Spring 2009

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

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

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 CRW5331 01
Poetry Workshop  
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the end of the module students will have attained:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.