Fall 2021 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| AML 6027 | W 3-5 | 20th Century American Literature: Cultures of US Imperialism | Malini Schueller |
| CRW 6130 | W 6-8 | Fiction Workshop | David Leavitt |
| CRW 6166 | R 9-11 | Fiction Forms | Uwem Akpan |
| CRW 6166 | M 9-11 | Poetry Forms: Rhetorical Devices in Poetry | Ange Mlinko |
| CRW 6331 | T 9-11 | Poetry Workshop | Michael Hofmann |
| ENC 6428 | T 6-8 | Digital English: Rhetoric and Social Media | Laura Gonzales |
| ENG 6138 | F 9-11; W E1-E3 |
Studies in Film: 21st Century Film and Media Theory | Barbara Mennel |
| ENG 6824 | W 9-11 | Proseminar: Writing about Novels | Roger Maioli dos Santos |
| ENL 6256 | T E1-E3 | Victorian Genders: Masculinities | Pamela Gilbert |
| LIT 6236 | R 6-8 | Issues of Gender and Sexuality in African Literature | Apollo Amoko |
| LIT 6358 | F 6-8 | The World of James Baldwin and Critical Race Theory | Mark Reid |
| LIT 6855 | F 3-5 | Value and Evaluation | Susan Hegeman |
| LIT 6855 | T 9-11 | Contemporary Children’s Literature Studies | Kenneth Kidd |
| LIT 6856 | R 3-5 | Cultural Studies: Georges Bataille and the Accursed Share | Terry Harpold |
| LIT 6934 | W 6-8 | Comparative and Cultural Rhetorics | Raúl Sánchez |
Course Descriptions
AML 6027
20th Century American Literature: Cultures of US Imperialism
This course takes its title from the well-known collection published in 1993 which transformed the field of American studies by making colonialism and imperialism central to conceptions of nation, culture, and identity. The theoretical basis for the course will be the broad field of postcolonial studies and the smaller, but burgeoning field of U.S. empire studies. By reading a broad range of works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, we will examine different tropes of empire such as going native, colonial domesticity, pornotropics, tutelary colonialism, exhibiting empire and remasculinization; at the same time, we will focus on the specific sites of empire such as the “frontier,” Hawai’I, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam. The course will engage with different forms of U.S. imperialism such as North American settler colonialism, Pacific and continental expansionism, control of far-flung colonies, and empire without colonies. We will also examine some cultural expressions of resistance to empire. The purpose is to examine the different ways in which, at historically specific moments, cultural texts (memoirs, novels, and films) and empire are imbricated and to raise a number of questions: How are travel and exploration implicated in empire? What are the differences in how the sites of U.S. empire are constructed in the national imaginary? How does contemporary literature register histories of, and ongoing US imperialism? How might literature resist cultural imperialism?
Some of the texts we will read include Mary Helen Fee, A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines (1910), Luis Rafael Sanchez Macho Camacho’s Beat (1980), R. Zamora Linmark Leche (2011), Assata Shakur Assata: an Autobiography (1987), Nora Okja Keller Fox Girl (2002), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (2018)
The course should be of interest to students in contemporary American literature, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, race studies, and postcolonial studies.
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
This is an intensive fiction writing workshop for graduate students in the MFA program in Creative Writing.
Reading will consist of short novels, stories, and essays by a variety of writers, likely to include John Cheever, Penelope Fitzgerald, Amy Hempel, Grace Paley, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, Joy Williams, and Alejandro Zambra—as well as works by visitors to the 2021 Florida Writers Festival. All first- and second-year fiction MFA students will be automatically enrolled in this workshop, which is also open to poetry MFAs and English PhDs if space is available. If you are not a fiction MFA and are interested in taking the course, please contact me.
CRW 6166
Fiction Forms
CRW 6166 is a fiction writing workshop where students will be exposed to a particular form of doing fiction. We shall read to a collection of African historical novels and short stories. These models shall help us learn how to fictionalize historical events. It will be important to build a community that learns from the myriad African texts and supports how we use this Form to tell our stories.
