Summer and Fall 2006

Fall06 AML5017 
Gender, Romance, and the 'Early American' Novel  
Moore, Dennis - 644 1177 WMS416, dmoore@english.fsu.edu

Moving well beyond Hawthorne's facetious reference to that "d****d mob of scribbling women," this course will explore the origins of the American novel in the tension between the novel and the romance, two literary forms that shared a great deal besides a permeable, shifting boundary. Students will draw on the recent renaissance in scholarship on earlier American culture, much of which draws on Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; we'll read it and Cathy Davidson's brilliantly Expanded Edition of Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America and recent work by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, along with some period texts, including Wieland, Charlotte Temple, and Hope Leslie.

Fall06 CRW5130 
Fiction Workshop  
Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila - 644 5776, 422 WMS, sotaylor@english.fsu.edu

I believe it?s important for writers at your level to map out the thematic and technical reach of their work and to refine their process into a discipline. We?ll use the basic workshop format, with considerable work in small groups. You?ll write two new pieces, both of which will be discussed in the large group. We?ll pay attention to revising and journal-keeping. We?ll talk about publication and actually prepare and send off a manuscript. We will maintain high standards while practicing respect and even mercy. Novelists welcome.

Fall06 CRW5130 01
Fiction Workshop  
Butler, Robert Olen - 644 0238, WMS 411, rbutler@english.fsu.edu

Rephrased to fit your style: This course is based on Butler's book of lectures, From Where You Dream. Its focus will be on the artistic process rather than craft and technique.

Fall06 ENC5028 
Rhetorical Theory and Practice  
Staff  

A survey course in rhetoric, beginning (at the beginning) with Plato and Aristotle and continuing to the twentieth century, where readings will include the work of Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Adrienne Rich. Projects will include one research project as well as other writings.

Fall06 ENC5216 01
Introduction to Editing and Publishing  
Stuckey-French, Ned - 644 2638, 419 WMS, nstuckey-french@english.fsu.edu

This course will introduce students to book and magazine publishing. Through lectures, discussion, simulations, workshops, meetings with publishing professionals and a variety of written assignments, students will examine the publishing process from the evaluation of manuscripts to the marketing of a finished product.

The first part of the course will be devoted to book publishing and will introduce manuscript evaluation, editing, design, production, promotion, advertising and budget analysis. Students will learn about the details of line editing, copyediting and writing catalogue copy as well as larger issues such as conceptual (or developmental) editing, acquiring material, drawing up a marketing plan and negotiating contracts. In order to put these skills into practice and learn to work with a group, students will participate in a book workshop in which simulated companies will create a "spring catalogue" of new titles.

Magazine publishing will be the focus of the second part of the course. We will discuss how to pitch ideas, meet deadlines and produce finished copy. Assignments will introduce students to fact checking, cutting, ethical problems and design. The unit will conclude with a magazine workshop in which each student will develop a proposal for a new magazine.

OBJECTIVES

TEXTS (at the FSU Bookstore and Bill's Bookstore):

Fall06 ENG5047 02
Studies in Drama: "Sex on the Renaissance Stage."  
Daileader, Celia - 645 6478, WMS 439, cdaileader@english.fsu.edu

This course examines the representation of gender, sexuality and eroticism in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and others, as well as the theoretical problem entailed in the embodiment of female dramatic roles by boy actors. A second issue to be examined is that of Shakespeare's canonicity versus the relative dearth of attention to his contemporary dramatists, many of whom were equally if not more esteemed at the time. Requirements: weekly 1 page reader response papers, performance project, in-class participation and final research paper.

Fall06 ENG5138 01
Studies in Film: Fear, Identity, & Gender in Literature and Film 
Saladin-Adams, Linda - 644 5569, WMS 429, lsaladin@english.fsu.edu

Though Freud has located identity formation in the emotion of fear--a boy's fear of castration or a girl's terror at her lack, critical thinkers have looked at identity and anxiety as far more complex and on bases that are less sexist and rigid. This course will explore the way in which fear functions in literature and film by briefly reviewing some perceptions about the term. Fear is a term used quite loosely but not always analyzed in depth. We will see how obsession, anxiety, trauma, and phobias surface in films as well as written texts. The information we glean will be speculative, and as a group we will incrementally redefine terms to suit our applications and perhaps contribute further insights into previous critical observations.

Fall06 ENG5720 
Research Methods in Composition and Rhetoric  
Yancey, Kathleen - 645 6896, WMS 224, kyancey@english.fsu.edu

A course in epistemology, that is, a course that takes as its focus both what and how we know in rhetoric and composition. Such a course is both disciplinary-taking up questions important to the discipline-and interdisciplinary-begging, borrowing, and stealing methods from elsewhere to re-make them as the discipline's own. Those research methods are diverse, including the historical, the theoretical, and the empirical. Accordingly, students in the course will learn, for example, how to read theoretical scholarship and to pose questions that guide historical research projects, and to create research designs borrowing from social science methodologies and to critique large-scale studies?as well as define what those are. Projects in the course include reviews of research and scholarship; a research notebook; and a research design project that may lead to thesis or dissertation projects.

Fall06 ENG5835 01
TOPICS IN PUBLISHING: THE MAN WHO MADE SHAKESPEARE, ENGLAND'S FIRST LITERARY PUBLISHER  
Taylor, Gary - 645 6474, WMS421, gtaylor@english.fsu.edu

This course will repeat and extend the McKenzie lectures in the history of the book that I gave at Oxford University in spring 2006. We will use the career of a single important early publisher as the basis for a larger historical and theoretical exploration of the importance of publishers as mediators and shapers of literary canons, artistic reputations, and cultural change. Edward Blount was the chief publisher of the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays-the folio edition of "Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies", published in 1623; but he also published the first English editions of Montaigne's Essays, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and many other now-canonical works, written by his own contemporaries. He thus opens up crucial questions about the relationship between capitalism (financing book production) and criticism (deciding which books are worth publishing). But Blount was also competing with the origins of the newspaper industry, and the emerging market in ephemera, thus raising questions about the relationship between journalism and creative writing. And his network of writers was not simply English, but broadly European; so we will also be addressing issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the history of books.

No previous experience in publishing is required (but is always welcome). Our reading of Blount's career will be contextualized by much secondary reading in book history, and particularly the history of publishing, by major modern scholars such as Chartier, Darnton, and McKenzie. This course will be the beginning of a series of new courses associated with the recently funded cluster of new hires in the History of Text Technologies, and will also satisfy requirements in the existing certificate program in Editing and Publishing.

Fall06 ENG5933 
ISSUES IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES  
Berry, R. M. - 644-5158, 437A WMS, rberry@english.fsu.edu

DESCRIPTION: The objective of this course is to initiate you into the ongoing institutional conversation called "criticism." If the objective is achieved, you should leave the course with a rudimentary historical understanding of how current controversies, schools, and practices within literary criticism have developed, and with an overview of some questions, topics, and problems that organize contemporary critical practice.

Over the course of the semester, we will read a number of texts which have been formative for the way literary and/or cultural study is conducted today. Some of these texts will themselves attempt to provide an overview or history of critical problems. Others will argue a fundamental position, or they may reinterpret an earlier text. Some of the questions we will confront are: What precisely do literary critics study? What, if anything, distinguishes a specifically literary use of language from other uses? What are the fundamental components of a story? What is the relation of a literary text to the historical changes or political conditions contemporary with it? Where does sexuality reveal itself in language? How are poems inflected by gender? What is an author, a text, a word, a meaning? How does the writing of an individual relate to the group(s) of which she's a member? How do cultural systems function?

Although it will be difficult not to get into debates over the correctness of the theories we study, we will try to avoid this as much as possible, since our primary aim will be to understand rather than assess them. This kind of distance and restraint may not always be possible, but we'll make it our aim.

TEXT: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al (Norton: 2001).

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

  1. Papers: Every student will be responsible for writing two essays (6-10 pp each). The purpose of each of these essays is to set forth your interpretation of a theoretical text, issue, conflict, or debate studied in the course texts. This may be done by contrasting two texts which disagree on an issue of importance, explaining what is the source and/or consequence of the disagreement, and attempting to determine which text seems more convincing. Or you may wish to follow out a single idea, conflict, or theme through several texts, showing how it undergoes modification and assessing the significance of these changes. Or you may want to apply one of the assigned theoretical texts to a literary work, or perhaps challenge the interpretation of a given literary work by one of the assigned texts. NOTE: Regardless of what topic you choose, you must make significant use of at least one of the texts assigned for our course, and graduate students are normally expected to make use of some secondary material as well (i.e., critical texts written about the primary text you're discussing). At the end of the introductory material for each of our assigned readings, The Norton Anthology includes a bibliography of criticism.
  2. Oral Presentation: Each student will be responsible for presenting to the class one text, author or subject from the assigned readings. The presenter will be responsible for identifying (what he/she believes to be) the central issue in the assigned text and explaining its significance to the class. In other words, the presenter will act as interpreter of the assigned text, trying to show what point it's making, what seems most controversial or difficult about it, etc. This normally requires that the presenter read more than just the assigned readings for that week, but the presentation is to focus on the assigned text, not on the author's life, career, or other writings. That is, you are to present your interpretation of the assigned reading, not a report. The goal is to explain what you think the text means. Presentations will normally last 15 but not more than 20 minutes. After the oral presentation, students should normally arrange to meet briefly with me to discuss their performance. Also, each class one student will be assigned to begin our discussion by acting as respondent to the presenter and addressing to him/her at least two questions. The aim of these questions will be to identify some point in the theoretical text (or in the presenter's interpretation of it) that seems genuinely debatable.
  3. Class participation: All students are responsible for attending each class, reading all of the assigned material before class, and participating in discussion. A pattern of missed classes, non-participation in discussion, irrelevant remarks, or other indications that the student is not keeping up will result in a lowered final grade.

GRADES:

Each paper will count one third of the student's final grade, and class participation (primarily the student's oral presentation and response, but including his/her contributions to class discussion) will count one third.

Fall06 ENG5933 
PEDAGOGY WORKSHOP  
Coxwell-Teague, Deborah - 644 3164, WMS 222E, dteague@english.fsu.edu

This workshop is intended to provide first-year teaching assistants continued support during their first year of teaching in the FSU First Year Writing Program. Preparation for teaching ENC 1102 in the spring and continued development of ENC 1101 teaching skills will be emphasized.

Course requirements include regular attendance and participation in all workshop meetings, along with completion of all assignments. These include observing a fellow TA and completing an observation and reflection paper, designing a policy sheet and course outline for ENC 1102, completing assignments related to responding to student writing, and, close to the end of the semester, completing a writing assignment in which TAs reflect on their first semester as teachers in our program and look ahead to the coming semester during which they will be teaching ENC 1102.

Fall06 ENG5933 04
TOPICS IN ENGLISH: Magazine Culture and the Modern American Essay 
Stuckey-French, Ned - 644 2638, WMS419, nstuckey-french@english.fsu.edu

Essays now enter the canon primarily through composition readers or other anthologies, but when we find them in that new context, we read them differently than they were first read. E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake," for instance, is a famous and oft anthologized essay about a father and son fishing on a lake in Maine. It is generally read and taught as a nostalgia piece, but when it appeared in Harper's in 1941 and was collected the following year in One Man's Meat, it was also read as a comment on isolationism and impending war. We cannot feel the war clouds gathering as that audience did in 1941, but we can historicize so that we might develop a deeper understanding of both American culture and the form of the personal essay.

We will study the rise of the American magazine culture by reading articles and chapters by critics such as Richard Ohmann, Janice Radway, Christopher Wilson, Lynn Bloom, James L. W. West III and others, and by studying the history of magazines such as The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Saturday Review of Literature, Ms., Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. We will also read a variety of modern American essays by writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez and Annie Dillard.

Text: The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

Course Requirements: Each student will write two essays (8-10 pages) and give a 20-minute presentation on an essay and the magazine in which it first appeared.

Successful completion of this course satisfies three credit hours of the academic requirement for the Certificate in Editing and Publishing. If a student has already met the academic requirement, the course can count for additional credits toward the 12-hour Certificate.

Fall06 ENL5206 01
Studies Old English Language and Literature  
Johnson, David - 644-0314, DIF 432B, djohnson@english.fsu.edu

Studies Old English Language and Literature is an introduction to the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England. The main focus of the course will be on acquiring a reading knowledge of the language, but we will also consider the cultural contexts of the prose and poetry we are learning to read. Two exams, frequent quizzes, two papers and stimulating discussion of matters linguistic, literary and cultural are among the demands of the course.

