Graduate Courses

It can be argued that one of the most profound and paradigm-shifting developments in U.S. literature since 1875, most certainly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the emergence of the immigrant's voice, the foreigner's presence and narrative, in that literature, including, in this case, African immigrant writers' significant and still-growing contributions to American life and letters. In her study Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century (2018), Stephanie Li persuasively argues, among other things, that the border-, nation- and identity-blurring work by the new generation of African immigrant authors in the U.S. has forced a reconsideration of our long-held notions of race, Americanness, Africanness, blackness, citizen, alien, and particularly "American," "African American," and even "African" literary "canons." Even as someone intelligently called their continent "shithole" country and recent sweeping changes to U.S. immigrant policies further complicate travel, educational opportunities, work, and life in general for many an African in and coming to America, postcolonial African immigrant writers continue to produce indisputably some of the most dazzling fiction in American literary history, decades post-1875. This course is conceived as a space for students, for us, to meditate on these issues. On our reading list are these novelists and works: NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names; Dinaw Mengistu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears; Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers; Ike Oguine, A Squatter's Tale; Okey Ndibe, Foreign Gods, Inc.; Teju Cole, Open City; Uwem Akpan, New York, My Village; and of course Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 20th and 21st centuries; African American, African, and African Caribbean Literature and Culture; and a Literary Genre (Fiction). This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

From the chains of slavery, to the horrors of segregation, to ongoing systemic racism, violence has been an ever-present force that has shaped the black experience. Taking its intellectual cue from the work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Toni Morrison, Kara Walker, and others, this course seeks to fathom contemporary black women’s aesthetic, narrative, and cultural production in relation to the imaginative archive of slavery and recurring instants of violence, rupture, and resistance that mark the lives of black female subjects. A heuristic reading of a diasporic history in relation to atemporality and the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism will guide our scholarly work along with a consideration of the lingering consequences of slavery on the existential condition of blackness (and a gendered presence) in a New World setting.

The following primary works constitute the basis of our investigation: Toni Morrison, A Mercy; Nnedi Okorafor, Binti; Nalo Hopkinson, Browngirl in the Ring; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills; Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose; Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light; and Octavia Butler, Fledgling.

This course satisfies the requirement for the following Areas of Concentration: African American, African, and African Caribbean Literature and Culture; and a Literary Genre (Fiction). This course also meets the Alterity requirement

This course is intended to develop the nascent literary artist’s deep sense of the sources and nature of the creative process. This will be done by an examination of the aesthetic philosophy voiced in From Where You Dream, and by the subsequent creation of literary work for the workshop. There are a few cautions. Unlike most workshops, there will be no peer criticism in class. Craft and technique, as such, will be discussed only incidentally and ad hoc, being instead relegated to the place where it belongs: the compost of the imagination. The workshop will be divided into two groups, which will begin by alternating in the presentation of the opening 500 to 700 words of a piece of literary fiction. These will be carefully, aesthetically critiqued in class by the instructor. The student writers will proceed further only when their opening manifestly contains the DNA of narrative as a literary art form.

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

At the core of this rigorous, traditional workshop is the premise that any student work under discussion could be better. In a majority of fiction handed in to a graduate workshop, the thing that most needs to get better is the storytelling and structure. To attack that, this class will take a nuts-and-bolts approach to mastering the fundamentals of what a story is and how it’s put together.

The default mode here is that students will be expected to workshop, revise, and resubmit two short stories (though you could workshop three). If you wish to workshop any portion of a novel, we will meet one-on-one to custom-tailor a workshop strategy for that book (rather than treating it the way we would a short story).

“A writer,” said Saul Bellow, “is a reader moved to emulation.” “I know of no good, ignorant writers,” wrote Richard Wilbur. “Great stories and novels,” said Charles Baxter, “are permission-givers.” In this course, you’ll develop your writing in tandem with your reading: eradicating ignorance, receiving permission, being moved to artful emulation. The strangeness of individual talent won’t be blunted by such things. Quite the contrary.

