Graduate Course Descriptions, Ordered By Course Number

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.

Spring08 AML5017 02
Studies in U.S. Literature to 1875: Epidemiology on the Literary Landscape 
Cristobal Silva 644-1771, WMS 229, csilva@fsu.edu

This course investigates early American writings about illness and epidemic to understand the influence they had in transforming the national landscape from a "vacant wilderness" into a democratic Republic. Our readings will include histories, pamphlets, poems, sermons, and fictions dating from the colonial to the Republican eras and beyond. We will be guided by questions about the ways that epidemiological classifications represent political, gender, and racial categories in order to theorize what we might call the biological evolution of American identity, and the formal evolution of American national narratives. Our reading of secondary source material -- including Cindy Patton's Globalizing AIDS -- is designed to help us explore the parallel concerns about the status of citizenship and nationhood in both early-American and twenty-first-century materials. This class is interdisciplinary in nature, and will therefore ask us to think about the nature of literary criticism, cultural studies, and medical practices.

Spring08 AML5017 01
Studies in U.S. Literature to 1875: Whitman and Dickinson: Sex, Text, and the Body 
Paul Outka 644-2619, WMS 228, paul.outka@fsu.edu

The purpose of this course is two-fold: First, it will provide the opportunity to read extensively in the work of two of America's most significant poets. We'll read most of Whitman's poetry, all of Dickinson's, and a substantial selection of both writers' prose as well. Discussion will alternate authors biweekly to encourage intertextual connections between two artists at once sharply different stylistically and culturally, and yet profoundly linked by (among many other things) their queer sexuality, the textuality of gendered embodiment, the creation and politics of authoritative voice, and an engagement with the wider culture. Second, the course will take up a range of pertinent theoretical discourses in the secondary critical work on each author, including queer theory, gender theory, embodiment, and cultural studies,. The course will require regular class participation, a critical review, and a seminar paper.

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).

Spring07 AML5027 
AMERICAN FICTIONS BETWEEN THE WARS  
Fenstermaker, John - 644 1780, WMS223B, jfenstermaker@english.fsu.edu

We will consider contemporary visions of America as subject and theme in fictions published between the Wars (roughly 1920-1940). Together we will discuss works by six authors and add two films: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Horace McCoy, Steinbeck, Wilder; Andy Hardy, Stagecoach). Papers and reports will allow discussion of other writers, e.g., Stein, Cather, Lewis, Toomer, Parker, Miller, Hurston, O'Neill, Hellman, Arlen, Agee, Mitchell, Wright. We will discuss depictions of American culture from various perspectives but will continually note among characters in the texts an often romanticized memory or vision of time and history, and of the past as it impinges on the present. There will be two short papers and a term paper / oral report; the latter will focus on the general cultural moment of a significant literary or historical event or on a contemporary issue touching upon the idea or the condition of America in the period of our inquiry.

Spring08 AML5027 01
Ernest Hemingway: Then and Now  T 6:45-9:30. WMS 225
John Fenstermaker 644 1780, WMS 223B, jfenstermaker@fsu.edu

We will read, discuss, and write about Hemingway's fiction, considering the author as artist and thinker. What is the place (meaning) of that art and thought today--for the American who reads, for the student of cultural history, for the literary canon. . . -- Nearing the close of the 20th century, the MLA annual Bibliography recorded more published scholarship in 1995 devoted to Hemingway than to any other American writer of the 20th century. Critics have claimed much for Hemingway's cultural importance. Rena Sanderson observes that when he arrived at young manhood, there was a struggle . . . between men and women over personal and sexual freedom, economic independence, and political power . . . [affecting] his thinking and writing about women. . . . [A]nyone who wants to understand the confused history of gender relations in twentieth-century America would do well to read him closely." Despite such critical (and biographical) discourse, we know that we have no direct access to the person Hemingway--only to his texts. Thus, his published words constitute the materials of our enterprise. Regarding Hemingway's words as style, Roger Rosenblatt, on the occasion of Hemingway's 100th birth date in 1999, observed: "But the key to all was [as Hemingway had said] one true sentence, and going on from there, true sentence after true sentence, until what one produced was the truth, and that, oddly, was pure fiction. . . . What he did with truth-telling was to show how complicated the simplicity of it was. . . . He repeated words and phrases over and over, until he perfected a style as plain as the nose on your face, and just as indispensable. In so doing, he changed the rules of writing." Reading closely, making the words palpable, we will experience Ernest Hemingway's art and ideas in the stories and five novels.

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.

Spring08 AML5296 01
STUDIES IN AMERICAN MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURE  
Christopher Shinn 644-7430, WMS 432, cshinn@fsu.edu

This course approaches the study of Asian American, African American, and U.S. Latino/a literatures and cultures through a critical analysis of migration, diaspora, postcoloniality, worldliness, transnationalism, the borderlands, comparative ethnicities, race, gender, technology, and globalization. Writers may include Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Kaiji Kawaguchi, Laura Joh Rowland, Martin Delany, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Malcolm X, Gayl Jones, Francisco Goldman, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Julia Alvarez. Special attention will be given to the ways that national literature constructs its putative borders against which we read the discordant mappings of modern diasporas and the global order. Beginning with theories of migration and exile, we will investigate how literature works to narrate the nation and how the geopolitical constructions of the Black Atlantic, the Asia-Pacific, the Pacific Rim, South Asia, the Borderlands, Third Space, and the U.S-Caribbean Divide, complicate our understanding of national culture as well as reinforce our critical assumptions about new forms of territorial sovereignty and postnational geography. In so doing, we hope to interrogate the ways that we commonly speak of "citizens," "aliens," "exiles," "migrants," "immigrants," "foreigners? and "refugees," as we increasingly find ourselves confronting what Ohmae Kenichi has called a "borderless world." Assignments include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages), class presentations, and a final research paper (approximately 12-15 pages).

