Fall 2008

Fall08 AML5017 01
Early America in the Transatlantic World  
Cristobal Silva WMS 229 csilva@fsu.edu

This course will be guided by a series of questions designed to highlight the impact of Transatlanticism as a critical concept in the field of Early American Studies. Our goal will be to investigate various Transatlantic currents that decanter our understanding of the Colonial and Early Republican eras, and to bypass the traditional teleological histories that might lead us from the Mayflower Compact to the Bill of Rights. We will ask how, for example, English assumptions about their bodies shaped colonial encounters with the New World, and how those assumptions were in turn shaped by encounters with Native American and African bodies; we will ask how Transatlantic movement functions as a potent trope for mapping the status of women in the New and Old Worlds, and why this mapping opens productive fields of interrogation; we will ask how Transatlantic networks reorient racial identity, and provide a platform for critiquing the eighteenth-century slave trade that these very networks enabled.

We will cover the period ranging from the first English settlements in Virginia (1588) through the end of the eighteenth century, and read texts written on both sides of the Atlantic, including Thomas Harriot?s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), Anne Bradstreet?s The Tenth Muse (1650), Mary Rowlandson?s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), John Locke?s Two Treatises of Government (1689), Daniel Defoe?s Moll Flanders (1722), Phillis Wheatley?s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Benjamin Franklin?s Autobiography (1771?88), and Olaudah Equiano?s Interesting Narrative (1789).

Fall08 AML5027 01
From James to Cather  
Timothy Parrish 644 4059, WMS 221, tparrish@fsu.edu

An exploration of the turbulent period in American literature and culture between the Civil and the rise of modernism. During this period the United States was transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Immigration, women's rights, and the response to the general failure to incorporate freed slaves into American society animated the literature of the time. Writers such as Adams Autobiography, Du Bois, Howells Hazard of New Fortunes, Crane Maggie, Dreiser, Gilman Women and Economics Yezeirska Bread Givers, Wharton House of Mirth and Norris Vandover depicted the challenge Americans faced when trying to adapt to the rapidly changing social and political landscape. This is also the time when realism became naturalism became modernism Stein, Three Lives. Along with the authors mentioned I plan to include Wright's later Native Son as a response to Dreiser's American Tragedy. James Portrait of a Lady and Cather The Professor's House.

Fall08 AML5608 
Studies in the African American Literary Tradition; The Crisis of Humanity in African American Literature. 
David Ikard 645-6861, WMS 227, dikard@fsu.edu

Focusing on the political trajectory of the debate within African American intellectual circles over how best to combat and reverse white perpetuation of black inferiority, this course will reconsider conventional theoretical approaches to (re)presenting black humanity. Chief among our goals will be to puzzle out the usefulness and limitations of conventional anti-essentialist critiques of black texts with an eye towards exploring (black) humanity beyond socially prescribed race, class, and gender lines. What will become clear are the tenacious ideological obstacles that complicate the creation of a model of black identity that, at once, accounts for black victim status writ large and acknowledges black social and political agency. The primary texts for the course will include Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Going to the Territory, Toni Morrison's Paradise and Playing in the Dark, Edward P. Jones's The Known World, Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle, Olympia Vernon's Eden, and Percival Everett's Erasure.

Fall08 CRW5130 
Fiction Workshop  
Robert Olen Butler 644 0238, WMS 411, rbutler@fsu.edu

The fall graduate fiction workshop under Robert Olen Butler will, as it traditionally does, focus intently on the essentials of process in creating literary narrative. But this semester it will do so by proposing an aesthetic theory of the short short story as a distinct art form, and students will write only short short stories.

Fall08 ENC5217 03
Editorial Theory from Jerome to JSTOR  
Gary Taylor WMS 421 gtaylor@fsu.edu

Editorial theory is a version of critical theory that, in addition to asking the fundamental critical questions--what is a text? is there a difference between a text and a work? what is the relationship of the author to the text? how do you determine the value of a text/work/author?--applies or modifies those questions/answers in relation to the practical problems of preserving and transmitting past texts to contemporary readers, often in media or languages different than those in which the text/work was originally composed. Editorial theory therefore affects every text you have ever read, and if you become an important writer it will eventually affect every text you ever write. This course begins with St Jerome, whose edition of the Latin Bible was the basis for European culture for more than a 1000 years, and concludes with the new theoretical and practical issues raised by digital technologies.

