Graduate Courses

The plantation never went with the wind.

In fact, the plantation and its organizational, capitalistic, racial, ecological, and material logics shape our contemporary moment to such a profound degree, some argue we dwell in an epoch of its own making: the Plantationocene.

With no singular definition, the plantation exists in various forms and modalities around the world—recreating the world in its image since the 1400s. As we interrogate the Plantationocene, this course is an interdisciplinary consideration of literature, film, television, and the theoretical interventions of Black Study. To situate the plantation at the center of this inquiry does not always mean we are only going to discuss violence and dispossession. This course insists the plantation is also a story about craftsmanship, agency, resistance, and beauty that, albeit complicated and resisting romance, still has something relevant to say about our current struggle for Black liberation.

Requirements: This course satisfies the general literature requirement for one course 1660-1900. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: African American Literary and Cultural Studies. It also fulfills the Alterity requirement

I know the nature of the beast for I have lived in its belly. —José Martí

This course will cover Latino/a Literature written in English from the emergence of Jose Antonio Villarreal's Pocho in 1947 (the first Chicano/a novel in English) to the present and the exciting work of Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, and Judith Ortiz-Cofer. Latino/a Literature—which contains thus far the work of Mexican-Americans (Chicano/a), Puerto Ricans (Nuyoricans), and Cuban-Americans (there are a few other groups being represented now, for example Julia Alvarez as a Dominican and Francisco Goldman as a Guatemalan)—is constantly growing, and, like African-American, Asian, and Native American Literatures, has established itself in the panoramic landscape that is American Literature. The work the course will focus on will be introductory in nature and will be unified by the following themes and perspectives: the “Americanization” process and the struggle to define, redefine, and attain the American Dream; the use of cultural myths; language and memory; gender; religion and spirituality; rural versus urban (the barrio) life; ideals and values; the role of Latino/a writers and poets; the question of universality and specificity. The reading load is reasonable and the rationale behind this "list" of required texts is that the student, during his/her student career, will unlikely run into these texts as opposed to those that have become popular. Of course, we will discuss and touch upon them as well.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American, British, Irish); Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies; and a Literary Genre (Fiction).This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

In this workshop, we will study the combinations of image and pattern required in our fiction. We will consider notes on visual storytelling, including Susan Sontag’s “anthology of images” and “grammar of seeing” concepts. Toni Morrison’s process of moving from “picture to meaning to text” will also be a guide. Other lessons in photography will come from Teju Cole, Eudora Welty, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Our primary craft text will be Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. The book classifies prose structure using forms derived from nature—waves, cycles, colors, explosions, etc. We will consider those examples as we read students’ short stories and novel chapters.

Requirements: 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.

I believe strongly in discussing freshly minted student material in workshops. In my experience, the energy and exchange of ideas in such a group can motivate everyone who participates. Ideally, for this class, I’d like you to submit new work. However, if you do submit a pre-workshopped piece, make sure that you are really open to hearing our suggestions. I would prefer that you submit something rough and malleable rather than polished and fossilized. Each student will have two-three pieces workshopped by the entire class, twenty pages max per submission. If you want to submit a longer piece you can do it in separate sessions. In addition, each student will choose a published short story from either Best American Short Stories 2024 or The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Stories and do a presentation on it in class.

Together we will explore some of the subtleties of the craft of fiction writing. What risks do successful fiction writers take and how can we learn from them? What new risks might you take in your own fiction? How can you make your fiction as dramatic, intense, engaging (and publishable) 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.

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

In this graduate poetry workshop, emphasis will be on your poems and the writing you generate during the course. I typically run workshop with a bit of the traditional model and some new ways to give each poet an opportunity to speak on the poet’s own process. I consider workshop to be a collective space. I expect to learn from poets enrolled in the course, and I expect poets to learn from me as instructor of record. We are equals. I’m thinking of Shelley’s line from “A Defence of Poetry” – “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Do we feel like “unacknowledged legislators of the world” or not really? How do we make poems? And why?