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.

Spring08 AML5608 01
What Happens to Chosenness, Chosen Figures, and Civil Rights When They Meet the African American Literary Imagination?  
Robert Patterson 645 6863, WMS 445, rjpatterson@fsu.edu

At the intersections of African American literary studies and womanist and black liberation theologies, this interdisciplinary graduate seminar will explore representations of Chosenness in the African American literary tradition. Referring to the biblical Exodus narrative, the trope of Chosenness suggests that God selects specific group and/or individuals through which to reveal Divine power. Understanding their experiences of disenfranchisement in the United States as similar to the Israelites' in the Exodus story, African Americans, from slavery until the present, have considered themselves Chosen. Correlatively, their civil rights movements for political enfranchisement have consistently invoked the notion of a Moses-like figure, who holds the responsibility of leading the group in obtaining its rights. Nevertheless, following the 1960s civil rights movement, where Dr. King reified the notion of Chosenness and embodied the notion of an ideal Chosen figure, this formulation of political leadership has become heavily critiqued because of its emphasis on one sole leader, exclusivity, and perpetuation of disenfranchising ideologies about gender and sexuality. In fact, in the twenty-first century, the ideals of Chosenness and Chosen figures may even be bankrupt, despite consistent yearnings for a King-like African American political leader. In this course, we will examine how African American literature, from its inception, has reified and critiqued the ideals of Chosenness and Chosen figures. We will think energetically about the paradoxes of the metaphor-for example, how it at once advances notions of racial enfranchisement, but at the same time advances notions of gender disenfranchisement-and how the 1960s civil rights movement, and the subsequent rise of the disciplines of African American Studies, Women's Studies, Womanist Theology, and Black Liberation Theology propelled this critique. To that end, we will think about civil rights more expansively, to include categories of gender and sexuality, which the metaphor of Chosenness, as commonly deployed, separates from racial rights, as well as new forms of political leadership for the 21st century. A previous familiarity with womanist and liberation theologies is not a pre-requisite for this course.

Graduate students enrolling in this seminar should expect class attendance and preparation, a book review, a syllabus for an undergraduate African American literature course, a presentation w/paper, and a seminar paper to determine their course grade. Students should note that a seminar paper may be an extension of their presentation paper.

Required texts may include:

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.

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.

Spring07 CRW5130 02
Fiction Workshop  
Baggott, Julianna - 645 1744, WMS428, jcbaggott@aol.com

This course is an advanced level fiction workshop which will include investigation of published work and student work. Alongside the traditional workshop format, students will be required to engage in exercises that will hopefully lead to more textured stories. There will be mapping of plots, as well, which we will do collaboratively, at first, as a whole class. We will also be creating, throughout the course of the workshop, a backlog of story concepts, meaning that students will create storylines for possible future use and for exercise in the art of plotting. The workshop will culminate in a final portfolio.

Spring08 CRW5130 01
Fiction Workshop  
Julianna Baggott WMS428, jcbaggott@aol.com

This course is an advanced level fiction workshop which will include investigation of published work and student work. Alongside the traditional workshop format, students will be required to engage in exercises that will hopefully lead to more textured stories. There will be mapping of plots, which we will do collaboratively, at first. We will also be creating, throughout the course of the workshop, a backlog of story concepts, meaning that students will create storylines for possible future use and for exercise in the art of flexible plotting. The workshop will culminate in a final portfolio.

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.

Spring07 CRW5331 01
Poetry Workshop  
Kirby, David - 644 1534, WMS420, dkirby@english.fsu.edu

You will be submitting 12 new poems to Prof. Kirby. Half the class will present each week. In addition, you?ll be responsible for the following: (1) A portfolio consisting of a selection of your best work this term. Value: 70 points. You?ll be writing 12 poems for class; your portfolio will consist of revised versions of the best 10. (2) Presentation of a poem from Technicians of the Sacred: 5 points. (3) Conferences: 5 points. There will be conferences the weeks of January 15- 19 and April 16-20; you?ll come prepared with questions and poems to be discussed. (4) Bits Journal: 5 points. You?ll keep a journal of verbal ?bits? you can make poems out of, including stories, snatches of conversation you overhear, quotations from books, and so on. Note these two important dates: by January 29, give me 250 words describing your progress on this journal and on February 26, I?ll want to see the journal itself, which should be at least 5-6 pages long. (5) Revision report: 5 points. By March 19, you?ll give me revisions of your work thus far plus 250 words on what you?ve accomplished in the way of revisions. (6) Soul Siblings: 5 points. By April 2, I want a 500-word essay from you on three poets who write like you or from whom you?ve learned. (7) Mailable Manuscript: 5 points. This will consist of 3-5 poems (the cream of your portfolio), a cover letter, a SASE, and an envelope addressed to a magazine (but left open for my perusal). The mailable manuscript and portfolio are due April 23. A note on absences: any class missed for any reason is 5 points off. You can buy back those points by writing a 250-word review of a contemporary poetry book within a week of the absence. The idea is not to penalize legitimate absences but insure you have a quality experience even though you may have to miss.

