Fall 2007

Fall07 AML5608 
  
Maxine Montgomery 644 1906, WMS433, mmontgomery@english.fsu.edu

This course offers an investigation of selected texts by contemporary Black Women with a view to understanding the construction of spaces of resistance. We will read and discuss works by a range of authors, including Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Shirley Williams, and others. Issues of migration, home, and exile will undergird our analyses, just as postcolonial and Black Feminist Literary Theory will propel our discussion.

Fall07 ENC5028 
Rhetorical Theory and Practice  
Kathleen Yancey 645-6896, WMS 224, kyancey@english.fsu.edu

The art of rhetoric focuses on what we know and how we know and how we represent what we know. We?ll begin (at the beginning) with Plato and Aristotle, because their work tends to contextualize all work in rhetoric, but we?ll move quickly to the twentieth century. We?ll read and discuss many of the major theorists?for example, Weaver, Perelman, Richards, Burke, Bakhtin, Gates, Rich, and Ong. We?ll also consider how their diverse understandings of rhetoric can help us inquire into a variety of phenomena, including the civil rights movement; various political campaigns, events, and speeches; images of both print and multi-media varieties; works of literature; film; and corporate communications strategies, particularly around events like the Challenger disaster. Projects will include two shorter assignments and one longer assignment that could lead to a presentation or publication.

Fall07 ENC5216 01
Introduction to Editing and Publishing  
Ned Stuckey-French 644-2638, WMS 419, 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

Fall07 ENC5317 01
Nonfiction Workshop (Article and Essay)  
David Vann 645 7629, WMS 442, david@davidvann.com

The Argument1:
Memoir, personal essay, travel writing, adventure writing, and nature writing. One could include other genres, but these are the five we?ll address in this course. We?ll consider memoir in relation to fiction and confession, with a brief look back to Augustine. For personal essay, we?ll start with Aristotle and the critical essay, then discuss Seneca, Montaigne, Addison, and Swift before jumping into our own time. We?ll consider travel and adventure writing in relation to each other and to memoir, and nature writing in relation to the British Romantics and American Transcendentalists. We?ll look at possibilities and limitations in each genre, and I hope these discussions will carry over into the workshop as we consider your own works in progress. We?ll discuss language and craft in detail, including structure and strategies for revision. We?re attempting a useful workshop, in other words, against the backdrop of a brief but broad survey of the field.

The voice of the Devil:
On a personal note, I think the field is difficult to define because it splits in two directions?toward reporting the experiences of others and toward writing about one?s own experience?without ever splitting. The personal essay is the prime example, with its insistence on a personal narrative blended with an essay on a public topic. So I should admit up front that I have no experience in journalism. We?ll consider a few examples based on ?literary journalism,? such as The Perfect Storm and River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, but for the most part I?ll focus on writing based primarily on personal experience, whereas another teacher could just as legitimately focus more on journalistic works. ?Personal Nonfiction? might be a better term for what I?m teaching.

A Memorable Fancy:
The writing requirements are two new pieces of creative nonfiction (both of which will be workshopped) and a significant revision. You can write in any of the five genres. You must write new work (and no ?multiple submission? or ?group work? allowed).

Proverbs of Hell:
The published readings will be available on Blackboard through the library?s online course reserves. You won?t need to buy any materials. I?ve kept the number of pages light, and I?ll expect you to read each of the selections twice, the first time for its effects and the second to look more carefully at how it was made.

Fall07 ENC5700 
Theories of Composition  
Kris Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 447, kfleckenstein@english.fsu.edu

English 5700 focuses on theories of composition from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Its overarching goal is to familiarize students with the conversation swirling around writing and literacy so that students can both enter into and contribute to that conversation. This requires a global understanding of the field (i.e., what issues generate talk, what agendas do various individuals bring to the conversation, and what keywords serve as ?god terms,? in Burke?s sense of the word) and a local understanding of the field (i.e., what is its historical arc, its interdisciplinary foraging, and its various philosophical orientations).

