MLL Graduate Course Offerings
Spring ‘24
Program: Chinese
Graduate course number: FOL 5934-01
Course Title: Studies in Chinese-English Translation
Instructor: Aaron Feng Lan
Time: TR, 3:05-4:20pm
Language of Class Discussion: Chinese
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No
Course Description: This course introduces students to essential concepts of translation theory and enables them to develop skills and techniques in Chinese-English translation. Upon completing this course, students will be able to apply essential concepts and principles of translation theory, compare and analyze the linguistic and socio-cultural features of Chinese and English, and employ effective skills and appropriate reference tools in Chinese-English translation.
Graduate course number: ASN 5935-01
Course Title: SLA of East Asian Languages
Instructor: Zhiying Qian
Time: M, 4:50-7:20pm
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 provides an introduction to the field of second language acquisition in Chinese and Japanese. It covers practical issues in Chinese and Japanese pedagogy, problems in current SLA research, analysis of learner data from multiple perspectives, and comprehension of important studies in current Chinese and Japanese SLA research.
Program: French
Graduate course number: FRW 5775
Course Title: Caribbean Meets Quebec: Encounters, Relations, Returns
Instructor: Dr. Munro
Time: TR11:35-12:50
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course is based around the notions of encounters, returns, and relations, and specifically the physical meeting of two major authors that is a central part of the course, between Gisèle Pineau and Naomi Fontaine. This meeting, which takes place as part of their joint residency at FSU, is used as a focal point for the broader discussion of relations between the Caribbean and Quebec. We begin with Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, a key text that echoes throughout the other readings in the course. We will also read Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme, before considering how the Martinican poet influenced some of the most prominent poets from Quebec. Edouard Glissant’s ideas of Relation will be an important point of reference. The work of Sean Mills will provide information on the ways in which Haiti and Haitians in particular have related to Quebec, its culture and society. This leads on to analysis of work by Dany Laferrière, one of the most prominent Haitian authors living and working in Quebec. In preparation for the residency, we then read works by Gisèle Pineau and Naomi Fontaine, both of whom have recognized the importance of Césaire and, in the case of Fonatine, of Laferrière, to their work. The week of the residency will be a time of encounter and relation between the two authors and their readers. We will ask them about their relations with and visits to either the Caribbean and Quebec, among other issues. The course will conclude with classes on Canadian tourist films of Haiti and Haitian street gangs in Montreal. Time permitting, we will also include translation workshops in the schedule.
Graduate course number: FRW 5595
Course Title: Paris Monuments
Instructor: Dr. Boutin
Time: TuTh 3:05-4:20
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: What accounts for Paris’s sustained appeal on the world’s stage? This advanced undergraduate/graduate course explores how Paris became iconic through exploration of its monuments. Thinking critically about cultural heritage and sites of remembrance, we'll evaluate dominant or under-examined narratives and myths about Paris, its people, & its places.
Graduate course number: FRW 5599
Course Title: Espaces fracturs: autobiographies, histoire et memoire
Instructor: Dr. Joos
Time: TuTh 9:45AM - 11:00AM
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 is taught in French. We will read autobiographies and autobiographical novels written by French and Francophone writers: Claude Simon, Jean-Claude Charles, Gisele Pineau and Assia Djebar’s autobiographical works will be read alongside articles and theoretical texts that enable them to make connections between styles and themes. All these autobiographies deal with the trauma of war or colonization, sometimes both. We will analyze how individual memory and history combine in fractured narratives and will think about the autobiographical genre that emerge after World War II in the Francophone space while keeping the works of Montaigne in mind.
Program: German
Graduate course number: GEW 5597
Course Title: Migration Literature in Germany
Instructor: Dr. Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe
Time: TuTh 11:35AM - 12:50PM
Language of Class Discussion: German
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course will focus on theliteratureofmigration in Germanyexploring the sociology of migrant experience, challenging the concept of the ‘mother tongue’, looking at multilingual contexts (codes, registers, writing in the migrantliteratureas opposed to mother tongue), gender, and kinship. For this, we will readmigrationfiction to explore the differences ofmigrationacross time. We will explore these questions inliteratureand adaptions. This course is three-folded: First, we will explore theconcept of migration and guestworkers.Second, we will study the concept oflanguage, followed by the idea of writing as a process. Specifically, we will explore the identity of the migrant (how do we define Germans vis-a-vis outsider), life in diaspora (what is home?), and how language is an obstacle as well as performance. We will engage with secondary literature/theory, read primary literature, and films.
While some challenging texts will be read in English, this course will predominantly engage in the German language (discussions, short texts, short writings).
Graduate course number: GEW 5595
Course Title: Just Literature/Literary Justice: German Tales of Crime and Punishment
Instructor: Dr. Christian Weber
Time: TuTh 4:50-6:05
Language of Class Discussion: German (mostly)
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course deals with shorter literary and philosophical texts by canonical German authors from the 18th to the 20th century, among them Schiller, Kleist, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud. Based on close readings of these texts, we will discuss the origins of crime and evil and address the problem of determining and enforcing justice.
An essential part of this exercise is, however, also to test and reflect the limits of interpretation. We need to consider the difficulties of authors/narrators to represent a criminal case objectively, that is, without prejudice, and, in turn, become aware of the potential fallibility of readers in the attempt to do hermeneutical justice both in respect to the texts and the oftentimes concealed and obfuscated ‘truth’ of events that these texts represent or (intentionally) misrepresent.
Program: Italian
Graduate course number: ITW 5486
Course Title: Reading contemporary Italian Prose
Instructor: Zanini-Cordi
Time: Mondays 4:50-7:35 pm
Language of Class Discussion: Italian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No / Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes
Course Description: In her prize-winning book After La Dolce Vita. A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy, Alessia Ricciardi borrows the category of “lightness” from Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Lezioni americane) and argues that together with “sweetness,” “weakness” and “softness” it functions “in the Italian context as (a) key trope of belonging and self-identification.” Playing with the title of Calvino’s sixth memo (Consistency), which he never had the time to write, this course will explore various manifestations of Italian identity as represented in film and literature from around the time of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) through Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2013) to the present day. By investigating how literature and film have addressed themes like history, politics, religion, gender, crime and immigration we will attempt to define the consistency and inconsistencies of Italian identity(ies).
Graduate course number: ITA5900
Course Title: Boccaccio’s Decameron
Instructor: Elisabeth Coggeshall
Time: T/Th 9:45-11:00
Language of Class Discussion: Italian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: No / Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: No / Yes
Course Description:
In this course, we will read Boccaccio’s Decameron,a collectionof short stories that can be considered "pandemic fictions." Few of the stories have much, if anything, to do directly with the Plague. In some ways, that is their power. Boccaccio’s ten narrators take the opportunity to critique the old “normal” and, by so doing, bring about a new “normal,” born from the ashes of the old ways. It is no coincidence that Quattrocento humanism and, with it, the Italian Renaissance, would arise in the wake of the Plague.
In the course, we will pay particular attention to the uses offiction,storytelling, as an ethical practice and a method for healing a society broken by pandemic. We will read the texts in their original form—initaliano antico—which will require a slow, careful, and patient reading of the texts. For this reason, readings are relatively short, and I expect you to pay careful attention to the vocabulary, structures, and rhetorical strategies that Boccaccio and his narrators employ.
Program: Japanese
Graduate course number: JPT 5506
Course Title: War and Representation
Instructor: Matt Mewhinney
Time: Tues. & Thurs. 1:20–2:35 PM
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 examines how Japanese artists respond to war, how war shapes aesthetic thought, and how war is represented in literary form and other media from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Students will learn how aesthetic form affords an artist an ethical position about war and wartime experience. Texts include poetry, fiction, memoir, reportage, painting, photography, and film. We will read works by Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ōgai, Long Yingzong, Wang Changxiong, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yosano Akiko, Mishima Yukio, and Ōoka Shōhei, and view films including Sansho the Bailiff(1954),Patriotism(1966), and In This Corner of the World(2016).
This course is cross-listed with undergraduate section JPT4505. Students enrolled in JPT55506 will be required to meet outside of class for an additional graduate discussion session a few times throughout the semester to discuss secondary readings and/or view additional films.
Graduate course number: JPW 5134
Course Title: Postwar Japanese Literature
Instructor: Matt Mewhinney
Time: Tues. & Thurs. 11:35AM–12:50 PM
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes (but the student must have advanced reading proficiency in Japanese—a placement test might be required.)
Course Description: This course examines selected texts in postwar (roughly the 1940s through the present) Japanese literature and literary and cultural criticism. Students will learn how to read and critically evaluate these texts with the help of secondary readings in English. All primary texts are presented in the original Japanese. Authors include Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki, and Yoshimoto Banana.
This course is cross-listed with an undergraduate section JPW4130. Graduate students enrolled in JPW5134 will be evaluated at a higher level through rigorous written assessments that involve translation from Japanese into English as well as critical reflection on the texts and themes covered in the course. Supplementary readings will also be provided.
Graduate course number: JPT 5935
Course Title: SPECIAL TOPICS IN JAPANESE STUDIES: JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY FILM AND MEDIA
Instructor: FRANZ PRICHARD
Time: T 4:50-7:20, 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/departments: YES
Course Description: This course examines the vivid perspectives of documentary film, photography, literature, and other visual media from Japan. We explore the shifting contours of documentary practices as filmmakers, artists, writers, and thinkers forged creative new forms of ethical and aesthetic responses to the ecological disasters, dispossession of regional communities’ lands and livelihoods, and the expansive forms of violence at play in the Cold War remaking of the Japanese nation-state from the postwar period to the present. Participants in the course will collaboratively reconsider the ways Japanese documentary media unsettle existing boundaries and methodologies of media criticism and practice to foster interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to Japan’s diverse media cultures in their regional and global contexts. All materials will be engaged with in English. Prerequisites: None.
This course is cross-listed with undergraduate section JPT4934. 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 and/or view additional films.
Program: Linguistics
Graduate course number: LIN 5602
Course Title: Language Contact
Instructor: Antje Muntendam
Time: TuTh 11:35 am-12:50 pm
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the field of language contact. Topics include theories of language contact, methods, contact-induced change at different linguistic levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), endangered languages, pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. The course covers a wide range of language pairs and contact situations across the world.
Graduate course number: LIN 5695
Course Title: Psycholinguistics II: Lexical processing
Instructor: Gretchen Sunderman
Time: TuTh 9:45-11:00 am
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: In this course, students will examine the relationship between language and cognition in individuals who speak and understand more than one language, focusing on recent psycholinguistic research carried out in a variety of second languages (e.g., Spanish, Dutch, English, Italian). Students will be introduced to the major issues and concepts in psycholinguistics, as well as various models of language processing and experimental tasks used in the field.
Graduate course number: LIN 5932
Course Title: Special Topics: Research Methods
Instructor: Tom Juzek
Time: TuTh 1:20-2:35 pm
Language of Class Discussion: English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to specific research methodologies and statistical procedures used in quantitative experimental research in applied linguistics. This course will provide all students with the means to critically evaluate quantitative research in language studies and will provide advanced M.A. and Ph.D. students with the basic tools to carry out their own data based research.
Program: Slavic
Graduate course number: FOT 5805
Course Title: Translation Theory and Practice
Instructor: Dr. Wakamiya
Time: Monday, 4:50PM - 7:50PM
Language of Class Discussion: English
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Graduate students should be able to translate from source language into English
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: In thisseminarwe will study theories oftranslationand evaluate others' practices oftranslation while workshopping our own translation projects. Among the topics to be addressed are linguistic and cultural specificity, the ethics of translation, AI and translation, and professional issues.
The course is open to graduate students in any program or department. Course participants may discuss existingtranslations and producetranslations from any language; however, all texts must be rendered into English to give our course a common language for analysis and critique.
Graduate course number: RUW 5930-002
Course Title: Gogol and Ukrainian Romanticism
Instructor: Dr. Romanchuk
Time: TuTh 9:45AM - 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: This course puts the great Romantic writer Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) into dialogue with various structuralist and post-structuralist disciplines as it restores him to his Ukrainian context. It traces how Gogol's early publications lent coherence to works written in and about Ukraine in the 1820s and early 30s, and how the "New" Russian and Ukrainian literatures alike grew out of this formation in the later 1830s and early 40s. It also serves as an introduction to structural linguistics and anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, together with related fields. Taught in English with English-language translations and tutorial in Russian and Ukrainian.
Graduate course number: RUW5579
Course Title: Modern Russian Literature
Instructor: Dr. Efimov
Time: Th 4:50PM - 7:50PM
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 the development of 20th-century literature from Modernism through the Soviet period to the glasnost era.
Graduate course number: RUS5415
Course Title: Graduate Russian Conversation and ComprehensionInstructor: Dr. Efimov
Time: TuTh 1:20PM - 2:35PM
Language of Class Discussion: Russian
Reading knowledge in required in target language: Yes
Open to graduate students from other MLL programs/departments: Yes
Course Description: (S/U grade 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.
Program: Spanish
Graduate course number: SPW 5195
Course Title: Studies in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures
Instructor: Matthew Goldmark
Time: Tu/Th 4:50-6:05
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: In this course, students read fantasy, fiction, superhero comics, and watch movie adaptations to learn how Latin American and Latinx comics depict communities.
Graduate course number: SPW 5287
Course Title: Spanish American Modernismo(s): 1880-1930
Instructor: Jose Gomariz
Time: MoWe: 3:05-4:20
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 examines Modernista literary writings from the 1880s through the 1920s. We will study the intersections of culture, race, and gender in Modernista writings, and compare differences, encounters and disencounters between normativity and diversity. Texts include: "Yo soy un hombre sincero." and "Nuestra América" by José Martí. Essays and poems by Julián del Casal from La Habana Elegante. "El rey burgués" and "El pájaro azúl" by Rubén Darío, "Indomable" by Juana Borrero, and "Mis amores" by Delmira Agustni.
Graduate course number: SPW 5496
Course Title: Spanish-American Women Writers
Instructor: Delia Poey
Time: Mo 6:35-9:05
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 studies Spanish-American women writers, varying from year to year, focusing on prose fiction, non-fiction and/or drama. Supplementary readings from critical and theoretical works.