Spring 2009

Spring09 AML4111 01
The Nineteenth Century American Novel  
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 439, ledwards@fsu.edu

Examining key novels from the nineteenth century, this course explores how writers tried to use literary fiction to envision "America" and "Americanness" for a young nation in a time of rapid social change. We will discuss developments in the novel during the period, including the influence of the sentimental novel, the realist novel, and the Gothic novel. We will also discuss vital moments in literary history, such as: antebellum "American Renaissance" efforts to establish a national literature, later sectionalist works that debated the very possibility of nation leading up to the Civil War, and postbellum realist novels that grappled with changing definitions of America and its citizens during a period of social upheaval. Authors studied include Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Chopin, Chesnutt, and Poe.

Spring09 AML4121 
Twentieth Century American Novel  
Ned Stuckey-French WMS 325, nstuckey-french@fsu.edu

This course will introduce students to seven major American novels of the twentieth century. Some of them were widely read when they were first published; others fell out-of-print and were only recovered later when critical tastes and political climates changed; and some of them speak to each other more or less directly. All of them have had wide and lasting appeal and changed the course of American literature.

Course requirements will include regular participation in a BlackBoard discussion group, occasional reading quizzes, two papers, a midterm and a final.

Texts:

Spring09 AML4261 01
Literature of the South  
Leigh Edwards 644 8918, WMS 439, ledwards@fsu.edu

In this class, we will examine a range of important literary works by Southern writers and question what the concept of "Southern Literature" has meant to different authors or critics. We will think about the South as a region with its own distinctive history and culture. Yet we will also examine "the South" as an imagined community or a set of often competing ideas. We will discuss the development of Southern Literature in a variety of genres and historical periods, ranging from the colonial period to the present. Selected critical readings on Southern literature and culture will help us address the fiction and poetry as well as units on folklore, visual culture, and popular music. Discussing writers as various as Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson and Johnny Cash, our goal will be to unravel changing definitions of self and society in this region.

Spring09 ENC4311 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Bruce Bickley WMS 417, bbickley@fsu.edu

Combines whole-class workshopping and online writing and editing experience. Students bring their own current projects into the classroom mix. Moving from shorter compositions to extended essays, students can write film and music reviews, drafts of academic papers, personal narratives and memoirs, creative non-fiction, feature articles and interviews, and other types of essays.

Spring09 ENC4500 01
Introduction to Media Assemblage Theory  
Amit Rai 645-1459, WMS 453, asrai@fsu.edu

This course introduces students to the study of media as self-organizing patterns of information, sensation, value, form, and matter. We look closely at the theory of media ecologies and pose what an assemblage approach has to offer the field of media ecologies. This course assumes that you have taken "Critical Issues," (ENG 3014) as well as some film theory or rhetorical theory course.

Spring09 ENG3014 06
  
Daniel Vitkus 645 0100, WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

This course offers an intensive introduction to the most important concepts and critical issues in literary studies today. We will be discussing, not just literature, but literary theory and methodology. Our study of literary theory will address exciting, foundational problems having to do with meaning, culture, and subjectivity. Students will learn about the main schools of contemporary literary theory and then apply these theories as we analyze literary texts. We will ask not only "What do these texts mean?" but also "How do they mean?". Some of the other questions we will explore include: What is "literature?" What is the purpose and function of literary studies? How do we determine what a text means? Where does meaning reside--in the author, the reader, or the text? What is the relationship between literature and society? Between text and historical context? We will discover how theory can help us to understand the ways in which literature and culture both respond to and shape the world around us.

Spring09 ENG3931 
Tutoring Writing: Theory and Practice  
Scott Gage  sbgage@gmail.com

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 skills as both writers and interpersonal communicators. 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.

Spring09 ENG4020 
Rhetorical Theory and Practice  
Kristie Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 224, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu

Rhetorical Theory and Practice introduces students to the range and power of rhetorical theory. It includes a historical overview of various theories and provides opportunities for an application of those theories. This configuration of English 4020 focuses on the rhetoric of popular culture: the array of activities, texts, and media that appeal to a broad spectrum of people.

Spring09 ENG4932 
Hemingway  
John Fenstermaker 644-1352, WMS 435, jfenstermaker@fsu.edu

We will read and discuss Ernest Hemingway's fiction, focusing upon the author as artist and thinker. Why read Hemingway at the millennium? In 1995, the MLA International Bibliography recorded more published scholarship devoted to Hemingway than to any other American writer of the 20th century. Critics have claimed much for Hemingway's cultural importance. Rena Sanderson observes that when "he arrived at young manhood, there was a struggle . . . between men and women over personal and sexual freedom, economic independence, and political power . . . [affecting] his thinking and writing about women. . . . [A]nyone who wants to understand the confused history of gender relations in twentieth-century America would do well to read him closely." Despite such critical (and biographical) discourse, we know that we have "no direct access" to the person Hemingway--only to his texts. 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.

Spring09 ENG4934 01
Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Early Modern Literature  
Bruce Boehrer 644-3029, WMS 112A, bboehrer@fsu.edu

Studies Renaissance writing in light of environmental and animal-rights issues.