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

In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson opined, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.” After surveying works of pioneers and innovators at the fin de siècle through the late twentieth century (Rimbaud, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Stein, Neruda, Brooks, Bishop, Simic, Giovanni, Mullen, et al.), we’ll explore innovative contemporary collections that exploit the long line without falling flat in the wake of A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, choosing from recent ones by Atsuro Riley, Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, Ross Gay, Taylor Johnson, Desiree C. Bailey, and m.s. RedCherries. Lyric essays on the line by James Longenbach, Alyson Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington, and others also will animate our discussions of our own poems, which will be the central focus of this workshop. These readings aim to help students constellate a literary genealogy and converse with confidence about our relationships to the prose poem and other incarnations of the long line.

Requirements: 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 workshop and its traditional format are designed for prose lovers with the desire to feel liberated to write in any main genre that suits their purpose and artistic vision. Two of my favorite writers—Zadie Smith and Joan Didion—serve as perfect role models for the literary aspirations of the members of this class—Writers with a capital W, with a comprehensive knowledge of all techniques that transform words into literature. You have to talk (critiquing your classmates’ work), and you have to write (a minimum of 25 pages of new prose. Also, you’ll need two survival tools—a sense of humor and a refusal to tolerate censorship. Misfits welcome.

Requirements: 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 course work.

This course traces the digital side of Black feminist thought and practice. We will focus on the role of music, movement, and making—that is, the vernacular rhetorical literacies—that have been used throughout the generations by Black women to persuade, educate, protect, and serve. The course will be divided into three units, all which will sit at the intersections of multimedia and activism: 1) Sounds of Revolution (focusing on the role of music and alternative digital practices in Black women discourses, e.g., spirituals, quilting, blues, jazz, and hip-hop); 2) Traditions of the Collective (focusing on writing from print to online spaces as a form of solidarity building and mobilization, e.g., pamphlets, autobiographies, blogging); 3) Hashtag This (engaging digital activism focusing on Black woman-created and/or -led sociopolitical movements and online advocacy, e.g., hashtags, content creators, social media as platform). Throughout the semester, students will produce small reflective projects related to each unit. These smaller assignments will inform a larger critical work as a final project.

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

Theories of composition will introduce you to the discipline of Composition Studies and a number of conversations within the profession.

The primary goal of this course is to increase understanding of, and appreciation for, composition studies both as situated, practical activity in the world and as an academic discipline concerned with writing. The course should also help you learn about the history of English studies in general, reflect productively on literacy issues for your own professional development, and open up a body of new texts, debates, theories, and practices that could be relevant for your research.

We will begin with a survey of composition theory from historical perspectives exploring some key concepts and issues that give rise to what we know about writing, and the rhetoric(s) behind composition pedagogies. Another section of the course explores theories of composition including social linguistic, cognitive writing and the literacy theories. In addition, we will analyze how writers learn to write and how researchers study writing. Throughout the course we will discuss the politics of composition studies.

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

This course is an introduction to the field of literary and cultural studies. We will be dealing with the three most basic unities of literary and cultural analysis: its production, the product, and its reception, especially in the context of the encounter between Europe and the Americas. We will juxtapose works of fiction and criticism as well as look at peculiar hybrids of fiction and theory. Some of the main questions that we will be asking are: What is an author, and why is it problematic to postulate its mere existence? Where do writers get inspiration? How do they produce literature? Are style and method fundamental aspects of an ars poetica? And what constitutes a literary text? Can a film be a text? Can texts be translated, and if so how? What is fiction, and is literature exclusively fictional? After a text is produced, it reaches fortuitous and manifold hands. What do we look for when we read? Is reading interpreting? How do we read? Throughout the semester we will engage in dialogue with pre-modern as well as modern and contemporary texts written in a wide variety of languages and belonging to a number of different genres. Our readings will include Homer, Auerbach, Borges, Sontag, Plato, Preciado, Freud, Barthes, Calasso, Molloy and many more.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for Gateway Theory course.

