Graduate Course Descriptions, Ordered By Course Number

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

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

Spring09 AML 5017 
Indian' Captivity Narratives in Context  
Dennis Moore 644-1177, WMS 416, dmoore@fsu.edu

What does the so-called "Indian" captivity narrative tell us about the early modern culture that publishes and consumes it and about the culture of the captors? How central an ingredient is gender? (Hint: check out the thoroughly sensational John Vanderlyn painting from the cover of one of the books we'll be reading.) After reading Mary White Rowlandson's 1682 True History, we'll examine several subsequent variations on the story, drawing on two anthologies (Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives and Women's Indian Captivity Narratives) and two texts from the 1780s and '90s that re-worked the tradition (the epistolary fiction Letters from an American Farmer, by Cr?vecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown's novel Edgar Huntly). For context we'll read Mary Dearborn's Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture and The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, along with a couple of chapters from Joe Snader's Caught Between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction -- and, for good measure, Bharati Mukherjee's delightfull pomo novel from the mid-1990s, The Holder of the World, which makes clear that the rumors of this tradition's death have been greatly exaggerated. Rather than having a mid-term, we'll work on a couple of early stages of the research paper: each student will draw up an annotated bibliography and a prospectus, working toward a 15-page paper on a topic of the student's choosing. (How about a final? Yep, of the take-home, essay-questions variety.)

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).

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

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

Spring10 AML5017 
Studies in US Lit to 1875:  Evolution, Essentialism, and the Organic Sublime: the Nineteenth-Century Posthuman 
Paul Outka, WMS 228, paul.outka@fsu.edu

In the nineteenth-century transatlantic culture of Europe and the United States, a range of scientific discourses—medical, evolutionary, chemical, and environmental—began to suggest that human identity was physical rather than spiritual, a particularly complex expression of the natural. We became a part of the earth that learned to talk, rather than Beings who transcended the earthly. This constitutive similarity between self and world was, the course argues, an early version of what contemporary theorists of biotechnology call the "posthuman." The experience of the posthuman was often deeply disturbing, both to the subject immediately involved and to the wider ideological formations prevalent in the nineteenth-century that depended on a disjunctive relationship between human and nature. That collapse did more than rewrite the human in natural terms however—it also worked in the opposite direction, making nature itself part of the human. This reading of posthuman theory should help us see how nature pivoted in the nineteenth century from its early status as an unchanging realm that functioned as a sign of the ineffable divine, to an evolving and utterly material system no longer metaphysically different from other "artificial" mechanisms, and did so in a way that mirrored a similar redefinition of human identity from soul to body. Such a reading should complicate contemporary definitions of the posthuman as at base a merge between the human and the technological, insisting instead on a view that sees nature, the human, and the technological as all differently realized, but fundamentally and qualitatively similar material constructions. Readings will include both contemporary posthuman theory from writers like N. Kathryn Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Lennard Davis, and Cary Wolfe and a range of transatlantic literary and cultural texts, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, H. G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, Darwin's Origin of the Species, and selections from Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson and others.

Spring10 AML5017 
GENDER, ROMANCE AND EARLY AMERICAN NOVELS  
Dennis Moore, WMS 416, dmoore@fsu.edu

In the context of the renaissance currently underway on early American history and culture, and in synch with growing attention to the history of the book, this course will explore the growth of prose fiction in the century or so preceding the so-called American Renaissance of the early 1850s. We'll read Jurgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Cathy Davidson's brilliantly expanded edition of Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, as well as such early examples as The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and a couple of Charles Brockden Brown's titles from the end of the 1790s, including Wieland. We'll see what all the fuss was about, in Hawthorne's prefaces, about distinctions between "novel" and "romance." In preparation for writing a 20-page research paper, each student will prepare an annotated bibliography, then a prospectus, then a full draft; there'll be no mid-term, then, but we'll close with a take-home exam.

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.

Spring09 AML5027 01
STUDIES IN U.S. LIT SINCE 1875 Postmodernist American Poetry and the New York School of Poets 
Andrew Epstein 644-8110, WMS 409, aepstein@fsu.edu

This seminar focuses on the loose collective of avant-garde poets known as the "New York School," a group increasingly viewed as one of the most significant and influential to emerge in American poetry since World War II. As we engage in an in-depth study of the core poets -- Frank O?Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, among others -- we will examine their innovative responses to modernism and the European avant-garde (cubism, surrealism, Dada), as well as their perpetuation of an American avant-garde tradition stemming from Emerson and Whitman. We will consider their work both individually and collectively, and we will interrogate -- as the poets did themselves -- the paradoxes of the avant-garde itself, including the problems inherent in the very notion of a "school" of poetry (after all, O'Hara himself said "schools are for fools"). We will also investigate the interconnections between these poets and some of their contemporaries, like Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and will end the semester by looking at the work of several important poets who follow the lead of the initial movement, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley.

The course will examine this writing within the web of its historical and cultural contexts -- viewing experimental postwar American poetry as a response to the complexities of American culture during the Cold War era. Much attention will also be paid to the intersections between New York School poetry and developments in the other arts, particularly Abstract-Expressionism and other avant-garde painting (Pollock, de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol) and cutting-edge jazz and classical music (Parker, Monk, Cage). Because these poets are pioneering and major exemplars of "postmodernism," we will also tackle ongoing theoretical debates over the slippery definition of postmodernism itself. Throughout, we will assess the centrality of New York School poetics to contemporary American writing, as we examine how these poets radically re-imagine language and poetic form, wrestle with problems of individualism, community, and the self, and develop an influential poetics of the everyday.

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

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

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.

Summer09 AML5608 
Studies in African-American Literature  
Maxine L. Montgomery 644-1906, WMS 433, mmontgomery@fsu.edu

Our primary aim in this combined advanced undergraduate/graduate course is to examine tropes of migration, home, and exile in representative texts by contemporary Black women novelists in the African Diaspora. We will read and discuss works by authors such as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Jamaica Kincaid with a view to understanding the ways in which fictional works reveal nuances of the quest for self-identity in a specifically postcolonial setting. Theoretical writing by bell hooks, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy and others will serve to propel our discussion. Ultimately, our engagement with key texts allows us to map the geographic and metaphysical journey on the part of fictional characters in the move from a place of racialized subjectivity to a site allowing unhindered autonomy.

Course requirements include reading, regular attendance and participation; the completion of seven three-page analytical responses; and a ten to twelve-page critical essay.

Required Texts:

Spring10 AML5637 01
Latino/a Literature  
Virgil Suarez,  WMS 452, vsuarez@fsu.edu

This course will cover Latino/a Literature written in English from the emergence of Jose Antonio Villarreal's POCHO in 1947 (the first Chicano/a novel) to the present and the exciting work of Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez. Latino/a Literature--which contains thus far the work of Mexican-Americans (Chicano/a), Puerto Rican-Americans, and Cuban-Americans--is constantly growing, and like African-American Literature, gaining popularity. The work the course will focus on will be unified by the following themes and perspectives: the "Americanization" process, and the struggle to define, redefine, and attain the American Dream; the use of cultural myths; language & memory; gender; religion and spirituality; rural versus urban (the barrio) life; ideals and values; the role of Latino/a writers and poets; the question of universality and specificity. The reading load is reasonable and the rationale behind this "list" of required texts is that the student, during his/her student career, will unlikely run into these texts as supposed to those which have become popular. Of course, we will discuss and touch upon them as well.

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.

Fall09 CRW5130 
Fiction Workshop  
Robert Olen Butler 644 0238, WMS 411, rbutler@fsu.edu

The fall graduate fiction workshop under Robert Olen Butler will, as it traditionally does, focus intensively on the essentials of process in creating literary narrative. It will do so by proposing an aesthetic theory of the short short story as a distinct art form, and students will write only short short stories until we all decide we?ve had enough of that. (This is the fifth Butler workshop to take this approach, and the other four freely and enthusiastically decided to stay with the short short to the end.)

