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Undergraduate Courses

Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.

Fall 2024

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below.

 

Course # Section Class # Time(s) Room Course title Instructor
AML 3605 8DK2 28328 T 6-8 ONLINE African American Literature 1 King
AML 4170  8JM1 29336 T 4 / R 4-5 TBA Afrofuturism Mollenthiel
AML 4282 8JS1 28331 M W F 8 TUR 2334 Early LGBTQ Literatures Schorb
AML 4311 8MR1 28332 M W F 4 TUR 2322 The World of James Baldwin & Critical Intersectionality Reid
AML 4311 8SS1 10292 M W F 7 ONLINE Edith Wharton Smith
AML 4453 8EK1 29609 T 7 / R 7-8 TBA On the Road: Representations of America Through European Eyes Kligerman
AML 4453 8JS2 28333 M W F 6 TUR 2334 The Pen & the Penitentiary: U.S. Prison Literature in History Schorb
CRW 3110 8KB1 11869 M 9-11 FLI 0113 Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing Blasco Soler
CRW 4211 8MH2 28342 M 9-11 FLI 0121 Creative Non-Fiction Hofmann
CRW 4905 8KW1 11870 T 9-11 MAT 0005 Senior Advanced Writing Workshop Williams
CRW 4906 8AM1 11889 T 9-11 MAT 0004 Elegies and Odes Mlinko
ENC 3312 8CM1 29576 T 5-6 / R 6 MAT 0113 Advanced Argumentative Writing Chakraborty
ENG 3121 8PB1 28560 M W F 3 / T 9-11 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 History of Film 1 Bianchi
ENG 4015 8PR1 12198 M W F 7 MAT 0113 Psychological Approaches to Literature: Atoms and the Void Rudnytsky
ENG 4133 8PB2 28561 M W F 4 / M 9-11 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Cinema of the Global South Bianchi
ENG 4133 8RB1 28562 T 2-3 / R 3 / T E1-E3 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Shakespeare and Film Burt
ENG 4134 8SB1 25693 M W F 5 / W 9-11  TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Women and Fashion in French Cinema Blum
ENG 4135 8RH1 28563 T 5-6 / R 6 / R E1-E3 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Introduction to Israeli Cinema Holler
ENG 4146 8TM1 28564 R E1-E3 / W E1-E3 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Long-Form Filmmaking Mowchun
ENG 4310 8HR1 28567 T 8-9 / R 9 / R 9-11 TUR 2322 / ROL 0115 The European Road Movie Raynard
ENG 4310 8RB2 28565 T 4 / R 4-5 / W 9-11 TUR 2334 Sounds, Music & Horror Films Burt
ENG 4905 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Independent Study Kidd
ENG 4910 8LG1 28568 T 9-11 MAT 0003  Community Engagement Gonzales
ENG 4910 8MG1 27300 T 5-6 / R 6 MAT 0118 20thC & 21stC Print Histories Galvan
ENG 4911 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Undergraduate Research in English Kidd
ENG 4936 DEP-X DEP-X R 6-8 ONLINE Honors: Nineteenth-Century African American Women: Their Lives and Literature King
ENG 4936 DEP-X DEP-X W 6-8 MAT 0009 Honors: Contemporary American Literature & Cultures of Imperialism Schueller
ENG 4940 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Internship Kidd
ENG 4970 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Honors Thesis Project Kidd
ENL 3122 8PG1 25768 T 9-11 MAT 0117 Nineteenth-Century British Novel Gilbert
ENL 3154 8MB1 25694 M W F 4 ROL 0115 20th Century British Poetry Bryant
ENL 4303 8PR2 23929 M W F 8 MAT 0113 John Milton: Poetry and Prose Rudnytsky
LIT 3003 8EK2 29610 T 4-5 / R 4 TBA The Horror, The Horror: Representations of War and Political Violence Kligerman
LIT 3003 8PG2 29587 W 9-11 TUR 2535 Detection and Crime in Fiction Gilbert
LIT 3043 8SHA 25695 T 2-3 / R 3 ONLINE Modern Drama: Learning by Doing Homan
LIT 3173 8JW1 28652 M W F 6 MAT 0118 Yiddish New York Wagner
LIT 3173 8JW2 28602 M W F 8 MAT 115 Russian Jewish Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries Wagner
LIT 3383 8JM2 28753 ASYNCH ONLINE Black Women Transatlantic Mollenthiel
LIT 3383 8RL1 28647 T 7-8 / R 7 TBA African Women Writers Lugano
LIT 4194 8AA2 25698 T 2-3 / R 3 TUR 2303

African Literature and Colonial Anthropology

Amoko
LIT 4483 8MG2 26144 T 2-3 / R 3 MAT 0113 Seeing Differently: Comics and Identity Galvan
LIT 4930 8DKA 26150 T 10 / R 10-11 TUR 2334 Vampire Cinema Kujundzic
LIT 4930 8DKB 26151 T 8-9 / R 9 TUR 2334 Jewish-American Cinema Kujundzic
LIT 4930 8JE1 28655 M W F 7 MAT 0102 Black Englishes Essegbey
LIT 4930 8SHB 26149 T 4 / R 4-5 ONLINE  An Evening with Tom Stoppard Homan
LIT 4930 8THB 26147 T 10 / R 10-11 MAT 0113 Feminist Speculative Fiction Hedrick
LIT 4930 8YXA 29098 M W F 7 TBA Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Global Cinema Xiao

Course Descriptions

AML 3605

African American Literature 1
Debra Walker King

Description: African American writers from 1746 to the present have written in all genres, leaving none unchanged by the appropriation. It is a literature that not only intertextualizes elements of the vernacular tradition (spirituals, folktales and the blues) and its own immediate past but is a regenerative force of conscious construction and literary beauty within the history of American literature. The goal of this course is to investigate the transformational power of Black imagination and artistic genius within social and political contexts. Students will gain an understanding of and appreciation for the creative dexterity and conventions of this literature. The period covered begins with Lucy Terry’s 1746 “Bars Fight” and ends with the Harlem Renaissance. Although chronology is obscured by a focus on genre, readings are arranged so that students can trace the development of various genres and various styles, themes, images, and structures across time and within individual author’s works. In this way, the course emphasizes the creative process, intertextuality, and literary history.

AML 4170

Afrofuturism
Julia Mollenthiel

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of literary and artistic forms of Afrofuturism. Students will engage in close examination of texts by Afrofuturists from both academic and popular realms that may include fiction and non-fiction, in addition to non-print sources such as film and music. We will probe the genre of Afrofuturism and its tenets with a particular focus on representations of race and sexuality through time travel, aliens and space, robots, and more. We will consider the relationship between science fiction, African American history, and African diasporic literary traditions including dystopian and utopian visions of the past and future. We will also consider the various ways in which technology intersects with race and how Black artists use science fiction to challenge hegemonic systems of oppression.

AML 4282

Early LGBTQ Literatures
Jodi Schorb

This course familiarizes students with the long tradition of LGBT literature before what we might call the “invention of homosexuality.”
Now we take for granted the phrase “sexual identity,” but this concept itself has a history. The belief that sexuality is a core component of a person’s identity emerged out of specific historical, cultural, and scientific developments, and the words “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” were not even coined until 1869 and 1880 respectively. The literary (and real) world has always been a place of abundant sexual diversity, gender variance, and same-sex love and sex: yet the cultural meanings of what we know call “homosexuality” shifts across space and time.

After an overview of influential Western traditions that helped shape a legible tradition of LGBTQ writing in English, the course will focus intensely (but not exclusively) on queer identity-formation in nineteenth-century American literature. Through a blend of cultural history and close literary analysis, students will analyze the literary representation of same-sex desire and theorize how a text’s queer elements generate thematic purpose and meaning.

Most crucially, we will explore how pre twentieth-century individuals sought to articulate same sex love without access to a shared language or shared cultural codes. Sometimes writers looked backward to express and legitimate same-sex desire (drawing especially from classical myth and the Bible); others looked forward, developing an emergent language of sexuality and queer futurity.

Likely readings will be drawn from: Ovid, Metamorphosis; Plato, Symposium; the King James Bible; Békotsidi’s “Song of Blessing” and other aikane and two-spirit songs; William Shakespeare, sonnets; anon., Don Leon; Anne Lister, Diaries; periodical fiction such as “The Man who Thought Himself a Woman” (1857), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Two Friends” and other nineteenth-century short stories; letters by Alexander Hamilton, Herman Melville, Addie Brown, and others; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; poetry by Emily Dickinson; Oscar Wilde, De Profundis; case studies by European sexologists; and the Digital Transgender Archive. We’ll also read a contemporary novel immersed in this archival history, Blackouts, by Justin Torres, the recipient of the 2023 National Book Award for fiction.

Expect to gain historical knowledge as well as improved skills in critical reading, reading, and literary analysis. Assignments will likely include two analytical essays (4-7 pages), a group creative project; and periodic homework such as discussion board posts, research activities, and first-person reflections.

AML 4311

The World of James Baldwin and Critical Intersectionality
Mark A. Reid

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin’s literary and sociopolitical writings. The course expects that students apply critical race theory in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from writing by scholars as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class discussion and written work will discern whether there exists evidence of Afro-Pessimism and or postNegritude moments in Baldwin’s oeuvre that easily dismisses postracial fantasies and the machination of neoliberal gestures.

Readings, class discussions, and film screened will critically surveys James Baldwin’s writings, lectures, and selected biographies that explore Baldwin’s life in the United States, France, and Turkey. Baldwin was engaged in the socio-political world that surrounded and sometimes consumed his artistic and moral energies. He was active in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and international concerns about the construction of nation, race, and sexuality. One critic wrote of Baldwin in these words: “Following publication of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s literary star approached its peak during the turbulent 1960s. His burgeoning role as celebrity, prophet, and leader heaped an unsustainable amount of pressure and responsibility onto his slight frame in an American landscape that doubly punished Baldwin for being both black and gay, and he often turned to Turkey for sanctuary”.

This course will reveal the artistry, compassion, and moral commitment of one of America’s greatest writers. Students will critically study how James Baldwin fared as an American writer and social critic. and how critical race theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. Class discussion will consider how Baldwin imaginatively exposed and fervently articulated the coming consciousness that generates “Black Lives Matter” awareness and endgame.

