Spring 2007

Spring07 AML5027 
AMERICAN FICTIONS BETWEEN THE WARS  
Fenstermaker, John - 644 1780, WMS223B, jfenstermaker@english.fsu.edu

We will consider contemporary visions of America as subject and theme in fictions published between the Wars (roughly 1920-1940). Together we will discuss works by six authors and add two films: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Horace McCoy, Steinbeck, Wilder; Andy Hardy, Stagecoach). Papers and reports will allow discussion of other writers, e.g., Stein, Cather, Lewis, Toomer, Parker, Miller, Hurston, O'Neill, Hellman, Arlen, Agee, Mitchell, Wright. We will discuss depictions of American culture from various perspectives but will continually note among characters in the texts an often romanticized memory or vision of time and history, and of the past as it impinges on the present. There will be two short papers and a term paper / oral report; the latter will focus on the general cultural moment of a significant literary or historical event or on a contemporary issue touching upon the idea or the condition of America in the period of our inquiry.

Spring07 CRW5130 02
Fiction Workshop  
Baggott, Julianna - 645 1744, WMS428, jcbaggott@aol.com

This course is an advanced level fiction workshop which will include investigation of published work and student work. Alongside the traditional workshop format, students will be required to engage in exercises that will hopefully lead to more textured stories. There will be mapping of plots, as well, which we will do collaboratively, at first, as a whole class. We will also be creating, throughout the course of the workshop, a backlog of story concepts, meaning that students will create storylines for possible future use and for exercise in the art of plotting. The workshop will culminate in a final portfolio.

Spring07 CRW5331 01
Poetry Workshop  
Kirby, David - 644 1534, WMS420, dkirby@english.fsu.edu

You will be submitting 12 new poems to Prof. Kirby. Half the class will present each week. In addition, you?ll be responsible for the following: (1) A portfolio consisting of a selection of your best work this term. Value: 70 points. You?ll be writing 12 poems for class; your portfolio will consist of revised versions of the best 10. (2) Presentation of a poem from Technicians of the Sacred: 5 points. (3) Conferences: 5 points. There will be conferences the weeks of January 15- 19 and April 16-20; you?ll come prepared with questions and poems to be discussed. (4) Bits Journal: 5 points. You?ll keep a journal of verbal ?bits? you can make poems out of, including stories, snatches of conversation you overhear, quotations from books, and so on. Note these two important dates: by January 29, give me 250 words describing your progress on this journal and on February 26, I?ll want to see the journal itself, which should be at least 5-6 pages long. (5) Revision report: 5 points. By March 19, you?ll give me revisions of your work thus far plus 250 words on what you?ve accomplished in the way of revisions. (6) Soul Siblings: 5 points. By April 2, I want a 500-word essay from you on three poets who write like you or from whom you?ve learned. (7) Mailable Manuscript: 5 points. This will consist of 3-5 poems (the cream of your portfolio), a cover letter, a SASE, and an envelope addressed to a magazine (but left open for my perusal). The mailable manuscript and portfolio are due April 23. A note on absences: any class missed for any reason is 5 points off. You can buy back those points by writing a 250-word review of a contemporary poetry book within a week of the absence. The idea is not to penalize legitimate absences but insure you have a quality experience even though you may have to miss.

Spring07 CRW5331 
Poetry Workshop  
Kimbrell, James - 644 0887, WMS309, jkimbrell@english.fsu.edu

This course will focus primarily on poetry written by its participants. We will carry these considerations out, however, in the context of a wide selection of poetry from outside the classroom. Assuming a solid basis in contemporary poetry on behalf of its participants, this course will create a forum in which students can begin to shape or re-shape their own first collections, one poem at a time, and is meant to go beyond the traditional workshop nuts-&-bolts format. Accordingly, we will examine a good deal of canonical poetry in the pursuit of understanding the origins and possibilities of our own writing. Each student will workshop at least seven poems each semester. Everyone will be expected to be very familiar with the poems scheduled for that week before the workshop and will be required to submit thorough written responses to each poem. We will focus as well on the art of the poetry review; each student will be required to submit one publishable review of a volume of recent poems.

