Fall 2009

Fall09  
History of Text Technologies  
Gary Taylor WMS 421, gtaylor@fsu.edu

"You can't have art without resistance in the materials" (William Morris). This course provides an introduction to the complex interactions between literary culture and the changing, overlapping, frustrating and inspiring media ecologies that have shaped the way we produce, transmit, transform, receive and interpret creative representations of human experience. Beginning with the two opposed categories of the ephemeral and the monumental (tattoo, graffiti, ballads, texts written on clothing or carved in stone, newspapers, blogs, Bibles), the course will then embark on a generally chronological tour of technologies and their literary forms: the diversity of manuscript (from Anglo-Saxon to Emily Dickinson), the evolution of print from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the history and theory of reading (including the ways that new technologies transform their users), visual texts, film, recorded sound, broadcast and digital media. Each of these categories will be explored through a combination of case studies and hands-on encounters. We will be sampling Sappho, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Declaration of Independence, Emily Dickinson, Charlie Chapman, T. S. Eliot, Billie Holiday, Martin Luther King Jr.

This course is required in the new Editing, Writing, Media track of the English major.

Fall09 AML2600 
Introduction to African American Literature  
Jerrilyn McGregory WMS458, jmcgregory@fsu.edu

This is an introductory course to African American literature. The course is not designed to be a survey of African American literature. Instead, several writers and genres of literature will be examined in-depth to supply an overview of certain historical moments as relates to one particular theme: the "ghosts of slavery."

The main objective is to pay tribute to the variety of genres significant to African American literature. Along with the traditional genres of poetry, drama, and fiction, the course will offer the study of oral literature and a slave narrative. These writings are regarded as having influenced other literary forms.

The course will interrogate representative texts by African American men and women writers. This approach intends to engage a diversity of voices along with genres, with the design to encourage an appreciation of African American literature. The following are potential required texts depending on availability:

REQUIRED TEXTS

Fall09 AML2600 
Introduction to African American Literature  
Dennis Moore 644-1177, WMS 416, dmoore@fsu.edu

All semester we'll immerse ourselves in reading, discussing and, yes, writing about the rich array of materials and writers that we associate with these two overlapping expressions African American and U.S. literature. In addition to reading some texts that you've encountered before, you'll greatly expand your familiarity with both of those expressions. As in any survey course we will cover a lot of material -- most of it in the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, complete with the audio CD -- but of course I won't assign everything in that anthology. We'll proceed chronologically, focusing along the way on literary history, including the anthology's six very helpful background essays. We'll pay attention to the relationships between a TEXT and the many CONTEXTS that swirl around it, sometimes like sharks around a slave ship. Do I expect everyone in this class to be an English major? Of course not; I do expect, though, that you're here because you, too, are drawn to these materials we'll be reading, discussing, and writing about.

Fall09 AML3630 01
Lainto/a Lit Honors  
Virgil Suarez 644 2521, 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 1959 (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, re-define, 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.

Fall09 AML4111 
The Nineteenth-Century American Novel  
Paul Outka 644-2619, WMS 228, paul.outka@fsu.edu

In this course we will read a wide range of nineteenth-century American novels, with a concern to bring into dialogue well-known and lesser-known works, particularly around issues of racial identity and gender identity. Readings include works by James Fennimore Cooper, Lydia Marie Childs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Harriet Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Stephen Crane and others.

Fall09 AML4213 01
Early American Literature  
Cristobal Silva WMS 229 csilva@fsu.edu

This course focuses on the literature from the Colonial era to the Early Republic. Authors include John Winthrop, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, and Charles Brockden Brown. We will investigate the various modes of representation through which early colonists understood their place in the New World, and trace the major intellectual currents that shaped American identity in the wake of the Revolution.

Fall09 AML4261 
Southern Literature  
Diane Roberts 644 1749, WMS 434, dkroberts@fsu.edu

William Faulkner famously said that "in the South, the past is never dead, it's not even past." This course addresses the power of history to shape the writings of Poe, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, but the major emphasis will be on Faulkner's fiction. Novels to be studied include Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses. There will be exams, weekly essays, and two research papers.

