Philip Grech | Florida State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Philip Grech

The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2018

Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London's urban populatio... more Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London's urban populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization. As the story begins, the narrator sits in a café observing people walk by. While classifying the mostly degenerate amalgamation of people into a taxonomized catalog, he identifies “a decrepid [sic] old man,” who immediately captures his attention, prompting a daylong pursuit. In the end, the narrator concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime.” Criticism on this story often focuses on this flâneur, but when broadened to include the crowd, a “psychopathic crowd structure” is revealed. Similarly, Vicki Hester and Emily Seger's analysis of Poe's “The Black Cat” suggests that the narrator's behavior is consistent with current forensic research on psychopathy. Yet, for “The Man of the Crowd,” Steven Fink identifies the flâneur as the author's version of the legendary Wandering Jew. However, when readers jux...

The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2018

Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London’s urban populations in a ... more Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London’s urban populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization. As the story begins, the narrator sits in a café observing people walk by. While classifying the mostly degenerate amalgamation of people into a taxonomized catalog, he identifies “a decrepid [sic] old man,” who immediately captures his attention, prompting a daylong pursuit. In the end, the narrator concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime.” Criticism on this story often focuses on this flâneur, but when broadened to include the crowd, a “psychopathic crowd structure” is revealed. Similarly, Vicki Hester and Emily Seger’s analysis of Poe’s “The Black Cat” suggests that the narrator’s behavior is consistent with current forensic research on psychopathy. Yet, for “The Man of the Crowd,” Steven Fink identifies the flâneur as the author’s version of the legendary Wandering Jew. However, when readers juxtapose the evolutionary history of psychopathy from the nineteenth century to today, alongside the political and social conditions of the nineteenth-century crowd, the paranoia and fear embedded in modern city life reveals otherwise. A breeding ground of mass suspicion between individuals—beyond the narrator and old man—is a psychopathic crowd structure in which everyone is “a man of the crowd.” And despite psychology’s rapid evolution in the past century, the psychopath in our world remains nearly as elusive as in Poe’s.

Syllabi by Philip Grech

Our current political discourse is scattered with claims and accusations regarding which persons ... more Our current political discourse is scattered with claims and accusations regarding which persons or groups qualify as “American,” “not American,” or “un-American.” This question has profound consequences that can range from the mundane—such as attempts at tarnishing a reputation—to the more serious, such as democratic in/exclusion, and legal and extralegal violence.

What it means to “be American” was pivotal in the nation’s founding as Paine’s Common Sense and Crèvecœur’s Letters From an American Farmer make clear, but the politics of Americanness were negotiated, oftentimes violently, in the centuries of Colonial Era politics and culture that preceded the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is arguably more critical now than ever to understand what “Americanness” is (or can be) and what made it this way—starting from the beginning (or close thereto).

Focusing in pre-1800 American literature and culture, our endeavor will navigate through exploration and captivity narratives, US slavery and the trans- and circum- Atlantic slave trade, indigenous American literature, religion and the Puritan tradition, Enlightenment discourse, the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution and the Constitution, early-American print culture (including the sentimental novel), gender studies, and perspectives in law and literature. Finding motivation in the problems, issues, and contradictions within the figuration of collective identity, we will better understand the political discourse surrounding “what it means to be American” as it was then, and therefore, as it is now.

ENC 1101 fulfills the first of two required composition courses at Florida State University. This... more ENC 1101 fulfills the first of two required composition courses at Florida State University. This course stresses the importance of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, as well as the importance of using writing as a recursive process involving invention, drafting, collaboration, revision, rereading, and editing to clearly and effectively communicate ideas for specific purposes, occasions, and audiences.

In addition to these objectives, this course emphasizes composing for advocacy in order to help students understand the importance of identifying purpose, audience, and effective rhetorical strategies when crafting a written text. The focus on composing for advocacy emphasizes that writing is an adaptive-rather than an immutable-means of communication that seeks to promote action (of thought or behavior).

This course offers concepts and vocabulary to help students make thoughtful composing choices for texts that combine writing with other forms of multimodal communication. These rhetorical composing concepts include rhetor, audience, purpose, context, strategies, medium, and arrangement. Students learn about these concepts recursively throughout the course and are given opportunities to apply their knowledge of these concepts in the crafting of four major projects.

ENC 1101 fulfills the first of two required composition courses at Florida State University. Adhe... more ENC 1101 fulfills the first of two required composition courses at Florida State University. Adhering to Florida State University's College Composition Program's first-year composition course objectives, this course stresses the importance of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, as well as the importance of using writing as a recursive process involving invention, drafting, collaboration, revision, rereading, and editing to clearly and effectively communicate ideas for specific purposes, occasions, and audiences. In addition to these objectives, this course will emphasize rhetorical composing: this course will help students determine purpose, audience, and the most effective strategies to use when composing. The purpose of Compose, Design, Advocate (CDA) is to help students approach and analyze composing situations. This course will offer concepts and vocabulary to help students make thoughtful choices in presenting visual, oral, written, and other multimodal communication. These rhetorical composing concepts include purpose, audience, context, strategies, medium, and arrangement.

This course introduces students to the critical reading of short stories dating from the nineteen... more This course introduces students to the critical reading of short stories dating from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. This course aims to teach students to identify tone, narration, form, theme, characterization, and other formal aspects of short fiction. Students will be encouraged to formulate their own interpretation of the works we read based on their developing ability to recognize the decisions each author has made in constructing the text. Students will be introduced to a variety of meaningful social and cultural contexts and asked to read the stories with an awareness of the social and cultural situations that inform our understanding of the story's thematic meanings. A central goal of this course is to not only have students understand how the cultural and social milieu in which writers are writing within (or are revisiting) are shaping their work, but in turn, how we as readers are being shaped by these authors' vision of social, cultural, and historical events. An examination of any theme in a short story is not just a literary investigation, but also an examination of human nature. Concepts such as characterization, setting, symbolism, and so forth will be the platform from which we will explore. This course will revolve around decoding meaning from the latent and manifest content of literary works and connect that analysis to larger social, cultural, political, or economic issues particular to the works' historical and modern contexts.

College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequent... more College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. This course aims to help students improve their writing skills in all areas: discovering what they have to say, organizing their thoughts for a variety of audiences, and improving fluency and rhetorical sophistication. Students will write and revise three papers, devise their own purposes and structures for those papers, work directly with the audience of their peers to practice critical reading and response, and learn many new writing techniques.

This course helps students to think about what it means to be an English major. It reviews the hi... more This course helps students to think about what it means to be an English major. It reviews the history of the discipline in ways that are accessible and meaningful to students and talks about current practices and areas of inquiry, including the broadening of categories of interest to other forms of writing and media. It also helps students to acquire skills that will be useful to them in their other courses. It will guide students through annotation and analysis, drafting, workshopping and revision, introduce the concepts of thesis and argumentation, and give students vocabulary for specialization. This class is intended to prepare students to be English majors, to show how English studies can be used both in college and in their career choices and to expose them as well to the sheer pleasure of reading and writing. COURSE OBJECTIVES By the end of the course, students will demonstrate the ability to: • Identify the basic terms, conventions, and scholarly methods for literary, cultural and media studies that form the traditional core of English Studies • Develop an argument with a thesis statement, using appropriate terminology of the field, practicing close reading skills, analyses, and interpretation of texts • Create a minimum of approximately 15 pages of graded writing, including close reading, interpretive and researched essays, revisions, essay exams, and/or response papers, etc. • Refine abilities to understand literature and other texts, in reading, in critical thinking, and in writing through: • Introducing the basics of humanities-based scholarly research, including a range of archival resources and databases; incorporating secondary sources into arguments; focus on research on literature • Reading challenging, powerful, and engaging literature and other texts with complex and nuanced meanings; introducing scholarly and disciplinary critical approaches and vocabulary for understanding literature, media and culture studies • Exhibiting flexibility and complexity of critical thought in analyzing literature, media, and culture Inclusive Learning Statement Your success in this class is important to me. We will all need accommodations because we all learn differently. If there are aspects of this course that prevent you from learning or exclude you, please let me know as soon as possible. Together we'll develop strategies to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course.

This course (AML 3311) studies literary portrayals of crowds in nineteenth-century American liter... more This course (AML 3311) studies literary portrayals of crowds in nineteenth-century American literature and asks questions such as: what does it mean for a heterogenous group of individuals—composed of various races, ethnicities, and class position—to gather in a public space? Who is socially, economically, and politically included or excluded? What are the participatory boundaries of democracy? How do we reconcile the rights of the individual with the demands of a crowd? Authors included are Crèvecoeur, Cooper, Sedgwick, Apess, Gustave Le Bon, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Davis, Harriet Jacobs, Wells Brown, Jefferson, Fern, Alcott, and Sojourner Truth.

