Graduate Course Offerings

Professor Barclay Barrios

Summer Term 2 (First Half)

Tues/Thurs, 4:45pm–7:55pm

This course will provide a focused introduction to some of the major critical theories around sexuality and related topics. We will read Michel Foucault’s Introduction to the History of Sexuality as well as selected readings from other high profile thinkers and theorists in this area. Given the condensed summer schedule, we will focus primarily on foundational theories that inform much of the current critical debate while point to more contemporary work that would be worth investigation.

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Graduate Course Offerings

Professor Timothy Miller

Monday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contributing to contemporary literary theory. Fantasy studies, by contrast, has seen comparative neglect within the same range of theoretical approaches, despite the potentially broader remit of the fantastic itself. This course will introduce you to some of the major works of fantasy literature and fantasy theory from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, as we interrogate this history of neglect and begin to pursue our own theorizations of the fantastic. Is fantasy really “under-theorized”? Do certain bodies of critical theory work with fantasy particularly well, or especially reward expansion of their own traditional scope to include more fantastic texts? What can fantasy studies learn from theory, and theory learn from fantasy studies? Possible fantasy novelists to be considered include Ursula K. Le Guin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and N. K. Jemisin. We will also be reading excerpts from the two most influential monographs theorizing genre fantasy itself, and, additionally, each student will deliver a class presentation on a chosen school or area of critical theory -- or perhaps major theorist -- that will speculate on some potential applications to fantasy studies.

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Professor Clarissa Chenovick

Wednesday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

Eros and intellect are often made to seem like opposites. The idea that love and desire are “blind” or irrational is idiomatic, and the erotic has long been treated as a function of the body rather than the mind. The critical and literary texts in this course challenge these surface-level truisms. While critical works like Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) invite us to consider critically the possibility that sex could be a mode of thought as well as the subject of critical inquiry, influential works of feminism and queer studies such as Audre Lorde’s influential essay “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978) and Ela Pryzbylo’s recent Asexual Erotics (2019) challenge the conflation of the erotic with the sexual, offering new ways of thinking about both the sexual and the erotic and about the intersections of body, mind, and affect.
 
The literary texts in this course also challenge, provoke, and delight in the multiplicity of attitudes they take toward sexuality, eros, and intellect, ranging from the ways the love sonnets of Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare use metaphors as a means of understanding and creating erotic experience to the ways seventeenth-century devotional writers like John Donne and Richard Crashaw position their sometimes shocking imagery of erotic touch and union with God as an activity of the “understanding” that produces physiological sensation. Reading these critical and literary texts in tandem with one another, we will investigate some of the varieties of eros in early modern literary texts in order to expand our own ability to think critically about the ways that the categories of thought and sensation, body and intellect intersect both in our own present-day cultural and critical approaches to eros.

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Professor Carla María Thomas

Wednesday, 7:10pm–10:00pm

This course will trace the development of the various Englishes from its emergence in what is now England during the Old English period (c. 650-1150) to today’s global Englishes. The course will be reverse chronological, starting with the most familiar contemporary Englishes, using Míša Hejná and George Walkden's Open Access textbook A History of English, and working our way back to Old English and Proto-Indo-European roots. The last few weeks of class will focus on student research interests, which may be more sociolinguistic than historical in nature, with student-chosen readings (essays or book chapters) and presentations that culminate in a final research paper of their choice. After this course, students will understand how our mouths literally produce consonant and vowel sounds, why we pronounce words the way we do, our strange grammatical quandaries (like what’s up with our use of “do”), a basic understanding of some premodern Englishes, and much more!

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Professor Andrew Furman

Tuesday, 7:10pm–10:00pm

Henry David Thoreau was one of the most important writers and thinkers in 19th-century America. His essays, books, and now famous Journal laid the groundwork for the progressive intellectual movement of Transcendentalism, and also forged, in no small part, distinct elements of the American ethos we are still negotiating, various "-isms" such as individualism, idealism, abolitionism, environmentalism, pastoralism, and eco-centrism. Through examining a good portion of his nonfiction writings—most concertedly, the two books published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854), his most famous essays, and ample selections from the lifelong project of his Journal—we will interrogate his unique contributions to America’s literary and intellectual culture, and explore the various ongoing controversies over his legacy.  

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Professor Robert Adams

Thursday, 4pm–6:50pm

In this course, we will be using ethical and metaphysical philosophy in an exploration of differing modes of modern fiction. The focus will be upon the fiction, with the philosophy (read in brief selections provided) as a conceptual background. We will begin with ancient (Plato) and contemporary (Bernardo Kastrup) philosophical representations of the infinite Good as an ultimate value and metaphysical reality, and then we will proceed to examine the modes and authors below. The last two weeks of the course will be reserved for conference-length presentations by all class members, each of which will lead to a final paper submission of 15-20 pages. There also will be brief, simple-answer reading quizzes at the beginning of each class session.  