We will begin with the elements of composition, examining various perspectives on the writer, the text, the audience, and the context, as well as the interactions among the four. To do this we will read such scholars as Kinneavy, Booth, Bitzer, Rosenblatt, Britton, Brodkey, and Berlin. We will build (and contribute) to a vocabulary of keywords in composition, in the process teasing out both key issues and key works. In addition, as we track composition?s evolution into the twenty-first century, we add a fifth element to the four listed above: medium and its transformation of literacy into multiliteracies.

Projects will involve a short (3-5) keyword paper, a seminar paper designed for a conference presentation, and a weekly reading journal. Participation and oral reports are also a feature of the class.

Fall07 ENG5933 03
Issues in Literature and Cultural Studies  
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@english.fsu.edu

In a recent letter to The New York Times Book Review, Peter Brooks wrote that ?literary theory is often jargon-filled, narcissistic, smug, and generally rebarbative. Yet it has also taught us a good deal about the nature of language and literature, and contributed to a revitalization of literary study. The work of such best-selling critics as Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt is in fact unthinkable without the contributions of literary theory.?

In this class, we will examine the implications of Brooks? statement from a number of angles. (1) We?ll start by looking at some "specimen texts? (poetry, fiction, short play); (2) next, we?ll read a variety of essays from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism articulating dominant theoretical viewpoints; (3) we?ll conclude our readings with John Carey?s book on aesthetics; and (4) we?ll finish class with a quick reconsideration of the specimen texts again. Readings and discussions will examine the development of literary theory over the last 200 years and emphasize the practical applications of recent developments in psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, race and ethnicity studies, reader response, and aesthetics. These categories are not always mutually exclusive, so while we will consider pure laboratory forms of these movements, we will also deal with the ways in which they often combine, interact, and play off each other.

Fall07 ENG5933 
PEDAGOGY WORKSHOP  
DEBORAH COXWELL TEAGUE 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.

Fall07 ENL5206 
Studies in Old English Language and Literature  
Elaine Treharne 644 5191, WMS 422, etreharne@mac.com

This course aims to provide students with an in-depth study of specific aspects of the lives and thoughts of the Anglo-Saxons (up to c. 1200), drawn out using a range of disciplinary approaches. We shall engage in literary and linguistic analyses of the many extant written sources, and the examination of art historical, architectural, and archaeological artifacts surviving from the period c. 500-1200. Such study aims to introduce students to modes of careful and objective evaluation of a range of different source materials in determining what can be learnt about one of the most dynamic and multifaceted periods in British history.

Weekly sessions will involve the analysis of a particular type of source evidence (legal, archaeological, architectural, medical, historical, literary, art historical, etc.) thematically inked to set Old English texts. The latter will incorporate The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Elegies, heroic literature, sermons and saints? lives, medical and prognosticatory texts, and Anglo-Saxon laws. Themes pursued in our detailed study will include Sex and Sexuality, War and Death, the Transience of Life, Law and Disorder, Sin and Salvation, Women: their bodies, rights and roles, and Christianity and Paganism. By the end of the module, students will be able to: demonstrate familiarity with multi-disciplinary methods of analysing evidence; critique source materials in a sophisticated and detailed manner, evaluating the value of different extant artifacts; read Old English with the help of grammars and dictionaries; locate and evaluate the source material in relation to relevant social, historical and cultural frameworks; convey an awareness of the links between Anglo-Saxon, post-conquest, and modern culture. The assessment will include short presentations and a 3000-word interdisciplinary project focusing on a particular aspect of Anglo-Saxon England (such as Childbirth; Attitudes to Same-Sex Love; Death and Glory; Punishment; the Politics of Language).