Fall09 AML4604 02
“Put A Ring On It?” Representations of Love and Marriage in African American Culture, 1970-Present 
Robert Patterson 645 6863, WMS 226, rjpatterson@fsu.edu

Invoking a phrase from singer Beyonce Knowles 2008 popular song "Single Ladies," this course explores contemporary representations of love and marriage in African American culture. Drawing upon literature, music, films, sermons, and magazines, we will interrogate how these different media construct the institutions of "love" and "marriage." The disciplines of literary and cultural studies, theology (liberation and womanist), sociology, and history will provide the theoretical paradigms and analytical tools to aid us in our endeavors. Some of the questions we will return to throughout the semester are: 1) How do the overlapping categories of race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality inform our views about love and marriage? 2) What factors compel people to marry, remain single, or "live-together"? 3) What are the advantages and disadvantages (personal and political) of getting married? 4) What does "love" have to do with marriage? 5) Should the state and church define and regulate who is able to "marry"? 6) What alternatives exist to marriage? 7) How, if at all, do civil unions complicate our understanding of marriage?

While there are not any prerequisites for taking this course, students entering it must be prepared to think critically, analytically, and energetically about the readings, discussions, and assignments. Assignments will include: quizzes, a mid-term examination, a short 5 page paper, marriage vows, and an end of the term 10-12 page critical essay. Attendance and class participation also will factor significantly into final course grades.

Texts that need to be purchased include: Toni Morrison's Sula, Ernest Gaines' In My Father's House, Gloria Naylor's: Linden Hills, Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, August Wilson's Fences, Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, and asha bandele's The Prisoner's Wife.

All other texts will be available through the course's blackboard e-reserve system.

Fall09 AML4680 
American Multi-Ethnic Literature  
Maxine L. Montgomery 644-1906, WMS 433, mmontgomery@fsu.edu

This advanced undergraduate course seeks to explore the terrain of American Multi-ethnic Literature through a focus on texts by American Indian, Latino/a, Asian American, and African-American writers. Our discussion will center on the ways in which representative authors concern themselves with attempts on the part of ethnic groups to negotiate a space for themselves within and at times outside of the continental United States. Not only will we engage such issues as border crossing, cultural hybridity, immigration, and assimilation, we will discuss matters relevant to the confluence between writing and difference.

Course requirements include reading, attendance, and discussion; the completion of eight three-page analytical responses; a ten-page critical essay; and an oral presentation based upon the research paper.

Required Texts:

Fall09 CRW4320 01
POETRY WORKSHOP:  
Virgil Suarez 644 2521, WMS 452, vsuarez@fsu.edu

This course will focus (intensely so) on the writing and critique/reading of poetry. We will be reading contemporary poets as well as some classics, focusing on how the poet derives his/her inspiration. Each student will have a chance to workshop up to 15-20 pages of poetry during the semester.

Fall09 CRW4320 
Poetry Workshop  
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

You're good at poetry or you wouldn't be here. In this class, you're going to get better and also become a lot more professional. Part of that involves giving generously to each other. Did you know that originally "Do-Re-Mi" went "Do is a deer, a female deer, Re is a drop of golden sun," etc., and it wasn't until someone told Richard Rodgers to drop the verb that the song became what it is today? Do your best to be that anonymous someone.

There'll be a variety of activities in this class, including reports of several kinds, craft lessons, and so on. But the main emphasis will be on your portfolio: you'll be writing a poem a week and revising the best of these for final submission.

Fall09 ENC4212 
Topics in Editing  
Susan Hellstrom  shellstrom@fsu.edu

You will work together with your peers in this class to write, edit, and produce a newsletter for the English Department. Not only will you get a chance to sharpen your writing, editing, and interviewing skills, but you will also get a chance to learn some basic techniques in PhotoShop and InDesign, two of the most widely used graphics programs in professional publishing. Major assignments will include the journalistic, feature-style articles you write for the newsletter, while other assignments will include readings, reflections, presentations, and class discussion.

Fall09 ENC4311 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Ned Stuckey-French 644-1352, WMS 435, nstuckey-french@fsu.edu

This is a course in the writing of creative nonfiction. Because creative nonfiction is a large and unwieldy genre, we will focus within it on the personal essay. We will begin to explore the range and flexibility of this form in discussions of our own work and that of published essayists. Students will also meet in small groups, in which they will create a magazine and present it at a public reading as an introduction to the publishing profession.

Fall09 ENC4500 
Composition Theory  
Michael Neal 644 4024, WMS 223C, michael.neal@fsu.edu

ENC 4500 focuses the emergence of composition as a discipline and its relationship to other areas within English studies, its theoretical evolution, and leading ideas that currently inform the field. We will examine the act of composing texts in a variety of modes (written, oral, visual, and digital) as well as the rhetorical contexts that surround composing for different audiences and purposes. We will study such key composition issues as theories of literacy, grammar and correctness, process, invention, social issues related to composing, technology, and new media.

