Spring 2025 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 | M 6-8 | Eco-Poetry and Poetics | Harpold |
| CRW 6130 | R 9-11 | Fiction Workshop | Akpan |
| CRW 6331 | M 9-11 | Poetry Workshop | Mlinko |
| ENC 7760 | M E1-E3 | From Paper to Publication: The Peer-Reviewed Journal | Gonzales |
| ENG 6138 | T 9-11, SCR W 9-11 | Philosophy and the Cinema’s Questions | Ray |
| ENG 6824 | W 6-8 | Proseminar: American Women in Comics | Galvan |
| ENL 6276 | R 6-8 | The Pedagogical Scene in the British Novel from Shelley to Ishiguro | Wegner |
| LIT 6855 | F 3-5 | The Contemporary | Hegeman |
Course Descriptions
AML 6027
Eco-Poetry and Eco Poetics
Terry Harpold
An introduction to and eclectic survey of modern poetry addressing human relations with the more than human world in an age of planetary transformation.
We’ll read mostly poetry by American writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, though we’ll turn back in time for a few important historical precursors (e.g., Walt Whitman). More recent poets whose work we’ll read may include, among others, Louise Glück, C.S. Giscombe, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Ronald Johnson, Ada Limón, Donato Mancini, W.S. Merwin, dg nanouk okpik, Sun Ra, Muriel Rukeyser, John Shoptaw, and Gary Snyder. We’ll also read selected short critical texts on the history, poetics, and practice of this vital, diverse literary genre.
Graded course requirements include moderating seminar discussions of two poems selected by the student from Ada Limón’s recent anthology Poetry in the Natural World (2024), and a final long writing project. The project may take the form of a research paper or a creative work.
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 6331
Poetry Workshop
Ange Mlinko
This graduate poetry workshop is restricted to students in the MFA program. We will be workshopping poems with an eye to the Master’s thesis and, ultimately, book publication. The reading for the class includes single poetry collections from recent decades for models of theme and structure.
ENC 7760
From Paper to Publication: The Peer-Reviewed Journal
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 academic writers practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals. The course explains the process for publishing in several academic forms, including 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 be encouraged to 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.
ENG 6138
Philosophy and the Cinema’s Questions
Robert B. Ray
The last decade has seen an increased interest in the relationship of philosophy to issues raised by the cinema. Many (but not all) of these interests descend from the late Stanley Cavell, a Harvard philosophy professor, whose subjects included not only Emerson and Wittgenstein, but also screwball comedies and Cary Grant. Cavell asserted that the movies he cared most about often engaged in their own philosophical work, and we should allow them to teach us what they know.
In this course, we will use philosophers (Plato, Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Cavell) to take up questions that films make us think about. What counts as acting? How would we teach a child to distinguish between documentary and fiction? Does it matter what an actor is thinking about when he or she performs a scene? How do a filmmaker’s choices affect our response to a movie? Why can the same script yield entirely different results in the hands of different directors? How do we learn to follow a rule? How is pretending related to acting, lying, courtship? Can you pretend to be yourself? For what things is photography more useful than painting?
Movies will include People on Sunday, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Blow-Up, The Rules of the Game, It Happened One Night, 1001 Grams, Close-Up, and Anatomy of a Murder.
Assignments: bi-weekly two-page papers responding to prompts distributed the week before; a final four-page paper.
ENG 6824
Proseminar: American Women in Comics
Margaret Galvan
This proseminar will introduce students to a broad range of American women creating comics and to modes of scholarly writing and professionalization with an emphasis on building your CV for the job market. This course will be particularly useful for students with an interest in contemporary American literature, children’s literature, comics studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, marginalized histories and creators, book history, grassroots publishing, memoir studies, visual and popular cultures, etc.
Despite a long history of female creators, readers, and nuanced characters, women’s participation in American comics has frequently been overlooked. In this class we will explore why women’s contributions have not been visible in comics histories and think alongside contemporary scholars focused on recovering these forgotten women. We will start by reading how comics have been defined and ask why women have been excluded. We will read comics by women and think about what it means to create comics as a woman, for women, and/or about women.
Our readings will bring us to consider the range of stories that women tell and the diversity of identities they represent. We will begin in the mid twentieth century and look at Miss Fury, an early superheroine who predates Wonder Woman and was created by a woman. We will also read comics by women in the period advocating for Black civil rights and documenting the brutality of Japanese internment. Moving forward chronologically to the present day, we will read powerful non-fictional and fictional comics by women that advocate for women’s rights, that welcome younger readers into the medium, that shine light on overlooked historical events, that think about what it means to be a woman artist, and more. Our readings will include comics by Tarpé Mills, Miné Okubo, Jackie Ormes, Trina Robbins, Sara Dyer, Lynda Barry, Thi Bui, Emil Ferris, Bishakh Som, and Rosa Colón Guerra.
Alongside these readings in comics, we will also discuss how to build a research focus as a scholar throughout the semester. We will go over the nuts and bolts of publishing in journals and edited collections, and students will complete and send off for publication book reviews of contemporary women’s comics. We will hear from scholars about their research in the field and how they developed a research focus and found support for their scholarship. We will also review the conventions of sharing research at conferences, and students will draft abstracts and present research in a course symposium. Students will select a final professionalization activity for their final project in the course.
ENL 6276
The Pedagogical Scene in the British Novel from Shelley to Ishiguro
Phil Wegner
In this seminar, we will explore the ways British novels—from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1832) to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun (2021)—stage the essential human encounters that take place on what I am calling the “pedagogical scene,” a space extending far beyond the conventional classroom. After a reading of Frankenstein, we will spend the next few weeks discussing some foundational theoretical texts, such as Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Fredrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1888), Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures (1919), Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-1970), Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984), and Jacques Derrida’s “The University without Condition” (2002). We will then turn our attention for the remainder of the semester to some major accomplishments of “British” modern fiction that take up these concerns. Possible readings will include Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1985), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the opening section of Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), David Lodge’s “Campus Trilogy”—Trading Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988)—and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Clara and the Sun.
This course will be of interest to any graduate student working in British and modernist literature and culture, critical university studies, Creative Writing, or anyone who wants to take the opportunity to slow down and reflect carefully and responsibly on the most important issues facing us as teachers today and the possible futures for the university.
LIT 6855
The Contemporary
Susan Hegeman
In this seminar, we will explore a problem central to the field of cultural studies; namely, how does one study the cultural present? We will do this, first, through the estranging task of attempting to define “the contemporary” as a discrete cultural period. When did “the contemporary” start? When will it (did it) end? How does “the contemporary” map onto other periodizing concepts such as modernity, postmodernism, neoliberalism, post-millennialism, techno-feudalism, and so forth? Can we define “the contemporary” in terms of specific events, themes, aesthetic properties, or structures of feeling? Is “the contemporary” experienced the same way by everyone everywhere? How does the category of “the contemporary” challenge conventional assumptions about cultural and aesthetic value?
We will also discuss some difficult methodological problems in studying the contemporary. How do we identify objects of cultural analysis that help us elucidate our conceptions of the contemporary? How do we address issues of ephemerality, scope, and scale? As we work collectively through these questions, students will also practice developing research agendas in a variety of areas, including cultural, film, and literary studies.
The reading list has yet to be finalized, but will consist partly of key cultural studies texts by Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and others, and by more recent literary critics including Dan Sinykin and Sianne Ngai. We will collaborate to identify novels, films and possibly other objects to discuss, and students will have ample opportunity to connect their current research interests to class discussion and formal course assignments.
Interested students are welcome to reach out to Susan Hegeman (shegeman@ufl.edu) for more information.