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

This course is primarily a workshop, so all reading for the course will support the primary goal: to write poems. We are writing in a time when administrations scrub websites of words. One day there was an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at FSU. The next day there was no such office. At the national level, PEN America reported, in an article titled "Federal Government's Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship," that banned words include accessible, activism, affirming care, anti-racism, bias, bisexual, Black, carbon footprint, climate, community, COVID-19, critical race theory, disabilities, discussion of federal policies, diversity, elderly, equality, ethnicity, exclusion, feminism, gay, gender nonconformity, Gulf of Mexico, H5N1/bird flu, hate speech and very many more. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: "Poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history." Given poets made all the words and we are poets, how do we feel about banned words? What is a "chilling effect" on free speech and are we experiencing it? Which poets, throughout time, have written despite censorship? And what can we learn from them? I will also want to learn from you, as a community of writers, and what troubles you about censorship. There may be a "final project" where you "adopt" a poet whose work has been censored, and also central, to your development as a poet. Introduce us to the poet's work and why it matters to you.

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

“It takes me so long to formulate a thought worthy of articulation, and it takes me so long to articulate my opinions in a form worthy to call thought,” C.D. Wright said in a 2014 conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye and Juan Felipe Herrera, her fellow chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, about revision. In two years, she would make her transition and leave us to sort out how she was able over several collections to constellate a host of speakers who were at once “one big self”—many-throated and polyphonic yet singularly searing—and one with others. This semester, we will examine the twenty-first-century epic tradition through a host of debut and second collections and historicize their lineages as we refine our own in this moment of such profound chaos, grief, inhumanity, and uncertainty. What makes a contemporary (anti-)elegy timely and timeless? We will plumb that question's depths until we find a deeper love of our big selves inside our singular wordcraft. In addition to Wright, other master-poets we'll engage may include Desiree Bailey, William Brewer, Meg Day, Danielle Cadena Deulan, torrin a. greathouse, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Tyehimba Jess, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Donika Kelly, Megan Pinto, Max Ritvo, Taije Silverman, Jake Skeets, Mosab Abu Toha, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora, and our own Kaveh Akbar, Kerry James Evans, Diamond J. Forde, Yolanda Franklin, Nicholas Goodly, Aimee Seu, and Jane Springer.

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

This course examines the evolving relationship between digital technologies and composing, exploring how the tools, platforms, and systems we write with and through shape the ways we create, communicate, and circulate knowledge. Drawing on a historical arc, the course moves across three interconnected areas: 1) the digital turn in Rhetoric and Composition, 2) digital multimodal composing practices, and 3) digital automation.

We will investigate how the field has theorized, adopted, and critiqued digital technologies. Special attention will be given to contemporary issues such as generative AI, algorithmic writing tools, and what automation means for composing processes and pedagogies. Throughout, we will ask not only what is happening but how we should respond as scholars, writers, and instructors.

Students will experiment with a range of digital and multimodal tools and develop a final exploratory digital composition accompanied by a critical reflection on their process, choices, and learning.

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

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

This course focuses on the history of the field and the theories that inform rhetorical studies in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The course moves students chronologically and topically through representative selections in the field’s scholarship (namely, many of the selections that the FSU Rhetoric & Composition Program requires for the doctoral qualifying exam in this area). The course assumes the following as central concerns in the study of rhetoric as a phenomenon: the nature of rhetoric, authorship, audience, epistemology, discourse, and context.

Course requirements include extensive reading of foundational texts; engaging in synchronous and asynchronous group discussions; leading discussions on class reading selections; completing a take-home mid-term exam; and composing a final project that demonstrates awareness of the reaches of rhetorical theory.

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

This course examines the university in the United States, both its historical foundations and contemporary form, with special attention to the institutional politics and culture of the humanities, English departments, and the academic profession. We will mostly be reading recent work in critical and abolitionist university studies—on the racial/settler colonial foundations of the university, academic capitalism, institutional power, the imperial dynamics of the university, the politics of criticism, and the institutional struggles of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and other marginalized interdisciplines. We will also engage with material on the concrete workings of the “neoliberal” university today, covering issues such as the financialization of higher education, student debt, academic labor, and the proletarianization of the university workforce. Another portion of the course will be devoted to social movements and protests in the university, not excluding visions of radical education beyond the university as we know it.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Theory.