Fall09 ENG3014 02
Critical Issues in Literary Studies: An Introduction to Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, Sections 
Robert Patterson 645 6863, WMS 226, rjpatterson@fsu.edu

In this introductory course, we will consider how theoretical frameworks help us make meaning of texts. Exploring some of the key theorists, theories, and critical practices literary and non-literary employ to study literature and culture, we will examine theoretical approaches and frameworks, including psychoanalysis, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, (black) feminism, signifyin(g), and cultural studies. In addition to primary works from The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2008), Peter Barry's Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory and Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction will provide our theoretical approaches and frameworks. Furthermore, we will apply our analytical paradigms to texts in order to understand the ways in which readers produce meaning from texts. To aid us in this endeavor, we will read Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Throughout the semester, the following three questions will guide us: What is literature? How do we read it? Why do we read it?

While there are not any prerequisites for taking this course, students entering it must be prepared to think critically, analytically, and energetically about the readings, discussions, and assignments. Your course grade will consist of the following: quizzes (20%); three non-cumulative examinations (60%); class participation (10%), and final group presentation w/paper (10%). Class attendance is mandatory and your final course grade will suffer if you miss more than three classes during the semester.

Texts that need to be purchased include: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Jonathan Culler), Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Peter Barry), The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

All other texts will be available through the course's blackboard e-reserve system.

Fall09 ENG3014 04 and 05
Critical Issues in Literary Studies  
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 439, ledwards@fsu.edu

This course will introduce you to the major debates in the field of literary studies today. We will explore the main schools of contemporary literary and cultural theory and consider key questions, such as: Why do we read literature? How do we produce interpretations, meaning, and cultural value? How does literature both reflect and shape the social world? Theory can enliven your approach to literature and culture, and we'll be putting literature in dialogue with media and popular culture to test these scholarly approaches. Approaches studied include formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, historicism, Marxism, cultural studies, feminist theory and gender studies, and postmodernism. Writers discussed include Alice Walker, Kate Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. Through lively class discussion and a series of writing assignments, you will examine some momentous cultural theories.

Fall09 ENG3931 
Tutoring Writing: Theory and Practice  
  

Tutoring Writing: Theory and Practice teaches students the principles of conducting one-on-one peer writing tutorials. Students who enroll in the course can expect both a classroom component focused on writing center theory and a practical component that will provide hands-on experience in the university's Reading Writing Center (RWC). The course is designed to help students improve their ability to respond as both readers and writers to a range of writing situations. Upon satisfactory completion of the course, students will have the opportunity to apply to work either for credit or for hourly compensation in the RWC and its various locations on campus.

Fall09 ENG4333 
Advanced Shakespeare  
Elizabeth Spiller 645-1543, WMS 323, espiller@fsu.edu

This course will provide an intensive exploration of the works of William Shakespeare. We will pay particular attention to questions surrounding the staging of the plays, their performance and publication histories, the sources that Shakespeare used and adapted in creating his works, and the cultural uses to which they have subsequently been put by later readers and writers. We will look at some of Shakespeare's less often read works, but our primary attention will be to careful reading of the major plays.

Fall09 ENG4932 
Hemingway in the 21st Century  
John Fenstermaker WMS 435, jfenstermaker@fsu.edu

We will read and discuss Ernest Hemingway's fiction, focusing upon the author as artist and thinker. 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. Those words constitute the material of our study.

Regarding Hemingway's words for their revolutionary stylistic simplicity, Roger Rosenblatt, on the occasion of Hemingway's 100th birthday in 1999, remarked provocatively: "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. In so doing, he changed the rules of writing. 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." We will read selected stories and four novels.

Fall09 ENG4934 
Senior Seminar: Toni Morrison as Cultural Critic  
Robert Patterson 645 6863, WMS 226, rjpatterson@fsu.edu

In this seminar, we will read the writings of Toni Morrison, exploring the ways in which Morrison represents history, nation, race, gender, sexuality, and religion in her works. As Morrison indicates in her Nobel Lecture, dominant ideologies and language (can) prevent the circulation of new knowledge and the exchange of ideas. Her works, in many respects, challenge and complicate hegemonic notions of history, nation, race, gender, sexuality, and religion that aim to oppress and/or exclude non-majority groups. Reading her fiction, literary and cultural criticism, Nobel lecture, and short story ?Recitatif,? we will examine the ?cultural work? that Morrison?s corpus of writing does. In particular, we will think energetically and exhaustively about the ways in which Morrison?s writing produces discourses that augment, refute, and/or complicate many of the dominant ideas that exist in contemporary culture.

Students entering this seminar must be prepared to think critically, analytically, and energetically about the readings, discussions, and assignments. Assignments will include 2 or 3-four page analytical essays, an annotated bibliography, a final 10-12 page research paper, an in-class presentation based on the research project, and in-class quizzes/close reading activities. Class participation and attendance will also factor into the course grade.