Spring07 CRW5331 
Poetry Workshop  
Kimbrell, James - 644 0887, WMS309, jkimbrell@english.fsu.edu

This course will focus primarily on poetry written by its participants. We will carry these considerations out, however, in the context of a wide selection of poetry from outside the classroom. Assuming a solid basis in contemporary poetry on behalf of its participants, this course will create a forum in which students can begin to shape or re-shape their own first collections, one poem at a time, and is meant to go beyond the traditional workshop nuts-&-bolts format. Accordingly, we will examine a good deal of canonical poetry in the pursuit of understanding the origins and possibilities of our own writing. Each student will workshop at least seven poems each semester. Everyone will be expected to be very familiar with the poems scheduled for that week before the workshop and will be required to submit thorough written responses to each poem. We will focus as well on the art of the poetry review; each student will be required to submit one publishable review of a volume of recent poems.

Spring08 CRW5331 
Poetry Workshop  
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

This is an advanced course for those who are well underway in their poetic careers; the assumption is that you will have taken a version of our undergraduate Poetic Technique class as well as at least one undergraduate workshop. You will be submitting a new poem or part of a poem to me each week; you'll write either 12 poems or 400 lines total. Every other week, you'll be asked to bring multiple copies so the whole class can workshop your poem. You'll also be responsible for numerous craft exercises of the kind that professional poets undertake, such as outside readings, attendance at poetry performances, attempts at new forms or modes that are challenging to you, and other practices that make up the poet's daily life.

Spring08 ENC 5317 01
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Diane Roberts 644 1749, WMS 434, dkroberts@fsu.edu

Narrative Non-Fiction Workshop: where the "Reality Community" meets to practice truthiness in prose.

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.

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.

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):

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

Spring07 ENC5217 
Topics in Editing: Line-Editing  
Bickley, Bruce - 644 3243, WMS417, bbickley@english.fsu.edu

Designed for academic, corporate, agency, and free-lance writers and one of the Department?s standard Graduate Certificate in Publishing and Editing course-offerings. Thorough review of grammar, punctuation, proofreading, and style-editing. Line-editing practice and open discussion in large-group and small-group workshop structures. Electronic textual mark-up practice, online. Participants apply course principles to their own current writing and editing projects and to the work of their classmates. Our goal is to teach everyone how to edit confidently and competently almost any kind of professional prose--starting with your own prose.

Spring08 ENC5217 04
Topics in Editing and Publishing "Material Modernism: Avant-garde Writers, Their Readers and Their Publishers." Wms 116, M, W 3:35-4:50
S. E. Gontarski, 644 6038, WMS 430, sgontarski@fsu.edu

This course surveys and explores the issues related to publishing the experimental art of the 20th century. How did the most radical and experimental writers get published? Who made the capital investment in their work and what were the chances of adequate return on that investment that is the lifeblood of publishing? Who were the readers for this work, how were the works marketed to attract a readership, and what was the extent of that readership? In many respects then the class will examine the history of reading in the 20th century. Moreover, such related topics as the ethics of publishing (as well as the ethics of reading) and censorship of the new and daring art will be a major focus as well. We will conduct studies of the ?little review? and book review phenomena in both Europe and the United States as well as the emphasis on limited deluxe editions of Modernist writers. As Lawrence Rainey suggests (in Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture), ?by restricting supply [modernist writers] could exploit the limited demand for modernist literature, turning each book into an object d?art that acquired potential investment value for collectors? (154). On the other hand, the counter thrust in publishing was to develop an new mass readership for Modernism. The Modernist movement (as well as its publishers) seems caught between the tactical retreat from public culture that dominated the Victorian period to the postmodern embrace of culture as commodity.

This course qualifies for the ?Academic? requirement for the Certificate in Publishing and Editing as well as for the emerging M. A. in Publishing and Editing.

Spring08 ENC5217 
Line Editing  
Bruce Bickley WMS 417, bbickley@fsu.edu

An S/U practicum emphasizing grammatical and proofreading mastery and audience-mindful usage, syntax, and style. Features lecture and discussion, in-class workshops, and online editing instruction. Participants bring into the classroom mix their academic, corporate, government agency, freelance, and personal writing projects for large-group and small-group revising and editing practice, leading to publication.

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.

Spring07 ENC5317 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Roberts, Diane - 644 1749, WMS434, droberts@english.fsu.edu

The Reality-Based Community. In this course we will read various kinds of narrative non-fiction such as investigative pieces, memoir, reportage, essays etc. all of which will have some "literary" component (whatever that is). We will also produce our own projects, either stand-alone shorter pieces or parts of a larger work and workshop them. Participation and professionalism are essential.

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.