No prior knowledge of Old English or any other synthetic language (such as Latin or German) is required or assumed. Much of the semester will be devoted to learning the language, and translation (I believe it was Nietsche who defined ?Philology? as the ?art of slow reading?), but from time to time I will ask you to read an article or two which may, along with the text of the week, serve as the starting point of more literary discussion. Among other things, this course will provide you with the key to reading one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Beowulf.

Fall06 ENL5216 
Intertextual Chaucer  
Warren, Nancy - 644 5077, 405A WMS, nwarren@english.fsu.edu

As the second word of the course title suggests, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer will be at the heart of this class. We will read most of The Canterbury Tales as well as such texts as The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. Accordingly, this course will provide an opportunity for students interested in medieval and / or early modern literature (or students of other periods, for that matter, who may need to teach survey courses at some point in their career) to ground themselves in the work of one of the heaviest of heavy hitters of the English canon.

As the first word of the title suggests, however, Chaucer's works will not be the only ones that occupy us. We will read his texts in dialogue with his sources, with works of his Middle English contemporaries, and with the works of his later medieval and early modern imitators and admirers. In doing so, we will consider such issues as the literary and national politics of vernacular writing, the dynamics of canon formation, and the processes by which Chaucer was created as (in the words of John Dryden) the "father of English poetry."

We will read texts in Middle English; however, prior experience with Middle English is neither expected nor required. Our writing assignments will focus on mastering professionally-useful genres: the conference abstract, the scholarly book review, the annotated bibliography, and the conference-length paper. Students will also write frequent, informal reading responses.

Fall06 ENL5227 
Studies in Renaissance Literature: Radical Shakespeare  
Vitkus, Daniel - 645 0100 WMS 220, dvitkus@english.fsu.edu

Students will read a range of plays by Shakespeare that might be said to have questioned the dominant ideology of early modern England.

These plays will include Hamlet, Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Richard II, Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. We will examine the question of literary radicalism: what was the ideological place and social function of Shakespeare's theater? To what degree can we say that these plays challenged or subverted orthodox thinking and conventional belief? There will be secondary readings that will help students to contextualize the plays.

At the same time, the course is designed to help prepare graduate students who might one day teach a Shakespeare course of their own.

Fall06 ENL5236 
Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Anglo-Caribbean Texts and Contexts  
Ward, Candace - 644 1833, WMS113, cward@english.fsu.edu

NB: Text Selection subject to change based on availability

The Caribbean region had begun to figure in European thinking nearly two centuries before North America was even a vague image in the minds of most knowledgeable Europeans. Perhaps we can only begin to assess the changing influence of the Caribbean region in world affairs by remembering that, before the Caribbean had begun to do Europe's bidding, there had not been any "world" affairs. Otherwise said-and with no apologies for this formulation-"the world" (in quotation marks) first became a modern concept in the Caribbean.--(Sidney Mintz, "Goodbye, Columbus: Second Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millennium," 1993)

Course Overview. Hoping to develop a more comprehensive picture of eighteenth-century British literature and culture, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the Caribbean. As Mintz's comment suggests, this critical reappraisal is both necessary and overdue, given the centrality of the Caribbean colonies and the Atlantic slave trade to the development of modern British capitalism and culture. We will take part in this reassessment by examining a variety of novels with a Caribbean connection, and explore the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in representations of the region over the course of the long eighteenth century. Many of the novels, like Sarah Scott's sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, were written by authors who never traveled to the "Torrid Zones." Others, like J. W. Orderson's Creoleana and Herbert De Lisser's White Witch of Rose Hall, were produced by West Indians whose firsthand experiences of life in the tropics strongly mark their writing. In addition to such fictional works, we will read nonfiction prose accounts of the Caribbean, ranging from parliamentary speeches on abolition to excerpts from the journals of Thomas Thistlewood, who served for over thirty years as an overseer on a sugar estate, and from Lady Maria Nugent's accounts of her travels in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, the period when her husband served as governor of the island. A major portion of the course will be devoted to examining how slavery and race informed popular conceptions of the West Indies and West Indians. To assist us in this project we will draw on a number of critical approaches-e.g., postcolonialist, feminist, and materialist theories-to analyze the primary texts.