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 and scholarly practices. Most of these texts are known for their stylistic and conceptual difficulty. In parsing the ideas that currently circulate in the scholarly debates of our discipline, we will concentrate on some of the most compelling threads of inquiry in our field.

This course satisfies the requirement for a Gateway Theory course.

This course sees the history of bookbinding as integral to understanding how material production shapes literary history. We will consider key historical shifts in the methods and purposes of bookbinding, including the transition from bespoke binding to publishers’ bindings. Along with earlier case studies—such as the eighteenth-century publisher John Newbery, who invented the practice of selling children’s books alongside literary-themed toys—we will consider more recent examples—such as the affordable Penguin Library series from the early twentieth century. While this is not a course in bookbinding/making, students will learn about structural features and design elements of different types of bindings.

The class will feature visits to Special Collections, where students will build bibliographical skills for analyzing historical texts, as well as a focus on building book historical research skills in digital and physical archives. Overall, this seminar is as much about learning methodologies and bibliographical skills as it is about specific knowledge about bookbinding history. Though many of the examples we will study are from an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British context, students will, in consultation with the instructor, have freedom to focus on other national and temporal areas for their larger assignments.

A background in book history or the History of Text Technologies (HoTT) is not required, but a willingness to explore the methodologies of those fields and bookish materiality more generally is.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course in 1660-1900. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: History of Text Technologies; and Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 18th and 19th centuries.

This course is inspired by the theme of the 2027 Feminism and Rhetorics conference titled “Resistance/Resilience: Sustaining Feminist Activist.” The Feminism and Rhetorics Conference is a biennial gathering of scholars invested in feminist history, theory, and pedagogy, many of which are members and/or supporters of T[1] he Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. In preparation for this upcoming gathering, this course will survey diverse herstories of resistance within feminist, rhetorical, and feminist rhetoric scholarship. Potential topics and perspectives include diasporic traditions of Black feminism, transnational feminism, spatial rhetorics, and representations of feminism within pop culture, hip-hop, social media, and everyday life. In addition to engaging historical contexts that situate feminist-led activism, this course creates space to interrogate contemporary issues, topics, and representations of activism that may be interpreted via a feminist rhetoric lens.

An underlying intention of this course is to challenge traditional notions of feminism, activism, and rhetoric. Although representations of feminist activism within the public sphere will be well represented within this course, equal space and consideration will also be given to daily acts of resistance and resilience employed within the private sphere (e.g., self-love/care, community engagement, rhetorics of home).

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

Among the most theorized texts in the American pantheon, Moby-Dick reads you. Melville told Hawthorne it was a “wicked book.” This seminar will read Moby-Dick as a machine for producing impossible readings, a text that has swallowed psychoanalysts, Marxists, radical thinkers, continental philosophers, ecocritics, media theorists, and avant-garde artists whole and left them all changed and slightly wrecked. We’ll treat the novel as a limit-case: not a classic to be mastered but a problem that keeps generating its own dissatisfied interpreters, each convinced they’ve finally flensed the animal, none of them right. We read Moby-Dick and successive and sometimes conflicting frameworks. Our guides: C.L.R. James (Mariners, Renegades and Castaways), composing his masterpiece in a detention cell on Ellis Island; Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael), who detonates the novel into a projective poetics of space and breath; Michael Rogin (Subversive Genealogy), who restores Melville to the political wreckage of slavery and Jacksonian democracy; Cesare Casarino (Modernity at Sea), for whom the ship is a laboratory where biopower and labor play out off the books; Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark), on whiteness and the American literary imagination; D.H. Lawrence, whose feverish chapter in Studies in Classic American Literature remains the most unhinged critical encounter with the book on record; and the International Necronautical Society, whose transmissions on death and failure claim Melville as patron saint of the literary undead.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course in 1660-1900. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Theory; Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 18th and 19th centuries; and a Literary Genre (Fiction).