Spring08 ENC5720 
Research Methods in Composition and Rhetoric  
Kathleen Yancey 645 6896, WMS 224, kyancey@fsu.edu

A course in epistemology, that is, a course that takes as its focus both what we know and how we know in rhetoric and composition. Such a course is both disciplinary-taking up questions important to the discipline-and (as in many fields) interdisciplinary-begging, borrowing, and stealing methods from elsewhere to re-make them as the discipline's own. Because research methods in composition and rhetoric are diverse (including the historical, the theoretical, and the empirical), we'll read a diverse array of texts and create, as a class, a number of research designs. We'll thus review theoretical scholarship and critique large-scale studies, pose questions that guide historical research projects, and design studies relying on adapted social science methodologies. Projects in the course include 3-5 written reviews of research and scholarship; a research notebook; and a research design project that may lead to thesis or dissertation projects.

Spring07 ENC5933 04
Visual Rhetoric  
Neal, Michael - 644 4024, WMS444, mneal@english.fsu.edu

This course begins with the assumption that visual language is one of many available means of persuasion that neither displaces nor functions in isolation from other modes of communication. By studying visual rhetoric in the context of contemporary, popular culture, we will discover how frameworks used to explore written communication are sufficient for some discussions but insufficient for others when studying visual rhetoric. Visual messages are present in print as well as in digital form, in film and television as well as on pages and signs, and in layout and design as well as in illustrations and photographs. Visual rhetoric is equally relevant in the Rembrandt exhibit at the MET as it is on the t-shirts of the patrons who visit each day.

This course will begin by exploring several attempts to define and classify visual rhetoric and visual argument in order to get a sense of the depth and breadth of current scholarship as well as multi-disciplinary perspectives that influence our thinking about the visual. This will lead us to explore questions such as: What are the relationships among visual, oral, written, and digital rhetorics? What language is best situated for articulating visual principles in relationship to rhetoric? How do different disciplines and professions read, make meaning from, and compose visual texts? What influences do screens, hypertexts, and multi-modality have on visual rhetoric? How can/should the teaching of composition, literacy, and English be influenced by visual rhetoric?

Students in this seminar will be asked to read, critique, analyze, and produce a number of texts during the semester: visual, written, digital, and multi-modal. We will start by reading and writing about visual rhetoric with contemporary, popular culture images before moving into more sophisticated analysis, critique, and production of visual and multi-modal texts. The final project for the course will be a seminar paper appropriate for a conference presentation or a multi-modal essay on a student-selected subject. The course does not require any previous experience or expertise with digital technologies, though a willingness to explore and experiment with readily available composing technologies is essential.

Spring08 ENC5933 04
Designing Writing  
Michael Neal 644 4024, WMS 444, michael.neal@fsu.edu

This course begins with the assumption that writing and the academic programs that support it should be designed in response to current theories and research in rhetoric and composition. We will examine several themes across writing programs that concern design and observe how they play out in academic settings where writing takes place. The principal sites for writing we will study in this course are first-year composition, writing centers and studios, and writing across the curriculum. We will look at questions surrounding how, where, when, and by whom writing is designed and delivered.

Through investigating theories, research, and best practices in designing writing and its programs, we will explore questions such as:

Students in this seminar will be asked to read, critique, and analyze articles/chapters throughout the semester. They will need to understand the roles of the three major writing program divisions in the course as well as how they work together to shape a coherent approach to college writing. Students will produce a minor project for each of the three divisions and an in-depth project for the final.

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.

Spring07 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory  
Goodman, Robin - 644 9234, WMS324, rgoodman@english.fsu.edu

This course focuses on a specialized area of critical theory, in this case Feminist Theory. We will be looking at the development of what is known as the "second wave" of feminist philosophical thought, working through its seminal texts from Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler. We will consider feminist debates over issues that have defined feminism in a broad range of mostly humanistic fields, i.e. sexuality and the body, language, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, identity, the subject, queerness, discourse, performativity, race, class, the gaze, the division of labor. From early intersections with existentialism, to later poststructuralist interventions, this course will then look to postcolonialism in order to think about how feminism can respond to the current war and the global crisis in democracy, turning to the social sciences, and in particular anthropology, in order the reflect on issues such as fundamentalism and the veil, the post-industrial rise in service and "affective" labor, and the end of the state-centered myths of welfare and development. Readings may include the work of: Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Mies, Ahmed, Mernissi, Haraway, Gallop, Freud, Lacan, Bordo, Rubin, Firestone, Sedgwick, Mulvey, Moi, Abu-Lughod, Spivak, Ong, and others.

Spring08 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory Aesthetics and Politics  
Robin Truth Goodman 644 9234, WMS 324 rgoodman@fsu.edu

During the height of the poststructuralist vogue, aesthetic theory was neglected. Inaugurating itself in a book edited by an art historian who called the movement the "anti-aesthetic" and by an architect whose interests focused on buildings in the shape of ducks, poststructuralism was often concerned with a sense of the historical, the social, the popular, or power that had an inherent effectiveness, a functionality, a direct influence, or a desire for the referential. Many poststructuralist theorists were reacting against Modernist ideas on the autonomy of the aesthetic or formalist ideas about the internal integrity of the artistic product as being too-otherworldly, silent about its own position in reproducing the class struggle, or erasing the footprints of its own privilege or complicity. While Pierre Bourdieu, for example, talked about aesthetic taste as always interested and therefore embedded in material social relations, Foucault all but ignored the particularity of the literary in favor of the much more instrumentalized model of a "discourse" indiscernible from institutional networks, the circulation of specialized and professionalized languages, and the emergence of the modern subject.

