Graduate Course Descriptions, Ordered By Professor

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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
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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

How do we construct a sense of "justice" and "human rights" in the face of the Holocaust?
Is there a "proper" or "commensurate" way to represent the Holocaust through film alongside literature, art or critical theory?
What is the role of memory (and institutionalized history) in our relationship to the trauma of the Holocaust?
What roles do popular culture, and particularly film, play in visualizing the Holocaust?
What roles do literature, visual art, and critical theory play in memorializing the Holocaust?
How do film genre conventions shape the way in which we visualize the Holocaust?
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?
How does stereotyping of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other factors influence the way in which we sift the "facts" from the 'fictions" of representing the Holocaust?

Fall08 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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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:

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Island Princess.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta. Ed. James R. Siemon. (New Mermaids) Methuen, 2007.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Ed. William Sherman and Peter Hulme. (Norton Critical Edition) W. W. Norton, 2003.
Daniel Vitkus, ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. Columbia UP, 2000. (includes The Renegado and A Christian Turned Turk)
Anthony Parr, ed. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Manchester University Press, 2000. (includes The Sea Voyage and The Travels of the Three English Brothers)
Peter Mancall, ed. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries. Penguin Classics, 1972.
Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. London, 1590. (reprint) Dover Publications, 1972.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Fall07 ENG5933
PEDAGOGY WORKSHOP
DEBORAH COXWELL TEAGUE 644-3164, WMS 222E, dteague@english.fsu.edu

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

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

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

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

Fall08 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.

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 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 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 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.

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

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

demonstrate familiarity with multi-disciplinary methods of analysing evidence;
ritique source materials in a sophisticated and detailed manner, evaluating the usefulness 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.

Course Texts:

Required:

Introduction to Old English, 2nd ed., Peter Baker (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), ISBN 978-1-4051-5272-3
The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction, John Blair (Oxford: OUP, 2002) ISBN 0-19-285403-8

Optional:

The Anglo-Saxons, ed. James Campbell (London: Penguin, 1991) ISBN 0-140143955 (paperback)
Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed., Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003 or 1999 edition) [Get it second-hand.]
A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, 14) by J. R. Clark Hall, John Richard Clark Hall, Herbert Dean Meritt (University of Toronto Press; 4th Reprint edition,1984), ISBN 0802065481

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:

an advanced knowledge and understanding of the fundamental practices of codicology and palaeography;
an excellent understanding of the methods of manuscript production from the preparation of skins to the writing of model scripts;
an introductory knowledge of editing and its functions;
advanced team-work skills;

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.
The student will demonstrate acquaintance with the main reference books, as well as the most recent scholarly production, that address these issues.
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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

ENL 5276 students only: The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 2, Eighth Edition) (New York: Norton) ISBN 0-393-92715-6
ENL 5276 students only: The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume F, Eighth Edition) (New York: Norton) ISBN 0-393-94776-9
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard (New York: Grove Press) ISBN 0-8021-3581-1
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.]
Murphy, Samuel Beckett (Grove Press: New York) ISBN 0-8021-5037-3
The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi (New York, Scribners Paperback Fiction, 1995) ISBN 0-684-82540-6
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

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

Useful Text

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

Suggested/Recommended Films [Supplemental]

The Shooting Party
Gosford Park
The Remains of the Day
Howard's End
Iris

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.

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.

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.

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:

Michelle Cliff Abeng
Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea
Zee Edgell Beka Lamb
Simone Schwarz-Bart The Bridge of Beyond
Carmen Garcia Dreaming in Cuban
Edwidge Dandicat Breath, Eyes, Memory
Paule Marshall Daughters
Merle Hodge Crick Crack, Monkey

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:

Tina McElroy Ansa, Baby in the Family
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Jacques Roumain, The Masters of the Dew
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Spring08 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.

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.

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.

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.

other REL
Freud and the Invention of the Modern Mind
M. Day 644-0205, Dodd Hall 120B, mday@fsu.edu

Some years ago the literary critic Harold Bloom argued that Shakespeare single-handedly invented the modern concept of ?personality.? From Bloom?s perspective, the ability to think of us having ?selves? that possess ?inwardness? and ?depth? can be traced back to the Shakespearean canon. As one might expect, few readers were convinced. However, rejecting Bloom?s answer does not mean that we should also reject his search for the conceptual sources of our modern selves.

If any single person can be credited with ?inventing? the contemporary portrait of what it means to be human, it is Sigmund Freud. Whether we are discussing sex, religion, dreams, humor, art, bowel movements, or morality, we do it?knowingly or not?with Freud?s psychoanalytic vocabulary. Reflecting on Freud?s legacy, the poet W.H. Auden suggested that he is less a person than ?a whole climate of opinion, under whom we conduct our different lives.? This seminar explores Freud?s life, work and legacy against the backdrop of the histories of science. Structurally speaking, the course is built around the close reading of key Freudian texts and is roughly divided into three thematic sections. In the first section (?Freud as Detective?), we will examine Freud?s case histories and clinical reflections. In the second section (?Freud as Archaeologist?) , we will study Freud?s attempt to excavate the psychological complexity of everyday life. In the third section (?Freud as Critic?), we will scrutinize Freud?s macro-sociological theorizing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

How is college writing understood by students, teachers, and administrators?
Who teaches, tutors, advises, responds to, and evaluates student writing? In what settings and contexts? And what preparation do they have in composition theories and rese

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Graduate Course Descriptions, Ordered By Professor