Department of English

Tace Hedrick

We will be examining questions of what the literary term “modernism” (and modernity) means in work from the 1920s through the 1940s. Unlike “high” modernism which is primarily European and white, however, we will examine modernism and modernity particularly as they apply across the national and linguistic borders of the Caribbean, the United States, and Mexico, and especially in the service of racial and sexual politics. We will look at sites of modernist production such as the Harlem Renaissance, examining the connections as well as disjunctions between US modernist artists and those in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. We will be reading such writers as Nicolas Guillén, Zora Neal Hurston, Jean Toomer, looking at architects and artists such as Luis Barragán, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and more. All readings are in English.

Padgett Powell

This course is open to MFA candidates in fiction only.

Your job is to write with force and surprise and to tender your efforts regularly and cleanly. My job is to induce criticism which will cure whatever ills are at hand without making the writer ill.

It is difficult to say what is wrong with a piece of fiction in a way that will be at once corrective and palatable to its author. A good professional editor may manage it with a piece not much flawed. I fear, after nearly twenty years trying, that it is rarely possible to do this in a direct way to a more troubled piece of writing for the forming writer then and there. I believe, though, that it is possible, in speaking ostensibly about this or that piece of writing by this or that writer, to speak prescriptively and salubriously toward the bettering of later writing, both that done by an author and by witnesses to his or her ordeal. A general sense of what constitutes good writing is supposed to obtain in the course of our piecemeal daily assaults upon the specific faults and merits of a particular piece of writing.

Objective of course clearly stated at outset: that you leave it writing better than when you entered it. That you put to paper things not said before that surprise us.

Amy Hempel

Prose poem, short-short, or “couldn’t finish”—a class on the short-short story, the form one writer said is “like a short story, only more so.” We will read short-short stories from their first appearances up to the present by writers including Henri Michaux, Kafka, Barry Yourgrau, Bernard Cooper, Abigail Thomas, Barry Hannah, and many more. Students will write a short-short story at least every other week in addition to the reading.

Ange Mlinko

In this course, we will read longish, to long, to book-length poems from the past half-century, including Briggflatts by Basil Bunting, The Ballad of Jamie Allen by Tom Pickard, The Book of Ephraim by James Merrill, Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackay, “Incantata” by Paul Muldoon, “From the New World” by Jorie Graham, and Decreation by Anne Carson.

Michael Hofmann

This is the MFA workshop in poetry. It will follow the usual format—the reading aloud of a poem, a stricken silence, an abject prompt, a still queasy silence, the final, unwillingly extorted suggestion of some change to the poem’s punctuation… And alongside this, or variants thereon (or even departures therefrom), I have it in mind to read some first books by 20^th-century poets, including, I hope, and subject to availability and subsequent changes of heart or mind: Observations by Marianne Moore, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, (perhaps) In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz, The Colossus by Sylvia Plath, Sunrise by Frederick Seidel, The Visit by Ian Hamilton, A State of Justice by Tom Paulin, Shouting at No One by Lawrence Joseph, and Short Haul Engine by Karen Solie. (Good first books are in short supply. Excessively short supply, some people might say.)

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 in the field. 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

Esther Romeyn

(Crosslisted with GEW 6901 Special Study in Germanic Languages and Literatures: Turkish German Cinema in Global Contexts)

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This course discusses these films in different thematic and methodological contexts: minority and migration cinema, global art cinema, feminist theory, long-term documentary, queer studies, and transnational aesthetics. We will also pay particular attention to issues of production, distribution, and reception. Attendance at screenings will be mandatory as the course includes screening of films that do not circulate in mainstream distribution channels and have been purchased with a Library Enhancement Grant by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. Directors will include but are not limited to Fatih Akın, Ayşe Polat, Aysum Bademsoy, Thomas Arslan, Kutluğ Ataman, Seyhan Derin, and Yüksel Yavuz. No prior knowledge of either Turkish, Kurdish, or German language, culture, or history is necessary. Assignments will include a book review, an abstract, and a final research paper. The class might include skype interview(s) and/or visit(s) by filmmakers. Readings will include Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sited, Sounds, and Screens, ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel.

Roger Maioli

Reflecting on Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), J. Paul Hunter once observed: “Everyone in the past thirty years who has written about the beginning of the English novel has been engaged in rewriting Watt and, in doing so, renewing him.” Hunter was writing in the 1990s, but his assessment remains true to this day. Modern historians of the novel continue to engage with Watt’s foundational study, often to refine and just as often to challenge it. In this seminar we will examine Watt’s account of the novel’s rise as well as the critical tradition that emerged in response to it. We will be pairing up our critical readings with primary sources that illustrate the issues that animate the debate—including novels by Defoe, Richardson, Madame de Lafayette, and Aphra Behn.