Spring07 ENC5217 
Topics in Editing: Line-Editing  
Bickley, Bruce - 644 3243, WMS417, bbickley@english.fsu.edu

Designed for academic, corporate, agency, and free-lance writers and one of the Department?s standard Graduate Certificate in Publishing and Editing course-offerings. Thorough review of grammar, punctuation, proofreading, and style-editing. Line-editing practice and open discussion in large-group and small-group workshop structures. Electronic textual mark-up practice, online. Participants apply course principles to their own current writing and editing projects and to the work of their classmates. Our goal is to teach everyone how to edit confidently and competently almost any kind of professional prose--starting with your own prose.

Spring07 ENC5317 
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop  
Roberts, Diane - 644 1749, WMS434, droberts@english.fsu.edu

The Reality-Based Community. In this course we will read various kinds of narrative non-fiction such as investigative pieces, memoir, reportage, essays etc. all of which will have some "literary" component (whatever that is). We will also produce our own projects, either stand-alone shorter pieces or parts of a larger work and workshop them. Participation and professionalism are essential.

Spring07 ENC5933 04
Visual Rhetoric  
Neal, Michael - 644 4024, WMS444, mneal@english.fsu.edu

This course begins with the assumption that visual language is one of many available means of persuasion that neither displaces nor functions in isolation from other modes of communication. By studying visual rhetoric in the context of contemporary, popular culture, we will discover how frameworks used to explore written communication are sufficient for some discussions but insufficient for others when studying visual rhetoric. Visual messages are present in print as well as in digital form, in film and television as well as on pages and signs, and in layout and design as well as in illustrations and photographs. Visual rhetoric is equally relevant in the Rembrandt exhibit at the MET as it is on the t-shirts of the patrons who visit each day.

This course will begin by exploring several attempts to define and classify visual rhetoric and visual argument in order to get a sense of the depth and breadth of current scholarship as well as multi-disciplinary perspectives that influence our thinking about the visual. This will lead us to explore questions such as: What are the relationships among visual, oral, written, and digital rhetorics? What language is best situated for articulating visual principles in relationship to rhetoric? How do different disciplines and professions read, make meaning from, and compose visual texts? What influences do screens, hypertexts, and multi-modality have on visual rhetoric? How can/should the teaching of composition, literacy, and English be influenced by visual rhetoric?

Students in this seminar will be asked to read, critique, analyze, and produce a number of texts during the semester: visual, written, digital, and multi-modal. We will start by reading and writing about visual rhetoric with contemporary, popular culture images before moving into more sophisticated analysis, critique, and production of visual and multi-modal texts. The final project for the course will be a seminar paper appropriate for a conference presentation or a multi-modal essay on a student-selected subject. The course does not require any previous experience or expertise with digital technologies, though a willingness to explore and experiment with readily available composing technologies is essential.

Spring07 ENG5049 
Studies in Critical Theory  
Goodman, Robin - 644 9234, WMS324, rgoodman@english.fsu.edu

This course focuses on a specialized area of critical theory, in this case Feminist Theory. We will be looking at the development of what is known as the "second wave" of feminist philosophical thought, working through its seminal texts from Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler. We will consider feminist debates over issues that have defined feminism in a broad range of mostly humanistic fields, i.e. sexuality and the body, language, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, identity, the subject, queerness, discourse, performativity, race, class, the gaze, the division of labor. From early intersections with existentialism, to later poststructuralist interventions, this course will then look to postcolonialism in order to think about how feminism can respond to the current war and the global crisis in democracy, turning to the social sciences, and in particular anthropology, in order the reflect on issues such as fundamentalism and the veil, the post-industrial rise in service and "affective" labor, and the end of the state-centered myths of welfare and development. Readings may include the work of: Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Mies, Ahmed, Mernissi, Haraway, Gallop, Freud, Lacan, Bordo, Rubin, Firestone, Sedgwick, Mulvey, Moi, Abu-Lughod, Spivak, Ong, and others.

