Fall 2009

Fall09  
Poetry Workshop  
Erin Belieu WMS 326, ebelieu@fsu.edu

This workshop will be conducted in the traditional workshop format. You will be required to turn in poems weekly. Also, at some point in the semester you will be asked to give a 20 minute presentation on one of poetry's "unsung heroes/heroines." The idea is for each student to discover a poet (from any time period--your choice) who, in our present moment, we may have failed to consider fully. These don't have to be utterly obscure writers, more poets who've momentarily fallen out of fashion who would be good to revisit. Examples of such writers would be Louis MacNeice, Mina Loy, Faulke Greville, Janet Lewis, George Meredith, Weldon Kees, etc.

Fall09 AML5017 
Studies in American Literature to 1875: Colonial American Landscapes  
Cristobal Silva WMS 229, csilva@fsu.edu

Our aim in this class will be to think through the political, theological, literary, and scientific formulae that helped shape conceptions of space in the New World, and to investigate how the spatial experiences of colonial exploration and settlement impacted upon early American identities. At each moment of our investigation, we will test the limits of terms such as America, space, geography, nature, and exploration so that we may arrive at a better understanding of the cultural imaginings that bind landscape and identity. We will, for example, seek to understand how conceptions of space are unexpectedly framed by politics and aesthetics; we will ask how race and gender inflect the experience landscape in the New World (and vice versa); and we will consider the inherent tensions of a process that gave legible shape to ?nature? while itself claiming to mirror ?natural? phenomena. Texts for this course will be drawn from a broad cross-section, including works by Thomas Harriot, John Winthrop, Richard Ligon, Mary Rowlandson, William Byrd, James Grainger, and Olaudah Equiano.

Fall09 AML5027 
Studies in American Literature Post 1875  
Timothy Parrish 644 4059, WMS 221, tparrish@fsu.edu

The course looks at the American postmodern novel and selected examples of postmodern theory. Postmodernism has many masks but is generally understood as a form of skepticism. All truths are partial, limited, expedient. To try to get a handle on a topic that often attempts to refuse handles, we?ll look at the "theoretical" work of postmodernist critics such as Hutcheon, McHale, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. But the course will be mainly novel driven and the novelists I expect to read include: DeLillo, Pynchon, Vonnegut, McCarthy, Roth, Didion, Ozick, Nicholson Baker, Evan Connell, Nabokov and, for continental contrast, W. G. Sebald. Feel free to write me with inquiries or suggestions. Seminar paper, presentation.

Fall09 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 intensively on the essentials of process in creating literary narrative. 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 until we all decide we?ve had enough of that. (This is the fifth Butler workshop to take this approach, and the other four freely and enthusiastically decided to stay with the short short to the end.)

Fall09 ENC5216 
Introduction to Editing and Publishing  
Ned Stuckey-French 644-2638, WMS 325, nstuckey-french@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

Fall09 ENC5217 
Topics in Editing  
Susan Hellstrom  shellstrom@fsu.edu

You will work together with your peers in this class to write, edit, and produce a newsletter for the English Department. Not only will you get a chance to sharpen your writing, editing, and interviewing skills, but you will also get a chance to learn some basic techniques in PhotoShop and InDesign, two of the most widely used graphics programs in professional publishing. Major assignments will include the journalistic, feature-style articles you write for the newsletter, while other assignments will include readings, reflections, presentations, and class discussion.

Fall09 ENC5317 
Narrative Nonfiction  
Diane Roberts 644 1749, WMS 434, dkroberts@fsu.edu

This is a workshop course with a strong reading component. Texts to be studied may include Domesticity by Bob Shachochis, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, DJ Taylor's Bright Young People and others. Students will have the opportunity to workshop pieces at least twice, either stand-alone essays or parts of longer works. At the end of the semester, students will present a portfolio of work including at least one potentially-publishable piece or chapter suitable for use as a book proposal.

