Undergraduate Courses

This course offers a survey of major works by African-American writers, typically including Douglass, Chesnutt, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Walker.

This course offers a survey of major works by African-American writers, typically including Douglass, Chesnutt, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Walker. We will examine the evolution of Black American literature by examining slavery narratives, the Harlem Renaissance, and Afro-futurism through lenses of cultural modality, folklore, Louisiana Voodoo, and Haitian Vodou. This course satisfies requirements for CORE FSU and University graduation through Exploring the Human Experience and the State-mandated Writing (W credit).

This is a summer course devoted to Herman Melville’s classic sea tale, Moby-Dick: or The Whale. Most basically, it will provide you the opportunity to carefully read and analyze one of the greatest but most challenging novels ever written in a dynamic classroom setting. In so doing, we will foreground the grand theme of the novel as indicated by its title: the whale. By that I mean we will explore and educate ourselves about the life, culture, and environment of whales, “Earth’s most awesome creatures,” and let that be our inspiration for reading Melville’s masterpiece. The course will also devote time to popular representations of Moby-Dick, both the novel and the whale, in other genres, including film, comics, and visual art.

“The world keeps ending, and the world goes on.” So writes contemporary poet Franny Choi in an evocative phrase that captures the apocalyptic sensibilities of post-World War II American culture. This course surveys the ways in which apocalypse has saturated American literature from the postwar moment to the present, exploring how major authors have indexed nuclear, social, geopolitical, epidemiological, and ecological crises through apocalyptic storytelling. We will consider what insights the project of following the apocalyptic can offer us into the relationship between “literary” and “genre” fiction in the postwar period. We will take seriously the socially uneven distribution of apocalyptic experience in postwar America. And we will, continuously, move back and forth across both of apocalypse’s eschatological dimensions—as the end of the world, and as revelatory and prophetic knowledge of the world. Authors covered in this course will likely include Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Adrienne Rich, Samuel Delany, Tony Kushner, Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Karen Russell, Craig Santos Perez, and (bringing it full circle) Franny Choi, read alongside relevant critical and scholarly sources.

Why were so many enduring classics of US literature published between 1850 and 1855? That is the question we will explore in this course. Over seventy years ago, F. O. Matthiessen coined the term the “American Renaissance” to describe the inventive outpouring of national literature in this half-decade—classics such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). While scholars have long since criticized and revised Matthiessen’s exclusively white, male club of “renaissance” writers, it remains a curious fact that many of the most groundbreaking and historically significant texts in today’s expanded canon were also published in the same half-decade—among them, Sojourner Truth's "I Am a Woman's Rights" (1851), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854). In a survey of "major figures" from 1850 to 1855, we will work to understand this broad literary revolution by considering the historical, political, and social context of every text we read.

This course introduces a broad range of Asian American literary traditions. We treat Asian as a fluid and contested category, encompassing South, East, and Southeast Asian lineages, to understand Asian American as a formation mediated by migration, labor, exclusion, and assimilation. The cultural narratives we explore illuminate questions of identity in an interconnected cosmopolitan outlook. Situating the texts within the currents of global modernity, we consider how rapid technological change, capitalist expansion, and shifting geopolitical relations reconfigure experiences of diaspora and belonging. We will engage with the questions central to the field: What does it mean to belong/refuse belonging? How do language and form become sites of cultural negotiation? How do writers transmute the sediment of history, migration, and generational rupture into literature? Drawing on transnationalism, imagined communities, globalization, cosmopolitanism, diaspora studies, and multiculturalism, the course investigates representation, appropriation, appreciation, and authenticity. The close reading of the texts and our critical discussion will trace how these texts resist Orientalist representations, monolithic narratives of assimilation, and construct new imaginative possibilities for identity and community. Students will develop a shared critical vocabulary and nuanced insight into the diverse voices that define Asian American literature as both a national and transnational phenomenon.

This is a period course that studies the origins and evolution of the American novel in its 19th century iterations, including the seduction novel, the gothic, the plantation romance, and early historical realism. The course is designed to privilege reading the novels themselves and to allow topics of discussion to emerge from that shared experience. At the same time, we will trace prominent themes, tropes, and concerns, guided by theory and criticism. In addition to maintaining a rigorous reading schedule, assignments include: analytic paper projects, an annotated bibliography, an oral presentation, discussion posts, and writing workshops.

This is a period course that studies the origins and evolution of the American novel in its 19th century iterations, including the seduction novel, the gothic, the plantation romance, and early historical realism. The course is designed to privilege reading the novels themselves and to allow topics of discussion to emerge from that shared experience. At the same time, we will trace prominent themes, tropes, and concerns, guided by theory and criticism.

In addition to maintaining a rigorous reading schedule, assignments include: analytic paper projects, an annotated bibliography, an oral presentation, discussion posts, and writing workshops.

This class is an introduction to American novels of the 20th Century (and one slightly into the 21st). We will read novels, discuss novels, study the history of the century and develop skills and language that will expand our sphere of enjoying literature.

Southern literature is full of haunted houses, haunted minds, curses, and ghosts both real and imagined. Is slavery America’s Original Sin? Are we imprisoned in our own history? In this course, we’ll explore how and why. Students will be expected to read and comprehend at a very high level (this is an advanced course and will be taught as such) and produce sophisticated, erudite, clear, and intellectually-rigorous writing. Authors to be studied may include Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Angelina Grimké, Ralph Ellison, Randall Kenan and others. Meets the requirements for 4000+ and genre courses.

Southern literature is full of haunted houses, haunted minds, curses, and ghosts both real and imagined. Is slavery America’s Original Sin? Are we imprisoned in our own history? In this course, we’ll explore how and why. Students will be expected to read and comprehend at a very high level (this is an advanced course and will be taught as such) and produce sophisticated, erudite, clear, and intellectually-rigorous writing. Authors to be studied may include Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Angelina Grimké, Ralph Ellison, Randall Kenan and others. Meets the requirements for 4000+ and genre courses.

For CRW majors, this class counts as a 4000-level workshop.

In his book, “Understanding Comics,” Scott McCloud defined comics, “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” Like a traditional written narrative or piece of art, the graphic narrative (GN) and comic should evoke a sensual response from the reader/viewer but does so with both text and visual art. In this class you will create your own visual narratives. (I differentiate the terms “graphic novel” and “graphic narrative.” “Graphic novel” implies fiction because of “novel.” “Graphic narrative” is a broader term, encompassing both works of fiction and non-fiction. I will often use “comics” interchangeable with “graphic narrative.”)

The Graphic Narrative Workshop is composed of writers and visual artists and has a focus of collaboration. Visual artists are not required to have a writing background, and writers are not required to have an art background, but an important part of this class is to discover the language of your “other” creative art. One of my goals is for writers to do some art and artists to do some writing.

You will study graphic narratives, comics and books on craft and create stand-alone works of graphic narrative. You will discuss your own creative projects and processes.

This course is an analysis of and exercises in the elements of fiction: point of view, conflict, characterization, tone, and image. It will focus on character creation, emphasizing how to craft original, fully realized characters with depth and complexity. We will explore setting and world as extensions of character, and examine how a character’s desires, flaws, and choices should actively shape and drive the events of a story’s plot. Our reading will include wide-ranging and diverse writers of realist and speculative fiction, as well as craft texts that illuminate the units and craft techniques under discussion. We will write and workshop two longer pieces of fiction, one of which will be revised at the end of the semester, as well as engage in regular generative exercises building up to these longer pieces.

This course is an analysis of and exercises in the elements of fiction: point of view, conflict, characterization, tone, and image. We will also investigate how affective forces engineer a short story. In lieu of treating feelings as mere tempers, we will interrogate the possibilities of emotions: how they dictate narrative structure, how they push characters to extremities, and how they engineer visceral responses in the reader.

This undergraduate fiction technique and workshop course explores how realism can be made strange—formally inventive, emotionally charged, and structurally daring—while remaining grounded in lived experience, emotionally precise, and embodied. The course focuses on the body as a generative force in narrative—how sensation, desire, illness, grief, pleasure, and violence shape voice, structure, and time. Students will explore techniques that render interiority with intensity.
Through close reading of selected contemporary and twentieth-century writers, the course investigates techniques such as fragmentation, narrative disruption, repetition, compression, surreal or uncanny intrusion, and hybrid structures. Craft discussions will emphasize emotional stakes, narrative risk, point of view, and grammatical, syntactical, and narrative structures.
Weekly generative exercises will focus on emotional stakes, sensory precision, structural risk, and subversive approaches to character and plot. Students will workshop original short stories and novel excerpts, developing a critical vocabulary for discussing craft while cultivating rigorous, generous critique practices.
By the end of the course, students will assemble a portfolio of revised work that engages experimental form, embodied experience, and subversive approaches to realism. Designed for serious writers, this course encourages aesthetic risk alongside disciplined craft.

This course is an analysis of and exercises in the elements of fiction: point of view, conflict, characterization, tone, and image.

According to Stephen King, to write fiction is "to shovel shit from a sitting position." In this class, we'll do a whole lot of shoveling. Our craft-oriented discussions will examine contemporary short stories, novel chapters, craft essays, and film excerpts. Our in-class exercises will investigate voice, character, dialogue, setting, and other building blocks. Our technique-driven workshops will explore the work of you and your peers. Together, we'll practice all stages of the writing process, and do so boldly.

This course is an analysis of and exercises in the elements of fiction: point of view, conflict, characterization, tone, and image. Students will generate writing both in and out of class, learn to examine short stories through a craft lens, and critique peer work. Students will have the opportunity to workshop at least one piece of fiction. We will explore, as a group, sources of inspiration for fiction including personal experiences, found text, and speculative frameworks.