Spring10 CRW5311 02
Poetry Workshop  
Barbara Hamby,  WMS 419, bhamby@fsu.edu

Each class will be devoted primarily to discussing new poems by the workshop participants. However, each week on Blackboard I'll post a short reading from the letters of a poet, beginning with Byron, Keats, Dickinson, Rimbaud, and continuing with Rilke, Marianne Moore, Eliot, Stevens, Lowell & Bishop, Plath, and Ginsberg & Gary Snyder. I want to think about what it means to be an artist. Along with the letters I will post a contemporary poem from the last twenty years to discuss in terms of a poet's letters. Some poets I'm thinking of are Lucie Brock-Broido, Richard Siken, Matthew Dickman, Brenda Shaughnessey, D.A. Powell, Olena Davis.

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.

Spring09 CRW5331 01
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.

Spring10 CRW5331 01
Poetry Workshop  
David Kirby,  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. We'll also be engaged in other practices that make up the poet's daily life, notably reading and discussing a variety of contemporary poems. We'll be working mainly with three very different poetic voices that can be heard in these books: Michael Blumenthal's And, Matthew Dickman's All-American Poem, and Amy Gertsler's Dearest Creature. These will be required reading for everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

OBJECTIVES

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.

Spring09 ENC5217 
Topics in Editing - Line Editing  
Bruce Bickley WMS 417, bbickley@fsu.edu

S/U graded. This course links each semester with a cohort section for full-time state employees registering under fee waivers. Note: Topics and section numbers for ENC 5217 vary from term to term. Depending upon their own program restrictions, students can take a maximum of 12 hours in all sections of ENC 5217.

A workshop and practicum for academic, government agency, corporate, and free-lance writers that offers interactive line-editing instruction and experience. Includes a professional refresher on grammar, punctuation, usage, and active-voice, "plain-language" editing. Students bring their own current projects into the class. Course combines whole-class workshopping and online, electronic mark-up and editing practice using Microsoft Word's Track Changes and other tools.

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

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

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.

Spring09 ENC5317 01
Advanced Article & Essay Workshop  
Ned Stuckey-French WMS 325, nstuckey-french@fsu.edu

This course is an advanced writing workshop. We will spend most of our time critiquing drafts of each other's work in order to prepare that work for publication, but will also study published essays (from The Best American Essays of the Century, eds. Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates) in order to improve our understanding of the craft of nonfiction and the markets available for it. In doing this work together we will work to develop a community of writers intent on helping each other gain the courage, understanding, discipline, and ambition necessary to become working professionals.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Spring09 ENG 5933 03
Issues in Literary and Cultural Studies  
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

In a 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"; (2) next, we'll read a variety of essays 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. 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, gay and lesbian criticism and queer theory, 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. Please note that a grade of A is not automatic in this class. In classes of this type, grades of A, A-, B+, and B tend to fall roughly into quartiles.

 ENG 5933 
  
  

Spring09 ENG5028 
Rhetorical Theory and Practice  
Kristie S. Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 224, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu

This course explores 20th century configurations of rhetoric. We will do that by studying the influence of specific philosophers/rhetoricians (Richards, Burke, Perelman, Toulmin, Foucault, Grassi, Anzaldua, Haraway, Hayles, Gates, etc.), particularly in terms of a set of issues (agency, identity/community, materiality, and technology) that characterize rhetoric in the early days of the 21st century. While the focus is on 20th century rhetoric, we will be drawing on 2500 years of Western rhetoric to provide a background and context for the current moment. Thus, to understand Richards, we will examine 18th century Common Sense Realism; for Grassi, we will read Vico. To study the neo-Aristotelian Chaim Perelman, we will also study Aristotle. The primary focus, however, remains on 20th century rhetoric.

Course grades will be based on the following: 6 short (2-3 page) response papers, participation in online and in class discussions, and 2 10-12 page papers.

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.

Spring09 ENG5049 
Theories of Modernism  
S. E. Gontarski 644-6038, WMS 430, sgontarski@fsu.edu

This seminar will explore the theme and variation of Modernism, and recent attempts to recast or refurbish the enterprise. Dominated by exiles, Modernism has been inherently international, interdisciplinary, cross cultural, and even perhaps pan-historical. The first problem we will encounter will be to separate the idea of the "modern," codified succinctly in Ezra Pound's catch-phrase "Make it new," from the literary, social and historical period of Modernism, and then to treat that period in its cross-cultural, interdisciplinary context. We will seek to make some distinctions between Modernism and the avant-garde, and look toward not only post-Modernism but post-avant-gardism as well, or put more directly, the death of the avant-garde.

In addition then to examining Modernist stirrings in Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, we will examine one of the definers of the modernist sensibility in Henri Bergson, particularly Creative Evolution, but perhaps the earlier Matter and Memory as well. We will also follow the month by month debates about the issues of the new art in the periodicals of the age, particularly the Paris based, English language transition [sic] and This Quarter magazines.

I should note as well that over the years this Modernism seminar, taught both as a Humanities and an English seminar, has generated a significant number of major published essays, dissertations, and books. A selection of notable published essays includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring10 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory: Feminist Theory  
Robin Goodman, WMS 324, rgoodman@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 new trends in postcolonialism and the discourses of new global citizenship in order to think about how feminism can respond to the current wars and the global crisis in democracy, turning to the social sciences, and in particular anthropology, in order the reflect on issues which may include 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.

This course will focus broadly on feminism theory's relationship with three central cross-currents in theory: psychoanalysis, Marxism, and post-structuralism. Readings may include works by: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan Gayle Rubin, Helen Cixous, Seyla Benhabib, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Toril Moi, Juliet Mitchell, Michele Barrett, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, and Monique Wittig.

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).

Spring09 ENG5068 01
History of English Language  
David Johnson  djohnson@fsu.edu

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).

Spring10 ENG5068 01
Studies in Language and Literature -  Fetish, Relic, Monument, Thing: The Sensual Book 
Elaine Treharne,  WMS 447, etreharne@fsu.edu

From buildings constructed to resemble books, to collectibles and memorials shaped as open pages, to the structure and lexis of the Web and Kindle, the BOOK seems as present as a thing could be. This course seeks to unravel the sign of the BOOK—what it means, how it signifies and how it is signified.

We shall begin with an examination of the words and phrases involved in the description of a book from its earliest manufacture in the fourth century to the present day. Having defined what we mean by BOOK, we shall then investigate the emergence of the earliest books, paying particular attention to the ways in which they were made, used, and depicted. To get us into the spirit of looking at these old forms of the book, we shall read two or three modern novels that employ medieval manuscripts as code-holders, secret symbols, objects replete with meaning beyond the words on the page. Informed with the many aspects of the BOOK as concept, we shall look at a sequence of case studies: the book as fetish—bled upon, sexualised, ritualised; the book as relic—sacred, enclosing body parts, a means to salvation; and the book as monument—memorial for the dead, public and political artefact, prestigious power-broker.

All of our case studies will be paired with modern artists' books to show the infinite potential of the technology, the medium, and the message of the BOOK in all its senses (using all of our senses too).

Students will be asked to produce and present short reviews of textual and theoretical material; and they will also write a final research paper, which will include a discussion of some of the major issues raised during the course in relation to one extended case study. This final paper can also focus on the manufacture or reconstruction of a book.

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?

Spring09 ENG5138 01
Media Assemblage Theory  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 453, asrai@fsu.edu

Beginning with the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, we will explore in this course the relationship between the capacities of the body and a variety of contemporary media in the context of global capital. From postcolonial explorations of film (Bollywood, Hong Kong cinema) to experimental digital art (generative art, artificial intelligence art, video games), this course will give students a working knowledge of assemblage theory, emergent capacities, multiplicities, non-linear evolution, and media contagion.

Spring10 ENG5227 01
Art, Technology, and Knowledge in the Renaissance: Gutenberg and the Inventions of Print  
Elizabeth Spiller, WMS 323, espiller@fsu.edu

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. We will begin with what, more even than gunpowder or the compass, became the quintessential invention of the Renaissance, the printing press, but our ultimate focus will be on the ways in which knowledge itself became a technology?splitting the divide between the arts that Aristotle had dismissed as knowledge practices and the sciences that had not yet come into being as an intellectual category. We will look at: the shift from Aristotelian physics to mechanical arts, humanism and the rise of early modern science, the invention of the printing press and telescope, Galenic humoralism and the challenges from Paracelsian iatrochemistry, and the rise of mechanism and experimentalism. Most importantly, though, we will see how the inventions of science and the discovery of facts also led unexpectedly to the creation of fiction. Primary emphasis will be on understanding major writers and thinkers of the period and the intellectual movements and aesthetic traditions with which they are associated.Works by: della Mirandola, Vespucci, More, Shakespeare, Bacon, Galileo, Donne, Jonson, Hobbes, Milton, Hooke, and Cavendish, among others.

