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:

*******

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.

*******

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.

*******

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.

*******

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.

*******

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.

*******