This course is an analysis of and exercises in the elements of fiction: point of view, conflict, characterization, tone, and image. It will focus on character creation, emphasizing how to craft original, fully realized characters with depth and complexity. We will explore setting and world as extensions of character, and examine how a character’s desires, flaws, and choices should actively shape and drive the events of a story’s plot. Our reading will include wide-ranging and diverse writers of realist and speculative fiction, as well as craft texts that illuminate the units and craft techniques under discussion. We will write and workshop two longer pieces of fiction, one of which will be revised at the end of the semester, as well as engage in regular generative exercises building up to these longer pieces.

What can a poem do? In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of writing poems, challenge our conceptions of poetry, and embrace experimentation. We will read, write, and discuss poetry in a low-stakes, creative environment, cultivating our personal interests and surprising ourselves with lyric possibility. Activities will include generative and reflective writing, workshops, revision, and conversations about poems and craft readings. We’ll emphasize contemporary lyric poetry, poetic voice, and the defying of traditional conventions. Together, we’ll explore the sheer range of what a poem can be, and who you can be as a poet. Bring your questions, curiosities, and obsessions. Writers of all experience are welcome.

This course is for aspiring poets and critics. The course studies the elements of poetry with some practice in writing poetry. Students will be expected to: 1. Engage with published poetry, analyze the writers' use of style, form, metaphor, image, character, setting and narrative shape to assess how writers expand our understanding of human experience. 2. Write their own poetry, demonstrating attention to the artful use of language. 3. Demonstrate principles of editing, critiquing others' work in a constructive, professional manner.

This course explores poetic technique by discovering, developing, and deploying your literary lineage and literary landscape. With poetry as a constant, we will explore the roots and the reach of the lyric, approaching it as a living practice shaped by memory, storytelling, and cultural inheritance. Together we will study how poets develop a lyric “eye”: a way of seeing, listening, and translating experience into language. Through close reading, discussion, and generative writing exercises, students will explore core elements of poetic craft including image, voice, line, syntax, rhythm, and metaphor.

The course will engage poetry as both art and method—examining how poets work across documentary poetics, personal narrative, and hybrid forms of storytelling to witness, record, and reimagine lived experience. Students will encounter poetry not only as literature but as a mode of inquiry, a form of archival practice, and a method of world-making. Throughout the semester, students will experiment with a range of poetic strategies and forms while developing their own lyric voice and literary landscape. Workshops and revision practices will emphasize attentive reading, craft awareness, and thoughtful feedback. By the end of the course, students will produce a small portfolio of poems that demonstrate an evolving understanding of poetic technique, literary lineage, and the lyric as a practice of storytelling.

This course explores poetic technique by discovering, developing, and deploying your literary lineage and literary landscape. With poetry as a constant, we will explore the roots and the reach of the lyric, approaching it as a living practice shaped by memory, storytelling, and cultural inheritance. Together we will study how poets develop a lyric “eye”: a way of seeing, listening, and translating experience into language. Through close reading, discussion, and generative writing exercises, students will explore core elements of poetic craft including image, voice, line, syntax, rhythm, and metaphor. The course will engage poetry as both art and method—examining how poets work across documentary poetics, personal narrative, and hybrid forms of storytelling to witness, record, and reimagine lived experience. Students will encounter poetry not only as literature but as a mode of inquiry, a form of archival practice, and a method of world-making. Throughout the semester, students will experiment with a range of poetic strategies and forms while developing their own lyric voice and literary landscape. Workshops and revision practices will emphasize attentive reading, craft awareness, and thoughtful feedback. By the end of the course, students will produce a small portfolio of poems that demonstrate an evolving understanding of poetic technique, literary lineage, and the lyric as a practice of storytelling.

This course will provide students the opportunity to write poetry extensively but also to read books by contemporary masters including Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Jennifer Chang, and Louise Glück. We will read books of poems by these poets and others and discuss what we find therein together. The workshops in this course, in addition to shorter assignments and creative prompts, will be a great opportunity for students to question, strengthen, and extend their writing and writing practice. The course will culminate in the completion of a portfolio of original work.

Because this is an advanced class, we'll brush up on the basics and then move beyond them to explore some of the subtleties of the craft. By reading, discussing, and responding in writing to works of a diverse group of published writers, we will learn to recognize literary uses of language and fictional techniques that we might then employ in our own writing. We will ask ourselves: What risks do published writers take and how we you learn from them? What risks might we take in your own fiction? How can we make our own fiction as dramatic, intense, and engaging as possible? Our goal is the creation of a community of writers who can learn from and help each other. Courage, honesty, and dedication are expected. In this class, you will compose four story starters (based on prompts I give you) and then write a complete short story using one of them. You’ll revise this short story three times over the course of the semester and participate in both small group and whole class critiques of your story.

Because this is an advanced class, we'll brush up on the basics and then move beyond them to explore some of the subtleties of the craft. By reading, discussing, and responding in writing to works of a diverse group of published writers, we will learn to recognize literary uses of language and fictional techniques that we might then employ in our own writing. We will ask ourselves: What risks do published writers take and how we you learn from them? What risks might we take in your own fiction? How can we make our own fiction as dramatic, intense, and engaging as possible? Our goal is the creation of a community of writers who can learn from and help each other. Courage, honesty, and dedication are expected. In this class, you will compose four story starters (based on prompts I give you) and then write a complete short story using one of them. You’ll revise this short story three times over the course of the semester and participate in both small group and whole class critiques of your story.

CRW 4120 meets the Scholarship in Practice (s) requirement for Liberal Studies.

This course is for poets who approach excellence and aspire toward publication. May be repeated to a maximum of nine semester hours.

This course hopes to introduce the student to a variety of means to a very specific end: the crafting of a poem that is not only a clear expression of your imagination, but that is capable of becoming an imaginative vehicle for its reader. This pursuit will be carried out within the context of weekly guided and independent readings of a wide selection of contemporary poetry. Students will concentrate especially on writing for an audience, creating concrete and evocative imagery, and exploring a variety of different strategies for the drafting and revising of their poems.



This course is for poets who approach excellence and aspire toward publication. May be repeated to a maximum of nine semester hours.

This course introduces students to familiarize with the kinds of learning involved with English major. During the semester we will explore certain histories of English studies, significant dialogues and topics discussed within the field considering available career choices with English studies. Students will be practicing key skills such as annotation, argumentation, drafting, revision, workshopping, and application of various discipline-specific vocabularies. Eventually, the course intends not only engaging students to contemporary forms of creative fiction, literary fiction and visual literacy, but also enhance critical thinking, close reading helping them to analyze and interpret complex literary texts. All in all, it intends to help students understand how the use of English language connects them with the world they live in.

ENC 3021 serves as a foundational course for students across disciplines not limited to Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM). This course introduces students to key concepts, histories, and frameworks in the study of rhetoric — the art and practice of persuasion, meaning-making, and communication across contexts. We will trace the development of rhetorical traditions beginning with classical Western rhetoric and extending outward to engage diverse global traditions, asking how different cultures, communities, and historical moments have understood and practiced the art of rhetoric. Central themes include the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos, and how notions of credibility, reasoning, and empathy operate differently across communities, texts, and media. We will also consider how visual and digital modes of communication extend and complicate traditional rhetorical frameworks. By the end of this course, students will have a broad foundation in rhetorical theory, an awareness of diverse rhetorical traditions, and practical skills for analyzing and producing rhetoric across multiple contexts, media, and cultures.

How do we trace rhetorical theory and its study? Some claim it begins with Aristotle, yet our contemporary concept of rhetoric likely existed centuries before according to other geographical traditions. This course will attempt to carefully survey rhetorical theory from its different origins, trying to understand how it has evolved over time. It is nearly impossible to do a true survey of rhetorical theory within the course of a semester. However, we will do our best with a general understanding that there will be lots of gaps. Using themes and chronology, we will read to focus around class discussions and assignments to ask you, the students, to try and fill these gaps. Finally, readings are meant to provide insights on the different ideas explored regarding rhetoric from the ancient traditions to contemporary rhetorical theories.

ENC 3021 serves as a foundational course for students across disciplines not limited to Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM). This course introduces students to key concepts, histories, and frameworks in the study of rhetoric — the art and practice of persuasion, meaning-making, and communication across contexts. We will trace the development of rhetorical traditions beginning with classical Western rhetoric and extending outward to engage diverse global traditions, asking how different cultures, communities, and historical moments have understood and practiced the art of rhetoric. Central themes include the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos, and how notions of credibility, reasoning, and empathy operate differently across communities, texts, and media. We will also consider how visual and digital modes of communication extend and complicate traditional rhetorical frameworks. By the end of this course, students will have a broad foundation in rhetorical theory, an awareness of diverse rhetorical traditions, and practical skills for analyzing and producing rhetoric across multiple contexts, media, and cultures.

This course serves as an introduction to creative nonfiction (CNF). We will look at different types of CNF, including: the personal essay, the lyric & braided essay, hermit crab essays, etc. We will examine different books and individual essays to discuss what goes into successful CNF, and how the genre employs elements of craft like characterization and plot. The course will include both critical and creative writing, as well as a workshop component in which students will share their creative work for feedback and critique.

This course introduces students to the study and practice of creative nonfiction, a genre that exists on a spectrum between researched, journalistic articles and lyrical, reflective personal essays. Creative nonfiction is "nonfiction" in its commitment to truth and accuracy, and "creative" in its use of literary techniques shared with fiction—scene, dialogue, character, imagery, structure, and voice. We will explore multiple forms within the genre, with particular focus on the personal essay, flash nonfiction, and braided/segmented essays. Through reading published work, discussing craft techniques, completing generative writing exercises, and workshopping drafts, you will develop your ability to tell true stories with artistry and intention. The course balances craft study with practice. We'll examine how successful CNF writers make choices about structure, voice, research, metaphor, and form, then apply those techniques in your own writing. Toward the end of the semester, you'll have the opportunity to explore an additional subgenre of your choosing. No prior experience with creative nonfiction is required. Whether you're new to the genre or have been writing CNF for years, this course emphasizes growth, experimentation, and discovery. You'll be supported in taking creative risks, trying new approaches, and finding your voice as a nonfiction writer. By the end of this course, you will have produced polished essays in multiple forms and developed a stronger understanding of what creative nonfiction can do and be. Expect to read actively, write regularly, revise substantially, and engage generously with your peers' work.