Fall07 ENL5227 
Renaissance Poetry and Prose  
A. E. B. Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@english.fsu.edu

We'll study some of the poetry and prose written during an age of information revolution, rapid social change, intensive cross-cultural contact, and discovery of new sciences and new worlds. Writers surveyed will include the major (Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, et al.) and the now-less-canonized (Isabella Whitney, Anne Locke, Alexander Barclay, William Baldwin, Thomas Watson, Anon., et al.). Many of these works challenge some of our discipline's favorite categories (for instance, periodization: we'll be led to question the period boundary between "medieval" and "Renaissance" and explore why "early modern" caught on). Since formal experimentation was so important to these writers and their readers, and since the new print technology radically changed poems and/on pages, we'll give attention to their theories of poetic form and of book aesthetics. Required: active preparation and seminar participation, primary and secondary readings. Possible range of other requirements: a conference-style presentation, an article-like essay, daily written responses, in-class exercises, abstracts, exams.

Fall07 ENL5227 
Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Early Modern Literature  
Bruce Boehrer 644-3029, WMS 112A, bboehrer@english.fsu.edu

This seminar will introduce students to the major theorists of ecocriticism and animal studies (e.g., Singer, Merchant, Bookchin, Agamben, Latour) and will apply their theories to a reading of early modern English texts by such authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Jonson.

Fall07 ENL5236 
Studies in Restoration/18th Century British Literature Early Anglo-Caribbean Texts and Contexts 
Candace Ward 644-1833, WMS 113, cward@english.fsu.edu

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 West Indian 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 texts--novels, poetry, drama, autobiography, journals, and other nonfiction prose--about the Caribbean, and exploring the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in representations of the region over the course of the long eighteenth century. Some of the literary texts, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Sarah Scott's sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison were written by authors who never traveled to the "Torrid Zones." Others, like James Grainger's epic pastoral The Sugar-Cane and the anonymous Hamel the Obeah Man, were produced by white Creoles 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 journal of Thomas Thistlewood, who served for over thirty years as an overseer on a sugar estate, and from Lady Nugent's accounts of her travels in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. 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.

Fall07 ENL5256 
Studies in Fiction: Gender and Disease in the Victorian Novel  
Meegan Kennedy aka Margaret Kennedy Hanson 644 7771, WMS 413, mkennedy@english.fsu.edu

Why does the Victorian period have all those droopy women? What is a "hectic flush" and what does it mean when someone in a novel has it? Why do so many nineteenth-century novelists write about "fever" in particular? What is the difference between typhus and typhoid, diphtheria and phthisis, and why do we need to know? Why shouldn't British women use chloroform for childbirth, anyway? This class will examine the answers to these questions, and more generally how literary and medical texts negotiate the problems of gender and disease in the nineteenth century. We will investigate how "disease" helps to define gender -- as in the love-mad woman, the invalid, and the hysteric -- as well as how, on the other hand, gender shapes cultural perceptions of disease -- as in consumption, fever, and syphilis. We will examine realist, sentimental, and sensationalist narratives of gender and disease in novels by Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, Charlotte Yonge, Mary (Mrs. Humphry) Ward, Sarah Grand, and Richard Marsh, and in short pieces by Samuel Warren, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. We will supplement these with selected short non-fiction texts by Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Sigmund Freud, and assorted nineteenth-century physicians; and historical and critical texts on gender, sexuality, medicine, and Victorian culture. Assignments include a short presentation, an annotated bibliography and paper proposal, a conference-length paper (that you will be presenting to your peers), and a revision of this into a seminar paper.

Fall07 LIT5235 01
STUDIES POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 226, arai@english.fsu.edu

What is the postcolonial question in cultural production today? How does the transnational frame of the postcolonial enable us to think of literature or film anew? Drawing on postcolonial literary and media studies, this course aims to address these questions by situating different contemporary literary and filmic texts from around the world in relation to colonialism, capital, feminism, and the body.

Fall07 LIT5309 
STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE  
Leigh Edwards 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 also 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. Our sites of study include advertising and consumer culture, film, television, public memorials, the romance novel, popular music, and sports. We will explore key theories and methodologies, including the Frankfurt school, mass culture critics, structuralism, Marxism, feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodernism, and cultural populist approaches. 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.