|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
Spring 2010 Graduate Courses
Course Number: LIT 6932
Course Title: Fiction & Fantasy
Professor: Martin
Time: M 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca Raton
Is The Lord of the Rings the greatest work of fiction of the twentieth century?
It appears on several lists as the most important or favorite of many readers. On the
Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels, on the other hand, it doesn’t appear at all.
Let the debates begin! Tolkien’s great fictional romance will be the centerpiece of this
course. Other fantasy authors we will tuck in around the edges include MacDonald,
Lewis, LeGuin, and King.Course Number: ENG 5018
Course Title: Literary Criticism 1
Professor: Carol McGuirk
Time: T 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
Our discussions will trace the origins and development through the 18th century of
European classical and neoclassical literary criticism, with discussion also (through
Longinus’ influence) of elements in Romantic criticism that emerged long before the
historical era of nineteenth-century Romanticism itself. Most of our meetings will be
centered on two critics whose ideas contain significant parallels or contrasts. Among
these will be Plato and Plotinus, Aristotle and Corneille, Samuel Johnson and Longinus,
Immanuel Kant and David Hume, Alexander Pope and Horace, Thomas Love Peacock
and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.
The goal is to enrich students’ cultural literacy and to enhance their critical vocabularies,
so that their own critical projects are strengthened. Because we cannot fully cover
several thousand years of Western critical history in a single semester, I have targeted
ideas that continue to be important today. Returning to Plato in our final class, for
instance, we will consider Derrida’s celebrated deconstruction of Platonic keywords in
Plato’s Pharmacy. Requirements include either a twenty-page term-paper (produced in
stages) or two 10-page papers. Also required are weekly one-page papers in which
you will comment on the material assigned for the coming class. Solid preparation,
steady attendance, and useful participation are also requirements.Course Number: CRW 6024
Course Title: Translation Workshop
Professor: Rebecca McKay
Time: M 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
Note: Students need not be fluent in another language to register for the workshop. If you have access to an English-language “crib” (literal translation) you have the tools you need to participate.
In an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. Not only does the practice of literary translation allow us to bring as-yet-undiscovered work into another language, but it also forces us as writers to examine the materials of our craft. In addition to critiquing each others’ translations of poetry, prose, or drama into English, students will read and discuss articles about literary translation; read reviews and criticism; and compare multiple translations of the same work. Students will explore and formulate their own strategies and approaches to literary translation, with an eye to how these strategies and approaches intersect with their own writing.
Finally, this class will have an optional component: through the nonprofit organization Blue Planet, students will have the opportunity to lead translation/creative writing workshops for elementary, middle-school, or high-school students. This component should prove very rewarding–especially for MFA students who are interested in getting some experiences teaching creative writing.
Please contact Professor McKay for more information: rmckay3@fau.edu
Course Number: ENG 6049
Course Title: Studies in Queer Theory
Professor: Barclay Barrios
Time: M 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
In this course we'll be reading foundational works in Queer Theory by critics such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner. In order to contextualize these complex theoretical works we will read short primary works of fiction and nonfiction. Please be forewarned: readings in this course are particularly dense and some readings will contain explicit erotic material.
Course Number: CRW 6130
Course Title: Workshop–Fiction Writing
Professor: Papatya Bucak
Time: R 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
Students in the graduate fiction workshop will write either three new short stories or 60-75 pages of a novel. Likely texts are: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid and assorted stories.
Course Number: AML 5937
Course Title: 20th-Century American Fiction
Professor: Steve Blakemore
Time: T 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
A study of American 20-century fiction (short stories, essays, and two novels), in which critical theory will be deconstructed, academic hegemonies will be subverted, and the postmodern will be colonialized. The course will consist of lecture and (mostly) discussion, with close readings of all the texts. Written weekly responses, three in-class examinations, and a twenty-page paper make this course a must take for all but the slothful. Daily MP3s will roundoff our interdisciplinary incursion.