“The problem is, first, to know when you are not writing well and, then, to be able to fix it” - Toni Morrison This course is a workshop-centered exploration of creative nonfiction, where students will develop essays rooted in memory, observation, research, and lived experience. Through drafting, peer workshop, and sustained revision, we will examine how writers shape truth through narrative structure, imagery, voice, and reflection. Workshop will function as an editorial conference: a space to give and receive thoughtful feedback, to practice reading like writers, and to revise toward deeper clarity and resonance. Students will produce original creative nonfiction essays and engage in generative exercises designed to help uncover material, experiment with form, and strengthen revision practices. Together, we will consider how nonfiction writers transform personal and cultural experience into art. We will read and discuss works by writers such as Toni Morrison, Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Joan Didion, Imani Perry, Beth Ann Fennelly, and others whose essays move between the personal, the critical, and the archival. By the end of the semester, students will have developed multiple drafts of original nonfiction, practiced the craft of workshop, and gained tools for shaping memory, experience, and inquiry into intentional literary form.

Our course explores how food constructs identities, relationships, and power dynamics through crafting nonfiction prose such as articles and personal essays. Based on NYU’s Food Studies Program, “food is a lens through which to view and analyze key political, economic, and cultural problems facing today’s globalized world.” The writers whose work we will consume represent a smorgasbord of social, cultural, political, and aesthetic perspectives. Together, these authors exemplify how meals are not mundane but rather inseparable from universal categories such as gender, culture, place, class, race, and politics. To inspire our own articles and personal essays, we will feast on a buffet of works by Anthony Bourdain, Nora Ephron, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Haruki Murakami, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Judith Jones, Calvin Trillan, Ruth Reichl, Laurie Colwin, Amanda Hesser, and others. We will emphasize writing as a process, including brainstorming, drafting, workshopping, revising, and editing. Pull up a chair to the table as we evaluate how meals are similar to nonfiction in that both are shared experiences that bring people together.

Our class will emphasize the lyric essay through which you can tell your story in your own voice however you see fit. We will read lots of lyric narratives from around the world. They will have a variety of synthesized frames: political, social, cultural, historical, psychological. Pick and choose.

This course is an introductory course in the craft of creative nonfiction, a genre that employs prose craft techniques to present variations of truth, fact, experience, and memory. In this course, we will focus on the voice and hearts of our creative works: what stories are worth telling? What speaks to us and why? We’ll explore what memory can hold, what it distorts, and what it refuses to give back cleanly, paying close attention to the ways personal recollection is often shaped by desire, trauma, family dynamics, silence, and time, while also learning to read like writers, with an eye for detail and nuance. We'll address questions of memory, perspective, and the concept of objectivity while reading writers both living and long dead. Students will develop a clear understanding of point of view, ethics, pacing, temporal arrangement, voice, and structuring. Because creative nonfiction encompasses a wide range of forms, including memoir, personal essay, lyrical essay, literary journalism, nature writing, travel writing, biography, cultural criticism, queer criticism, and more, expect to engage with multiple modes of nonfiction by writers whose identities, histories, and perspectives may align with or differ from your own. No topics are off limits, including, but not limited to: sexuality, gender, queerness, the body, violence, race, religion, etc., so please be advised that some material may be triggering. We will also study works that reflect on the craft of nonfiction, and you will produce your own pieces of creative nonfiction, no less than ten pages and no more than fifteen to be workshopped in class.

This is an introductory course in the craft of creative nonfiction, a slippery genre that includes a miscellany of forms concerned with the presentation—and interrogation—of truth, fact, experience, and memory itself. Situated within this genre are essays of all kinds; works of reportage; works that tell life stories; works of cultural, literary, and political criticism; and more. We will read and discuss published works, placing contemporary writers in dialogue with those past, and will read craft essays and hold active class discussions to develop a robust vocabulary with which to describe and analyze the works we read. Students will also write their own pieces of creative nonfiction, at least one of which will be workshopped (read, critiqued, and discussed) by the class, then significantly revised by the end of the term.

This class introduces students to scriptwriting texts and techniques, particularly adaptation of original or existing/found texts in other forms beyond the page. Through the study of exemplary models of scriptwriting, students will become familiar with the conventions, genres, and strategies of various modes of screenwriting, including but not limited to podcasting, situation comedy, and documentary and feature film. Along the way, we will ponder the ethics of creating images on screen that are cognizant of their capacity to influence audiences as we embrace the social responsibility of crafting meaningful screenplays that make powerful statements while entertaining, winning over, and bringing together a range of audiences. This course fulfills Upper-Division Writing requirements.

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of television pilot writing, focusing on structure, character, and industry conventions. Using Save the Cat! Writes for TV by Jamie Nash as a foundation and analyzing successful pilots (Fleabag, Fargo, Abbott Elementary), students will learn key storytelling beats and unwritten rules of TV writing. Through workshops and writing exercises, they will develop their own pilot scripts, refining their technical and aesthetic awareness. By the end of the course, students will complete a polished draft of a TV pilot.

This class will take you through the entire process of development from concept and elevator pitch, one-, three-, and ten-page synopses, to the completed first draft of a feature-length screenplay. We will examine the roots of filmic narrative, read several important and pertinent works of 19th and 20th century classic literature and contemporary and recent guides to screenplay craft, and screen as many movies as we can. You will learn how scripts win or lose competitions, and get industry coverage, and how to start, staff and run an independent film production company. Your work will be shared with the class at every stage, but you will also learn how to protect your intellectual property from theft. We will be honest and respectful, help each other, and have smart fun.

The course explores the art, craft, and cultural consciousness of writing for the screen in the 21st century, with a focus on the TV pilot and the short film. By examining the craft and techniques of scriptwriting, students will learn how historically marginalized, underrepresented, and global voices — encompassing race, gender, sexuality, and disability — are telling new stories, impacting the way content is consumed, and evolving the craft of scriptwriting. First, we will read several scripts from various cultural backgrounds, analyzing the politics of authorship and production, as well as how the current digital media landscape is shaping narrative structure, pacing, and audience engagement. Then, we will engage in scriptwriting exercises to stimulate creativity, as we discuss craft and technique and explore how contemporary writers are redefining character, plot, theme, and genre. We will then conduct a workshop for each of our stories. By the end of the semester, students will have completed either a TV pilot script or a short film script.

This course focuses on the principles of composing, especially across different composing spaces. Students create works in several different media, including (1) in print, (2) on the screen, and (3) for the network, while also learning how to edit the works deployed in each medium appropriately. In addition, students repurpose at least one of these works for another medium. Students conclude the course by creating a digital portfolio.

This course focuses on the principles of composing, especially across different composing spaces. Students create works in several different media, including (1) in print, (2) on the screen, and (3) for the network, while also learning how to edit the works deployed in each medium appropriately. In addition, students repurpose at least one of these works for another medium. Students conclude the course by creating a digital portfolio.

ENC 3146 (WEPO) is one of three core courses for Editing, Writing, Media (EWM), and it helps provide a foundation for the major. As part of this foundation, this course introduces you to the principles of composing and editing across different media environments, paying special attention to how each new composing environment has its own audience, context, and purpose to consider along with affordances and constraints. We will also focus on how your composing process changes and the challenges that you face as you compose across spaces.

Overall, this course attempts to help you:

1. Understand principles of composing and rhetoric, especially the ways they function across different composing spaces;

2. Compose for three spaces—print (physical), digital (screen), and network (online);

3. Edit and revise appropriately the texts created in each space;

4. Understand the ways technologies build upon their predecessors as well as inform the composing and circulation of texts.

Your work in this course will culminate in a digital portfolio that will highlight the texts you’ve created throughout the semester.

This course explores acts of reading, writing, conversing, and composing within the theories and practices of contemporary writing center studies: the people who do it, how they do it, and how to help others do it. Throughout the semester, we will explore tutoring practices for working with writers in a one-on-one setting. The class consists of a four-week practicum, during which students are trained to tutor in FSU’s Reading-Writing Center and/or Digital Studio (RWC-DS) under the mentorship of a graduate consultant. Completion of the course allows students to apply for openings in the RWC/DS staff.

This course considers how students, as writers, editors, and media analysts, can strategically address complex social and political problems in their local and campus communities. The course explores how communication technologies have historically constructed the public sphere, determining who is included and how discourse is circulated. The class trains students to use advanced editing, writing, and media strategies to intervene strategically in and shape public discourse. Students simultaneously examine how social issues reshape communication practices. Students will investigate how media ecologies frame public debates. Students will also analyze how publics are mobilized and how coalitions advocate for social change. A core element of the course is learning to conduct stakeholder analyses and evaluate the infrastructures that support texts’ circulation. The course culminates in a final action-oriented project where students craft a network of texts aimed at moving people to act on an issue in their local community or on campus.

This course will help you take your editing skills to the next level, explicitly focusing on improving another's writing. It seeks to develop the skills of synthesizing another's ideas and data, structuring and clarifying his or her argument, and ordering coherently any multi-part exposition. It is primarily practical in orientation, covering proofreading, grammar, spelling, fact checking, and line-editing. We consider carefully authorial goals and audience needs and how these should influence the editing process. The course aims to prepare students for the elementary practice of textual production between draft stage and final publication.

This course is primarily “workshop” in orientation—we do a lot of work in class, and we often check our work in class, too. Regular course attendance, then, is vital to learning and success. There is a minimum attendance requirement to receive credit for the course regardless of your performance on exams and assignments.