Fall09 ENC5700 
Composition Theory  
Michael Neal 644 4024, WMS 223C, michael.neal@fsu.edu

ENC 5700 focuses the emergence of composition as a discipline, its theoretical evolution, and leading ideas that currently inform the field. We will examine the act of composing texts in a variety of modes (written, oral, visual, and digital) as well as the rhetorical contexts that surround composing for different audiences and purposes. We will study such key composition issues as theories of literacy, process, writing technologies, genres, collaboration, remediation, invention, difference, assessment, and new media with authors such as Janet Emig, Nancy Sommers, Sharon Crowley, Mina Shaughnessy, Richard Fulkerson, George Hillocks, David Bartholomae, Andrea Lunsford, Victor Villanueva, Cynthia Selfe, Beverly Moss, Kathleen Yancey, and Douglas Hesse among others.

The class will be an interactive graduate seminar that will feature weekly readings, class discussion, collaboration, short presentations, and a culminating project.

Fall09 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory: Theories of Modernism: Reading "As If" 
S. E. Gontarski 644-6038, WMS 430, sgontarski@fsu.edu

This seminar will explore the roots and varieties of the literary period we loosely call Modernism, roughly the first half of the Twentieth Century but the long view of the period reaches back to the mid Nineteenth Century and extends into the Twenty-first. Dominated by exiles, Modernism seems inherently international, interdisciplinary, cross cultural, and even perhaps pan-historical. The first problem we will encounter will be to separate the idea of the "modern," codified succinctly in Ezra Pound's catch-phrase "Make it new," from the literary, social and historical period of Modernism, and then to treat that period in its cross-cultural context.

The immediate problem here is the very lively debate about which historical period Modernism actually covers. Does it begin with Charles Baudelaire who published Les Fleures du Mal (Flowers of Evil) in 1857 (the same year Flaubert's Madame Bovary was published, at least in book form) and who used the term "modernism" about his work? Or does Modernism begin with Baudelaire's successors, the Symbolists, who were so influential on T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and William Butler Yeats, among other, that group we generally call the High Modernists? The enormously influential book here, particularly for English and Irish writers, is Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899, revised 1908 and 1919). Or does Modernism begin with the new "realistic" theater of Henrik Ibsen, whose Ghosts premiered in 1880? Or can we date the period from the publication of what may be--for better or worse--the most influential book of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, published conveniently in 1900? Or is Modernism essentially, in the narrowest definition of the period, a "between the wars" movement, that is, from 1918-1939.

The difficulties of dating the end of the movement are as daunting as those of dating its inception: 1939?, or the end of World War II, 1945? Or are we still in the midst of the Modernist movement, Postmodernism being merely a minor variation of Modernism, a difference not of kind but of degree? Is the real revolution, as critics like Harold Bloom contend, Romanticism's break with Neo-Classicism, Modernism and Postmodernism being merely part of Romanticism's ongoing evolution.

In addition then to examining Modernist stirrings in Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, in the theater of Artaud, we will examine at least three forms that Modernism takes: (1) the "high Modernism" of Proust, Joyce, Yeats, all those writers treated in Edmund Wilson's seminal Axel's Castle (1931), plus Beckett, who may be a transitional figure not only to Postmodernity but to German romanticism as well; (2) the Dada, Futurist and Surrealist forms of anarchic Modernism (if Proust and Joyce et al. are the "high" Moderns, Tzara, Breton et al. must then be the "low" Moderns); and finally, (3) Marxists theories of art like those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

We will as well approach our reading "as if"; that is, we will read theory "as if" it were literature, literature, "as if" it were theory, and we will examine what is to be gained from such a approach to reading.

Fall09 ENG5933 
PEDAGOGY WORKSHOP  Wednesdays--2:30-3:20 p.m.
Deborah Coxwell Teague 644-3164, WMS 222E, dteague@fsu.edu

Pedagogy Workshop is intended to provide you with continued support during your 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.

Fall09 ENG5934 
Issues in Literary and Cultural Studies:  "Shakespeare and the Early Feminists" 
Celia Daileader WMS 422, cdaileader@fsu.edu

Who's afraid of the big, bad, Bard? Virginia Woolf was not the first author to voice ambivalence toward Shakespeare's canonical status, endowing a fictional "Judith Shakespeare" with equal talent and ambition. In fact, proponents of gender parity both male and female critiqued his sexual politics long before the term "feminist" came into popular usage, and authors of his own age-in revisions and adaptations-sought to give more voice and agency to his heroines. This course will look at writings from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century that manifest resistance to Shakespeare's gender politics-with particular stress on Shakespeare's "sisters" Aphra Behn and Virginia Woolf. Requirements include an article-length research paper, weekly response papers, active class participation, and a conference-style research presentation. Students enrolled in this class will be expected to have studied Shakespeare and/or English Renaissance literature in at least one upper-division English class.

