MLL Graduate Course Offerings Term: Spring 2023
EALC—Chinese
Graduate course number: CHI5505
Course Title: Reading into Chinese Culture
Instructor: Zhiying Qian
Time: MW 3:05-4:20 pm
Language of Class Discussion: Chinese
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This is an advanced Chinese language course for students interested in learning advanced vocabulary and the written form of Chinese. The course materials include a variety of authentic materials, such as television shows, films, short novels, essays, newspaper articles, and folklore. Students are required to conduct in-depth research on one aspect of Chinese traditional culture and present their findings at the end of the semester.
Graduate course number: FOW 5595-01
Course Title: Studies in East Asian War Cinema
Instructor: (Aaron) Feng Lan
Time: 4:50-8:20, Monday
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course studies major war films produced in China, Japan, and South Korea. The modern histories of these countries have been shaped by military conflicts, ranging from civil wars to regional and world wars. These wars have profoundly affected these countries in each of their own nation-building struggles, their relations with one another, and their positions in the world. Over the past several decades, memories of such wars have been invoked over and over again on the silver screen in these countries. In this course we will explore issues and topics essential to the making of war films, including representations of history, nationalism, gender politics, traumatic memories, East Asian war ethics, and aesthetics/cinematics of violence. More importantly, we will analyze and evaluate these war films not only in the sociopolitical contexts of each nation but also from transnational and comparative perspectives. No knowledge of East Asian languages is required.
EALC—Japanese
Graduate course number: JPT5935
Course Title: Contemporary Japanese Literature
Instructor: Matt Mewhinney
Time: Tues. Thurs. 1:20-2:35
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: Why write? Why read? In response to these questions, this course explores the ethics of the novel and the affective experience of reading in contemporary Japanese literature. We will examine how today’s most highly-acclaimed Japanese writers—including Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Furukawa Hideo, Murata Sayaka, and Kawakami Hiromi—demonstrate the novel’s ethical power to enlist us to know and feel for people different from ourselves. We will also explore how other literary forms (e.g., poetry, art, essay, and film) open spaces for thinking about alterity, sympathy/empathy, and the imagination. No prerequisites. All Japanese texts are presented in English translation.
This course is cross-listed with an undergraduate section JPT4124. Students enrolled in JPT5935 will be required to meet outside of class for an additional graduate discussion session a few times throughout the semester to discuss secondary readings by literature scholars including Wayne C. Booth, Dorothy Hale, Rita Felski, Lisa Zunshine, Suzanne Keen, and Jean-François Vernay.
Graduate course number: JPN5900
Course Title: Advanced Japanese BInstructor: Junko Brudenell
Time: Tues. Thurs. 9:45-11:00
Language of Class Discussion: Japanese
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course is designed to give students an opportunity not only to strengthen their knowledge of intermediate Japanese, but also gain better insight into the structure of modern Japanese. Through homework and classroom exercises, students are taught to write, read, speak, and listen to upper intermediate to lower advanced Japanese.
French
Graduate course number: FRW4770/5775
Course Title: Narrating Epidemics: Disease, Society, and Culture in the Francophone World
Instructor: Vincent Joos
Time: T/Th 9:45-11:00am
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: In this course, we will read 20th and 21st century literary works in parallel with articles in medical humanities and anthropology to explore the individual and collective shifts epidemics and pandemics trigger. We will work in the Francophone world, which could mean Senegal, Belgium, France, or the Haitian community of Miami -- in other words, the Francophone world is truly global and mobile. This means that we will not impose borders to the subjects we study, we will instead think in a comparative fashion. After all epidemics do not know borders. Here are the key questions we will ask during the course of the semester: How diseases alter human interactions? How do they solidify national and regional borders? What do they reveal about individual and collective freedom? What cultural separations and social fractures have been caused by epidemics in the past hundred years? What diseases reveal in terms of economic, social, and gendered inequalities? How epidemics transform our sense of self and our relation to the natural world? Entering the history of francophone regions at crucial moments of biological crisis, this course aims to analyze the many ways diseases have transformed the human experience. The course is in English.
