Fall 2022 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| AML 6027 | F 3-5 | The Culture of McCarthyism | Susan Hegeman |
| CRW 6130 | R 9-11 | Fiction Workshop | Uwem Akpan |
| CRW 6166 | W 9-11 | Forms of Poetry | Michael Hofmann |
| CRW 6331 | M 9-11 | Poetry Workshop | Ange Mlinko |
| ENC 7760 | W 6-8 | From Paper to Publication: The Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in English Studies and Related Fields | Laura Gonzales |
| ENG 6016 | T 9-11 | Figures of Desire | Pietro Bianchi |
| ENG 6075 | T 3-5 | Black is, Black ain’t: Debates in African American Literature | Delia Steverson |
| ENG 6137 | M 3-5 | The Language of Film: Films of Environmental Crisis | Terry Harpold |
| ENG 6824 | R 9-11 | Proseminar: Public Humanities and Visual Culture | Barbara Mennel |
| ENL 6276 | W 6-8 | PostPunk Cultures – The British 1980s | Marsha Bryant |
| LIT 6934 | W 9-11 | Enlightenment and the End of Ethics | Roger Maioli dos Santos |
Course Descriptions
AML 6027
The Culture of McCarthyism
Susan Hegeman
In this class we will take a broad look at the history and culture of red scare political repression as it has resonated through the 20th and 21st century United States. We will discuss literature, films, and nonfiction essays that address the surveillance, blacklisting, and persecution of “subversives” during the postwar red scare and after. Topics will include censorship and self-censorship, historical trauma, closeting, paranoia, conspiracism, and the moral injuries of “naming names.” We will also chart the development of liberal anticommunism as an ideology, and of totalitarianism as a concept. We will also discuss the targeting of African American public figures and gays and lesbians. As much as possible, we will work to connect the context of the cold war red scare to its resonances in contemporary American life, such as in the culture wars over critical race theory and transgender athletes and the 21st century rise of populism and authoritarianism.
Written work can be a series of short responses to the reading or a seminar paper. MFA students are welcome to write creative responses.
The syllabus is not final. Prospective students are welcome to contact me about particular interests in this topic and to suggest items for inclusion in the course. A tentative list may include:
- Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (1976)
- E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (1971)
- Francine Prose, The Vixen (2021)
- Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
- Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1991)
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
- Essays by James Baldwin, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Timothy Snyder
- Films: High Noon, Viva Zapata!, The Manchurian Candidate, The Days of the Condor, Good Night and Good Luck
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
Uwem Akpan
CRW 6130 is a fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. In the course of the semester, we are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. We are also expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewrite. As Steven Gillis, author of Benchere in Wonderland says, “The art of writing is in the rewriting.”
And since good writing or rewriting begins with good reading (or hearing of the story), we will be exposed to the works of celebrated writers and how they have dealt with key issues like craft, motivation, voice, suspense, characterization, etc.
CRW 6166
Forms of Poetry
Michael Hofmann
The ‘forms’ of this ‘forms course’ are some of the forms of (poetry) translation. I see it as being composed of three parts. One writing and workshops; and two of reading and discussion.
Two or three of our meetings will be given over in their entirety to workshops, considering and responding to groups of ongoing (or new) translations by members of the class. I have been led to believe there are enough of these to make such a measure appropriate.
The rest will be reading, which comes in two parts: the one is of 3 epic or bulk or serial translators, each with particularly strong or distinctive voices: Ezra Pound (Cathay, Homage to Sextus Propertius, etc. all included in his Collected Shorter Poems, or Personae); Robert Lowell (his anthology of translations called Imitations); Tom Paulin (his compilation of adaptations/ anti-translations called The Road to Inver).
The second subset of reading includes a sampling of voices that bring to English qualities and experiences we would be much the poorer for not knowing: these will include Bei Dao, Joseph Brodsky, Günter Eich, Luljeta Lleshanaku, and Wislawa Szymborska.
CRW 6331
Poetry Workshop
Ange Mlinko
The graduate poetry workshop is a 3-hour period, divided between discussion of assigned reading (1/3) and student poem analysis (2/3). The assigned reading will encompass poets from the US and abroad, from which we will draw lessons on craft, tone, rhetorical strategies, and philosophical approach.
ENC 7760
From Paper to Publication: The Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in English Studies and Related Fields
Laura Gonzales
Publishing peer-reviewed articles is one of the most effective ways to prepare for the academic job market and a requirement for promotion for nearly all faculty positions (that require research and publication). It is also one of the most valuable methods for participating in professional conversations and for establishing one’s voice in those conversations. This graduate seminar is an introduction to the complex world of academic publishing and is designed to give writers in the humanities practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals. The course explains the process for publishing in several academic forms, the peer-reviewed article in particular. The seminar shares strategies for achieving success in the academic writing arena, including setting up a work schedule, identifying appropriate journals for submission, working with editors, writing query letters, clarifying arguments, organizing material, and developing long-term professional ethos. Participants in the seminar will revise a classroom paper, conference paper, or dissertation chapter into a peer-reviewed article and submit it for publication. Thus, there are two primary goals for this seminar: 1. demystifying academic publishing processes and 2. providing a supportive atmosphere in which participants work to revise an article from classroom quality to journal quality to the end of submitting and publishing that article. The class is part lecture, part workshop & combination of learning and doing.
ENG 6016
Figures of Desire
Pietro Bianchi
“Desire is not a simple thing” Sigmund Freud used to say. Still, sometimes our empirical experience seems to be the opposite. It would not be difficult to list all the material objects, things and experiences that would fulfill the phrase: “make a wish”. Yet, psychoanalysis teaches us not to confuse “desire” with “will”. If it is true that we live in a society that has monumentalized self-confidence and “knowing what you want”, the place of desire, as separate from will, seems to remain elusive. Beyond all the material goods and at the bottom of all the commodities that surround us and that we would like to have, there is something about ourselves that remain opaque and cannot be expressed. This is what psychoanalysis calls “desire” and that philosophy have been struggling with for centuries: a question about our own identity; a blank spot in our own subjectivity.
In a journey that goes from Plato to Saint Augustine, from Judith Butler to Gilles Deleuze, from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig we will analyze all the multi-faceted understandings of the concept of desire. Readings will be limited to 70-80 pages per week but they will always be accompanied by a film that will be considered integral part of the assignment and will be discussed in class: among them we will see Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, David Lynch’s Mullholland Dr., Harmony Korine’s Springbreakers, C.T. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and A Magnificent Obsession. This course should be useful both to students interested in critical theory, gender studies and philosophy as well as to those interested in film and visual studies. Students will be responsible for leading a class discussion once throughout the semester, posting weekly short response papers on Canvas, and writing a final paper of 15-20 pages which could serve as an article draft.
ENG 6075
Black is, Black ain’t: Debates in African American Literature
Delia Steverson
In his provocative thesis about the state of African American literature, Kenneth Warren asserted that African American literature is no more—that the literature we distinctly name African American had emerged in protest of state-sanctioned racial violence and had, therefore, ended with the dismantling of Jim Crow. His bold claims led scholars in the field to critically inquire and re-evaluate the identity, purposes, and literary history of the field. This course then enters this debate about what is (and conversely, what isn’t) African American literature. We will focus on a variety of themes and issues—including Black uplift, slavery, respectability politics, identity, protest, publishing, the politics of art, among others—to understand the history of, locate, and challenge assumptions about the field of African American literature. We will draw on a variety of texts, forms, and genres across time, including fiction, essays, life-writing, newspapers, speeches, images, and other media. We will consider such questions as: What is/was/isn’t African American literature? Why does that even matter? What are the purposes of African American literature? Is African American literature always and only protest literature or is it something else? How should/can we teach African American literature? Students will have the opportunity to lead class discussion, research the emergence and evolution of a literary journal of their choice, as well as produce a project that engages with the issues of the course or write a final seminar paper.
ENG 6137
The Language of Film: Films of Environmental Crisis
Terry Harpold
An in-depth survey of the imaginative ecologies and ethics of the historical and contemporary cinema of environmental crisis. (Here, the term “crisis” describes natural and human-caused disasters, and conditions of weather and climate that catalyze the plot, images, and sounds of a film.) We will view and discuss primarily long-form narrative fiction films and short experimental films in which human and nonhuman agents are thrust into conditions of environmental transformation – alienation, upheaval, collapse, extinction, and re-creation – and confront new relations to other beings of the natural and built worlds.
A key emphasis of the course is on learning how to see environmental elements of a film as more than scenery or allegorical doubles of characters’ emotions and actions: as real, determinant situations of subjectivity and agency – human and more-than-human – in the medium of film.
Films discussed may include, among others: Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (US, 1928), Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, Holland, 1929), Ralph Steiner’s H2O (US, 1929) and Surf and Seaweed (US, 1931), Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, 1936), Jean Epstein’s Le Tempestaire (France, 1947), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (UK, 1947), Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (Japan, 1954), Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (UK, 1961), Hiroshi Teshigara’s The Woman in the Dunes (Japan, 1964), Yoshimitsu Banno’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Gojira tai Hedora, Japan, 1971), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (US, 1972), William Friedkin’s Sorceror (US, 1977), Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (Australia, 1977), John Carpenter’s The Thing (US, 1982), Amir Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust (Iran, 1989), Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime, Japan, 1997), Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand (Casa de areia, Brazil, 2005), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (Sānxiá hǎorén, China, 2006), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (Hungary, 2011), Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (S. Korea/Czech Republic, 2013), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia 2015), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (UK, 2018), and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lija’s Aniara (Sweden/Denmark, 2018).
Assigned readings will address the films and filmmakers discussed, the cultural, historical, and ecological contexts of their work, and selected texts from the emerging discipline of cinematic weather and climate studies. Writing requirements include short seminar reports on screened films and a conference-length seminar paper. Creative final projects in lieu of a seminar paper are permissible with the approval of the instructor.
ENG 6824
Proseminar: Public Humanities and Visual Culture
Barbara Mennel
This proseminar introduces graduate students to the study of the humanities in the context of the public. It will survey theories of the public sphere with particular attention to foundational concepts and contemporary revisions. Reflecting current debates, the course will highlight the work of cultural institutions, from the museum to the movie house. Excursions and visits by practitioners and scholars, including advanced or former graduate students, will provide experiential learning and informational conversation. As a proseminar, the course will cover the changing work of graduate studies and attend to the range of academic and public genres and media, from the seminar paper, dissertation, and grant application to project-oriented collaboration and podcasts. The proseminar’s focus will provide a framework for students engaging with a range of visual culture from historic examples to new media but is open to all graduate students.
The course may discuss publications by the following scholars and practitioners: Linda Martin Alcoff, Hannah Arendt, Dave Colangelo, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Nicole Fleetwood, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacqueline Stewart. Podcasts may include “Public Work: A Public Humanities Podcast,” “Careers in the Public Humanities,” and “Under Review: Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education.”
The seminar requires participants to engage in collaborative processes to define, deliver, and present on a final project by December 8, 2022. The syllabus will include time for group formation and incremental assignments to assist in the process. The final submission may range from a traditional paper to engagement with public media and partners. Course participants may consider publication in a new Colloquy within Arcade on The Future of Public Humanities. To account for feasibility, participants may also submit a white paper or a grant proposal for a future project.
ENL 6276
PostPunk Cultures – The British 1980s
Marsha Bryant
This seminar will explore poetry, fiction, film, television, and popular music that emerged alongside major cultural shifts in the U.K. during the 1980s. It was a time of “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the new social identity “Black British,” and the New Wave. In the wake of Johnny Rotten’s declaration of No Future, Derek Jarman proclaimed The Last of England. The emergent discipline of cultural studies assessed the social meanings of style, and Bloodaxe Books marketed “poetry with an edge.” We will work across artistic and popular media to map key cultural intersections of the British 80s, considering how they seem to be reconfiguring in the wake of Brexit. Our writers include Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Carol Ann Duffy, and our UF colleague Michael Hofmann. We’ll read Dick Hebdige’s iconic Subculture: The Meaning of Style plus a selection of academic and crossover essays. We’ll discuss films by Jarman, Stephen Frears, and Neil Jordan, plus episodes of the TV show The Young Ones. And we’ll engage with Gainesville’s annual punk rock festival (The FEST). Assignments will include a seminar report on an 80s singer/band, a few Perusall annotations, a conference paper proposal, and a seminar paper (MFA option is a conference-length paper + creative response).
LIT 6934
Enlightenment and the End of Ethics
Suppose someone were to claim that cold-blooded murder is morally permissible. How would you respond? Christians or religious Jews might disagree by citing the Fifth Commandment (“Thou Shalt not Kill”), while secular utilitarians might condemn murder for its pernicious consequences. But you might also agree by saying something like this: “Suppose a woman dies under our hands, her death makes room for another; the same as plucking a turnip makes room for the planting of a cabbage.” This remarkable defense of murder comes from Stupeo, the anti-hero of George Walker’s philosophical novel The Vagabond (1799). Stupeo has learned to defend murder by reading prominent philosophers of the day, and Walker uses him to lampoon the Enlightenment. Echoing Walker’s views, the philanthropist Hannah More blamed Enlightenment philosophers for justifying “savage brutality, treason, and murder,” in the name of “an overturn of all morals.” For Walker, More, and a number of other commentators, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was a threat to morals. It made a mockery of the very idea of ethics, rendering the distinction between right and wrong, or vice and virtue, absolutely meaningless.
These complaints may seem like low blows in a war of ideas; but a number of prominent twentieth-century thinkers have similarly accused the Enlightenment of “overturning all morals.” For Max Horkheimer, Lester Crocker, and Alasdair McIntyre, the philosophers of the Enlightenment rendered untenable any attempt to develop a coherent system of ethics. The logical consequence of their systems, for these authors, can be found in the depraved novels of the Marquis de Sade, who justified everything from poisoning and theft to torture and recreational beheadings.
In this course we will investigate why the Enlightenment has given rise to such readings. What made its philosophy and literature seem so immoral to contemporary and posthumous observers? In approaching these questions we will couple essential readings in the history of ethics (Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, and Nietzsche) with a selection of literary and philosophical works from eighteenth-century England and France. They include Gothic fiction, satirical comedies, philosophical dialogues, and narrative poems, by authors ranging from Denis Diderot, Ann Radcliffe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Elizabeth Hamilton, Adam Smith, and scandalous libertines such as the Earl of Rochester and Alberto Radicati.