Required Texts:

Fall06 ENL5246 01
Studies in British Romantic Literature: British Poetry, 1780-1830 
Walker, Eric - 644 4869, 438 WMS, ewalker@english.fsu.edu

Extensive and intensive readings in the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Opportunities to work on the poetry of Barbauld, Smith, Robinson, Hemans, and Landon. With the help of William St. Clair?s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, a regular emphasis on reading practices and book production and circulation. To ground theory in best-practice scholarship, a regular emphasis on editorial problems and practice, both print-based and electronic, such as the Blake Archive, the Cornell Wordsworth edition, the new Bollingen edition of Coleridge?s poetry, and various hypertext editions available at the Romantic Circles website. Three shorter essays (1200 word range); one longer term essay (5000 word range).

Fall06 LIT5038 
Studies in Poetry: Post-Modern and Contemporary Poetry 
Gardner, Joann - 644 1881, WMS426, jgardner@english.fsu.edu

This course will offer a survey of the various movements and traditions in poetry from WWII to the present. Starting with a review of the High Modernists (Yeats, Pound, Eliot), we will establish the cultural, philosophical and technical framework for this study and go on to identify ways in which contemporary poets at once follow through with and depart from the Modernist example. Since "Contemporary Poetry" is, by nature, a work in progress, some attention will be given to the problems, methods and solutions regarding the development of literary canons. Treatment of such groups as The Black Mountain School, The Beats, The New York School, Black Arts, Feminist, Post-Colonial, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American and Confessional poetry will be included. Our readings will be in the form of both poems and prose essays by poets.

Fall06 LIT5309 01
STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE  
Edwards, Leigh - 644 8918, WMS 323, ledwards@english.fsu.edu

This course examines theories of popular culture and the emergence of mass culture. We will take seriously George Lipsitz's claim that "perhaps the most important facts about people have always been encoded within the ordinary and the commonplace." Paying particular attention to the relationship between literature and popular culture, we will analyze strategies of reading and reception as well as constructions of ideology in this material, including categories such as gender, race, class, and nation. The course interrogates designations such as "high," "pop," "mass," and "folk" as well as concepts of subculture, counterculture, and youth culture. We will focus particular attention on television and popular music, although we will also consider popular fiction, advertising, and consumer culture. We will explore key theories and methodologies, including cultural studies, Marxism, political economy, populism, audience studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postmodernism. Critics studied will include Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Barthes, Williams, Althusser, Gramsci, Hall, de Lauretis, Modleski, Hebdige, Bourdieu, Radway, Bordo, Douglas, and Lipsitz. Our focus will be on U.S. culture, but we will consider questions of globalization and make use of transnational critical frameworks.

Fall06 LIT5517 
Studies in Gender  6:45-8p.m. TTR, 116 Wms
Picart, Caroline Joan (Kay) S. - 644 0734, WMS453, kpicart@english.fsu.edu

This course takes as its center the issue of authority in relation to the politics of representation, as manifested in texts, broadly defined, whether they be in science, art, literature or law. These issues are pivotal to debates in contemporary feminist theory and the philosophy/sociology of science. Conventionally, issues of feminism and science, and gender and art have been pursued as separate areas of inquiry. What such an approach obscures, however, are the natural intersections and common themes that bind the epistemologies, politics and ethics of scientific and artistic activities. Among the crucial questions are: How is authority established in texts? How do the artistic conventions and popular views of science continually come together to regenerate the Frankenstein myth?a myth of male self-birthing, steeped in anxieties concerning the control of nature, technology, and the ?feminine other?? How does one de-center the subject of Enlightenment science, the ?neutral? voice of law, and Romantic or colonial art? In what ways has the historical exclusion of women from the spheres of science, law and ?high? art contributed to the rise of patriarchy? How does one move from a politics of exclusion to one of integration? What historical cases illustrate the correlation between scientific, artistic, legal and literary representations and the resultant political and economic hierarchies, differentiated along gendered, racial, and class lines? Is there such a thing as an essentially ?feminine? type of science, art, law or literature? How has nature been gendered in both science, literature, law and art? Can one make an argument for a distinctively ?feminist? epistemology based on biological or sociological grounds, rooted in representations in/of science, literature, law and art? What would be the conditions of possibility within which one could speak of a ?feminist? ethics related to these spheres? What feminist strategies can be employed to move towards a more just and humane world, particularly as rooted within scientific, legal, literary and artistic modes of production, expression, and consumption?