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Graduate Courses, Fall 2015

Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.Note: Course numbers listed in the table below are linked to course descriptions. Descriptions will expand when you click the course title.

AML 6027

INDIGENEITY AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Susan Hegeman

In 2007, the United Nations passed the “Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People” (UNDRIP), an important document that helped to define a political phenomenon already underway: The development of a global indigenous politics and identity. Indigenous people often face similar battles for recognition and against discrimination, cultural and language loss, and loss and despoliation of key economic and cultural resources. They are often the first to feel the effects of climate change and of the industrialization of rural and wilderness areas.

This course will explore the emerging field of Indigenous Studies in relation to American Studies, a field that has long struggled with imperatives to internationalize and de-provincialize. Of course, the study of the history and culture of North American Indians has always been a part of American Studies. Through reading and seminar discussion of newer works of literature, history, and criticism, this course will centrally address one question: How does a focus on indigeneity change our understanding of American Indian studies and American studies?

The course should be useful for students interested in cultural studies, American literature and culture, and (post-)colonialism. It should also serve as an introduction to some of the themes and major works of American Indian Studies and Indigenous Studies.

Time(s) – F 3-5

CRW 6130

GRADUATE FICTION WORKSHOP

Amy Hempel

Time(s) – T E1-E3

CRW 6166

THE FORMS OF VERSE

Michael Hofmann

A long look over the fence: A course of readings, not of poets’ prose but rather of the sort of prose that poets might write if poets did write prose. Novels, stories, memoirs, essays, allsorts, but all prose. Including Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Bohumil Hrabal’s In-House Weddings, Wolfgang Koeppen’s memoir Youth, William Gass’s story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story, and four or five other delicate texts still to be resolved…

In the hope that the angel of prose may breathe on you.

Time(s) – T E1-E3

CRW 6166

STUDIES IN LITERARY FORM

Padgett Powell

In this course we will read some Turgenev and Peter Taylor, some Diderot and Beckett, some Kleist and Kafka and Barthelme, some Dinesen and Paley, some Stein and Hemingway, some Bernhard and O’brien (Flan), maybe a little Jane Bowles and Juan Rulfo. Some of these are intelligently paired. The point will be to witness the narrative tactics and the stylistic tics and steal them for your own use. You will turn in exercises in writing after these authors, and develop those pieces you can into perhaps standing pieces that are not dismissed as mere exercises. Open to MFA candidates in fiction.

Time(s) – M E1-E3

CRW 6331

VERSE WRITING

Ange Mlinko

This is a poetry workshop that will be equal parts writing and reading. A provisional reading list might include poems and essays by Anne Carson, Susan Stewart, Allen Grossman, Constantine Cavafy, and James Merrill.

Time(s) – M E1-E3

ENG 6075

QUEER THEORY

Kim Emery

This seminar is designed to serve as a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and thus attends to foundational texts from Foucault onward. As the semester progresses, we will move on to consider more recent work by Ann Cvetkovich, Roderick Ferguson, Christina Hanhardt, José Esteban Muñoz, and Dean Spade, among others. As time allows, we may also consider examples of queer cultural work in extra-academic contexts and genres. Participants can expect to conclude the semester having gained, at the least, (1) solid grounding in the central concerns, methodologies, and texts that formed the field, (2) a good understanding of current debates and developments, and (3) an appreciation of how the perspectives, attitudes, and insights of queer theory may enrich their own work, whatever their field of concentration.

Each participant will be assigned primary responsibility for one class discussion, along with an accompanying short paper and presentation. Short homework assignments, a paper abstract, and a seminar paper (15-20 pages) are also required.

Please email with any questions, or to suggest possible readings: kimemery@ufl.edu

Time(s) – M 9-11

ENG 6137

PHILOSOPHY/CINEMA/DIALOGUES

Robert Ray

If philosophy begins with Socrates, then its original form was the dialogue. In this course, we will begin by looking at models for philosophical questioning (two of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, Gareth B. Matthews’s Dialogues with Children, Gregory Bateson’s “Metalogues,” and two essays by J. L. Austin). We will use these models to write dialogues about movies, including the first Lumière shorts, Chaplin’s Kid Auto Races at Venice, Siodmak’s People on Sunday, Blow-Up, Anatomy of a Murder, Kiarostami’s Close Up, Vertigo, and Renoir’s A Day in the Country. Other possibilities are movies by Jacques Tati, All the President’s Men, The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and the Alec Guinness version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Dialogue-writing help will come from short readings about the cinema.