CRW 6166
Poetry Forms: Rhetorical Devices in Poetry
This is a forms course examining the use of rhetorical devices, often in lieu of metrical, rhyming, and stanzaic modes of organization. Each week we will close-read contemporary poets (and some mid-century, Modernist, and canonical English poets) who rely on metonymy, apophasis, irony, litotes, paradox, prosopopoeia, and paranomasia. We will discuss the use of these techniques to achieve what Seamus Heaney calls a “two-faced approach” to wordsmithing: “[Words] stand smiling at the audience’s way of reading them and winking back at the poet’s way of using them.” This is not a workshop, but practice exercises will be assigned in addition to readings.
CRW 6331
Poetry Workshop
This is the graduate poetry workshop, MFA @ FLA. I hope to goodness that we will have in-person classes by then. Otherwise, I am thinking, mostly free assignments – no flaming hoops, no fantastical obstacle courses – and we will read some diasporic English: a Canadian, an Australian, and possibly others. The certainties are Karen Solie’s The Road In is Not the Same Road Out and Les Murray’s Learning Human…
ENC 6428
Digital English: Rhetoric and Social Media
Social media has long been leveraged by organizers, activists, scholars, and community members to foster connections and create change across physical locations. Social media movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, #SayHerName, #CriptheVote, and many more represent the ingenuity of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who innovate rhetorical infrastructures, including social media, to fight for justice.
At the same time, it is well documented that social media platforms, such as Facebook, are owned, sponsored, and/or moderated by white supremacists. Social media algorithms are consistently manipulated to perpetuate stereotypes and misinformation, particularly in current times.
This course will establish a space for analysis, discussion, and content development surrounding the intersections of rhetoric and social media. Students will read scholarship about social media activism, algorithmic design, artificial intelligence, and rhetorical velocity. Using this research, students will then trace social media events and movements of their choice, to develop a digital installation showcasing the intersections of rhetoric and social media in relation to their own scholarly and activist interests.
ENG 6138
Studies in Film: 21st Century Film and Media Theory
This seminar has several interlocking objectives:
- It introduces graduate students to the field of film and media studies by surveying twenty-first century awardees of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. We will assess trends, themes, and directions in current film and media studies based on reading of the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for an outstanding book published in the field of cinema and media studies, the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship award, which recognizes innovative work that expands the discipline of cinema and media studies, the Best First Book Award for the best first book by an author in the field of cinema and media studies, the Best Edited Collection Award for the year’s best anthology in cinema and media studies, the Best Essay Awards for essays published in journals and anthologies, and the Student Writing Award for an essay or writing by a graduate student, and finally of the Outstanding Dissertation Award.
- The course will thus offer graduate students an introduction to scholarship, including theory and history. It will instruct students on reading theory and history as an active engagement, which is instrumental in graduate education.
- This seminar focuses on different scholarly genres, including the scholarly article, the dissertation, the book, and the edited volume. We will discuss their relationship to each other and their distinctions from each other. We will also address questions, such as: which research project lends itself for which genre or how to craft a good dissertation?
- We will also confront the question of quality of scholarship. As we are only reading award-winning essays, dissertation(s), books, and edited volumes, we will ask what makes each text outstanding? This course will provide students with an understanding of quality research, scholarship, and writing.
Film screenings will be accompany the readings to reflect the respective scholarly publication. Written assignments will be commensurate with the expectations in a graduate seminar. Virtual visits by authors for workshops, conversations, and interviews with seminar participants may be possible. Active reading, participation, and writing are fundamental for the success in this course.
