Undergraduate Courses

This is an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures, histories, and cultures of the Afro-Gulf South that takes its cue from our close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico. Through texts offering contemporary readers historical constructions of the South as well as more recent texts, we will consider the cultural place of the Afro-Gulf South in our sociopolitical imagination. Our texts and authors will be varied. They include: slave narratives, fiction, memoir, photography, film, and music. For example, we will gain lyrical, anthropological insight from Zora Neale Hurston; engage poetic sensibilities with Natasha Tretheway; confront our understanding of memory and violence in the documentary work of Valerie Scoon; attend to the painful reality of climate change with Jesmyn Ward; and search for citizenship in the memoirs of Kiese Laymon and Richard Wright. The music of spirituals, work songs, juke joints, tent revivals, and chitlin circuit stops from Bradfordville, Florida, to Big Freedia’s New Orleans will be the soundtrack to our semester.

This course examines the global dimensions of Asian American Literature. We will explore how narratives address race, identity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. Through analysis of travel literature, selected novels, and a play, we will delve into the interplay between individual and collective identities within the Asian American experiences. Throughout the course, critical analysis will be applied through lenses such as race theory, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitan perspectives, addressing questions of representation, authenticity, and identity politics. By engaging with the selected texts, students will gain insight into the diverse voices and experiences within Asian American literature while exploring broader themes of race, identity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism in today's society. This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies, Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies, a Literary Genre (Fiction), and also fulfills the Alterity requirement. The following are the prescribed texts: Tropic of Orange: Karen Tei Yamashita Native Speaker: Chang-rae, Lee The Namesake: Jhumpa Lahari Donald Duck: Frank Chin Video Night in Kathmandu: Pico Iyer. Disgraced: Ayad Akhtar

American Novels will explore the term “American” and the idea of what it means for a work to be an “American novel.” We will study the current events taking place in the timeline of the fictions when the novels were written. We will discuss the timelessness of the work and how the 20th and 21st century shaped the novel.

Texts may include these novels and others:

Dune by Frank Herbert

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

“We know that we are beautiful. And ugly too,” New Negro Renaissance superstar Langston Hughes wrote in The Nation in his 1926 manifesto “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain,” a response to “The Negro Art Hokum,” an essay that conservative satirist George Schuyler had published a week earlier. This course begins at the apocryphal moment these two men (and a host of others) debated about how the children and grandchildren of newly emancipated African Americans should express themselves in literature (drama, fiction, nonfiction, poetry), dance, music, film, and visual art. Black folk had shown how integral they were to an “American” identity but had not been allowed to delineate their singular contributions and define their original aesthetic standards outside the European ones and the ones that had emerged in the era of American chattel slavery that had shaped misperceptions of them and their cultural contributions. Alongside primary texts, we will study the debates driving the evolution of Black artists’ literary traditions from the Renaissance to the period known as the Black Arts Movement. To this end, we will spend the semester investigating two central questions: How have Black Americans invoked and revoked the stereotypical characterizations of blackness (Mammy, Uncle Tom, Buck, Jezebel, Sambo, Pickaninny, etc.) that persist? To what end are contemporary conceptions and representations of beauty shaped by these painful chapters in history as well as those that have recurred in the last century? By this course’s end, you will be able to answer, with greater confidence and complexity, what makes Blackness—with all its wonders and fraught humanities—beautiful, “way back then”—and now? This fall's course will set up explorations of Black beauty aesthetics that enrollees can continue in Spring 2026 as we explore the flowering of Black arts from the Blaxploitation era to the present day.

This course will focus on the major poets of twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, with special attention to form, voice, and the crises of subjectivity. Beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as foundational figures, we will consider how later poets redefined literary traditions through experimentation, political engagement, and new modes of expression. From high modernism to contemporary innovations (performance poetry, found poetry, flarf, etc.), we will explore how poetry grapples with history, identity, and the power of language, in order to develop a deeper understanding of its evolving role in American literature and culture.

Poets studied may include: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Terrance Hayes, Ocean Vuong, etc.

The Graphic Narrative Workshop is composed of eight art studio majors and eight creative writing majors. They work together in collaborative teams to make original comics. We will be reading Making Comics (Scott McCloud), Words for Pictures (Bendis) and a selection of comics chosen by the students. For writing majors, this course counts as a 4000-level creative writing class.

We will read and dissect short stories and novel openings to better understand foundational craft moves like creating tension, character development, imagery, and the like. Additionally, students will develop a writing practice and have the opportunity to workshop their own stories or novel openings

This course explores fiction through Affect Theory. It emphasises how feelings, sensations, emotions, and experiences shape characters, plots, and narrative meanings. By probing how fiction evokes affective responses in characters and readers alike, we will analyse techniques such as tone, images, conflicts, points of view, language, settings, characterisations, and atmosphere to enhance the emotional depth and resonance of storytelling. We will learn how to apply these techniques to the stories we tell. What rhetorical choices are we intentionally making to evoke pathos? 
   
   In this class, we will read a lot besides writing a lot, engaging contemporary and classic fiction as well as the framework of Affect Theory. This is to understand how affect operates in narrative structure, from the subtle evocation of mood to the powerful currents of desire, fear, and joy that drive characters and plots. 
   Writing exercises and workshops will guide students in crafting fiction that not only tells a story but also deeply moves its audience.
   
   Key topics include:
   • Emotions and Storytelling: The conscious creation of feelings in stories. 
  
   • Language Choices: The impacts of rhythm, syntax, and word choices on affective tone
   
   • Plot: How narrative perspective shapes emotional experiences
   
   • Conflict: The tension between affect, rationality, and interpretation in fiction
   
   By the end of the course, students will have a nuanced understanding of how fiction works on an affective level. They will develop their writing practices to include an expansive knowledge of the intentional creation of immersive, emotionally-compelling characters, stories, and dialogues.

The goals of this course are to develop an understanding of fundamental fiction-writing concepts and to apply those to your work. The course is designed to be helpful for students who have never written a story and for students who have been writing stories for years. You will be reading a variety of short stories from established writers and looking for techniques that can be helpful to your writing. Classes will include writing exercises, craft discussions, workshop discussions about fellow students’ work, writing a complete short story, and making revisions to your story based on instructor and student feedback.

This course is designed to help you develop your unique poetic voice while learning key writing techniques. Through workshops, exercises, readings, and peer feedback, you'll explore different forms and styles to find what works best for you. For writers of all experiences, you'll gain the tools to express yourself confidently and refine your craft. By the end of the course, you'll have a collection of poems and a deeper understanding of your creative process.

This course provides a space for students to develop fiction in a workshop environment. Students will begin the semester writing short exercises that will support the development of two workshop stories, a prompt workshop submission, and one work of flash fiction. This combination of pieces will allow students to explore variations in their voices and approaches. The writers should leave the course with a more concise set of questions to consider as they develop new and existing work. Through our questions and discussions, each writer will be encouraged to provide quality feedback and to evaluate the critiques received from others.

This course (taught by a New York Times Bestselling author who’s also a 5-time winner of FSU-wide teaching awards) is a nurturing, rigorous fiction workshop focused on the creation, revision, and realization of competent apprentice-level short fiction. The primary objective is to write a short story that reads as if you’ve read one before. Easy, right? (Spoiler alert: it's not. But it IS a realistic goal!)