Course Number: CRW 5025:
Course Title: Lyric Essay–Workshop
Professor: Susan Mitchell
Time: W 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
The lyric essay is a hybrid, a macaronic, cross-pollinated form that, like a poem, accretes in fragments. In this graduate workshop students will read and write essays that straddle genres, and borrow their strategies from fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, song and film. Be ready to revise--a lot.
Course Number: LIT 5009:
Course Title: Modern Allegory
Professor: Robert Adams
Time: M 4:00-
Campus: Boca
In this course we will consider the varying manners in which modern authors have employed allegory in making metaphysical, psychological, social, spiritual, and political arguments through fiction and poetry.
In the process we will consider various definitions and theories of allegory as a literary genre-mode and creative method. We will be reading work from the following modern British and American authors:
G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Firbank, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Merrill, W. H. Auden, James Purdy, Flannery O’Connor, John Ashbery, Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster, and Jane Bowles.
Course Number: ENL 6455
Course Title: Shakespeare and Co.
Professor: Jennifer Low
Time: W 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
This course places Shakespeare in the context of his contemporaries—the many other playwrights of his period, who often collaborated with each other and responded to the work of their peers in complex ways. We will study the tradition Shakespeare inherited from his predecessors and see what he passed on to those who followed him. The course will be organized thematically, with plays grouped in clusters around topics such as revenge tragedy; leadership and tyranny; cross-dressing in comedy; and women, madness, and sexuality. Focusing on close textual analysis of these poetic works while learning about historical, cultural, and theatrical backgrounds, we will consider how different playwrights re-worked the ideas of their contemporaries in the midst of a vibrant, rapidly changing world. Writers studied will include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, and a “rediscovered” female writer, Elizabeth Cary.
Course Number: AML 6934
Course Title: 20th Century African American Literature and Theory
Professor: Sika Dagbovie
Time: W 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
This course provides an overview of twentieth century African American literature, criticism, and theory. Our study of the texts will focus on the ongoing debates about black literature: What is black writing? What should it be? What is the role of the African American writer? What is the function of African American literary art? How does one define a black aesthetic? We will also consider how the politics and rhetoric of black literary art have changed over time and the ways in which historical and political movements (including the Harlem Renaissance, the Protest Period, the Black Arts Movement, the New Black Aesthetic/Post-Soul Aesthetic) affect literary aesthetics. Texts will likely include Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave, Trey Ellis’ Platitudes, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Sapphire’s Push, and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.
Course Number: AML 6934
Course Title: Postwar American Poetry
Professor: Mark Scroggins
Time: R 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
If nineteenth-century American poetry is a medium-sized town with two main streets labeled "Whitman" and "Dickinson" -- you find your way around the two-score byways and alleys ("Poe," "Longfellow," "Whittier") pretty easily -- then postwar American poetry is an entire continent. How does one go about constructing a narrative of this bewildering poetic richness; how does one map this vast territory?In this course, we will read intensive selections of some of the vast variety of poetry written by United States poets between the end of the Second World War and the present. We'll read poems (mostly from anthologies) and statements of poetics, as well as a certain amount of secondary commentary and literary history. In keeping with the hypothesis that poetry, like other forms of literature, is a social activity, we'll pay special attention to the manner in which specific group formations (or "movements") have influenced the development of the poetic art. This emphasis on group formation should in no way obscure attention to individual achievement (what used to be called "genius"); but there will be no sense that postwar poetry can be reduced to a handful of "significant," "important" figures, or boiled down to a half-dozen "canonical" monuments.
For starters, we will look at exemplary works from the Black Mountain group, the Beat Poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Language Writing, and the Black Arts movement; other group monikers that might get attention include the Deep Image poets, the New Formalists, the practitioners of the "Analytic Lyric," Conceptual writers, and Flarf.