Spring07 ENG5138 01
Studies in Film Biomedia, Biocapital 
Rai, Amit - 645 1459, WMS 226, arai@english.fsu.edu

This course traces the rise of a new form of power that continuously assembles together, with various effects, the affective body, venture capital, and different media platforms. We will call this the new media assemblage of contemporary biocapital. Following Kaushik Sunder Rajan, we define biocapital as a form of value extraction based in the informational and neurological substrate of the body (linking DNA-data, the ethics of the human genome, a yet-to-come neuro-nano-science, and the global strategies of the pharmaceutical and gaming industries). This course situates this machine of value in the projection of possibly lucrative and always fearful "futures," in the hype-hope-terror of contemporary finance capital and counter-terrorism: what constitutes value today is the hyped-up potential of certain "branded? technologies, in the contagious mediatization of terrorist threats. Hype-hope-terror is the unstable affective disposition of our common sense in the "age of the World Target? (Chow). Tracing a historical and theoretical trajectory from the thermodynamic models of nineteenth century mechanics (rooted in the labor theory of value, in the politics of representation and its attendant media, and imperialism) to the present conjuncture "in which the 'informational substrate of life' has been technologically rendered and made manipulateable and profitable" (Patricia Clough), this course introduces students to three related fields of enquiry. The first is the queer and feminist analysis of the "volatile body," that body which is continuously being refunctioned through its open and dynamic connection to media technologies and its unpredictable contagions. The second, is the postcolonial critique of the global affect economy, and the theorization of "quantum effects" in the production of hype-hope-terror value. Third is the post-phenomenological analysis of bodies in technologies (Ihde, Massumi, Hansen, and beyond): how do contemporary digital media technologies implicate the affective dynamism of situated (raced, classed, gendered, sexed) bodies, and what forms of negotiation are taking shape at the dynamic thresholds between bodies, media, and capital?

Possible Texts:

Spring07 ENG5933 
Topics in English: Shakespeare, Performance and Presentism  
O'Rourke, James - 644-5202, WMS441 jorourke@english.fsu.edu

This course will introduce students to a new movement in Shakespeare studies called "presentism." During the past generation of Shakespeare criticism, the term presentism has been used pejoratively to describe work that supposedly lacked an understanding of an unbridgeable cultural gap between the early modern period and our modernity. Recently, some critics who have contested the fundamental principles of the New Historicism have also begun to describe their own work as "presentist." The central principle of presentism is that the critical force of Shakespeare's plays reaches into some of the most fundamental narratives that continue to shape our modern conceptions of sexuality, cultural identity, and the exercise of political power.

The nature of performance in Shakespeare's theater is a significant area of contention between the New Historicism and presentism. New Historicists commonly contend that early modern Britons were effectively interpellated into the dominant ideological formations of their culture through political forms of theatrical display, and that the theater itself, as it rendered its audience as passive spectators, functioned as a site for the reinforcement of conventional beliefs. One version of presentism, which draws on research into early modern performance conventions, adopts Bertoldt Brecht's contention that Shakespeare's plays employ a "naive surrealism" that made it impossible for either the performers or the audience to forget that they were participating in the construction of a story.

The theoretical framework for the course will be set out in readings from New Historicist and presentist critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Scott Kastan, W. B Worthen, Ewan Fernie, and Robert Weimann. If it arrives in time, we will also look at a volume of essays due out from Routledge in December titled Presentist Shakespeares. The plays we will discuss will include The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and Troilus and Cressida for discussions of gender roles; The Merchant of Venice and Othello for connections between race and sexuality; and a series of histories and historical tragedies (Richard II, Henry V, Macbeth and King Lear) for an examination of the symbolic forms of political power.

Spring07 ENG5933 03
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION AND CONVERGENCE CULTURE: How We Read, Write, and Make Knowledge in the Age of the Internet 
Yancey, Kathleen - 645 6896, WMS224 kyancey@english.fsu.edu

Using several frames of reference, ENGL 5933-03 will explore two related questions. First, what difference does technology, especially digital technology, make in the ways that we write, the ways that we read, and the ways that knowledge is made, sanctioned, and shared? Second, what do the changes related to digital technology mean for those of us who teach reading, literature, and writing? To answer these questions, we?ll consider briefly some earlier shifts in literacy motivated by changes in technology: from manuscript culture to print culture, for example, and from the ?private? knowledge of the 18th century to the mass culture publication of the 19th century. Our focus, however, will be on the changes that are occurring now: What are they? What do we make of them? As scholars and teachers, how do we respond to them?

