Spring 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring10 CRW5331 01
Poetry Workshop  
David Kirby,  WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

This is an advanced course for those who are well underway in their poetic careers; the assumption is that you will have taken a version of our undergraduate Poetic Technique class as well as at least one undergraduate workshop. You will be submitting a new poem or part of a poem to me each week; you'll write either 12 poems or 400 lines total. Every other week, you'll be asked to bring multiple copies so the whole class can workshop your poem. We'll also be engaged in other practices that make up the poet's daily life, notably reading and discussing a variety of contemporary poems. We'll be working mainly with three very different poetic voices that can be heard in these books: Michael Blumenthal's And, Matthew Dickman's All-American Poem, and Amy Gertsler's Dearest Creature. These will be required reading for everyone.

Spring10 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory: Feminist Theory  
Robin Goodman, WMS 324, rgoodman@fsu.edu

This course focuses on a specialized area of critical theory, in this case Feminist Theory. We will be looking at the development of what is known as the "second wave" of feminist philosophical thought, working through its seminal texts from Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler. We will consider feminist debates over issues that have defined feminism in a broad range of mostly humanistic fields, i.e. sexuality and the body, language, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, identity, the subject, queerness, discourse, performativity, race, class, the gaze, the division of labor. From early intersections with existentialism, to later poststructuralist interventions, this course will then look to new trends in postcolonialism and the discourses of new global citizenship in order to think about how feminism can respond to the current wars and the global crisis in democracy, turning to the social sciences, and in particular anthropology, in order the reflect on issues which may include fundamentalism and the veil, the post-industrial rise in service and "affective" labor, and the end of the state-centered myths of welfare and development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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