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.

Spring10 ENG5720 
Research Methods in Rhetoric and Composition  
Michael Neal, WMS 223c, michael.neal@fsu.edu

This research methods graduate seminar covers several of the principal ways composition and rhetoric scholars make and support knowledge claims. After an introduction to epistemology in the field, we will cover theoretical, historical, and empirical methods for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data. Students will learn to critically read research publications in composition and rhetoric as well as develop their own research questions and proposals for future studies. The course is an interactive graduate seminar, featuring the close reading, dialogue, reading response, research activities, and workshops.

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.

Fall08 ENG5835 
Editorial Theory from Jerome to JSTOR  
David L. Gants WMS 316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

Description: 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. http://english8.fsu.edu/Courses/ENG5835_F08

Texts:

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.

Spring09 ENG5933 04
Introduction to Humanities Computing  
David L. Gants WMS 316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

This class is an introduction to the field of humanities computing, with an emphasis on the techniques, tools and theoretical underpinnings as they apply to the analysis of literary works. While the syllabus includes a substantial amount of reading, the primary pedagogical focus of the course will be hand-on learning. Students will work both in and out of class on a series of exercises designed to familiarize them with: the UNIX operating system and the principles of systems administration; electronic text creation, mark-up and manipulation (including some rudimentary computer language instruction); digital image creation and the basics of graphic design; hypertext and hypermedia publication; digital pedagogies, and on-line discursive communities (such as blogs and Second Life). Work over the semester will lead to a final collaborative project where students will have the opportunity to concentrate on an area of special interest. This course does not presume any prior experience with electronic text, mark-up or UNIX, although students should have some familiarity with at least one operating system and supply their own laptop computer with an ethernet or wireless connection. http://english8.fsu.edu/Courses/ENG5933_S09

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

Pedagogy Workshop is intended to provide you with continued support during your first year of teaching in the FSU First-Year Composition Program. Preparation for teaching ENC 1102 in the spring and continued development of ENC 1101 teaching skills will be emphasized.

Summer09 ENG5933 
Critical Issues, Graduate Seminar  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 453, 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 science fiction stories and viewing film and media, we explore what theory can do. We begin with three early traditions of aesthetics: Vedic (Bharat Muni, Natyashastra), Buddhist (D. T. Suzuki and others), and Aristotelian (Poetics and Rhetoric). 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/memory circuits, and emergent 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 methodological implications of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamical theory of Ilya Prigogine, Manuel Delanda, Stuart Kauffman, and David Bohm, among others.

Summer09 ENG5933 
Visual Rhetoric  
Kristie S. Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 224, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu

In this course we will explore the fuzzy category of visual rhetoric as it plays out in our visually bedazzled Western culture, examining it from the perspective of the following questions:

  1. What is rhetoric?
  2. What is the visual?
  3. What happens when we put rhetoric and visual together?
  4. Does it matter how we put them together?
  5. Does it matter when (historically) we put them together?
  6. What is the scope of visual rhetoric?
  7. How might we teach visual rhetoric?

While we will not be able to address any one question in depth, my plan it to provide you with a foundation that will allow you to push forward with your own explorations after this class has ended.

Texts include Olson, Finnegan, Hope, eds. Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, as well as numerous selected articles available as PDFs in the course library of our Bb site or through Strozier's electronic databases.

Grades will be based on the following: 4 "project" journals (1 written, 1 digital, 1 scrap box, 1 lesson plan); a mid-term project (an exploratory paper of 6 to 8 pages examining the implications of "picturing" rhetorical theory or composition theory through the lens of the image; and a final project of 8 to 10 pages, that may consist of a proposal for a visual rhetoric research project, a proposal for a pedagogical unit of visual rhetoric, or an analysis of a visual artifact.

Fall07 ENG5933 
The History of the Book  
David L. Gants WMS316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

Course Goals. This course seeks to examine the rise of the codex book in western culture and its impact on individuals and institutions. It begins with a historical survey of the varied forms of textual reproduction used by different cultures, including the development of paper and block printing, vegetable and animal manuscript scrolls, and procedures for storing and cataloguing books. The bulk of the course covers machine printing from Gutenberg to the present day, with an emphasis on the main components of the industry: early print technologies of the common press, movable type and laid paper; state and trade institutions of regulation, control and distribution; the industrial age and the development of machine presses, mechanical typesetting, new illustration processes and mass-produced paper; shifts in patterns of readership and reception from the first Frankfurt Book Fair through modern mass marketing; and the current ?death of the book? age of post-modern readers, e-books and the Internet. http://english8.fsu.edu/Courses/ENG5933_F07

Course Requirements.

Primary Texts. This course has four required texts:

Spring10 ENG5933 01
The Book as a Material Object  
David Gants, WMS 316, dgants@fsu.edu

Books are eloquent witnesses to their own creation and reception. Each leaf bearing inked impressions of long-recycled letterforms and elegant autograph marginalia speaks to the eyes and the hands and the minds of those who made those marks. Watermarks hiding in the fibers of the paper hint at the aesthetic desires of those who twisted wire profiles into miniature icons and sewed them onto the waiting paper mould. Because it involves careful listening to what an object tells us, this course might also be called The Autobiography of a Book. It complements more theoretical and sociologically oriented History of the Book offerings by approaching the book as a physical artifact, exploring various methods of bibliographical analysis, and engaging in current scholarly debates. The syllabus consists of three dove-tailed sections: enumerative, where we will compile a list of books according to some organizing principle (author, journal index, printer or publisher, etc.); descriptive, where we will prepare a full bibliographical description of a book or books from their enumerative list; analytical, where we will write an essay suitable for publication in a bibliographical journal, preferably something dealt with in the first two sections.

Spring10 ENG5933 04
African American Literacies  
Rhea Lathan,  WMS 222f,  rlathan@fsu.edu

The purpose of this course is to explore distinctively African American approaches to epistemologies and pedagogies (knowledge, learning and teaching). We will take up the rich diversity in African American rhetoric(s) as well as literacy acquisition and use, which includes the retention of African derived ideologies and philosophies. We will begin by analyzing social, historical and theoretical perspectives within composition studies while examining variables within the field. Next we will analyze social histories that place African American women at the center of the collective structure of literacy studies. These histories contain analytical models critical to any study attempting to track literacy within an African American community. This is because African American women in the United States have traditionally assumed positions that initiate and sustain social and political crusades. Finally, it has long been argued that an Afracentric pedagogy is central not only to the success of African American students but a crucial means to broaden the knowledge base of all students, regardless of race, class or gender; therefore this course will explore theoretical paradigms surrounding this debate along with ideas on the best way to build an execute such a curriculum in composition studies.

The working assumption of the course is that knowledge is embodied, relational, contextual as well as structural, political, and abstract. The course introduces a variety of concepts as well as approaches to knowledge: it is not assumed that one approach is more reliable than others. However, each of these approaches relies upon coded practices, traditions, methods arguments, not immediate or intuitive knowledge. Students will be expected to engage and analyze these perspectives.

Few scholars have established the linkages between these approaches, however, each has received extensive attention in and of itself. We will do preliminary reading to familiarize ourselves with diverse African American perspectives in the field while exploring the following themes: social historical perspectives on African American Rhetoric(s); social and historical perspectives on African American literacy; African American traditions of writing acquisition, instruction and use; perspectives on African American women?s critical intellectualism. It is necessary to combine these perspectives in order to explore the full range of questions raised by this course. What is the future of literacy studies? What should be studied now and how? What are the legacies, meanings and functions of African American literacy acquisition and use? What are the intellectual traditions of community based African American people? And what are the implications of these traditions? In what ways do these implications impact contemporary Africa American adult literacy acquisition and use?

This is a very rapid reading course. Therefore, we will approach the reading with a particular eye to the difficulty of studying African American literacy in context and look carefully at the theoretical and methodological choices that the authors make.