A preview: According to Sven Birkets of The Gutenberg Elegies, changes wrought by the digital revolution undermine our ability to think and write coherently. According to Richard Lanham of The Electronic Word, our new ability to see at and through the screen afforded by the Internet resuscitates the manuscript culture of the Renaissance for a new kind of (digital) Renaissance. According to Sherry Turkle of Life on the Screen, the Internet is a genuinely new space for identity formation, and according to Howard Rheingold, for political action. According to Mark Prensky, today?s students are ?digital natives,? and we who teach them ?digital immigrants.? Echoing Prensky?s observation, some scholars call for a return to the past; others, like Gunter Kress of the New London Group and Glenda Hull of Berkeley call for a new reading and writing curriculum based in a convergence of print, screen, and Internet. And Collin Brooke, in Linga Fracta, suggests that through skillful electronic ?networking,? we both create new knowledge and represent it in new ways.

After completing this course, you?ll be able to identify both the significant questions currently in play around digital culture and a range of perspectives on those questions. You?ll be able to cite key works in, and thinkers commenting on, network culture and to understand how they talk to, around, and across each other. And you?ll be able to consider what all this means for education, now and in the future. Through completing a project?options include a print bibliographic essay; a hypertext review essay; a creation of a weblog or set of wiki entries on the one or more issues, and a syllabus keyed to these issues?you will develop the expertise that comes from investigating a topic in considerable depth.

To accomplish these goals, we'll read in print and online; we?ll write in print and online; we?ll talk and present to each other; we?ll raise questions and try to answer them as members of a community. In exploring digital culture, we will develop a new vocabulary defining this emerging interdisciplinary field and project how current trends may play out. If we succeed in these efforts, you'll find that you?re knowledgeable?as a teacher and a scholar--about issues that are likely to inform English Studies and education more generally well into the 21st century.

Spring07 ENG5933 02
Modernism and 20th Century Philosophy  
Berry, R. M. - 644 5158, WMS437A, rberry@english.fsu.edu

It is probably the case that 20th century philosophy, at least in its continental version, would be incomprehensible apart from modernist literature, and vice versa. This course takes this relationship as its subject. We will survey the writings about literature and modernism by the major continental and American philosophers of that last hundred years, reading essays, excerpts, and portions of books by such figures as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, H. G. Gadamer, Gilles Deleuze, Arthur Danto, Theodore Adorno, J. Habermas, W. Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, J. F. Lyotard, M. Foucault, J. Derrida, Alain Badiou, Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Undboubtedly that list will prove too ambitious, but we will try at least to sample from it promiscuously Although the course will assume some familiarity on the students' part with modernist fiction, poetry, and drama, we will probably read some poetry by Paul Ceylon, short fictions by Kafka, and Beckett's Endgame, since these three figure so largely in 20th century philosophical writings. We also may have occasion to look at Artaud's writings on theater and the art criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. We will take as our inspiration and guide, the forthcoming book On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide to the Unruly (Fordham UP: 2006) from Gerald L. Bruns.

Spring07 ENG5956 
Studies in Victorian British Literature, Novels and/in Magazines: Serial fiction and Victorian periodicals 
Kennedy, Meegan aka Margaret Kennedy Hanson 644 7771, WMS413, mkennedy@english.fsu.edu

Listed on FSU Registrar website under Margaret Hanson

Victorian literature and culture was signally shaped by two related developments: the explosion of new periodicals for all audiences, and the serial publication of novels, whether in these periodicals (as with most of the novels we will read) or in individually-sold "parts" (as with the novels by Dickens and Thackeray). We will consider how serial publication affects novels' construction and reception. The class will also study, more generally, the rise of periodicals and of mass literacy; the social history of a range of periodicals including literary, political, and medical periodicals and their role in the British Empire; the imagined class and gender of various audiences; and the class and political alliances of particular publications. How does the periodical function as context and setting for literary work? How do its illustrations, nearby texts, and even advertisements shape readings of novels? Finally, we will examine the vexed relation between authors, editors, and critics as it emerges in periodicals' pages. Probable readings include Dickens, Pickwick Papers; Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Gaskell, North and South; Eliot, The Lifted Veil/Brother Jacob; Collins, The Moonstone; Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds; Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Spring07 ENG6939 
Novel Seminar  
Winegardner, Mark - 644 3542, WMS418, mw@english.fsu.edu

The object here is to write a real novel, not to perpetuate a class assignment. It's also a seminar (capped at 12), so we'll be able to adapt what we're doing to the needs of your novel. Whether you are about to start a novel or in the homestretch, if you want to have the book done by December of 2007, this class may be for you.