The course is structured so that you’re free to fail (students who do all the work earnestly and on time are GUARANTEED a grade no lower than a B), but you'll learn how to embrace the positive, liberating value of the kind of failure that's crucial to any artist's apprenticeship. If you do the work and trust the process, you're certain to walk away from this class a more sophisticated reader, a more adept editor, and a dramatically better writer.

The course will also touch on such practical matters as how (and when) to start publishing, how (and whether) to apply to graduate creative writing programs, and how to make a living as a working writer.

This course meets the Scholarship in Practice (s) requirement for Liberal Studies.

Each student will submit between 1-2 full length short stories for peer review and workshop

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

In this course, we will move beyond parsing the important, intricate details of prosody you’ve ideally encountered in CRW 3311 (and possibly other sections of CRW 4320) and write into and against modes and schools of thought that dominate contemporary poetics, particularly our intense moment of hypervisibility and hyperviolence. We will focus not only on refining the single “perfect poem” but also curating a series of poems whose speakers’ voices we can modulate to interrogate personal and cultural history and memory with greater veracity. We will attend to the ways that the performance of race, gender, and nationality contemporize and transform the ancient elegy and other modes of writing. To achieve this ambitious feat, rather than reading several books, we will spend the better part of the semester studying these modes and schools vis-à-vis representative writers over successive fortnights before reading two new collections as exemplary models of our aim of producing a small poetry collection.

Each student will write and workshop 8-12 poems during the semester and submit said poems for peer review and constructive criticism.

Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas,” and the same is true for poems. Our classroom will be your garden. It’ll be your laboratory. Our classroom will be the little convenience store on the truck route that never closes as well as the high-volume, deep-discount retail poetry outlet that ships more units than anyone else in the tri-state area.This will be a bits-and-kits based course in which you’ll keep a daily journal of verbal “bits”you’ll move around until they become “kits” you’ll make into poems. You’ll map your poetic genealogy in our classroom, work with partners, lead discussions. We’ll teach, care for, and learn from one another unceasingly. Hit the gym! This may be the busiest class you’ve ever taken as well as one of the most fun. It always is. Make sure you take CRW 3311 (Poetic Technique) first, though -- that's where you'll learn the basics.

Fiction Technique offers a supportive space to develop and experiment with your voice, your style, and the stories you want to tell. The goal is to give you the tools and the vocabulary to write, such as plot structure, character development, writing conflict, etc. We will focus on exploration and discovery of what themes are important to you as an artist, generating work that reflects your unique sense of experience, and developing skills for critiquing your peers’ work.

The most important aspect of writing is reading well and learning to read like a writer. Thus, this class will also ask you to read and engage with a variety of published stories and peer work, asking what are the aims of the story? And what are the elements of craft that helped the story achieve those aims? We will look at different authors’ strengths and omissions in their craft and learn how to begin reading to develop your own strengths as a writer.

This course is designed for upper-level undergraduate students interested in understanding and constructing fiction, specifically the short story, whether you have been scribbling away in isolation for years or are new to creative writing. Our goals for the course are to develop a solid writing practice, to explore basic craft concepts and apply them to our own work, to experiment with different approaches to fiction, and to familiarize ourselves with a supportive workshop process. Classwork will include reading and discussing published stories and craft essays, writing exercises, the completion and revision of a full draft of a short story, and participating in workshop.

Fiction Technique is a space to experiment with voice, style, and the kinds of stories you want to write. The goal is to give you tools and vocabulary needed to improve your craft.

The most important aspect of writing well is reading well. This class will ask you to read and engage with a variety of published stories along with peer work, always asking what are the aims of the story? And what are the elements of craft that helped the story achieve those aims?

Practically speaking, we’ll spend the majority of the semester practicing fiction skills—which include both writing techniques and learning how to read like a writer. In the final weeks, we will focus on producing, workshopping, and revising your work.

Poetry goes beyond Poe, Dickinson, Frost, and Shakespeare. What are poets writing and publishing today? How can you be a part of that? We will be learning about a variety of living poets from a diverse array of authors who are alive and well, publishing dazzling works in the English language. From Ada Limon to Terrence Hayes, this class has poetry for everyone looking to read about our world today through poetry.

Regarding the lyric poem, Nick Mount tells us that “the lyric tries the impossible, it tries to temporarily stop time.” In this class, students will have the opportunity not only to study elements of poetic technique but also to write poetry regularly and receive feedback on their writing. We will close read, discuss, and draw inspiration from a wide variety of contemporary poets whose work may inform our own. Aided by generative prompts and weekly workshops, each student will create a portfolio of original work. Together, we will develop our critical acumen while investigating what—for ourselves and for other poets—makes a poem sing, tick, or, maybe, stop time.

In this course, we will first examine influential poetic schools including Romanticism, Imagism, Objectivism, the Beat movement, New York School, Black Mountain poets, Deep Image, Confessional poetry, and Language poetry etc. By understanding these traditions, you'll develop a broader context for your own creative practice and discover which approaches resonate with your artistic vision. By the end of this workshop, you'll have a portfolio of new poems, a deeper understanding of the poetic craft, and the skills to continue developing your poetic voice. Whether you're just beginning to explore poetry or looking to refine your craft, this course offers a supportive environment to develop your unique voice.

Fiction Workshop (CRW 4120) is a course on the craft and art of fiction writing, only available for students who have satisfactorily completed Fiction Technique (CRW 3110). This course assumes you have a serious interest in writing, reading, and discussing fiction. Our concerns are mainly practical and craft-based: where you as author wish to go with a particular draft, and how we, as readers and writers engaged in a common cause, might help you get there.

In class we will examine how various craft points are at work in a number of published stories, and very often these texts will serve as templates for imitation and inspiration. However, this course will primarily follow the workshop model, and therefore student writing, and the discussion of same, will be our main focus. To that end, over the semester students will be required to produce, and share, a flash fiction piece of between 500-750 words, as well as two short stories (8-15 pages each).

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

Finding your distinct voice is an exciting first step in becoming a poet. We will begin each class discussing poems in a variety of voices. Then you will be given a prompt and 20 minutes to handwrite a poem. This is your first draft. You will take the poem through three more drafts before you bring it to workshop the next week. After the first week the second part of each class will be devoted to workshopping your poems. Not only will you develop your voice, but you will also develop work habits that will make you a better writer. All texts will be on Canvas.

Although we will start in Egypt and with African rhetoric, we will trace many different rhetorics across the world throughout distinct eras to emphasize the differences in rhetorical knowledge and meaning making processes. During this process, we will consider knowledges, histories, and identities as subjective and ever-changing. We will also consider how visual methods of delivery factor into and evolve meaning making processes. Although you may not have had experience with visual rhetoric in previous courses, this class will encourage you to expand your understanding and appreciation of rhetoric to include visual modes of delivery, interpretation, and understanding. Further, we will frequently (re)define rhetoric and its intersection with concepts like epistemology, ontology, truth, belief, identity, social interaction, and social justice.

ENC3021 is one of three core courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) track and works to provide a foundation for the major. In this course, explore the history and evolution of rhetorical practices, examining how they shape communication, power, and social structures across cultures and media. Throughout the course, we’ll engage with an array of rhetorics with diverse origins and methodological approaches. From foundational texts in the Western rhetorical canon, to visual and digital rhetorics, to those emerging from feminist, Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized perspectives, we will explore how rhetorics shape and are shaped by the sociopolitical contexts from which they emerge. Throughout, we’ll consider what rhetoric can do––how it can be a tool for (or against) social change. By the end of the course, students will have the tools to think about rhetoric not just as a way of persuasion, but as a powerful means for shaping identity, challenging power structures, and shaping our social worlds.

ENC 3310 Article and Essay Technique is an introductory course in the craft of creative nonfiction, a genre that includes creative use of prose craft techniques to present truth, fact, experience, and memory. Creative nonfiction includes a wide range of works including: memoir, personal essay, lyrical essay, literary journalism, profiles, science writing, nature writing, travel writing, biography, cultural criticism, and more. Expect to engage with several modes of nonfiction, personal essays, and memoir excerpts written by writers like you and unlike you. No topics are off limits — including, but not limited to: sexuality, the body, violence, race, religion, etc. Please be aware that some material may be triggering. We’ll also study works on the craft of nonfiction, and you’ll produce your own pieces of creative nonfiction to be workshopped in class.

This course serves as an introduction to creative nonfiction (CNF). We will look at different types of CNF including: the personal essay, the lyric & braided essay, travel & nature essays, & longform reporting. The course will also contain a workshop component in which students will share their creative work for feedback and critique.

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

ENG 3416 (WEPO) is one of three core courses for Editing, Writing, Media (EWM), and it helps provide a foundation for the major. As part of this foundation, this course introduces you to the principles of composing and editing across different media environments, paying special attention to how each new composing environment has its own audience, context, and purpose to consider along with affordances and constraints. We will also focus on how your composing process changes and the challenges that you face as you compose across spaces.
Overall, this course attempts to help you:
1. Understand principles of composing and rhetoric, especially the ways they function across different composing spaces;
2. Compose for three spaces—print, screen, and network;
3. Edit and revise appropriately the texts created in each space;
4. Understand the ways technologies build upon their predecessors as well as inform the composing and circulation of texts.
To accomplish these goals, we'll engage with multiple kinds of texts: we’ll read some, write some, talk about some, and create remediated forms of some. As there are multiple career paths for an EWM major, this course is designed specifically to introduce you to professional contexts you may encounter after leaving Florida State.

ENC 3416 (WEPO) is one of three core courses for Editing, Writing, Media (EWM), and as such, it helps provide a foundation for the major. This course situates writing “as a social and rhetorical activity,” meaning we write with/through/for specific purposes, distinct audiences, and unique identities (Roozen Naming What We Know 2015). We will situate composition as an embodied act, exploring how we write and compose with and through our bodies. Then, we will explore the principles of composing and editing across different media environments, paying special attention to how your process is affected when you compose in different contexts, with different materials and genres, and for different audiences. 
This course seeks to answer 4 guiding questions: 
(1) How is writing both social and rhetorical? 
(2) What key terms or concepts are necessary for understanding the principles of composing? 
(3) How do we compose for a variety of spaces, like print, digital, and network? 
(4) How do we engage with editing and revision in print, digital, and networked spaces? 
As a student in this course, you will gain introductory experience in multimodal or multimedia composition in print and digital spaces; a critical understanding of your own composing processes; and a transferable vocabulary for analyzing, inventing, and revising texts.

This course explores acts of reading, writing, and composing: the people who do it, how they do it, and how to help others do it. Students are trained to tutor in the Reading Writing Center and/or Digital Studio and actively work in those spaces. Completion of the course allows students to apply for openings in the RWC/DS staff.

In this course, you will gain essential skills to write effectively for sports. From the Super Bowl to the Olympics and from Serena Williams to Caitlin Clark, you will enhance your storytelling techniques that will enable your readers to visualize the game-winning touchdown or the gravity-defying flip in gymnastics. This course will encourage you to bring your subjects to life in a way that is meaningful, creative, and expressive. Who are athletes on and off the field? What led to their triumph or defeat? How did they overcome adversity? These are some of the guiding questions that will compel you to dig deep and write engaging content.

Other aspects of the course include analyzing sports artifacts and discussing the impact of the media (print, television, radio, and Internet) in shaping public perception about athletes. Writing assignments may include a feature article, sports narrative, press release, and sports column. Whether your knowledge of sports is limited or extensive, this course sets a foundation to write effectively for sports.

Rethinking Language: Media Narratives and Cross-Cultural Writing explores how language shapes identity and influences media discourse. From news headlines to viral tweets, we’ll analyze how language is framed and whose voices are heard. Through a mix of academic writing, media analysis, and narrative projects, you’ll experiment with different ways of writing to connect with audiences, challenge language hierarchies, and rethink cultural boundaries. We’ll also explore how people blend and adapt language and how media both reinforces and resists these shifts. Whether you speak one language or many, this course will give you new ways to think about language and help you develop practices that reflect the complex way people communicate in the real world.

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

Visual rhetoric surrounds us in everything from museum exhibitions to social media feeds, from corporate branding to street art, from Instagram to the architecture and design of campus buildings. This course begins with the premise that visual rhetoric represents a distinct yet interconnected mode of discourse that deserves thoughtful attention. Rather than treating the visual as supplemental to written or oral rhetoric, we will investigate how visual rhetoric operates according to its own principles while simultaneously engaging with other modalities. Students will analyze visual texts across various disciplines and contexts, undertaking projects such as investigative photo essays, a study on visual representations of identities, and the examination of visuals related to public memory.

In this course, we explore forms of nonfiction: journalism, personal essays, and investigative writing to acquaint you with the possibilities of the genre. We will do exercises in reporting, researching and writing, learning how to use prose to create a picture, make an argument, explore the deep regions of the self, all without making anything up!

At the end of the semester, you will turn in a portfolio which includes all writing exercises, drafts, and revisions.

Writing requires discipline and application to the craft–as well as talent. You will not get an A for effort alone. This is an advanced course which requires advanced work.

Our goal is to produce two essays, 12-16 pages of polished writing.

This course offers students the opportunity to develop tools for producing, designing, and circulating a diversity of texts that address a wide range of audiences and contexts.

ENC 3021 stands as one of the three courses for the Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) major. As a foundation for the major, this course is designed to expose and bridge students to various rhetorical principles, theories, and frameworks and be acquainted with relevant issues and contexts across the field of rhetoric. These theoretical ideologies and frameworks aim students to strengthen epistemic ground in their discipline. We are confident that this course will have significant support to evolving writers, scholars, and editors with its heuristic applications.

To start with, we will scale up the evolution of rhetoric by familiarizing to its root from the Western rhetorical traditions. We will begin with Greek and Roman rhetorics but will not limit to historical canonical rhetoricians. To some extent in a sequential order we proceed to prominent scholars of present rhetorical theories and frameworks whose contributions reinforced the production and analysis of texts, situations, and communication.

Although we will start in Egypt and with African rhetoric, we will trace many different rhetorics across the world throughout distinct eras to emphasize the differences in rhetorical knowledge and meaning making processes. During this process, we will consider knowledges, histories, and identities as subjective and ever-changing. We will also consider how visual methods of delivery factor into and evolve meaning making processes. Although you may not have had experience with visual rhetoric in previous courses, this class will encourage you to expand your understanding and appreciation of rhetoric to include visual modes of delivery, interpretation, and understanding. Further, we will frequently (re)define rhetoric and its intersection with concepts like epistemology, ontology, truth, belief, identity, social interaction, and social justice.