ENG 6824
Proseminar: Writing about Novels
In around 2013, the editor of a prestigious journal in American literature told me and a group of fellow graduate students: “Brilliant readings are a dime a dozen. If you have a brilliant reading of a novel, keep it. I don’t need another brilliant reading.” This was more than a quip. He was revealing to us a hidden rule of academic publishing: that in order to get published, it is not enough for an essay to be good. It also needs to follow certain formal procedures, engage in appropriate ways with the secondary scholarship, demonstrate its relevance given the current state the field, and be directed at the right journal.
This seminar will help you understand and follow these unwritten rules of academic publishing, with a focus on writing about novels. We will begin the semester by reading selected works by Aphra Behn and Jane Austen, and we will focus on essential reading skills such as finding an interpretive problem, locating textual evidence and counter-evidence, identifying relevant secondary scholarship, and defining where your reading fits within current debates in the field. Having practiced reading, we will then practice writing. You will be producing and workshopping short and long writing assignments that will help you structure your paper within the conventions expected by academic journals. Later in the semester you will be focusing on a novel of your choice (not to exceed 400 pages). I will work with you on developing your reading, and at the end of the semester you should have a robust first draft. I will be giving you extensive feedback on how to enrich that draft prior to finally submitting it to a journal.
We will also spend time in class discussing journals and the protocols for communicating with editors during the submission and revision process. The course should be helpful whether you are just getting started in grad school or are working to get your first piece published.
ENL 6256
Victorian Genders: Masculinities
This course will focus on Victorian genders with a special emphasis on masculinities, especially as manifested at mid-century (mostly the 1840s–1870s) in the novel. Additionally, we will spend time reading and thinking about secondary works which interrogate and historicize our principal terms. Many of you have indicated interest in gender issues generally and specifically in masculinities, a topic which has received increasing attention in recent years. We will also be thinking about the ways modern masculinity, more or less invented in this period, continues to be a force in our present. By the end of the course, you will have read a substantial amount of important secondary work (critical, historical, theoretical) regarding mid-century masculinities, as well as a good selection of both canonical and less-known Victorian novels.
Possible Primary Texts:
- Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship
- Gaskell, North and South
- Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays
- Meredith, Ordeal of Richard Feverel
- Ouida, Under Two Flags
- Collins, Man and Wife
- Kingsley, Westward Ho
- Pater, “Diapheneite” (1864) and “Winckelmann” (1867) [two short essays-handout]
- Darwin, From Selection in Relation to Sex (VII, Part II, Chapters XIX–XXI: “Secondary Sexual Characters of Man” (two chapters) and “General Summary and Conclusion” 1871
- Haggard, She 1886
The course will focus on novels (probably seven or eight) and secondary readings about gender and especially masculinity. Most of these readings will be critical and historical, rather than theoretical in the strict sense, and so you should either be familiar with basic concepts in gender theory or be prepared to do a little extra reading on your own. However, the class discussion will be tailored to (and by) the class members, so you if need to know more about something, please ask. I would also like to emphasize that, although the course will focus on the construction of masculinity in the period, that topic cannot be discussed without reference to female identity, class, and sexuality, among other issues. The use of the plural in the course title is not simply a convention; it reflects the imbrication of gender with other identity categories, despite the increasing sense of a widely shared masculine “essence” which marks the period and which it left as a legacy. In short, I expect seminar conversation to be rather wide-ranging.
Tentative requirements:
Requirements include regular attendance and participation, eight short (1–2 page) responses to the reading, posted to the class email list, substantial contributions to discussion of response papers over email, one full length paper (21–25 pages), and one formal oral presentation of your research.
Response papers are due each week. You may choose which eight weeks you will turn something in, but please do not turn them in late. Response papers should be circulated and shared; you must post them electronically at least 48 hours before class. (I will create an email list for the class, to which you may post papers, responses, questions, etc.) Response papers should be short (one to two pages), focused essays which engage the reading (primary, secondary or both) directly.