While I'll adapt the requirements to the individual student, for most students this seminar will focused on getting your novel up and running, on making the first 100 or so pages of it strong enough that the book moves solidly beyond the realm of file-drawer novel. Ideally, nothing will come before the workshop unless the entire class has read the entire novel up to that point. If, by the end of the term, your novel is working reasonably well, you may pursue course credit for it (as a DIS or via dissertation/thesis hours) for the remainder of 2006.

You'll begin the semester by writing a proposal for the novel (I've sold my last three novels that way). After that, we'll move on to workshopping everyone's novels, coupled with a a careful study of what the opening of a novel does.

As for the latter task, you'll be asked to make a study of the first 100 or so pages of several novels (these could/should be books from your reading list, and can of course be books you've read before).

As for the former: workshopping a portion of a novel can be as absurd as work-shopping a scene of a story. It's crucial (in the case of your peers' work) to focus on the segment of the story before us and to quell any attempt to create a novel written by committee. It's equally crucial (in the case of your own work) not to cater unduly to the committee. Your novel is more important than this class.

You should run at least 20,000-30,000 words (60-90 pages) worth of work through class workshops, ideally in three or four workshop slots. Exactly how much you turn in to the class, and in what-sized chunks, is negotiable. (However: any time you're planning to submit a chunk of more than 10,000 words, let me know a week before you do so.)

Spring07 ENL5216 
Studies in Middle English The Myth of ‘Middle English’ 
Treharne, Elaine - 644 5776, WMS422 

This course will focus in detail on up to six key texts produced from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries to examine what 'Middle English' might mean. By investigating the genesis, composition and contemporary reception of these texts (a saint's life, a sermon, a chronicle, a debate, a romance, and a religious satire), we shall uncover how, why and in what circumstances prose and poetry came to be written, read and understood. We shall begin by analysing the manuscript context of each work, looking at the scribe's performance; we shall evaluate the interventions of other readers who have left their marks in the manuscripts; and we shall consider the interpretation of these texts by modern critics, who so frequently seek to decontextualise, label and close-off texts in ways that contemporary writers and readers simply would not conceive of. A key question is, of course, what is 'Middle English' in the middle of? How did those writers from c. 1050 to 1450 regard themselves and their work? Why do the modern arts and humanities insist on the false boundaries caused by periodisation?

Students will be expected to acquire the skills for reading manuscripts and weekly work will seek to hone these skills. Students can choose to produce a mini critical anthology of excerpts of later medieval texts; or to submit a portfolio consisting of manuscript transcriptions together with a detailed reading log. Packs will be supplied for the course, though it might be helpful if students bought my Anthology (!), Old and Middle English: An Anthology, by Blackwell Publishers.

Spring07 ENL5227 01
Studies in the Renaissance: Focus on Milton  
Boehrer, Bruce - 644-3029, WMS112a, bboerher@english.fsu.edu

This course will focus upon a close reading of Milton's work in light of such issues as the domestic politics of the early Stuart and Interregnum periods; available ideologies of family structure and gender relations; humanism, euhemerism, and the classical tradition; and the theology of radical Protestantism in the seventeenth century. Most of the course will be devoted to studying the entirety of Paradise Lost; however, we will also consider such briefer works as Comus, Lycidas, and (time permitting) Samson Agonistes.

Spring07 HUM6939 03
Pragmatism and the American Century  
Mikkelsen, Ann - 645 6861, WMS227, amikkelsen@english.fsu.edu

Pragmatism, the philosophic and scientific method articulated by Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is widely considered to be the first American and one of the first definitively modern modes of thought. While these statements can be debated (pragmatism has origins in British Utilitarianism, for example), what cannot be denied is that pragmatism has decisively shaped and been shaped by twentieth-century disciplinary discourses ranging from philosophy to history, economics, psychology, public policy, and literary studies. This course will address pragmatism as a philosophical, historical, cultural, and political phenomenon in four stages. In unit one we begin with pragmatism?s origins in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, focusing upon their essential philosophical claims. In unit two we will discuss recent historiography on pragmatism (by James Kloppenberg and Louis Menand, among others) in which the philosophy is discussed in terms of its political, cultural and economic logic in relation to Progressivism and capitalism. In the latter part of this unit we will also address critiques of James and Dewey by intellectuals of the 1910s-1930s such as Randolph Bourne and Lewis Mumford. In unit three we will turn to literary manifestations of pragmatic thought and the recent ?pragmatic? turn in literary criticism (for example, the work of Richard Poirier and Ross Posnock) in addition to literary texts by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Robert Frost, among others, that have been read as ?pragmatic.? In unit four we will consider various neo-pragmatic turns in philosophy by theorists such as Richard Rorty and J?rgen Habermas. Throughout the semester, we will address the continuing debate over what exactly pragmatism is, what its politics may be, and what legacies pragmatism offers to intellectuals seeking to maintain or create a place for critical thought in a modern democracy.

Spring07 LIT5038 
Studies in Poetry: Modernist Poetry In the American Grain  
Epstein, Andrew - 644 8110, WMS405A, aepstein@english.fsu.edu

This course will provide students with a firm grounding in modernism and modern American poetry. We will engage in a comprehensive investigation of the major figures, movements, and innovative styles in modern American poetry, as we move from its roots in the 19th century (Whitman and Dickinson) to the mid-twentieth century. The course will pay special attention to ongoing debates about the definition and nature of "modernism"; situating the poetry within its cultural and historical context; issues of gender, race, and the dialogue between politics and poetry; and modern poetry's relationship with other developments in the arts, such as modern painting.

Our in-depth study of the central American modernist poets will stress the persistent emphasis on experimentation and avant-garde poetics within the American tradition. Throughout, we will consider the perennial question that has long concerned both poets and critics: what, if anything, is American about American poetry? How and why do American poets radically re-imagine poetic form and content, and navigate the tension between innovation and tradition? How do they respond to what Wallace Stevens called "the pressure of reality" and the tumultous upheavals of the 20th century? Why are many of the poets so preoccupied with the ordinary and the daily, and how do they develop new forms in order to capture the experience of everyday life in modernity?

Poets will likely include Whitman, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, H. D., and Mina Loy. Our discussions will be framed by secondary readings in the most important critical and theoretical debates about modernism and modernist poetry, including works by critics like Kenner, Perloff, Vendler, Bloom, Altieri and others.

Spring07 LIT5186 
Studies in Irish Nationalism, Forging Identities: Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Nationalism/Postnationalism, Thursdays 6:45-9:30
Gontarski, S. E. - 644 6038, WMS430, sgontarski@english.fsu.edu

The purpose of this course is to examine the Irish quest for identity and, politically, independence, chiefly in a literary context, and concurrently to examine Post-colonial and Post-nationalist Irish literature in its broader, internationalist cultural context. We will feature three dominant figures in modern Irish literature, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett as they develop in, struggle with, and move beyond at least a provincial Irish or Anglo-Irish literary heritage, and then examine the conflicts of subsequent generations of Irish writers to develop and flourish in their shadows and amid the (sometimes suffocating) history and myths of the Rising. Central to our concern is whether the forging of Irish identity (or any national identity, for that matter) is itself always and inevitably a forgery. We will also examine the contemporary shift into more popular (and hence internationalist, or global, or trans-national) forms of Irish culture in film and music.

Spring07 LIT5327 01
African American Women and Folklore  
McGregory, Jerrilyn - 644 3161, WMS458 jmcgregory@english.fsu.edu

This course explores a broad range of topics relating to African American women's traditional culture, arts and expressive behavior, as well as attitudes toward and beliefs about them. Topics will include the historic stereotyping of African American women; the ways in which AFAM women make their experiences meaningful through legends and personal experience narratives; the place of AFAM women as performers and preservers of traditional forms of artistic expression; AFAM women and the blues tradition; traditional domesticity & AFAM women; marked moments in AFAM women's life cycles; and the social powers and dangers of female sexuality in the context of AFAM women.

Spring07 LIT5388 01
Studies in African-American Literature Contemporary Black Women's Fiction 
Montgomery, Maxine - 644 1906, WMS433, mmontgomery@english.fsu.edu

This graduate course entails an interrogation of what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as a "culture of resistance" among Blacks in the African diaspora. Using representative texts by contemporary Black women novelists as a basis for our discussion, we will draw upon scholarly and theoretical works by Hill Collins, Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, Carolyn Boyce Davies and others in exploring the ways in which fictional characters attempt to fashion safe spaces -- architectural, personal, and communal -- allowing a reversal of White patriarchal rule. Issues of migration, exile, and home will undergird our investigation, just as feminist and post-colonial literary theory will propel our discussion. Included are such novels as Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Tina McElroy Ansa's Ugly Ways, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Glora Naylor's Bailey's Cafe.