Graduate course number: FRW4761/5765
Course Title: Women and Art in the Caribbean and Quebec: Gender, Colonialism, Indigeneity
Instructor: Martin Munro
Time: T/Th 11:35am-12:50pm
Language of Class Discussion: French
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course focuses on key women in the literature and arts of the Caribbean and Quebec. Designed to tie in with two Winthrop-King conferences, the first on Caribbean women and the second on Indigenous writing from the Americas, the course offers a unique opportunity to learn about and engage with some of the most prominent artists and scholars from both regions. Beginning with the Haitian author Marie Chauvet, we will then read works by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau before discussing the contemporary Haitian artist, Tessa Mars. The second part of the course will focus on Quebec, and authors such as Naomi Fontaine and Joséphine Bacon. Classes will alternate between thematic and stylistic discussions, film viewings, translation workshops, and other activities. At the end of the course students will have been introduced to some of the major women artists from these two regions and will be able to discuss them in terms of issues of gender, colonialism, and indigeneity.
Graduate course number: FRW 4460/5595
Course Title: Charles Baudelaire and Poetic Modernity/ Charles Baudelaire et la modernité poétique.
Instructor: Aimée Boutin
Time: T/Th 3:05-4:20pm
Language of Class Discussion: French
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: A central figure in the development of modern poetry and Modernism, Charles Baudelaire transformed the sonnet and the lyric, developed the prose poem, and wrote art criticism and important essays (on his male and female contemporaries, on intoxicants, on music, on photography and caricature). Given that his writings engaged with so many discourses that became central to modern aesthetics and continue to influence 20-21st century poets who wrote in his wake, this seminar will adopt Charles Baudelaire as a prism through which to examine nineteenth-century cultural production in France and beyond. Depending on participants’ interests, topics of discussion may include figurative or critical concepts such as verse and prose, self and other, good and evil, memory and loss, time and space, spleen and ideal, morality and obscenity, flânerie, the city and the senses, translation across poetic forms and languages, gender and race. Offered in French with all readings in French.
German
Graduate course number: GEW 5595
Course Title: Exile and Nazi Germany
Instructor: Birgit Maier-Katkin
Time: TR, 3:05 – 4:20 pm
Language of Class Discussion: German
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/dep: Yes
Course Description: This course focuses on selected literature by German writers (such as Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers) who were forced to leave their country in the wake of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. It explores the historical events leading to the exodus of so many famous German authors and offers insight into a dark period of German history when human rights were not guaranteed for every German citizen.
Examining works of prose, poetry, drama and theoretical writings, we will address how the disastrous events taking place in their homeland influenced the exiled writers and how these works reflect and respond to the personal, social and political crises of their authors’ time. This course is taught in German. If you have questions please contact me at: bmkatkin@fsu.edu
Graduate course number: GET 5525
Course Title: Cinema of Prostitution and Corruption
Instructor: Christian Weber
Time: T, 4:50-7:30 / Th, 4:50-6:05
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/depts: Yes
Course Description: This course explores one very prominent theme in German and World Cinema: Prostitution and Corruption. Why is the prostitute such a prominent figure in films from the 1920s to the present? How do films with prostitutes as lead characters promote and reflect on debates about modernity, gender, and power relations? How have these debates played out differently/similarly in various societies and how have they changed over the course of the past hundred years? We will investigate these questions (among others) by observing the role of prostitutes in films from three different eras: the early period of modernization and emancipation in the 1920s and 30s, the New Wave Cinemas of the 1960s and 70s, and contemporary Global Cinema. While the general focus will be on German Cinema (esp. Josef von Sternberg, Reiner W. Fassbinder), I am more than happy to add examples from other national cinematic traditions according to participating students’ interests.
Taught in English. Please contact me (cweber@fsu.edu) if you are interested and have questions.
Italian
Graduate course number: ITW5505
Course Title: Gender in Italian Culture
Instructor: Silvia Valisa
Time: W 3:05-5:55PM
Language of Class Discussion: Italian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This class explores Italian culture, narrative and visual arts through the lens of gender and sexuality. What is gender? What does it mean to study culture, history and literature through gender? How do gender and sexuality intersect? Using a reverse chronology--from the recent election of a right-wing government in Italy to the beginning of the 20th century-, we will explore how female, male, and non-binary identities are represented, critiqued, negotiated and performed in the Italophone space. We will explore, among others: the gendering of the Italian language, drag culture, writer Elena Ferrante's renegotiations of gender tropes, the rise of feminist movements in the 1960s and 70s, Pier Paolo Pasolini's visual investigation of post-war sexual customs, Italian women's armed participation to anti-fascist resistance and the "Bible of Italian Feminism' - Sibilla Aleramo's A Woman (1906).
Graduate course number: ITW5705
Course Title: Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso (Trecento Writers)
Instructor: Elizabeth Coggeshall
Time: TR 3:05-4:20 (with required additional one-hour discussion section for majors/ MAs in Italian, time TBD)
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description:
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Dante's Commedia is its ability to oscillate between the foreign and the familiar. The commentary tradition testifies to the poem's perennial foreignness: even the first readers required explanation of the text's complex detail, local history, and obscure figures. Dante's own sons produced some of the earliest commentaries, and within the Western canon the amount of commentary produced on the Commedia is second only to that on the Bible. Yet as we read the Comedy in the 21* century, seven centuries do not stand in the way of a profound sympathy between Dante's world and our own. His insights into the human condition remain relevant, continuing to inform our understanding of how one might best live. In this course we will follow Dante's path through the afterlife, heeding both its familiarity and its foreignness, as it winds through questions of ethics, politics, theology, poetics, and social life in medieval Italy and beyond. In Spring '23, this course will conclude with a hands-on public-facing project, in which students will collaborate with one another to use digital tools to present research on the multimedia and multilingual resonance of Dante's poem across 21st-century global cultures. Students with expertise in all languages are welcome!
Graduate course number: ITA 5900 (will become an LIN course)
Course Title: Rekindling the Romance: Historical Romance Linguistics for the 21st Century
Instructor: Katy Prantil
Time: TR 9:45-11:00
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No / Yes (but knowledge of a Romance language is expected
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes (Romance languages)
Course Description:
The main objective of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the interconnectedness of the Romance languages through detailed linguistic analysis of phonological (sound) changes, morphological (parts of words) changes and some syntactic (word order) changes. Since this course assumes no prior linguistic knowledge, after a brief introduction and classification of the Romance languages currently spoken, an overview of sounds and transcription will be presented along with key terminology. Following this we will continue outlining the historical development of the Romance languages, starting with an overview of Latin. From there we will then analyze the major Romance languages from a historical perspective, noting similarities and differences. In order to test our understanding of the processes at play in linguistic change, we will examine texts from different historical stages, as they really are the only record we have of how individuals may have spoken during this developmental period.
Slavic
Graduate course number: RUW5930
Course Title: Epic Song in Southern and Eastern Europe
Instructor: Romanchuk
Time: TR 9:45-11
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target languages: No / Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes
Catalog Description: Oral-traditional epic (narrative) songs about the deeds and deaths of heroes—their comings of age and weddings, returns or rescues, and sieges of cities—have enthralled and unsettled audiences from time out of mind. This seminar surveys the modern epic of southern and eastern Europe in historical context, the Parry-Lord theory of oral-formulaic composition, and the discipline of oral tradition.
Course Description: In southeastern Europe—Greece, the Sunni Muslim and Orthodox Christian Slavic lands, Romania, and Albania—epic song in its oral-traditional form survived almost to the present day. This modern epic was shaped in and by the Ottoman Empire, and our seminar focuses on the songs of that shared space or ecumene: the epic of the Turks’ Slavic coreligionists in Bosnia, where Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord tested the theory of oral composition; and that of the Turks’ subjects or foemen elsewhere in Europe, in particular Greece, Serbia, and southern Ukraine. The expansion of or resistance to Ottoman power and the concomitant encounter of Muslim and Christian are central to all these epics. Beyond Ottoman Europe, this seminar surveys the later Ukrainian epic (which focuses on resistance to Polish rule) as well as the Russian (which preserves, inter alia, pre-Ottoman Ukrainian, and more generally Slavic, song plots).
As Pamela Lothspeich says, epic is about power. Yet epic may serve to justify power or to resist unjust power: the epic of expansion is met by the epic of resistance. Moreover, non-heroic epic, dealing with family conflict and sung by women, often forms a counterpoint to heroic epic sung by men. Due to their tribal or nationalistic appeal—as listeners “identify with a hero of their blood, cast in their mold” (Richard M. Dorson)—epic songs have been reborn in recent years as particularist works, serving to mobilize populations in nationalist movements and wars. Yet epic songs also have an enduring, universal appeal as chronicles of the deeds of those “who live for action and for the honour which comes from it” (C. M. Bowra). Finally, epic song is the royal road to the study of oral tradition, an “exciting and rapidly expanding field” (John Miles Foley) synthesizing Parry and Lord’s study of oralformulaic composition with anthropology, musicology, and performance studies.