Spring10 ENG5933 
Issues in Literary and Cultural Studies  
Barry Faulk, WMS 219, bfaulk@fsu.edu

This course is a survey of modern (post 1800) literary criticism and theory, and is the gateway Theory requirement for the Literature program.

Is there any other reason to take the class? After all, haven't some very smart people, including some who made their career writing literary theory, recently declared that Theory is Deader than Dead? Perhaps: but theory literacy remains foundational to the field, and English professionals consult the Theory archive first and foremost, to address the key questions of what we should read and how to read it, and how texts relate to other texts and historical contexts.

As the Book List suggests, we will read some writers who paved the way for contemporary theory (Marx, Freud, Saussure) as well as sample recent developments in the field.

Course Reading: (Leitch, Cain, etc. Eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Blackwell's, 2008).

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

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

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

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.

Spring09 ENG5988 
MEDIEVAL METHODOLOGIES  WEDNESDAYS 6-8PM
Nancy Bradley Warren 644 5077, WMS 216, nwarren@fsu.edu

This course aims to introduce graduate students to the core methodologies practised by medievalists, who, by the nature of the field, tend to be interdisciplinary (or perhaps better, multidisciplinary) in their work. Students will acquire an introduction to the principal elements of research, through this team-taught course, staffed by experts in their respective disciplines, and with two or more Faculty present for each session. By the end of the course, students will understand the major sources and approaches in medieval studies; have a grasp of where to look for information and primary resources; and how to use the many critical apparatus available to them.

Assessment will take the form of a portfolio to be presented at the end of the semester. This portfolio will contain a dozen completed worksheets, derived from individual weekly sessions that the student will submit to illustrate their understanding of each skills element of the course.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring10 ENG5998  
Reading and Re-reading Bergson  
S. E. Gontarski, WMS 430, sgontarski@fsu.edu

This weekly seminar is modeled after the sort of student-led seminars regularly held in the sciences to deal with particular contemporary issues. It will concentrate on the close reading and re-reading of two of Bergson's major works, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution in order to confront principle issues in Bergson studies in the aftermath of Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism. Collateral readings in other contemporary critics of Bergson will also feature in seminar discussions. Students taking the course for credit will write a detailed critique of one of Bergson's other books. Such a paper should be written as if it were a chapter in an anthology entitled, Understanding Bergson, which it may well become.

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.)

Spring09 ENG6939 02
Medieval Graduate Seminar Medieval Manuscripts: Their Makers and Users  
Elaine Treharne 644-5191, WMS 447, etreharne@mac.com

Course Aims5
This module aims to introduce students to Manuscript Studies from c. 400 to 1500 AD, from monumental script to the origins of the Western manuscript codex up to the origins of print. We shall investigate how literary and historical texts were created, produced, transmitted, and used, focusing particularly on materials in English, but also looking at manuscripts written in other, major European languages. During this course, students will acquire a number of valuable transferable skills that result from the meticulous reading and interpretation of the manuscript page in its physical context: the weekly assignments will introduce students to the skills of codicology (the study of the physical make-up of manuscripts), palaeography (the describing and analysis of ancient scripts), transcription (the reading and interpretation of writing in manuscripts) and editing (the conversion of original manuscript texts into modern readable forms). Students will handle manuscripts, learn how to prepare parchment, and understand-through emulation-how particular scripts were written and the ideological significance of writing and its media of presentation.

By the end of the module students will have attained:

Course Texts
Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Chicago, 2008)

Assessment
Assessment will be by combination of weekly transcriptions, a presentation, a mid-term, and a final paper on manuscripts to be chosen with the professor's approval.

Fall09 ENG6939 
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, WEB 2.0, AND CONVERGENCE CULTURE: How We Read, Write, and Make Knowledge in the Age of the Internet  
Kathleen Yancey 645-6896, WMS 223B, kyancey@fsu.edu

Using several frames of reference, ENGL 6939-01 will explore two related questions. First, what difference does technology, especially digital technology, make in the ways that we read, the ways that we compose, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared? Second, what do the changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and composing? To answer these questions, we will consider briefly the relationship between literacies and technologies, marking the shift from manuscript culture to print culture; and from models of private knowledge to mass consumption of knowledge abetted by mass media and the role of politics, economics, and ideology in each shift. Our focus, however, will be on the changes that are occurring now: What are they? What do we make of them? How are societies and public institutions reacting? As scholars and teachers, how do we respond to them?

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

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

Summer09 ENL 5227 01
Studies in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare  
Daniel Vitkus 645 0100, WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

Students will read, discuss and analyze five plays by William Shakespeare. During the first week, we will study the historical and theatrical contexts in which Shakespeare lived and for which he wrote. During the rest of the course, we will focus on individual plays, paying close attention to the details of Shakespearean language while exploring broader issues of interpretation. As much as possible, the class will view and discuss film versions of the plays in order to understand these texts as scripts for performance. Students will also read primary and secondary materials that will help them to contextualize and analyze the plays (all students will therefore need to purchase and use the specific editions of the plays listed below). The course will culminate in the completion of a research project.

required texts:

 ENL 5256 
  
  

 ENL 5256 
  
  

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:

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

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

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:

Spring09 ENL5227 01
STUDIES IN THE RENAISSANCE  
Anne Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu

Women in Early Print Culture: This course examines first how women are represented in printed works between Caxton's press (1476) and the charter of the Company of Stationers (1557), and second, how they involve themselves more and less directly with the means of production. (The chronological limits of early print, however, will admit some Elizabethan representations, for contrast, in the latter part of the course; we'll also begin with some ideological and literary backgrounds from selected classical and medieval works.) The thematic focus of the course will be on how the new printers handle questions of sexuality, love, marriage, and gender roles. These questions were clearly important in a rapidly changing society, and the new technology spread texts about gender to a readership that was both expanding and changing in composition. To treat questions of gender in terms of early media means also to explore early print culture more generally; our focus will be on literary culture (that is, literary history, poetics, and aesthetics), and will necessarily involve print literacies, class mobility, internationalism, education, etc.. We'll read secondary work from (e.g.) Johns, Chartier, Darnton, MacKenzie, Hellinga, Driver, McCloud, Ong, and Walter Benjamin. We'll examine the sometimes vivid scholarly disagreements about early media, and apply them to our gender questions. For instance, Eisenstein famously wrote about the press as "agent of change," but we might ask if, where gender is concerned, the new technology simply amplified old ideologies. Early typefaces and mise-en-page imitated manuscript aesthetics, but how well did innovative content about gender issues come across in such visibly nostalgic formats? Since many of the primary works we'll read about and by women have not been canonized, reception theory and the long history of literary institutions will also come into play; we won't ignore the 18-21st centuries' revisions, reappropriations, suppressions of early printed works on gender questions. Seminar method will include some lecture notes (since so much of this material will be new to most participants), reading, discussion, class presentations, research workshops. Individual projects are essential to the course; students may choose to aim their projects for presentation at an academic conference or for submission to a scholarly journal.

Spring09 ENL5227 02
Reading: History, Theory, and Practice  
Elizabeth Spiller 645-1543, WMS 323, espiller@fsu.edu

Reading: History, Theory, and Practice takes as its point of departure the recognition that reading is an inherently human and a necessarily artificial achievement. Both learned and invented, reading is a historically specific cultural practice and one whose history, as Robert Darnton has argued, is as complex as the history of cognition itself. This course will focus on the history of reading in the early modern period, but it is also structured to provide an introduction to the history and theory of reading as a whole. We will think about how different technologies (the printing press, secretary hand, or new methods of engraving, for instance) enabled new kinds of reading and produced new categories of readers. We will also consider how reading itself crucially constituted a kind of technology and one that was integral to new forms of knowledge and belief: changing reading practices were at the heart of the rise of early modern humanism and the Reformation as well as an informing force in the development of early modern science. The first half of the course will be devoted to topics in the history of reading and we will become acquainted with major accounts of reading in early modern print culture. The second half of the course will be organized as a set of case studies around important and historically transitional ways of reading: reading and the development of humanism, reading and religious belief, reading and natural philosophy and early modern science, and reading and the literary imagination. A graduate seminar intended for students interested in early modern literature, HOTT, book history, and the history and theory of reading.

