University of North Florida -- Department of English: Programs of Study -- Orientations: A Booklet for Incoming Graduate Students

Welcome to the M.A. Program in English at the University of North Florida. The M.A. Program is designed to serve the interests and needs of a broad variety of graduate students: secondary school teachers, prospective community college instructors, and other professionals requiring an advanced degree; students preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs in literature or cultural studies; creative writers seeking more experience in literature; returning students looking to supplement their previous work in literature and satisfy personal interests; and others. With courses offered year round and primarily in the evening, the M.A. Program class schedule is convenient for both part-time and full-time students.

The members of the graduate faculty in the English Department have diverse backgrounds, professional interests, and pedagogical theories and methods. Course syllabi and requirements vary accordingly. Nonetheless, graduate students can expect to take courses that share certain features distinguishing them from undergraduate study. This booklet discusses some of these features, providing a brief overview of the M.A. Program and its general goals, suggesting resources for achieving the goals, and introducing the members of our faculty.

For Program requirements, please see the UNF Graduate Catalogue or the M.A. Program website accessible through http://www.unf.edu/coas/english. To discuss the Program, please contact the Coordinator of the M.A. Program, Chris Gabbard: 620-1254, cgabbard@unf.edu.

We look forward to working with you to help you achieve your goals. We hope that your studies here are challenging, enjoyable, and fulfilling.

Graduate study in English literature extends undergraduate work by considering additional critical, theoretical, and social complexities. Entering graduate students may be used to dealing one-on-one with a novel, poem, play or film. Graduate courses, though, often will encourage students to step further out of their existing critical frameworks and into new ones by reading and engaging with critical and theoretical literature. The stepping out may be provisional (students taking a course introducing psychoanalytic criticism need not commit themselves to a lifetime of psychoanalytic approaches to literature), but the coursework will complicate and enrich a student's intellectual life both inside and outside the university. Graduate literary study does not teach us to recite what we already know. The value of the best graduate study like the value of the best literature is in its challenge, in how it changes ways of thinking.

Graduate students consequently often read theoretical essays and scholarly criticism along with literary works. They also often do primary research into letters, manuscripts, contextual materials (such as economic, social and political records), etc. Graduate instructors frequently assign such reading and research, though committed graduate students also may pursue such work independently or, more often, under the individual guidance of their instructor. While graduate study will increase the complexity of your thinking, it also will increase the intensity and, we hope, the pleasure with which you read, whether you are working your way through a group of novels or through the textual universe of a single phrase.

The primary goal of the M.A. Program in English is to help students become still more thoughtful, more discerning and more articulate citizens of the university and of the world. This is a large goal. We are excited about working with you to achieve both it and your individual goals.

SPECIFIC GOALS AND MEANS OF ACHIEVING THEM

Most students arrive in the M.A. Program in English already having established themselves as exceptionally good readers. The literary and critical or theoretical texts that students encounter in the M.A. Program, though, will present new complexities to even the most accomplished readers. The following questions can lead to effective reading of literary, critical, and theoretical texts alike.

• What do you know about the text, about its medium (oral, written, filmic, electronic), the conventions governing its genre, and its author?

b. Are you willing to commit the time and energy necessary to read a text that you may not find entertaining that you may find difficult, frustrating, baffling?

c. Are you willing for the text to be more complex than you suspect or know how to negotiate?

c. How does the text address its possible readers? Does the text seem to postulate an ideal reader? Does the text seem to exclude any readers?

d. What claims does the text make? What rhetorical strategies does the text use in the interest of its claims?

e. What kind of diction does the text use specialized and in-group, "common," a vernacular?

• What characters and/or what real people (for instance, theorists or critics) appear in the text, when, under what circumstances, and playing what role?

b. If the text lacks a plot, how might one describe the movement from beginning to ending?

e. How does the text's linear sequence of words (if it has such a sequence) affect the experience of reading?

a. What are the logical, as opposed to temporal, relations among the texts events, scenes, or moments?

b. How do these logical relations come into focus during the experience of moving through the text; that is, how does the temporal experience of the text disclose its non-temporal structure?

c. What kind of spaces, spatial orientations, and geographical references occur within the text?

Also, see "Hints for Reviewing Critical and Theoretical Sources" in section on Researching

Critical conversations focusing on literary topics are a useful path to knowledge. By taking part in rigorous discussion, we agree to test, question, and challenge our own ideas and beliefs as well as those of others. This mutual undertaking can help all participants make sound, reflective judgments.

For critical conversation to work, the participants must be candid, sincere, curious, and willing to prepare. This joint activity calls for "making arguments," not having them. Making arguments is both cooperative and competitive, both playful and serious. Victory is less the goal than is strengthening powers of judgment. Still, on the personal level, much is at stake. Others may reveal our thinking to be inconsistent or our claims to be unconvincing. The knowledge that our views may be challenged or that our reasoning may be unpersuasive creates an incentive to refine and develop our thinking and to search for arguments of the highest quality.

Making and defending arguments publicly helps us to become increasingly familiar with the intricate way in which literature works. By offering a forum in which such critical conversations take place, the graduate program at the University of North Florida helps its students develop analytical and interpretive skills and abilities of reflective judgment.

While knowledge of the protocols and practices of doing research must develop through years of experience, making efficient use of sources and resources will help all researchers with their writing projects. The following resources and "Hints for Reviewing Critical and Theoretical Sources" can help you become an efficient researcher.

• Reference Librarians: When in doubt, ask. Reference librarians are a valuable resource: by training they like to track down hard-to-find information. After you have done what you can do to find your materials yourself, ask a reference librarian for help tracking down more, especially if you know that a book, article or a search database exists and you cannot locate it.

• UNF and SUS Library Catalogue: The UNF library has a strong collection of critical monographs and comprehensive critical studies, though other libraries (especially those connected to research institutions like UF and FSU) have still larger collections. After looking through the UNF catalogue, switch over to the SUS (State University System) catalogue and search again. If you find interesting titles, request the books through Interlibrary Loan (see ILLiad, below); it's best to do your search early so that ILLiad has time to get the books for you and you have time to review them.

• MLA Bibliography: This is the best, most comprehensive bibliography of criticism written about English and foreign language literatures. The bibliography is available on-line at the library (or, if you have the right software and permissions, remotely) and also in large catalogues. You can search key words, author names, and titles. To save time and conduct thorough research, write a list of key words relevant to your project before starting your search. The MLA database provides bibliographical information and subject information about articles, but does not provide full text. Our library has a very limited collection of periodicals; do your MLA search early so that you will have time to use Interlibrary Loan (see ILLiad, below) as needed. If you are fortunate, the MLA database will provide a link to an full electronic text located on JSTOR (described below).

• JSTOR: This database provides the full text of articles from a limited number of periodical publications (many of which also have print versions). Generally speaking, you should back into JSTOR from the MLA Bibliography so that you do not miss important articles that appear only in print.

• ILLiad: Interlibrary Loan is an essay-saver (sometimes it feels like a life-saver) in a city that lacks a large research library. The UNF library staff are very responsive to requests, and books and articles often arrive within a few days of your request. Sometimes, though, they do not; so, request early and do not absolutely count on being able to see a desired text.

• Special Collections: If you are doing work on literature you may wish to use rare texts in Special Collections either at UNF (where our Special Collections are relatively small) or at a research library such as UF (considerably larger). You can gain great pleasures and many critical insights from working with a first edition of a text.

• Microfilm/Microfiche/Microcards: Can't get to a Special Collections library? Many historical texts (including journals, newspapers, and now-rare popular publications) are available on various microforms. These often can be obtained through Interlibrary Loan (see ILLiad, above).

• English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC): This reference database lists nearly all English-language titles extending from the beginning of publishing to 1800.

Books

• Look first at front matter and back matter: i.e. at full title, at series information (if any), at table of contents (chapter titles, etc.), and at index. Construct a sense of the book's focus and what the book covers. In five minutes or so, you should be able to determine whether the book will be of use.

• Read the introductory chapter. Introductory chapters of critical monographs frequently include a chapter description which explains in a paragraph or two the content and argument of each chapter; find this chapter description and get the author's own summary of the book's specific concerns and objectives.

• Use the table of contents and index to go to specific areas of interest to you; then, expand your reading outward to gain a fuller understanding of the context and direction of the specific discussion. When reading selectively, beware of reading out of context; an author might make a provisional case using evidence that is directly relevant to you only to move well beyond that case by chapter's – or book's – end.

• Consider the title closely for the specific topic and method range that it suggests: will the article address more than the work(s) you are interested in? less? Will it take a feminist approach? a psychoanalytic approach? a new historicist approach?

• Read the first paragraph (or two) and the last paragraph (or two). Does the author summarize the argument and content of the article?

• Page through the article, looking at subject headings (if any) and reading occasional sentences or paragraphs. Does the article look as if it warrants reading in its entirety?

As you collect materials, you may wish to start writing a bibliography (well before you actually start writing your essay) so as to be able to review your potential sources at a glance. For related purposes, you may wish to annotate your bibliography. An annotated bibliography briefly describes and sometimes evaluates sources. (See the annotated bibliography at the end of this booklet.)

The Graduate Faculty of the M.A. Program in English at the University of North Florida believe that the most important and lasting communication in the study of literature occurs through writing, and that writing well about texts at a graduate level is inseparable from good reading, conversation and research. Nearly all graduate English courses require substantial writing and use this writing as the primary basis for course grades.

In Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff identifies two crucial questions that graduate students should ask themselves when writing: "So what?" and "Who cares?" (198) Effective critical writing, he argues persuasively, should answer both questions clearly.

What are the implications? What standard ways of thinking about a specific text – or textuality or language itself – must be reconsidered in the face of your essay's argument?

For whom does your essay matter? Who else is thinking about the texts, the issues and/or the theories you are discussing? Do they agree with you or disagree with you?

Such questions imply certain courses of action for writers. Central among them is learning the field – in other words, learning what others have said and written about your subject. These others are likely to be among those to whom your essay most matters, and these are the people with whom you should consider yourself to be engaging in a critical conversation when writing your essay. The literary critic and theorist Kenneth Burke suggests that we should think about this conversation as we might think about a conversation at a cocktail party. Graff, paraphrasing Burke, explains, "people who walk up to a conversation, listen to what is going on to find out what the interlocutors are already talking about, then make a contribution to this pre-existing conversation generally have more success than those who interrupt whoever is speaking and launch into an unrelated discourse about whatever happens to be on their minds" (Graff 194-5).

Graduate faculty generally will not expect you to be experts on the topics you write about. Some essay assignments may ask you to explore ideas instead of (or as well as) taking a well-supported stand in a critical controversy. The best exploratory writing, though, delves as well into a complex body of what people already know or think that they know.

The M.A. Program also values compositional clarity and a manifest knowledge of the conventions of critical writing. Even the most brilliant thinking will be lost on readers if they are unable to access it through the thinker's writing. And even the most brilliant and clearly written essays will lose authority if the writer shows an ignorance of critical discourse conventions.

Unless an instructor requests otherwise, then, essays should establish a focus or an argumentative claim and should develop it clearly, logically and with supporting evidence. Essays should be free of grammatical and mechanical errors.

Also, unless an instructor requests otherwise, essays should use the MLA (Modern Language Association) format as set forth in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (2003). Essays should have titles that engage the reader's interest and inform the reader of the paper's focus. They should be double-spaced throughout (including in block quotations and notes), with one-inch margins and a standard 12-point font. Pages should be numbered. If notes are necessary, they should appear as endnotes. A bibliography of texts mentioned in the paper should appear on a Works Cited page.

Mary Baron
Dick Bizot
Keith Cartwright
Timothy Donovan
Chris Gabbard
Kathy Hassall
Marnie Jones
Sam Kimball
Tru Leverette
Nancy Levine
Clark Lunberry
Jason Mauro
Pam Monteleone
Betsy Nies
Bill Slaughter
Jillian Smith
Brian Striar
Allen Tilley
Bart Welling
Mike Wiley
Mark Workman

Teaching Interests: British Renaissance; adolescent and children's literature; the illustrated book; pedagogy; the problem of evil (literature and theology)

Current Research and Writing: STORYKNIFE (poetry); National Writing Project; educational consulting

Select Publications and Projects: Wheat Among Bones (poetry, 1979); Letters for the New England Dead (poetry, 1974); "Getting Out of the Way" (with Denise Rambach, 2002); "Gerard Manley Hopkins" (1998); "Blind Rebellion: Lessing's The Good Terrorist" (1986)

Teaching Interests: modern and contemporary Irish literature; Victorian and modern British literature; literature and the other arts

Current Research and Writing: Irish literature, especially poetry; the story of Salome and John the Baptist in history, legend, literature, and the arts

Select Publications and Projects: "Authority and Violence in the Irish Schoolroom: Time in Armagh" (forthcoming); "Eavan Boland Subverts 'the previous terms of . . . discourse' in 'Mother Ireland' and Other Poems" (under consideration); "A Sense of Places: The Homing Instinct in the Poetry of John Montague" (1995); "Films from Irish Plays, 1911-1996" (1997); "Mastering the Colonizer's Tongue: Yeats, Joyce and Their Successors in the Irish Classroom" (1997)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: I expect to enable students to read texts worth reading, to confront issues worth confronting, and to engage with any and all questions and ideas that may arise from the reading. I expect to challenge students to exercise (and in the process to improve) their reading, thinking, writing, listening, and speaking skills. I expect that my expectations of what students can accomplish, including the levels of excellence they can attain, will exceed their own expectations coming into a course; yet I expect that my expectations will prove realistic and achievable. I expect that everyone in a class, myself included, is there to learn and will learn; I expect, too, that everyone will find pleasure and satisfaction in learning. My goal is to reach these expectations.

Teaching Interests: African American literature and culture; African diaspora and expressive traditions (particularly the Caribbean and West Africa); literature and culture of the U.S. South; creolization and new world studies (particularly crossroads of the U.S. south and the Caribbean); modern/contemporary poetry of the Americas and West Africa; postcolonial theory and subaltern studies; comparative literature, methodology and practice

Current Research and Writing: Voodoo Hermeneutics / The Crossroads Sublime (an examination of creolized religion, music, and landscapes in works located in the Gullah Sea Islands, New Orleans, and Florida [contemporary Miami and colonial St. Augustine]); poetry

Select Publications and Projects: Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, Gothic Tales (2002); Saint-Louis: A Wool Strip-cloth for Sekou Dabo (Poetry, 1997); "Notes Toward a Voodoo Hermeneutics: Marvelous Transitions, Soul Rhythms, and Passages to the Creole Saints in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow" (2003); "Loyalists, Geechees & Africans: North American Roots of Afro-Bahamian Culture" (2000); "Reading Roots from Sunjata to Kunta Kinte and Milkman Dead" (1995)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: Literature exists to test us, to give us certain kinds of pleasure and vigor, and to challenge as we "essay" our various ways in the world. I like to approach the word "essay" more as a verb than a noun. What matters most to me in a graduate course is that students work towards independent "essaying" of their own purpose and interests in the courses I offer. I usually call students to work on a relatively long (12-15 page) term paper, which we workshop through various draftings over the course of the semester. For this to work best, students must find a way to essay a topic born of their own curiosity and interest, and then follow through with their own independent research and drafting. I stand ready to assist at every stage as we work to propose viable topics, locate relevant sources, and persevere through drafts to the oral presentation and final "hard copy." My graduate courses tend more towards critical conversation, discussion, and single-page "call and response" student presentations than towards lecture format . . . though the professing/preaching mode may come into play as well from time to time. The goal in the end is to help you essay something in which you are invested enough to give clear and vibrant form.

Teaching Interests: Rhetoric and Composition, Rhetoric and Philosophy, Literacy and Media Studies, Critical and Literary Theory

Publications: "The Fog of War: What Yet Remains." with A. Samuel Kimball and Jillian Smith 2005; "To Do Justice to This Moment Between Exhaustion and Totality?" with John Mucklebauer 2004; "Community, Assimilation, and the Unfamiliar." 2002.

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: In sum, I try to strengthen graduate students to be cloase, focused readers, careful, stylish writers, who engage in spirited, respectful discussion throughout the seminar.

Teaching Interests: Disability Studies (with an emphasis on the rhetoric and representation of cognitive impairment), British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, gender studies, biocultural studies, medical discourse, and travel writing

Current Research and Writing: Idiocy and Wit: The Origins of Our Ideas about Mental Disability, a book-length study considering depictions of physiologically based mental impairment (and its metaphorical applications) and spanning the period roughly from John Locke's 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding to William Wordsworth's 1798 poem "The Idiot Boy"

Select Publications and Projects: Articles on Early Modern travel wrtiing and texts by Andrew Marvell, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and John Dryden have appeared (or soon will appear) in such journals as SEL (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900), Restoration, ELN, and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: One of my mentors, Prof. Wai-Leung Kwok of San Francisco State University, used to say that we engage in literary study in order "to explore our histories, our responsibilities, and our interests, as students of literature." His articulation captures the nature of the labor we undertake in, and in preparation for, the classroom.

Current Research and Writing: A book on the ways in which literature for children and adolescents explores the world as a dangerous place

Select Publications and Projects: Holy Toledo: Religion and Politics in the Life of 'Golden Rule' Jones(1998); "Telling His Own Story: Henry James's William Wetmore Story" (1987); "'Hurricanes, Traffic, Wet Grass & Bugs': Experiential Learning on the Florida-Georgia Coast" (1995); "An 'Unsuitable Job' for Anyone: The 'Filthy Trade' in P. D. James" (1997)

(1) offer a nuanced interpretation of literary texts; (2) articulate the arguments of relevant scholarly debates; (3) understand how varying theoretical perspectives influence our interpretations of texts; and (4) advance their own ideas in the context of an on-going scholarly conversation.

I value active engagement with the material and the course's organizing questions. Graduate classes function as seminars where the instructor and students collaborate. This requires significant preparation outside of class: a thoughtful, analytic reading of the primary texts; research in contextual and theoretical perspectives; continual revision of a term-long writing project. I assign an Annotated Bibliography early in the semester, which requires students to summarize a number of significant articles or texts. Students share this work with one another so that we gain a larger sense of the shifting debates. Building on that work, I assign a term-long paper that requires students to integrate their own ideas into the on-going scholarly conversation. The research and writing that each student engages in throughout the term enlivens class discussion. At the end of the semester students formally present their work to the members of the class.

Teaching Interests: American literature (Puritan, Nineteenth-Century, American Renaissance, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville); classical Greek literature; literary criticism and theory (especially Derrida's deconstruction); literature and science (including evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology)

Current Research and Writing: Literature as a "science" of false belief, literature and the spirit (as opposed to the techniques) of the democracy to come, literature and artificial life

Select Publications and Projects: The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture (U of Delaware, forthcoming);"The Linguistic Turn, First-Person Expereince, and the Terror of Relativism: The Affective Limits of Ratiocination" (on Poe's "The Purloined Letter," forthcoming); "Contraceiving the Truth in The Scarlet Letter" (2006); "D-Ciphering Dupin's Fac-simile Signature: The Infanticidal Implications of a 'Dessein si Funeste'" (2005); "The Fog of War: What Yet Remains," with Tim Donovan and Jillian Smith (2005); "Travel, Travail, and the Biblical Itinerary of the Word: The Contrasting Examples of Poe and Melville" (2005); "Conceptions and Contraceptions of the Future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, Alien Resurrection" (2002); "Laius a tergo, the Symbolic Order, the Production of the Future: Chinatown's Primal Scene" (2002); "(Not) Begetting the Future: Technological Autochthony, Sexual Reproduction, and the Mythic Structure of The Matrix" (2001); "'Bad-Ass Dudes' in Pulp Fiction: Homophobia and the Counterphobic Idealization of Women" (1997).

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: To discern in different ways literature's intricacies of beauty; to trace, again, in different ways, its astonishing deployments of language; to remain open to its category-defying surprises; to continue to feel the shock of its force; and to behold what Jacqued Derrida describes as the "incomprehensible newness" of literature's uncanny voicings - at once alien and intimate, consolatory and disturbing, familiar and baffling - which seemingly arrive as if from elsewhere else.

Teaching Interests: African-American, multicultural, and mised race literature; gender, cultural, race and mixed race studies

Current Research and Writing: book: Meridians: Mapping Metaphors of Mixed Race Identity; articles: Civil Rights era and contemporary cinematic portrayals of interracial romance; late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of mixed race memoirs

Selected Publications and Projects: "Traveling Identities: Mixed Race Quests and Fran Ross's Oreo" (2006); "Revolutionary Vision: Black Women Writers, Black Nationalist Ideology, and Interracial Sexuality" (2002)

Statement on Class Goals & Expectations: Being interested in the ways literature intersects with and illuminates life, I design classes that encourage students to bring all of themselves into the classroom, which I see as a space where we can better understand ourselves, others, and our potential to impact the world. Graduate classes are arenas where we challenge oursleves and are challenged, by others and by the texts we read, in productive intellectualism; they are spaces where we practice the use of our voices, both written and oral, and where colloboration occurs in the production of knowledge. To that end, I design discussion-centered classes, expecting all participants to contribute their unique voices and insights. Students work on publication-length term papers that are drafted throughout the semester and publicly discussed through oral presentations. Students also produce shorter response papers that accompanies critical inquiry, intellecutal discovery, and self-awareness, as well as the motivation to connect theory with praxis. They emerge ready to ask new questions, to create new answers, and to imagine new possibilities for being in the world and being in relation to others.

Teaching Interests: Dramatic literature and performance studies, the interrelations of the arts, the history of avant-garde, the history of modernism (and beyond)

Current Research and Writing: My recent research has found me back in the cruel world of the French theater theorist Antonin Artaud, via Derrida's seminal essays upon him, for a recent conference at the University of Manitoba, and from there, an eventual, desired publication emerging from the material. Soon, I hope to continue on an essay already underway on the visual, quasi-concretely poetic dimension found in the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Selected Publications: "Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman's String Quartet II and Triadic Memories" (Substance 2006); "Wiping Blood from the Walls: Medea's Make-Believe Pleasures of Terror" (Theatre Topics 2006); "So Much Depends: Printed Matter, Dying Words and the Entropic Poem" (Critical Inquiry 2004); "Theater as Installation: Ann Hamilton and the Accretions of Gesture" (Mosaic 2004); "In the Name of Coriolanus: The Prompter (Prompted)" (Comparative Literature 2002); "Quiet Catastrophe: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Vanished" (Discourse 2002); "(Silence): Scripting [It], Staging [It] on the Page, For the Stage" (Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 2001); StonePoems (a book of poems and photgraphs) (Kalligram Press 1999).

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: In any graduate-level class that I might offer, I strive to create a congenial atmosphere conducive to both passionate engagement and a sharp focus upon whatever types of text we might be examining. And of those "types of text," I would encourage us always to keep our definitions broad and inclusive, allowing for interdisciplinary convergences, as well as a receptivity to the unexpected associations with daily life, from the newspaper's raging headlines, to our surrounding community's most immediate developments.

Though plenty is heard from me, there is ample opportunity among us for exchange, confrontation, agreement, dispute, as we collectively attempt to discern the multiple meanings and messages to be found in the material at hand. In this pursuit, esthetic attention and application are alwyas to be coupled with the most rigorous of analytical inquiries. As such, I'm generally less interested in singular conclusions to an argument, and more interested in evidence of creative and lyrical thought that has dialectically deepened and made more rich and complex our chosen topic.

Teaching Interests: Interdisciplinary learning (the grotesque in literature and art, blues and literature); experimental fiction; the American Dream from 1860 to 1960; Faulkner

Current Research and Writing: "Blues Structure in Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues'"; Djuna Barne's Nightwood; "Rural Poor in Literature"

Select Publications and Projects: "Teaching Robert Johnson" (2002); "Works in Progress: The Uncollected Poetry of Barnes's Patchin Place Period" (1993); the Djuna Barnes edition of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (editor, 1993); "'She Plays Blues Like a Man': Gender Bending the Country Blueswomen" (1993)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: I try, in my classes, to create a balance between critical inquiry and close encounters of the third kind with the text. Students can expect to receive a large number of handouts (definitions, reading lists, theoretical texts, etc.) in the first weeks of class. I want them to be able to use the critical vocabulary as soon as possible, so we can relax about its use in papers and discussions. In class discussions, I try to use a Socratic method, asking questions to elicit statements, and then asking the students to justify what they have said or to offer evidence from the text we are discussing, while I add statements and make adjustments to the blackboard tally. When this method works it serves as an effective form of student-centered teaching. My goal is to effect close readings of texts that seem to come almost entirely from the students. Wherever possible, I try to stretch students by asking them to exercise their imaginations in small group exercises (acting out a charade based on a scene in As I Lay Dying, for example, or inventing terms for use on examples of experimental fiction my favorite, so far, is the term "tromboning"). I have a preference for creative assignments. I ask students to write imitations, for example, and then defend their work by analyzing their imitations, using the critical apparatus at their disposal. Such work encourages the development of a dispassionate understanding of the student's own writing while it requires an ear sensitive to the nuances of literary style and structure. What matters to me the most is clarity of thought, originality, and a tactful use of critical theory, in that order.

Select Publications and Projects: "'The More I Say 'I':' Frost and the Construction of the Self" (2001); "The New Frontier: Huck Finn in the Nuclear Age" (2000); "The Shape of Despair: Structure and Vision in Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'" (1998)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: With Gerald Graff, I believe that "talk about books and subjects is as important educationally as the books and subjects themselves," and that "elevating books and subjects over the secondary talk about them only helps keep students tongue-tied." This "talk about books" embraces both the discussions we have in class and the reflections found in literary journals, books, and other sources of what is unfortunately called secondary literature. There is nothing secondary about such literature; it comprises the other side of the page of a single text, our object of study. I hope my students leave my graduate classes with a sense that the acts of reading a text, mulling it over, offering a position in class, pitting that position against the position of others, researching the criticism and commentary on a text, and writing an article-length paper are all parts of the single complex gesture of reading. With the addition of one small-bracketed insertion, Robert Frost has the best bead on graduate level work that I know: "Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems [and criticism] ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A) .We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do."

Teaching Interests: 20th-century American literature; American ethnic traditions; postmodernism

Current Research and Writing: Eugenics in Southern literature; ethnic traditions in children's and adolescent literature

Select Publications and Projects: Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideologies in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920's (2002); "Writing History through Collage: Using Crots in the First-Year Research Paper" (2000); "Whiteness Studies" (2002)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: In my classes, students will engage in critical thinking, focusing not only on close reading skills but also the application of literary theory to texts. Students will examine broad literary issues such as questions of periodicity or canonization in addition to unpacking cultural assumptions surrounding the act of reading, writing, and publication. Typically, I encourage students to examine social and historical contexts for the production of texts, their critical reception, as well as the impact of our contemporary milieu on our own analytical approaches and responses to such texts. Students will always read secondary material either literary theory or criticism provided in class or critical articles during individual research. Developing arguments, supporting positions, and locating the limitations of such positions will inform class discussion and individual writing assignments. Students will write often, receiving feedback throughout the semester in preparation for the demands of the final research paper. Class presentations will augment discussion.

Teaching Interests: American literature; American studies; world literature in English; creative writing; poetry and poetics; criticism and theory; literature and psychology; culture and technology

Current Research and Writing: Various poems and essays; editing and publishing Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics

Select Publications and Projects: Older Men (poetry, forthcoming); Untold Stories (poetry, 1990); The Politics of My Heart (poetry, 1996)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: Among other things I've heard myself say, more than once, about my teaching: My teaching project is to erase the lines that are too often drawn between literature and life, classroom and world, critical and creative writing. It is, finally, the use value of any text that most interests me in it.

Teaching Interests: Contemporary American literature; film; visual culture; cultural studies

Current Research and Writing: Documentarian Frederick Wiseman and the idea of affective cinema; Drivers' education films and citizenship; collecting and collections in America a project addressing issues of acquisition, visual display, accumulation, ownership, and simply the stuff people keep

Select Publications and Projects: "Relics, Remains, and Spectacles: September 11" (2003); "A New Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1996); "The Politics of the Spectacle: The Transgender True Crime Case of Brandon Teena" (forthcoming).

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: In the classroom, I want us all to reach toward what we don't know, toward the exhilarating uncertainty of learning. I also want the classroom to reach out into the world and our lived lives.

Literature is not meant to recite to us what we already know: its value is in its challenge. Similarly, I don't design graduate study in literature for students to recite what they already know. Rather, I hope to change our ways of thinking. At its best, the study of literature, much like literature itself, disrupts our understanding of texts and our relation to the world: its value is in its challenge. My goal in graduate study is to increase the complexity of our reading, thinking, and writing. Toward this end, we will never read literature without considering contexts: theoretical, historical, cultural, literary, interdisciplinary. Contexts increase our intellectual complexity, but they can also increase the intensity with which we read, carefully and closely.

Finally, we need to recognize that education is a public event, and that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves in learning and in sharing what we have learned. In my classroom we will always be concerned with careful, lucid, and relevant communication, especially written communication. I hope that we enter the classroom inspired and leave the classroom inspired.

Teaching Interests: Renaissance; classics; classical backgrounds of English literature (all periods, but especially medieval and Renaissance)

Current Research and Writing: A book on (Re)generative Poetics: Vergil, Ovid, and the Making of English Renaissance Poetry

Select Publications and Projects: The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe (co-editor, forthcoming); "Soracte Reconsidered: The Burden of Youth and the Relief of Age in Horace Odes I.9" (1989); "The 'Manciple's Tale' and Chaucer's Apolline Poetics" (1991); "Milton's Elegia Septima:The Poetics of Roman Elegy and a Verse Translation" (1993)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: Class is a combination of lecture and discussion. Oral reports from students are a standard part of the course. The study of the literature and the body of literary criticism on it are both important. The major assignment will usually be a final paper which seeks to make a meaningful contribution to the critical conversation on the topic of choice. It is expected that students will have good command of writing skills such as grammar, spelling, organization, and clarity.

Teaching Interests: Medieval and Renaissance English literature; theory of plot; myth

Select Publications and Projects: Plots of Time: An Inquiry in History, Myth, and Meaning (1995); Plot Snakes and the Dynamics of Narrative Experience (1992)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: I view a course as an opportunity for the students to explore a defined field of interest and to come to some provisional formulations concerning it. My courses employ active learning techniques because I have found they create the best conditions for exploration and learning. We do a lot of small-group work and share our thoughts and our writing with one another. I use portfolio grading of writing and expect self-evaluations of work, though I reserve to myself the final word on the grade. Generally, I give announced quizzes on the reading assignments but no final exam in the belief that when students have read the material with care, what they make of it is best left to them. I do not view an M.A. program in English as primarily training for research scholars. I do expect that students will read enough secondary materials to enter the national conversation in matters of special interest.

Teaching Interests: 20th-century literature and culture of the U.S.; environmental literature and ecocriticism; textual and bibliographic studies; Faulkner and Southern studies; literature of the Americas

Current Research and Writing: Inescapable Earth: William Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha, and the Book of Nature; Textual evolution of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom; "Chasing Walden: The Pursuit of Happiness Then and Now"; an article on Walt Whitman; a comprehensive study of the intersections of textuality and environmental representation in modern American literature, provisionally titled The Text in the Garden

Select Publications and Projects: "One Wild Word: Leap and the Art of Restoration" (2003); "A Meeting with Old Ben: Seeing and Writing Nature in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses" (2002); "In Praise of the Black Mother: An Unpublished Faulkner Letter on 'Mammy' Caroline Barr" (2001); "More News from Faulkner's Library" (2000); "Faulkner's Library Revisited" (1999)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: My chief goal in graduate-level teaching is to help every student become (1) a smarter interpreter of literary texts through both close reading and contextually-oriented approaches, and (2) a fluent and active participant in critical dialogue surrounding the texts we read. To accomplish both parts of this goal I stress frequent verbal and written presentations of individual research along with lots of exposure to contemporary critics and tend to favor open classroom discussion of ideas over lectures. In the not-so-distant future I hope to involve students in direct interventions in the books themselves through online editorial and other textual studies projects, helping fulfill what I see as a responsibility to transmit and keep vital the texts and ideas that form an irreplaceable part of our cultural heritage. As an ecocritic I do have very strong feelings about the state of the environment, Bush administration environmental policy, the meat industry, environmental racism, our culture-wide obsession with creating unnecessary waste, and so forth, but always try to avoid using my position as a "bully pulpit." Rather, my goal in classes involving ecocriticism is to help students become keener critics, themselves, of literary representations of the environment and the ways in which these representations affect our lives and the lives of other creatures on the planet. The only sin in my classroom (besides plagiarism or outright boorishness) is that of leaving any assumption unexamined, including my own.

Teaching Interests: British Romantic literature and culture; spatial studies; authorship and intellectual property issues

Current Research and Writing: a book on Romantic Migrations; a book on Romantic Fraudulent Authorship

Select Publications and Projects: Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (1998); "Consuming Africa: Geography and Identity in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative" (forthcoming); "Coleridge's 'The Raven' and the Forging of Radicalism" (2003)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: In my graduate classes we explore and play with ideas about literature and culture, questioning our assumptions and moving toward increasingly complex and interesting understandings of our objects of study. Treating ourselves as full participants in a professional community of literature students, we explore and play alongside other readers and thinkers who have published critical and theoretical books and articles in our subject area. I believe that literature, literary studies, and critical theory matter, not just within the university, but outside it in our various work places, social and political situations, and personal lives. Consequently, I encourage students to examine the contexts of literature and criticism (social, political, philosophical, historical, geographical, etc.). My classes nearly always operate as seminars, with mini-lectures from me but with students' voices being central to all conversations. Usually, students do a group presentation and write one or more short papers during the term and then a longer final paper. I equally value clarity of communication and intellectual risk-taking.

Select Publications and Projects: "Professional Wrestling" (forthcoming); "Folklore and Freedom" (1996); "Folklore and the Literature of Exile" (1995); "Tropes, Hopes, and Dopes" (1993); "Narratable and Unnarratable Lives" (1992)

Statement on Class Goals and Expectations: My expectation of graduate courses is that they will provide occasions for shared, theoretically informed inquiry into subjects of mutual interest, resulting in rich dialogue and written work of high quality.

Students must maintain a 3.0 average to remain in the M.A. Program in English. Courses in which students earn grades of C+ or lower will not count toward completion of the degree requirements.

Please see discussion in M.A. in English web site or talk with Mike Wiley, the Coordinator of the M.A. Program in English.

The M.A. Exam essay is the capstone writing experience in the M.A. in English. As you approach the final classes of your M.A. degree program, please meet with Mike Wiley, the Coordinator of the M.A. Program in English, to obtain an informational pamphlet on the exam.

Plagiarism is a form of cheating. It occurs when a student misrepresents the work of another as his or her own. Plagiarism may consist of using the ideas, paragraph or sentence structure, the whole text, paragraphs, sentences, or phrases of another without appropriate acknowledgement. Sources may be in print or electronic. Plagiarism also includes employing or allowing another person to write or substantially alter work that a student then submits as his or her own.

– Adapted from San Francisco State University's College of Humanities "Statement on Plagiarism"

The English Graduate Organization (EGO) is a social and professional organization. It co-hosts the Annual Graduate Student Conference, holds readings of critical and creative writing, and organizes sessions to discuss topics of interest to graduate students.

Each year the English Department and the English Graduate Organization hold a conference in which current graduate students and alumni of the M.A. Program in English deliver scholarly papers. The event gives students and alumni experience in one of the central activities of university-level critical writing. It also provides a free lunch.

Many of our graduates teach in Duval and St. Johns County Public Schools. Some have adjunct positions in our department, at Flagler College, or at community colleges. Others have positions in television and radio production, journalism, advertising, marketing, technical writing, editing, trade publishing, script writing, bookstore management, corporate in-house education and training, fund raising, consulting, university admissions, continuing education, GED Program teaching and administration, archival management and reasearch, and teaching English as a second language.

A large number of our graduate students have been accepted into Ph.D. programs (University of North Florida students have done exceptionally well in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs at the University of Florida) or have gone on to law school.

In general, there are job possibilities wherever employers need someone who is a smart, articulate, research-skilled, analytically adept, communicatively expert, and independent-minded self-starter. The Small Business Administration has long recognized that the key factor in business success is communication skill, and that the major sub-factor is being able to write well. According to the "1999 Job Outlook Survey," conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, communication ranked first on the list of skills employers seek in job applicants. Communication and writing abilities are foundational for someone who wants to thrive in an information and communication-based economy.

For more thoughts and information, visit the website "Getting into and out of Academe" (accessible through Google), posted by Alex Pang, a deputy editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. The following print texts also may be useful: Robert W. Bly's Careers for Writers and Others Who Have a Way with Words (VGM Career Horizons, 1996); Career Choices for Students of English (Career Associates, Walker Publishing, 1990); Julie DeGalan and Stephen Lambert's Great Jobs for English Majors (VGM Career Horizons, 1995); and Marjorie Eberts and Margaret Gisler's Careers for Bookworms and Other Literary Types (VGM Career Horizons, 1995).

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.

This dictionary contains hundreds of succinct essays explicating terms and concepts useful in discussing literature.Each entry consists of an explanation of a term's meaning and examples drawn from a wide array of literary texts. Using accessible prose, this reference guide also elucidates terminology associated with literary theory and periodization.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.

A clear-speaking introduction to theoretical approaches, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, lesbian/gay criticism, Marxist criticism, new historicism and cultural materialism, postcolonialism, narratology, and ecocriticism. See the helpful one-page lists of "What each kind of theorist does."

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Bennett and Royle accurately claim that their "clear and accessible [book] . . . offers new ways of thinking about literature and about what is involved in reading critically." The book includes 28 short chapters (each 8-10 pages) on "key critical concepts all of which have more or less familiar names." The opening chapter is on the idea of "The beginning," the concluding chapter on the idea of "The end." In between are chapters on "Readers and reading," "The text and the world," "Monuments," "The Uncanny" "Narrative," "Character," "Voice," "Figures and Tropes," "Laughter, "The Tragic," "History," "Me," "Ghosts," "Sexual difference," "God," "Secrets," "Pleasure," and so on. The authors apply the concepts to literary texts, their "primary focus . . . [being] on what is powerful, complex and strange about literary works themselves." The result is a fear-allaying, even enjoyable introduction to what might otherwise appear to be frightful Literary Theory.

Gibaldi, Joseph, ed. Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, 2nd ed. New York: MLA, 1992.

One of the few texts written specifically to serve as an introduction to graduate studies. Includes general introductory essays on Textual Scholarship, Canonicity and Textuality, Literary Interpretation, Historical Scholarship, and Literary Theory. Also includes a section on Cross-Disciplinary and Cultural Studies, with essays on Interdisciplinary Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Ethnic and Minority Studies, Border Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Gibaldi, Joseph, ed. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003.

Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP. 2003.

Gerald Graff's book addresses the breach between students who feel alienated from the professional discussion of literature that occurs in critical and theoretical journals, and professional scholars and teachers who are frustrated and perplexed by their students' resistance to engaging in critical arguments about literature. Graff suggests that those on each side of the divide can take more responsibility for building bridges rather than walls. Academic professionals need to realize that they sometimes make "ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they are or need to be." And students need to realize that critical and theoretical "talk about books and subjects is as important educationally as the books and subjects themselves."

Greenblatt, Stephen and Giles Gunn, ed. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: MLA, 1992.

A slightly dated, but still very informative account of the field(s) of literarystudies, the book contains essays on literary periods (Medieval Studies, Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Seventeenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romantic Studies, Victorian Studies, Modernist Studies, Postmodernist Studies, American Literary Studies to the Civil War, and American Literary and Cultural Studies Since the Civil War) and on fields of literary theory Feminist Criticism, Gender Criticism, African American Criticism, Marxist Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Deconstruction, New Historicisms, Cultural Criticism, Postcolonial Criticism, Composition Studies, and Composition and Literary Studies). The essays are by experts in the areas of focus and sometimes use specialized language.

Lentricchia, Frank and Thomas McLaughlin. Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

This collection of essays offers an engaging and accessible introduction to key concepts in the field of literary and cultural study. In the simplest terms, it provides the conceptual language of theory: "representation," "rhetoric," "culture," "ethnicity," "desire," and more.This collection offers not only extended definitions, but a vivid sense of the value and use of these concepts. A very helpful reader for student and teacher alike.

Welcome

General Statement

Specific Goals and Some Means of Achieving Them

	Reading
	Conversation
	Researching
	Writing

Graduate Faculty: Goals and Expectations

Programs and Policies

	Grading
	Required Coursework
	M.A. Exam
	Plagiarism
	English Graduate Program (EGO)
	Annual Graduate Conference
	Employment Prospects

Further Reading