Fall08 ENC5217 
Line Editing  
Bruce Bickley WMS 417, bbickley@fsu.edu

A practicum for academic, government agency, corporate, legal, technical, or free-lance writers that offers hands-on line-editing instruction and experience. Includes a professional refresher on grammar, punctuation, and usage. Stresses ?plain-language? active-voice drafting, line-editing, revising, layout logic, and proofreading strategies. Operates in whole-class and small-group settings. Also provides online electronic mark-up and editing practice using Microsoft Word?s Track Changes and other tools.

Fall08 ENG5327 
The Supernatural in African Diaspora Fiction  
Jerrilyn McGregory 644 3161, WMS 458, jmcgregory@fsu.edu

Any number of approaches to African Diaspora fiction can be identified. In this course the focus is on the supernatural as it manifests itself in various forms of fiction in contemporary works. I use the word "supernatural" expansively to include not only the usual indications of phenomena beyond the natural world and the scope of human action, but conjuration, "speculative fiction," "magic realism," and manipulations of time and historical periods that create an "unnatural, realistic" novel form.

This class will explore belief systems that traditionally have informed the particularistic worldview of many people of African descent. The course privileges an experience-centered analysis of belief systems as they inform writings within the African Diaspora. The objective is to develop a high context for some core supernatural beliefs that operate as a recursive strategy in African Diaspora literature(s).

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Fall08 ENG5700 
Composition Theory  
Michael Neal 644 4024, WMS 444, michael.neal@fsu.edu

English 5700 focuses on major theories of composing with an emphasis on composition as a discipline and historical and contemporary theories of composition. We will examine the act of composing/writing itself and the social, cognitive, linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of the way people communicate in writing. Students will develop their own theories of composition in relationship to such key issues as genre, rhetorical situations, composing processes, literacy, and media and through readings by scholars such as Faigley, Berlin, Fulkerson, Bitzer, North, Brandt, Bizzell, yancey, and Wysocki. We will give special attention to ways that composition is evolving in response to digital technologies and multi-modal literacies.

The class will be an interactive graduate seminar that will feature weekly readings, discussion, collaboration, a response blog, presentations, and a seminar paper.

Fall08 ENG5933 
ISSUES IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES  
R. M. Berry 644 5158, WMS 405G, rberry@fsu.edu

DESCRIPTION: The purpose of this course is to initiate you into the ongoing institutional conversation called "criticism." We will read a number of texts which have been formative for the way literary and/or cultural study is being conducted today. Some of these texts will themselves attempt to provide an overview or introductory history of critical problems. Others will argue a fundamental position, or they may reinterpret an earlier text. We'll see that the distinction between interpretive essays (sometimes called "practical criticism") and essays about interpretation itself (sometimes called "theory") repeatedly break down, leading to further reflection on the intellectual basis of even the most ordinary practices. Although it will be difficult not to get into debates over the correctness of the ideas we're reading, we will try to avoid this as much as possible, since our primary aim will be to familiarize ourselves with the dominant models of contemporary criticism, rather than to assess them. In other words, our goal will be, as much as possible, to understand these texts and to see how their ideas and procedures are being used. This kind of distance and restraint may not always be possible, but we'll make it our aim. Success will have been achieved if students emerge from the course possessed of a basic understanding of the terms, topics, schools, and debates active within English departments today.

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 issue, conflict, or debate studied in the course texts. This may be done by contrasting two texts which you believe 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 challenge the interpretation of a theoretical issue or debate given by one of the assigned texts. 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 normally graduate students are expected to make use of secondary material as well (i.e., critical texts written about the primary text you're discussing).
  2. Oral Presentation: Each student will be responsible for presenting to the class one text, author or subject from the assigned readings. It is expected that these presentations will involve more than merely summarizing the assigned text. The presenter will be responsible for identifying (what he/she believes to be) the central issue in the assigned text and explaining to the class its significance. This normally requires that the presenter read more than just the assigned readings for that week. Presentations will normally last 15 but not more than 20 minutes. There will be two presentations each class. 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 (i.e., each respondent will be paired with one of the presenters). The aim of these questions will be to identify some point in either the theoretical text or the presentation 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 may result in a lowered final grade.

Grades: Each paper will count one third of the student's final grade, and class participation (i.e., regular participation in class discussion, plus one oral presentation and one formal response) will count one third.