Graduate course number: RUW5375
Course Title: Russian Short Story
Instructor: Wakamiya
Time: W 4:50-7:50
Language of Class Discussion: Russian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No / Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes (e.g., REES)
Course Description: NOTE: for non-native speakers ONLY: native speakers contact Romanchuk This course studies the development of the short story in the 19th and 20th centuries, the major writers, and their representative works.
Graduate course number: RUS5415
Course Title: Graduate Russian Conversation and Comprehension
Instructor: Efimov
Time: TR 1:20-2:35
Language of Class Discussion: Russian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No / Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes (e.g., REES)
Course Description: NOTE: for non-native speakers ONLY This course consists of extensive conversation and comprehension practice on contemporary themes. May be repeated once for credit to a maximum of six semester hours. Not open to native speakers of Russian.
Spanish
Graduate course number: SPN 5776
Course Title: Acquisition of Spanish Phonology
Instructor: González
Time: T R 3:00-4:15
Language of Class Discussion: Spanish
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the fundamental theories, techniques and methodologies concerning the acquisition of phonetics and phonology in a second language, and their application to Spanish. It surveys seminal and current research on the acquisition of Spanish phonology and explores instructional strategies that can be used in teaching Spanish pronunciation.
Graduate course number: LIN 5723
Course Title: Linguistic and Cognitive Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition
Instructor: Leeser
Time: M W 3:05-4:20
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: In this course, students will be introduced to a wide range of theories and key constructs within the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Students will also become familiarized with SLA research methods and data analysis procedures. (Minimum requirement for the MA exam in Second Language Acquisition).
Graduate course number: LIN 5932
Course Title: Programming in Linguistics
Instructor: Juzek
Time: T R 1:20-2:35
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description:
Graduate course number: ITA 5900
Course Title: Studies in Italian Language and Literature: Historical Romance Linguistics
Instructor: Prantil
Time: T R 9:45-11:00
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: YES
Course Description: This course focuses on the interconnectedness of the Romance languages through detailed linguistic analysis of phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes in the development from Latin into various Romance varieties.
Graduate course number: SPW 5365
Course Title: Empire and Intimacy in Colonial Spanish America
Instructor: Goldmark
Time: T 3:05-6:35
Language of Class Discussion:
Reading knowledge in required in target language:
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments:
Course Description: Sex has played a fundamental role in the construction of Spanish imperialism as a unique geopolitical system. It undergirds the definition of Latin America as a singular space produced by “sexual conquest,” procreation, and mestizaje. To question this single model of imperial organization and its contemporary legacies, this course engages theory from kinship and sexuality studies and interrogates how “intimate” relationships—sexual, but also affective, ethnographic, and religious—configure imperial systems, their political structures, and hierarchies of difference. We will read a variety of sources, from literary to bureaucratic documents, to ask “where” and “how” imperial intimacy takes place. While our primary texts remit to 16th and 17th century Spanish America, we will engage scholarship on empire and intimacy, kinship, and sexuality from a variety of historical periods and imperial traditions to study how intimacy builds empire(s). In turn, we will consider the strengths and challenges of comparative work across empires and time periods.
Graduate course number: SPW 5586
Course Title: The Early Spanish Episteme
Instructor: Howard
Time: T R 1:20-2:35
Language of Class Discussion: Spanish
Reading knowledge in required in target language: YES
Course Description: This course begins with the premise that it is possible to trace certain important epistemological shifts in the Western world from the end of the Middle Ages to our own time. The course aims to heighten our awareness of how today the practice of professional cultural studies is systematically interpellated through the discourses specific to our own systems of knowledge and communication. Taking medieval and early modern Iberia, as well as its colonies, as a case study, examinations of a selection of texts from this geographic and temporal space revolve around the usefulness, or lack thereof, of some of the contemporary West's most prominent social constructions of subject formation, such as race, class, gender, and nationhood.
Graduate course number: SPW 5486
Course Title: Contemporary Spanish Women Writers
Instructor: Cappuccio
Time: T R 11:35-12:50
Language of Class Discussion: Spanish
Reading knowledge in required in target language: YES
Course Description:
Graduate course number: 5386
Course Title: Contemporary Spanish American Prose Fiction since 1927
Instructor: Galeano
Time: Mondays 6:35-9:05pm
Language of Class Discussion: Spanish
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Course Description: