20th-Century British Literature

ENL 4273.001 J. Ulin Cat 2 Boca In-Person W/F 11:00am–12:20pm

African-American Lit to 1895

AML 4604.001 R. Fox Cat 1 Boca In-Person T/R 9:30am–10:50am

Creative Writing:Nonfiction

CRW 4211.001 A. Furman Cat 3 Boca In-Person T/R 2:00pm–3:20pm

This course is designed to introduce you to exceptional and inspiring models of three of the major subgenres of creative nonfiction—memoir, literary journalism, and the lyric essay—and to offer you the opportunity to write in two of these three modes, possibly exploring certain interconnections between them. During workshops, students will offer helpful critical feedback to one another. We will pay particular attention to the role of the nonfiction writer as a “character” in the “story” that he or she tells, and the way/s in which this character may be developed differently—and with greater or lesser emphasis—in the various subgenres mentioned above. Hopefully, the readings will inspire you all to move out of what might be your comfort zone in writing nonfiction, whether your comfort zone is to write intensely personal memoirs or impersonal journalistic essays.

Intro to Literary Studies

ENG 3822.005 E. Stockard Req. for English Majors Distance Online Live Lecture M 7:10pm–10:00pm

Students will read examples of the major genres of English literature (drama, poetry, novel, essay) beginning with writing from the medieval period, and moving to the Renaissance, the 18th Century, Victorian, and modern literary periods. The readings will focus on the idea of acquisition, and we will look at how the acquisition of material goods is represented from the medieval to the modern period by means of characteristic literary techniques and conventions. We will also consider the relation of art, particularly literary art, to the material world, and the status of women in this world of acquisition. Representative readings include Doctor Faustus (drama), “My Last Duchess” (poetry), The Forsyte Saga: Man of Property (novel), A Room of One’s Own (essay).

Required for English Majors and fulfills a requirement for the English Education major.

Honors Seminar: Afterlives of Empire

ENG 4932.001 A. Kini Cat 1 or 2 Boca In-Person WF 2:00pm–3:20pm

This course grapples with the ongoing structures and legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, Euro-American empire in Asia and settler colonialism in the Americas. While these topics are usually studied separately, we will focus on engaging the connections, overlaps and intersections between these incommensurate and nonequivalent histories of colonialism and gendered racialization. As Lisa Lowe observes in her groundbreaking study The Intimacies of Four Continents, “The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections. Even the questions we can ask about these histories are influenced by the unevenly inhabited and inconsistently understood aftermath of these obscured conditions” (1-2). Following Lowe, we will read promiscuously across established disciplinary formations—including literature, cultural studies, history, anthropology, legal studies, sociology, film and performance—to unsettle normative understandings of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Throughout our study we will pay particular attention to intersectional, comparative and relational approaches and methods.

Medieval Literature

ENL 4210.004 T. Miller Cat 2 Boca In-Person WF 9:30am–10:50am

In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and dull suffering, games and other forms of play flourished across Western Europe: contemporary games such as chess, backgammon, and playing cards began to develop into their modern forms during the period. In this course, we will read a broad survey of medieval literature -- from the Old English heroic poem Beowulf to the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales -- but with an emphasis on how these texts engage with games, gaming, and play, including various kinds of medieval contests, competitions, sports, entertainments, and even ritualized insult exchanges, a premodern analogue of the rap battle. We’ll also be asking some simultaneously serious and playful questions: did 15th-century authors write Chaucer fan fiction, and can Choose Your Own Adventure novels tell us anything about Chaucer, and vice versa?

17th Century Literature

ENL 4221.001 J. Leeds Cat 2 Distance Online Live Lecture R 4:00pm–6:50pm

This course offers an introduction to the major forms and concerns of British literature during the years 1603-1674, the period of the English Revolution. Materials for the course have been selected so as to demonstrate how various orthodoxies (religious, political, philosophical, poetic) were challenged, and also defended, during this period. This emphasis on orthodoxy and reform requires considerable attention to the historical context of the literature under discussion. The chief literary forms examined will be the following: lyric poetry, the sermon, the polemical essay, and the philosophical essay or treatise; authors include Donne, Bacon, Burton, Herbert, and Hobbes. Students will leave the course understanding the 17th-century origins of modern democracy and modern materialism.

Satisfies pre-1800 distribution requirement for English major; Satisfies Option 2 in British Literature for English Education major

Digital Protest Rhetorics

ENC 4930.002 A. Stagliano Cat 3 Distance Fully Online

 

World Lit: Critical Approaches

LIT 4225.001 A. Kini Cat 1 Boca In-Person WF 11:00am–12:20pm

Race, Migration, Empire. This course offers an introduction to contemporary global literatures in English by writers from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. We will focus on the braided themes of race, migration and empire as they are explored in literary works that grapple with the histories and legacies of British and US imperialisms. Reading across multiple intellectual traditions—including postcolonial literary theory, Black diaspora studies, American studies and feminist theory—students will be introduced to key debates and questions that have animated the study of “world literature in English,” including issues of language, representation and imperial power. Literary and cultural texts will include works by NoViolet Bulawayo, Andrea Levy, Meena Alexander, Zadie Smith, Dinaw Mengestu and Mira Nair.

Chaucer

ENL 4311.002 E. Stockard Cat 2 Davie In-Person W 9:30am–12:20pm

This course provides students with an opportunity for intensive study of selections from The Canterbury Tales. We will be looking at how the collection of tales, each told by a different pilgrim, places a number of opposing perspectives in motion. Often-intertwined topics will include love, war, power, sex, money, and religion. Among the highlights are The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, but you are invited by Chaucer to choose the best tale. As we accompany Chaucer’s pilgrims on their journey, students will develop skill in reading Middle English and become familiar with some historical contexts of Chaucer’s writing—social as well as literary.

Fulfills Category 2 and pre-1800 requirements for the English major; Chaucer also fulfills a major author requirement for the English Education major.

Milton

ENL 4341.001 J. Leeds Cat 2 Distance Online Live Lecture W 4:00pm–6:50pm

The course introduces students to Milton’s major works in poetry and prose; we will read some of Milton’s early poems, selections from his prose treatises, and Paradise Lost. The goals of the course are as follows: 1) to explore the symbolic order of Milton’s Christian Humanism, 2) to convey the essentials of Miltonic radicalism in matters political, social, ecclesiastical, and theological, and 3) to assess Milton’s contribution to the forms and style of English poetry. Because Milton's writings are grounded in the events of his time, students will be required to develop a basic knowledge of 17th-century English history. Students will leave the course well-schooled in certain fundamental concepts and concerns of Renaissance and Reformation thought.

Satisfies pre-1800 distribution requirement for English major; Satisfies major author requirement for English Education major

Structure of Modern English

LIN 4680.006 J. Leeds Cat 3 Distance Online Live Lecture M 4:00pm–6:50pm

This course offers a comprehensive study of English grammar and syntax, focusing on analysis of the structures of English prose. We will examine in detail the elements of English prose at the levels of the word, the phrase, the clause, and the sentence, and we will analyze sentences of increasing complexity as the semester proceeds. By strengthening your grasp of grammatical interrelationships within the sentence, the course will also enhance your abilities as a writer.

Required for English Education majors

Irish Literature

LIT 3184.001 S. Mitchell Cat 1 Distance Online Live Lecture TR 11:00am–12:20pm

Look at the children and classroom in Peter Tillberg’s ironically titled Will You Be Profitable, My Dear? In my view (your view might be different), this is the stultifying classroom that haunted the nightmares of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian, and Mary O’Malley—writers who resisted the collective expectations of their society to create poems, plays, and fictions that liberate us as individuals and encourage our own inventiveness and originality. “The act of poetry / is a rebel act,” writes Irish Poet Michael Hartnett, and each of the writers we will read was, or is, a rebel. As the protagonist of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man puts it, “I intend to escape three nets….” To find out what those nets were—and the nets we might need to escape now— join us in reading and discussing the greatest works of Irish Literature and the two greatest authors of the twentieth century, Yeats and Joyce. Fáilte roimh an saol! [pronounced: fal-cha rev ahn seel] For more information, contact Professor Mitchell: <smitch21@fau.edu>

Literary Theory

LIT 3213.002 R. Fox Req. for English Majors Boca In-Person TR 2:00pm–3:20pm

Modern Poetry

LIT 4032.001 S. Mitchell Cat 2 Distance Online Live Lecture TR 2:00–3:20pm

When Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théatre des Champs-Elysée in Paris on May 29, 1913, its savage rhythms, brutality, and dissonance precipitated a brawl as pro and con members of the audience argued so volubly the music was drowned out. What Stravinsky’s music ushered in was the Modern Period. Between 1913-14, some of the greatest works of modern literature, music, and art were created. In this course we will focus on poets who ushered in new feelings—angst, alienation, loneliness, despair, and rage—and broke with traditional language and traditional forms: Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and W.H. Auden. For more information, contact Professor Mitchell  <smitch21@fau.edu>.

Literary Theory

LIT 3213.003 E. Berlatsky Req. for English Majors Boca In-Person WF 9:30am–10:50am

As Jonathan Culler writes in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, since the 1960s “writings from outside the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters. Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study, but an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun.” This course will sample the “unbounded” scope of critical theory by reading foundational theoretical statements on mimesis, reading, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, (post)colonialism, race, feminism, queer theory, and more. We will also work on applying theoretical principals to primary texts, including short poems and at least one longer text, possibly Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.