Fall 2008 Graduate Course Descriptions

Course Number: AML 6305
Course Title: Phillip Roth
Professor: Furman
Time: M 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Philip Roth is one of our most important living fiction writers.  He has won the Pulitzer Prize (American Pastoral, 1997), two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959; Sabbath’s Theater, 1995), two PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock: A Confession, 1993;  The Human Stain, 2000), and, among other prizes, a PEN/Nabokov Award in 2006 to honor a body of work “of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship.”  To gauge the long evolution of Roth’s craftsmanship, we’ll read most of Philip Roth’s major works of fiction, paying particular attention to Roth’s literary experimentalism, his Jewishness, and the interconnections.  Course requirements will include an annotated secondary bibliography and a final research paper.   

Course Number: AML 6934
Course Title: Portrayal of Aging in Literature and Film
Professor: Childrey
Time: Th 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Davie
             Description forthcoming

Course Number: AML 6938.001
Course Title: Disability in Southern Literature
Professor: Hagood
Time: Th 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
           Literature written by and about inhabitants of the United States South is replete with disabled figures, from William Faulkner’s Benjy Compson to Flannery O’Connor’s Manley Pointer. Southern literature thus seems a fecund site for the emerging field of disability studies—the study of the political, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding human variation. In this course, we will be familiarizing ourselves with the work of theorists of literature and disability and considering ways that their work helps illuminate the writing of selected southern authors on multiple levels, from the personal characteristics and experiences of singles characters to the larger implications of disability and the southern body politic (and, by extension, the national body politic). The course will include literary texts from the 1830s, when the South first emerged as a political force, through the 2000s, when the South is continuing to be at the forefront of U.S. political, economic, and cultural figurations.

Course Number: AML 6938.002
Course Title: U.S. Latino/a Performance
Professor: Machado
Time: W 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Performance is the place where the written word intersects with the visual. In staging a performance, US Latino performers verbally transcribe their cultural experiences and physically embody Latinidad. Performing subjectivity entails movement, images, corporeality and abstraction. This graduate seminar will focus on US Latino/a performance within poetry, drama and film.
            We will be moving from improvisational forms such as performance poetry and art to more institution-centered spaces like theatre and film. By bringing US Latino/a studies criticism into conversation on the subject of US Latino/a performance, we will address issues of genre as well as questions of authenticity, sexuality, language, history, politics and the marketplace.
            Some of the writers and theorists we'll discuss include Frances Aparicio, Nao Bustamante, Juan Flores, Coco Fusco, Frances Negrón-Mutaner, Pedro Pietri, and Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez.

Course Number: CRW 5025
Course Title: Experimental Fiction
Professor: Schwartz
Time: M 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Description forthcoming.

Course Number: CRW 6130
Course Title: Workshop: Fiction Writing
Professor: Bucak
Time: W 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Students will write and workshop either three complete short stories or three 20-25 page installments of a novel.  Readings will likely include The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and two individually chosen texts.

Course Number: CRW 6236
Course Title: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Professor: Bradley
Time: M 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Advanced composition in creative nonfiction writing, consideration of significant examples of memoir, essay, and literary journalism forms.  Course aims at perfecting a series of personal essays or chapters in a book-length nonfiction narrative, improving critical abilities.

Course Number: CRW 6331
Course Title: Workshop: Poetry Writing
Professor: Scroggins
Time: Th 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Advanced composition in poetry writing, consideration of significant examples of poetic forms.  Aims at perfecting a series of poems, improving critical abilities.

Course Number: ENC 6700
Course Title: Studies in Composition Methodology and Theory
Professor:  Barrios
Time: F 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
             ENC 6700, a course exclusively for new GTAs in the department of English, will introduce you to the field of Rhetoric and Composition in the context of your teaching.  Using readings by noted critics such as David Bartholomae and Richard E. Miller, you will develop a theoretical vocabulary to discuss your pedagogy as well as a set of tools to reflect on your own teaching.

Course Number: ENG 5019
Course Title: Literary Criticism II
Professor: Ostas
Time: M 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Major themes and theoretical statements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Course Number: ENG 6009
Course Title: Principles and Problems of Literary Study
Professor: Martin
Time: T 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Research and Methodology; problems of textuality and critical assumptions; history of ideas.

Course Number: ENL 6305
Course Title: Milton
Professor: Martin
Time: W 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Description forthcoming.

Course Number: ENL 6455
Course Title: Conrad, Kipling, and Postcolonial Theory
Professor: Buckton
Time: Th 4:00-6:50 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
             Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling were both born in countries dominated by imperialism--Conrad in Russian-dominated Ukraine, Kipling in British-dominated India--and both went on to become major figures in the world literary landscape of the twentieth century. Moreover, both Conrad and Kipling brought readers’ attention to the harsh realities of imperialism, while also arguably promoting a “romance” of imperial adventure. While it is indisputable that both writers made imperialism and the experience of the colonizer central to their fiction and (in Kipling’s case) poetry, critical debate continues to rage as to whether these writers’ work exclusively supported the imperialist projects of European powers in Africa, India, and elsewhere, and the oppression of the indigenous peoples of colonized countries, or whether their fictions also developed critical perspectives on and challenges to imperialism and its ideological underpinnings. From Chinua Achebe’s powerful attack on Heart of Darkness to Edward Said’s post-colonial critique of Kipling’s Kim, the works of these writers have continued to draw scrutiny and be the focal point of controversy. In this course we will read extensively in the writing of Conrad and Kipling--including major works such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Kim, and The Jungle Books--as well as in post-colonial theory and critiques of their work, in order to better understand the complexities, ambivalence, and contradictions of their representations of imperial culture and society. Our reading in post-colonial theory will include critics such as Homi Bhabba, Chinua Achebe, Benita Parry, and Edward Said.

Course Number: LIN 6107
Course Title: History of the English Language
Professor: Leeds
Time: T 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca Raton
             This course traces the development of English pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax from their ancient Germanic beginnings to their most recent and popular forms, including the global dispersion of English in the modern era.  Students will be asked to master a considerable amount of linguistic and historical detail in support of a few key concepts: the distinction between synthetic and analytic languages, the relation between oral and written usage, the impact of political and economic history on the history of language.  Considerable emphasis will be placed on the use of philological reference works as a basis for classroom discussion.

Course Number: LIT 6246
Course Title: Jean Rhys
Professor: Goldman
Time: W 4:00-6:50
Campus: Boca Raton
             Modernist?  Post-modernist?  Colonial?  Post-colonial?  British?  Caribbean?  Feminist?  Not?  Jean Rhys, defined and redefined, categorized and recategorized, has emerged as a site of academic debate where subfields of literary studies collide and jostle for space.  In this course we will consider them all.  Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams was born in Dominica in 1890, danced in chorus lines in England in the 1910s, lived penuriously as an expat in Europe in the 1920s, was presumed dead for a decade in the 1940s and proclaimed England’s greatest living writer in the 1960s.  Along the way she wrote five novels and numerous collections of short fiction.  We will read every word ever published under her pseudonym, plus criticism and biography.  Seminar paper and oral presentation.

Course Number: LIT 6936
Course Title: Modern Literature and Sexuality
Professor: Adams
Time: Th 7:10-10:00 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
             In this course, we will be reading a variety of modern novels, short stories, and poems while focusing on issues of sexuality and sexual theory.  We also will discuss relevant issues concerning literary genres and traditions and habits of reading.  We will read one novel or several short stories or poems by an individual author every week together with related critical essays.