You are also expected to contribute substantively to discussion on the list. The class will be conducted as a seminar; each member will be expected to speak during each class meeting and to discuss collegially with other class members. I will contribute as a discussion facilitator and resource person, but not, generally, as a lecturer. You should plan to use the class to explore and expand your own research interests wherever possible. If you would like to tailor your final project for a particular purpose (dissertation chapter, for example), please let me know.
LIT 6236
Postcolonial Studies: Issues of Gender and Sexuality in African Literature
This course hinges on vexed questions pertaining to issues of gender and sexuality in modern African literature. Since the inauguration of the field in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, sex and sexuality have constituted a central creative and interpretative discursive formation. The representational economies these diverse literatures have been called into question on account of their normative gender and/or sexual logics. Much of this critique has been dependent, for its authority, on theories developed in the Western academy. To what extent can such ostensible “western” theories as feminism and queer theory provide critical paradigms and parameters for the study of putatively African aesthetic objects? Are such theories necessarily inappropriate on their account ostensible Eurocentricism”? From the perspective of Western feminism and queer theory, is African literature doomed to seem sexist and heteronormative, if not, homophobic (in silent contradistinction perhaps to more enlightened Western literature)? Is a critique of sexism and heteronormativity in African letters conceivable outside the bounds of Western theory? Alternately, is it not problematic to conceive of African literature in terms its radical difference from the so-called Western tradition? In the name of contesting Eurocentricism, do allegedly nativist theories of African literature risk normalizing historical and contemporary social inequalities, not to mention a certain anti-intellectualism? What accounts for the lingering hostility to feminism and especially queer theory in certain prominent quarters of African studies? Is the opposition pitting Western theory and African literature itself part of the problem it purports to resolve? To what extents are the texts in question “African”; to what extent is the theory in question “Western”? We will seek to answer these questions by looking at a range of canonical African fictions and Western theories of gender and sexuality. In addition to such hypercanonical Western thinkers as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we will focus on lesser known but insightful and provocative theorists situated in Africa. Authors studied will include such diverse figures as Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Mariama Ba, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chamamanda Ngodi Adichie and Yvonne Awour Odhiambo.
LIT 6358
The World of James Baldwin and Critical Race Theory
This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin’s literary and sociopolitical writings. The course expects that students apply critical race theory in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from writing by scholars as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class discussion and written work will discern whether there exists evidence of Afro-Pessimism and or postNegritude moments in Baldwin’s oeuvre that easily dismisses postracial fantasies and the machination of neoliberal gestures.
The seminar critically surveys James Baldwin’s writings, lectures, and selected biographies that explore Baldwin’s life in the United States, France, and Turkey. Baldwin was engaged in the socio-political world that surrounded and sometimes consumed his artistic and moral energies. He was active in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and international concerns about the construction of nation, race, and sexuality. One critic wrote of Baldwin in these words: “Following publication of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s literary star approached its peak during the turbulent 1960s. His burgeoning role as celebrity, prophet, and leader heaped an unsustainable amount of pressure and responsibility onto his slight frame in an American landscape that doubly punished Baldwin for being both black and gay, and he often turned to Turkey for sanctuary.”
This course will reveal the artistry, compassion, and moral commitment of one of America’s greatest writers. Students will critically study how James Baldwin fared as an American writer and social critic. and how critical race theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-black violence in words and deeds. Class discussion will consider how Baldwin imaginatively exposed and fervently articulated the coming consciousness that generates “Black Lives Matter” awareness and endgame.
LIT 6855
Value and Evaluation
What is value(d), and how do we make evaluative judgments, as literary or film critics, as academics, and as social actors? In this course, we will study classic positions in the theory of aesthetic judgment (Hume, Kant). We will also read more recent works in the theory of value and evaluation, and works in the sociology of value and taste, covering such topics as the formation of canons, and protocols of academic judgment. We will look into the culture and politics of accountability, in higher education and in society in general. Finally, we will read works of literary history and criticism that address problems of evaluation. This course is widely interdisciplinary, and should be of interest to students wanting to expand their knowledge of the history and theory of criticism and aesthetics, and to explore social-scientific approaches to the study of culture.
