Graduate Course Offerings
| Professor Taylor Hagood | Thursday 4:00pm–6:50pm |
This course will focus on the large, protean, flexible, and provocative concept of undeadness in literature and film of the United States South since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From classic Southern Gothic of William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell to the later twentieth century work of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to the zombies of The Walking Dead, this course explores the implications of southern horror. The course will be approached across theoretical systems and disciplines.
| Professor David Medina | Wednesday, 4:00pm–6:50pm |
In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Edward Said reminds us that “culture” is both something one possesses and a boundary that defines who belongs and who does not. Borders, whether physical or ideological, emerge from such boundaries and shape how literature encodes power, difference, and identity. This course explores American literature from 1700 to 1900 through the lens of boundaries and borders. Throughout, we examine how material objects, ideas, and texts alike become sites where culture is produced and contested. Our readings will focus on how colonial American and european writers constructed boundaries, such as one bewteen "civilized" and "savage," how those boundaries become tangible borders, and how authors challenged, redefined, and resisted these divisions. Our readings include, but will not be limited to: travel narratives, epics, novels, captivity accounts, and short works of fiction. Special attention will be given to how material bibliographic objects—books, periodicals, and archival forms—functioned as instruments of colonial expansion, class production, gendered discipline, racial classification, and cultural boundary-making. By attending a rich archive of literature produced from 1700 to 1900, students will gain a deeper understanding of how early American authors negotiated cultural and political borders and how the boundaries established during this period continue to shape American history, literature, and culture.
| Professor Alexander Slotkin | Tuesday 4:00pm–6:50pm |
While we typically think of rhetoric as persuasive speech, scholars now recognize rhetoric to include everything from still and moving images to sounds, artifacts, places, and more. But what is rhetoric? How do we study rhetoric, and what does it look like? Is rhetoric cultural—and, if so, how do different communities practice it? Can plants and animals use rhetoric, too? These questions point to the breadth and depth of rhetoric as a concept and a field of study, one that invites us to explore its multiple definitions, histories, and futures.
Taking up these questions, this course introduces students to contemporary and enduring issues in the field of rhetorical studies, with particular attention to how scholars define rhetoric, study it, and apply rhetorical theories across diverse contexts. We’ll explore a wide range of topics, including rhetoric and the body, rhetoric and the environment, and rhetoric and culture.
| Professor Ian MacDonald | Monday 4:00pm–6:50pm |
Whether for good or ill, the language of literary theory and its attendant Continental-philosophical influences is a part of the study of literature in the academe. Whether or not one holds to the arguments these various theorists make or takes a position of “post-theory” that suggests they have led the field of literary analysis off track, any student of the subject at the graduate level is expected to have some grasp of the work of Marx, Saussure, Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno, Fanon, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Williams, Derrida, Said, Spivak, Gates, Butler, Halberstam and more. ENG 5019 serves as a crash course for these avenues of inquiry from the historicism and idealism of Hegel through the branching specialties of the twenty-first century. Touching on most (if not all) the names introduced here, the course traces a collection of elements which, compounded, aggregate to form a theoretical foundation that bleeds into nearly all contemporary academic discourse surrounding how and why we read literature in the present.
| Professor Julieann Ulin | Wednesday 7:10pm–10:00pm |
This course will provide you with a foundation in literary research that is necessary to write critical essays in your graduate courses. You will gain research skills through a series of written assignments designed to introduce you to the tools and methodologies of literary research, the specific resources at FAU, author societies, key publications and journals in your chosen field, calls for papers, grant applications and support, and the profession more generally. The course will use James Joyce's Ulysses as a case study.
| Professor Ian MacDonald | Tuesday 7:10pm–10pm |
This course begins in, but branches off of Afrofuturism to focus on the increasing output of speculative literatures being written in or centering Africa. Tracing sf along routes delineated by colonialism and Empire, this course attends to the problematics and potential opened up by sf written in and about postcolonial contexts and specifically the cultural matrices intersecting the African continent in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Authors include Nnedi Okorafor, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Tade Thompson, Mashigo Mohale, Namwali Serpell, and Sofia Samatar.