Texts that need to be purchased include: Toni Morrison?s The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Paradise (1994), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Toni Morrison: Conversations, edited by Carolyn C. Denard.

All other texts will be available through the course?s blackboard e-reserve system.

Fall09 ENG4934 
Senior Seminar: the Southern Gothic  
Diane Roberts 644 1749, WMS 434, dkroberts@fsu.edu

Why is the South characterized in art as weird, backward and scary? What are we trying to tell ourselves? We will read fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. We will also study films such as Deliverance, Baby Doll, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Crimes of the Heart. There will be a midterm and a final, plus research papers. Note: this is a senior level class. Students must present sophisticated, polished work in order to pass.

Fall09 ENG4934 
Senior seminar  
Eric Walker 644 4869, WMS 438, ewalker@fsu.edu

The course texts will be a combination of contemporary fiction (Ann Patchett's Run), poetry (Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers), memoir (Twice Born), and film (such as Losing Isaiah, Secrets and Lies, Casa de los Babys) and landmark historical texts such as Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale; and George Eliot, Silas Marner. Our goal will be to study how a form of social practice-surrogate parenting-shapes and is shaped by representational praxis over time.

Fall09 ENG4934 
Senior Seminar:  Freedom and Bondage in the American Renaissance 
Paul Outka WMS 228, paul.outka@fsu.edu

This course will examine a number of texts written during the so—called "American Renaissance," a period traditionally defined by the burst of creative work by Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and several others, published in the decades preceding the Civil War. At the same time, we will broaden this canonical focus to include writers who have not been traditionally included in the American Renaissance, including Harriet Jacobs, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, David Walker, and Harriet Wilson. This broader context will allow us to view the extraordinary concern with individualism, self-creation, originality, and freedom in the canonical group through the prism of slavery, the issue that saturated the period?s political, cultural, and philosophical discourse. Rather than dismissing the canonical texts as simply escapist, or including the less canonical texts as mere variations on the central works, we will read this important literary period as fundamentally intersectional, as a profoundly interrelated series of meditations on freedom and bondage.

Fall09 ENG4938 
Honors Seminar: Copernicus, Darwin, Freud: The Road to Postmodernism 
David Kirby 644-1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu

Jacques Derrida and other postmodernists talk of "decentering," the moment in our culture "in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse."

But the idea of decentering has been around for a long time. The forebears of postmodern thought made the ego successively tinier: Copernicus proved that the sun doesn't revolve around us; Darwin showed that we are descended from other species; Freud announced that we are not even the masters of our own minds. These days, we're used to the idea that we're not in charge any more, but have we really examined the idea thoroughly? Let's begin with the antecedents of postmodern thought and work our way forward.

In this class, we're going to engage with theory, with poetry, and, mainly, with the history of ideas. The point is not to so much to acquire knowledge, though we'll certainly do that; the point is to learn how original minds work.

Fall09 ENL2012 
British Literature, Medieval to 1800  
Elaine Treharne 644-5191, WMS 447, etreharne@mac.com

Aims and Objectives:
This course aims to introduce students to key moments in the literary history of the British Isles up to 1800. We shall read and discuss texts as famous as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Paradise Lost, and Gulliver's Travels. We shall also read much less well-known material, such as the Old English Elegies and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Through the interrogation and analysis of these fascinating literary texts, we shall learn about the authors and the cultural contexts in which these works were produced. Such study aims to introduce students to modes of careful and objective evaluation of a range of different forms and genres, all centred on an immensely dynamic and multifaceted period of English Literature's rich history. Weekly lectures will involve the analysis of one or more literary texts, in combination with other historical and artistic materials linked to those texts. Students will learn how to use major research tools to assist their reading, and will be shown how to formulate research questions in relation to literary texts and how to evaluate texts through close reading. Lectures will include space for discussion and workshop-style analysis.

Required text:
A major anthology will be required for this course (to be decided).

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

Fall09 ENL3334 01
Introduction to Shakespeare  
David L. Gants WMS 316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

We will approach the study of Shakespeare's plays not from any one overarching perspective but rather from numerous (and sometimes contradictory) avenues: literary, theatrical, historical, linguistic, theoretical, and aesthetic. The overall aim of the course will be to acquire a broad familiarity with Shakespearean texts and contexts. Along the way we will engage in a number diverse activities: short lectures, in-class discussions, informal and formal writing, student presentations, casting exercises, short quizzes, database inquiries, and video viewings. Just how the balance of goals and activities will work out in the end depends on the unique interests, tastes, and talents of the class, but by the end of the term we should all have a deeper and more fulfilling understanding of the plays we read and discuss.

