Department of English

Fiction Writing

Padgett Powell

This course inclines to be a forms course, not a workshop per se, but you may enroll for credit under either rubric, according to your transcriptural needs. The schedule of enrollment priorities can be found in full elsewhere; in brief, first- and second-year MFAs in fiction may enroll without encumbrance and with guaranteed admission; next, second-year poets and first-, in that order, by submission of manuscript to instructor and permission to enroll; next third-year in fiction; next whoever is left alone and in the sunshine. By “not a workshop per se” I mean not a course that solicits the work you do while being you, seen in more or less whole form, while we read certified solid models of good writing that demonstrate narrative fundamentals worthy of emulation (William Trevor). We shall eschew all that.

We will read several moderately small, (some) not immoderately good, moderately weird, and (I hope) immoderately interesting books. They constitute, taken together and taken apart (isn’t that cute?), incidentally, an imperfect inscribed area of Southern writing that might be called para-Gothic (ladies’ para-Gothic at that), and even more incidentally a similar inscribing of Florida writing. These strike me as two zones in literature appropriate for you to be exposed to while here. They touch too on fiction called detective, and that I call hoax, and the wry-elegant-smart. Not so incidentally the books are to get you properly playful—in imitation, in repudiation, in fondness or pique, in inspiration positive or negative—in your responses to them. I’ll ask you to read what of them you want to, to write after them when you can, not after them when you can’t write after them or don’t want to, to have fun. We will read them early, run out of books, possibly then watch the films made of some of the books. When you have two good pages inspired by this scheme, two of what might in time be much more (I think five pages a week is a good assignment), we will look at your writing in class. Explication of the books will be negligent.

The Way We Die Now, Charles Willeford; Ninety-two in the Shade, Thomas McGuane; Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor; Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers; The Clothes They Stood Up In (also in Three Stories), Alan Bennett; The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda; Victoria, Knut Hamsun; Seize the Day, Saul Bellow.

What We Do in Workshop

In a workshop we look at formative work. Formative work usually differs from that of the professionals I will give you as models in two ways: the reader loses trust in the author, or interest in the writing. These categories are not exclusive. Loss of trust can be a function of artificial withholding, errant relevance, usage errors, or other wants of sophistication on the author’s part. Any of these slippages of trust will contribute to loss of interest. Sometimes too there can be loss of interest when nothing is wrong but nothing is really right. Things may be just dull.

In workshop you read a piece of formative work looking for things that made you lose trust in the author. In narration there should be but one question a reader asks: And? If she says, What? Or Say what? Or Wait a minute, I thought . . . Or if she becomes confused (when is when, whose story is it, what is the problem), loss of trust is swift and real interest is impossible.

Times: M 3-5

Fiction Writing

Jill Ciment

Coming soon.

Times: T E1-E3

Fiction: Forms

Padgett Powell

This course inclines to be a forms course, not a workshop per se, but you may enroll for credit under either rubric, according to your transcriptural needs. The schedule of enrollment priorities can be found in full elsewhere; in brief, first- and second-year MFAs in fiction may enroll without encumbrance and with guaranteed admission; next, second-year poets and first-, in that order, by submission of manuscript to instructor and permission to enroll; next third-year in fiction; next whoever is left alone and in the sunshine. By “not a workshop per se” I mean not a course that solicits the work you do while being you, seen in more or less whole form, while we read certified solid models of good writing that demonstrate narrative fundamentals worthy of emulation (William Trevor). We shall eschew all that.

We will read several moderately small, (some) not immoderately good, moderately weird, and (I hope) immoderately interesting books. They constitute, taken together and taken apart (isn’t that cute?), incidentally, an imperfect inscribed area of Southern writing that might be called para-Gothic (ladies’ para-Gothic at that), and even more incidentally a similar inscribing of Florida writing. These strike me as two zones in literature appropriate for you to be exposed to while here. They touch too on fiction called detective, and that I call hoax, and the wry-elegant-smart. Not so incidentally the books are to get you properly playful—in imitation, in repudiation, in fondness or pique, in inspiration positive or negative—in your responses to them. I’ll ask you to read what of them you want to, to write after them when you can, not after them when you can’t write after them or don’t want to, to have fun. We will read them early, run out of books, possibly then watch the films made of some of the books. When you have two good pages inspired by this scheme, two of what might in time be much more (I think five pages a week is a good assignment), we will look at your writing in class. Explication of the books will be negligent.