AML 4311

Edith Wharton
Stephanie A. Smith

Like her older friend, the writer Henry James, Edith Wharton née Jones (1862-1937) was a writer’s writer and a novelist’s novelist, a supreme chronicler of her era, now called The Gilded Age. Born into a wealthy, New York City family, she grew up among the American aristocracy of the City, which she would skewer in her novels; at the late age of twenty-three she married Edward (Teddy) Wharton but the marriage didn’t last; Teddy’s mental health had never been stable and it slowly fell apart; Wharton was granted a divorce in 1913, which was unusual for a woman at this time and she moved permanently to Paris. Wharton also won the first Pulitzer prize awarded to a woman and was given an honorary doctorate by Yale; during WWI, instead of retreating into her wealth, she became a war correspondent and a humanitarian and was awarded the Legion of Honor by France in 1916. In this class we’ll read a selection of Edith Wharton’s most important works starting with The House of Mirth (1905) in a reexamination of this major American author from the perspective of the 21st century. For more about the author see https://www.edithwharton.org/discover/edith-wharton/

AML 4453

On the Road: Representations of America Through European Eyes
Eric Kligerman

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how both American and European writers represent the concept of the American Dream in 20th and 21st century literature and visual media. We will situate iconic works of American literature (Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Baldwin, Didion, Delillo and Coates) next to how the American dream is experienced by European writers and filmmakers, including Kafka, Adorno, Brecht, Nabokov, Baudrillard and Herzog. How has the American dream been re-imagined and represented by European writers and artists?

AML 4453

The Pen & the Penitentiary: U.S. Prison Literature in History
Jodi Schorb

Beginning in the 1780s, American prison reformers participated in a transatlantic debate about the value and promise of reformative incarceration. These debates and reforms birthed the modern prison and its enormous historical, cultural, and literary legacy. This course analyzes the role of the prison in American literature and the impactful contributions of inmate authors (poetry, fiction, life writing, letters.)

Readings are drawn from three areas: the birth and evolution of the US penitentiary (primary and secondary sources), secondary scholarship on the prison from the interdisciplinary field of prison studies, and literature that emerges out of the prison—with a strong emphasis on culturally significant work by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated writers.

Students who complete this course will gain substantial understanding of how the first “modern” US prisons were envisioned: by whom, and for what purposes. They will understand scholarly claims and also make their own original arguments as to how the prison (as material space, as cultural icon, as theoretical idea) impacted the development of American literature. They will gain tools and skills to analyze how incarcerated writers represent the experience of imprisonment to outside readers. Students will also have opportunity to conduct hands-on research in primary archives such as JSTOR’s American Prison Newspapers 1800- and Doran Larson’s American Prison Writing Archive.

Likely readings include: Austen Reed, Life and Memoirs of a Haunted Convict; short stories by Edgar Allen Poe; selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne; Julian Hawthorn, “If Not Prisons, What?”; Martin Luther King “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; Leonard Peltier, My Life is a Sun Dance; Etheridge Knight, Poems from Prison; Mariam Kaba, “Justice”; Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon; poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca and Catherine LaFleur (Florida’s current Luis Angel Hernandez Prison Poet Laureate), and secondary readings by Angela Davis, Joy James, Michel Foucault, and others.

Assignments include first-person reflections on the course materials, at least two 4-7 page essays, a shorter archival research and discovery project, and periodical homework/discussion boards/group work.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Kathryn Blasco Soler

TBA

CRW 4211

Creative Non-Fiction
Michael Hofmann

A course on writing about people and places. The reading-list might have been drawn from nature writing or science or biography, but I have come down in favour of a mulch of history, geography and politics, from an array of cult authors and Nobel laureates including Ryszard Kapuscinski, Andrzej Stasiuk, Joseph Roth, Svetlana Alexievich, Joan Didion, Bruce Chatwin, and Annie Ernaux, among possibly others. Spoken contributions will be encouraged. Participants will do much writing of and on their own, either on several different projects, or perhaps on a single task. Reading and writing, research and style, should all benefit. (I would rather you came wanting to write a book about cuttlefish than on the first twenty years – or indeed the first six months – of your lives, but the latter may be allowable under certain circumstances; I should like it, however, not to preponderate.)

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop
Kimberly Williams

“I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does function as a creative writer’s ruse) for two reasons. One, because it ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources.” How do we articulate the nuances of culture and memory into fictive works? How can cultural history serve as a channel to explore the act of witnessing, collusion, and rebellion? How can we use memory as a tool to mirror the complexities of the human condition? For this course, we will explore cultural memory in storytelling and how that kinship impacts characterization, dialogue, plot, and more. As Toni Morrison details in the above quotation, it is memory that emboldens the discernment and contradictions in fiction. In this course, we will write with/from specific authors who use cultural memory as wellsprings for their testaments. Let’s experiment with flash fiction, short stories, collaborative storytelling, and more before we transition into workshop. We will hear from such “memory workers” like Danticat, Gaitskill, Machado, Gawad and plenty more. You have your memories and I have mine; fiction says both recollections are true.

CRW 4906

Elegies and Odes
Ange Mlinko

In this advanced workshop, we will read elegies and odes across languages and time periods. Then we will write our own, paying particular attention to the methods devised by poets as different as Sappho and Emily Dickinson, Derek Walcott and Les Murray, Frank O’Hara and Rainier Maria Rilke. This course will involve close-reading and annotating individual poems, and writing answer poems and imitations. Workshops are small, intense, and cover a lot of ground—just like poems.

ENC 3312

Advanced Argumentative Writing
Sayantika Chakraborty

In this course, you will receive practice and instruction in argumentative writing by studying the relationship between gender inequality and climate change. Focusing on indigenous and tribal communities, we will examine how women are uniquely vulnerable to ecological disasters by discussing issues of consumption, waste, reproduction, and migration.

Texts may include The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020), “Sunshine State” by Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson (2016), The Woman who Thought she was a Planet by Vandana Singh (2008), and films such as Don’t Look Up (2021). Writing assignments may include an annotated bibliography, an argumentative essay, as well as short and informal discussion posts.

ENG 3121

History of Film 1
Pietro Bianchi

At first, there were shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, camera obscura, and the magic lantern: different devices that used moving imagery for entertainment and storytelling. However, it was only at the end of the 19th century that Thomas Edison in New Jersey found out that if you put some still images on a roll and spin these images in a box, they give the illusion of movement. It was only a matter of months, and in 1895, the Lumière brothers in France invented the Cinematograph, the first type of motion picture film mechanism. Film was born.

In this course, we will reflect on the invention of cinema and learn what happened during the first few decades of its life: years when a few audacious artists, technicians, and entrepreneurs invented an art form from scratch, with no one to look up to. After a couple of weeks where we will study the predecessors to film and the historical context of the late 19th century (interestingly film was invented around the same years of the telephone, the phonograph, electricity, the automobile, and psychoanalysis) we will analyze film’s commercial expansion, the first great actors and directors and the first few years of Hollywood, the artistic development in German expressionism and Soviet montage and the advent of sound in the late 1920s.

We will see films by the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, Erich von Stroheim, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein and Augusto Genina.

The class has a weekly mandatory screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussions (a strong emphasis will be given on active participation). Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 5-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature: Atoms and the Void
Peter Rudnytsky

In his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius (c. 99-55 BCE) dares to think the unthinkable: the gods take no interest in human affairs, the soul dies, there is no afterlife, the universe consists of atoms in an infinite void, and the highest goal of human life is the pleasure that comes from ridding oneself of delusions and the deep wonder that comes from seeing things clearly. In this course, we will begin by reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which tells the gripping story of how the discovery in 1417 of a manuscript of Lucretius’s poem, which had been lost for more than a thousand years, ushered in the modern world. We will then take up the challenge of the poem itself, before examining the tensions between Epicureanism and Christianity in Thomas More’s Utopia. We will conclude by attempting to see our own realities clearly with the aid of Timothy Snyder’s Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4133

Cinema of the Global South
Pietro Bianchi

In 1969, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino wrote a manifesto called Hacia un tercer cine (Toward a Third Cinema), in which they examined the complex nexus of cinema, politics, and filmmaking practices. They called for a cinema that would reject both Hollywood commercial movies and bourgeois European art films. This marked the beginning of third cinema: a film movement that expressed anti-colonial and anti-capitalist sentiments, as well as a new collective-oriented filmmaking practice. It became a point of reference for decades of political and experimental cinema in the Global South.

This course offers a critical approach and diverse mapping strategies for the study of cinema in the Global South, with all its differences and complexities. Students will be introduced to theoretical debates about the global circulation of films, aesthetics, audiences, authorship, and concepts of the transnational. The first section of the course will analyze some of the most important films of Third Cinema (such as La Hora de Los Hornos by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Memorias del Subdesarrollo by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Antonio das Mortes by Glauber Rocha). In the second section, we will discuss several filmmakers who revolutionized cinema in the Global South during the 1970s and 1980s (including Assia Djebar, Haile Gerima, Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, and Yilmaz Güney). Finally, the last section of the class will focus on contemporary filmmakers (such as Jia Zhang-ke, Anurag Kashyap, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pablo Larraín, Elia Suleiman, Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso and Lav Diaz).

The class includes a mandatory weekly screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussions (with a strong emphasis on active participation). Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 5-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4133

Shakespeare and Film
Richard Burt

We will watch film adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Requirements: Class participation; co-lead class discussion twice; a Film Clip Exercise; two 500-700 word papers; and two discussion questions and three shot analyses for each class.

ENG  4134

Women and Fashion in French Cinema
Sylvie Blum

The class is tailored around the history of women’s fashion and style in French cinema. The class spans the twentieth century. The material bridges different areas of fashion and film studies. Through various readings and film screenings, you will acquire the necessary tools and terminology to decode the system. Areas covered include advertising, architecture, the art of the couturière, fabric, cuisine, film costume, sustainable fashion and taste. The class is designed for third + fourth year students who are already versed in exploring and analyzing certain literary and cultural texts. It might be an introduction to film for some of you who have never taken a film class. You will familiarize yourselves with the proper terminology and acquire knowledge in a field that is rich in historical, artistic, and cultural markers. The readings contain biographical and personal narratives, as well as theoretical and cultural essays about the topic. The screenings return to early silent, and then classical French cinema, and later include recent documentaries and popular fiction films sometimes from different nations with links to French fashion.

ENG 4135

Introduction to Israeli Cinema
Roy Holler

Israeli cinema may not feature the usual superhero fanfare or the dazzle of Hollywood special effects, lacking the grandiose budgets, zombies, epic battles, and big-name stars. But what Israeli films lack in glitz, they compensate with heart: rich with stories of trauma and memory, love and loss, spanning narratives from the front lines of war to the rare moments of peace. Israeli films tackle racial, gender, and geopolitical tensions, capturing personal tales as well as narratives that resonate across the nation. Crucially, they offer an authentic portrayal of Israeli identity and provide deep insights into the distinct Middle Eastern landscape of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Films will be pre-screened, with additional titles available for home viewing. Students will be expected to submit weekly film reviews, write a midterm paper and work on a group presentation for their final project.

ENG 4146

Long-Form Filmmaking
Trevor Mowchun

As advertised, this course will be a bold venture through the artistic, technical and temporal challenges of long-form/feature filmmaking (and by temporal I mean there is only one semester to complete this monumental task). No doubt this will be a collaborative undertaking; however, it will also involve delegation and specialization. In other words, students with an interest in screenwriting will have an opportunity to work on the script; students with an interest in producing and/or directing can be more involved in these roles; those interested in acting will be able to focus on that great and mysterious art, and so on. Likely, everyone will have to do a bit of everything. The instructor will oversee the process from script to screen, steering the ship away from familiar routes of passage into the uncharted and creatively liberating waters of film.

*Additional meetings outside of class may be required.
*Registration for this course is restricted to those students who hold the prerequisite: ENG 4136, the introductory filmmaking course. Interested students who lack the prerequisite should contact the instructor at tmowchun@ufl.edu

ENG 4310

The European Road Movie
Holly Raynard

Like its American predecessor, the European road film has typically served as a powerful vehicle for cultural criticism, personal introspection and transformation. Yet the European map—replete with national borders, linguistic differences and imposing barriers like the Berlin Wall—hardly evokes the open road of America’s mythical frontier, where a traveler can venture some 3000 miles without a foreign phrasebook, passport, visa or police authorization. Migration, deportations, and social inequity have further complicated the notion of European mobility even as globalizing forces seem to promise increased cross-cultural traffic. In sum, European travel narratives offer a new perspective on the journey as such and the cultural issues engaged by travelers. This course will explore Europe’s dynamic cultural terrain from the 1950s to the present as it maps the essential coordinates of European travel and the road movie genre.

ENG 4310

Sounds, Music, and Horror Films
Richard Burt

We will trace the development of the horror film from German Expressionist films to pre-code Hollywood silents and talkies by director Todd Browning, some them starring Lon Cheney, to Carl Laemmle films produced at Universal studios, to producer Val Lewton films, to 70s horror classics, to trash horror cinema, and to the emergence of analog horror in films directed by David Cronenberg. Films will include The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Warning Shadows, The Last Warning, Waxworks, The Cat and the Canary, The Phantom of the Opera, Freaks, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar, The Old Dark House, Dracula, Dracula’s Daughter, The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Hands of Orlac, The Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, The Devil Doll, Cat People, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Exorcist, Carnival of Souls, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Rabid, Scanners, and Videodrome. We will pay particular attention to sound effects and soundtrack music.

Requirements: Class participation; co-lead class discussion twice; one film clip exercise; two 500-700 word papers; and two discussion questions and three shot analyses for each class.

ENG 4910

Community Engagement
Laura Gonzales

Emphasizing the role of humanities professionals as public intellectuals, this course provides frameworks, methods, and strategies for practicing community engagement not as service, but as reciprocal research. This course will ask students to consider what communities they belong to, what audiences fuel their work, and how our research in English studies can contribute to the good work that is already taking place in communities outside the ivory tower. Drawing on frameworks and methodologies that thread together Chicana feminism, Black womanist epistemologies, and decolonial theory (among others) with emerging practices in information and technology design, this course will ask students to consider who the communities and publics that we are all accountable to as members of the academy. Particular emphasis will be placed on developing public-facing materials and portfolios that demonstrate students’ preparation for both academic and pubic-facing work in community organizations, justice-driven businesses, and other public venues. No prior experience with community engagement is required, as we will all begin the course by learning about each other and the communities we currently inhabit. Course projects will include a research-driven community researcher positionality statement, digital materials demonstrating community commitments, as well as a literature review based on community-engagement research.

