Graduate Courses

CRW 5130 is a graduate workshop in fiction writing. This class will follow the workshop model, and therefore student work, and the intensive discussion of that work, will be our main focus. To that end, over the course of the semester students will be required to share at least three story-length manuscripts (one revision and two new pieces; novel excerpts are fine). This course assumes you have a very serious interest in fiction writing, as well as in discussing the writing of same with others likewise engaged. Our concerns are mainly practical and craft-based: where you as author wish to go with a particular draft, and how we, as readers and writers engaged in a common cause, might help you get there.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

In this workshop, we will study the combinations of image and pattern required in our fiction. We will consider notes on visual storytelling, including Susan Sontag’s concepts of the anthology of images and the grammar of seeing. Toni Morrison’s process of moving from picture to meaning to text will also be a guide. Other lessons in photography will come from Teju Cole, Eudora Welty, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Our primary craft text will be Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. The book classifies prose structure using forms derived from nature—waves, cycles, colors, explosions, etc. We will consider patterns in workshop pieces and assigned readings that may include the short stories of Dantiel Moniz, Joshua Ferris, Daniel Alarcón, Laura Van Den Berg, Uwem Akpan, Rion Amilcar Scott, Amina Gautier, and Joy Castro. We will read one novel, The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. Each writer will workshop two submissions, short stories, or novel sections. Before their workshop session, the writer can provide five questions for the respondents to consider. This approach allows the writer to add their voice to the discussion. Graduate students outside of the Creative Writing Program will need the instructor’s permission to enroll in the workshop.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

How does one become a great poet? The craft portion of the class will be devoted to the tensions in the life of poets as they deal with doubt, fame, loneliness, family, friends, frenemies, enemies, poverty, love, heartbreak, and, of course, writing. We will be reading excerpts on Canvas of the letters of Horace, Ovid, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson, Rilke, Rimbaud, Sexton, Plath, Langston Hughes, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. I have a template of 15 tensions that you can use to guide your reading, but you are free to discover your own. I have left out some great poets (Whitman, Wordsworth) because they weren't great letter writers. The first part of the class will be devoted to discussing the letters in small groups and then as a class. The second part of the class will be devoted to a workshop of your own work.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

Poetry writing workshop. Each student will write up to 12 poems and bring them to the workshop during the semester.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

According to nonfiction guru Lee Gutkind: “The word 'creative' refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.”

In this workshop, students will read various nonfiction writers and produce stories—true stories—with the goal of publishing them. We will discuss how you pitch to newspapers, journals, magazines, online sites, etc., as well as how to write a nonfiction book proposal.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

ENC 5700 provides a critical overview of the field of contemporary composition studies, from the early twentieth century to the present, with an emphasis on theoretical “turns” that have acted—or do act—as landmarks. Its overarching goal is to familiarize you with the conversations situating writing, rhetoric, literacy, teaching, institutional politics, and institutional discourse so that you can enter into and contribute to those conversations. This requires both a global understanding of the field (i.e., what are its historical arcs, its interdisciplinary foraging, and its various philosophical orientations) and a local understanding of the field (i.e., what issues generate talk, how it forms its social agendas, what various individuals bring to the conversation, and what keywords serve as “god terms,” in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the word). By the end of the semester, you will have both a comprehensive sense of critical issues in the field, and a more critical understanding of those issues that reflect your own scholarly and pedagogical interests, in and beyond the university. This course is also open to students from outside the English department.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Rhetoric and Composition.

Research Methods is the most important course you will take as a graduate student. In turn, it can be the most difficult and challenging content-based course. Be prepared to be challenged on your learning/comprehension. This Research Methods Seminar covers several ways composition and rhetoric scholars make and support knowledge claims. These ways, though, are not exclusive to the discipline, often drawing on research methods, methodologies, and epistemologies across academic disciplines. Not only will we seek to discover and explore the major research paradigms in the field, but we will also discuss how they function to construct knowledge, their underlying assumptions, and their ethical implications. Rhetoric and Composition as a discipline has a commitment to feminist, anti-racist, and decolonizing epistemologies, which can be seen in our acceptance of intersectional methodological approaches. Therefore, in this survey of intersectional qualitative research methods common in the field, we will consistently return to discussions of ideology and the ethics of power dynamics and underrepresented voices. After a brief introduction to epistemology, we will (1) formulate research questions, (2) investigate various ways to collect and analyze data, and (3) plan a mixed-methods qualitative study. In addition, all students will complete Institutional Review Board (IRB) training to become certified human subjects researchers at FSU if they have not done so already.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Rhetoric and Composition. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