Required texts will include (but are not limited to): Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, Orlando, and The Waves; Shakespeare's "Sonnets"; The Taming of the Shrew, Othello; John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, The Feigned Courtesans, The Lucky Chance; Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Fall09 ENG5998 
A Wake for the Wake Finnegans Wake in Theory: The Finale 
S. E. Gontarski 644-6038, WMS 430, sgontarski@fsu.edu

The combined Finnegans Wake seminar, tutorial, and reading group will be reconstituted one more time this fall semester for its 14th consecutive (academic) year; that is, we have now completed (with some interruptions) 13 years of a projected 14-year seminar. The fall 2009 installment will thus be the Wake's finale, or a Wake for the Wake. As was the case these past 13 years, a mixed group of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, obsessive-compulsives, and Joyce incurables will meet weekly to read aloud this narrative sound poem and discuss that portion of the text. This fall's re-incarnation of the group will meet Wednesdays from 12-1:30 (more or less) and feature theoretical and source readings and include public performances.

For obvious reasons we have not historically begun each semester at the beginning (if that's the word) of the text. In fact, one couldn't begin at the beginning even if one wished since the novel has no beginning; its opening pages follow the final pages of the novel, nor has it an end since the final words of the novel precede the opening words. We conclude then (suspect as conclusions may be) that it matters little where one jumps into the process of textuality and constructed meaning so long as one overcomes inertia and jumps. Next fall we begin our leap with the final chapter that, in its turn, or turn and turn about, anticipates the opening of the novel. We are thus in the Prequel of sorts to the Wake. Our end is the thus the perfect place to launch a new beginning.

The seminar/tutorial is available this fall for 1 or 2 credits, but preferably for 1. This finale will continue the feature of close reading of 2-3 pages of FW per week, but since we are in the final chapter of the final book, the moment of ricorso, the (cracked) mirror to the text as a whole, a compacted if not impacted anthology of all its stories, we will focus much more on theories of the Wake in this final installment. Students taking the course for credit will need as usual to attend every weekly session, participate by taking regular turns at reading the text aloud, participate in the public performances, and present a seminar paper at one of those weekly meetings, this time on a major secondary or theoretical document.

I might add a bit of retrospection at this point--the group has produced at least one M. A. thesis, three dissertations nearing completion, a substantial number of conference presentations (including two this spring '09 term), and several published essays-these include Andrew E. Baumann's "The River Ever Runs, & Anna Calls": A Joyce-Deleuzian Billet Deux" in Hypermedia Joyce Studies 5.2 (February 2005); and most recently Nicholas Morris's "'Say yeh and wah say': Paronomastic Kenoma and the Idiotic Tetragrammaton in Finnegans Wake III.3," Hypermedia Joyce Studies 8.2 (July 2007).

Join us then for this semester-long Wake for the Wake. (1 or 2 credits only)

Fall09 ENG6939 
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, WMS 223B, kyancey@fsu.edu

Using several frames of reference, ENGL 6939-01 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 will 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? How are societies and public institutions reacting? As scholars and teachers, how do we respond to them?

What you just read in the paragraph above is the same description I've used in the two earlier versions of this course. In each, we focused especially on textuality, materiality, and community. This third version of Digital Revolution, Convergence Culture, and Web 2.0, however, is a "remix": we will continue attention to these three earlier topics, but we will re-frame them as we draw on a new set of readings. For a framework, we will use the rhetorical canons—invention, delivery, arrangement, style, and memory—as a lens for our consideration of how literacy is being challenged and transformed by digital technologies and Web 2.0 social networking. Our (new) readings will include Brown's The Social Life of Information; Shirky's Here Comes Everybody; Johnson-Eilola's Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work; Losh's Virtualpolitik; LaTour's Reassembling the Social; Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age; and Leesig's Remix as well as several articles and book chapters.