Spring10 ENL5227 02
Studies in the Renaissance: Shakespeare  
Daniel Vitkus WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

The course offers a survey of the theatrical career and dramatic writings of William Shakespeare, and through the secondary course readings students will gain familiarity with the current state of Shakespeare studies (from book history to historicism to presentism) and be exposed to a range of critical perspectives. The course is intended to help prepare graduate students who might one day teach a Shakespeare course of their own. We will discuss a variety of plays (including comedy, tragedy, history, and tragicomedy), paying close attention to the specific textures of Shakespearean language while exploring broader issues of interpretation. Each play will be considered within the cultural context of its original composition and performance--early modern London, an urban society experiencing economic, political, and religious tensions that troubled and energized Shakespeare's theater. The course will culminate in the completion of a research project.

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

Required Texts

Course Reader (available on electronic reserve at the library. The reader contains the following:

GRADUATE STUDENTS are responsible for supplementary critical readings (to be handed out or placed on reserve) related to each of the primary texts covered in class. Graduate students will also be required to take the midterm and final exams.

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

NB: Text Selection subject to change based on availability

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

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

Required Texts:

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

The Caribbean region had begun to figure in European thinking nearly two centuries before North America was even a vague image in the minds of most knowledgeable Europeans. Perhaps we can only begin to assess the changing influence of the Caribbean region in world affairs by remembering that, before the Caribbean had begun to do Europe's bidding, there had not been any "world" affairs. Otherwise said--and with no apologies for this formulation--"the world" (in quotation marks) first became a modern concept in the Caribbean. (Sidney Mintz, "Goodbye, Columbus: Second Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millennium," 1993) Course Overview. Hoping to develop a more comprehensive picture of eighteenth-century British literature and culture, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the Caribbean. As Mintz's comment suggests, this critical reappraisal is both necessary and overdue, given the centrality of the West Indian colonies and the Atlantic slave trade to the development of modern British capitalism and culture. We will take part in this reassessment by examining a variety of texts--novels, poetry, drama, autobiography, journals, and other nonfiction prose--about the Caribbean, and exploring the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in representations of the region over the course of the long eighteenth century. Some of the literary texts, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Sarah Scott's sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison were written by authors who never traveled to the "Torrid Zones." Others, like James Grainger's epic pastoral The Sugar-Cane and the anonymous Hamel the Obeah Man, were produced by white Creoles whose firsthand experiences of life in the tropics strongly mark their writing. In addition to such fictional works, we will read nonfiction prose accounts of the Caribbean, ranging from parliamentary speeches on abolition to excerpts from the journal of Thomas Thistlewood, who served for over thirty years as an overseer on a sugar estate, and from Lady Nugent's accounts of her travels in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. A major portion of the course will be devoted to examining how slavery and race informed popular conceptions of the West Indies and West Indians. To assist us in this project we will draw on a number of critical approaches--e.g., postcolonialist, feminist, and materialist theories--to analyze the primary texts.

Spring09 ENL5236 
Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Anglo-Caribbean Texts and Contexts  
Candace Ward 644-1833, WMS 113, candace.ward@fsu.edu

Hoping to develop a more comprehensive picture of eighteenth-century British literature and culture, literary critics have increasingly turned their attention to the Caribbean. According to Caribbean scholars this critical reappraisal is both necessary and overdue given the centrality of the Caribbean colonies and the Atlantic slave trade to the development of modern British capitalism and culture. We will take part in this reassessment by examining a variety of novels with a Caribbean connection, and explore the contradictions and paradoxes embedded in representations of the region over the course of the long eighteenth century. Many of the novels, like Sarah Scott's sentimental novel The History of Sir George Ellison were written by authors who never traveled to the "Torrid Zones." Others, like J. W. Orderson's Creoleana and Herbert De Lisser's White Witch of Rose Hall, were produced by West Indians whose firsthand experiences of life in the tropics strongly mark their writing. In addition to such fictional works, we will read nonfiction prose accounts of the Caribbean, ranging from excerpts from the journals of Thomas Thistlewood, who served for over thirty years as an overseer on a sugar estate, to first-person slave narratives related by Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince.

A major portion of the course will be devoted to examining how slavery and race informed popular conceptions of the West Indies and West Indians. To assist us in this project we will draw on a number of critical approaches-e.g., postcolonialist, feminist, and materialist theories-to analyze the primary texts.

Spring10 ENL5236 
Studies in Restoration/18th Century British Literature Rebellion, Slavery, & Abolition in the British Atlantic   
Candace Ward, WMS 113, candace.ward@fsu.edu

"To lay the past to rest... means not that we should forget it but that we have no choice but to relate it, no choice but to live on within the full knowledge and unending of it. Time does not pass but accumulates. Why? Because what has been begun does not end but endures. Because this fatal Atlantic 'beginning' of the modern is more properly understood as an ending without end. Because history comes to us not only as flash or revelation but piling up. Because this is, not was. Because this is the Atlantic, now. Because all of it is now, it is always now, even for you who never was there."
—Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic

Course Overview.
2007 marked the 200th anniversary of Britain's passage of the Act To Abolish the Slave Trade. In this course, we will examine what Baucom describes as the "piling up" of history, contextualizing the events that shaped the "fatal Atlantic beginning of the modern"—Caribbean slavery—and leading up to the passage of the Abolition Act and full emancipation in 1838. The discourses of rebellion, slavery, and abolition that provide this context cross generic and chronological lines: our enquiries begin in the Restoration period, with Henry Neville's "porno-topia," The Isle of Pines (1668) and Aphra Behn's novella recounting the story of the rebellious slave Oroonoko; moving into the eighteenth century, we'll not only encounter proplanter georgic poetry like James Grainger's four-book The Sugar-Cane and ameliorist novels like Sarah Scott's History of Sir George Ellison, but also colonial narratives like planter-historian Edward Long's description of Tacky?s Revolt in his History of Jamaica and Dr. Benjamin Moseley's account of the runaway-slave-turned-highwayman, Three-Fingered Jack, the "Terror of Jamaica." These reports, along with slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince and oral histories from Jamaica's Maroon communities bring alive what Caribbean historian Hilary Beckles calls "one protracted struggle launched by Africans and their Afro-West Indian progeny against slave owners"—a struggle that spanned more than three centuries.

As we explore the complexities and contradictions embedded in these narratives—rife with racialized stereotypes and, to our eyes, highly problematic assumptions about agency and identity—we will also work to avoid the "facile normalization of the present" (David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity). In other words, we will refuse to essentialize differences between "us" and the historical "them" of our enquiry, and look to these texts for our "now."

In addition to theoretical readings ranging from Frantz Fanon to Stuart Hall, Required Texts include:

Course Requirements. Each student will be required to write two papers, the first a 10- to 12-page close reading of one of the texts covered, the second an 18- to 20-page research paper dealing with some aspect of the course materials. A 1- to 2-page abstract will be due three weeks before the long paper is due, and a mandatory conference will be held two weeks before the due date. Peer review workshops may be conducted if time allows. You will also be asked to submit a list of three scholarly journals or conference paper calls to which you would submit your paper. In addition to the two papers, each student is required to develop a 50-minute lesson plan focusing on some aspect of the materials covered in class, for example, a particular work or narrative technique, or a critical approach. The plan should include the following:

Students will distribute the lesson plan and then present it as they would teach it.

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

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

Spring08 ENL5246 01
Studies in British Romantic Literature, Green Romanticism, 11:00-12:15 TR
Eric Walker 644 4869, WMS 454, ewalker@fsu.edu

This course will study the past two decades of ecocriticism in British Romantic cultural studies; we will work with theory and criticism by Timothy Morton, Kevin Hutchings, Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, and James McKusick, among others, and we will test-fly this body of theory and criticism in readings of romantic-period verse, especially poety by William Wordsworth, William Blake, and John Clare. The course will be open to research projects on a wide array of romantic topics and writers: slavery and ecocritism, ecocriticism and empire, Green Austen, etc. For those working in ecocriticism and the Renaissance or ecocriticm in American studies, this allied work that's been ongoing in British romantic studies for nearly twenty years can supply an important complement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring09 ENL5256 
Studies in Victorian Literature  
Barry Faulk 644 6530, WMS 219, bfaulk@fsu.edu

This class surveys the literature and culture of late-Victorian modernity, focusing on British fiction published in the years between 1880 and 1905. Most of what we regard to be contemporary "crises" ?the waning of traditional religious faith, the rise of belief in spiritualism and the paranormal or spiritualism, the future role of women, the representation of same-sex desire, the apocalyptic possibilities opened up by science, the accelerated growth of new kinds of print and visual media? are treated in British literature of this period. New literary genres like science fiction, the imperial "romance," as well as new types of detective fiction and the Gothic emerged in the period.