Although we will start in Egypt and with African rhetoric, we will trace many different rhetorics across the world throughout distinct eras to emphasize the differences in rhetorical knowledge and meaning making processes. During this process, we will consider knowledges, histories, and identities as subjective and ever-changing. We will also consider how visual methods of delivery factor into and evolve meaning making processes. Although you may not have had experience with visual rhetoric in previous courses, this class will encourage you to expand your understanding and appreciation of rhetoric to include visual modes of delivery, interpretation, and understanding. Further, we will frequently (re)define rhetoric and its intersection with concepts like epistemology, ontology, truth, belief, identity, social interaction, and social justice.

This course traces the history of rhetoric alongside the development of hip-hop, examining how both have shaped and responded to cultural, political, and technological change. Students will explore how rhetorical concepts—such as persuasion, argumentation, and style—manifest across oral traditions, written texts, and digital media. By analyzing key rhetorical figures (e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Gorgias) alongside influential hip-hop artists (e.g., Lamar, Hill, Shakur), students will investigate the evolving role of rhetoric in public discourse. Through critical analysis and multimodal composition, the course will highlight hip-hop’s contributions to contemporary journalism, media technologies, and activist movements while contextualizing its place within the larger rhetorical tradition.

Derived from the French verb essai (to attempt) the essay is a dynamic form of writing, flexible enough to contain many questions about both the self and the wider world, as well as their connections. In this class, we will read a diverse array of essays written by writers well-known and obscure, modern and foundational,, Traditional and genre-bending- exploring the texts in ways that inspire and generate one's own writing. We will also write in ways that are responsive and free-flowing, focusing on the practices of writing, reflection, and feedback. Whether you see yourself as a nonfiction writer or not, you'll be surprised at what this genre has to offer when it comes to self-expression and discovery.

This course introduces students to the history and language of cinema, tracking its evolution over time. Students will explore the key genres—such as Crime/Noir, Western, Horror, etc.—as well as the main influential film movements, including, but not limited to: German Expressionism, Poetic Realism, Neorealism, the various “New Waves,” New Hollywood, and so on. Through critical discussion, students will learn to recognize the formal techniques and specific choices of directors, as well as to analyze their resultant effects, particularly in view of a film’s thematic content. Special attention will be given to the overall conventions of the medium and the development of those conventions, as well as the myriad frames of "seeing/being" unique to cinema alone (as opposed to the devices of literature, for instance).

This is a workshop-style course intended for the study and practice of non-fiction. We'll be familiarizing ourselves with the history of non-fiction across the world as well as studying its various elements. We'll be approaching non-fiction as a synthesis of reality, the lyric, and beauty--with the blank page in front of you as the best of friends always ready to listen.

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

How do we write about (dis)ability in ways that are ethical, compelling, and impactful? In this course, we’ll explore how (dis)ability is constructed, communicated, and contested across media, journalism, digital spaces, and pop culture. Through rhetorical analysis, multimodal composition, and hands-on editorial practice, students will develop the skills to craft narratives that challenge stereotypes, advocate for accessibility, and shape inclusive communication in professional and creative fields. Whether you're interested in publishing, digital media, content strategy, or advocacy, this course will equip you with essential tools for writing with, for, and about (dis)ability in the Editing, Writing, and Media field and beyond.

This course will help you take your editing skills to the next level, explicitly focusing on improving another's writing. It seeks to develop the skills of synthesizing another's ideas and data, structuring and clarifying his or her argument, and ordering coherently any multi-part exposition. It is primarily practical in orientation, covering proofreading, grammar, spelling, fact checking, and line-editing. We consider carefully authorial goals and audience needs and how these should influence the editing process. The course aims to prepare students for the elementary practice of textual production between draft stage and final publication. This course is primarily “workshop” in orientation—we do a lot of work in class, and we often check our work in class, too. Regular course attendance, then, is vital to learning and success.
Counts toward the EWM Advanced Requirements

This course offers students the opportunity to develop tools for producing, designing, and circulating a diversity of texts that address a wide range of audiences and contexts.

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

This course invites students to explore what it means to be an English Major through the lens of creative expression, adaptation, and interpretation. It reviews the history of the discipline, talks about current practices and areas of inquiry, including the broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. While grounded in close reading and critical analysis, the course places an emphasis on the creative process behind writing, reimagining works of art, and researching in literature, visual media, and/or digital forms. Students will develop key skills in annotation and analysis, drafting, workshopping, and revision, and will be introduced to concepts of thesis and argumentation, providing them with the vocabulary for specialization. Alongside the required textbooks and traditional literary texts, we will engage with contemporary forms of creative nonfiction, literary fiction, and visual storytelling. Emphasis will be placed on writing as an act of both analysis and creativity, encouraging students to think (and write) both critically and imaginatively. Designed to prepare students for further studies in English, this course also highlights the ways reading, writing, and interpretation connect to future career paths, artistic practice, and personal expression. Above all, it aims to illustrate the power of language, the joy of storytelling, and to prove that studying English can help us shape how we understand ourselves and the world.

This course prepares students for the type of work and learning that happens within an English major. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the history of English studies, key conversations and topics within the field, and the career choices related to a degree in English. Among the skills we will develop are annotation, argumentation, drafting and revision, and applying specialized vocabulary, all of which are applicable across a range of disciplines but are particularly helpful in the study of English. This course will cultivate the critical thinking and close reading skills essential for English majors and will equip students for reading and analyzing complex literature. This class fulfills a core requirement.

This course prepares students to be English majors, shows how English studies can be used both in college and in the students’ career choices, and exposes students to the pleasure of reading, writing, and using language to its best effect. The course will be focused on “An American Experience”, that which introduces students to five major subsets and compositions of American texts to broaden their understanding of American English studies as it exists today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

This course will present a survey of graphic novels, including manga and manhwa, as well as influential American, British, and African graphic novels. We will examine issues related to how graphic novels are generically defined and received, as well as how the art form has influenced cinema and cinematic adaptation. Authors involved will include Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Marguerite Abouet, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Chugong. Relevant questions will address the differences (if any) between graphic novels and comic books, and how text and visual art can work together to create unique forms of storytelling.

This class focuses on the relationship between a text and its filmic adaptation. We will interrogate such issues as fidelity, intertextuality, interference, and historical context. While the majority of the course texts will be "War Stories" (genre selections like anything from Atonement to Starship Troopers), students will have the opportunity to present a project on any film adaptation of their choice.

This course will study classic and contemporary theories of film adaptation, borrowing as well as breaking from the concept of fidelity to create a space to explore how the cinema engages with literature, and how literary stories are deformed and reformed through the medium of film. In addition, the class will learn to compare and contrast major novels with their famous film counterparts, understanding the legacies, controversies, and techniques that went into formulating these media powerhouses of popular culture.

WEPO is one of three Editing, Writing, Media (EWM) core courses. This section takes a journalistic and adaptive graphic design approach that invites students to consider and problematize principles of composing across different mediums, modalities, and spaces. We will focus on: (1) composing rhetorically and designing with purpose; (2) writing for different mediums—print (physical), digital (screen), and networks (online), considering their affordances, constraints, and rhetorical situations; (3) read texts to gain an understanding of writing and ideas of prescriptivism/descriptivism; and (4) explore the relationships across and between genres, modalities, and materiality. Students will write journalistic-style articles, “publish” for print, and engage with industry standard software (e.g. Adobe Creative Cloud and Canva Pro); students leave the course with the necessary skills to compose for these genres, modes, mediums, etc. and for specific audiences. Students end the course by curating a digital portfolio that highlights their artifacts.