Course requirements include (1) considerable reading and writing (in print and online); (2) the creation of a blog or wiki; and (3) a project through which you will develop the expertise that comes from investigating a topic in considerable depth. Project options include individual work (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) and collaborative work (a creation of a website focusing on issues we address in the course; a set of themed interviews with scholars addressing these issues made available in multiple formats).

Fall09 ENL5206 
Studies Old English Language and Literature: The Language of Life and Death in Anglo-Saxon England 
David Johnson 645-9158, WMS 111, djohnson@fsu.edu

The cultural and historical entity that we refer to as "Anglo-Saxon England" lasted from about 500-1200. This period saw the production of literature, art and other cultural institutions that are still with us today. In this course we will explore the language of the Anglo- Saxons, focusing for the first six weeks on learning to translate what to many would appear to be a foreign language, but which in reality is the ancient ancestor of our own. Our choice of texts will allow us to gain some insight into how the Anglo-Saxons thought about this life and the one(s) to come, as well as the literary forms they gave such cultural expressions. We will read both poetry and prose from this era that deals with the timeless themes of life and death, from The Dream of the Rood to excerpts from King Alfred's translation of the De consolatione Philosophiae. No prior knowledge of Old English or any other synthetic language (such as Latin or German) is required or assumed. Please feel free to contact me for further details.

Fall09 ENL5246 
Studies in British Romantic Literature: The History of Sexuality and the Origin of Autobiography 
James O'Rourke 644-5202, WMS 441, jorourke@fsu.edu

Historians of literary genres tell us that the latter part of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of two new genres: autobiography and pornography. The word "pornography" first appears in print in 1769, and "autobiography" in 1786. While people had written about themselves, and about sex, before this period, in the eighteenth-century the focus of self-writing shifts from the spiritual autobiography to the scandalous memoir. This shift is not just a transformation of a literary genre; it reflects the emergence of the modern subject described by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, whose "deeply buried truth" is her "sex." In this course, we will look at Foucault's theory of the modern subject and at some of the most influential works that cross formal generic boundaries, yet share the characteristics of the "autobiographical pact" that emerges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Rousseau's Confessions, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, and Nabokov's Lolita and The Enchanter.

Fall09 ENL5256 01
Studies in Victorian Literature: Gender and Disease in the Victorian Novel 
Meegan Kennedy 644 7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

This class will examine how literary and medical texts negotiate the problems of gender and disease in the nineteenth century. How and why do novels negotiate medical "truths" of their time, from a sturdy constitution to a hectic flush, from diphtheria to phthisis, quinine to chloroform? How do they adapt medical theories--such as bodily economies of spending and saving, the climax of fever, or the telltale blush--to narrative ends? 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 Bront?, Elizabeth Gaskell, 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, critical, and theoretical texts on gender, sexuality, medicine, and Victorian culture. Assignments include a short presentation, an annotated bibliography and paper proposal, a conference-length paper, and a revision of this into a seminar paper.

Fall09 ENL5835 
History of Text Technologies  
Gary Taylor WMS 421, gtaylor@fsu.edu

"You can't have art without resistance in the materials" (William Morris). This course provides an introduction to the complex interactions between literary culture and the changing, overlapping, frustrating and inspiring media ecologies that have shaped the way we produce, transmit, transform, receive and interpret creative representations of human experience. Beginning with the two opposed categories of the ephemeral and the monumental (tattoo, graffiti, ballads, texts written on clothing or carved in stone, newspapers, blogs, "immortal" poetry), the course will then embark on a generally chronological tour of technologies and their literary forms: the diversity of manuscript (from Anglo-Saxon to Emily Dickinson), the evolution of print from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the history and theory of reading (including the ways that new technologies transform their users), visual texts, film, recorded sound, broadcast and digital media. Each of these categories will be explored through a combination of case studies and hands-on encounters, accompanied by at least one historical and one theoretical reading per week (with "guest star" appearances by other faculty).

This course is required for the new "History of Text Technologies" concentration, and also satisfies requirements for the editing and publishing certificate. But its overview of every period (including the future) also provides a foundation for literary and cultural studies more broadly. Students will be allowed and encouraged to focus their own written and oral assignments on the periods, media, or genres that interest them most.

