Summer 2008 Graduate Course Descriptions
Summer Session 2 (Formerly “A”)

Course Number: CRW 5025
Course Title: Mixed Genres
Professor: Mitchell
Time: MW 4:45-7:55 PM
Campus: Boca Raton

Course Number: ENG 6009
Course Title: Principles and Problems of Literary Study
Professor: Barrios
Time: TuTh 4:45-7:55 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            This course will introduce you to the methodologies and techniques of literary research and will touch on all phases of the research process.  We’ll start by looking at the history of the discipline and the institution to consider the investment we have in research and the production of knowledge.  Then we’ll cover informal and non-technological research techniques before focusing in on the refined skills of electronic research, including Boolean operators, database selection, and considerations of citation.  We’ll discuss how to evaluate research, how to read for research, and how to process that reading into conventional academic genres such as conference papers and articles.

Course Number: ENL 6305
Course Title: Robert Louis Stevenson
Professor: Buckton
Time: MW 4:45-7:55 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Creator of “horror” stories such as Jekyll and Hyde? Author of “books for boys” like Treasure Island? Historical novelist of the Scottish Jacobite rebellion (Kidnapped)? Traveler and pioneer of travel writing, in works such as The Amateur Emigrant? Critic of European colonialism (In the South Seas)? One of the challenges of reading and studying Robert Louis Stevenson is the diversity of roles he played in the course of his brief literary career. The most popular and innovative writer of the later nineteenth-century, the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) inspired pleasure and admiration in readers and fellow-writers throughout his short life, but was then marginalized after his death as an author of “romances” and “stories for boys.” In the last two decades a critical reevaluation has restored Stevenson to the position of a leading figure in late-Victorian literary culture, a self-conscious stylist, pioneer of “romance” and adventure stories, and a major influence on 20^th century authors such as Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. Despite being an invalid for most of his life, Stevenson’s career was nonetheless defined by global travel—including several periods in the United States (his wife, Fanny Osbourne, was an American)--and travel and location which link Stevenson’s writing in different genres, will be a central focus of this course. Most famous for Treasure Island and his notorious “shocker,” Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Stevenson began his career as a travel writer and ended his years as an exotic exile in the South Seas, where he wrote devastating critiques of Victorian colonialism and incorporated the tropical Polynesian landscape and culture into his late fiction. The aim of this course is to investigate and compare the many differentStevensons—the writer of horror stories, author of juvenile fiction, the travel writer and traveler, the passionate critic of colonialism—and to look for patterns and resemblances, as well as differences and contradictions, between them. Equally, Stevenson’s career is fascinatingly interwoven with issues such as the shifts in the class structure of British society, the expansion and decline of Empire, the culture of “decadence,” the redefinition of gender roles and emergence of new sexualities, which will help us to appreciate this most enigmatic and shape-shifting of Victorian writers.

Summer Session 3 (Formerly “B”)

Course Number: AML 6938
Course Title: Jewish-American Fiction
Professor: Furman
Time: TuTh 4:45-7:55 PM
Campus: Boca Raton
            Jewish-American writers have been at the forefront of the American literary scene for several years.  Saul Bellow, for example, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.   More recently, six of Philip Roth's novels were named as finalists in a New York Times Book Review survey (May 21, 2006) to identify the best work of American fiction written in the past 25 years. Younger writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Allegra Goodman, Dara Horn, Thane Rosenbaum, Nathan Englander, Michael Chabon and Gary Shteyngart continue to exert their powerful voices.  This course will provide you with the opportunity to explore the work of several of these major (and emergent) Jewish American fiction writers.  Following the path of Jewish-American fiction through four general phases--immigrant assimilation, alienation, rediscovery, and the new immigrants--this graduate survey is designed to introduce you to the Jewish-American literary tradition and the cultural issues informing this tradition and Jewish-American identity, in general.