Fall09 ENL4161 
Renaissance Drama  
David L. Gants WMS 316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

We have long identified William Shakespeare as the transcendent genius of the Renaissance, and his thirty-odd plays are emblematic of the nascent English theatre. Yet he did not work in a vacuum. Dozens of playwrights composed hundreds of plays from the erection of the Red Lion playhouse in 1567 to the closing of the theatres in 1642, in the process making the stage the preeminent medium for literary expression. During this seventy-five-year explosion of creativity, actors, playwrights, con-artists, aristocrats, and burghers all had a hand in generating some of the greatest works of prose and poetry in the English language. In this course we will study the best (and worst) plays, interludes, pageants, and entertainments of this period to gain a better appreciation of their experimental range and striking imaginative achievement. We will focus on both depth and breadth, i.e. we will read a wide variety of works as well as examining in detail select plays. An appreciation of the texts will emerge from close readings, in-class and on-line discussions, exploration of their historical contexts, and individual study.

Fall09 ENL4220 
Renaissance Non Dramatic: Lyric Poetry  
Anne Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu

The course focuses on lyric poetry in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Authors will include Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Donne. We will begin with selected classical and medieval backgrounds to these poems. Sonnet sequences will be prominent, but it's not only love poetry: we'll read many poems about nationhood, self-hood, politics, daily life, etc.. By popular demand, we'll also read emblem books. Class activities may include such things as lectures, discussions, presentations, papers, annotated bibliographies, midterm, final exam.

Fall09 ENL4240 
Studies in British Romantic Literature:  
James O'Rourke 644-5202, WMS 441, jorourke@fsu.edu

We will read the work of some of the major poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats) and novelists (Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte) of the period.

Fall09 ENL4934 01
Senior Seminar: British literature and science in the 19th century 
Meegan Kennedy 644 7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

This course will trace the relationship between literature and science during a time when it was very much still in flux. Literary and scientific writers developed distinct professional roles during the nineteenth century, but both also asked: How can I observe most clearly? What is true? How should I narrate what I see? We will read sensation fiction, realist fiction, "scientific romance," poetry, and essays, observing mad scientists and poets, doctors and detectives, in dialogue with contemporaneous scientific debates in optics, astronomy, medicine, natural selection, phrenology, and mesmerism.

Fall09 LIT4093 
Currents in Contemporary Literature  
Timothy Parrish 644 4059, WMS 221, tparrish@fsu.edu

This course on "Contemporary Literature" will begin with Proust (Swann's Way) and Kafka (The Trial). No literate person—and certainly no "important" writer—since the 1920s can fail to have confronted Proust or Kafka except as a kind of evasion or willful descent into ignorance. The next hundred years of narrative literature has been a response to their narrative experiments and discoveries. Other writers could be likewise adduced (Joyce most obviously) but we will anchor ourselves in Proust and Kafka and then quickly move toward the present (and perhaps at some point determine whether the present is the means by which the past appropriates us, or vice versa). Works likely to be assigned include: The Voyeur (Robbe-Grillet), Lolita (Nabokov), The Loser (Bernhard), Blow-Up and Other Stories (Cortázar) I Served the King of England (Hrabal), Fiskadoro (Denis Johnson) Blindness (Saramago), The Road (Cormac McCarthy), Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), The Amulet or Last Evenings on Earth (Roberto Bolaño). The course shares an assumption with the books assigned: reading is one the best things you can do with your time and while reading provokes thought, it should be fun too. In other words, don't let Proust scare you, we'll work through him and the rest together and have fun while we're at it too.

Fall09 LIT4304 
Popular Culture  
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 439, ledwards@fsu.edu

This course examines theories of popular culture and the emergence of mass culture. We will take seriously George Lipsitz's claim that "perhaps the most important facts about people have always been encoded within the ordinary and the commonplace." Paying particular attention to the relationship between literature and popular culture, we will analyze strategies of reading and reception as well as constructions of ideology in this material, including categories such as gender, race, class, and nation. The course interrogates designations such as "high," "pop," "mass," and "folk" as well as concepts of subculture, counterculture, and youth culture. We will focus particular attention on television and popular music, although we will also consider popular fiction, advertising, and consumer culture. We will explore key theories and methodologies, including media studies, 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.

Fall09 LIT4385 
African-American Women Writers  
Maxine L. Montgomery 644-1906, WMS 433, mmontgomery@fsu.edu

Our primary aim 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 Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison 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, attendance, and discussion; the completion of eight three-page analytical responses; and a ten-page essay.

Required Texts: