Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
Summer 2021
Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses
Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below.
Summer A
| Course # | Section # | Class # | Time(s) | Room | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AML 3607 | 1S01 | 19118 | MTWRF 3 | TBD | African American Literature: 1945 to Present | Ashley Clemons |
| ENG 4134 | 1S02 | 19119 | MTWRF 4/ MW 6-7 | TBD | Women and Film | Megan Fowler |
| ENC 4414 | 4454 | 19767 | MTWRF 2 | TBD | Hypermedia | Natalie Goodman |
| ENG 4905 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Independent Study | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4911 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Undergraduate Research (English) | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4940 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Internship | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4970 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Honors Thesis Project | Kenneth Kidd |
Summer B
| Course # | Section # | Class # | Time(s) | Room | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AML 3284 | 4S01 | 19120 | MTWRF 2 | TBD | Southern Women’s Literature | Alyssa Dewees |
| ENG 4905 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Independent Study | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4911 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Undergraduate Research (English) | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4940 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Internship | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENG 4970 | DEP-X | DEP-X | TBD | TBD | Honors Thesis Project | Kenneth Kidd |
| ENL 3234 | 4S02 | 19125 | MTWRF 3 | TBD | The Long Eighteenth Century | Brooke Fortune |
| LIT 4322 | 4322 | 19769 | MTWRF 4 | TBD | Witches, Spirits, and Men of Steel: Folklore and World Literature | Romy Rajan |
| LIT 4333 | 4S03 | 19126 | MTWRF 5 | TBD | Literature for the Adolescent | Yvonne Medina |
Course Descriptions
Summer A
AML 3607
African American Literature: 1945 to Present
Ashley Clemons
From Gwendolyn Brooks to Kendrick Lamar, the African American vernacular tradition continues to shape American culture. Historically, these oral and musical storytellers retain African Americans’ experiences, and often critique conditions within United States society. Accordingly, this course pays special attention to what Amiri Baraka calls, “the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life, our words, the libretto, to those actual, lived lives” (Blues People, x). Students will survey significant periods such as Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, The Black Arts Era, and the contemporary. We will consider both prominent and understudied contributions to poetry, gospel, sermon, songs of social change, jazz, hip-hop/rap, and the American theatre. Students will think about historical, social, and cultural contexts to develop critical perspectives on issues related to social justice, race, gender, and sexuality. This course will consist of novels, critical texts/lectures, music, and other multimedia.
Minor Note: Students will be asked to find their voices in discussion, writing, and collaboration. To accomplish this goal, they will be expected to demonstrate patience, respect, thoughtfulness, and open-mindedness throughout the entire course. Some materials may contain religious references, violence, and brutality. Ultimately, students have the opportunity to hear new and familiar sounds in African American literature.
ENG 4134
Women and Film
Megan Fowler
This course will examine women in cinema as film subjects and objects, spectators, and filmmakers. The primary purpose of this class is to teach you as students women’s role in film history, familiarize you with influential works in feminist film theory, and help you hone your oral and written critical analysis skills in viewing and reading film.
Tracing the last 100 years of cinematic history, we will begin with the early silent period before moving into the “Golden Age” of classic Hollywood cinema. Topics of note from this period will include the significance of the Hollywood starlet as a figure, the hidden history of female editors (known at the time as “cutters”), and the significant contributions women made to Hollywood film during the eras of the New Woman, the Great Depression, and WWII. Moving to the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we will consider historical shifts for women both in front of and behind the camera in the wake of emerging film movements like the French New Wave and rising social movements such as second wave feminism. Finally, we will conclude in the contemporary era, focusing on the rise of female directors in both independent and mainstream film. With more women assuming primary roles in film production, this era offers new opportunities to approach film from an intersectional feminist lens. Our class will accordingly tackle questions about the role of race, queerness, and disability in cinematic depictions of women. Potential filmmakers from this period include Cheryl Dunye, Lana and Lily Wachowski, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Aurora Guerrero.
Given our wide breadth, this class will also include films from a wide variety of genres and mediums. For example, we will explore generic traditions that have primarily been associated with women’s films including the melodrama, romantic comedy, and historical drama. In our conversations around these genres, we will discuss both the ways in which such subject matter reflects women’s daily lives as well as the often denigratory treatment of these films (frequently dubbed “chick flicks” in the contemporary) by the wider public sphere. In addition, this class will consider the feminist possibilities of speculative genres such as film noir, horror, and science fiction, synthesizing our conversations with feminist scholarship from authors like E. Ann Kaplan, Carol Clover, and Donna J. Harraway.
ENG 4134 “Women and Film” is an online course. As such, the class will be offered through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous sessions on digital platforms Zoom and Canvas. Participation in the form of class attendance, discussion posts, and attentive engagement with course materials is required.
ENG 4414
Women and Film
Natalie Goodman
This course will familiarize students with the emerging field of digital rhetoric. Digital technologies have profoundly affected the ways in which we produce and circulate writing, and digital networks create new possibilities and obstacles for writing that require new theories, methods and rhetorical practices. This course will examine the history of writing as a technology, looking to contemporary scholarship on digital rhetoric and multimodal composition in order to theorize and invent new methods for networked writing. Readings will challenge students to consider how digital media reshape the ways we research, compose, and distribute knowledge, as well as how those forms of digital knowledge we create shape the physical environments and corporeal bodies we live in. Course readings will tap a variety of media, including linear text, video essays, pop culture texts, podcasts, programming tutorials and videogames (all of which will be available for free online).