The Internship in Editing allows graduate students to receive academic credit for completion of an internship or practicum focused on writing or editing. The course is graded S/U and may be taken for 1 to 6 credit hours. The course requirements may be fulfilled through many types of work including professional service, such as serving as poetry editor for a literary magazine or managing editor for an academic journal, or writing/editing projects associated with a communications-focused job. Email course instructor with questions and to discuss available opportunities or whether a current job or position would be eligible for credit.

This course will focus on the field of ecotheory, from ecocriticism and literary studies in the 1980s and '90s (primarily in a US context) into a more contemporary and broader theoretical mode. We will also look to specific science and speculative fiction, media, and the arts that operate as themselves ecotheoretical texts of imaginative, speculative ecologies. Though the course does begin with readings on other core ideas in ecocriticism about “nature” and “environment,” the speculative mode will undergird all readings even as we put speculation itself up for critique. If the speculative has been understood as a mode that attempts to grasp an impossible whole, that which one cannot gain experience of in the world, what is the relation between abstract, dialectical, and speculative ways of thinking? In what way has speculative thought informed how we theorize the ecology/the environment, and what do speculative-fictional ecologies do or offer beyond just “imagining otherwise”?

The course provides a historical account of the field of ecocriticism/ecotheory alongside major environmental movements, and locates in fiction and art ecological otherwises and critiques of the climate-changing present. Key themes and subfields of the course include the history of the wild/wilderness and settler colonialism, the nature/culture binary, nature writing, the nonhuman turn, feminist/queer/trans ecologies, the Black horizon, utopia and apocalypse, climate fiction, ecomedia studies, systems theory, animal studies, futurisms, Indigenous studies, the Anthropocene and racial Capitalocene, and others.

Theory and philosophy readings may include works by Whitehead, Hegel, Todd, Jameson, Muñoz, Woods, Buell, Tsing, Haraway, Cronon, J.T. Roane, Alaimo, Chen, Hayward, Heise, Nixon, Parikka, Garrard, Merchant, Yusoff, etc.

Possible authors of fiction include Callenbach, Ballard, Le Guin, Wilk, Stanley Robinson, Tchaikovsky, Butler, Negarestani, and Ghosh.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st centuries; and Theory. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

Since its conception, the cinema and its filmmakers have constantly drawn from literary sources to create narratives in the new medium. In this course, we will study classic and contemporary theories of film adaptation, borrowing as well as breaking from the concept of fidelity to create a space to explore how the cinema engages with literature, and how literary stories are deformed and reformed through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of text-to-film adaptations and explore their wider adaptation “networks,” as well as consider how some literature and culture were influenced by film, or adapted itself by “seeing cinematically,” before the cinema even fully evolved.

Subcategories for study may include: animation in/as adaptation, cinema and modernity, reel bodies, ecocriticism & biocinemimicry, and the proto-cinema of Thomas de Quincey.

Selected film/adaptation theory will be read, including writings by André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Charles Darwin, Sergei Eisenstein, Kamilla Elliott, Lucy Fischer, Tom Gunning, Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, and Robert Stam.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st centuries; Film and Media; and Theory.

This course is reserved for first-year English Department teaching assistants. Students observe college composition classes; observe tutoring sessions; deliver lessons in a class; participate in tutoring sessions; and meet with graduate mentors to better prepare for teaching duties as teaching assistants at FSU.

All first-year graduate students on assistantship need to enroll in this course to satisfy TA-training requirements.

Early modern drama was written to be performed, yet plays are often engaged through silent, solitary reading. This group allows us to gather and experience these texts through live, embodied, collaborative reading, to say and hear the written words.

The setup is simple: in each session, we'll read a play together and have a brief discussion after. You don't have to be a trained actor or an early modernist to participate. Plays will be circulated in advance, so prior reading is an option but not a requirement.

We'll determine times, locations, and texts at the beginning of the term based on everyone's schedules and interests. Plays may include "greatest hits" as well as overlooked gems, Shakespearean bangers as well as less frequently studied plays that happened to be highly successful in their own moment.

Requirements: for one credit hour, show up and participate regularly. For two credit hours, show up and participate regularly, and prepare to introduce one play during the semester and to guide discussion after.

This course engages with border history and theory from a rhetorical perspective.

Students enrolled in this novel writing class should be in the throes of writing a novel, just beginning one, or revising one. In this course we will explore the craft of novel writing by reading and closely examining five short novels, workshopping sections of your own novel, and reading and discussing interviews with published writers about novel writing. I will also give you writing exercises to help you gather material, develop your plot, and get to know your characters.

For MFA students, this course satisfies 3 of the required 12-15 hours of writing workshops. For PhD students, it counts toward the 27 hours of required coursework.

In this course, students will engage with the most widely read piece of Old English literature, Beowulf, in its original language and manuscript context. While most undergraduate English majors encounter this 3,182-line poem in an introductory British literature course as the prime example of Old English literary culture, there is scant evidence that Beowulf was widely circulated in early medieval England, and our only extant copy barely survived a library fire in the 18th century. The single manuscript itself is also quite a late example of the language, predating the 1066 CE Norman Conquest by only about half a century. How then did this peculiar tale become the modern starting point for studying Old English? To try to answer this question, we will read a wide variety of scholarship selected to introduce students to key discussions and developments in Beowulf scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as explore new directions the field is taking. Each week we will translate specific sections, compare our translations to published ones, and read articles analyzing those lines through a variety of lenses (historical, linguistic, legal, comparative, feminist, ecological, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, etc). In doing so, we will explore the murky depths of this millennium-old poem that has continuously fascinated scholars from a wide array of disciplines and, like King Hrothgar interpreting the ancient hilt of a giant's sword, unpack Beowulf's ever-evolving legacy and potentiality. Previous experience with Old English is not required, as language instruction will be incorporated into the class and materials and readings will be adapted to fit each student's level of familiarity with Old English.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660).

This course will examine Shakespeare’s relationship to the transformative media of early modern England down to today on stage, in film, in print, in digital formats, in music, and in comics. What makes Shakespeare’s work so appealing through the centuries and in different media formats? How has it continued to appeal to evolving media structures? We will look at Shakespeare’s relationship to printers, publishers, actors, playing companies, theatrical infrastructure, and the bodies of performers. Who is “Shakespeare”? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and what relevance do they continue to hold for us today? Active class participation is required. No background in Renaissance literature necessary, though prior experience with Shakespeare is a plus.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); History of Text Technologies; or a Literary Genre (Drama).

This course focuses on animals and animality in early modern English literature. Reading an array of texts, including drama and poetry as well as selections from contemporary popular works such as animal husbandry manuals, cookbooks, natural histories, emblems, almanacs, broadside ballads, and more, we’ll consider how early modern humans were “thinking with animals” and how they lived among and experienced the creaturely world. We will also think about animality and otherness. What does literature reveal about how early modern people differentiated between human and other-than-human lives—about what it means to be human or animal? How is animality mapped onto human bodies and to what effect? Conversely, are animals humanized or anthropomorphized? How does animality converge with other categories of difference or disqualification? How do animal tropes shape early modern literature? To what extent is “the animal” a literary invention? (To what extent is “the human”?)

Our practice will be grounded in careful close reading of primary texts; accompanying readings in early modern cultural contexts as well as secondary and theoretical work in early modern animal studies, posthumanism, disability studies, and more will provide foundations and critical frameworks for approaching our texts.

Course assignments may include regular discussion posts, presentations, and guiding discussion. For the culminating project, participants will identify a call for papers or site of publication and produce a piece of original scholarship which may be presented as a conference paper or developed into a publishable article.