Fall08 ENG5933 03
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, WEB 2.0, AND CONVERGENCE CULTURE: How We Read, Write, and Make Knowledge in the Age of the Internet 
Kathleen Yancey 645 6896, WMS224, kyancey@fsu.edu

Using several frames of reference, ENGL 5933-03 will explore two related questions. First, what difference does technology, especially digital technology, make in the ways that we read, the ways that we compose, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared? Second, what do the changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and composing? To answer these questions, we?ll consider briefly the relationship between literacies and technologies, marking the shift from manuscript culture to print culture; and from models of private knowledge to mass consumption of knowledge abetted by mass media?and the role of politics, economics, and ideology in each shift. Our focus, however, will be on the changes that are occurring now: What are they? What do we make of them? As scholars and teachers, how do we respond to them?

A preview: According to Sven Birkets of The Gutenberg Elegies, changes wrought by the digital revolution undermine our ability to think and write coherently. According to Richard Lanham of The Electronic Word, our new ability to see at and through the screen afforded by the Internet resuscitates the manuscript culture of the Renaissance for a new kind of (digital) Renaissance with new emerging rules governing intellectual property. According to Sherry Turkle of Life on the Screen, the Internet is a genuinely new space for identity formation, and according to Howard Rheingold, for political action. According to Mark Prensky, today?s students are ?digital natives,? and we who teach them ?digital immigrants.? Echoing Prensky?s observation, some scholars call for a return to the past; others, like Gunter Kress of the New London Group and Glenda Hull of Berkeley call for a new reading and writing curriculum based in a convergence of print, screen, and Internet. Collin Brooke, in Linga Fracta, suggests that through skillful electronic networking, we both create new knowledge and represent it in new ways, while Jim Porter argues that the Internet is remediating the rhetorical canons. In the midst of all this speculation is the undeniable effect of Web 2.0: a recent report claims that teenagers spend 16.7 hours a week online, and if you really want to know what your students are thinking, you should facebook them?and yes, it?s now a verb ;)

After completing this course, you will be able to identify both the significant questions currently in play around digital culture and a range of perspectives on those questions. You will be able to cite key works in, and thinkers commenting on, network culture and understand how they talk to, around, and across each other. And you will be able to consider what all this means for education, now and in the future?in terms of reading practices (both close and distant reading qua Morretti); in terms of researching; in terms of composing; in terms of sharing information; in terms of changing understandings of intellectual property. Through completing a project--options include a print bibliographic essay; a hypertext review essay; a creation of a weblog or set of wiki entries on the one or more issues, and a syllabus keyed to these issues--you will develop the expertise that comes from investigating a topic in considerable depth.

To accomplish these goals, we'll read in print and online; write in print and online; talk and present to each other; raise questions and try to answer them as members of a community. In exploring digital culture, we will develop a new vocabulary defining this emerging interdisciplinary field and project how current trends may play out. If we succeed in these efforts, you'll find that you are knowledgeable as a teacher and a scholar about issues that are likely to inform English Studies and education more generally well into the 21st century.

Fall08 ENG5933 
PEDAGOGY WORKSHOP  
Deborah Coxwell-Teague 644-3164, WMS222E, dteague@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 Composition 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.

Fall08 ENL5206 
Old English and the Anglo-Saxons  
Elaine Treharne WMS422, etreharne@mac.com

Aims and Objectives:

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 sample 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 linked 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.

Assessment will consist of two pieces of written work and an oral presentation.

By the end of the module, students will be able to:

Course Texts:

Required:

Optional:

Fall08 ENL5216 
Intertextual Chaucer  
Nancy Warren 644 5077, WMS 216, nwarren@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.

Course Objectives

Fall08 ENL5227 01
Studies in the Renaissance: Focus on Milton  
Bruce Boehrer 644-3029, WMS 112A, bboehrer@fsu.edu

This course will focus upon a close reading of Milton's work in light of such issues as the domestic politics of the early Stuart and Interregnum periods; available ideologies of family structure and gender relations; humanism, euhemerism, and the classical tradition; and the theology of radical Protestantism in the seventeenth century. Most of the course will be devoted to studying the entirety of Paradise Lost; however, we will also consider such briefer works as Comus, Lycidas, and (time permitting) Samson Agonistes.

Fall08 ENL5227 
Studies in Renaissance Literature. "Thomas Middleton: Our Other Shakespeare"  
Gary Taylor WMS 421 gtaylor@fsu.edu

Last November Oxford University Press published The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, the result of 20 years of work by 75 scholars in 12 countries. Middleton--the most modern of the early modernists, England's Caravaggio, the first great poet of urban life, the first English "realist", the "bard of sex" (Time Magazine), the most politically subversive writer of his time, who also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early London--is the only English playwright who wrote masterpieces in as many different genres as Shakespeare (including tragedy, comedy, history, and tragicomedy), but unlike Shakespeare he wrote for many different companies and playing spaces, in a very different stylistic and aesthetic register. This course assumes no previous knowledge of Middleton; it will introduce you to a great writer your parents and your high school teachers didn't want you to know about.