The course is organized around central themes and intellectual debates as represented in (more or less) canonical literature of the period. Course reading will include: George Gissing, New Grub Street, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, A.C. Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Richard Marsh, The Beetle, H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Vernon Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales.

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

This class will examine how literary and medical texts negotiate the problems of gender and disease in the nineteenth century. How and why do novels negotiate medical "truths" of their time, from a sturdy constitution to a hectic flush, from diphtheria to phthisis, quinine to chloroform? How do they adapt medical theories--such as bodily economies of spending and saving, the climax of fever, or the telltale blush--to narrative ends? We will investigate how "disease" helps to define gender--as in the love-mad woman, the invalid, and the hysteric--as well as how, on the other hand, gender shapes cultural perceptions of disease--as in consumption, fever, and syphilis. We will examine realist, sentimental, and sensationalist narratives of gender and disease in novels by Charlotte Bront?, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Yonge, Mary (Mrs. Humphry) Ward, Sarah Grand, and Richard Marsh, and in short pieces by Samuel Warren, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. We will supplement these with selected short non-fiction texts by Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Sigmund Freud, and assorted nineteenth-century physicians; and historical, critical, and theoretical texts on gender, sexuality, medicine, and Victorian culture. Assignments include a short presentation, an annotated bibliography and paper proposal, a conference-length paper, and a revision of this into a seminar paper.

Summer09 ENL5256 
Victorian British Literature  
John Fenstermaker 644-1352, WMS 435, jfenstermaker@fsu.edu

Major Victorian writers focused upon the social, moral, cultural, and political conditions of the time. Among many pressing issues, nineteenth-century British writers, thinkers, and apologists addressed two great questions: the "Condition of England" question (focusing upon the exploitation of the working classes by new and powerful capitalists who controlled the mines, the mills, and the factories) and the "Woman Question." The latter subject, touching all aspects of the lives, particularly of middle-class women, grew ever larger as the century progressed.

Taken as a whole, Victorian writing is full of seemingly realistic depiction of the entire social spectrum--the dispossessed, the urban and rural laborers, the nouveau riche middle class, the landed gentry, the clergy, the aristocracy. Were these portraits accurate? What actually were the conditions in Britain in the period 1832-1901? In a time of inordinate self-scrutiny, what forces may have been at work to prohibit or undermine realistic depiction of actual life? In addition, what choices made consciously and freely by the artists themselves may have distorted the presentation of issues? We shall investigate such questions to more fully understand this Age and both the collective and individual consciousness(es) that dominated its art and thought.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Spring10 ENL5256 01
Studies in Victorian Literature: Victoria Telecom  
Paul Fyfe, WMS 427, pfyfe@fsu.edu

This course investigates the literary dynamics of a Victorian "tele-culture": a term Nicholas Royle uses to encompass "nineteenth-century forms of communication from a distance through new and often invisible channels, including the railway, telegraphy, photography, the telephone and gramophone" (Telepathy and Literature, Basil Blackwell, 1990: 5). We will take telecommunication as material context and metaphor for several important transformations in Victorian culture. These include conceptions of speed and place; the period's emerging historicism; authorial separation from an increasingly unknown readerships; trans-Atlantic print culture; the imagination of a national community over an imperial horizon; and the late-century fascination with spiritual mediation. Our reading includes novels, poetry, short stories, and essays from some familiar Victorian and trans-Atlantic authors (including Dickens, Eliot, Twain, James, Kipling, Verne), as well as from lesser-known and anonymous contributors of telegraphic romances and verses on electric cables. In parallel to these readings, the course engages a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives.

Using electronic communications tools of our own, we will also examine the linkages of a Victorian tele-culture with our contemporary information age. The course aims to suggest that the work of interpretation is itself a form of tele-communication, that our critical perspectives actively remediate the works in question. We will explore this in several formats over the semester, including an interpretive computer game called IVANHOE, the use of online Victorian archives, creating a class blogosphere, and an electronic option for final projects. Familiarity with computers and internet navigation is welcomed, but no elaborate technical knowledge is needed. In addition to frequent contribution through our course communication channels and a class presentation, the course requires an article-length seminar paper. This course satisfies the Transmission/Transformation requirement in the History of Text Technologies (HoTT) track.

Summer06 ENL5276 
Modern British Literature  T, R 6:45-10 PM, WMS 318
Gontarksi, S. E. - 644 6038, WMS 430, sgontarski@english.fsu.edu

The class will explore the literature written in anticipation, execution, and aftermath of the great age of British Modernism, that period of experimental literature from about the beginning of the first World War to the end of World War II. The liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau by the Red Army on 29 January 1945 and the dropping the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 seems to have ushered in a frighteningly new era. In a sense then we will survey the literary ethos (and its context) of the entire 20th century--with a 10 (or so) year preface and a like postlude, in which we will wrestle with the attempts at a meaningful literature in the Post-World War II era, in the Post-Auschwitz age.

One response of literary Britain to a world of accelerated change since the Industrial revolution was (and is) a retreat into tradition. As critic Chris Bigsby notes, "English [literature] has for far too long been regarded as a cosily provincial, deeply conservative, anti-experimental enterprise, resistant to innovation, rooted in mimesis, and dedicated to the preservation of a tradition of realism casually related to that of the nineteenth century." Fellow critic, Frederick Bowers concurs: "What strikes an ex-patriate most about contemporary British [literature] is its conformity, its traditional sameness, and its realistically rendered provincialism. Shaped only by its contents, British [literature] is the product of group mentality: local, quaint, and self-consciously xenophobic."

What British literature seemed to have needed in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in order to generate change and even to sustain life is some infusion of energy from outside its own boundaries and traditions. This is what seems to have fueled the great age of British Modernism, when the principal "British" writers were American (Eliot, Pound), Irish (Joyce, Yeats, Beckett), and Polish (Conrad), the principal literary tradition French poetry, Symbolism. In the 1970s and 1980 (to steal the title of a book by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, who actually stole it from Salman Rushdie), the Empire wrote back, and British literature was again regenerated by forces not always immediately recognized as "British." That is, so many "British" writers now have the look and the names of former colonials. We will examine both the tenacity with which British literature has returned to tradition in the post-War era, and, on the other hand, how the former Empire or Commonwealth has generated a Renaissance in the mother country and helped shape and explain what is now a fully multi-cultural Britain.

Texts for ENL 4273 and ENL 5276

  1. ENL 5276 students only: The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 2, Eighth Edition) (New York: Norton) ISBN 0-393-92715-6
  2. ENL 5276 students only: The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume F, Eighth Edition) (New York: Norton) ISBN 0-393-94776-9
  3. The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard (New York: Grove Press) ISBN 0-8021-3581-1
  4. Tom Stoppard Plays 5: Arcadia, the Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood (New York: Faber and Faber) ISBN 0-5711-9751-5 [NB: or, a separate edition of Arcadia.]
  5. Murphy, Samuel Beckett (Grove Press: New York) ISBN 0-8021-5037-3
  6. The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi (New York, Scribners Paperback Fiction, 1995) ISBN 0-684-82540-6
  7. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1981 ed.) 0-15-662870-8

Supplementary Text for ENL 4273, Required for ENL 5276

  1. The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 ed.) ISBN 0-19-513612-8
  2. The Hours, Michael Cunningham (New York: Picador, 2002) ISBN 0312305060
  3. White Teeth, Zadie Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2001) ISBN 0375703861
  4. Demented Particulars: "Annotations to Murphy," C. J. Ackerley (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books)

Useful Text

  1. The Contemporary British Novel, Philip Tew, (London: Continuum Books, 2004)

Suggested/Recommended Films [Supplemental]

  1. The Shooting Party
  2. Gosford Park
  3. The Remains of the Day
  4. Howard's End
  5. Iris

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

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

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

Spring07 HUM6939 03
Pragmatism and the American Century  
Mikkelsen, Ann - 645 6861, WMS227, amikkelsen@english.fsu.edu