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Professor Alexander Slotkin

Friday, 4pm–6:50pm

course catalog description below; extended description forthcoming

Review and discussion of recent scholarship in the teaching of composition, with an emphasis on practical applications in the classroom. Required for and restricted to graduate assistants teaching composition for the first time. May count toward the 24 credits of coursework required for the MA degree.

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Professor Sika Dagbovie-Mullins
Professor Julia Mason
Professor TBA

course catalog description below; extended description forthcoming

For English Department teaching assistants, discussion and evaluation of materials and methods of undergraduate English instruction; participation in appropriate Departmental workshops and colloquia. May count as an elective beyond the 24 credits of coursework specified in the catalog. 

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Graduate Course Offerings

Professor Sika Dagbovie-Mullins

Tuesday, 7:10pm–10:00pm

What, if anything, characterizes twenty-first century African American literary production? In her essay and introduction to a special issue of American Literary History, Stephanie Li identifies African American “twenty-first-century writers’ wide-ranging determination to claim their dead and envision a home for the living.” This, for example, contrasts with Kenneth Warren’s assertion that African American literature came to an end when Jim Crow ended. This course will focus on the diverse array of African American literary texts published since 2000. We will ask ourselves: what cultural, social, and political movements and events have shaped African American literary production in the new millennium? How does one define a black aesthetic? We will consider the politics and rhetoric of black literary art in the twenty-first century. Examining both award-winning and lesser-known texts, we will explore how black writers have responded to what Saidiya Hartman names the “afterlife of slavery” in their work. In particular, we will read texts that narrate black oppression, racism, racial violence, and trauma, but also black agency, resistance, and survival. Texts will likely include:

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Professor Alexander Slotkin

Thursday, 7:10pm–10:00pm

All cultures are rhetorical, and all rhetoric is cultural. Hence, this course makes room for persuasive writing traditions from different cultural communities and contexts—especially your own—by introducing students to the subfield of “cultural rhetorics.” Cultural rhetorics explores how meaning is created and situated within specific community contexts, blending the different styles, languages, and objects people use to communicate. As a newer area of study, cultural rhetorics (est. circa. 2000) has the flexibility to recognize meaning-making practices typically excluded from traditional areas of academic inquiry, such as code-meshing, farming, and quilting. Students in this course can expect to study how diverse cultural communities make meaning before embodying their own traditions and practices in their writing.

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Professor Ian MacDonald

Monday, 7:10pm–10:00pm

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.

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Professor Julieann Ulin

Tuesday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

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.

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Professor Oliver Buckton

Monday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

“Elementary, my dear Watson” has become one of the most famous catchphrases in British literature—even though it never actually appears in any of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle! The myth of Sherlock Holmes has helped to create the image of the Victorian era as one of dark foggy streets, diabolical villains, and exotic bohemian lifestyles. But Conan Doyle, in creating the world’s most famous detective, was greatly influenced by precursors in Victorian crime fiction. The “Sensation Novel” shocked Victorian readers of the 1860s with its scandalous themes of murder, adultery, bigamy, larceny, and other crimes, usually set within “respectable” middle-class society. Genre-defining novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), propelled crime and punishment to the center of popular Victorian fiction. The 1860s culminated with the first full-length detective novel in English, Wilkie Collins’s multiple-perspective masterpiece The Moonstone (1868), and inspired much late-Victorian fiction featuring daring detectives and super sleuths, including Victorian gothic landmarks such as Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But equally significant was the rise of the female detective in the Victorian period, offering new insights into the gendering of crime and punishment. This seminar will investigate the social contexts, literary origins, and narrative techniques and forms of Victorian crime fiction, investigating the deep connections between the explosion of crime fiction in Victorian Britain after 1860 and Victorian anxieties about class, evolution, sexuality, gender, marriage, race, and empire. Authors to be studied include Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary E. Wilkins, and Oscar Wilde.

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Professor Taryne Jade Taylor

Thursday, 4:00pm–6:50pm

This course focuses on Latinx Futurisms in science fiction and fantasy (SF/F). Latinx Futurisms is a subgenre of speculative fiction that is part of the larger CoFuturisms movement which includes Afrofuturisms and Indigenous Futurisms. This semester we will delve into a thread of Latinx Futurisms that I call Ancestral Latinx Futurisms—speculative works that draw on non-Western mythologies as central elements of their world-building. Authors such as Daniel José Older, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Ibañez, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez draw on a wide-range of non-Western cosmologies, both pre-Columbian and syncretized, such as Santería, Mesoamerican cosmologies, Brujería, Andean cosmologies, and Taíno cosmology. In so doing, these authors create a more inclusive mythopoetics of Anglophone sf/f, which has been dominated by works influenced by European cosmologies. In addition to reading phenomenal works of sf/f, we will discuss central elements and theories in science fiction and fantasy studies.

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