Spring 2008

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

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

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

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

Required texts may include:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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:

Other Graduate Courses of Interest to English Students

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

COURSE DESCRIPTION

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

COURSE OBJECTIVES

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

COURSE CONTENT

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

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

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

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

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

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.