This course explores how masculinity shapes and is shaped by cinema. Through a genre survey of crime sagas, action thrillers, comedies, dramas, and horror films, we will examine cinema that exemplifies, establishes, dismantles or subverts the typical Hollywood “guy movie.” Students will analyze works by filmmakers such as Sean Baker, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, Kelly Reichardt, and others alongside critical texts, gaining a deeper understanding of how masculinity functions within American culture and storytelling.

This course explores how masculinity shapes and is shaped by cinema. Through a genre survey of crime sagas, action thrillers, comedies, dramas, and horror films, we will examine cinema that exemplifies, establishes, dismantles or subverts the typical Hollywood “guy movie.” Students will analyze works by filmmakers such as Sean Baker, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, Kelly Reichardt, and others alongside critical texts, gaining a deeper understanding of how masculinity functions within American culture and storytelling.

In this class, we will think about books not just as things we read, but as objects we store, circulate, and design to convey specific meanings. As a survey course, we will begin with examples of the earliest tools with which humans began to record messages and move forward into the present day, lingering over particularly important moments in book history such as the development of the printing press and creation of a mass market of books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, we will see how all of these text technologies formulated the modern book. Throughout the semester, we will continue to return to the question: how does material form shape how we communicate? Our readings will consist of critical interventions in the history of text technologies as well as historical case studies, all of which we will supplement by visiting the special collections at Strozier Library. These resources will invite us to consider how editing, circulation, and physical presentation shape the texts we engage with every day. This course satisfies the genre requirement.

In this class, we will think about books not just as things we read, but as objects we store, circulate, and design to convey specific meanings. As a survey course, we will begin with examples of the earliest tools with which humans began to record messages and move forward into the present day, lingering over particularly important moments in book history such as the development of the printing press and creation of a mass market of books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, we will see how all of these text technologies formulated the modern book. Throughout the semester, we will continue to return to the question: how does material form shape how we communicate?

Our readings will consist of critical interventions in the history of text technologies as well as historical case studies, all of which we will supplement by visiting the special collections at Strozier Library. These resources will invite us to consider how editing, circulation, and physical presentation shape the texts we engage with every day.

This course satisfies the genre requirement.

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

Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (c. 1589) follows a tragic hero who offers his body and soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of service from the demon Mephistophilis. When his time is up, Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” – but it’s too late.

Why does Faustus blame his books? How are texts dangerous, in early modernity and in the present? Early modern English culture was fascinated with the performative power of texts – what words, written and spoken, could do. In exploring the title question of this course, we will consider representations of powerful texts in Marlowe’s play as well as the textual transmission of the Faust myth itself from early modern contexts to contemporary remixes and remediations. Our class will effectively perform a case study, tracing Faustian intertexts over time. We will map the relationships among those involved in the production and transmission of text: authors, printers, publishers, editors, performers, booksellers, archivists, readers. We will think carefully about how pre-modern texts are edited and marketed to twenty-first-century readers: what role does an editor have in shaping a text and how we interpret it?

We will take an iterative approach, examining primary and secondary readings, appropriations, and adaptations, to inform and develop our thinking about texts and textuality. Work in this class includes a combination of assignment types, including in-class and hands-on work, low-stakes quizzes and reflective writing, and a final project creating a critical edition of an early modern primary text.

This course meets the pre-1800 and genre requirements.

This course explores the historical and rhetorical construction of the public sphere and pays particular attention to how texts mediate participation in public discourse. Beginning with the advent of the printing press and extending to the rise of digital publics, the course examines how communicative technologies have shaped who counts as “the public” and who has access to text production and circulation.

Drawing on foundational and contemporary theories of the public sphere—from Jürgen Habermas to Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner—we will analyze how publics are constituted rhetorically and how text functions as a vehicle for visibility, belonging, and debate. We will also engage with the work of scholars such as Laurie Gries to consider how circulation and uptake shape rhetorical impact across media ecologies.

“ '. . .As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.' ” --Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas From Chaucer's Wife of Bath onward, women who "get around" have been viewed with fascination and loathing by masculinist power, and female mobility (when not enforced by what Gayle Rubin calls "the traffic in women") has been stigmatized, eroticized, exoticized, and demonized. At the same time, having the means to travel—and the intellectual and spiritual freedom travel proffers—can be celebrated as marks of an individual woman's empowerment within a given culture. We will study works by and about women in motion across a broad historical spectrum and from a variety of cultural standpoints. (This course meets the diversity requirement for the LMC track of the English major.)
NB. This course is READING INTENSIVE and adheres to a strict BOOK-ONLY policy. Students are required to purchase hard copies of all assigned readings. Moreover, the use of portable electronic devices in the classroom is strictly prohibited unless authorized by the Office of Accessibility.

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

This course introduces students to the field of English studies, exploring its history, major literary theories, and evolving areas of inquiry. Through the analysis of contemporary texts, we will also focus on themes of history, language, and identity, in order to understand how literature reflects and challenges the world around us.

Besides theoretical discussions, students will develop essential skills in close reading, critical analysis, argumentation, and revision. This course highlights the practical applications of English studies—both in academic settings and beyond—while emphasizing the sheer enjoyment of reading, writing, and critical thinking.

What does being an English Major even mean? This course will provide an insight into the major skills such as reading critically, composing effectively, and editing. We will be engaging with a multitude of different types of literature, engaging both in the critical movements they provide a glimpse of and the strategies that can be applied to our own writing and editing.

As an introductory course, this class will act as a guide that will introduce you to English studies and the opportunities the field can provide. The course reviews the history of the discipline in ways that are meaningful and accessible, and we will talk about current practices and areas of inquiry for the field, including broadening the concept of writing to include other forms of writing and media that you may not have previously considered. The course will also help you to acquire skills that will be useful for you in other courses such as: annotation, analysis, drafting, workshop and peer review, and revision. You will also develop vocabulary for specialization in the major throughout our discussions and readings in this course.

Some of the most famous contemporary graphic novels—see Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis—aren’t novels at all but rather works of autobiography and journalism. When did memoirists and journalists discover this medium, and why does it remain popular? How do autobiographical comics use the mechanics of storytelling and visual art to create meaning and/or represent real people, real places, real events? What limitations and ethical considerations must readers and authors of this medium contend with?

In this course, by focusing on long-form autobiographical comics, we will address these questions and interrogate the relationship between language and image. Our reading list may include works by Alison Bechdel, Thi Bui, Chanel Miller, Scott McCloud, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, and others. And while we will prioritize our critical inquiry of the narrative and visual aspects of this form (by reading, analyzing, and writing about autobiographical comics), there may be some opportunities throughout the semester to create your own as well.

This class teaches us a wide range of theoretical approaches to literature and culture, and will draw from an equally wide range of intellectual approaches, including psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, and deconstruction. We will learn about the histories of these critical methods and frameworks as well as how each teaches us to approach literature, culture, and the broader world; and we will think over the course of the term about what constitutes cultural critique more broadly. This class will give you key concepts, authors, movements and histories of critique that are foundational for literary, media, and cultural studies.

Feeling overwhelmed by structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism and post-humanism and the endless parade of -isms? Instead of drowning in the full Gulf of Theory (yes, with a capital T), we'll make a base camp on the most compelling ideas and questions. We'll read fascinating primary texts, literature alongside influential theoretical ideas, examining how these frameworks can illuminate your understanding of stories, poems, film, culture, "new" and "old" media, memes, and more. Together we'll create cognitive maps to navigate this intellectual terrain. No need to memorize every theoretical school from Aristotle to Žižek—we'll focus on approaches that genuinely expand how you read and think about literary, social, and cultural texts across multiple platforms. This course cuts through the jargon to deliver what matters: powerful critical tools and exciting literature, films, and media artifacts that will transform how you see the world.

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

In this course, we will explore portrayals of magic, witches, and witchcraft in cinema from the silent era to the present day. Through an array of films spanning horror, fantasy, drama, and experimental works, this course examines how witches have been depicted as figures of power, transgression, resistance, and fear. We will analyze these representations in relation to gender, sexuality, politics, and cultural anxieties, considering how the witch functions as both an archetype and a subversive force in film.

In addition to screenings, we will engage with critical and theoretical readings from literature, film studies, feminist and queer theory, and popular culture. Discussions will explore themes such as the historical persecution of witches, the witch as a feminist icon, and the connections between witchcraft and marginalized identities. By the end of the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of how cinema has shaped and reshaped the mythology of the witch across different historical and cultural contexts.

Fulfills LMC requirement: Understanding Genres

In this course, we will explore portrayals of magic, witches, and witchcraft in cinema from the silent era to the present day. Through an array of films spanning horror, fantasy, drama, and experimental works, this course examines how witches have been depicted as figures of power, transgression, resistance, and fear. We will analyze these representations in relation to gender, sexuality, politics, and cultural anxieties, considering how the witch functions as both an archetype and a subversive force in film.

In addition to screenings, we will engage with critical and theoretical readings from literature, film studies, feminist and queer theory, and popular culture. Discussions will explore themes such as the historical persecution of witches, the witch as a feminist icon, and the connections between witchcraft and marginalized identities. By the end of the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of how cinema has shaped and reshaped the mythology of the witch across different historical and cultural contexts.

Fulfills LMC requirement: Understanding Genres

This course will trace the relationship between speculative fiction and environmental thought, focusing on American fiction and film since WWII, and starting from the central premise that speculation and ecology are tightly entwined. We will take up different fantasies and fears about environmental futures, some fictional, some not. We will explore how speculative fiction imagines the more-than-human entities, experiences, and systems that motivate ecological thought. We will investigate the leverage speculative fiction offers onto the intersection of social, technological, and environmental issues—an intersection which is at the heart of environmental justice. We will consider the force that different ideas about “nature” and “the natural” exert on the social. And we will contemplate how speculative fiction might help us to imagine better worlds in the context of contemporary ecological crisis. Students can expect to read broadly as well as deeply, to reflect on their own values and assumptions, and to engage both critically and creatively with the core science fictional and ecological practice of speculation. Key authors to include Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Jeff VanderMeer, and N.K. Jemisin.

Meets LMC Genre requirement.

When it comes to medieval texts, the words upon them are only half the story, the rest lies within the scribbles of bored scribes, faint text long scraped away, and beautiful illuminations. Within this course we will be zooming into the history, creation, and secrets of these texts within the Middle Ages. We will touch upon palimpsest, illuminations, maps, and other such works as well as delve into the writing itself and what it tells us about the text it belongs too. This course will work with the textbook Introduction to Manuscript Studies and include a visit to Special Collections

This course is an introduction to the history of the development of different text technologies across time and space. Humans across the globe and across history have used technologies to create, organize, circulate, and preserve ideas. FSU English’s interdisciplinary program surveys the variety of forms this effort has taken, including (but certainly not limited to): scrolls, graffiti, manuscript, print, illustration, phonograph, photograph, film, tattoos, and digital multimedia. In our class, we will explore the social, cultural, and material conditions of text technologies, and how they shaped— and continue to shape—how people use (or decide not to use) them across the globe. We will also practice how to be ethical historians who critically examine narratives and biases towards the cultures whose text technologies we study.

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

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

This course takes as a starting position that queer theory has always been about more than/in opposition to queerness as sexual or gender identity. Instead, we will locate key debates and issues in queer theory over the last 4 decades, as sites of interrogation into socially constructed norms and dominant structures of power that shape our gendered and sexual lives, bodies, and experiences. The course will serve as an introduction to the still lively, (if not always ending or in fear of being “over”), field of queer theory in the US context, which emerged in its institutional, and by now established form, around 1990. Charting its historical emergence in response to feminist theory and gay and lesbian studies in the 1980s paralleled with activist movements for sexual, gender and racial justice that paved its way, we will begin with texts before 1990 to best understand debates that formed the field, before moving into more contemporary queer theory. Topics in the course will include, then, first the field’s emergence in relation to feminism, activism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics, followed by weekly interventions that “queer” topics such as: literary and cultural studies, sex/sexuality, ecology, temporality, affect, the archive, compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy and the couple, childhood, disability, class, aesthetics, geography, race, blackness, gender and settler colonialism, reproduction and the family, science studies, education, and queerness beyond identity.

Meets diversity requirement.

In popular imagination, medieval people lived static lives in homogenous communities. In reality, many from all walks of life were quite mobile. They journeyed for business, pleasure, curiosity, diplomacy, personal or spiritual enlightenment, and war (either as armies or as refugees), among other reasons. This course will introduce students to medieval narratives about travel and movement. What motivated travelers to start their journeys? Piety mixed with wanderlust, like the 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta? Or maybe piety as an excuse for greater autonomy, like the 15th-century Englishwoman Margery Kempe? How did they describe the places and people they encountered along the way? Did they travel alone, or as part of a diplomatic envoy or a group of pilgrims? Did they write their accounts from notes or dictate to interlocutors from memory? And who were the audiences for their writings?

This class will consider a wide spectrum of travelers from various eras and geographical regions across Asia, Africa, and Europe as part of a larger project to engage scholarship on the Global Middle Ages and unsettle colonial perspectives of the European explorer. We will also examine connections between medieval travel narratives and more modern settler-colonial fantasies of exploration and conquest. Students can expect to write four short literary analysis papers over the semester and lead discussion with a group for one class.

This course meets the pre-1800 requirement.

This course will survey various works of William Shakespeare, including plays and poems. You will be introduced to an array of ideas that all engage in what has been variously dubbed “the esoteric,” or “the occult,” which are umbrella terms for ideas dealing in heterodox conceptualizations of the sacred, including but not limited to magic, Kabballah, alchemy, spiritualism, “shamanism,” intermediary beings, entheogens, tarot, divination, and more. We will analyze the philosophical, political, and aesthetic aspects of these works, asking how Shakespeare utilized heterodox spiritualities as literary devices, how such forms of “occulture” intersect with more mainstream religions and cultures, and how one can define “literary” occultism and/or “occult” literature. Assigned works include: The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems. In terms of historical methodology, we would also like to ask particular questions: How do social contexts shape literary products? These questions will require us to consider issues of intertextuality, influence, national and world literatures, trans-culturalism, hegemony, and historiography.