Shakespeare has been, and continues to be, studied in relation to any and every literary theory, and most books, articles, and courses on Shakespeare focus on the “right” way to interpret his work. This course will instead focus on Shakespeare as a writer—and re-writer—of phrases, sentences, paragraphs (i.e., “speeches”), stage directions, scenes, stories, titles, and genres, which continue to inspire readers and audiences around the world. People only care about what Shakespeare meant because of how he meant it: by stringing words together in new and compelling ways.

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

This course poses the question: Did the South win the Civil War? We’ll explore this provocative idea through readings in literature and history, particularly novels by William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Randall Kenan and others, as well as nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and W.J. Cash.

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

This course examines the narrative dimensions of “the Anthropocene,” the term marking the historical period during which humans have exerted planetary-scale ecological and geological influence, with a focus on how climate inflects the shape and study of the novel in the 21st century. Both as ecological reality and as historical/cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is often described as a radically new period that upends fundamental assumptions of (particularly Western) modernity: the categorical division of “human” from “nature,” for instance; the belief in progress; the scale at which human life is staged. Naomi Klein puts it simply: “This changes everything.” In this course, we’ll take that provocation seriously even as we interrogate it, delving into a set of linked questions: What patterns of contemporary novelistic innovation—in content, form, style, genre—does the Anthropocene seem to prompt? What pressures do different material issues—disaster, debility, displacement, extraction—place on the conventions of literary narrative? What marks a novel as “about” the Anthropocene, and what are the competing definitions of an “Anthropocene novel” that might complicate the category? How do novels take up the philosophical questions of history, futurity, planetarity, coloniality, race, embodiment, and power that the Anthropocene concept activates? How do novels resist the totalizing force of Anthropocene imaginaries by narrating (to borrow from Jennifer Wenzel) “from below”? How has the Anthropocene affected the methods, objects, and stakes of literary criticism, and what do we make of these changes? In other words, at the broadest level, this course asks: what are the relationships among contemporary literature and contemporary life? Novels are likely to include Oryx and Crake, Cloud Atlas, Animal’s People, Salvage the Bones, Autumn, Future Home of the Living God, Exit West, and How Beautiful We Were, read alongside relevant scholarship drawn from contemporary literary studies, ecocriticism, genre theory, science studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as contemporaneous critical responses to each major text. Course assignments will be designed to give you familiarity with some of the fundamental “genres” of academic writing—the abstract; the conference talk; the article—with the hope that each of you leaves the seminar with an original project you can develop for publication.

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

What does it mean to see a poet whole? How do later volumes change the way we see the earlier work? What images, questions, and/or obsessions sustain a poet over time and how do they evolve over the course of an entire “career”? Is a poetic career itself a formal structure (early apprenticeship, mid-career expansion, later style, self-curation), and in what ways do these collections confirm or resist that structure? In this course we will read three recent collected works: The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, Louise Glück's Poems 1962-2012 (along with the two volumes that followed, Faithful and Virtuous Night and Winter Recipes from the Collective), and Larry Levis's Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems. We will also read critical essays and reviews relevant to these books.

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: a Literary Genre (Poetry).

William Blake is the funny bunny of English Romanticism. Keats and Wordsworth get most of the glory, and Coleridge and Shelley are not far behind, but Blake is not only an eye-popping read in his own right but also a precursor to Whitman, Ginsberg, and the poets of today. We’ll study Blake in his own time but also ours.

This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course in 1660-1900. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Literary and Cultural Studies of the Long 18th and 19th centuries; and a Literary Genre (Poetry).

This course is structured on a series of book/film pairings involving women travelers and tropes of (im)mobility. Given the historic injunction to domesticity and the prohibition of female mobility (or, in my shorthand, fem(m)obility), is travel for women on their own terms synonymous with empowerment? Under what circumstances is the freedom to travel compromised and/or complicit in class and/or cultural hierarchies that are otherwise oppressive? Under what circumstances, contrariwise, is it a mark of an individual's transnationalist and/or intersectionalist positioning? These are some of the questions that will drive our discussions this semester.

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