The Way We Die Now, Charles Willeford; Ninety-two in the Shade, Thomas McGuane; Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor; Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers; The Clothes They Stood Up In (also in Three Stories), Alan Bennett; The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda; Victoria, Knut Hamsun; Seize the Day, Saul Bellow.

What We Do in Workshop

In a workshop we look at formative work. Formative work usually differs from that of the professionals I will give you as models in two ways: the reader loses trust in the author, or interest in the writing. These categories are not exclusive. Loss of trust can be a function of artificial withholding, errant relevance, usage errors, or other wants of sophistication on the author’s part. Any of these slippages of trust will contribute to loss of interest. Sometimes too there can be loss of interest when nothing is wrong but nothing is really right. Things may be just dull.

In workshop you read a piece of formative work looking for things that made you lose trust in the author. In narration there should be but one question a reader asks: And? If she says, What? Or Say what? Or Wait a minute, I thought . . . Or if she becomes confused (when is when, whose story is it, what is the problem), loss of trust is swift and real interest is impossible.

Times: M 3-5

Fiction: Forms

Jill Ciment

This class will explore fictional forms—point of view, voice, plot, scene, character, and structure. The semester will be divided between lectures and workshops. Each student will create a basic outline for a novella and then proceed to experiment with different approaches to that story, putting into practice all the elements of narrative. Reading will be assigned weekly.

Times: T E1-E3

Poetry Composition

Michael Hofmann

This is the graduate poetry workshop, MFA @ FLA. I will have mostly free assignments—no flaming hoops, no fantastical obstacle courses—and we will read two books (though this is very much subject to review) the Selected Rosemary Tonks and the Collected Philip Larkin.

Times: M E1-E3

Disability Studies

Delia Steverson

This course will introduce students to key methods, theories, practices, and debates of Disability Studies. Disability Studies is a complex, diverse, and growing field that is interdisciplinary in nature. Our class will also take an interdisciplinary approach and through such disciplines as sociology, history, psychology, literature, law, and others, we will explore how disability is understood in relation to what it means to be human. We will consider disability as spectacle, the history of disability, the connections between race and disability, the rhetoric of disability, disability as embodied experience, disability representations in art, literature, and film, as well as the social, cultural, and medical models of disability.

Possible texts include works by Disability Studies scholars such as Cynthia Wu, Nirmala Erevelles, Robert McRuer, Margaret Price, Sharon Mitchell, David Snyder, Kim Nielsen, Rosemary Garland Thomson, Chris Bell and Rachel Adams, among others.

Students will have short assignments, a presentation, and either a seminar paper or a conference paper.

Times: R 6-8

Graphic Archives

Margaret Galvan

This seminar deals with the necessity and difficulty of archives as a space to study visual print culture. Due to grassroots distribution, circulation, and publishing methods, archives—not bookstores or libraries—are the necessary place to study radical visual culture. We laud the rise of digital collections and archives, but materials like these remain under-digitized and under-cataloged. Text-based finding systems in traditional finding guides and digital infrastructure do not well support the study of visual culture—especially incidental images nested amongst text.

We will engage active theoretical conversations around radical archives and materials that have emerged over the past few years, extending from Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings (2003) to monographs and special issues of journals such as Radical History Review(2014, 2015), Archive Journal (2015), Transgender Studies Quarterly (2015), Radical Teacher (2016), and Australian Feminist Studies (2017). Across a number of these texts, feminist zines of the early 1990s serve as an area of focus for scholars, librarians, and archivists. Because zines as self-produced grassroots media do not conform to mainstream publication information, zine archivists and librarians have developed new protocols for how to catalogue these materials so that important information will not be lost. How might we apply these principles or develop our own for organizing and researching other, diverse visual ephemera—comics, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, buttons, t-shirts, etc.—in physical and digital collections?

