Queens Summer English Course
Offerings
Summer Session
I
June 2, 2009-July 3, 2009
E 1040: Writing for Business (30048)
MTWR: 8:30-10:30 a.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
While we practice some of the more routine kinds of writing
relevant to “business” environments (for example, memos, minutes,
reports, correspondence, email exchanges), in this course we will
focus on the fundamentals of all good writing: clarity, concision,
organization, and rhetorical power. We will have some
readings about business to which we will respond, both in class
discussion and in writing. You should leave this class with a
better sense of what it means to present complex material clearly
to various kinds of audiences.
E. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (30383)
Online
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Spend five weeks reading award winning contemporary fiction from
around the globe as part of an online “virtual community.”
Class discussions will be asynchronic: participate in the virtual
community according to your own schedule. Readings will include:
Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, Life of Pi by Yann Martel,
and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. For more information
call x5608 or email Dr. Jennifer Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
E. 2200: Introduction to English Studies (30261)
MTWR 10:40-12:40 p.m.
“Memory, Selfhood, and Representation”
Dr. Amy King
How do we discuss and write about literature? This course
will discuss what constitutes literary argument and evidence in the
academic discipline of English, and practice those skills in
classroom discussion and in writing. Since this course serves as
part of the English department’s requirements for future work in
literary studies, the primary objective of this course is to
prepare you for this work. Emphasis will be placed on
learning traditional close-reading skills as well as thinking in
interdisciplinary ways about literature. How to read and analyze
texts, some of which may be culturally and historically distant
from us, will be a primary concern, as will grasping particular
ways of reading the primary genres of the discipline— poetry,
drama, narrative fiction—as well as newer texts from cultural
studies, including film and media sites. The course’s subtitle,
“Memory, Selfhood, and Representation,” gestures to a set of ideas
around which the texts of this course revolve. Some questions we
will consider: what is the relation of recollection to individual
identity? How are memories of traumatic or difficult events
processed or distorted? What are the ethics, and
representational problems, of collective remembrance? To what
extent is memory a guide to the truth of past events? We will
be reading a variety of texts (primarily but not exclusively
literary) that center on the dynamics of human memory. We
will be using memory as our guiding subject, in both its personal
and collective dimensions as represented primarily but not
exclusively by literature.
E. 3550: Short Fiction (30906)
MTWR 10:40-12:40 p.m.
Dr. Stephen Sicari
I have found that reading short fiction is an ideal summer course:
we have a little amount of time to read, so we can reader shorter,
more focused, and extraordinarily rewarding works in the five-week
session. Sometimes the short story offers a better way into
the study of prose fiction than does the novel: in short fiction
the writer can experiment with theme and form more freely and often
more wildly than he or she might in a genre that requires intricate
plotting and extensive character. In the short story the
writer can be more self-conscious about the craft of writing and
bolder in reflecting on the nature of fiction as part of the
fiction itself. In this course we will read short fiction by
some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: James Joyce,
Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth Barth, and Italo
Calvino.
E. 4994: Seminar in Themes/Genres (30311)
Gender and American Culture
Online
Dr. Jennifer Travis
Together we’ll read short works by major American authors that seek
to trouble conventional notions of masculinity and
femininity. Our writers will include: Hannah Foster,
Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Herman
Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Class discussions will be
asynchronic: participate in the virtual community according to your
own schedule. For more information call x5608 or email Dr.
Jennifer Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu.
Summer Session II
July 7, 2009-August 10, 2009
E. 1040: Writing for Business (30071)
Online
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This online course will familiarize students with the styles and
forms for writing in professional settings. We will draft and
revise documents traditionally associated with business
environments, including resumes, letters, and proposals; and we
also will investigate the conventions of communications in the
professional world. Why is it useful to consider “business writing”
as a genre distinct from expository or creative writing? What
special methods and techniques does it require? Assignments will
encourage students both to refine their professional writing skills
and to consider the particular kinds of knowledge and communication
that are required by the technological and global nature of
contemporary business practices. Class discussions and assignments
will be submitted online; evaluation will be based on the quality
of contributions to our collective conversation as well as on the
final drafts of all writing assignments.