This course satisfies the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); and a Literary Genre (Drama). This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

In 1807, Britain’s Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act; in 1833, the Emancipation Act was passed, effective August 1834, with the implementation of the Apprenticeship period, followed in 1838 with “full freedom.” In this course, we examine what Ian 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 these landmark legislations. 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 Oroonoko; moving into the 18th century, we’ll not only encounter ameliorist novels like William Earle’s Obi, but also colonialist narratives like Edward Long’s description of Tacky’s Revolt in his History 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. The course ends with an examination of that struggle’s long-lived legacy as manifested in later Caribbean fiction: Michel Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca; or, Blighted Life, A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854), Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955), and Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988). As we explore the 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” (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.”

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course in 1660-1900*. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 18th and 19th centuries; African American, African, and African Caribbean Literature and Culture; and a Literary Genre (Fiction). This course also meets the Alterity requirement. *Indicative of the shifting contours of “period studies,” this course covers the “long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” and includes material on both sides of the 1800 mark. In some cases, and only with Instructor’s and ACGS’s permission, the course may count as a pre-1800 course: in order to do so, both the short paper and the major research paper must focus on pre-1800 primary texts and topics (i.e., two different pre-1800 texts and topics—one for the short paper, one for the research paper) to ensure that the bulk (60% minimum) of coursework is devoted to pre-1800.

This graduate seminar will be devoted entirely to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the foundational works of the Western literary canon. Over the course of the semester, we will undertake a sustained, intensive reading of the poem, attending closely to its language, syntax, rhetoric, imagery, theology, politics, and poetic form. Concentrating on a single work for an entire semester will allow us to practice the art of close reading at an advanced level and to discover the extraordinary complexity that sustained attention can reveal. Our goal is not simply to understand Milton, but to learn how to read poetry deeply, patiently, and precisely.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following areas of concentration: Medieval and Early Modern Literary and Cultural Studies; and a Literary Genre (Poetry).

How was modernism received and revised in the postcolonial world? How have postcolonial poets adapted modernist techniques while altering our understanding of modernist cultural practices and institutions? This course will address current debates about cultural nationalism, imperialism, avant-garde poetics, transnationalism, and periodization in modernist and postcolonial studies by examining poets such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Arun Kolatkar, Mani Rao, and Craig Santos Perez.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course in Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st centuries; and a Literary Genre (Poetry). This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

While British writers increasingly retreated from the formal radicalism associated with high modernism, Irish writers sustained, extended, and transformed modernist experimentation throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Writing in and against English (both nation and language), within the pressures of colonial and decolonial history and linguistic estrangement, Irish modernists forged what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously theorized as minor literature: writing that deterritorializes language and genre, politicizes aesthetics, and destabilizes authorship.

This seminar examines Irish Modernism as an ongoing if conflicted project rather than a closed historical moment. Focusing on James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett, the course traces how narrative recursion, ontological instability, cognitive exhaustion, and formal failure become defining aesthetic strategies as this Holy Trinity of Irish writers seems to have issued a license: “Go forth and experiment!" The final unit extends Holy Trinity modernism into post-Beckett fiction and drama, with particular attention to Brian Friel, Marina Carr, and Enda Walsh, situating contemporary Irish theatre within its modernist afterlife.

The course emphasizes intensive close reading, theoretically informed discussion, oral presentation, and sustained research writing appropriate to graduate-level scholarly work.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st centuries; and a Literary Genre (Fiction).

This LIT 5309 course examines popular culture and media in the context of the emergence of mass culture and focuses on the evolution of media in the digital era. We will address popular music, television, film, and new media. We will also consider audience studies and fan culture. Our reading draws on media studies, screen studies, popular music studies, film and new media, popular culture studies, and digital humanities. The course will give you solid grounding in media studies and the chance to do more specialized research in the field. Within media studies, we will discuss topics including multi-platform storytelling, media convergence, serialized narratives on television, interactive digital videos and films, digital technology and popular music, documentary film, and new ideas of media in the digital era. Our focus will be on US media, but we will consider questions of the global circulation of media.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Film and Media; Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st Centuries; the History of Text Technologies (reception conceptual area, Film/Television media); and a Literary Genre (Film/Television).