In the wake of poststructuralism, many theorists are now asking if aesthetics got a bad rap. What does poststructuralist theory neglect, for example, if it thinks about the autonomy of the aesthetic as outside the political? What does it mean to give up a category that seems to question and even sometimes to disrupt late capitalism?s reduction of everything to instrumental rationality? Is there a way of re-politicizing the poststructuralist legacy by thinking about its distrust of aesthetics as itself a political positioning? Does the poststructuralist marginalization of questions aesthetic also marginalize questions of the human that would be essential to thinking about a cleaner environment, the end of imperialism, an alternative to militarization, a more democratic organization of the political? Is there a way of retrieving aesthetics now in order to get beyond the poststructuralist stalemate between, on the one hand, the representational needs of women, minorities, and people outside the West and, on the other, a model of language where representation is always uncertain?

Readings may include works by Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, George Lukacs, Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere.

Spring08 ENG5068 01
History of English Language  
David Johnson 644-0314, DIF 432B, djohnson@fsu.edu

ENG 5068-01, History of the English Language, is a course that traces the dynamic evolution of the English language from its elusive ancestor, Indo-European, to the present. The main goals of the course are to provide you with a bird's-eye overview of the historical development of English phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, graphics, and vocabulary, and to explore the cultural contexts of the language's growth and transformation from the Anglo-Saxon period on. In working toward these goals, we'll also give occasional attention to other topics that impinge on the language's history such as etymology, lexicography, onomastics, dialects, the influence of other languages, and problems in usage and idiom. If all goes as planned, by the end of the term you can hope to attain a basic understanding of the cultural and linguistic phenomena that have shaped the language we currently speak, write, and read; you'll be familiar with the methodology and terminology of historical linguistics; you'll be able to effect a reasonably accurate pronunciation of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English; and you'll gain some first-hand experience researching at least one aspect of the language from a historical perspective.

In addition to frequent reading and workbook assignments, the course?s requirements include two exams (a midterm and a final) and one short paper (roughly five to eight typed, double-spaced pages).

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.

Spring07 ENG5138 01
Studies in Film Biomedia, Biocapital 
Rai, Amit - 645 1459, WMS 226, arai@english.fsu.edu

This course traces the rise of a new form of power that continuously assembles together, with various effects, the affective body, venture capital, and different media platforms. We will call this the new media assemblage of contemporary biocapital. Following Kaushik Sunder Rajan, we define biocapital as a form of value extraction based in the informational and neurological substrate of the body (linking DNA-data, the ethics of the human genome, a yet-to-come neuro-nano-science, and the global strategies of the pharmaceutical and gaming industries). This course situates this machine of value in the projection of possibly lucrative and always fearful "futures," in the hype-hope-terror of contemporary finance capital and counter-terrorism: what constitutes value today is the hyped-up potential of certain "branded? technologies, in the contagious mediatization of terrorist threats. Hype-hope-terror is the unstable affective disposition of our common sense in the "age of the World Target? (Chow). Tracing a historical and theoretical trajectory from the thermodynamic models of nineteenth century mechanics (rooted in the labor theory of value, in the politics of representation and its attendant media, and imperialism) to the present conjuncture "in which the 'informational substrate of life' has been technologically rendered and made manipulateable and profitable" (Patricia Clough), this course introduces students to three related fields of enquiry. The first is the queer and feminist analysis of the "volatile body," that body which is continuously being refunctioned through its open and dynamic connection to media technologies and its unpredictable contagions. The second, is the postcolonial critique of the global affect economy, and the theorization of "quantum effects" in the production of hype-hope-terror value. Third is the post-phenomenological analysis of bodies in technologies (Ihde, Massumi, Hansen, and beyond): how do contemporary digital media technologies implicate the affective dynamism of situated (raced, classed, gendered, sexed) bodies, and what forms of negotiation are taking shape at the dynamic thresholds between bodies, media, and capital?

Possible Texts:

Spring08 ENG5138 
Studies in Film: Visualizing the Holocaust through Film  
Caroline (Kay) Picart 644 0734, WMS 453, kpicart@fsu.edu

This class uses an interdisciplinary approach (drawing principally from film theory, critical theory, cultural studies, literature, the visual arts, and human rights law) to answer the following questions:

  1. How do we construct a sense of "justice" and "human rights" in the face of the Holocaust?
  2. Is there a "proper" or "commensurate" way to represent the Holocaust through film alongside literature, art or critical theory?
  3. What is the role of memory (and institutionalized history) in our relationship to the trauma of the Holocaust?
  4. What roles do popular culture, and particularly film, play in visualizing the Holocaust?
  5. What roles do literature, visual art, and critical theory play in memorializing the Holocaust?
  6. How do film genre conventions shape the way in which we visualize the Holocaust?
  7. How do the different media/forms of expression (literature, poetry, art) differentially enable us and limit us in "getting at" the experience of the Holocaust?
  8. How does stereotyping of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other factors influence the way in which we sift the "facts" from the 'fictions" of representing the Holocaust?

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.

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.

Spring07 ENG5933 
Topics in English: Shakespeare, Performance and Presentism  
O'Rourke, James - 644-5202, WMS441 jorourke@english.fsu.edu

This course will introduce students to a new movement in Shakespeare studies called "presentism." During the past generation of Shakespeare criticism, the term presentism has been used pejoratively to describe work that supposedly lacked an understanding of an unbridgeable cultural gap between the early modern period and our modernity. Recently, some critics who have contested the fundamental principles of the New Historicism have also begun to describe their own work as "presentist." The central principle of presentism is that the critical force of Shakespeare's plays reaches into some of the most fundamental narratives that continue to shape our modern conceptions of sexuality, cultural identity, and the exercise of political power.

The nature of performance in Shakespeare's theater is a significant area of contention between the New Historicism and presentism. New Historicists commonly contend that early modern Britons were effectively interpellated into the dominant ideological formations of their culture through political forms of theatrical display, and that the theater itself, as it rendered its audience as passive spectators, functioned as a site for the reinforcement of conventional beliefs. One version of presentism, which draws on research into early modern performance conventions, adopts Bertoldt Brecht's contention that Shakespeare's plays employ a "naive surrealism" that made it impossible for either the performers or the audience to forget that they were participating in the construction of a story.

The theoretical framework for the course will be set out in readings from New Historicist and presentist critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Scott Kastan, W. B Worthen, Ewan Fernie, and Robert Weimann. If it arrives in time, we will also look at a volume of essays due out from Routledge in December titled Presentist Shakespeares. The plays we will discuss will include The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and Troilus and Cressida for discussions of gender roles; The Merchant of Venice and Othello for connections between race and sexuality; and a series of histories and historical tragedies (Richard II, Henry V, Macbeth and King Lear) for an examination of the symbolic forms of political power.

Spring07 ENG5933 03
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION AND CONVERGENCE CULTURE: How We Read, Write, and Make Knowledge in the Age of the Internet 
Yancey, Kathleen - 645 6896, WMS224 kyancey@english.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 write, the ways that we read, 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 writing? To answer these questions, we?ll consider briefly some earlier shifts in literacy motivated by changes in technology: from manuscript culture to print culture, for example, and from the ?private? knowledge of the 18th century to the mass culture publication of the 19th century. 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. 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. And Collin Brooke, in Linga Fracta, suggests that through skillful electronic ?networking,? we both create new knowledge and represent it in new ways.

After completing this course, you?ll be able to identify both the significant questions currently in play around digital culture and a range of perspectives on those questions. You?ll be able to cite key works in, and thinkers commenting on, network culture and to understand how they talk to, around, and across each other. And you?ll be able to consider what all this means for education, now and in the future. 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; we?ll write in print and online; we?ll talk and present to each other; we?ll 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?re 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.

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.

Summer06 ENG5933 03
Issues in Literature and Cultural Studies  
Kirby, David - 644 1534, WMS420, 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, first by looking at some "specimen texts"; then by reading a variety of essays articulating dominant theoretical viewpoints; and finally by looking at the specimen texts again to see how theory changes our view of them. Readings and discussions will examine the development of literary theory over the last 150 years and emphasize the practical applications of recent developments in structuralism and post-structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural studies, gender studies, queer theory, and reader response; approaches emphasizing ethics and aesthetics will be examined as well. These categories are not always mutually exclusive, so while we will begin by considering pure laboratory forms of these movements, we will also consider how they often combine, interact, and play off each other.

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.

Spring07 ENG5933 02
Modernism and 20th Century Philosophy  
Berry, R. M. - 644 5158, WMS437A, rberry@english.fsu.edu

It is probably the case that 20th century philosophy, at least in its continental version, would be incomprehensible apart from modernist literature, and vice versa. This course takes this relationship as its subject. We will survey the writings about literature and modernism by the major continental and American philosophers of that last hundred years, reading essays, excerpts, and portions of books by such figures as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, H. G. Gadamer, Gilles Deleuze, Arthur Danto, Theodore Adorno, J. Habermas, W. Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, J. F. Lyotard, M. Foucault, J. Derrida, Alain Badiou, Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Undboubtedly that list will prove too ambitious, but we will try at least to sample from it promiscuously Although the course will assume some familiarity on the students' part with modernist fiction, poetry, and drama, we will probably read some poetry by Paul Ceylon, short fictions by Kafka, and Beckett's Endgame, since these three figure so largely in 20th century philosophical writings. We also may have occasion to look at Artaud's writings on theater and the art criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. We will take as our inspiration and guide, the forthcoming book On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide to the Unruly (Fordham UP: 2006) from Gerald L. Bruns.

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.

Spring08 ENG5933 
The Poetics of Everyday Life: Twentieth-Century Writing and the Question of the Quotidian  
Andrew Epstein 644 8110, WMS 409, aepstein@fsu.edu

The concept of "everyday life" has emerged as an important organizing principle in recent literary and cultural studies, but as an area of inquiry it is still vaguely defined and hotly debated, filled with intriguing paradox and contradiction, and destined to invite rich new interpretations of literary works and movements. As one recent critic put it, "The everyday is everywhere in recent work in the humanities, but to what end?" This seminar will investigate theories of everyday life -- drawing on thinkers like Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Situationism, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, William James, and Stanley Cavell -- in order to better understand the obsession with dailiness, the everyday, and the "ordinary" in modernist and postmodernist writing and visual art. We will take up a series of influential and innovative literary works that articulate an aesthetics of the quotidian and the daily, that prioritize the ordinary, the small, and the everyday over the epiphanic and extraordinary, that probe the paradoxes of the everyday and its relationship to art. And we will see whether theories of everyday life, from sociology, philosophy, literary theory, and cultural studies, can help illuminate this terrain. Writers may include Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, Nicholson Baker, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bernadette Mayer. Vvisual artists discussed may include Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.

