Geoffrey D. Klock
Professor
English
EMAIL: gklock@bmcc.cuny.edu
Office: N-751M
Office Hours: On sabbatical until Fall 2024
Phone: +1 (212) 776-6502
Geoff Klock has a doctorate from Oxford and is an award-winning tenured full professor at BMCC where he has been teaching since 2008. He argues knowing the canon is empowering because it teaches that much of the way the broken world works is not natural but built by individuals; they did that with (often garbage) ideas, ideas are real, and new ones (yours!) could imagine the world in a different way. The central work of his life involves using a kind of famous-elite-artist-thinker toolbox to navigate mass culture and life, paying special attention to the bizarre often psychosexual intertwining of imagination and reality, and the way art responds to earlier art. Eight students have taken four of his classes in a row, essentially minoring in Geoff Klock studies. He sports an extensive and aggressive purse and shoe collection, has a Jean Grey tattoo, knows how to cook, and does not say bad things about students, ever. If you attend class, get assignments in on time, don’t plagiarize, and do multiple drafts based on his advice, you can have whatever grade you want; there are no textbooks to buy. To me, my X-Men.
Expertise
Plato, Shakespeare, Kafka, Proust, David Lynch, and the X-Men
Degrees
D.Phil., Oxford University, English, 2007
MA, NYU, English, 2000
BA, NYU, English and Philosophy, 2000
Courses Taught
- English Composition is the standard freshman writing course. The course introduces students to academic writing. By its conclusion, students will be ready for English 201 and for the writing they will be asked to do in advanced courses across the curriculum. Students completing ENG 101 will have mastered the fundamentals of college-level reading and writing, including developing a thesis-driven response to the writing of others and following the basic conventions of citation and documentation. They will have practiced what Mike Rose calls the "habits of mind" necessary for success in college and in the larger world: summarizing, classifying, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Students will be introduced to basic research methods and MLA documentation and complete a research project. Students are required to take a departmental final exam that requires the composition of a 500 word, thesis-driven essay in conversation with two designated texts.
Prerequisite: Pass the CAT-R and CAT-W or Accuplacer tests
Course Syllabus - This is a course that builds upon skills introduced in English 101. In this course, literature is the field for the development of critical reading, critical thinking, independent research, and writing skills. Students are introduced to literary criticisms and acquire basic knowledge necessary for the analysis of texts (including literary terms and some literary theory); they gain proficiency in library and internet research; and they hone their skills as readers and writers. Assignments move from close readings of literary texts in a variety of genres to analyses that introduce literary terms and broader contexts, culminating in an independent, documented, thesis-driven research paper. By the conclusion of English 201, students will be prepared for the analytical and research-based writing required in upper-level courses across the curriculum; they will also be prepared for advanced courses in literature.
Prerequisite: ENG 101
Course Syllabus - Introduction to Literary Studies is an inquiry into what it means to study literature, involving close reading, critical and creative analysis of a wide variety of prose fiction, drama, and poetry, and informed by an introduction to some of theoretical issues currently invigorating literary studies. In addition to works of literature, students will read critical and theoretical works. This course combines a study of literature with continued training in clear and effective expression. It is designed for prospective Writing and Literature majors and other interested students.
Prerequisite: ENG 101 or 121
Corequisite: ENG 201
Course Syllabus - This is a film history and appreciation course, with special emphasis on style, techniques, genres and themes. During one double period in which a full-length film is shown, students are encouraged to take notes. In the next class the film is discussed and analyzed. Students will read about the development of the cinema and write essays about well-known films.
Pre-Requisite: ENG101 and ENG201 or ENG121
Course Syllabus
Research and Projects
My only project is to teach a handful of thinkers in an in-person classroom, and the research is for that.
Publications
My published work is not the best representation of what I do — to see me think you will have to come to me in person.
How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (Continuum, 2000); Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets (Continuum 2007: this book is priced for libraries, not for people); The Future of Comics, The Future of Men: Matt Fraction’s Casanova (Sequart, 2015); Aestheticism, Evil, Homosexuality, and Hannibal: If Oscar Wilde Ate People (Lexington, 2017: this book is priced for libraries, not for people). Also I wrote like 25 essays but I don’t feel like listing them here. I have a good one on Logan in the book Superheroes and Excess and another good one on Wordsworth in a book called Articulating the Action Figure; I did a pretty good one on Mulholland Drive and Hamlet but I no longer agree with the conclusion I reached there.
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Distinguished Teaching Award 2017
Additional Information
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul” — Nicholas Malebranche