ENG 4910

Print Histories in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Margaret Galvan

How do books get made? How do we print in color? How did we make copies before Xerox? How have new technologies changed how we produce books and other printed matter? These kind of questions and others that deal with the materiality of books and book history will guide us in this course as we learn about the rapid evolution of print technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries for books, periodicals, comics, and other printed matter. We will discuss and sometimes participate in demonstrations of technologies like: linotype, letterpress, mimeograph, xerography, spirit duplication, risograph, offset, 3D printing, PDFs, typewriters, word processing, etc. We will visit relevant research collections and labs on campus to peek behind-the-scenes into the practical nuts and bolts of literary production and distribution. Students will learn how to conduct original research into a specific print technology, drawing upon relevant archival and other resources.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and a research project with a digital component.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Nineteenth-Century African American Women: Their Lives and Literature
Debra Walker King

Description: During most of the nineteenth-century, Victorian values and ideologies ruled. With the downfall of slavery and the rise of industrialization and urbanization many of these standards changed and new codes of living surfaced. How did the African American woman, her views, and her goals fit into the changing system? What were her means of survival and how was her identity constructed within the age of genteel America? What roles did she play in feminist pursuits? What voices clamored to he heard and how did America react to these voices? In this course, these and other questions will be addressed as students concentrate on the complex struggles of equality and difference experienced and discussed by nineteenth-century women who produced autobiographies, novels, short stories, poems, essays and speeches. Texts surveyed include Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper’s, Iola Leroy, and Emma Dunham Kelly’s, Megda.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Contemporary American Literature and Cultures of Imperialism
Malini Johar Schueller

Course Description: The collection of essays titled Cultures of US imperialism (1993) transformed the field of American literary studies by making colonialism and imperialism central to conceptions of nation, culture, and identity. How do we see imperial culture as integral to American literary and cultural productions? By reading a broad range of works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, we will examine different tropes of empire such as going native, colonial domesticity, pornotropics, tutelary colonialism, exhibiting empire and remasculinization; at the same time, we will focus on the specific sites of empire such as Hawai’I, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Vietnam. The course will engage with different forms of U.S. imperialism such as North American settler colonialism, Pacific and continental expansionism, control of far-flung colonies, and empire without colonies. The purpose is to examine the different ways in which, at historically specific moments, cultural texts (memoirs, novels, and films) and empire are imbricated and to raise a number of questions: How are travel and exploration implicated in empire? What are the differences in how the sites of U.S. empire are constructed in the national imaginary? How are questions of empire and gender related? How does contemporary literature register histories of, and ongoing US imperialism? How might literature resist cultural imperialism?

Possible texts will include Tommy Pico’s (Kumeyaay) Nature Poem, David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly, Mary Helen Fee’s A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines, Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory [hacha], Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet, and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, and Rambo, First Blood Part II.

ENL 3122

Nineteenth Century British Novel
Pamela Gilbert

This course samples key developments in the British novel through the nineteenth century. We will examine the novels within three contexts: historical, literary-historical, and critical. If you have not had English 2022, you should plan to familiarize yourself with the period: the Norton Anthology introduction to the period is a good place to start. Gilmour’s and Houghton’s books are also very useful and are on reserve in the library.

The Victorian period was the great age of the novel’s emergence as a dominant popular form within a newly extensive literary marketplace, and Victorian novelists were consummate entertainers driven to sell widely and well. They were also preoccupied with the condition of their own culture; to paraphrase Richard Altick, rarely is the Present so much present in literature as it is in the novel of this period. Victorian novelists considered it their duty and pleasure to criticize, praise and generally comment upon current issues, and they developed new forms and genres to accommodate their purposes. These issues represent the formative phases of social concerns which we have inherited and which still define us: for example, the role of mass media, the ethics of capitalism, gender roles, the responsibilities of liberal government, the welfare state, pollution, the role of nation in the global community, etc. We will read a range of representative genres and consider them not only in the light of the emergence of the novel as a dominant form, but as documents of a culture’s attempts to represent and work out these issues of contemporary importance—aesthetically and ethically—and consider the ways in which Victorian ideas resonate for us today.

This course provides upper-division credit in the major, and will be taught with that in mind; therefore, students will be expected to know how to do research in the field and to attempt the application of critical frameworks. Due to the nature of the material, there is a considerable amount of reading. Carefully consider your reading speed and the expectations of the other courses you are taking before committing to this course.

Possible texts:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
other critical readings to be provided.

ENL 3154

Twentieth-Century British Poetry
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Carol Ann Duffy, and UF’s own Michael Hofmann. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of gender, family, and nation will shift as definitions of “British poetry” change. Course Assignments include one short and one long paper, a panel presentation, class discussion, digital participation, and a parody. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis, argumentative writing, and creative thinking.

ENL 4303

John Milton: Poetry and Prose
Peter Rudnytsky

In addition to Paradise Lost, the greatest poem in the English language, Milton is the author of the masque known as Comus, the elegy “Lycidas,” the brief epic Paradise Regained, and the biblical tragedy Samson Agonistes, as well as prose works defending divorce, freedom of the press, and the execution of King Charles I. Through it all—his desertion by his first wife, his blindness, the crushing of his political hopes—Milton struggled to justify his own ways to God in order to write a poem that aftertimes would not willingly let die. In this course, we will see how, after breaking his vow of celibacy that he believed was the precondition for being a poet-priest, Milton threw himself into politics and became the foremost spokesman for the Puritan Revolution, only to return to poetry after the Restoration and write the late masterpieces in which he encodes his spiritual and sexual autobiography. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

LIT 3003

The Horror, The Horror: Representations of War and Political Violence
Eric Kligerman

This course sets out to probe the cultural, social and political functions of horror in relation to shifting moments of historical violence. In addition to exploring the horror genre in literary and cinematic works of the imagination (Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hitchcock’s Psycho), we will ultimately apply the aesthetic, epistemic and ethical questions arising in the genre to shifting representations of traumatic history. As we map out the history and themes behind this popular genre, our aim is to probe the intersections between horror and its socio-cultural and historical contexts. How is political violence represented, conceptualized and memorialized across shifting linguistic and visual texts? What ethical questions arise in our engagement with representations of traumatic limit events and the experience of horror these events entail?