Spring08 ENG5933 03
PROBLEMATIZING American Exceptionalism  
Dennis Moore 644-1177, WMS 416, dmoore@fsu.edu

Exceptionalism describes that cluster of assumptions about America's being able to do whatever it pleases (think "city on a hill," in both its seventeenth-century and Reagan-era contexts). Yes, using the expression "America" in the preceding sentence is outdated -- as are those assumptions. To see this paradigm shift more clearly, we'll work with David Noble's Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Univ of Minnesota P, 2002). Donald Pease's entry on "Exceptionalism" in the just-published Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press, 2007) will help us put Noble's historicizing in a broader context: "New American studies scholarship has begun to document these antiexceptionalist movements. This scholarship is characterized by its understanding of globalization (rather than exceptionalism) as its horizon of intelligibility, and its practitioners have supplanted the "frontier" and the "melting pot" with the "borderlands" and the "contact zone" as the cultural tropes that inform their scholarship" (111). We'll draw on this Keywords collection throughout the semester, while reading plenty of materials from the earlier Heath Anthology of American Literature (including, yes, John Winthrop's 1630 sermon) and a couple of novels, including Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow's understated novel from the mid-1970s, when much of this huge shift was taking shape.

Spring08 ENG5933 05
ISSUES LIT/CULT STDS  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 226, asrai@fsu.edu

This course introduces students to various methods of contemporary cultural, media, and literary analysis. By situating different theories all within the purview of a methodological project, the emphasis will be on building a viable and pragmatic box of tools with which a practice can proceed and become... What? That "what" is the open-ended basis of this syllabus because it depends on the particular domain of intervention that each of you negotiates and creates within and beyond this course. Those domains--all of which have durations, histories, evolutions, processes--will sometimes overlap, sometimes diverge, and always after a time dissolve. Through reading short fiction (stories by Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, and Bruce Sterling), a novel (Amitav Ghosh's Calcutta Chromosome), and viewing film and media, we explore what theory can do. We begin with three early traditions of aesthetics: Brahmanic (Bharat Muni, Natyashastra), Buddhist (D. T. Sazuki and others), and Aristotelian (Poetics). We begin with one overarching question: what is the relation between representation and the body? Throughout the course, we develop concept-tools from these traditions such as representation-mimesis, plot-thought-order vs. character-surface-sensation, desire, subalternity, subjugated knowledge, pragmatism, juice-mood, stillness, becoming-being, context, subjectivity, sensory-motor circuits, and form. Through these concepts we situate contemporary Western criticism within an international and transdisciplinary frame. We will also take seriously the lessons the physical sciences offer humanistic hermeneutics (breaking down the binary of science=causality vs. humanities=interpretation) by considering the philosophical implications of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamical theory of Ilya Prigogine, Manuel Delanda, Stuart Kauffman, and David Bohm, among others.

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.

Spring07 ENG5956 
Studies in Victorian British Literature, Novels and/in Magazines: Serial fiction and Victorian periodicals 
Kennedy, Meegan aka Margaret Kennedy Hanson 644 7771, WMS413, mkennedy@english.fsu.edu

Listed on FSU Registrar website under Margaret Hanson

Victorian literature and culture was signally shaped by two related developments: the explosion of new periodicals for all audiences, and the serial publication of novels, whether in these periodicals (as with most of the novels we will read) or in individually-sold "parts" (as with the novels by Dickens and Thackeray). We will consider how serial publication affects novels' construction and reception. The class will also study, more generally, the rise of periodicals and of mass literacy; the social history of a range of periodicals including literary, political, and medical periodicals and their role in the British Empire; the imagined class and gender of various audiences; and the class and political alliances of particular publications. How does the periodical function as context and setting for literary work? How do its illustrations, nearby texts, and even advertisements shape readings of novels? Finally, we will examine the vexed relation between authors, editors, and critics as it emerges in periodicals' pages. Probable readings include Dickens, Pickwick Papers; Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Gaskell, North and South; Eliot, The Lifted Veil/Brother Jacob; Collins, The Moonstone; Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds; Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Spring08 ENG5998 05
Contemplation and Reflection 1 credit Reading Group 
Kristie Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 447, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu

Reflection has played a role in composition studies since the inception of the process movement, although the role that it plays has diversified over time. In this part of Contemplation and Reflection, we?ll take an historical approach, looking at reflection through four lenses: (1) its role in writing process; (2) its role in self-assessment and in transfer of learning; (3) its role in making knowledge more generally in a variety of disciplines; and (4) current questions surrounding reflection, including how it may change in digital environments.

While reflection is an integral part of composition studies, contemplation has a less central position in the discipline. Associated with meditation, silence, and mysticism, contemplation has, if anything, been marginalized from mainstream disciplinary conversations. To renew attention to contemplation, we have chosen selections that align with the four categories organizing the readings on reflection: writing process, learning, knowledge making, and current questions. We hope that you will see these texts as conversing with one another, a prelude to the conversations we hope to have as a class.

Spring07 ENG6939 
Novel Seminar  
Winegardner, Mark - 644 3542, WMS418, mw@english.fsu.edu

The object here is to write a real novel, not to perpetuate a class assignment. It's also a seminar (capped at 12), so we'll be able to adapt what we're doing to the needs of your novel. Whether you are about to start a novel or in the homestretch, if you want to have the book done by December of 2007, this class may be for you.