This course will help you take your editing skills to the next level, explicitly focusing on improving another's writing. It seeks to develop the skills of synthesizing another's ideas and data, structuring and clarifying his or her argument, and ordering coherently any multi-part exposition. It is primarily practical in orientation, covering proofreading, grammar, spelling, fact checking, and line-editing. We consider carefully authorial goals and audience needs and how these should influence the editing process. The course aims to prepare students for the elementary practice of textual production between draft stage and final publication.

This course is primarily “workshop” in orientation—we do a lot of work in class, and we often check our work in class, too. Regular course attendance, then, is vital to learning and success. There is a minimum attendance requirement to receive credit for the course regardless of your performance on exams and assignments.

Generally speaking, visual rhetoric involves learning to analyze and critique the rhetorical function of imagery, using images to respond to and organize arguments, and creating images that operate across diverse media, are shaped by multiple genres, and are designed to achieve different goals with different audiences – learning how visual symbols act on us, on others, and on our thinking. This semester, we extend that work toward the spatial, investigating genres and sites where the visual and the spatial intersect. Taking our cues from rhetorical ecologists, political geographers, postcolonial scholars, and spatial theorists, we’ll consider what we might call the “socio-spatial dialectics” of monuments, memorials, archives, maps, and other situated performances around human rights. We’ll also consider the many ways in which these dialectics can influence people’s attitudes, opinions, emotions, or beliefs. In sum, our study of visual rhetoric is a study of how images, objects, spaces and places communicate certain ideas or raise certain questions about human rights. Major assignments include a series of short production pieces with accompanying critical analyses, a take-home midterm exam, a culminating presentation, and a take-home final exam. The course will invite us to think and work in creative genres, even as it tests our abilities to write critically about the things that we read.

In this course, I will encourage you to follow your interests and ideas to write essays with insight, clarity, and narrative style. Once we create a vantage point and narrative stance, we can identify the form and structure that best support your writing and your writing-related aspirations. Through writing portfolio assignments and readings, we will write toward a better understanding of the personal essay form. Our course texts will include The Art of Time in Memoir and a sampling of published essays written by journalists, scholars, poets, fiction writers, and editors. After we read these selections, we will discuss elements of craft, content, and style. We will consider how the personal essay supports journalism, scholarly writing, and creative forms. During our workshop sessions, we will ask questions of one another about the presented work. You will also ask questions in your written responses to one another. Your semester creative portfolio will include two personal essays, and a final project of new or revised work.

In this course, I will encourage you to follow your interests and ideas to write essays with insight, clarity, and narrative style. Once we create a vantage point and narrative stance, we can identify the form and structure that best support your writing and your writing-related aspirations. Through writing portfolio assignments and readings, we will write toward a better understanding of the personal essay form. Our course texts will include The Art of Time in Memoir and a sampling of published essays written by journalists, scholars, poets, fiction writers, and editors. After we read these selections, we will discuss elements of craft, content, and style. We will consider how the personal essay supports journalism, scholarly writing, and creative forms. During our workshop sessions, we will ask questions of one another about the presented work. You will also ask questions in your written responses to one another. Your semester creative portfolio will include two personal essays, and a final project of new or revised work.

This course engages with "design" from a rhetorical perspective. Course readings will introduce theoretical and practical perspectives that problematize static conceptions of design and emphasize a rhetorical approach to producing and designing texts and/as technologies. Throughout the course, we will compose, revise, and design texts while practicing the rhetorical principles of localization, usability, accessibility, and human-centered design. This course offers students the opportunity to develop tools for producing and circulating a diversity of texts that address a wide range of audiences and contexts, with an emphasis on rhetorical considerations of design.

This course engages with "design" from a rhetorical perspective. Course readings will introduce theoretical and practical perspectives that problematize static conceptions of design and emphasize a rhetorical approach to producing and designing texts and/as technologies. Throughout the course, we will compose, revise, and design texts while practicing the rhetorical principles of localization, usability, accessibility, and human-centered design. This course offers students the opportunity to develop tools for producing and circulating a diversity of texts that address a wide range of audiences and contexts, with an emphasis on rhetorical considerations of design.

This class strives to help you to improve your writing and editing skills across a wide range of writing situations. Writing and editing are distinct, though related, skills. Some of the best ways to get better at writing are reading and critically analyzing the writing of others and practicing writing yourself, especially writing targeting improvement in particular writing skills. Thinking about writing, noticing what is good and not-so-good about a particular piece of writing (whether your own or from someone else), and considering ways to make writing better are all important to the ultimate goal of writing better. However, excessive self-consciousness during the writing process itself often makes for an uncomfortable writing experience and poor writing outcomes. Developing more confidence in your editing abilities makes writing less pressured. This class will help you to get better at putting your writing ideas into practice and to get better at improving the writing of others.

This course provides practical experience in editing, public relations, and other forms of written communications. May be repeated to a maximum of six semester hours; only three hours apply to majors. As an intern with Southeast Review, Florida State University’s nationally renowned literary journal, you will spend time creating posts for social media as part of a collaborative, peer-reviewed, and workshopped process. You will also work with section editors to review and evaluate journal submissions, in addition to learning the day-to-day operations of running a literary publication.

This course provides practical experience in editing, public relations, and other forms of written communications. May be repeated to a maximum of six semester hours; only three hours apply to majors. As an intern with Southeast Review, Florida State University’s nationally renowned literary journal, you will spend time creating posts for social media as part of a collaborative, peer-reviewed, and workshopped process. You will also work with section editors to review and evaluate journal submissions, in addition to learning the day-to-day operations of running a literary publication.

ENC3021 is one of three core courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) track and aims to provide a foundation for the major. This course traces approximately 2,500 years of rhetorical thought, beginning with the “classics” of Greek and Roman rhetoric and moving through major developments in the Western tradition. Students will encounter key theories and frameworks that have shaped how rhetoric has been understood and practiced. At the same time, this course challenges the idea of a single, unified tradition by examining rhetoric’s multiple origins, evolving definitions, and diverse contributors. Through both historical and contemporary lenses, we will explore how rhetoric intersects with power, knowledge, ethics, and philosophy. Students will analyze how past theories continue to inform present-day communication and how rhetorical ideas often re-emerge and circulate across time recursively. This course places particular emphasis on multimodality and the expanding boundaries of the field, including visual and digital rhetorics. By examining rhetoric not only as persuasion but as a meaning-making practice, students will consider what rhetoric has been and what it might still become.

What does it mean to communicate — really communicate — across time, culture, and media? This course invites you to ask that question seriously. We will trace the development of rhetorical thought across roughly 2,500 years, beginning with the foundational texts of Greek and Roman rhetoric and moving through a rich, contested, and often surprising history of ideas about how language, image, and symbol shape the worlds we inhabit.

Rather than treating rhetoric as a fixed set of rules for persuasion, we will approach it as a living process — something that evolves, travels, and transforms depending on who is using it and why. We will read canonical texts alongside rhetorics rooted in feminist, Black, Indigenous, and other traditions that have too often been left out of the story, and we will explore visual and digital rhetorics, asking how meaning-making works beyond the written word.

Throughout, we will return to a central question: what can rhetoric do? How has it been used to consolidate power — and to challenge it? How do ideas from centuries ago continue to circulate in conversations today?

By the end of the semester, you will have a working vocabulary of key rhetorical concepts and theorists, experience applying them to real texts and case studies, and a new way of seeing how communication works in the world around you. No prior background required — just bring your curiosity.

What is English? Florida State University’s English department offers three different specialized routes that answer this question: Literature, Media, and Culture (LMC), Creative Writing (CW), and Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM). The title “Introduction to English Studies” implies a broad scope. The course will cover various disciplines and their methods in general, from linguistics and literature to rhetoric and creative writing, among others, while also engaging in specific compositional and hermeneutic activities. The design of this course aims to both prepare students who plan to major in English and develop the knowledge and understanding of those currently majoring in English. Students will learn about a range of issues and values across the aforementioned fields and their relevance to English as a discipline. Specifically, students will read a variety of texts and topics while being introduced to a range of interpretive strategies. Students can expect to compose in various modes, responding to rhetorical, academic, and creative writing genres. Finally, they will engage in discussion and collaboration activities to gain a clearer understanding of what it means to study English.

This course helps students to think about what it means to be an English major. It reviews the history of the discipline in ways that are accessible and meaningful to students and talks about current practices and areas of inquiry, including broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. It also helps students acquire skills that will be useful to them in their other courses. It will guide students through annotation and analysis, drafting, workshopping, and revision, introduce concepts of thesis and argumentation, and give students vocabulary for specialization. This class is intended to prepare students to be English majors, to show how English studies can be used both in college and in their career choices and to expose them as well to the sheer pleasure of reading and writing.

ENG 2012 will help you to think about what it means to be an English major with a creative writing focus. There's a lot to find wonder and fascination in! We will discuss the current practices and areas of inquiry, including the broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. This course also helps students to acquire skills that will be useful to them in their other courses. It will guide students through annotation and analysis, drafting, and revision, introduce the concepts of thesis and argumentation, and give students vocabulary for specialization. This course is intended to prepare students to be English majors, to show how English studies can be used both in college and their career choices and to expose them as well to the sheer pleasure of reading and writing.

Are you interested in learning more about the English Major? As an introductory course, this class will act as a guide that will introduce you to English studies and the broad range of opportunities the field can provide. This course prepares students to be English majors, shows how English studies can be used both in college and in the students' career choices, and exposes students to the pleasure of reading, writing, and using language to its best effect. In this section, we will use the primary text, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, as a vehicle to explore various theories and approaches to reading and analyzing literature. We will write both on the text and beyond the text as we consider various areas of English studies. With the completion of this course, you will be better prepared for the variety of assignments found in future higher level English courses.