Pragmatism, the philosophic and scientific method articulated by Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is widely considered to be the first American and one of the first definitively modern modes of thought. While these statements can be debated (pragmatism has origins in British Utilitarianism, for example), what cannot be denied is that pragmatism has decisively shaped and been shaped by twentieth-century disciplinary discourses ranging from philosophy to history, economics, psychology, public policy, and literary studies. This course will address pragmatism as a philosophical, historical, cultural, and political phenomenon in four stages. In unit one we begin with pragmatism?s origins in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, focusing upon their essential philosophical claims. In unit two we will discuss recent historiography on pragmatism (by James Kloppenberg and Louis Menand, among others) in which the philosophy is discussed in terms of its political, cultural and economic logic in relation to Progressivism and capitalism. In the latter part of this unit we will also address critiques of James and Dewey by intellectuals of the 1910s-1930s such as Randolph Bourne and Lewis Mumford. In unit three we will turn to literary manifestations of pragmatic thought and the recent ?pragmatic? turn in literary criticism (for example, the work of Richard Poirier and Ross Posnock) in addition to literary texts by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Robert Frost, among others, that have been read as ?pragmatic.? In unit four we will consider various neo-pragmatic turns in philosophy by theorists such as Richard Rorty and J?rgen Habermas. Throughout the semester, we will address the continuing debate over what exactly pragmatism is, what its politics may be, and what legacies pragmatism offers to intellectuals seeking to maintain or create a place for critical thought in a modern democracy.

other HUM6939 
The Bible from script to print, 13 c. to 18 c.  
Francois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles 645 8292, DIF438 fdupuigr@ens-lsh.fr

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The course is an introduction to the history of the Bible as a book in the Western world during the late medieval and modern period (13 c.-18 c. ) : its textual history, production, diffusion, graphic presentation and social appropriation. Special emphasis will be given to the English and French cases.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

  1. The student will demonstrate knowledge of the making of manuscript and early printed Bibles, as well as of the main issues concerning their presentation, diffusion and appropriation in its historical context.
  2. The student will demonstrate acquaintance with the main reference books, as well as the most recent scholarly production, that address these issues.
  3. The student will demonstrate an ability to think critically and independently about a subject that has been, and is still sometimes, controversial.

COURSE CONTENT

The course deliberately focuses on the Bible as an artefact that can be studied with all the historian's tools, from the indispensable "auxiliary sciences" such as codicology or bibliography to historical disciplines that are seldom used together: religious history of course, but also the history of art, economy, society, or politics. Traditional chronological borders between the "medieval" and the "modern" period will be crossed to stress elements of continuity as well as the better known ruptures in biblical history: the advent of printing and the Reformation. This should also encourage comparative studies of manuscript and printed Bibles.

Although it will provide as an introduction indispensable notions about the biblical texts that the students will encounter, it will concentrate from week 3 on the Bible as a book. I will give most of the lectures, with guest lecturers who will be announced in due time.

  1. Week 1-2 Introduction / The shapes of the text : canons and versions
  2. Week 3 How were medieval manuscript Bibles made?
  3. Week 4-5 How were early printed Bibles made?
  4. Week 6-7 How were medieval manuscript Bibles laid out and illustrated?
  5. Week 8-9 How were early printed Bibles laid out and illustrated?
  6. Week 10 Networks and centres for the production and diffusion of manuscript Bibles
  7. Week 11 Networks and centres for the production and diffusion of early printed Bibles
  8. Week 12-14 The Bible and power from saint Louis to the English Revolution

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

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

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

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

Summer09 LAE5370 
Teaching English in College  Mondays and Wednesdays—9:30-12:15—319 Williams
Deborah Coxwell-Teague 644-3164, WMS 222E, dteague@fsu.edu

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

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

other LIS5916 
History of Reading in Everyday Life  
Wayne A. Wiegand 644-8123, LSB 254, wwiegand@ci.fsu.edu

This course is designed to acquaint students with the history of reading in everyday life from the Reformation to the 19th century in Europe, and with the history of reading in everyday life in the United States from colonial times to the late 20th century. Focus is on the agency of print in the social, cultural and intellectual life of common people . Subjects covered include: readers in England and Russia, 1600-1900; reading in colonial and revolutionary America; reading and women in the early 19th century, dime novels in late 19th century America, African American readers at the turn of the 20th century; labor and radical readers in the early 20th century; paperback reading and the reading of erotica at mid-20th century, and in the late 20th century comic readers, gay and lesbian readers, and Hispanic readers. Required texts include Umberto Eco?s Name of the Rose, Alberto Manguel?s A History of Reading,Simon Winchester?s The Professor and the Madman, and Paul Boyer?s Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age.

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

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

Spring07 LIT5038 
Studies in Poetry: Modernist Poetry In the American Grain  
Epstein, Andrew - 644 8110, WMS405A, aepstein@english.fsu.edu

This course will provide students with a firm grounding in modernism and modern American poetry. We will engage in a comprehensive investigation of the major figures, movements, and innovative styles in modern American poetry, as we move from its roots in the 19th century (Whitman and Dickinson) to the mid-twentieth century. The course will pay special attention to ongoing debates about the definition and nature of "modernism"; situating the poetry within its cultural and historical context; issues of gender, race, and the dialogue between politics and poetry; and modern poetry's relationship with other developments in the arts, such as modern painting.

Our in-depth study of the central American modernist poets will stress the persistent emphasis on experimentation and avant-garde poetics within the American tradition. Throughout, we will consider the perennial question that has long concerned both poets and critics: what, if anything, is American about American poetry? How and why do American poets radically re-imagine poetic form and content, and navigate the tension between innovation and tradition? How do they respond to what Wallace Stevens called "the pressure of reality" and the tumultous upheavals of the 20th century? Why are many of the poets so preoccupied with the ordinary and the daily, and how do they develop new forms in order to capture the experience of everyday life in modernity?

Poets will likely include Whitman, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, H. D., and Mina Loy. Our discussions will be framed by secondary readings in the most important critical and theoretical debates about modernism and modernist poetry, including works by critics like Kenner, Perloff, Vendler, Bloom, Altieri and others.

Spring08 LIT5038 
Studies in Poetry: Modernism  
Joann Gardner 644 1881, WMS 426, jgardner@fsu.edu

This course will examine the central works of High Modernism-that is, poetry and criticism produced in the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century associated with the free verse movement. We will draw from this material a sense of the modernist aesthetic and how it is distinguishable from the Victorian period that came before it and the Contemporary (or "Postmodern") period that comes after. Expect to study a range of poets, from Whitman and Dickinson to (Marianne) Moore and (Langston) Hughes. Expect also to engage in the political, cultural and technical debates growing up around the key figures: Yeats, Eliot, HD, Pound. Critical essays will be standards of the time, written by the poets themselves. In addition to gaining an overview of Modernism, students will focus more narrowly on a selected poet and related concern in order to assess individual contributions to the evolving definition of poetry.

Required Texts:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition. Volume 1. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, Eds.

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

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

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

Spring07 LIT5186 
Studies in Irish Nationalism, Forging Identities: Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Nationalism/Postnationalism, Thursdays 6:45-9:30
Gontarski, S. E. - 644 6038, WMS430, sgontarski@english.fsu.edu

The purpose of this course is to examine the Irish quest for identity and, politically, independence, chiefly in a literary context, and concurrently to examine Post-colonial and Post-nationalist Irish literature in its broader, internationalist cultural context. We will feature three dominant figures in modern Irish literature, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett as they develop in, struggle with, and move beyond at least a provincial Irish or Anglo-Irish literary heritage, and then examine the conflicts of subsequent generations of Irish writers to develop and flourish in their shadows and amid the (sometimes suffocating) history and myths of the Rising. Central to our concern is whether the forging of Irish identity (or any national identity, for that matter) is itself always and inevitably a forgery. We will also examine the contemporary shift into more popular (and hence internationalist, or global, or trans-national) forms of Irish culture in film and music.

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

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

Spring08 LIT5235 01
Studies in Postcolonial Literature in English  
Daniel Vitkus 645 0100, WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

The course will focus on postcolonial texts from the Middle East, with particular attention paid to the Arab-Islamic cultural tradition and its (post)colonial mutations. In conjunction with Salman Rushdie's visit to our campus for Seven Days of Opening Nights, students will be expected to attend his reading (discounted tickets will be available), which will occur on February 22. Course readings will include the following: a unit on the Quranic tradition (from translated excerpts from the Quran to The Satanic Verses and other writings by Rushdie); some postcolonial theory (including Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Irvin Schick, Alain Grosrichard); a unit on The Arabian Nights tradition (from the original manuscripts to postmodern re-imaginings); Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land; fiction by Arab, Turkish and Iranian authors; transcripts of Riverbend's blog from occupied Iraq, Baghdad Burning, and excerpts from other Iraq war narratives; a sampling of Christian-Zionist evangelical tracts on the Middle East; and several films (including Lawrence of Arabia and Not Without My Daughter). Students will be asked to prepare presentations, write a critical research paper, and attend several required evening film screenings.

Spring08 LIT5251 01
Studies in Victorian Lit  
Barry J. Faulk, 644-6530, WMS 219, bfaulk@fsu.edu

The class will focus on late Victorian Anglo-French literature and culture. We will treat Modern writing --Decadents, Symbolism, Modernism--as a highly structured response to the rise of the global metropolis. The course begins with Baudelaire, whose fateful link between a specifically Modern poetry and mid-19th century Paris set the agenda for later artists centered in the city of London. Since Modern Writing coincided with the zenith of the British Empire, we will read texts by Decadent writers and fin-de-siecle social investigators to discover how empire created new forms of metropolitan culture. Our course reading should give us fresh perspective on the final text on the syllabus, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: simultaneously Modernism's breakout work and the last great Symbolist poem.

Primary texts include selected poems from Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and Stephane Mallarme; also texts by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, Josephine Butler, W.T. Stead, Charles Booth, H.G. Wells, and T.S. Eliot. We will also read recent criticism on the relation between modernism and empire, as well as critical genealogies of modernism.

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

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

Fall07 LIT5309 
STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE  
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 323, ledwards@english.fsu.edu

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

Fall08 LIT5309 01
Studies in Popular Culture  TR 2-3:15 p.m
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 323, ledwards@fsu.edu

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

Spring10 LIT5309 
Studies in Popular Culture  
Leigh Edwards,  WMS 439, ledwards@fsu.edu

This course examines theories of popular culture and media in the context of the emergence of mass culture. We will take seriously George Lipsitz's claim that "perhaps the most important facts about people have always been encoded within the ordinary and the commonplace." Paying particular attention to the relationship between literature and popular culture, we will analyze strategies of reading and reception as well as constructions of ideology in this material, including categories such as gender, race, class, and nation. The course interrogates designations such as "high," "pop," "mass," and "folk" as well as concepts of subculture, counterculture, and youth culture. We will focus particular attention on television and popular music case studies, although we will also consider film, new media, convergence culture, popular fiction, advertising, and consumer culture. We will explore key theories and methodologies, including cultural studies, Marxism, political economy, populism, audience studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and postmodernism. Our focus will be on U.S. culture, but we will consider questions of globalization and make use of transnational critical frameworks. Fulfills the HoTT "Production" requirement.

Spring07 LIT5327 01
African American Women and Folklore  
McGregory, Jerrilyn - 644 3161, WMS458 jmcgregory@english.fsu.edu

This course explores a broad range of topics relating to African American women's traditional culture, arts and expressive behavior, as well as attitudes toward and beliefs about them. Topics will include the historic stereotyping of African American women; the ways in which AFAM women make their experiences meaningful through legends and personal experience narratives; the place of AFAM women as performers and preservers of traditional forms of artistic expression; AFAM women and the blues tradition; traditional domesticity & AFAM women; marked moments in AFAM women's life cycles; and the social powers and dangers of female sexuality in the context of AFAM women.

Spring07 LIT5388 01
Studies in African-American Literature Contemporary Black Women's Fiction 
Montgomery, Maxine - 644 1906, WMS433, mmontgomery@english.fsu.edu

This graduate course entails an interrogation of what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as a "culture of resistance" among Blacks in the African diaspora. Using representative texts by contemporary Black women novelists as a basis for our discussion, we will draw upon scholarly and theoretical works by Hill Collins, Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, Carolyn Boyce Davies and others in exploring the ways in which fictional characters attempt to fashion safe spaces -- architectural, personal, and communal -- allowing a reversal of White patriarchal rule. Issues of migration, exile, and home will undergird our investigation, just as feminist and post-colonial literary theory will propel our discussion. Included are such novels as Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Tina McElroy Ansa's Ugly Ways, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Glora Naylor's Bailey's Cafe.

Spring08 LIT5388 
Studies in Women's Writing  
Jerrilyn McGregory 644 3161, WMS 458, jmcgregory@fsu.edu

This course is a comparative study of Caribbean women writers in cross-cultural perspective. The sociocultural contexts within which the complex roles of women will be examined include Jamaica, Belize, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. By comparing and contrasting the creative imagination of the writers, one can witness a diversity of discursive strategies and representational experiences. Among the topics to be explored are women's participation in these societies, gender relations, the impact of urbanization and industrialization, religious and political participation, health issues, class status, and Caribbean women as cultural workers.

Beginning with oral literature of the West Indies, students will examine some of the traditions that eventually find expression within African Diaspora literatures. The course problematizes and foregrounds questions of difference and the quest for a voice as a precondition for female subjectivity. At last, but not least, the course will interrogate many of the following keywords: Alienation, Creolization, Exile (Ex/Isle), Mother Tongue, Postcolonialism, resistance, and the subalern.

Possible Representative Texts:

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

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

Spring09 LIT5388 01
Studies in Women’s Writing: Jane Austen  
Eric Walker 644-4869, 438 Williams, ewalker@fsu.edu

A study of Austen's fiction in the context of women's writing in late 18th and early 19th century Britain. In addition to the six published novels, we will read the juvenilia, the unpublished short epistolary tale Lady Susan, the fragment The Watsons, and the fragment of a novel, Sanditon, left unfinished at her death. While we build up a command of all the primary texts, we will work our way through a body of modern criticism, including notable moments such as Gilbert and Gubar's chapter on Austen's juvenilia in The Madwoman in the Attic and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's reading of Sense and Sensibility, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." We will pay particular attention to two recent exemplary moments in Austen criticism, William Galperin's The Historical Austen (Pennsylvania, 2003) and D. A. Miller's Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, 2003). Brief clips from the abundance of recent films will be regularly used to stage interpretive cruxes (forget the translations of Clueless or Bollywood: what happens when Pride and Prejudice unfolds on the campus of a large Mormon university in Utah? Seen that one?). Several shorter essays and presentations and a longer term essay in the 5-6,000 word range.

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

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

Required Books:

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

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

Spring09 LIT5517 
Studies in Gender: Gender, Agency and Identity  
Linda Saladin-Adams 644 5569, WMS 429, lsaladin@fsu.edu

As women entered the field of writing in the 18th and 19th century, they began to challenge institutional power via domestic fiction with such authors as Austen and the Brontes. This course will look at the transformation of gender positioning from the Victorian time period to the present, weaving through genres?novels, film, as well as the internet, and examining women in both the authorial and subject position. Initially, the appearance of female authorship was part of a shifting power dynamic challenging a patriarchal status quo. However, in shifting the historical conditions and "paving the way for the rise of the modern middle class" (Armstrong), the psychologized novel has built both power structures against continued attempts to repress the feminine as well as the seeds of self-doubt that participate in the reflexive gesture. We will read female-authored texts struggling with multiple issues surrounding gender, agency, and identity, texts such as Austen?s Emma and Woolf's Orlando. We will also focus on women in 1940's cinema as exemplary of a mode where women dominate the medium as subjects but are rendered powerless structurally. In order to explore the oscillation between the struggle for agency and the questioning of identity, we will also look at contemporary challenges to the body through Haraway's cyborg, potentially empowering women by redefining the body as part human, part technological. This same cyborg appears in the persona created through online sites?blogs, facebook, twitter and more, an additional class topic. Our goal for the course is to speculate genealogically, questioning the implications of gender, identity, and agency as a response to cultural dictates. Class work will include written responses, an oral presentation, and a final paper.

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

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

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