Spring09 ENG4934 07
Senior Seminar: Banned Books in America  
Fred Standley 644 1850, WMS 414, fstandley@fsu.edu

A study in selected book texts from among the many that have been banned or censored at one time or another in the United States (from the BIBLE to HARRY POTTER), and the four basic categories of reasons for such banning: political, sexual, social, and religious, or a combination of them. We will consider who challenges books and why this is antithetical to the philosophy and practices of a democratic society, and we will consider who defends books and why this matters in a democratic society.

Spring09 ENG4934 
The Supernatural in African Diaspora Fiction  
Jerrilyn McGregory 644 3161, WMS 458, jmcgregory@fsu.edu

Any number of approaches to African Diaspora fiction can be identified. In this course the focus is on the supernatural as it manifests itself in various forms of fiction. I use the word "supernatural" expansively to include not only the usual indications of phenomena beyond the natural world and the scope of human action, but conjuration, "speculative fiction," "magic realism," and manipulations of time and historical periods that create an "unnatural, realistic" novel form.

This class will explore belief systems that traditionally have informed the particular worldview of many people of African descent. The course privileges an experience-centered analysis of belief systems as they inform writings within the African Diaspora. The objective is to develop a high context for some core supernatural beliefs that operate as a recursive strategy in this literature.

Spring09 ENG4934 04
Senior Seminar: The Middle Ages and its Representations  
Nancy Warren 644 5077, WMS 216, nwarren@fsu.edu

This course jointly consideres medieval texts and cultural phenomena in their own historical moments and later representations of those texts and phenomena. We will investigate what sorts of literary, historical, and political questions get negotiated through engagements with the Middle Ages. We will ponder why particular characters, tropes, and themes recur so persistently in texts of various genres. For example, we will analyze Joan of Arc as she appears in her trial records, in Tudor chronicles, in Shakespeare's Henry VI Part I, in Shaw's Saint Joan, and in various films. Other units will likely address Arthurian romance, Chaucer, and Margery Kempe. Students will be expected to participate actively, read both extensively and intensively, and conduct research using both primary and secondary sources. Grades will be determined on the basis of reading quizzes, a midterm exam, informal writing assignments, and a multi-step research project (including an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper of 10-15 pages).

Spring09 ENG4938 01
Honours Seminar The Meaning of TEXT  
Elaine Treharne 644-5191, WMS 447, etreharne@mac.com

This seminar aims to introduce students to the complexities of the concept of TEXT in its broadest sense, focusing principally on the written word from c. 900 to 2000, but including discussion of visual text, oral text, and symbolic text. Initially, we shall engage in a close examination of the uses and multiple meanings of the word 'text' from its etymological roots in Latin to the present-day, where it is employed in an extraordinary range of referents from 'textology', 'textualist', and 'hypertext' to 'texting', 'textura' and 'intertextuality'. After unpacking this word's polyvalency and its multiple collocations, we shall move to the investigation of how meaning is formed by TEXT in its various physical and historical contexts. Among the major themes that we shall analyse is textual mouvance or variance (how texts change over time at the hands of successive users, whether annotators, readers, performers, editors, translators, or copyists); how paratextual features, such as illustration, typography, codicology and layout both affect and effect our interpretation; and the ways in which meaning can be said to derive from combinations of textual production, reception, and ideological or performative interactions. Rather than focusing on earlier debates about text and textuality (debates notably promoted in post-structuralism and affective stylistics), our primary focus will be linguistic in the first few weeks when we examine the use and meaning of TEXT, and materialist and visualist in the following weeks, when the physical object of the text will form our chief point of interpretative departure, though we shall also spend one or two sessions with illustrations and film. We shall spend at least three sessions in the Strozier Library examining, first hand, medieval manuscripts, early printed books, and artistic reworkings of earlier materials (William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer, for example).

There is currently no published coursebook for this seminar. Students will, however, be provided with an online pack of prepared materials; indeed, many of the texts are available electronically, and our interaction with these digitized materials and electronic texts will form part of our investigation about TEXT.

Primary Sources
The Oxford English Dictionary
Early English Books Online
Eighteenth Century Collection Online

Primary Reading Texts for Seminars

Selected Secondary Sources
Martin Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon
Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500
Peter Schillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts
Graham Allen, Intertextuality
Lynette Hunter, Literary Value/Cultural Power: Verbal Arts in the Twenty First Century
Maureen Bell, et al., eds., Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission
Susan Hockey, Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Principles and Practice

Assessment
Assessment will be comprised of oral presentations on actual manuscripts or printed books (from facsimile generally) (25%); a short project on an aspect of TEXT and related semantic fields (25%); a research project focusing on the life and materiality of a literary text from a diachronic perspective (50%).