This course is designed to help students understand what English Studies includes and to practice the kinds of work they’ll keep doing in upper-level courses: close reading, annotation and analysis, drafting, workshop-based feedback, revision, and learning the basic vocabulary of thesis and argumentation. With a focus on contemporary world literature, the course asks students to read “English” as a global field rather than a single national tradition. That means spending time with recent texts shaped by such ideas as translation, migration, postcolonial and diasporic life, and practicing how to write clearly about what those contexts do to meaning. Students will learn to read for craft and context, and to use evidence from primary texts alongside scholarship and other secondary sources to develop an original project that speaks to a particular field, question, or public conversation. We will draw on writings from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jesmyn Ward, Lorrie Moore, Mohsin Hamid, Han Kang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, and Zadie Smith, amongst others, as a way to ground the course’s core goal: training students in the interpretive and writing practices that define the discipline, using texts that feel urgent and current.

This course examines comics, graphic novels, words-and-pictures as an imaginative art, focusing specifically on global traditions of picture art across four different continents.

Theory, capital T. This headword classifies a bewildering number of forms of intellectual inquiry in literary and cultural studies. Some of these schools of thought are complementary, others mutually exclusive; some brand new, others borrowed or recycled. Most are known for their stylistic and conceptual difficulty. Rather than muddling through the entire intimidating collection of Theory's -isms and sifting through an equally perplexing collection of proper names, we will selectively sample some of its most compelling texts, ideas, and questions, concentrating on a handful of its most compelling threads of inquiry about literature, about culture and about critical and interpretive practices. Along the way, we will delineate some useful maps of the issues and motives of literary and cultural theory that will expand the ways you read and think about literary, social, and cultural texts.

This is a course about the history of ideas. It asks us to think about the frameworks we use to talk about and analyze literary and cultural texts. It is therefore deeply engaged in the politics of interpretive frameworks. We will carefully read critical texts that were ground-breaking in their day and try to consider what they can offer to our understanding of our own contemporary world. Most of these texts are known for their stylistic and conceptual difficulty. In parsing the ideas that currently circulate in the scholarship of literary studies, we will concentrate on some of the most compelling threads of inquiry in our field.

This course examines dystopian science fiction films as imagined worlds shaped by surveillance and systems of social control. Science fiction is a broad genre, and from the 1980s until the contemporary era, it has seen a common theme of what it means to live in a world where human behaviour is tracked, regulated, and managed, whether it is early cinematic visions of controlled industrial societies or contemporary films concerned with digital monitoring and predictive technologies. Through close analysis of key films such as, but not limited to, Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), and Ready Player One (2018), alongside various theoretical approaches from theorists such as Foucault and Deleuze, students will consider how dystopian science fiction represents the relationship between technology, power, and everyday life.

Together we will explore how dystopian films imagine societies organized around observation and control—whether through centralized state authority, corporate power, or more subtle forms of self-surveillance. The leading questions of the course will focus on asking how the assigned films depict authoritarian societies structured by technology, including artificial intelligence, data systems, and automated governance, and how dystopian science fiction both questions and reinforces technological forms of social control. Taking a historical approach, the course will move from mid- to late-twentieth-century films to contemporary works to trace the evolving conventions and boundaries of dystopian science fiction as a genre.

This course explores how animation makes — and unmakes — the boundaries that shape human life. Moving from early experiments in motion to contemporary global features, we study animation as a medium uniquely suited to visualizing connection and disconnection: between humans and the nonhuman world, between humans and other humans, between humans and themselves, and between people and their sense of home, belonging, and identity. Each unit asks how animated form (line, texture, timing, sound, design, and transformation) reshapes familiar genres such as fantasy, horror, science fiction, coming-of-age, and documentary, and how those genres help audiences think about violence, war, prejudice, and the “superficial” categories that divide communities. We will analyze how animated films represent structural harm (policing, nationalism, gendered constraints, extraction) alongside practices of care, witness, and repair. Readings in film and animation theory will provide concepts for close reading and argumentation, while screenings span multiple countries, techniques (hand-drawn, stop-motion, CGI, hybrid), and historical moments.

This course meets distribution requirements for Genre.

With the global, lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic not far behind this contemporary moment, memories of plague linger in collective thought and on-screen. Through a series of films spanning several genres – including science/speculative fiction, comedy, fantasy, horror, and the musical – this course examines how conceptions of mass infection are drawn and remembered through collective consciousness and cultural memory. We will analyze and reassess what these depictions of contagion (be they physically, socially, or culturally determined) suggest about the nature of infection as a socially transformative process.

Along with these screenings, students will engage with a variety of critical and theoretical texts from selected literature, popular culture, film studies, disability studies, and feminist and queer theory. This course discusses film as a means of exploring the problems of genre studies: relationship to literary genres, historical continuity, transformation of genre in the film medium. Students will consider how differences in not only genre but artistic medium (such as animation vs. live action, etc.) shift and redefine rigid definitions. What does it mean to contextualize experiences, such as “loneliness,” in the language of an epidemic? How does a speculative disease, such as a zombie virus, translate into the memory of “real-world” infection? How does the communicable bite of the vampire recall cultural appropriation? Through discussion, students will interrogate themes of plague, infection, mass hysteria, and transformation in film – both within the body, or in the very air around it.

Fulfills LMC requirement: Understanding Genres

This course explores the long and often paradoxical relationship between Hollywood cinema and queer identity. From the coded performances of the classical studio era to the disruptions of New Hollywood and the emergence of openly LGBTQ+ representation in contemporary film, we will examine how queerness has been both suppressed and spectacularized on the American screen. We will give particular attention to the Production Code, star personae, genre conventions, and the industrial constraints that shaped what could—and could not—be shown on screen in the classical era. How did filmmakers encode queer desire through performance, mise-en-scène, and narrative structure? How did audiences learn to read between the lines? And what changes when queerness moves from subtext to text? Through close analysis and engagement with film theory and queer studies, students will consider Hollywood as a site of negotiation between visibility and censorship, desire and discipline, fantasy and politics. Films may range from classic-era melodramas and noir thrillers to New Queer Cinema and twenty-first-century mainstream releases. The course ultimately asks: Is Hollywood an engine of normalization, a space of resistance, or both?

Fulfills LMC requirement for Understanding Genres. Counts towards Film Studies minor.

This course investigates femininity as performance in Hollywood cinema. Across genres and eras, the American screen has given us unforgettable stars, glamorous divas, melodramatic heroines, monstrous mothers, scheming villains, and camp icons. What makes these performances so powerful? And why do certain feminine figures inspire both devotion and anxiety? Drawing on theories of gender performativity, stardom, melodrama, and camp, we will analyze how actresses craft persona through voice, gesture, costume, and affect—and how the industry shapes, commodifies, and sometimes punishes feminine charisma. We will consider the diva as spectacle, the villainess as transgression, and the queen as a figure of excess and authority. The course will move from classical Hollywood star vehicles to contemporary films that interrogate fame, ambition, aging, and power. Along the way, we will ask how race, sexuality, gender identity, and class complicate dominant models of femininity, and why certain performances resonate so deeply within queer fan cultures. Through close viewing and critical analysis, students will examine Hollywood not simply as storytelling, but as a laboratory for staging gender itself.

Fulfills LMC requirement for Understanding Genres. Counts towards Film Studies minor.

This course introduces the history of the different technologies humans have used to record and communicate information in various contexts. Students investigate how technologies have shaped the way we produce, transmit, receive, and understand texts.

In the course, we will examine a range of forms, including tattoo, scroll, manuscript, print, photograph, film, television, radio, and digital multimedia. We will assess how such technologies impact the meaning of texts as well as their contexts. “Text” can refer to any meaningful combination of “signs” (or symbols) that can be analyzed and interpreted, and textuality refers to how texts make meaning in context. This course combines the fields of media history, history of the book, and digital humanities as well as text technologies.

We will consider larger questions such as: How does the medium or the delivery technology impact a text’s meaning? For example, when your favorite novel is turned into a film, how does that alter its meaning? Or when a delivery technology changes, as when you go from listening to your favorite song on a vinyl record to listening to it on a digital streaming platform, does that change in context impact the song’s meaning?

Our case studies range from cave paintings to YouTube, Gutenberg to Google. We will tackle larger debates, such as the relationship between mediums, how different delivery technologies have their own affordances and constraints, how media develops over time, what happens to old media when new media emerges, and how best to study media history (medium-specific analysis or crossmedia analysis). The course will help you develop your writing skills and your sense of rhetorical context as we examine media history by thinking about text technologies. Assignments include Canvas discussion posts, two shorter essays, a presentation, and the longer final essay.

This is a core course for EWM and meets the genre requirement for LMC.

When it comes to medieval texts, the words upon them are only half the story, the rest lies within the scribbles of bored scribes, faint text long scraped away, and beautiful illuminations. This course introduces the history of the different technologies humans have used to record and communicate information in various contexts. Students investigate how technologies have shaped the way we produce, transmit, receive, and understand texts. Within this course we will be zooming into the history, creation, and secrets of these texts within the Middle Ages. We will touch upon palimpsest, illuminations, maps, and other such works as well as delve into the writing itself and what it tells us about the text it belongs too. This course will work with the textbook Introduction to Manuscript Studies and include a visit to Special Collections.

This course considers how students, as writers, editors, and media analysts, can strategically address complex social and political problems in their local and campus communities. The course explores how communication technologies have historically constructed the public sphere, determining who is included and how discourse is circulated. The class trains students to use advanced editing, writing, and media strategies to intervene strategically in and shape public discourse. Students simultaneously examine how social issues reshape communication practices. Students will investigate how media ecologies frame public debates. Students will also analyze how publics are mobilized and how coalitions advocate for social change. A core element of the course is learning to conduct stakeholder analyses and evaluate the infrastructures that support texts’ circulation. The course culminates in a final action-oriented project where students craft a network of texts aimed at moving people to act on an issue in their local community or on campus.