We will work with a range of archives through site visits and presentations by those who work with/in archives. Throughout the semester, students will select and present on archival collections and develop and submit a grant proposal to the archive of their choosing. They will also complete a 20-page seminar paper. Readings may include texts by: Agatha Beins, Jean Bessette, Maylei Blackwell, Francis X. Blouin & William G. Rosenberg, Ann Cvetkovich, Jacques Derrida, Kate Eichhorn, Michel Foucault, Gabriella Giannachi, Randall C. Jimerson, Abigail De Kosnik, and Alana Kumbier.

Times: T 6-8

Theories of Film

Maureen Turim

Film theory has a long and complex history, which this course will examine. What did early film theorists mean by calling film the seventh art? How did theories of montage grow out of a particular historical moment to embrace an ideological transformation of the cinema? What are the various theories of realism in film, in conjunction with ontological arguments? How are those theories engaged ideologically? What did semiotics bring to film theory? How did psychoanalytical theories of film stem from investigations of identification and projection, dream and fantasy? How were they coupled with Marxist critiques at a particular historical juncture in the seventies? How did feminism and queer theory engage with these theories to question some of their premises, and enrich our theoretical understandings? How do philosophical approaches to film overlap with or differ from the project of film theory? How does film theory address history, race, and spectatorship? What do digital technologies demand of film theory? What is the project of contemporary film theory? I offer the course description as a series of questions, because film theory is always asking questions, fundamental questions about how film works. In this course we will look at how theorists have proposed to explore filmic epistemologies. Each week we will discuss a film that correlates with the theoretical approach to be investigated that week, for theory works alongside close visual and auditory analysis, framing the questions that help us more deeply understand film. While this course will be essential for any grad students preparing for careers in film studies that will include teaching film theory, it should also be useful to students of literature and creative writing who wish to think deeply about visual and auditory representation in relationship to writing. It will also be of great use to students in visual rhetoric.

Participants in the seminar will engage in class discussions and canvas postings that will lead to a diary project of their week-by-week thinking about the correlations between the films and the theoretical readings. At periodic junctures, these writings will be annotated. A final paper on a selected topic in film theory covered in the class will also be planned and written throughout the semester; each student will have a chance to present a synopsis of their project to the class.

Times: W 6-8

Screenings: M 9-11

Victorian Popular Novels

Pamela Gilbert

This course will explore “popular” and emerging genres in the nineteenth century novel, especially between 1830 and 1890. We may cover the historical, silver-fork, gothic, sensation, domestic, religious and/or adventure novel, to name a few. We will also interrogate the notion of the popular and the history of “taste.” Over the next weeks, I will narrow this down considerably — there is such a variety of popular work and ways to approach it in this period that I will probably organize the course in either four subgenres or three to four themes. If you know you plan to take the course, feel free to email and let me know your interests — I will try to shape the syllabus around the needs of the participants as much as possible.

Authors may include Bulwer-Lytton, Catharine Gore, Oliphant, Trollope, Ellen Wood, Braddon, Kingsley, Collins, Dickens, Yonge, Corelli and/or others. Critical readings may include Bourdieu, Armstrong (How Novels Think), Eric Auerbach (Mimesis) among several others. I shall divide the reading between novels, narrative theory, literary criticism, and historical materials designed to help us think through the idea of the popular as it relates to reading in this period.

The course will require a turn at discussion leading, eight short response papers, and a seminar paper of 21-25 pages.

Times: W E1-E3

Shakespeare, Media and Popular Culture

Richard Burt

In this seminar, we will focus primarily on Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, and Coriolanus and analyze their reception by literary critics, some of them practicing psychoanalytic criticism, some of them doing queer theory, ordinary language philosophers, including Cavell, John Searle, and J.L. Austin, theater productions, and film adaptations in the United States and the United Kingdom. We will cover issues involving democracy, elections, civility, friendship, hate speech ranging Orson Welles’s anti-fascist 1938 production of Julius Caesar to the Public theater’s production of the same play featuring a Donald J. Trump look-alike as Caesar. Our focus will be on Shakespeare criticism and philosophy in the 1980s and early 90s, although we will spend time on works of Shakespeare criticism by Kenneth Burke, Stanley Cavell, Janet Adelman, Michael Anderegg, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Goldberg. We will also discuss a number of philosophical texts about language that I believe are pertinent even though they have no direct bearing on Shakespeare. These include Alan Badiou’s True Life and Jacques Derrida’s essays “Signature, Event, Context”; “Limited, Inc”; and “Typewriter Ribbon, Limited Ink 2: (within such limits).”