Film aesthetics, in returning to the original Greek understanding of the word, produce sensations meant to be perceived by the cinematic spectator—an embodied affect. In this course, we will explore and interrogate the aesthetics of embodiment in and of film, the phenomenology of film (Sobchak), the haptic qualities of the cinematic text (Barker), the body’s role in the activity of cinematic spectatorship (Williams, Clover), and question how the body operates as the existential ground for perception in and of film, as inherited from the corporeal concepts of vision that emerged in the 19th century (Jonathan Crary, Walter Benjamin, etc.).

Bodies of investigation may include Nascent Film Bodies, The Body of the Film, Embodiment in Film, “Her Body,” Men of Steel, The Monstrous Feminine, Queer Bodies, Heavenly Bodies, Abject Beings, Alien Bodies, Corps de ballet, Dead Bodies, Nobodies, and Body Parts.

Texts for study may include: Tom Gunning, “The Impossible Body of Early Film”; Roland Barthes, “Garbo’s Face”; Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine; Linda Williams, “Film Bodies”; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Vivian Sobchak, “The Address of the Eye”; Martine Beugnet, Cinema of Sensation; Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience; Katharina Linder, Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema; Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film.

Films of study may include those by Georges Méliès, Loie Fuller, Germaine Dulac, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, Ridley Scott, Jonathan Glazer, Marina del Van, etc

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies; Film and Media Studies; History of Text Technologies (reception conceptual area, Film/TV media); Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; A Literary Genre (Film as a Genre). It also fulfills the Alterity requirement.

This course introduces the complex interactions between literary culture and the changing, overlapping media ecologies that have shaped the way we produce, transmit, transform, receive, and interpret creative representations of human experience. It provides an accelerated history and theory of “platformalism”: the affordances of forms through which particular technological platforms enable or disable, encourage or discourage aural, textual, and visual articulation and communications across spatial, temporal, and social boundaries (class, race, nation, gender). Because it is impossible to cover the more than 80,000+ years of text technologies in one course, we will focus on the complex interaction of text technologies in English and in the creation, transmission, and reception of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: skin (the earliest matrix for symbolic inscription, including make-up, whiteface, and blackface), semiotic fashions (clothes, accessories, wigs), many forms of manuscript (individual sonnets, playbooks, actors’ parts, musical notation), hand-press printing (advertising flyers, books), built acoustic amplifiers and multimedia systems (musical instruments, churches, theaters). Although our focus is the period 1564-1623, we will also spend a few weeks examining the re-transmission and re-reception of those works through later text technologies (machine printing, modern technologized theaters, sound recording, radio, film, digital). Topics are explored through case studies and hands-on encounters, accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Major assessment is of your individual projects, which may concern any time period or technology—though, if you want credit for a pre-1660 or pre-1800 course, your major project must focus on the technologies of that earlier period.

Requirements: This course satisfies the gateway requirement for the History of Text Technologies concentration. 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 British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); History of Text Technologies; or a Literary Genre (Drama).

This course examines primarily nonwestern rhetorical traditions, exploring foundational and contemporary phases in rhetorics associated with India, China, Greece, Rome, and the Islamic world, calling into question the viability of a single, static “rhetorical tradition.” The premise underlying this course is that we look to the rhetorical practices of the past—including the ways that cultural traditions argue, teach, debate, and historicize their concepts, myths, and philosophies—in order to formulate more robust theories about global rhetorical practices of the present. Moreover, we will be formulating theories of “global/intercultural” rhetoric that students can use as tools for further exploration into an ethnic rhetorical or textual tradition of their choosing. Finally, we will pay attention to the questions and dilemmas that are raised when we attempt to study any tradition or community “globally/interculturally.” Much of our work will be conceptual or methodological, rather than purely historical. That is, while we will read some historical scholarship to help us interact with these “nonwestern traditions,” we will spend more of our time learning to read, interpret, and diffuse more recent recirculations of these traditions without falling into representational traps (as best we can, anyway).

Please note: Given the unique scheduling of this section, there will be a short reading assignment posted in advance of the first class day for students to complete and bring to our first meeting. Interested and/or enrolled students should contact tgraban@fsu.edu in advance for the first-day readings.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area(s) of Concentration: Rhetoric and Composition; Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.