Students will study and use emerging writing technologies as they address the new ethical challenges facing contemporary writers in digital media environments. Students will learn digital research methods and create critical multimedia projects as they consider how new media affect the rhetorical frameworks through which we communicate and think. Assignments will follow a project-based learning model and include print media writings, a digital image-tracking project, and an artificial intelligence project. Students will learn digital rhetoric practices that bolster their ability to better describe the effects of digital media as they familiarize themselves with emerging tools for digital writing.
Summer B
AML 3284
Southern Women’s Literature
Alyssa Dewees
From the memoirs of Elizabeth Keckley (dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Davis) to Their Eyes Were Watching God, this course will explore the literature of women in the American South as well as the cultural forces which shaped their lives and identities. By analyzing artifacts of popular culture alongside the literature of the South, from early American to post-antebellum and into the modern era, students will interrogate how the pressing issues and debates of each historical period shaped the literature. Furthermore, discussions will also question how Southern literature influenced the political issues of the day as well as how it has helped to shape what we recognize as a Southern identity, and in particular a Southern female identity. By engaging with literature from diverse populations of Southerners and periods of Southern history, students will encounter multiple valences of Southern identity and shifting visions of the Southern origin story.
The assignments for this course will require students to read, analyze, and construct arguments concerning the assigned texts. Students will write two short essays throughout the semester as well as a creative blog project and submit a series of short reading responses.
Other texts may include:
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
- Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
- Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
- Carson McCullers, “The Member of the Wedding”
- Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person”
ENL 3234
The Long Eighteenth Century
Brooke Forturne
British historians designate the long 18th Century as spanning from the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, although some extend the period as far forward as the early 1830s. For the purposes of this course, we will be looking at texts ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1830s. Moving more or less chronologically, units in this course will examine some of the key figures, tropes, events and literary movements of the period, such as the rise of London as a modern cosmopolitan city following the Great Fire, the Gothic in its original iteration, piracy and criminality, the Regency, the Napoleonic Wars, and how the period shaped the rise of the modern novel. Alongside primary texts by authors such as Pope, DeFoe, Austen, Ainsworth, and Marryat, we will occasionally consider the popularity of the period in contemporary cultural iterations, such as in shows such as Harlots, Bridgerton, and Black Sails and films such as The Favorite. In format, this course will be split between synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Graded assignments include class discussions, reading quizzes, short reflection papers, a literature review, and a final research project.
LIT 4322
Witches, Spirits, and Men of Steel: Folklore and World Literature
Romy Rajan
Folklore and myth are often considered repositories of a past that has nothing to do with the present. Such a belief, however, belies the role played by myths and folktales in the formation of the modern nation as well as other modern institutions. This course shall look at how contemporary novels and films incorporate folklore into their narratives to build bridges between the present and the past. We will read/watch works that do this to a) reclaim pasts that have been marginalized or b) generate ideological covers for contemporary injustices by situating the folk in identitarian traditions. Such works often mirror the structure of folklore, offering an important means of situating oneself in a globalized world where identities are visibly unstable and ever-changing. We will explore how this role of the folk is often ambivalent and cannot be rooted completely either in the past or the present.
Tentative list of works
- Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954)
- Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl (2007)
- Zack Snyder, Man of Steel (2013)
- Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (2017)
- Ngugi wa Thiongo, The Perfect Nine (2018)
LIT 4333
Literature for the Adolescent
Yvonne Medina
Why is there a young adult genre? And how can we define it as “young adult” when media productions are largely controlled by adults? These are some of the authority challenging questions we will explore in the spirit of ironic adolescent rebellion. Roberta Trites’s Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Fiction argues that this genre is less concerned with individual development than testing the powers of various social structures. Following a brief period of rebellion, protagonists usually learn to conform to the same social structures without enacting systemic change. We will similarly examine ways young adult literature (dis)empowers readers.
We will trace various accounts of the young adult genre’s emergence and theorize the aesthetic conventions of this diverse genre. Young adult literature in many European languages is called “jeans prose” because it tends to emphasize material culture and trends. To that end, we will discuss the ways nostalgia, especially in and for the 1980s, drives popular ideas about adolescence and the concept of “coming of age.” We will also critique capitalist entanglements in processes of maturation such as the makeover arc.
We will examine subgenres that are sometimes excluded from traditional studies of adolescent literature like teen romance novels, narratives of disability, teen movies, and adolescent-created texts from published works to fan fiction. The conclusion of the course will focus on current generational trends and emerging adolescent subcultures, especially about Gen Z.
Texts may include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, selections from Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High, John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Wendy Mass’ A Mango-Shaped Space, and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park. Films may include The Breakfast Club, Clueless, She’s All That, Harold and Maude, and Framing Britney Spears.
Assignments will include a combination of short papers on assigned readings, one short presentation, one short creative project, and a final project/paper. In addition to traditional analytical papers, options for final projects include using generationally specific media platforms like TikTok to generate and transmit public humanities research.