LIT 6855
Contemporary Children’s Literature Studies
Our seminar will examine the emergence and onging evolution of children’s literature studies, broadly construed but with a particular focus on English and the humanities. Drawing on foundational work by scholars like Beverly Lyon Clark and Jack Zipes, we’ll read about the beginnings of the “field” and think about its mechanisms of production, acceleration, and circulation, mostly in the North American context but also internationally. We’ll consider how children’s literature studies has positioned itself in relation to other disciplines and academic projects, among them comparative literature and translation studies; fairy tale studies; psychoanalysis; studies of national literatures and cultures; animation and imagetext studies; postcolonial studies; disability studies; fandom studies; queer studies; theory studies; childhood studies. One goal of the course will be to get a feel for the current directions of the enterprise, and in the process to identify roads not yet taken. We will also talk to some of the scholars we’re reading about their work and their sense of what might come next. We will not pay much attention to the picturebook, as Professor Ulanowicz’s Spring 2021 course spotlights that form.
Seminar participants will develop projects attentive to questions of disciplinary formation and articulation, reflecting their own research interests and plans. We may even put on a mini-conference about our disciplinarity discoveries – that could be fun, right?
Possible Texts (some excerpts only):
- Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983)
- Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit (2003)
- Clare Bradford, Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2009)
- Sara Schwebel, Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (2011)
- Anastasia Ulanowicz, Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images (2013)
- Maria Nikolajeva, Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature (2014)
- Zoe Jaques, Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg (2014)
- Karin Murris, The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks (2016)
- Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature (2018)
- Elizabeth Wheeler, Handiland: The Crippest Place on Earth (2019)
- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019)
- Alison Waller, Rereading Childhood Books (2019)
- Derritt Mason, Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2020)
- Rachel Conrad, Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (2020)
- Lisa Sainsbury, Metaphysics of Children’s Literature (2021)
LIT 6856
Cultural Studies: Georges Bataille & the Accursed Share
“Exuberance is beauty” – William Blake*
A survey of the work of French philosopher, sociologist, art historian, and novelist Georges Bataille. We will focus on Bataille’s pre-WW II writings on materialism, the sacred and profane, and heterology (the autogenous disruption of self-consistency and utility), on his post-war writings on “general economy” (expenditure, eroticism, and sovereignty), and on the relevance of Bataille’s transgressive ideas to post-anthropocene ecological thought. Course requirements include collaborative moderation of in-class discussions and a long-form research paper, which will be workshopped in class in the final weeks of the semester.
* One of the “Proverbs of Hell” in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93, pl 10), also the motto of Bataille’s book on general economy, The Accursed Share (1949).
LIT 6934
Comparative and Cultural Rhetorics
This course theorizes rhetoric by examining rhetoric’s relation to culture. If rhetoric refers broadly to various systems of symbol use, and if culture refers broadly to forms of social organization, then we might describe the relationship between rhetoric and culture as intimate and complex, because symbols help organize societies. To explore the details of this claim, we’ll read and discuss various texts, including recently-published articles and some or all of the following books:
- Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. Diane Davis
- Shades of Sulh: The Rhetorics of Arab-Islamic Reconciliation. Rasha Diab
- Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Stuart Hall
- The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Stuart Hall
- Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions. Edited by Romeo García and Damián Baca
- On African-American Rhetoric. Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks
- Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics. Edited by Lisa King, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson
- Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. Edited by Iris D. Ruiz and Raúl Sánchez
Davis and Hall will provide terms with which to theorize rhetoric and culture, respectively. The other texts will provide occasions to test these terms and how they interact.
You’ll be expected to write and share informal responses to each week’s reading assignment. You’ll also carry out some kind of major assignment—a draft of a journal article or another kind of “text”—on a topic of your choice, that helps advance your research program. If you are new and don’t yet have a research program, this assignment will help you launch one.