Spring09 ENL3210 01
MEDIEVAL LIT. IN TRANS (HONORS)  
Anne Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu

This course will focus on women and later-medieval literature: not only women as they were portrayed in major literary works popular in Medieval England, but also women as writers of literature during the medieval period. Most of the works we'll study are secular. Some of them were first written in Latin, French, or Italian but were popular in various forms in England between about 1300 and about 1550; as the course title specifies, we'll read them in modern English translations. (This will allow us to keep in view what can be lost and gained in translation.) Authors include Ovid, Vergil, Theophrastus, Jean de Meun/Guillaume de Lorris, Dante, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, and the ubiquitous "Anon.," who may at times have been a woman. Course activities will include lectures, discussions, panels, student presentations, papers, & exams.

Spring09 ENL4122 01
Nineteenth-Century British Novel  
Meegan Kennedy 644-7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

The nineteenth century is sometimes considered the golden age of the novel. Reading domestic or historical fiction, romance or realism, silver fork novels or Newgate novels, sensation novels or condition of England novels, New Woman novels or scientific romances - nineteenth-century readers experienced a roller coaster of novel genres equal only in pace and variety to the rapid changes transforming British society. While we can't fit in all the genres I mention above, we will tackle six great (good as well as big) novels, in an effort to understand something of the pleasures and compulsions of nineteenth-century novel readers and writers. Authors include Austen, Scott, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, and Doyle.

Spring09 ENL4161 01
  
Daniel Vitkus 645 0100, WMS 220, dvitkus@fsu.edu

The course is a survey of English Renaissance drama. All of the plays we will study were written for performance in London between 1580 and 1635. We will read and discuss some of the best plays from this extraordinarily rich time and place in theater history, including works by Marlowe, Jonson and Middleton, Shakespeare?s greatest contemporaries and rivals. We will explore the poetic language and social significance of these texts, always keeping in mind that these texts are scripts for live performance. The issues of politics, gender, and class raised by these plays will be central to our classroom discussion.

Spring09 ENL4251 01
Survey of Victorian Literature  
Meegan Kennedy 644 7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu

This course explores the literature of Queen Victoria's reign, an era very close to our own in its interests and anxieties, and a period that prompted a strong reaction from twentieth-century writers and artists. Students will read poetry, essays, fiction, and drama in this survey of some of the major figures of the time. The course also examines the explosion of print culture; the vexed divide between high and low culture; the literary negotiation of issues like voting rights, women's role in society, and the growing British empire; and how Victorians became increasingly interested in the relationship between word and image. Authors include Browning (both), Tennyson, Dickens, George Eliot, Rossetti, Kipling, Arnold, Wilde.

Spring09 ENL4333 
Advanced Shakespeare  
Bruce Boehrer 644-3029, WMS 112A, bboehrer@fsu.edu

This course will offer an in-depth survey of Shakespeare's dramatic work, with reading drawn from all the major dramatic genres. The scholarly approach will be broadly historicist, aimed at situating Shakespeare's works within their contemporary intellectual, social, and political context.

Spring09 ENL4934 
Senior Seminar: Ecocriticism and animal Studies in Early Modern Literature  
Bruce Boehrer 644-3029, WMS 112A, bboehrer@fsu.edu

This seminar will introduce students to the major theorists of ecocriticism and animal studies (e.g., Singer, Merchant, Bookchin, Agamben, Latour) and will apply their theories to a reading of early modern English texts by such authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Jonson.

Spring09 HUM3930 
Honors Research Seminar  
David L. Gants WMS 316, dgants(at)fsu.edu

Description: As the Internet has expanded the number and variety of resources available to the scholarly researcher, so too has the power and sophistication of tools designed to manipulate those resources grown. This seminar's goal is to introduce undergraduates to the most popular applications currently in use and to train those students in their application to common research problems. http://english8.fsu.edu/Courses/HUM3930_S09

The seminar syllabus will focus on two distinct threads:

Coursework will culminate in a capstone project of each student's choosing that brings together the traditional and digital skills developed over the semester. By the end of the class, students should be able to assist FSU faculty in the development of diverse projects in the Arts and Humanities. Although computer expertise is not a prerequisite, participants should be familiar with either the Windows or Macintosh operating systems and possess their own laptop computers.

Communication. The Florida State e-mail system has an extremely high security setting, and as a result messages sometimes disappear. To prevent misunderstandings or lost information, all discussions regarding the class, assignments, or other concerns should take place in person. Use e-mail only to set up a time to talk with me in my office.

Course Requirements:

Primary Resources: This course has two required texts and one software package:

Spring09 LIT4385 01
Major Women Writers: Narratives of Female Spirituality  
Nancy Bradley Warren 644 5077, WMS 216, nwarren@fsu.edu

This course focuses on narratives of female spirituality originating in the medieval and early modern periods. We will consider writings by such figures as Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemlila Lanyer, Gerturde More, Grace Mildmay, and more. We will read the medieval texts in modern English translations. We will address such topics as women's places in religious institutions; the ways in which gender is involved in negotiations of orthodoxy and heresy; the cultural and political implications of women's representations of their individual experiences of the divine; and what it means in different periods for women to construct themselves as figures of spiritual authority. There will be both mid-term and final exams as well as reading quizzes and a substantial research project.