In this course, we will approach film theory organically through an examination of Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work as a film director. Indeed, French film critics of the 1950s encouraged a re-evaluation of film—and thus a re-invention of film theory itself—based on the belief that a director’s films reflect his/her individual artistry. Hitchcock was one of their primary and strongest prototypes of director as auteur, or author, who wields what they would designate as the “camera-pen.” Hitchcock’s body of work has since attracted substantial attention by film criticism, and his films have been analyzed through a variety of theoretical approaches, including structural, psychoanalytic, and feminist.

We will read film theory (Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Heath, Bellour, Doane, Mulvey, Modelski) and address the complex historico-theoretical relation between film theory and cinema with a particular focus on Hitchcock. We will further consider Hitchcock’s films as instruments that allow for the displacement of anxiety and the dispossession of socially unacceptable desires, fears, and traumatic memories. Film study will be comprised of both theoretical and mechanical elements; students will attend to structural elements such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound.

Films for study may include: The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in Understanding Genres.

In this course, we will approach film theory organically through an examination of Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work as a film director. Indeed, French film critics of the 1950s encouraged a re-evaluation of film—and thus a re-invention of film theory itself—based on the belief that a director’s films reflect his/her individual artistry. Hitchcock was one of their primary and strongest prototypes of director as auteur, or author, who wields what they would designate as the “camera-pen.” Hitchcock’s body of work has since attracted substantial attention by film criticism, and his films have been analyzed through a variety of theoretical approaches, including structural, psychoanalytic, and feminist.

We will read film theory (Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Heath, Bellour, Doane, Mulvey, Modelski) and address the complex historico-theoretical relation between film theory and cinema with a particular focus on Hitchcock. We will further consider Hitchcock’s films as instruments that allow for the displacement of anxiety and the dispossession of socially unacceptable desires, fears, and traumatic memories. Film study will be comprised of both theoretical and mechanical elements; students will attend to structural elements such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound.

Films for study may include: The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in Understanding Genres.

This course tasks students to use rhetorical theory to engage, interpret, and create media texts. The underlying theme of this course, and the practice that will centralize our discussion this semester, is the ‘remix.’ The terminology of remix can be found across various contexts, but we will focus on the ‘remix’ as it exists within pop culture including literature, music, film, and television. We will spend the first few weeks of the course considering the meaning of ‘remix,’ interrogating the word as a point of rhetorical inquiry. Then, we will develop our own collective theory of ‘remix’ which then may inform future analyses of others’ remixes. For example, we may begin with the artform of ‘the REE-MIX!” in hip-hop and identify key characteristics and functions of original songs versus their updated (and often up-tempo) versions. Or we may consider how adaptations of stories into films and other media alters the meanings and audiences of these texts (e.g., The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple, The Lion King). As a final project, students will have an opportunity to create their own remix of a primary text using whatever genre and/or media of their choosing. The purpose of this course is to consider the rhetorical purpose and functions of remixes, while also practicing the art of composing creative and ethical adaptations of original works.

In 2014 Tyler Trewhella started a movement on Tumblr. They named it “cripple punk” and described it like this: “Cripple punk rejects the ‘good cripple’ mythos. Cripple punk is here for the bitter cripple, the uninspirational cripple, the smoking cripple, the drinking cripple, the addict cripple, the cripple who hasn’t ‘tried everything’ […] Cripple punk does not pander to the able bodied.” For this course, we will read cripple punk authors and disabled authors as a theme to explore editing, writing and publishing.

This seminar functions as a senior capstone course for the various majors within the English degree program at FSU. Topics vary.

For this particular senior seminar, the English Department has taken what was a version of the EWM course “What Is a Text” and has turned it into a Senior Seminar Capstone in English course.

This course investigates concepts of “textuality,” which refers to how "texts" make meaning by being understood in context. We will test out key scholarly ideas by discussing some vibrant films as case studies. Our reading includes scholarship on textuality as well as on film. As we explore ideas about what counts as a "text" and where the meaning of a text resides, we will assess debates about the relationship between the text and vital contexts. These contexts include audience reception and the "paratext," which refers to associated material surrounding the text but that is separate from the text itself. In addition to scholarly debates about how to define "text" and "textuality," we will study concepts of paratexts, intertexts, adaptation, interactive texts, and remixes. We will consider, for example, films that have been adapted from literature and how to unpack the meanings of various kinds of texts. We will ponder what contexts can influence our reading of these texts, ranging from associated material like a film trailer to fan reactions or genre expectations. Assignments include frequent Canvas discussion posts, a shorter essay, and the longer final essay. In a final project, students will get the chance to produce their own multimedia text and to analyze how their own work engages issues of textual studies.

This senior seminar serves as a capstone experience for students in the major, inviting them to revisit, reflect on, and make connections between the key terms and concepts they have encountered throughout their academic careers. As students prepare to move into graduate study or professional life, this course asks: what have you learned, and how does it apply to where you are going? The course is organized around the idea that language, meaning, and communication is never static. How we compose and circulate texts is shaped by the media, technologies, and cultural contexts in which we work. Students will examine how composing practices are evolving in a digital world, engaging questions of genre, multimodality, intellectual property, and the role of emerging technologies such as AI and automation. The two foundational projects for this course are 1. a traditional academic paper that develops a researched, nuanced argument about a key term in the field its significance across contexts. 2. a digital composition that enacts the key term using digital tools and platforms to put the concept into practice as a form of making and meaning. Students will be asked to reflect on their learning, composing processes, and personal goals. By the end of the course, students will have produced work that reflects both their development in the major and their vision for the intellectual and/or professional work ahead.

In Poetics, Aristotle declares a writer’s role is to relate “not what has happened, but what may happen.” In addition to theorizing humans’ inclination to imitate, he acknowledges individuals’ instinct to reach “special altitudes” of “Song” and “harmony.” This course considers this differentiation between history and poetics and reframes African American, Afro-Latino/a, and Afro-Caribbean writers including but not limited to Phillis Wheatley Peters, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Gloria Naylor, George C. Wolfe, Terrance Hayes, francine j. harris, Desiree Bailey, Jeremy O. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, and Rickey Laurentiis as representative of “special altitudes” Black writers have reached beyond imitation of Western traditions and canons. We will harmonize, in our own writing, with models these writers offer as we (re)define a twenty-first-century poetics of writing across cultures inspired by how they trouble tropes of colorblindness, American exceptionalism, and citizenship and blur lines delineating gender, genre, and binary markers of sexual identity. We will spend the semester investigating two questions: How did U.S. chattel slavery and the views necessary to perpetuate its potency in the post-emancipation Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras mark those who are Black as “queer” objects  of desire and violence? What subjectivities have American writers of the African diaspora fashioned over four centuries to shift discourse to include LGBTQIA experiences and the ways in which fictions about Black masculinities and femininities queer even ostensibly heterosexual intimacies across cultures?

This course fulfills the Alterity/Diversity and Genre requirement.

In _Poetics_, Aristotle declares a writer’s role is to relate “not what has happened, but what may happen.” In addition to theorizing humans’ inclination to imitate, he acknowledges individuals’ instinct to reach “special altitudes” of “Song” and “harmony.” This course considers this differentiation between history and poetics and reframes African American, Afro-Latino/a, and Afro-Caribbean writers including but not limited to Phillis Wheatley Peters, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Gloria Naylor, George C. Wolfe, Terrance Hayes, francine j. harris, Desiree Bailey, Jeremy O. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, and Rickey Laurentiis as representative of “special altitudes” Black writers have reached beyond imitation of Western traditions and canons. We will harmonize, in our own writing, with models these writers offer as we (re)define a twenty-first-century poetics of writing across cultures inspired by how they trouble tropes of colorblindness, American exceptionalism, and citizenship and blur lines delineating gender, genre, and binary markers of sexual identity.

We will spend the semester investigating two questions: How did U.S. chattel slavery and the views necessary to perpetuate its potency in the post-emancipation Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras mark those who are Black as “queer” objects for psychosexual exploitation and violence? What subjectivities have American writers of the African diaspora fashioned over four centuries to shift discourse to include LGBTQIA experiences and the ways in which fictions about Black masculinities and femininities queer even ostensibly heterosexual intimacies across cultures?

Distribution: Course Diversity and Genre requirement

What does it mean to call something “decadent?” In everyday speech, the term “decadent” has taken on several meanings, from excessive and luxurious to sexually deviant and morally degenerate. The word has been applied to everything from the Roman Empire to chocolate cake. But since the nineteenth century, the term has also been associated with the ends of great periods in history, the decline of nations and empires, a poetics that turns away from the world, and an obsession with art for art’s sake. In this course, we will examine the idea of “decadence” in art, literature, and popular culture. We’ll examine classic 1890s works of the Decadent Movement in literature by Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson as well as later revivals and revisions of decadence in the Harlem Renaissance, postcolonial literature and art, and contemporary film and television.

From the haunted women of Gothic fiction to the defiant heroines of contemporary novels, how have women been depicted in American literature, and what do these depictions reveal about the relationship between culture, power, and lived experience? This course explores how literature has constructed, reflected, and challenged societal ideals of femininity and womanhood through the use, among other things, of gendered metaphors (e.g. “motherland,” “virgin wilderness”), feminine archetypes like the femme fatale, the tragic mulatto, and the feminine grotesque; and allegorical cultural symbols (e.g. Statue of Liberty, Columbia, Lady Justice). Course work includes several analytic paper projects, discussion posts, writing workshops, and a final exam.

