature and
expectations of reading. This expertise, however, also
emboldened women writers to speak and act politically and to
propose alternatives to social conventions and gender roles.
By the end of the 19th century, women writers thus were key players
in the emergence of modern feminism. This tour of American’s
women writers will include Mary Rowlandson, Lydia Maria Child,
Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe; we will be reading sentimental novels, Indian captivity
narratives, inter-racial love stories, and feminist utopian
fiction.
ENG 3400: Modernist
Literature
Prof. Isabella Winkler
MWF 12:20-1:15
This course will explore the aesthetic, philosophical, political
and literary implications of modernism by studying representative
literature, film and cultural criticism. We will pay special
attention to the way technology, media and sexuality inform the
blurry boundary between modernism and postmodernism. Texts
include modern readings by Woolf, Flaubert, Camus, Freud, Benjamin,
as well as contemporary writings by Don Delillo, Kurt Vonnegut,
Jonathan Crary and Jean Baudrillard.
ENG 3540: Irish Literature
Prof. Gregg Downing
TR 1:30-2:55
Ireland, at the edge of Europe, has always played a central role in
the history of European culture and literature, and especially in
the English-language literature of its nearest neighbor and
colonizer. Ireland’s strong Catholic traditions are also
important, particularly at a Catholic university. In this
course we will start with a brief glance at the earliest literature
of ancient and medieval Ireland, and then will spend most of our
time on important Irish contributions to English-language
literature during the several centuries, from Swift to Seamus
Heaney, the Irish poet who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for
Literature.
ENG 3720: Intro To Creative
Writing
Prof. Laura Maffei
MWF 9:05-10:00
Learn to love language like you never have before. Express
yourself like you never have before. This course will
introduce you to the joys of reading and writing poetry. You
will learn about the elements of different kinds of poetry, old and
new, and more importantly, you will hear, feel, and taste poetry in
the vibrant way it should be experienced. The workshop-style
format of this course will be friendly and encouraging. By
the end of the semester, who knows what may come out of your
pen?
ENG 3730: Poetry Workshop
Dr. Stephen Paul MillerTR 10:45-12:10
We will use models such as Whitman, Appolanaire, Stevens, and
Mullen to write experimental poetry.
ENG 4991: Seminar In British
Literature:
TR 10:45-12:10
Research problems in literature and criticism. Students may
take more than one seminar. Limited to juniors and
seniors.
ENG 4992: Seminar In American
Literature--The Problem Of Thomas Jefferson
Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
MWF 10:10-11:05
How could the author of the Declaration of Independence and of the
phrase “all men are created equal” not just hold slaves but sell
them and profit by them? This course addresses one of the
most persistent and fascinating problems in the history of American
letters. We will be reading Jefferson’s many letters and
proposals and delving into his biography but we will also be
recreating the political and intellectual dialogue of the late 18th
and early 19th century that made his hypocrisy to a large extent
representative of attitudes toward race, culture, and
democracy. An added feature of the class will be a
genealogical inquiry into Jefferson’s black “family,” i.e., the
children he fathered with his slave Sally Hemmings.
Evening Courses
ENG 3710: Creative Writing
T 6:50-9:50
ENG 3490: Special Topics-20th Century
Literature
W 6:50-9:50
ENG 3560: American Ethnic
Literatures
R 6:50-9:50