While I'll adapt the requirements to the individual student, for most students this seminar will focused on getting your novel up and running, on making the first 100 or so pages of it strong enough that the book moves solidly beyond the realm of file-drawer novel. Ideally, nothing will come before the workshop unless the entire class has read the entire novel up to that point. If, by the end of the term, your novel is working reasonably well, you may pursue course credit for it (as a DIS or via dissertation/thesis hours) for the remainder of 2006.

You'll begin the semester by writing a proposal for the novel (I've sold my last three novels that way). After that, we'll move on to workshopping everyone's novels, coupled with a a careful study of what the opening of a novel does.

As for the latter task, you'll be asked to make a study of the first 100 or so pages of several novels (these could/should be books from your reading list, and can of course be books you've read before).

As for the former: workshopping a portion of a novel can be as absurd as work-shopping a scene of a story. It's crucial (in the case of your peers' work) to focus on the segment of the story before us and to quell any attempt to create a novel written by committee. It's equally crucial (in the case of your own work) not to cater unduly to the committee. Your novel is more important than this class.

You should run at least 20,000-30,000 words (60-90 pages) worth of work through class workshops, ideally in three or four workshop slots. Exactly how much you turn in to the class, and in what-sized chunks, is negotiable. (However: any time you're planning to submit a chunk of more than 10,000 words, let me know a week before you do so.)

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.

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).

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:

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.

Spring07 ENL5216 
Studies in Middle English The Myth of ‘Middle English’ 
Treharne, Elaine - 644 5776, WMS422 

This course will focus in detail on up to six key texts produced from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries to examine what 'Middle English' might mean. By investigating the genesis, composition and contemporary reception of these texts (a saint's life, a sermon, a chronicle, a debate, a romance, and a religious satire), we shall uncover how, why and in what circumstances prose and poetry came to be written, read and understood. We shall begin by analysing the manuscript context of each work, looking at the scribe's performance; we shall evaluate the interventions of other readers who have left their marks in the manuscripts; and we shall consider the interpretation of these texts by modern critics, who so frequently seek to decontextualise, label and close-off texts in ways that contemporary writers and readers simply would not conceive of. A key question is, of course, what is 'Middle English' in the middle of? How did those writers from c. 1050 to 1450 regard themselves and their work? Why do the modern arts and humanities insist on the false boundaries caused by periodisation?

Students will be expected to acquire the skills for reading manuscripts and weekly work will seek to hone these skills. Students can choose to produce a mini critical anthology of excerpts of later medieval texts; or to submit a portfolio consisting of manuscript transcriptions together with a detailed reading log. Packs will be supplied for the course, though it might be helpful if students bought my Anthology (!), Old and Middle English: An Anthology, by Blackwell Publishers.

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

Spring07 ENL5227 01
Studies in the Renaissance: Focus on Milton  
Boehrer, Bruce - 644-3029, WMS112a, bboerher@english.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.

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.

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.

Spring08 ENL5227 01
Studies in the Renaissance Art, Technology, and the Invention of Knowledge in the Renaissance 
Elizabeth Spiller 645-1543, WMS 427, espiller@fsu.edu

Course description: This course offers an introduction to the works and ideas that defined Renaissance literature and does so from the perspective of the scientific inventions and discoveries of the early modern age. In a shorthand way, we will be interested in the three inventions that, in Francis Bacon?s famous aphorism, defined the early modern age: that of the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass, along with a few that Bacon does not mention. We will look at such topics as: the shift from Aristotelian physics to mechanical arts and experimentation, humanism and the rise of early modern science, the invention of the telescope, the dominance of Galenic humoralism and the challenges from Paracelsian iatrochemistry, rise of mechanism, and the founding of the Royal Society. We will see how the inventions of science and the discovery of facts also led unexpectedly to the creation of fiction. Our primary emphasis will be on understanding major writers and thinkers of the period and the intellectual movements with which they are associated; our secondary critical focus will be to think about how we organize knowledge into categories and disciplines. Works by: Pico della Mirandola, Vespucci, More, Galen, Paracelsus, Galileo, Bacon, Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Hobbes, Hooke, and Cavendish, among others.

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:

Summer06 ENL5236 
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature  
Ward, Candace - 644 1833, WMS 113, cward@english.fsu.edu

Course Objectives

This course-which is taught as a linked summer course, with approximately 25 undergraduate and 10 graduate students enrolled-is intended to introduce you to representative works and figures of the literary period from 1660 to 1800. Alongside poetry, prose, and drama, we will examine non-literary texts as well, texts that, like the literature, reflected and produced the cultures of eighteenth-century Britain. In addition to examining historical, political, economic, and gender-related issues of the period, we will explore some of the critical approaches to eighteenth-century studies, and discuss how the study of eighteenth-century texts is relevant to other areas of literary studies and to our lives outside the classroom.

Throughout the semester, you will be called on to discuss these texts and write about them in formal and informal papers and on exams. In order to successfully fulfill the requirements, you must demonstrate not only a familiarity with the texts and contexts (i.e., background information provided in lectures, class discussions, and independent research), but also an ability to communicate your ideas using the critical and analytical techniques that characterize literary and cultural studies.

Course Requirements