This course continues foci from ENC 1101, and emphasizes teaching students research skills that a... more This course continues foci from ENC 1101, and emphasizes teaching students research skills that allow them to effectively incorporate outside sources in their writing and to compose in a variety of genres for specific contexts.

This course includes drafting and writing expository essays and journal entries for a total of 7,... more This course includes drafting and writing expository essays and journal entries for a total of 7,000 words. The semester focuses on the importance of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, as well as the importance of using writing as a recursive process involving invention, drafting, collaboration, revision, rereading, and editing to clearly and effectively communicate ideas for specific purposes, occasions, and audiences.

This course covers tone, narration, form, and theme in representative short stories. Short texts ... more This course covers tone, narration, form, and theme in representative short stories. Short texts include both fiction and nonfiction. Authors included are Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Gogol, Morrison, Baldwin, Wright, Ellison, Alexie, Chopin, Cisneros, García Márquez, Carver, Carver, and Junot Díaz, among others.

This “Major Figures in American Literature” course focuses on nineteenth-century American authors... more This “Major Figures in American Literature” course focuses on nineteenth-century American authors, and more specifically, the ways in which these authors portray crowds. Our primary goal: to understand the relationship between literary portrayals of crowds and the political, cultural, and literary challenges faced by different groups in the United States. We’ll find this period as not so different from our own. The list of authors we will read together represent the diverse group of voices from the nineteenth century who imagined the idea of a people amidst an age of population expansion and its fluctuating, turbulent conditions. Crowds became one way for some writers to portray their ruminations and fears of “different” people with new ideas. Other authors, such as Whitman, saw crowds as optimistic gatherings to be celebrated and embraced for their diversity and heterogeneity—they promote interpersonal connection, uniting individuals to one another and to the universe. Today, many people share the same fears, apprehensions, and suspicions of crowds, while others celebrate and rejoice these same people. Just think of BLM, Occupy, teacher strikes, women’s marches, gun reform protests, and political protests. All of these are sites of democratic meeting.

ENC 2135 fulfills the second of two required composition courses at Florida State University. Whi... more ENC 2135 fulfills the second of two required composition courses at Florida State University. While continuing to stress the importance of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills emphasized in
ENC 1101, as well as the importance of using writing as a recursive process involving invention, drafting, collaboration, revision, rereading, and editing to clearly and effectively communicate ideas for specific purposes, occasions, and audiences, ENC 2135 focuses on teaching students research skills that allow them to effectively incorporate outside sources in their writing and to compose in a variety of genres for specific contexts.

This course will mainly examine American literature from the nineteenth century, a period that ma... more This course will mainly examine American literature from the nineteenth century, a period that many consider the most influential in terms of mythmaking and the formation of American identity, culture, and values. Yet, in order to understand nineteenth-century American identity, we will look at the literature produced by the preceding two hundred years of colonial history. We will engage with authors both within and on the margins of the canonical tradition of American literature, coming to terms with the faultiness of a singular American narrative and instead embrace a chorus of voices. We will develop critical perspectives on privilege and sovereignty, the implications of racialist strategy, and the voices and cultures who affected—and who were affected by—the lives of diverse communities. To understand the importance and value of nineteenth-century literature today, we will focus on the significance and meaning of these texts in our daily class discussions.

Days: MWF Office: WMS 331 Time: 10:10AM-11AM Office Hours: Mon/Wed 1-3PM and by appt. Room: DIF 2... more Days: MWF Office: WMS 331 Time: 10:10AM-11AM Office Hours: Mon/Wed 1-3PM and by appt. Room: DIF 236 "What then is the American, this new man?…He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds…Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world…Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?...The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions…This is an American." -J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails,

College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequent... more College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Since writing is a process of making meaning as well as communicating, College Composition teachers respond to the content of students' writing as well as to surface errors. Students should expect frequent written and oral response on the content of their writing from both teachers and peers.

The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2018

College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequent... more College Composition courses at Florida State University teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Since writing is a process of making meaning as well as communicating, College Composition teachers respond to the content of students' writing as well as to surface errors. Students should expect frequent written and oral response on the content of their writing from both teachers and peers.

This course covers fiction and nonfiction from WWI to the present. Reading and discussion focus o... more This course covers fiction and nonfiction from WWI to the present. Reading and discussion focus on authors of color. Authors include Baldwin, Coates, Morrison, Joan Morgan, Roxanne Gay, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, ZZ Packer, Junot Díaz, and Paul Beatty.