Undergraduate Courses

This course focuses on Toni Morrison (1931-2019). A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first African American writer, indeed the first black woman, to win the Nobel Prize for literature, among other honors, Morrison is a creative genius, intellectual luminary, and cultural icon that needs little or no introduction to readers worldwide, particularly English majors. In this class, we will study her first six novels, chronologically: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992). We will also examine her short story “Recitatif” and her Nobel Lecture. To help deepen our appreciation of Morrison’s world, politics, and art, we will place her canon in a nexus of contexts and traditions: African American, African, American, and African Caribbean. Students are encouraged to visit the Toni Morrison Society webpage for biographical, programmatic, and archival information.

This course meets Diversity and Genre requirements.

In this course we will: Read and study contemporary short stories. Develop a language to talk about short stories. Write short narratives to develop techniques. Learn how to be constructive critics of fiction in a workshop environment.

We will read and experiment with a variety of poetic strategies and forms as you begin the journey of sorting out the sense of self you had when you arrived from the varying points of view you’ll have an opportunity to inhabit. Short lectures on craft and mechanics, writing exercises, and discussion of readings will help make sense of your evolving worldviews, artistic voices, and creative ideas. Peer workshops aim to demystify the revision process as you improve your facility with written language and learn the importance of respectfully giving and receiving constructive feedback on written art’s resonance with an audience. We will cover a vast survey of formal poetic conventions emerging from historical & contemporary traditions in the West & East. After we develop facility with key terms—including image/object, introspection, voice, the line, syntax, prosody, etc.—we will experiment with traditional forms (Shakespearean & Petrarchan sonnet, villanelle, haiku, ballad stanza, etc.) as well as those you might not have encountered, including the pantoum and the ghazal.

In this class, our aim is to discover your voice. There are no rules in poetry, and this is why we must learn as much as possible through the practices of reading and craft. We'll read poetry from around the world. We'll talk about poetry from around the world. We'll trace the history of poetry and craft. We write poetry because we are human, so, most importantly, we'll write and workshop lots of poetry.

We will be looking at stories and poems as a way to gauge their narrative sources, which will include looking at chosen texts via the internet. Each student will write a couple of stories and poems.

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 intersections with concepts like epistemology, truth, belief, identity, and social interaction.

This course introduces students to the study of nonfiction prose in a variety of modes, with emphasis on studying the elements of nonfiction prose and practice in the craft of writing.

This course focuses on the principles of composing, especially across different composing spaces. Students create works in several different media, including (1) in print, (2) on the screen, and (3) for the network, while also learning how to edit the works deployed in each medium appropriately. In addition, students repurpose at least one of these works for another medium. Students conclude the course by composing a digital portfolio.

This section of WEPO has a focus on everyday writing. While other writing courses might focus primarily on academic texts, we’ll play with genre and consider audiences beyond the academy. To this end, we’ll study the everyday writing of discourse communities as we seek to understand more about how different people communicate across technologies and genres and for distinct audiences and purposes. Then, we’ll practice being composers, creating new compositions in both digital and print genres and honing our design and communication skills across media.

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.

What is English? Florida State University’s English department offers three different specialized routes that answer this question: Literature, Media, and Culture (LMC), Creative Writing (CW), and Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM). The title “Introduction to English Studies” implies a broad scope. The course will cover various disciplines and their methods in general, from linguistics and literature to rhetoric and creative writing, among others, while also engaging in specific compositional and hermeneutic activities. The design of this course aims to both prepare students who plan to major in English and develop the knowledge and understanding of those currently majoring in English. Students will learn about a range of issues and values across the aforementioned fields and their relevance to English as a discipline. Specifically, students will read a variety of texts and topics while being introduced to a range of interpretive strategies. Students can expect to compose in various modes, responding to rhetorical, academic, and creative writing genres. Finally, they will engage in discussion and collaboration activities to gain a clearer understanding of what it means to study English.

Are you interested in learning more about the English Major? As an introductory course, this class will act as a guide that will introduce you to English studies and the broad range of opportunities the field can provide. 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. In this section, we will use the primary text, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, as a vehicle to explore various theories and approaches to reading and analyzing literature. We will write both on the text and beyond the text as we consider various areas of English studies. With the completion of this course, you will be better prepared for the variety of assignments found in future higher level English courses.

This course explores the theories, methodologies, and creative choices between animated films and their novelistic hypotexts.

This course examines the horror film as a dark mirror of the American Dream. Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we will explore how horror cinema exposes the anxieties, contradictions, and repressed histories that undergird national mythology. From haunted houses and possessed children to serial killers, witches, and uncanny doubles, American horror persistently asks: What must be sacrificed to sustain the dream of freedom, prosperity, and innocence? Beginning with foundational works of classical Hollywood and moving through New Hollywood, independent cinema, and contemporary film, we will consider how horror registers fears about the family, religion, race, gender, capitalism, and the frontier. Through close analysis, historical contextualization, and theoretical readings, students will learn how genre conventions evolve over time and how horror serves as a uniquely powerful vehicle for cultural critique. Ultimately, the course argues that horror is not merely escapist entertainment, but a central site for negotiating the promises—and the nightmares—of American identity.

Fulfills LMC requirement for Understanding Genres. Counts towards Film Studies minor.

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. This course introduces the history of the different technologies humans have used to record and communicate information in various contexts. Students investigate how technologies have shaped the way we produce, transmit, receive, and understand texts. 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 offers an elaborated discussion of rhetorical theory and rhetorical criticism. We will begin with western rhetorical traditions of rhetoric and then complicate this cultural perspective by engaging the ways rhetoric gets enacted in diverse rhetorical spaces and situations. We will also consider how positionality and positions of power influence rhetoric and how/when/where/why it is employed. Reoccurring themes of the course will be the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos and how our notions and standards of “good moral character,” “logical reasoning,” and “empathy” are complicated ideas and beliefs that are not always applied equally to all situations and all people. Although this subject matter may be a review for some students, this course aims to offer an extended and nuanced discussion of these terms by drawing on scholarship from feminist historical rhetorics and cultural rhetorics perspectives. Ultimately, at the completion of this course, students should have a broad understanding of the many histories, meanings, and functions of rhetorics generally, and rhetorical appeals specifically.

This course investigates the nature of textuality and its relationship to various media and technologies, while also exploring theoretical and practical questions related to the production and reception of texts in a variety of different forms and media. Students read works in which textuality is broached as a topic, including multimedia texts, and also produce a final project in at least two different media.

We will test out these key scholarly ideas by discussing some vibrant films as case studies. Our reading includes scholarship on textual studies as well as on film. “Textuality” refers to how "texts" make meaning by being understood in context. 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 paratexts, intertexts, adaptation, interactive texts, 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 the final project, students will get the chance to produce their own multimedia text and to analyze how their own work engages issues in textual studies.

This course fulfills the Scholarship in Practice and Upper-Division Writing requirements, and the capstone requirement for LMC majors.

This course will introduce students to studying William Shakespeare at the college level, including some of his major works and recent adaptations. We will examine and analyze Shakespeare’s sonnets as well as plays such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. One of the course’s overarching questions will be, Why do these 400-year-old plays still have appeal for actors and audiences? Students will be introduced to the historical Shakespeare, critical views of his work over the centuries, and the literary and historical contexts of his works. A research project will allow students to examine a play of their choice and study its themes.

In this course, we will be examining a variety of readings, representative of a broad range of literary genres and cultures, through a lens of invention, asking how literature works to create wonder and other sensations in the reader. The readings will be drawn from an array of literary movements and historical eras, including selections from the Western canon. As we read and discuss, we will be looking for examples of the sort of literary inventions written about in Angus Fletcher’s book, Wonderworks. Examples of these inventions include: the Empathy Generator, the Tale Told from our Future, The Vigilance Trigger, The Fairy Tale Twist, the Stress Transformer, and the Double Alien. Together, we will ask why certain stories make us feel comforted and why we are drawn to read a sad story even though we know we are going to cry. Literature is a technology often used with a purpose. Let’s take it apart and put it back together again like a race car engine.

LIT 2010 is an introductory literature course designed to enrich students’ skills in both literary criticism and craft analysis. We will read and discuss and broad range of fiction, focusing on forms such as the novel, short story, and flash/micro-fiction. We will cover a brief historical view to establish a landscape of contemporary fiction’s inherited techniques and themes in the first half of the class and then we will shift our focus to the contemporary American fiction for the second half. This class will examine fiction writing through the lens of craft and literary theory, as well as historical and social contexts. 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, and what challenges the story answers to context of 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 to text inform each other and create friction in the literary landscape.

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 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.

The course also investigates how affective forces engineer a short story. In lieu of treating feelings as mere tempers, we will interrogate the possibilities of emotions: how they dictate narrative structure, how they push characters to extremities, how they engineer visceral responses in the reader.

“A poem should not mean / But be”: so writes Archibald MacLeish in “Ars Poetica.” How, then, do we read and respond to poems? This course will introduce you to the subjects, styles, and contexts of poetry from a wide range of historical periods. Together, we’ll learn how poems are not ciphers to decode, but worlds to explore. We’ll learn how to cultivate our own interpretations and write about poems in a way that feels both scholarly and beautiful. You will emerge from this course with a deeper appreciation of poetry as well as preparation for further study in the field of literature. All levels of experience are welcome. Fulfills a state-mandated writing (W) credit and genre distribution course for the LMC major.

This course examines utopian and dystopian ideas through short fiction and selected critical readings. Students will explore imagined societies and future worlds to consider how communities are organized, what values they prioritize, and what tensions arise when “better” systems are put into practice. Readings range across a variety of voices and approaches to speculative writing, pairing stories with accessible theoretical perspectives that offer new ways to interpret power, identity, technology, and environment. By the end of the term, students will have a stronger vocabulary for discussing utopian and dystopian narratives and a clearer sense of how speculative literature can reflect, question, and re-imagine the world we live in.

This course meets distribution requirements for Genre.