After reading and screening central works from the horror genre, we will examine some of the emblematic scenes of historical violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. Turning to such instances as the legacies of colonialism (Heart of Darkness), First World War (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) the Holocaust (Survival in Auschwitz and Eichmann in Jerusalem) the Vietnam War (Michael Herr’s Dispatches) and 9/11 (Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”), this seminar investigates the intersection between narratives of horror in the realms of both fantasy and history. In our inquiry into representations of horror, we will examine how this genre in European and American culture is employed to express both individual and national anxieties in the face of political violence. Finally, what does our fascination with the horrors of historical violence reveal about ourselves?

LIT 3003

Detection and Crime in Fiction
Pamela Gilbert

Crime is a very old topic in fiction, but the figure of the detective is a much more recent one, developing along with the modern novel itself. This course will survey the emergence of the detective in English-language fiction, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, moving through the recognized major genres of the Golden Age in the twentieth century and the variations of the twenty-first, closing with postcolonial Anglophone crime fiction. The course will include many of the following novels and short fiction: we will begin with the mid nineteenth century fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, Bulwer Lytton (occult detective) and Wilkie Collins, move on through the major innovations of the late nineteenth century by such authors as Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison and Catherine Pirkis, review the golden age of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker, and Pauline Hopkins, the hardboiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the procedural fiction of P.D. James, the satirical historical detective fiction of Ishmael Reed, and the present-day work of Deepa Anappara, Madhumita Battacharya and Unity Dow.

LIT 3043

Modern Drama: Learning by Doing
Sidney R. Homan

​My students and I “study” plays, explore the theatre, through performance. Sure, you can approach a play in various ways, as a document of the culture or history, as a subject filtered through a particular critical method, as a story the serves as a basis for discussion. I value these approaches. However, my own life has been something of a hybrid, divided between work in the theatre as an actor and director, and on campus as a teacher and writer, and so in LIT 3043 we take the play on its own terms, as something meant to be staged, with each student having an acting partner. Together they do 4-5 scenes during the semester, rehearsing together, then performing on Zoom before the class, with my serving as director and all of us in the class as an audience who discuss the performance.

In LIT 3043 we embrace a wide range of modern plays. Samuel Beckett’s works for the stage television, and radio that take us to the very frontiers of modern theatre, as well as his iconic Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. Harold Pinter’s brilliant dialogue plays, resting on an equally rich subtext: The Lover, Betrayal, No Man’s Land, Old Times, and Last to Go. Tom Stoppard’s masterful reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And Sam Shepard’s gritty and (seemingly) realistic “American” dramas: True West, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and his performance poems in Savage Love. We also lock at various short comic plays in the collection Laugh Lines: Christophers Durang’s Wanda’s Visit, Steve Martin’s surreal Zig-Zag Woman, Elaine May’s The Way of All Fish, among others.

We do all this though actual performance, taking the medium of drama, its art and craft, not as literature but as something meant to be staged before an audience. The course is online and my students and I have found that with their fellow actors in close-up on-screen, we can tighten our focus on decisions made by the actors on everything from delivery and gesture, to movement, even subtext. Zoom—this is to say—has some advantages.
I assess student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is considered a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper describing his or her experience during rehearsal. Performances and the scene-work paper count equally.

A word of comfort: whether you have acted before or not, experience in the theatre is not a factor in the class. We use acting as a way of studying the script. And, believe me, the course can bring out the actor in you! Please have no fears on this issue.

If you have any question or comments, please e-mail Professor Homan at shakes@ufl.edu.

(Chosen as the University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Sidney Homan is Professor of English and author of some twenty-two books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.)

LIT 3173

Yiddish New York
Jason Wagner

What is American literature? This class examines an American literature that still awaits appreciation. As a result of the mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late 19th-early 20th century, New York became a global center of Yiddish culture. Yiddish writers, journalists, actors, filmmakers, and political activists produced a rich and diverse culture, which flourished for a good part of the last century. This class will examine different genres of Yiddish cultural creativity, highlighting the specific nyu-yorkish qualities. All texts are presented in English translation and the class is conducted in English.

LIT 3173

Russian Jewish Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Jason Wagner

What is Russian Literature? What is Jewish Literature? This class explores texts originally written in the Russian language by Jewish authors concerning Jewish themes. It seeks to explore literary representations of Jewish life in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Literary texts will be put into historical contexts. Can the focus on this area of Russian literature augment our understanding of the traditional canon of Russian literature? All texts are presented in English translation and the class is conducted in English.

LIT 3383

Black Women Transatlantic
Julia Mollenthiel

This course will survey African American, African, European, and Caribbean literature and film written and produced by Black women from the 18th century to the present. Students will read and watch a variety of texts, each of which centers on materials that are thematically and historically related. We will examine how Black women across these geographical regions utilize certain aesthetics, styles, techniques, genres, and structures, as well as how these traditions explore ideas around freedom and identity. This course is organized thematically, with an emphasis on the movements and ideas of Black feminine social thought and political protest that contextualize Black women’s writing across the diaspora.

LIT 3383

African Women Writers
Rose Sau Lugano

TBA

LIT 4194

African Literature and Colonial Anthropology
Apollo Amoko

TBA

LIT 4483

Seeing Differently: Comics and Identity
Margaret Galvan

Comics studies has emerged as a scholarly field of inquiry over the past 25+ years, but many foundational thinkers considered only the form of the comic in their scholarship. Recent scholarship has both extended and challenged this formalist approach by engaging with how race, class, ideology, gender, sexuality, etc. shape comics. Indeed, comics has become a flashpoint for identity-focused theoretical investigations. In this class, we will ask how these theories shift our understanding of comics and how comics themselves represent issues of identity.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and a research project with a digital component.

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. The course will address issues of vampire and Empire (the imperial politics behind vampirism), vampirism and psychoanalysis, vampirism and modernism, vampirism and cinema, queer, gay and lesbian vampires, vampires of East and Central Europe, vampirism and anti-Semitism, vampirism and religion, vampirism and nationalism, history of blood in religion, film and literature, etc.

LIT 4930

Jewish-American Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

The course will introduce students to the rich history of Jewish-American cinema and the latest critical and theoretical literature about it. It will be organized thematically, and chronologically, starting with the topics of Jewish Diaspora, emigration to the US, the first sound film, and then films about the Holocaust, comedy, Israeli and World Cinema. During the course, we will screen and discuss films involved with the representation of the Jews.

LIT 4930

Black Englishes
James Essegbey

This course presents students with varieties of Englishes spoken by Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Students will learn about the structure of these varieties as well as the social histories which underpin them. They will appreciate difficulties in using terms like dialect versus language to describe these varieties. Further, they will watch movies and interact with native speakers of these varieties with a view to identifying features that set them apart. Students will also explore concepts like “pidgins” and “creoles” and learn to distinguish between “broken English” and Pidgin or Creole English.

LIT 4930

An Evening with Tom Stoppard
Sidney Homan

I’ve always wanted to do this. Give a course where, with fifteen students forming an acting company, we would stage a production of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The play of the Renaissance theatre, of its master playwright, as the source, the inspiration for one of the wittiest, most original, and perhaps existentially thrilling works of the modem theatre. Each actor will get a chance to play the two lead characters in various scenes, as well as the “attendant lords” (Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, and the Player and the acting company charged to stage The Murder of Gonzago).

At the end of the semester, we will make a professional video of the production, which will then be available to fellow teachers and students, and, indeed, anyone who’d like to experience R and G performed by a variety of actors and hence “takes” on the two courtiers and the play itself. Some acting experience would be helpful for our efforts here. And no need to buy any text; I will provide a script with the scene work divided so that every actor has equal stage time.

​Through performance, we will bring to life the script of Stoppard’s best-known play, exploring the objectives and aesthetics of the playwright, the art and craft of the actor, and what the word “theatre” can mean.

If you have any question or comments, please e-mail Professor Homan at shakes@ufl.edu.

(Chosen as the University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Sidney Homan is Professor of English and author of some twenty-two books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.)

LIT 4930

Feminist Speculative Fiction
Tace Hedrick

Darko Suvin, well-known theorist of science fiction, proposed in 1972 in an essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” that literary science fiction combines “the enabling of the mind to receive new wavelengths” (380) with the device of estrangement, which allows us to recognize familiar subjects but makes them seem unfamiliar (374). At around the same time, feminist science fiction (or speculative fiction, since not all “science” fiction has to do with scientific or technological progress) was increasingly making narratives that estranged not just our ideas of gender, but of biology, sexuality, and race, letting us think in new ways, or new wavelengths as Suvin had it. This course will look at feminist speculative fiction (where I include the Gothic) from around the 1970s to contemporary work. Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Anne Leckie, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Silvia Moreno-García, and others may be included. Reading quizzes and three long-essay exams are required.

LIT 4930

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Global Cinema
Ying Xiao

The course explores the rise and various aspects of Hong Kong cinema and Taiwanese cinema through the lens of globalization. One of the world’s largest and energetic film industries, Hong Kong cinema has a global presence and impact that enthralls a broad global audience not only as an epitome of popular entertainment but also through its creativity, craftmanship, diversity, and multifaceted interactions and linkages with other cinemas and international culture. Another example we juxtapose and examine in class is Taiwan new cinema, one of the most imaginative and stylistic films that demonstrates a distinct art and registers the discourses of postcolonialism, modernity, nationalism, and globalization in similar and different ways. How do they draw upon local traditions and identities and on the other hand, significantly connect to global market and Hollywood? How have they contributed to global cinema and the development of film as a medium?

This course takes students on a comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas to look at their histories, main themes, diverse genres, industrial practice, aesthetic styles, diasporic cultures, and the transregional/transnational cultural exchange and collaborations. Filmmakers and stars to be discussed include Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee. Screenings cover a wide variety of genres from martial arts, melodrama, comedy, romantic film, to ghost story and musical.