Fall09 LIT5038 
Studies in Poetry: Lyric Textuality, Sappho to Donne  MW 5:15-6:30
Anne Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu

The course takes a long view of earlier lyric, considering how textuality and intertextuality operate in the history of Western poetry. Starting with the fragments of papyrus on which Sappho's lyrics are found, ending with the monumental scholarship of the Donne variorum, we?ll consider how lyric poems---poems of the lyre, first---change in taking silent textual forms. Materials and media are studied as essential, transformative, signifying features of the lyric text. Like a more traditional "history of poetry" course, this one will treat historical contexts, subgenres, forms, etc.; unlike a more traditional survey, this one will read poems (1) in facing-page bilingual editions so as to highlight translation as an issue particularly vexed and important for lyric, and (2) in multiple texts, watching for the mischievous play of variants and other effects of transmission. Authors to be read very selectively, for background, in the first five weeks: Sappho, Anacreon, Ovid (from Amores), Catullus, Sulpicia, the trobairritz, Dante, Petrarch, & a few Pléiade poets. Our ten weeks' time with English poets will begin with the polyglot Charles of Orleans, who wrote the first one-author book of lyric in English (c. 1440). We then consider issues of media and textuality in selected works of some earlier Tudor poets (Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne), some emblematists, a middle-class woman (Isabella Whitney), some sonneteers (Anne Locke, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare), and a pair of conceit-stretchers (Herbert, Donne) who have been variably textualized. Theorists, some of whom were also practicing poets, will be read as we go, in apt or jarring juxtapositions with the poems; e.g. Ong, Horace, Dante, Puttenham, Sidney, Daniel, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Culler, Kristeva, Eco, Genette, Bourdieu.

In addition to poems and theory, each week includes praxis in poetics (i.e., low-risk practice writing in the genre, mode, and/or forms of one of the week's poets). Non-poets will not be harmed, but it's a poet-friendly course. Wallet-friendly, too: more than half the readings will be on Blackboard or on reserve. Lectures, discussions, praxis, a final exam, an essay aimed at scholarly presentation/publication.

Fall09 LIT5388 
Studies in Women's Writing: Caribbean Women Writers  
Jerrilyn McGregory WMS458, jmcgregory@fsu.edu

This course is a comparative study of Caribbean women writers in cross-cultural perspective. The transnational contexts from which the complex roles of women will be examined include Jamaica, Dominica, Belize, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad. The course problematizes and foregrounds questions of hegemonic difference and the quest for a voice as a precondition for female subjectivity. Also, the course will interrogate the representation of many of the following keywords: Creolization, Exile (Ex/Isle), Mother Tongue, Othermothering, Magical Realism, Postcolonialism, Subaltern Discourse, and the Caribbean Bildungsroman.

Required Books:

Fall09 REL5497 
The Soul and the Self Readings in Christian Anthropology 
François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, 645 7586, fdupuigrenetdesrouss@fsu.edu

The aim of this course is to introduce students to a selection of major texts that address the metaphysical make-up of the human person in Christian thought during the medieval and early modern period. Motifs stemming from Greco-Roman philosophers, especially Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, were, for more than a millennium, reinterpreted through the lens of the Bible and the Revelation to create a religious conscience of the self.

From Augustine's Soliloquies to Montaigne's Apology for Raymond de Sebond, the texts for this course have been purposefully chosen to emphasize the centrality of Augustinian thought for all Christian authors, and of the figure of Augustine as God's interlocutor - hence the great number of apocryphal dialogues published during the middle ages under the name of the saint. After three excerpts from Augustine, very diverse texts are proposed: two sets of university "questions" (Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther), a dialogue in the manner of Plato (Petrarch), an academic speech (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola), two philosophical treatises (Nicolaus Cusanus, Pietro Pomponazzi), a satire (Erasmus), and an essay from the inventor of the genre (Montaigne). These texts will be analyzed as representatives of precise doctrinal views and of shifting historical mentalities and sensitivities. As such they will be confronted with literary texts, with works of art, or humbler documents such as sermons, private letters or wills. All texts exist in English translation, but students with knowledge of Latin, or French in the case of Montaigne, are invited to consult them also in their original language.