Summer 2009

Summer09 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

Summer09 AML3311 02
Major Figures in American Literature  
Joann Gardner 644-1881, WMS 426, jgardner@fsu.edu

This course will include a selection of 19th century U.S. authors whose works are considered important. (James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Herman Melvillle's Moby Dick and Kate Chopin's The Awakening.) In addition to engaging with the works themselves, we will explore the concept of American identity and how its characteristics may have evolved.

Summer09 AML4111 
19th Century American Novel  
Cristobal Silva WMS 229, csilva@fsu.edu

This course examines a trajectory of American literature from Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain. As a class, we will consider the major themes and formal conventions that bind these texts , and ask how each of the authors we study approach questions such as: what is America? What does it mean to be American? and What does an American literature look like? Authors may include Franklin, Brockden Brown, Child, Douglass, Wilson, Melville, and Twain.

Summer09 AML4604 
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 CRW4320 
Poetry Workshop  
Erin Belieu WMS 326, ebelieu@fsu.edu

In this class we will both workshop our own poetry as well as read plenty of work by modern and contemporary masters. Students will be required to give a 15 minute presentation on a poet chosen in consultation with the professor.

Summer09 ENC4311 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Ned Stuckey-French 644-2638, WMS 325, 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.

Summer09 ENC4311 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Diane Roberts 644 1749, WMS 434, dkroberts@fsu.edu

In this course, we will explore literary journalism, personal essays, memoir and travel writing, both as readers and practitioners. Students will study essays by Annie Dillard, Philip Lopate, Richard Rodriguez, Andrei Codrescu, among others, as well as workshop pieces of their own writing and produce a portfolio by the end of the session.

Summer09 ENG4020 
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 ENG4934 01
SENIOR SEMINAR - THE RAW AND THE COOKED: POETRY IN THE POSTMODERN UNITED STATES 
Joann Gardner 644-1881, WMS426, jgardner@fsu.edu

This course will offer a survey of the various schools of poetry since WWII, in order to understand the influences, writing philosophies, and techniques of our time and to identify possibilities for future expression. We will include treatment of such groups as Black Mountain, The Beats, Black Arts, Feminist, Confessional and Deep Image Poetry. Our readings will be in the form of poems and prose essays. Our individual work will give depth and dimension to the core reading assignment.

Summer09 ENL3210 
Medieval Literature in Translation, Time Travel: Mapping the Medieval, 500-1500 
Elaine Treharne 644-5191, WMS 447, etreharne@mac.com

This course focuses on The Journey in Old and Middle English literature, with reference also to excerpts from relevant materials in other medieval literatures. The class will consider the spiritual journey, the metaphorical journey, and the methods of and motivations behind travelling in this early period. The course will utilise maps, descriptions of landscape and topography, and literary and historical texts in various analyses, thereby aiming to introduce students to different forms of evidence for interpreting the past, and to new approaches to studying literature in its specific historical contexts.

Required texts:
Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed., Elaine Treharne (Blackwell, 2003 or 1999 edition) [Get it second-hand if you want to.]
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (Norton, 2001)

Aims and Objectives:
This course aims to provide students with an introduction to an important aspect of medieval culture, that of The Journey, from c. 500 to 1500 CE. Through the interrogation and analysis of literary and documentary texts—including maps and itineraries—we shall learn about medieval geography, centres and margins, travelling and destinations, belonging and exile, the community and the individual in relation to this world and the next. Our focus will principally be the British Isles and Continental Europe, particularly the Mediterranean, and the ways in which medieval travellers regarded the various journeys upon which they embarked. Such study aims to introduce students to modes of careful and objective evaluation of a range of different source materials in determining what can be learnt about one of the central aspects of life (getting from one place to another or even living the metaphorical journey from birth to death) in an immensely dynamic and multifaceted period of history. Weekly sessions will involve the analysis of one or more literary texts, in combination with other source materials thematically linked to those texts. These other sources will incorporate images, objects and buildings from multiple genres and media, such as maps, charters, churches and secular buildings, descriptions of real and allegorical journeys, archaeological evidence from boats, roadways, and the landscape.

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

Summer09 ENL4230 
Restoration and 18-Century British Literature and Culture  
Candace Ward 644-1833, WMS 113, candace.ward@fsu.edu

This course is intended to introduce you to representative works and figures of the long eighteenth century, the period roughly dating from 1660 to 1838. Alongside poetry, prose, and drama, we will examine non-literary texts as well, texts that, like the literature, reflected and produced the cultures of eighteenth-century Britain. In addition to examining historical, political, economic, and gender-related issues of the period, we will explore some of the critical approaches to eighteenth-century studies, and discuss how reading eighteenth-century texts is relevant to other areas of literary studies and to our lives outside the classroom.

Throughout the semester, you will be called on to discuss these texts and write about them in formal and informal papers and on exams. In order to successfully fulfill the requirements, you must demonstrate not only a familiarity with the texts and contexts (i.e., background information provided in lectures, class discussions, and independent research), but also an ability to communicate your ideas using the critical and analytical techniques that characterize literary and cultural studies.

Required Texts

Course Library (available on Blackboard). The "library" contains the following required readings:

Summer09 ENL4251 
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 ENL4333 02
Advanced 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. As this is an ?advanced? course, students will also be required to 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: