Fall 2008
Fall08 AML3311
Major Figures in American Literature: Literature Between the Wars
Tiffany Brooks WMS451 tfy04@fsu.edu
This course is intended to explore a variety of major American writings from the period between the wars. We will consider each work through a variety of lenses including the literary movements of which each text is a part, the social context surrounding the novel's composition, critical discussions concerning the work, and the reader's own reaction to and experience with several significant novels, short stories, and poems of the period.
Fall08 AML4121
20th Century American Novel
Timothy Parrish 644 4059, WMS 221, tparrish@fsu.edu
We will begin with Henry James'
Portrait of Lady. James's career overlapped with the twentieth century and his experiments in form influenced the modernists. After James, we will read three turn of the century novelists who wrote (in part) in response to James: Edith Wharton (House of Mirth) Stephen Crane (Maggie), and Willa Cather (My Antonia). The second half of the course will focus on more recent, so-called postmodern American literature. Authors we likely will be reading include: Walter Abish, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, Denis Johnson, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Fall08 CRW4320r
Poetry Workshop
David Kirby 644 1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu
This is an advanced course for those who are well underway in their poetic careers; the assumption is that you will have taken our undergraduate Poetic Technique class. You will be submitting a new poem or part of a poem to me each week; you'll write either 12 poems or 400 lines total. Every other week, you'll be asked to bring multiple copies so the whole class can workshop your poem. You'll also be responsible for numerous craft exercises of the kind that professional poets undertake, such as outside readings, attendance at poetry performances, attempts at new forms or modes that are challenging to you, and other practices that make up the poet's daily life.
Fall08 ENC4311 02
Advanced Article and Essay Workshop
Kristie Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 447, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu
This configuration of ENC 4311 will focus on what Robert Root, Jr., and Michael Steinberg call the fourth genre: creative nonfiction, a loose category of writing that includes memoir, literary journalism, the nature essay, and others. Phillip Lopate labels such writing the "personal essay" because creative nonfiction is marked by the intimate connection between writer and reader. Relying on visual, digital, and textual selections, we will read and analyze one particular configuration of the personal essay: the memoir. Your semester-long final creative project will consist of an original memoir.
Fall08 ENG3014
Critical Issues in Literary Study
Robin Goodman 644-9234, WMS 324, rgoodman@english.fsu.edu
This course introduces students to some of the key components in contemporary critical theory. It gives students a chance to consider some of the difficult vocabulary, the conceptual issues, concerns, debates, and the framing of arguments, positions, and traditions that compose literary and cultural scholarship today.
Fall08 ENG3014
Critical Issues in Literary Study
Timothy Parrish 644 4059, WMS 221, tparrish@fsu.edu
The main objective is to introduce you to key figures and concepts in the history of literary criticism and theory. The course will be divided between "the Ancients" and "the Moderns" with an eye toward balancing depth (Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth, Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Eliot, Woolf) with practicality (New Criticism, Structuralism, Marxism, Feminist
criticism, etc.) Some of these essays blur the line between literature and criticism. Other essays try to draw that line once and for all. We will also read Cormac McCarthy's
The Road and stories by Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges. Midterm and Final exams, one longish paper.
Fall08 ENG3014
Critical Issues in Literary Study
Amit Rai 645 1459, WMS 226, asrai@fsu.edu
This course introduces students to various methods of contemporary cultural, media, and literary analysis. By situating different theories all within the purview of a methodological project, the emphasis will be on building a viable and pragmatic box of tools with which a practice can proceed and become?What? That ?what? is the open-ended basis of this syllabus because it depends on the particular domain of intervention that each of you negotiates and creates within and beyond this course. Those domains?all of which have durations, histories, evolutions, processes?will sometimes overlap, sometimes diverge, and always after a time dissolve. Through viewing a variety of short films and web-based media, we explore what theory can do. We begin with two early traditions of aesthetics: Brahmanic (Bharat Muni,
Natyashastra) and Aristotelian (
Poetics and
Rhetoric). We begin with one overarching question: what is the relation between representation and the body? Throughout the course, we develop concept-tools from these traditions such as representation-mimesis, plot-thought-order vs. character-surface-sensation, desire, subalternity, resonance, subjugated knowledge, pragmatism, juice-mood, stillness, becoming-being, context, subjectivity, sensory-motor circuits, and form. Through these concepts we situate contemporary Western criticism within an international and transdisciplinary frame. We will also take seriously the lessons the physical sciences offer humanistic hermeneutics (breaking down the binary of science=causality vs. humanities=interpretation) by considering the methodological implications of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamical theory of Ilya Prigogine, Manuel Delanda, Stuart Kauffman, and David Bohm, among others.
Fall08 ENG3014
Critical Issues in Literary Theory
Barry Faulk 644 6530, WMS 219, bfaulk@fsu.edu
Since the 1930s, Literary theory has played a crucial role in training students for the English profession. ENG 3014 surveys the major schools and arguments in 20th (and 21st) century literary criticism: psychoanalysis, the New Criticism, feminism, poststructuralism, post-colonialism, and more. We discuss why we read, how we read, what is literature, what constitues a text, and the relation between culture and power. In other words, the class addresses how and why reading and writing about books can matter in the world. Required text: The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism.
Fall08 ENG4020
Rhetorical Theory
Kristie Fleckenstein 644 3530, WMS 447, kfleckenstein@fsu.edu
ENG 4020 introduces students to the range and power of rhetorical theory. It includes a historical overview of various theories and provides opportunities for an application of those theories. The focus of analysis for this configuration of English 4020 is popular culture, which means, literally, the culture of the people. Pop culture, frequently cast as an opposite or binary of high culture, includes an array activities, texts, and media that appeal to a broad spectrum of people. Thus, pop culture includes everything from soap operas to malling, from
Sin City to Barbie dolls, from Harlequin romances to hairstyles, from rock to rockabilly, from World of War Craft to MySpace. We will analyze pop culture to uncover the way it functions persuasively.
Fall08 ENG4115
FIlm Theory: BIOMEDIA/BIOCAPITAL
Amit Rai 645 1459, WMS 226, asrai@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 heterogeneous 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, Hayles, 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?
Fall08 ENG4934
Senior Seminar: Retail Aesthetics
David Kirby 644 1534, WMS 420, dkirby@fsu.edu
You're about to check out of that supermarket called undergraduate education, yet you're not quite sure what's in your cart or why it's there. Here's your chance to find out and also prepare yourself to be a savvier consumer of the arts--music, film, television, plays, painting, sculpture, architecture, even literature--in the years to come. In this class, we'll begin with an intensive course in aesthetics, that is, the study of how the emotions and the intellect work together so that we say "I love this" about one work, "it stinks" about another, and "Eh . . ." about a third. Following that, we'll spend our time reading and discussing the poems, stories, and essays in
Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses, 2008 Edition (ISBN 1888889462), though there'll also be assignments involving live performance and gallery visits. There's going to be a ton of writing in this class: a short paper every week, a group paper, and a long paper near the end of the term, at which point you'll know why you feel the way you do about the arts that are, in many ways, our greatest wealth.
Fall08 ENG4934
Senior Seminar: Women, Men, and Renaissance Literature
A. E. B. Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu
What did it mean, under the monarch Elizabeth I, to be a good woman or a good man? How were gender relations constructed in this period of rapid, radical cultural change? How different were Renaissance assumptions about masculinity/femininity from our own? In reading a broad selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose, we will historicize notions about love, sexuality, marriage, and gender relations. We will examine how major (and several minor) poets reshaped certain tenacious received ideas about masculinity and femininity.
We'll read some of those received ideas as backgrounds first (in translation: Aeneid IV; Roman de la Rose selections; Biblical selections; the Lamentationes and a few selections from patristics and medieval feminists). We then turn to the poetry and prose of Christine de Pizan (in English; her works were well known in Renaissance England). Most of the course, however, will be devoted to early modern male and female writers whose works directly address gender issues: such a list would include the well-known and the little-known: e.g. Surrey and Emilia Lanyer, Henry Vaughan and Mary Sidney Herbert, Diana Primrose, William Shakespeare, Isabella Whitney, Philip Sidney, Mary Tudor, Thomas Howard, Anne Locke, Henry Locke, Thomas Sackville, Elizabeth Colville, Hugh Platt, Elizabeth Grey (Countess of Kent), Henry Stafford, Elizabeth Stafford, Anne Dowriche, and Christopher Marlowe. In reimagining the terms and tropes of masculinity and femininity, these writers also reconfigured the relations possible and desirable between men and women. Their revisions of received ideas connect with the broad cultural changes we have called "Renaissance," and they also connect with our own world; that is, "Renaissance" is also "early modern."
Course requirements may include such things as: well-prepared class participation, research project, seminar presentation, papers and/or critical annotations, midterm, and final.
Fall08 ENG4934 03
Senior Seminar: Fear, Identity, and Gender in Literature and Film
Linda Saladin-Adams 644 5569, WMS 429, lsaladin@fsu.edu
This class will examine the way in which fear informs identity and is affected by gender in written texts but mostly films. The course will begin with the novel
Dracula to establish course themes. Then the class will basically move to film for the rest of the semester, reading a number of critical articles as well. The information we glean will be speculative, and as a group we will incrementally redefine terms to suit our applications and perhaps contribute further insights into previous critical observations.
Fall08 ENG4934
Senior Seminar: "Women (Re)Writing the Classics."
Celia Daileader 645 6478, WMS 439, cdaileader@fsu.edu
This course examines women's interventions in the Anglo-American literary canon dominated by white, male authors like Shakespeare and (arguably the modern American Shakespeare) William Faulkner. Our starting point will be to problematize the notion of a monolithic list of "great works" in English by positing a "counter-canon" composed of critiques, appropriations, and revisions of the classics by women authors from Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison and beyond.
Fall08 ENG4938
HONORS SEMINAR: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE POSTHUMAN
Paul Outka 644-2619, WMS 228, paul.outka@fsu.edu
This seminar will examine the threat and promise of emerging biotechnologies, and the fundamental ways they challenge our sense of what it means to be human. Topics might include genetic engineering, stem cell research, cloning, bioterror, nanotechnology, human/machine interfaces, psychopharmacology, and longevity enhancement. Students will be expected to participate actively in discussion, prepare one group presentation, and write a substantial final paper. As an interdisciplinary course mainly in the Humanities, readings will be drawn from speculative fiction, cultural theory, and scientific journalism.
Fall08 ENL3210 01
Medieval Literature in Translation Time Travel: Mapping the Medieval, 700-1500
Elaine Treharne WMS422 etreharne@mac.com
This course will focus on The Journey in Old and Middle English literature, with reference also to excerpts from relevant materials in other medieval literatures. The class will consider the spiritual journey, the metaphorical journey, and the actual issue of travel and pilgrimage in this early period. We shall use maps, descriptions of landscape and topography, and historical analyses of the means by which medieval people travelled, and the reasons behind their journeys.
Among the texts we might study will be Sigeric's Journey to Rome, The Seafarerand The Wanderer, Margery Kempe's Pilgrimage, Mandeville's Travels, The Voyage of Othere and Wulfstan, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, Gerald of Wales' Itinerary around Wales, King Horn, and The Vision of St Paul.
Assessment will be through a combination of attendance and contribution; oral presentation; short quizzes; mapping of journeys; and a final project where students will follow the journey (real or metaphorical) of one of more early travellers.
Fall08 ENL3334
Introduction to Shakespeare
David L. Gants WMS316 dgants(at)fsu.edu
We will approach the study of Shakespeare's plays not from any one overarching perspective but rather from numerous (and sometimes contradictory) avenues: literary, theatrical, historical, linguistic, theoretical, and aesthetic. The overall aim of the course will be to acquire a broad familiarity with Shakespearean texts and contexts. Along the way we will engage in a number diverse activities: short lectures, in-class discussions, informal and formal writing, student presentations, casting exercises, short quizzes, database inquiries, and video viewings. Just how the balance of goals and activities will work out in the end depends on the unique interests, tastes, and talents of the class, but by April we should all have a deeper and more fulfilling understanding of the plays we read and discuss.
Fall08 ENL3334
Honors Shakespeare
Elizabeth Spiller 645 1543, WMS 427, espiller@fsu.edu
This course will provide an intensive introduction to William Shakespeare's plays and poetry. We will think about the contexts in which these works were first written as well as those in which we now read them. We will try to understand how Shakespeare's writing is the product of a particular moment in English history and culture, while also enhancing our sense of the richness of the literary tradition we acquire from and through Shakespeare.
Comedy of Errors will provide an introduction to Shakespeare's dramatic practice. We will then study the movement from romantic comedy to tragedy in
Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Rape of Lucrece, and
Othello. We will follow the shift from history to tragedy in works such as
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Richard II, and
Antony and Cleopatra. The course will include some work with Shakespeare's source materials as well as some attention to recent scholarship in the field, but emphasis will be on close readings of the texts. Student work will include writing that contains critical, creative, and analytical components.
Fall08 ENL4122 01
Nineteenth-Century British Novel TR 11-12:15 319 Wms
Meegan Kennedy 644-7771, WMS 413, meegan.kennedy@fsu.edu
The nineteenth century is sometimes considered the golden age of the novel. Reading domestic or historical fiction, romance or realism, silver fork novels or Newgate novels, sensation novels or condition of England novels, New Woman novels or scientific romances - nineteenth-century readers experienced a roller coaster of novel genres equal only in pace and variety to the rapid changes transforming British society. While we can't fit in all the genres I mention above, we will tackle six great (good as well as big) novels, in an effort to understand something of the pleasures and compulsions of nineteenth-century novel readers and writers. Authors include Austen, Scott, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, and Doyle.
Fall08 ENL4220
Renaissance Poetry and Prose
A. E. B. Coldiron 645 7630, WMS 431, acoldiron@fsu.edu
This course surveys sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose, with an eye to interrogating the idea of "Renaissance" and the idea of an English literature. The period and national boundaries, under scrutiny, prove to be instructively fluid. First, English literature was richly informed by Latin, French, and Italian texts and contacts. Second, in addition to the rebirth of classical literature that has traditionally defined the period, these writers drew on many texts and habits of mind we now call "medieval." Readings will likely include selections by (e.g.) Skelton, Barclay, Wyatt, Baldwin, Spenser, Isabella Whitney, Ralegh, Sidney, Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Montaigne/Florio, Hariot, Puttenham, Rachel Speght, Bacon, Lyly, Donne, and Herbert. Requirements are likely to include class participation, presentation, papers, midterm, final.
Fall08 ENL4220 02
Renaissance Poetry and Prose
Elizabeth Spiller 645 1543, WMS 427, espiller@fsu.edu
This course provides an introduction to major works of poetry and prose that defined this golden age of English literature by returning to the last great age of English kings and queens: we will begin with the remarkable Henry VIII, turn to his daughter Elizabeth, whom Henry had once declared illegitimate and who transformed the liability of being a female prince into a source of power, follow the rise of the Stuart monarchs under James I, and end with the aftermath to shocking execution of King Charles, the head of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in 1649. We will study how these monarchs saw themselves not just as princes and patrons but also as poets. These princes tried to use the language of poetry to consolidate their power, but poets of the period also make monarchy one of their key subjects. Beginning with Machiavelli?s advice for making princes and ending with Milton?s arguments for beheading them, we will see how writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Milton praised, scolded, and counseled the royal families of England. In doing so, we will explore the complex interrelationships between literature and politics during this key moment in English history.
Fall08 ENL4311 01
Chaucer
Nancy Warren 644 5077, WMS 216, nwarren@fsu.edu
This course will focus primarily on reading Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales in their literary and historical environment. Accordingly, in addition to the Tales, we will also read other works from the Chaucer canon as well as texts by Chaucer's predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Students will be expected to learn to read Middle English in order to work with Chaucer's texts in their original language, though we will also read some medieval texts in translation. We will explore a range of theoretical approaches in Chaucer scholarship. The fomat of the course will consist of lectures, discussions, and collaborative activities. Students will be evaluated on the basis of reading comprehension exercises and / or reading quizzes, a mid-term exam, a cumulative final exam, and a research project consisting of an essay of moderate length (in the neighborhood of 6-8 pages) and an in-class presentation.
Fall08 ENL4333
Advanced Shakespeare
James O'Rourke 644-5202, WMS 441, jorourke@fsu.edu
We will read the following plays:
The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and
King Lear. Our focus will be on how the plays operated in their original performance contexts, leading to such questions as: How did women in Shakespeare's audience react to
The Taming of the Shrew? Did the men in Shakespeare's audience really take boys for women in
Twelfth Night? Why did Shakespeare introduce a heroic black character into the all-white environment of the Globe theater, and then destroy him? Through such questions, we will explore how Shakespeare's plays reflected and challenged the cultural conventions of his time, and how his questions resonate for us today.
Fall08 LIT4033
Modern Poetry
Andrew Epstein 644-8110, WMS 409, aepstein@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. 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.
Fall08 LIT4322
Folklore
Ormond Loomis 644 2618, WMS 222F, oloomis@fsu.edu
This class examines folklore as a form of expressive culture, an area of literary interest, and a subject of scholarly study. Its scope includes folklore from throughout the world, but most of examples are drawn from the United States. It begins by looking at how folklorists and others seriously interested in traditional narratives, music, beliefs, rituals, and crafts have approached these and related subjects. A significant portion of the course surveys genres of expressive culture that folklorists have documented and analyzed and considers what examples of folklore reflect about the life and values of the people who create and sustain them. Toward the end of the semester, students share research on collection projects that they've undertaken, and the discussions address current trends in folk studies.
Fall08 LIT4385 01
Major Women Writers TR 11-12:15
Eric Walker 644 4869, WMS 438, ewalker@fsu.edu
The Novels of Jane Austen. All six published novels, plus the juvenilia and unpublished fragments. An emphasis on locating Austen in relation to the history of women's writing in the late 18th and early 19th century in Britain. The course will satisfy the requirement for post-1800 British literature.
Fall08 LIT4652
Middle Eastern Literature in Translation
Robin Goodman and Daniel Vitkus, dvitkus@fsu.edu, rgoodman@fsu.edu
This course will treat some of the dominant themes in Middle Eastern literature, film, and theory from the past two centuries. Some of the topics to be discussed are: tradition vs. modernity, the global effects of capitalism, militarism, gender relations, imperialism, terrorism/freedom-fighting, and nationalism. Our analysis of culture and imperialism will begin with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and end with the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Authors may include: Edward Said, Leila Ahmed, Frantz Fanon, Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Amos Oz, Tayeb Salih, and others.