E. 1100C: Literature in a Global Context (30908)
Online
Dr. Granville Ganter
This will be a fully online course, allowing students to
routinely post comments on the reading to fit their own schedules.
Readings will be short, dynamic, and engaging: Mary Rowlandson’s
captivity among the Wampanoag Indians during King Philip’s War; the
slave narrative of Frederick Douglass; Maxine Hong Kingston’s
wickedly pointed story of growing up Chinese in San Francisco; and
Joseph’s Conrad’s criticism of colonialism in Africa, Heart of
Darkness. Final project will be a paper where students explain the
idea that has most interested or perplexed them in the course.
Where appropriate, students will include quotations from online
class discussions and outside sources in their papers.
E. 2300: Introduction to Literary Criticism & Theory
(30530)
Dr. Granville Ganter
10:40-12:40 p.m.
The principal reason to take this course is to develop an awareness
that there are a variety of compelling ways to understand the
relation of the “text” (art, or literature) to the “world out
there.” Does art describe the actual world, or is it a complete
fantasy? We honestly do not always know. Magritte’s famous
modernist claim, “this is not a pipe,” under a picture of a pipe
may mean simply that the world of representation is not identical
to the world. A picture is a picture. Hence, a novel about a
sinking ship may affect people differently than witnessing a real
sinking ship. This course will emphasize 20th century responses to
the divide between signs and the world, but most twentieth-century
thinking has emphasized the disjunction between signs and the
world, not continuity. Units of course readings will include
Saussure and linguistics; Russian Formalism and Bakhtin; New
Criticism and poetry; psychoanalysis; structuralism and
post-structuralism; Marxism and ideology; Baudrillard and
virtuality & hypertexts; sex/gender theories; Bourdieu on class
and taste. In addition to class readings, students will be
asked to choose one theorist to research in depth over the entire
semester.
E. 3740: Fiction Writing Workshop (30907)
Online
Prof. Gabriel Brownstein
This is a fiction 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 stories. They will read and critique each
other’s fiction, and at the end of the course 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—and these
writers’ works will help us imagine and discuss our own.
Staten Island Summer English Course
Offerings
Summer Session I
ENG 2100
LITERATURE AND CULTURE:
“The American West”
Mixed Mode Course
Instructor: Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
MT 8:30-10:30; WR Online
We all know the west was won, but how was it “invented” as a
frontier of unlimited possibility and national progress? The
course makes a selection of fiction, non-fiction, and film about
the west in an effort
to understand why we on the east coast need it so much.
ENG 3470
TWENTIETH/TWENTY FIRST CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE:
“Black Autobiography from Malcolm X to Obama”
Mixed Mode Course
Instructor: Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
MT 10:40-12:40; WR Online
With Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father as its centerpiece, this
course assesses the impact that autobiographical writing has had on
African-American culture and United States history of the twentieth
and
twenty first century. Taking as their cue the nineteenth century
tradition of slave liberation narratives, this new generation of
autobiography has helped to form our conceptions of human identity
and personal development amid social forces and cultural
influences. As Obama’s case demonstrates, the process of writing
one’s own story also helped to bring a new kind of American leader
into the world. Other authors studied include Malcolm X and Maya
Angela as well as James Weldon Johnson, author of the novel
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man.
ENG 4994
SEMINAR IN THEMES AND GENRES:
“Mixed Race Romances”
Mixed Mode Course
Instructor: Dr. Robert Fanuzzi
MT 12:50-2:50; WR Online
From nearly the moment Columbus encountered the natives of America
to the election of 2008, the drama of race mixing of different
races has been formative for many of our ideas of progress,
justice, and reconciliation. And yet the prospect of race mixing
has also inspired panic and resistance, and a word, “miscegenation”
that literally means “mistaken” or deformed generation. Where did
these narratives come from and how do they affect our view of mixed
race people today? This course surveys a selection of
literature about romances between colonists and natives, Europeans
and Indians, masters and slaves, and white Americans and
African-Americans.
Summer Session II
ENG 1100C Core Literature in Global Context
Instructor: TBA
M-R 8:30-10:30