Course Number: CRW 5025
Course Title: Experimental Fiction
Professor: Jason Schwartz
Time: T 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
Course Number: ENG 6925
Course Title: Research Colloquium
Professor: Quentin Youngberg
Time: TBA
Campus: Boca
Course Number: ENL 6934
Course Title: 20th Century Irish and British Literature
Professor: Ulin
Time: R 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
In the introduction to his recent collection of short fiction, The Deportees and Other Stories (2008), Irish author Roddy Doyle writes that sometime in the 1990s, “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one.” This graduate course focuses on the dynamics of conflict in 20th century British and Irish literature from Yeats and Gregory’s 1902 dramatic collaboration Cathleen ni Houlihan through the peace talks which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. This course will consider Ireland’s transition from a colonial subject seeking independence to a postcolonial nation and EU member through literature, political writings, film, music and art. We will explore the centrality of colonialism, emigration and exile in the work of writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Along with active weekly seminar participation, two research papers (6-8 pages, 8-10 pages), several guided response papers, and an in-class conference presentation are required. For more information, please feel free to contact me at julin@fau.edu.
Course Number: ENL 6305
Course Title: Virginia Woolf
Professor: Eric Berlatsky
Time: T 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
Writing primarily between the World Wars, Virginia Woolf (1882-1940) was one of the most distinctive and insightful voices of her generation and remains a writer for all time. In addition to her groundbreaking work in short experimental fiction and the stream-of-consciousness novel, Woolf was one of the earliest practitioners of a feminist literary theory (avant la lettre), and a cunning, witty, and ironic essayist on matters of culture, society, and art. In her own way, she also transformed the genres of history, political essay, and biography, combining each of them with the novelistic genre that was her primary mode of aesthetic expression. Woolf’s life was also, by turns, comic and tragic. She suffered several nervous breakdowns, lost her mother, father, brother, and stepsister at a young age, was sexually molested by her stepbrother, had at least one lesbian affair while married to Leonard Woolf, and committed suicide just as England was being drawn into World War II. In short, she was an intensely interesting writer and person, more than worthy of a semester’s study and conversation. Over the course of the semester, we will read all or most of Woolf’s major novels, a selection of her essays, and some of the bountiful supply of Woolf criticism. We may also read some of the following: diary selections, selections of letters, Roger Fry, Freshwater (her only play), excerpts of Hermione Lee’s Woolf biography, work by a Woolf contemporary or two (Mansfield, Joyce, or both), and perhaps an exemplar or two of Woolf’s influence and legacy (Jeanette Winterson, Michael Cunningham). There will simply not be enough time to read and discuss everything that is worthy of study, but you can count on reading: The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Orlando, The Years, and Between the Acts all in the standard Harcourt editions. Requirements will include one “close reading” paper (5-6 pp.), a research paper (15-20 pp.) and perhaps one additional brief assignment.
Course Number: LIN 6107
Course Title: Hst of the English Language
Professor: Dan Murtaugh
Time: F 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
Course Number: LIT 6932
Course Title: Fiction & Fantasy
Professor: Tom Martin
Time: M 7:10-10:00
Campus: Boca
Course Number: LIT 6934
Course Title: Global Indigenous Lit
Professor: Quentin Youngberg
Time: R 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca
Global Indigenous Literature will explore the effects of globalization on indigenous societies. This exploration will take on several aspects. First, we will explore the transnational character of certain American Indian writers, such as Gerald Vizenor and Carter Revard, who practice a kind of literary nomadism. Second, we will explore some significant political struggles in indigenous Latin America that have been globalized through mass media. Finally, we will explore the impact of global concerns about indigenous rights (in the wake of the last few centuries' colonial enterprises) on indigenous people worldwide.
While our primary focus, at least in the beginning, will be on transnationalism and globalization in the indigenous Americas, in the process of our discussions students will be invited to think of indigenous literatures across the planet. (These include the expected places, such as South African or Australian indigenous literature; but also some more unfamiliar places such as Berber literature in Morrocco.)