Fall08 ENL5227 03
Studies in the Renaissance: The Global Renaissance  
Daniel Vitkus 645 0100, WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

The course will look at early modern texts from a global, historicist perspective, tracing a cultural history of travel, trade, piracy, and slavery through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will address questions of cultural, racial and religious difference, with reference to journeys and encounters that were recorded during the early modern period. Students will read and discuss a range of texts that represent contact, communication and exchange between England and the rest of the world. The readings will include drama, travel narrative, and ethnography. Students will chart the changes in English identity that took place during this era of accelerated mobility, exchange, and hybridity; and as we do so, we will refer to a few secondary texts that offer or deploy critical theories of race and alterity. One important focus for our investigations will be the space in which an emergent transcultural capitalism produced a turbulent culture of mixture, exploitation, and competition. Issues to be discussed: the relationship between history and text, the rise of international capitalism, the development of the slave trade, cultures of cosmopolitanism, and the function of gender in colonial and cross-cultural (con)texts.

Course texts will include:

Fall08 ENL5246 
The Romantics' Greatest Hits  
James O'Rourke 644-5202, WMS 441, jorourke@fsu.edu

This course will focus on some of the most influential (aka, canonical) works that have emerged from early nineteenth century British literature. We will cover both poetry and the novel. The poets will be Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, and the novelists will be Austen (Sense and Sensibility), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and Charlotte Bronte (Villette). We will pay close attention to the historical contexts of these works and to the theoretical premises of the modern critical debates they have inspired.

Fall08 ENL5256 01
Studies in Victorian Literature: Realism, visuality, and objectivity in the 19th-century British novel 
TR 2-3:15 415 Wms
Meegan Kennedy 644-7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

This course examines nineteenth-century British developments in literary, aesthetic, and scientific theory about human perception and representation, and how to communicate a true or reliable image of the world. We'll situate "realism" with attention to how theories about it develop across disciplines and periods, and we'll consider how new technologies, such as photography and the compound microscope, suggested provocative new models for visual realism. Nineteenth-century novel genres include domestic realism, psychological realism, social realism, and high or classic realism, as well as challenges to realism such as late-century romance. We'll examine the approaches to, revisions of, and departures from different kinds of realism in novels by Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy, and Doyle. We'll also be reading nineteenth-century literary criticism, nineteenth-century science, current literary criticism and theory, and history of science.

Fall08 LAE5370 
TEACHING ENGLISH IN COLLEGE  
Deborah Coxwell-Teague 644-3164, WMS222E, dteague@fsu.edu

This course is designed to help prepare new graduate teaching assistants in FSU?s Department of English to teach our first-year composition courses.

We will examine current perspectives, theories, and directions in composition teaching, and we will also take a close look at composing processes. In addition, we?ll study writers' and teachers' roles in the classroom, collaboration, and the relationship among speaking, writing, and reading. Our goal is to develop a teaching philosophy that synthesizes composition theory, our own teaching styles, curricular requirements, and student needs. We will ask questions such as "What do we teach and why? What do we not teach and why? Who are our students? How do I teach and why? How do I respond to student writing and why? How do I evaluate student writing and why?"

Students will also develop college teaching skills, knowledge of workshop formats, reading and response techniques, strategies for handling grammar and mechanics, and knowledge of invention and revision techniques. Study of these elements will help students meet the second goal of the course: to develop confidence and a repertoire of teaching strategies for college composition classrooms.

Fall08 LIT5309 01
Studies in Popular Culture  TR 2-3:15 p.m
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 323, ledwards@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 the cultural studies, Marxism, political economy, populism, audience studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postmodernism. Our focus will be on U.S. culture, but we will consider questions of globalization and make use of transnational critical frameworks.

Fall08 LIT5388 01
Studies in Women's Literature: "Women (Re)Writing the Canon."  
Celia Daileader 645 6478, WMS 439, cdaileader@fsu.edu

This course examines feminist, womanist, and/or minority interventions in the Anglo-American literary canon dominated by such figures as Shakespeare, Poe and Faulkner. Our starting point will be to problematize the notion of a monolithic list of "great works" in English by positing a "counter-canon" composed of critiques, appropriations, and revisions of the classics by women authors from Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison and beyond. Ultimately we aim to better understand the mechanics of canon-formation and to appreciate the rich space of interaction between margin and center of a literary tradition.