In this course, we will read some of the greatest hits of early modern English drama (non-Shakespearean) in a range of modes. We will focus on how animals and animality were staged, and how such representations relate to early modern beliefs about and experiences of human and animal lives. We will consider animal paratheatrical spectacles that inform drama as well as the “animal networks” of early modern London. As Ian MacInnes writes, "London was the grisly heart of the animal economy. Live animals converged upon the city in a vast systolic movement and were either consumed on the spot or distributed back outward in another vast diastolic movement of objects made from animals" (“Cow-Cross Lane and Curriers Row: Animal Networks in Early Modern England,” 78). How is this animal economy reflected in early modern drama? What do plays suggest about how early modern people differentiated between human and other-than-human lives - about what it means to be human or animal? How is animality mapped onto human bodies and to what effect? How does animality converge with other categories of difference or disqualification? How do animal tropes shape early modern literature? To what extent is “the animal” a literary and dramatic invention?

Each of our plays will be approached, first, through careful close reading; second, through examination of primary texts and contexts; third, through exploration of secondary texts (scholarship and theory); and fourth, through performance. Assignments may include in-class writing, low-stakes quizzes, group discussions and performances, and a final research-based project.

This course meets the pre-1800 and genre requirements.

This course explores literature published in Britain and its empire during the time of Queen Victoria, who was born in 1819 and reigned from 1837-1901. This era was surprisingly close to our own in its interests and concerns. Students will explore a range of authors and genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, in their historical contexts. This course will examine how Victorian writers reworked literary traditions and how their texts relate to nineteenth-century popular culture, new forms of publication and communication, developments in science and technology, and lively debates in politics, religion, and society.

This course explores British poetry, fiction, drama and essays from about 1900, although some precursors will be examined. Typically includes Hardy, Conrad, Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, Stoppard, Pinter, Beckett, among others.

This course will introduce students to Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. An experimental frame narrative including many medieval genres (knightly romance, bawdy bar-worthy tales, sermons, autobiographies, saints’ lives, confessions, and revenge narratives in both poetry and prose) told by diverse range of storytellers, this unfinished piece serves as a compelling window into fourteenth-century medieval life. Written entirely in Middle English, The Canterbury Tales is also inextricably bound up in the history and politics of medieval language, national identity, and fluctuating royal power. This course will consider Chaucer as part of both a 14th-century flourishing of poetry in Middle English (as opposed to the more prestigious French or scholarly Latin) and provide a more global perspective, as Chaucer was heavily inspired by continental and especially Italian writers such as Petrarch, Dante, and Boccacio. We will be engaging the Middle English text directly, spending quite a bit of time honing our pronunciation and translation skills. We will also read primary source documents that provide important insight into the history of Chaucer’s England and the cultural movements that impacted his work.

We will explore Chaucer’s perspectives on authorship and readership; social dilemmas and class conflicts; and racial, religious, and gender differences (including medieval traditions of antifeminism and antisemitism). Students can expect to write two shorter papers, a translation of a passage of Middle English, and a final research paper, as well as giving a presentation that explores and elucidates an important aspect of 14th-century medieval English culture.

This course meets the pre-1800 requirement.

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

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

In this course, I will encourage you to follow your interests and ideas to write essays with insight, clarity, and narrative style. Once we create a vantage point and narrative stance, we can identify the form and structure that best support your writing and your writing-related aspirations. Through writing portfolio assignments and readings, we will write toward a better understanding of the personal essay form. We will read the essays of journalists, scholars, poets, fiction writers, and editors. After we read these selections, we will discuss craft, content, and style elements. We will consider how the personal essay supports journalism, scholarly writing, and creative forms.

During our workshop sessions, we will ask one another questions about the work presented. You will also ask questions in your written responses.

English singer, songwriter and actor David Bowie would eventually become a cultural icon, but he spent his early career transmitting the futuristic ideas and speculations drawn from his extensive reading in the "New Wave" of Science Fiction writers to an ever-broadening audience. We will examine Bowie’s creative engagement with sci-fi, focusing on the singer's recordings from the early 70s from “Space Oddity” to Diamond Dogs (1975), a concept album about a futuristic dystopian England, as well as sample music from other futuristic/fantasy oriented bands of the day including George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic projects, Kraftwerk, and T.Rex. Our reading will focus on the sci fi and speculative fiction by H.P. Lovecraft, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and others that Bowie drew on for inspiration during these years.

This course introduces students to such narrative elements as point of view, characterization, setting, and symbolism in prose fiction and provides an introduction to the basic approaches of literary analysis. Most of our texts will be American short stories and novels from the early 20th century to the present.

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

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

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

This course is a survey of literature written in English from 1800 to the present, covering major literary periods and movements across centuries, continents, genres, and cultural contexts. Our readings will center on different manifestations of what Thomas Hardy called “the ache of modernism,” or what Karl Marx described as “all that is solid melts into air”: in other words, we will trace how literature wrestles with the many transformations of human experience in modernity, and how literary representations register profound geopolitical, social, scientific, technological, philosophical, and ecological changes. You will learn to draw on and speak to historical and cultural contexts alongside aesthetic questions of form and style as you interpret literary works. You will also explore how the literary history we encounter speaks to our present, and how the cultural moment in which we find ourselves today fits in the longer arc of modernity.

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

“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” ~Joy Harjo

This course explores the rich tradition of female poets who address food in their writing. Rather than distinguish the poets by epochs or forms, they represent a smorgasbord of social, political, cultural, psychological, and aesthetic perspectives. Together, these women exemplify how they employ food as a metaphor to explore themes such as: memory, place, family, immigration, trauma, oppression, love, and sexuality. Specifically, we will feast on a buffet of works by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Patricia Smith, Joy Harjo, Joyce Carol Oats, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Sandra Cisneros, Tracy K. Smith, and more. This course will examine food as a poetic device to write about the archetypal, sensuous, and physical nature of a woman’s appetite. Pull up a chair to the table as we evaluate how meals are similar to poetry in that both are shared experiences that bring people together.

In this section of Women in Literature, we will explore a wide range of portrayals of women in fiction. Our primary focus will be on contemporary women novelists, but the course will also incorporate poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Topics of discussion will include the marriage plot, patriarchy, sanity/madness, motherhood, friendship, and the role that race, class, and sexuality play in defining the experience of womanhood. Possible authors include Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Han Kang, Alice Munro, Jaquira Díaz, Jesmyn Ward, and Michelle Zauner.

Who was this man, this late literary giant, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (1930-2013), and why has he remained so significant in world letters? That Achebe was one of the most studied, revered, and influential literary and cultural figures of our time is irrefutable. In addition to his stature as Africa’s most important novelist, some scholars have insisted that no serious discussions of modern literature, modern African, African diaspora, world, twentieth- to twenty-first-century literature, or cultural, critical, and postcolonial theories for that matter, are complete if they omit his canon. In this course, we will examine Achebe’s life and career. We will study his five novels, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah, supplementing them with his short stories, essays, poetry, some of his television and transcribed interviews, and relevant criticism on his oeuvre. The major goal is to get students familiar with these works (which are seldom taught together) and unpack Achebe’s literary, political, cultural, and humanist concerns, his artistry, as well as his place in modern African fiction and world literatures. You may believe you have read and know Achebe’s critically acclaimed Things Fall Apart. Wait till we reread it in this class!

This course offers students a chance to read (really read) the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest, strangest, most inspiring writers in the English language. Against the conventional image of the sad, alienated spinster, the Dickinson you will encounter in this class is positively ecstatic, affirmatively queer, wonderfully defiant--her own person on her own terms. Our primary focus will be on Dickinson's embodied relationship to textuality and language, genre and poetic form. Students will be exposed to recent scholarly practices in Dickinson Studies with particular attention to manuscript criticism and material poetics. But we'll also learn about Dickinson’s fascinating biography and consider more recent representations of her life and work in art and popular culture.

In this course, students will be assigned readings representative of a broad range of literary genres and cultures. These readings will cover a variety of literary movements and historical eras. The readings will include selections from the western canon. Written analysis of literary works may be required. Students will be provided with opportunities to practice critical interpretation.

This course introduces students to key terminology, concepts, and methodologies for the study of complex literature. Students are guided in the practice of close reading and analysis by considering a selection of diverse texts and their use of literary elements such as plot, character, setting, genre, style, figurative language, argument, and the like. Students will also examine how the meanings of a text relate to its various contexts of authorship, publication, adaptation, reception, and scholarship. In this course, students will be assigned readings representative of a broad range of literary genres and cultures. These readings will cover a variety of literary movements and historical eras. The readings will include, but are not limited to, selections from the Western canon. Written analysis of literary works may be required. Students will be provided with opportunities to practice critical interpretation. The course provides groundwork in literary types for non-majors and is also strongly recommended as a preparation for upper-level (3000- or 4000-level) coursework in the field.

This course introduces students to key terminology, concepts, and methodologies for studying complex literature. It examines a broad range of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, focusing heavily on the themes of modernity, identity, gender, and dystopia. Secondary readings from various theoretical frameworks will aid in analyzing the assigned novels. The course provides a foundation in literary analysis for non-majors and is strongly recommended as preparation for upper-level (3000- or 4000-level) coursework in the field.

In this course, students will be assigned readings representative of a broad range of literary genres and cultures. These readings will cover a variety of literary movements and historical eras. The readings will include, but are not limited to, selections from the Western canon. Written analysis of literary works will be required. Students will be provided with opportunities to practice critical interpretation.

This introductory course focuses on the fundamentals of Western literature. We will study multiple genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry. The course will examine a range of authors including, as a case study, those writing during the drastic political, and socio-cultural shifts that occurred from the turn of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century. This course examines authors that reflect these contexts: Jack London, Walter Mosely, Louis Erdrich, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, Jennifer Egan, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara and more.

This course introduces students to the foundational literary genre of the short story, providing them with the reading, analysis, critical thinking, and writing skills essential for further literary study, whether academic or not. Throughout the semester, students will explore the history and diversity of the short story, including selections from the Western Canon, to develop a critical understanding of its formal elements—such as point of view, narration, tone, characterization, and theme—fundamental to literary analysis. The reading list spans from the early 20th century to the present, highlighting the short story’s evolution into the digital era.

This course will look at the history of the short story, starting with Chekhov, the father of the form. We will cover a brief historical view of the short story in the first half of the class and then shift our focus to the contemporary American short story for the second half. This class will look at the short story through the lens of craft, as well as historical and social contexts of the text. You will be asked to engage in discussions in each class, offering your own questions or insights into the what the story does well, what its shortcomings are, as well as considerations toward the society and time in which it was written. You will develop skills to read for craft analysis, and there will be opportunities to write fiction as a part of some class assignments, as well as your final project. There is also ample opportunity to engage in research or critical theory if that is a skill you are interested in honing. Practically speaking, we will work at the intersection of craft and literary criticism, seeking to discover how these two approaches inform each other and create friction in the literary landscape.

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” So goes a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches.” In this course, students will have the chance to study poetry and its elements—things like musicality, imagery, meter, metaphor, and form. Through our close and critical inspection of celebrated poets from a variety of eras, from Shakespeare all the way up to Yusef Komunyakaa and those writing in 2025, this course will create a solid foundation for students interested in thoroughly analyzing, understanding, and enjoying the art of poetry.

This course is an entry point into the world of poetry, perfect for beginners or those looking to strengthen their foundation. You'll explore the core elements of poetry while reading a variety of poems from different styles and periods. Through writing exercises and class discussions, you'll practice creating your own poems, learning how to express ideas and emotions in new ways. By the end of the course, you'll have a stronger appreciation for poetry and the skills to write your own with confidence.

This course introduces English majors to the most noteworthy authors, formative texts, and key imaginative traditions of British literature before 1800. Students will gain familiarity with the historical development of early English writing from the beginnings of the English language in Anglo-Saxon heroic epic; through the later medieval flourishing of courtly romance and satire; to the dazzling formal innovations of Renaissance lyric, epic, and drama; and concluding with the literary experiments of the eighteenth century as an age of progress and exploration. Students will encounter the major canonical authors of these periods (the Beowulf-poet, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift) as well as marginalized voices--especially female--and, toward the end of the period, transatlantic perspectives. You will learn to identify and analyze a variety of genres that are crucial to English literary tradition, and you will discover how authors imaginatively respond to their predecessors. The creative forms and major thematic investments of each era will be contextualized within the social and cultural history that shaped them.

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

How does science fiction imagine the agency of nature, nonhuman life, and planetary futures? This course examines speculative fiction that rethinks ecology and human relationships with the environment. It investigates representations of alien ecosystems, artificial ecologies, and speculative world-building that challenges anthropocentric perspectives. Readings include Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and contemporary works such as Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

In this course, students will be assigned readings that place Virginia Woolf’s writing with that of other women writers during the early twentieth century. Woolf is a vital contributor to modernist literature in that she altered literary norms as a pioneer of experimental techniques of narrative, such as inner monologues, stream-of-consciousness, feminism perspectives, and inclusion themes. Written analysis of literary works will be required. Students will be provided with opportunities to practice critical interpretation. The course will examine a range of contemporary women authors that intersect with Woolf’s oeuvre: selections of her major novels, short stories, essays, lectures, memoir and diary entries. There will be discussions of Woolf scholarship, and text from modernist contemporaries, such as, Elizabeth Bowen, Vera Brittain, Emily Homes Coleman, Hilda Doolittle (aka. H.D.), Mary Hutchinson, Katherine Mansfield, Betty Miller, Marianne Moore, Olive Moore, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Evelyn Scott, Gertrude Stein, Vita Sackville-West, and Rebecca West.

This course will focus on representations of the natural world – that is, the nonhuman beings that surrounds us – across a variety of genres, such as poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including bestiaries, fables, film, and scientific treatises. We will examine a range of media, and our discussions will be grounded in critical readings of ecocriticism and animal studies. This focus will enable students to build a strong foundation of critical thinking skills and knowledge to consider the rhetoric of the natural world, with potential for application of acquired knowledge and skills in a range of contexts, including potential outings outside the classroom.

A round-table style, reading-intensive exploration of prominent women authors in the Anglo-American tradition, with special focus on the theme of mobility versus confinement, women’s historical relationship to “the power of the pen,” and Virginia Woolf’s imperative that women writers must “kill the Angel in the House” in order to free their creativity. Requirements: frequent in-class writing assignments, two critical essays, active class participation, creative/interdisciplinary project, final exam.

Be advised that this course is strictly HARD COPY ONLY. Required text-books are to be purchased in BOOK FORMAT: tablets and e-readers may not be used in the classroom unless authorized by the Office of Accessibility. Cell-phone use is also restricted in the classroom.

This course fulfills the diversity requirement of the LMC track in the English major.