Summer 2009

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

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

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

Required Texts:

Summer09 ENG5933 
Critical Issues, Graduate Seminar  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 453, asrai@fsu.edu

This course introduces students to various methods of contemporary cultural, media, and literary analysis. By situating different theories all within the purview of a methodological project, the emphasis will be on building a viable and pragmatic box of tools with which a practice can proceed and become?What? That ?what? is the open-ended basis of this syllabus because it depends on the particular domain of intervention that each of you negotiates and creates within and beyond this course. Those domains—all of which have durations, histories, evolutions, processes—will sometimes overlap, sometimes diverge, and always after a time dissolve. Through reading short science fiction stories and viewing film and media, we explore what theory can do. We begin with three early traditions of aesthetics: Vedic (Bharat Muni, Natyashastra), Buddhist (D. T. Suzuki and others), and Aristotelian (Poetics and Rhetoric). We begin with one overarching question: what is the relation between representation and the body? Throughout the course, we develop concept-tools from these traditions such as representation-mimesis, plot-thought-order vs. character-surface-sensation, desire, subalternity, subjugated knowledge, pragmatism, juice-mood, stillness, becoming-being, context, subjectivity, sensory-motor/memory circuits, and emergent form. Through these concepts we situate contemporary Western criticism within an international and transdisciplinary frame. We will also take seriously the lessons the physical sciences offer humanistic hermeneutics (breaking down the binary of science=causality vs. humanities=interpretation) by considering the methodological implications of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamical theory of Ilya Prigogine, Manuel Delanda, Stuart Kauffman, and David Bohm, among others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

required texts:

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

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

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

REQUIRED TEXTS

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

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

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