In popular imagination, medieval people lived static lives in homogeneous communities. In reality, many from all walks of life were quite mobile. They journeyed for business, pleasure, curiosity, diplomacy, personal or spiritual enlightenment, and war (either as armies or as refugees), among other reasons. This course will introduce students to medieval narratives about travel and movement. What motivated travelers to start their journeys? Piety mixed with wanderlust, like the 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta? Or maybe piety as an excuse for greater autonomy, like the 15th-century Englishwoman Margery Kempe? How did they describe the places and people they encountered along the way? Did they travel alone, or as part of a diplomatic envoy or a group of pilgrims? Did they write their accounts from notes or dictate to interlocutors from memory? And who were the audiences for their writings? This class will consider a wide spectrum of travelers from various eras and geographical regions across Asia, Africa, and Europe as part of a larger project to engage scholarship on the Global Middle Ages and unsettle colonial perspectives of the European explorer. We will also examine connections between medieval travel narratives and more modern settler-colonial fantasies of exploration and conquest.

This course meets the pre-1800 requirement.

Even the most defining literary works of their day do not exist within a vacuum, devoid of any influence of the past. In this introduction to Shakespeare at the college level, we will be looking into Medieval concepts and Medieval history that Shakespeare draws upon to better understand how he uses these concepts to comment upon his present. Students will study and discuss these representative Shakespearean works and their past and present contexts. This course will put special focus upon the history plays, but will also look into Shakespeare’s own adaption of Chaucer: Troilus and Cressida. Later performances and adaptations of Shakespeare will also be topics of study and discussion, looking at how modern adaptions adjusts Shakespeare’s work, and the medievalism that inspired him, to fit within contemporary contexts.

Yes!!! There were novels written and read long before the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters appeared! This course will introduce you to a variety of eighteenth-century novels that preceded later, perhaps more familiar works like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. In addition to the novels themselves, you will also learn about the material and cultural contexts in which they were produced. What literary historians call the “rise of the novel,” for instance, coincided with powerful cultural, economic, and technological changes; this resulted in novels that mirrored and produced the world from which they emerged.

This course meets the Genre and Pre1800 Requirements

Yes!!! There were novels written and read long before the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters appeared! This course will introduce you to a variety of eighteenth-century novels that preceded later, perhaps more familiar works like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. In addition to the novels themselves, you will also learn about the material and cultural contexts in which they were produced. What literary historians call the “rise of the novel,” for instance, coincided with tremendous cultural, economic, and technological changes; this resulted in novels that mirrored and produced the culture from which they emerged.

This course meets the Genre and Pre1800 Requirements

This class will focus on early modern popular texts, or “bestsellers”: the viral texts and genres that were widely read and circulated in early modern English culture, 1550-1660. We’ll find out what people were reading, what genres and forms were most common and widespread, and how readers interacted with their texts.

Renaissance readers read widely from genres including broadside ballads, almanacs, popular pamphlets, jest books, sermons and bibles, household and husbandry manuals, cookbooks, plays, local and international news, and more. Our objectives include reading these texts closely, becoming familiar with their conventions and the contexts in which our “bestsellers” were produced and consumed, considering varying definitions of popularity and the formation of the literary canon at the exclusion of “popular” and “genre” literature, and developing a nuanced view of early modern readerships and literacies.

Meets the pre-1800 and genre requirements for LMC.

The British Romantics wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose in literary history, works whose influence lives on in genres as varied as horror movies and political manifestos. What’s more, the societal issues with which the Romantics grappled (e.g., new technologies, revolutionary politics, climate catastrophes) are issues that still challenge us today. This class will serve as an introduction to Romanticism defined both as a historical period (from 1789 to 1832) and as a literary aesthetic. Together we will explore literary works in which Romantic writers grapple with death, life, despair, and bliss. The class will have a particular focus on Gothic literature. We’ll discover how Romantic-era writers explored terror and anxiety by writing about nightmares, haunted castles, vampiric figures, and ghostly events. Students from all majors and areas of concentration are welcome. 

Class requirements include regular attendance, discussion posts, quizzes, short writing assignments, and a final project.

The British Romantics wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose in literary history, works whose influence lives on in genres as varied as horror movies and political manifestos. What’s more, the societal issues with which the Romantics grappled (e.g., new technologies, revolutionary politics, climate catastrophes) are issues that still challenge us today. This class will serve as an introduction to Romanticism defined both as a historical period (from 1789 to 1832) and as a literary aesthetic. Together we will explore literary works in which Romantic writers grapple with death, life, despair, and bliss. The class will have a particular focus on Gothic literature. We’ll discover how Romantic-era writers explored terror and anxiety by writing about nightmares, haunted castles, vampiric figures, and ghostly events. Students from all majors and areas of concentration are welcome.

Class requirements include regular attendance, discussion posts, quizzes, short writing assignments, and a final project.

This class is designed to increase your enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s work through a close reading of the texts in relation to performance of the plays, their social and historical settings, and the development of the plays as dramatic performances, on stage and on film. We will cover only a few of Shakespeare’s 43 extant plays and three books of poetry, but we will examine the broad spectrum across which Shakespeare wrote: sonnets, comedy, romance, history, and tragedy. In taking this approach, we will necessarily also examine William Shakespeare, the man, and the cultural milieu of the Early Modern Period in which he wrote. Performance is key to understanding Shakespeare, so we will watch films of staged performances and also filmed adaptations, and we will consider the differences between what the author wrote and these alternate performance genres.

This class is designed to increase your enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s work through a close reading of the texts in relation to performance of the plays, their social and historical settings, and the development of the plays as dramatic performances, on stage and on film. We will cover only a few of Shakespeare’s 43 extant plays and three books of poetry, but we will examine the broad spectrum across which Shakespeare wrote: sonnets, comedy, romance, history, and tragedy. In taking this approach, we will necessarily also examine William Shakespeare, the man, and the cultural milieu of the Early Modern Period in which he wrote. Performance is key to understanding Shakespeare, so we will watch films of staged performances and also filmed adaptations, and we will consider the differences between what the author wrote and these alternate performance genres.

Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, and Kazuo Ishiguro are some of the writers we’ll read and study together in this survey of British Literature from 1800 to the present day. Our course reading will cover literary movements from romanticism and victorianism to postmodernism and beyond; along the way, we will consider how British colonialism and decolonization shaped its literary history.

This is a course about adaptation, medievalism, and the Middle Ages. Students examine a body of medieval texts in their literary and cultural contexts, analyzing their reception and re-interpretation through the contemporary medium of film. Students also learn about the theory and practice of film adaptation in general, and the transformation of medieval texts to film in particular. We explore a range of medieval and modern genres and consider questions of transformation across time. For instance, what is the impact of entangling the fictional poem of Beowulf with the real historical account of 10th-century Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan in The Thirteenth Warrior (1999)? How do three different films about the legendary King Arthur–Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Excalibur (1981), and King Arthur (2004)--pick and choose sources from a diverse medieval canon to speak to (or mock) the expectations of their modern audiences? Which films lean into their anachronism to try to thematically bridge the gap between the medieval and the modern (such as Thor Ragnarok (2017) and A Knight’s Tale (2001)) and which claim a historical legitimacy to their presentations, even if they are equally anachronistic? Ultimately, we will consider how modern filmmakers create fantasies of medieval worlds to speak to their own cultural and political moments. Readings will include excerpts from the Norse Edda, medieval histories by Saxo Grammaticus and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Ibn Fadlan’s travel accounts, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, among others.

In this course, students will engage with a broad range of literary genres (including, but not limited to, the novel, the short story, and the poem) across a variety of literary movements from the Shakespearean era to the present. This course will examine how works of literature reflect and respond to the historical eras in which they were crafted, and will attend to how formal and stylistic features are strategically employed by writers to produce meaning. Further, this course aims to support students in developing critical thinking, interpretation, writing, and analytical skills through reading, discussing, and responding to a wide selection of texts from the Western canon (and beyond). To achieve this end, students will also learn about the key terms and methodologies of literary studies and be provided with numerous opportunities to practice critical interpretation and written analysis of literary works. Ultimately, LIT 2000 provides a groundwork in literary types for non-majors and is also strongly recommended as preparation for upper-level (3000- or 4000-level) coursework in the field.

In this course, students will engage with a broad range of literary genres (including, but not limited to, the novel, the short story, and the poem) across a variety of literary movements from the Shakespearean era to the present. This course will examine how works of literature reflect and respond to the historical eras in which they were crafted, and will attend to how formal and stylistic features are strategically employed by writers to produce meaning. Further, this course aims to support students in developing critical thinking, interpretation, writing, and analytical skills through reading, discussing, and responding to a wide selection of texts from the Western canon (and beyond). To achieve this end, students will also learn about the key terms and methodologies of literary studies and be provided with numerous opportunities to practice critical interpretation and written analysis of literary works. Ultimately, LIT 2000 provides a groundwork in literary types for non-majors and is also strongly recommended as preparation for upper-level (3000- or 4000-level) coursework in the field.

In this course, students will arrive with a piece of contemporary (post 2000s) literature (novel, story, song album, play, narrative-driven game, poetry collection, etc.) that they admire. Through an exploration of interviews, style, and research practices, students will uncover the lineage of inspiration that resulted in the present-day work they admire. Tasked with literally travelling back in time, students will engage with 2-4 books that trace an inspirational lineage through literature.

During class time, students will read short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry following the same methodology as the individual reading assignments; beginning the whole semester with a local contemporary writer, the whole class will work together to trace a lineage of poetry and flash writing backwards through the Western Canon and wherever else inspiration leads.

A midterm paper will engage with texts read during in-class discussion.

A final project will involve a combination of the student’s contemporary writer’s family tree of inspiration, an explanation of evidence used to form their tree, and an examination of style tactics employed by the writers that inspire us today, using a deeper understanding of how those tactics were developed over the history of literature.

This course introduces students to such narrative elements as point of view, characterization, setting, and symbolism in prose fiction and provides an introduction to the basic approaches of literary analysis. The course will engage with basic concepts of major literary theories, such as structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, and postmodernism. Most of our texts will be American short stories and novels from the early 20th century to the present by authors such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy.