Assignments: (1) Bi-weekly two-page papers, written as dialogues, typically responding to prompts I will provide. (2) A final paper of 6–8 pages, consisting of one or more dialogues about the movies.

Time(s) – T 9-11
Screenings:
W E1-E3

ENG 6138

WEIMAR CINEMA

Barbara Mennel

This course covers the classic cinema of the Weimar Republic, including such films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem, and M. The course will be organized around the tensions of modernity. We will address the origins of genre, such as science fiction, melodrama, mountain film, and the city film. We will pay particular attention to gender and sexuality in such films as Pandora’s Box, Different from the Others, Joyless Street, The Blue Angel, and Girls in Uniform. Urban space will feature as a central topic in discussions of Berlin: Symphony of a City, The Last Laugh, Asphalt, and People on Sunday. A postcolonial approach to cinematic orientalism will guide our discussion of Prince Ahmed and The Indian Tomb. In addition to discussing films framed by aesthetic, institutional, and socio-political concerns, we will also emphasize early, contemporary, and very recent approaches to Weimar Cinema. Authors might include Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Bela Balaczs, Lotte Eisner, Sabine Hake, Heide Schlüpmann, Miriam Hansen, Anton Kaes, and Christian Rogowski. Knowledge of German is not required for this course.

Time(s) – R 9-11
Screenings:
M E1-E3

ENL 6256

LATE-VICTORIAN AESTHETICISM, DECADENCE, AND SEXUAL POLITICS

Chris Snodgrass

The Victorian Period presaged the 20th and 21st centuries in at least two key ways. It was perhaps the first modern society in which gender and sexuality were central, and possibly primary, organizing principles of the culture. The Victorian Period, particularly the fin de siècle, was also one of those eras in world history—and perhaps the first modern one—that hypothesized aestheticism as a defining cultural ethic. The convergence of these two idea-sets incited a significant tension between tradition and modernity, stability and transience, linear history and aestheticized or “suspended” time, the ideal and the grotesque, among other dichotomies. The intersection of aestheticism (extended in late-Victorian “Decadence”) and sexual politics will be the focus of this course.

The course will survey a broad range of noteworthy texts, both written and visual, by familiar figures such as Walter Pater, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as relatively unfamiliar (“non-canonical”) writers, among them Victoria Cross, George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], Ella D’Arcy, and Graham R. Tomson [Rosamund Marriott Watson]. Visual images that bombarded the late-Victorian period will be considered as texts equal in interest to written texts. While most of the weekly assignments do not explicitly include critical theory—and a sophisticated knowledge of literary theory is in no way a prerequisite—you will be encouraged to employ whatever theoretical perspectives you know to help illuminate the issues under study.

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Your grade will be computed as follows:

50%: (a) submitting each week, on no more than two pages, three “hypotheses” or summarizing insights (each no more than one-half page in length, single-spaced); and (b) preparing for and participating in discussions of the scheduled course material.

50%: (1) assembling a fairly comprehensive appropriate bibliography relevant to your specific chosen project; and (b) producing the final 8- to 12-page conference paper (but with endnotes/footnotes in addition).

Time(s) – W 9-11

LIT 6358

CRITICAL AND THEORETICAL LOOK AT THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Mark Reid

This course extends the Harlem Renaissance and the geographical place of Harlem to embrace an international movement in Black creative and intellectual production between the 1920s and the end of the 1930s. During this period between the war years, Harlem was in vogue, and Caribbean, African, and American Blacks began a consorted effort to redefine Blackness in their literatures, arts, and political writings. In discussing this period, the course calls on students to critically and theoretically discuss issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. The critical and theoretical component includes such commentators as Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Barbara Christian, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Negri.

Time(s) – T 3-5

LIT 6856

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Apollo Amoko

Time(s) – R 3-5

LIT 6934

WRITING CHILDHOOD

John Cech

This course offers an opportunity to explore a number of the familiar genres of writing for young people—poetry, the picture book, realistic and fantasy fiction, biography, and non-fiction—as well as more experimental and innovative forms, like moveable and artist’s books and the graphic novel. Readings will be drawn from key children’s books and criticism and will make use of holdings in UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The emphasis in the course will be on rigorous, weekly writing assignments and critiques. Participants will need to bring to the course an open, creative spirit and a commitment to producing exceptional writing.

Time(s) – T 6-8