Times: R 3-5

Sexing the Past: Critical Debates on Pre-20th Century Gender and Sexuality

Jodi Schorb

The course will help students understand and analyze constructions of gender and sexuality prior to the 20th century. This seminar takes as its grounding point the post-Foucaultian debates over methodology and the epistemologies of sexuality, familiarizing students with the ongoing “continuity vs. alterity” debates, the challenges of periodization and chronology, influential methodological shifts (the temporal turn, the aesthetic turn, etc.) with an eye for how they proffer expanded possibilities for literary analysis.

We will begin with early field-shaping work by Foucault (including the “acts vs. identities” shift), Thomas Laqueur (on the transition from the ancient “one-sex” model of gender to the modern two-sex model), and David Halperin (on how to “do” the history of homosexuality). We will then explore how a recent generation of sex and gender scholars have modified this formative work, as new perspectives, methods, paradigms, and archives continually force us to reassess and offer “more nuanced concepts of identity and [sexual] orientation than early social constructivist accounts have allowed” (Traub, “Present Future”).

Although many of our literary texts and cultural examples will be drawn from the transatlantic and early American eighteenth century, the course is designed to allow students to apply the largely theoretical readings and debates to archives and texts they find relevant based on their own interests in pre-20th century Western literatures (British, Ibero-American, Caribbean, etc). Students will exit the course familiar with debates in sexual historiography and literary studies prior to the emergence of modern categories of sex and gender.

Assessment based on regular participation, rotating discussion facilitation, periodic presentations on how you are applying ideas thus far in the course, final project (seminar paper or conference paper).

Times: W 9-11

Introduction to Postcolonial Studies

Apollo Amoko

This course will examine canonical theories and fictions in postcolonial studies. The field refers to an effort by scholars in diverse disciplines to come to terms, from a global perspective, with the legacy of European colonialism. In the wake of the voyages of exploration and “discovery” from the fifteenth century onwards, a handful of European powers (England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands), came gradually to exercise sovereignty over vast territories covering roughly eighty percent of the world. In political, social, economic and cultural terms, the colonial situation effected epochal transformations of not only the conquered societies but also imperial Europe. The colonial encounter resulted in the consolidation of the idea of a European or Western modernity at the apex of human civilization. It also resulted in incomplete, chaotic, and traumatic attempts forcibly to transform other societies in the image of Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, virtually all formerly colonized territories had become independent nations but the effects of colonial rule continue to be powerfully felt at multiple levels. For example, the practice of everyday life in vast sectors of both the imperial and the colonized worlds continue to be governed, often with devastating consequences, by ideas about racial, national, continental, gender, sexual and other identities invented in the context of the colonial encounter. As well, the political economies of many formally independent nations continue to be characterized by fundamental contradictions, inequalities and dependencies brought about by colonial rule. Finally, the global economic, political and cultural order continues to be organized in terms of a contest pitting the interests of a handful of wealthy and disproportionately powerful nations against a multitude of poor and relatively powerless nations. Writers studied will likely include Mark Twain, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Times: R 9-11

Children’s Literature and the Second World War

Anastasia Ulanowicz

In the introduction to his book, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, historian Norman Davies lists five questions he regularly poses to lecture audiences:

• Can you name the five biggest battles of the war in Europe? Or, better still, the ten biggest battles?
• Can you name the main political ideologies that were contending for supremacy during the war in Europe?
• Can you name the largest concentration camp that was operating in Europe in the years 1939-1945?
• Can you name the European nationality (or ethnic group) which lost the largest number of civilians during the war?
• Can you name the vessel that was sunk with record loss of life in the war’s largest maritime disaster?

According to Davies, even the most educated members of his primarily British and North American lecture audiences have difficulty responding correctly to each of these questions. For example, although most U.S. Americans can readily identify the storming of Normandy in June of 1944 as a major—if not the major—event that took place on the European theatre, most demonstrate little to no knowledge of the battle of Stalingrad in January of 1943, even though it was statistically the bloodiest battle of the European war, and arguably its turning point. Moreover, although most Westerners are very well acquainted with the liberation of Nazi death camps by Allied armies, few can identify the Soviet gulag archipelago as the largest concentration camp system functioning in Europe between 1939 and 1945. Finally, although most North Americans and British subjects can readily identify such maritime disasters as the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic and the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania, comparatively few are acquainted with the 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustlaffa few nautical miles away from the port of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland)—indeed, “the vessel that was sunk with record loss of life in the war’s largest maritime disaster.”

Ultimately, as Davies argues, most Westerners recognize and commemorate a fairly limited narrative of the Second World War-era European theatre—one that significantly excludes the tremendous role played by Eastern European soldiers, sailors, partisans, activists, prisoners, whores, spies, and everyday civilians who engaged in ideological and/or material battles largely fought within the “bloodlands” territories spanning horizontally between contemporary western Poland and the eastern reaches of the Siberian steppe and vertically from Archangel to the Black Sea. However, internationally-renowned and multiply-translated works of children’s literature have played a significant role in re-orienting, as it were, narratives of the Second World War. To this end, this course will examine the works of such children’s authors as M.T. Anderson, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Esther Hautzig, Hergé, Uri Orlev, Ruta Sepetys and others who depict events before, during, and in the aftermath of the war. We will read these literary works alongside contemporary histories (e.g., Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin), scholarly criticism (e.g., Hamida Bosmajian’s Sparing the Child and Alexander Etkind’s Warped Mourning), works of political philosophy (e.g., Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism) and contemporary manifestos (e.g., Snyder’s On Tyranny) in order to consider the contemporary implications of Second World War history, memory, and representation—especially regarding issues of human rights discourse, national borders, nationalism, and post-Soviet memory and historiography.

Times: T 9-11

Blue Ecocriticism

Sid Dobrin

Earth is a planet of saltwater. Conventional accounts simplify: saltwater covers nearly 71% of the Earth’s surface. Roughly, that translates to about 128 million square miles of ocean surface and 310 million miles cubed in ocean volume. Relatively speaking, that’s a hell of a lot of saltwater (and just about anyone writing about marine environments is apt to relate that fact, as though the relative size stands as an argument in and of itself). The Ocean’s average depth is about 12,080 feet, with the deepest point at Challenger Deep at the southern end of Mariana’s Trench in the Pacific reaching 36,200 feet (just under 7 miles). Humans have seen less than 5-percent of this vastness—less than 1% below 1,000 feet down.

The ocean can be a strange place, an alien place, a wild place. Historically, we cast the ocean as the wildest nature, the untamable. But, in the same breath, we cast the ocean as a place of salvation. Contemporary environmental conversations and some oceanographic discussions describe the ocean as the place from where human salvation will likely emerge in the wake of environmental destruction; others point out that life on earth is dependent upon the health of the ocean: “as goes the ocean, so goes life” (Alana Mitchell, Sea Sick, 22). The ocean is strange and promising all in one breath.

The ocean. Singular. The bodies of saltwater that cover the planet are connected, or, more accurately, are a singular aquatic body divided only by human cartography for the sake of navigational communication, for the ability to conveniently identify location and for political claims to sovereign rights. But such convenience invades our thought, contributing to centuries of understanding the oceans as independent bodies. Instead, we must now think not of the world’s oceans, but of the world’s ocean—singular—or what author of Shakespeare’s Ocean Dan Brayton points out is standard discourse in the marine sciences: “the global ocean.” Or what J. H. Parry, the eminent maritime historian, described in his seminal book The Discovery of the Sea as “the one sea”: “All the seas of the world are one.” Unique in its oneness, the ocean is alone on this planet, and as far as we know at this moment, alone in the universe. The ocean, like Rocket Raccoon, declares, “Ain’t no thing like me, except me.” It is the rarest of jewels; there is no other of its kind. As such, its value is immeasurable. Its rarity surpasses the perception of its vastness. Size is relative.