LIT 2010 is an introductory literature course designed to enrich students’ skills in both literary criticism and craft analysis. We will read and discuss and broad range of fiction, focusing on forms such as the novel, short story, and flash/micro-fiction. We will cover a brief historical view to establish a landscape of contemporary fiction’s inherited techniques and themes in the first half of the class and then we will shift our focus to the contemporary American fiction for the second half. This class will examine fiction writing through the lens of craft and literary theory, as well as historical and social contexts. You will be asked to engage in discussions in each class, offering your own questions or insights into the what the story does well, what its shortcomings are, and what challenges the story answers to context of the society and time in which it was written. You will develop skills to read for craft analysis, and there will be opportunities to write fiction as a part of some class assignments, as well as your final project. There is also ample opportunity to engage in research or critical theory if that is a skill you are interested in honing. Practically speaking, we will work at the intersection of craft and literary criticism, seeking to discover how these two approaches to text inform each other and create friction in the literary landscape.

This course introduces students to the foundational literary genre of the short story. This course is an introduction to the history and variety of the short story as a form, including selections from the Western canon, and teaches students to understand, analyze and think critically about the formal aspects of the short story (including point of view, narration, tone, characterization, and theme) that are essential to all literary study.

The course also investigates how affective forces engineer a short story. In lieu of treating feelings as mere tempers, we will interrogate the possibilities of emotions: how they dictate narrative structure, how they push characters to extremities, and how they engineer visceral responses in the reader.

This course introduces students to the foundational literary genre of the short story. Students will learn about the history and variety of the short story as a form, including selections from the Western canon. The course will teach students to understand, analyze, and think critically about the formal aspects of the short story (including point of view, narration, tone, characterization, and theme) that are essential to all literary study. Major short story writers such as Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Jorge Luis Borges will be discussed. Student will engage with critical work as well as write and revise their own critical papers.

We write poetry because we are human. We read poetry for the same reason. In this class, through study and practice, we'll learn to understand and enjoy this beautiful literary form full of compressed expression of what it's like to be human in a complex world full of beauty, terror, and everything in between.

This course welcomes all students interested in learning about the diverse and fascinating world of poetry, from Lucille Clifton to Chen Chen. Students will learn how to read, navigate, analyze, and annotate published poetry from different time periods that engage with a variety of subject matters, such as finding joy in difficult times, responding to current events, the natural world, and the body.

This course introduces Anglophone literature. We read poetry, fiction, and prose that reimagine, resist, and reckon with inherited languages, borders, and histories. Texts are drawn from a range of national and cultural contexts, with attention to how writers navigate between local traditions and global literary forms. Some of the questions we discuss are what it means to write in the colonizer's language, how literary texts construct/refuse national and cultural identity, and how postcolonial writers engage with memory, displacement, and belonging. We ground our analysis in close reading while situating texts within their broader historical and political contexts.

People move across the world for countless reasons: because of economic necessity, political upheaval, displacement, war, and environmental crisis; or, for the pursuit of opportunities to study, work, rest, and travel. Whatever the cause and the motive, movement reshapes subjectivity, society, culture, and the environments through which it occurs.

This course surveys contemporary novels from around the globe that center on different forms of movement. Framing our discussions with core theoretical concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s identity and hybridity, we will consider how literature renders visible the stakes of movement across borders, languages, and worlds.

Throughout the semester, we will ask: How do power and precarity shape who can move and who is compelled to stay? How does movement transform the self and the communities we inhabit? How do narratives themselves structure and give meaning to stories of mobility?

Tentative readings include Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid, The Pickup (2001) by Nadine Gordimer, A Long Way from Douala (2016) by Max Lobe, The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019) by Christy Lefteri, and The Feast of the Goat (2000) by Mario Vargas Llosa.

This course is a survey of literature written in English from the medieval period until 1800. Studying a wide range of texts across genres and periods--from medieval epics like Beowulf to seventeenth-century poems like John Milton’s Paradise Lost to eighteenth-century treatises like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of Rights of Woman—this course will focus on how literary texts depict heroes and rebels. In doing so, we will consider how literature shapes and responds to cultural value systems. Students will read a variety of works in their historical contexts and will develop skills for detailed literary analysis, critical thinking, and academic writing. Students in the class will be expected to work individually and collaboratively as we strive to understand and analyze British literature before 1800.

This section of LIT3110 is online, and students will be expected to attend class with cameras on and to contribute actively to class discussions,

This course fulfills the LMC Core Requirement for Literary History I.

In Humans: A Monstrous History (UC Press, 2025), Surekha Davies writes, “There are no monsters, but all of them are real. This is a book about monster-making: the stories societies tell about who they think isn’t normal or typical—the process of defining people as something outside normal categories, as something monstrous. . . What real and fictional monsters share is a capacity to challenge or transcend ideas about typical bodies or behavior. Monsters are category breakers” (2). Our course, a survey of Anglophone literary development from the fall of the Roman empire to 1800, takes its cue from Davies’s description. While reading foundational texts and acquainting ourselves with important authors, genres, conventions, and contexts, we’ll have opportunities to think about monster-making, focusing our critical lens on where and how monsters appear and to what ends. What vision of “the human” emerges in contract to the monsters of our literary history? From Beowulf’s Grendel, to the title werewolf of Marie de France’s Bisclavret, Shakespeare’s Caliban and beyond, how are monsters and notions of the monstrous intertwined with the foundations of the Western literary canon and humanist ideals? Meets the LMC Core requirement.

This course is a survey of literature from the Romantic period (c. 1800) to the present. You will be introduced to a wide range of authors and texts from a variety of genres and settings. You will learn how to analyze major formal, philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of the works, ask what effects they have had, what social understandings they assumed, and what meanings they had and still have in the present. The course’s emphasis is not only on impactful and recognized texts but also texts that have significant thematic emphases, historical interest, and/or represent literary innovation. Focusing on authors and cultural contexts, we will learn how to identify and interpret characteristics of artistic movements or social practices important to literary development.

A reading-intensive survey of Anglo-American masterworks from the mid-19th through the late 20th century. Readings will be from multiple genres and women authors such as Dickinson, Larsen, and Woolf will be given special attention.

For many, the “Caribbean“ conjures images of turquoise waters and swaying palm trees, seen from the deck of a cruise ship or the balcony of an all-inclusive resort hotel room. In this class, we will broaden our understanding of the Caribbean by examining literary fiction by writers from the island and coastal nations that make up the circum-Caribbean. Works studied will be in English, whether originally published in English or translated from one of the many languages that contributes to the Caribbean’s linguistic richness. Novels include works by Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, Edgar Mittelholzer, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Ingrid Persaud. To more fully appreciate these texts, we will use concepts from Caribbean and Diaspora studies to examine questions such as: How has Caribbean literary culture been shaped by intersections between the “New World” of the Americas and the “Old Worlds” of Europe, Africa, and India? What makes a text or author “Caribbean”? What do these texts teach us about the relationship between history, geography, and cultural identity? About tensions between the local and the global, including questions about Caribbean identities outside the Caribbean region?

This course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of the science fiction genre.

This course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of the science fiction genre.

This course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of the science fiction genre. We will be looking specifically at women writing in the genre (including novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays).

This course meets the diversity requirement for the Literature, Media, and Culture major.

In this course, students study women writers, editors, readers, and/or the portrayal of women in literary texts. Individual sections vary in emphasis. 

This course examines writing by women and the portrayal of women in literature, film, and popular culture. Students will consider how terms like woman and femininity have shifted over time, and how women writers use fiction, memoir, and film to explore identity. Readings may include work by Nella Larsen, Emily Austin, Rivers Solomon, and Torrey Peters. Each primary text is paired with secondary literature and sources.

This course fulfills the following requirements: Exploring the Human Exp, State-mandated Writing (W credit), and LMC Diversity.

From the haunted women of Gothic fiction to the defiant heroines of contemporary novels, how have women been depicted in American literature, and what do these depictions reveal about the relationship between culture, power, and lived experience? This course explores how literature has constructed, reflected, and challenged societal ideals of femininity and womanhood through the use, among other things, of gendered metaphors (e.g. “motherland,” “virgin wilderness”), feminine archetypes like the femme fatale, the tragic mulatto, and the feminine grotesque; and allegorical cultural symbols (e.g. Statue of Liberty, Columbia, Lady Justice). Course work includes several analytic paper projects, discussion posts, writing workshops, and a final exam.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, ecocriticism has undergone a remarkable transformation. What began as a relatively focused inquiry into nature writing has grown into a vibrant field encompassing postcolonial ecologies, urban ecologies, environmental justice, waste studies, animal and plant studies, energy humanities, blue humanities, climate fiction, among other areas of inquiry. Arguably, in just a few decades, ecocriticism has moved from the margins of literary studies to one of its most intellectually dynamic and urgent domains.

This course surveys key recent fields in ecocritical studies through three movements: the more-than-human world (animal studies and plant studies), energy humanities (with particular attention to petrofiction), and climate fiction. Across these movements, we will ask: How does literature challenge the assumption of human exceptionalism? How do narratives render visible the infrastructures of extraction and energy that shape nature and culture alike? And how does climate fiction reshape narrative form, temporality, and scale in order to imagine life on a changing planet?

Our readings will include contemporary novels, short stories, and theoretical texts. The novels may include Open Throat (2023) by Henry Hoke, The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers, Oil on Water (2010) by Helon Habila, and Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures (2022) by Andrew Dana Hudson. For theoretical grounding, we will read selections from Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder, The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway, Energy Humanities by Imre Szeman, and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh.

This course counts toward the English 2000+ level electives requirement.

This course explores how modernist authors and artists engaged with new ideas emerging from modern philosophy, psychology, and non-literary arts; from transformations in technologies and cultural institutions; from large-scale movements of people and popular cultures; and from new forms of identity and agency.

This course explores the tradition of literature written in Ireland or by Irish authors abroad.

This course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of the science fiction genre.