This course will offer a supportive community in which we can discuss the various topics and problems encountered by anyone embarking upon the novel-writing process—discussing craft issues as they arise in relation to your own writing, as well as the published works we read. The ultimate goal is for you to walk away with at least the first 100 pages of your novel draft completed, as well as with clear ideas about how to finish that elusive first draft.

Requirements: 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 provides a foundation in the field of Discourse Analysis by introducing advanced graduate students to a variety of research methodologies (e.g., speech act theory; conversation analysis; pragmatics; interactional sociolinguistics; ethnography of communication; critical discourse analysis) guiding contemporary research in the field. Students will learn about the history, theory, and actual research practices involved in the various approaches.

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

The word “media” wasn’t used to describe communication systems until the 1920s, but Victorian culture was suffused by the concept. This was especially true of its novelists, who utilized the formal device of intrusive, self-reflexive narrators and pioneered new ways of describing urban space and landscapes in a concerted effort to turn the novel into an interactive, immersive media environment of the sort that we’re familiar with today.

In this course, we will study how Victorian writers confronted the new communication technologies of their day. Discussion topics will include how Victorian anxieties over personal and professional obsolescence brought about by mass media reflect our contemporary concerns with AI, the relations between gendered labor and new information tech such as the typewriter and stenograph, and the challenges that photography posed to the conventions of literary realism. Our course reading will include George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of the temporality of media and move beyond the conventional understanding that new media merely replaces the old.

Requirements: 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: British and Irish Literary and Cultural Studies 1660-1900; a Literary Genre (Fiction).

This course is cross-listed with Modern Languages and will be team-taught by Mark Winegardner and Lisa Wakamiya (Modern Languages). It will emphasize developments in the craft of short story writing, the history of the genre, and its reception. It will focus on the nineteenth-century short story as practiced by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, along with additional literary and critical readings. No reading knowledge of Russian is required; those who know Russian are encouraged to read the works in the original.

Requirements: 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: a Literary Genre (Short Story).

This course explores the body of literature on dreams and dreaming in the Middle Ages, with a focus on the peculiarly medieval genre of the dream-vision. First we will investigate the relevance of medieval “dream theory,” via ancient and medieval discussions of physiology, psychology, and dream taxonomy. We will then engage two central traditions that shape the dream-vision genre—the philosophical and the courtly—as expressed in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, respectively. Building upon these foundations, we will spend most of the semester closely reading the most intriguing dream-visions produced in late medieval England, by the era’s three most accomplished poets (contemporaries in the second half of the fourteenth century): Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous Pearl-poet (aka the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and William Langland.

Our fellow travelers on this journey include erotic daydreamers, narcoleptic sinners, and chosen visionaries, and our itinerary leads us to the question of whether medieval dream-poetry anticipates (or challenges?) modern ideas of subjectivity, personal experience, and psychology. Along the way we will consider the intersection of dreaming with literary representation and the creative alchemy by which dreams become texts and texts become dreams.

Middle English readings will be mostly in the original (with helpful glosses); foreign-language background materials will be read in English translation. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required; however, proficiency in Middle English pronunciation and comprehension is a formal goal of this seminar. This course will be of interest to medievalists and early modernists but also to those engaged in the history of subjectivity, psychology, and/or the generally bizarre. This most self-reflexive and metatextual of medieval genres will especially interest writers

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies; a Literary Genre (poetry).

This course is designed for both those who are proficient and not proficient in another language. There will be three introductory classes on the ethics, theory, and history of translation, but most of the classes will revolve around visiting poet-translators (in person and on Zoom) who will give talks on their translation projects and the challenges they present, as well as answer students’ questions. Every class will have a translation exercise for students to work on in preparation for their final projects. Silvia Valisa from Modern Languages is co-teaching this class, so you will be working with students from Modern Languages as well as English. Our visiting translators will be discussing works in Ukrainian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Haitian. Please contact me if you want to know more.

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

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

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; the History of Text Technologies (reception conceptual area, Film/Television media); Film and Media Studies; a Literary Genre (Film/Television).