The world’s ocean, though, is also complicated with the turmoil of possession. The possessive world’s indicates the ocean to be owned by the world; the world, of course, understood not to mean a global ecology, but the possession of the human inhabitants of the planet. The deeply-seeded cultural understanding of possession and its extension across the ocean confounds our ability to think of the ocean in ways other than territorially and reveals our desire to import land-based logic of ownership on the fluid space of the ocean. We have records of territorial disputes over ocean access and fisheries rights dating back to at least the early 1200s. Such cultural entrenchments will be difficult to overcome.

Enter ecocriticism and ecocomposition.

Ecocriticism emerged in English programs just over a quarter century ago. Reductively, ecocriticism adopted the mission of examining literature from an environmental standpoint. In the same way that feminist criticism studies literature from a feminist perspective or Marxist criticism studies literature from a Marxist perspective, ecocriticism claimed the study of literature from an environmental perspective. More speculatively, though, we might say that ecocriticism unfolded as humanists began to ask “what can we do?” alongside the sciences in the midst of growing environmental crisis.

Over the last 25+ years, ecocriticism has rapidly become not only a disciplinary legitimate critical form, but one of the most dynamic criticisms to emerge of recent. However, even in its institutional success, ecocriticism has failed in many ways, failures we might dismiss as resulting from its juvenescent standing. Key among these failures—at least for the purposes of this class—is ecocriticism’s terrestrial mindset, manifest in its historical attachment to Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain.” That is, ecocriticism has thus far been a land-based criticism stranded on a liquid planet. Ecocritics have produced only limited work in marine-based ecocriticsm.

This class is designed to explore the possibility of a Blue Ecocriticism, of a critical approach to literary and writing studies informed by oceanic thinking, fluidity, and systems ecology. This course will consider a rich range of subjects all bound by the global ocean to the end of invigorating oceanic thinking. At minimum, the course will ask, how have we written about the oceans and what are the ramifications of those writings. More dynamically, though, this course will unearth ecococriticsm, developing a vital theory of oceanic criticism. Subjects will include, but are not limited to:

• Atlantic/transatlantic & postcolonial studies
• Climate change and ocean rise
• Ecological literacy/digital literacy
• Marine animal studies
• Ocean as media
• Ocean/human/posthuman
• Oceanic studies
• The alien ocean
• The apparent ocean
• The appearance of blue as the last color humans have come to know
• The beach as transitional space
• The literary ocean
• The ocean as object and hyper object
• The oceanic sublime
• The paratextual ocean

Students will produce two projects for this class, including one multimodal project and a second research project.

Times: T 3-5

Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought

Debra King

“The most common way people give up their power is thinking they don’t have any.”

-Alice Walker

This course introduces students to an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist whose work, both creative and sociopolitical, has shaken the foundations of American literature and liberation theory to reconstitute the boundaries of both. Walker’s work has earned the highest accolades of praise and accomplishment, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983 and induction into the California Hall of Fame in 1993 (among others). As a writer and social activist, Walker remains an international figure of increasing fame and respect. Her novels, poetry, essays and blogs explore themes of naturalistic fiction while also engaging the more dramatic themes of modernism and Womanist thought: death, love, rebirth, responsibility, spirituality, and memory.

This semester students will investigate why critics herald Alice Walker as the mother of Womanism and determine, though her writing, what Womanism means. The works we will study are powerful offerings of prose and poetry that move beyond human victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal and revival. But most importantly, each selected text demonstrates not only what Womanism is or can do but also how one (regardless of color or nationality) can achieve the Womanist vision of vital, human connections that provide access to individual wholeness. I welcome you to journey with me into the world of Alice Walker’s Womanist thought and discover why she professes, “Everything is a human being.”

Times: M 9-11