We will begin by reading Watt’s introductory chapters alongside two novels that illustrate his thesis: Robinson Crusoe and Pamela. We will then proceed to examine three ways in which Watt’s thesis has been challenged: for giving priority to the English tradition, for focusing exclusively on male writers, and for neglecting non-canonical works. To consider the transnational dimension of the rise of the novel, for example, we will read selections from Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel and English Showalter’s The Evolution of the French Novel, together with the Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes and Madame de Lafayette’s courtly novella The Princess of Clèves. Similarly, to move beyond Watt’s picture of a male rise of the novel, we will read selections from Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist and William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment, in combination with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. We will also examine how scholars sympathetic towards Watt’s thesis—such as Michael McKeon and J. Paul Hunter—listened to these critiques and tried to reformulate the thesis on more defensible grounds.

For this course you will be giving one class presentation and writing one final paper. The final paper should engage with a combination of secondary and primary sources, and you will be writing it in accordance with the submission guidelines of an academic journal of your choice.

Marsha Bryant

This seminar will explore poetry, fiction, film, television, and popular music that emerged alongside major cultural shifts of the 1980s. It was a time of “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the new social identity “Black British,” and the New Wave. 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. We will also devote class time to “profession 101” issues, concluding that thread with Helen Sword’s book Stylish Academic Writing. Gainesville’s punk rock festival (The Fest), happens in the fall, so we’ll link with that event in some cool fashion.

Our texts will include:

• Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
• Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
• Julian Barnes, Metroland
• Martin Amis, Money
• Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren
• Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems
• Carol Ann Duffy, Collected
• Michael Hofmann, Acrimony
• Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’
• The Young Ones television series
• Derek Jarman’s Jubilee
• Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette
• Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game

Our assignments will include:

• Active participation in weekly discussion
• Presentation with handout
• Short response to music or fashion at The Fest
• Conference paper proposal
• Seminar paper (MFA option: conference-length paper + creative response)

Apollo Amoko

This course will explore diverse 21^st African Literature in terms of new writing by such established writers of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nurrudin Farah, Buchi Emechata and Tsisti Dangaremba as well as new emerging writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. The former writers came of age in late-colonial and early-post colonial Africa during the age of triumphant, or any rate, optimistic anti-colonial nationalism and the aesthetic of realism. In contrast, the latter group of writers emerged in the wake of the age of postcolonial disillusionment and the so-called African crisis, on the one hand, and the discourses of globalization, on the other. The course will address the various modes of post-realist aesthetic expression and experimentation that have emerged in various attempt to represent the continent’s complex history, bewildering cultural diversity and enduring economic, political and social challenges. What new protocols for reading can we devise beyond paradigms such as anticolonial nationalism, literatures of disillusionment and literatures of crises can be developed. For contextual purposes, the course will open by briefly introducing or re-acquainting students with such foundational texts in modern African literature as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru.

Mark Reid

This seminar introduces students to the literature and films that dramatize the experiences of Afro-Europeans and Black American expatriates in Western Europe. Weekly readings will cover literature, critical theory, philosophy, political essays, and films that treat the socioeconomic and cultural experiences of the African Diaspora (European citizens and immigrants) from sub-Saharan and North Africa. Note: Assigned and recommended texts and readings are held at the Reserve Desk on the second floor of Library West. Check the Reserve List for this course to see if any assigned essays or plays are available as PDF files on ARES (ELECTRONIC RESERVE) section on Library West Website. Look under Reid and this course’s section number.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Ten weekly reaction papers to readings and film screenings
  30%
• Two oral presentations on an instructor-assigned weekly readings and or film screening
  20%
• One “essay-in-progress” (rough draft of a 20-minute conference paper)
  20%
• One five-page annotated bibliography of the “essay-in-progress”
  20%
• One oral presentation of an “essay-in-progress”
  10%

Sid Dobrin

Early rhetoricians placed substantial value upon the idea and practice of memory. Memoria, after all, was one of the five canons of rhetoric. As writing technologies evolved, rhetoric was repeatedly adapted to account for literacy in the same ways as orality. As written and print culture became the dominant form of communication, memoria began to fall by the wayside as an emphasized element of rhetoric, some criticizing writing as technology determined to eliminate the need for memory, others praising its contributions to sustained memory. In the digital age, we find ourselves needing to engage memory more directly, albeit in a drastically different form, one that might reductively be understood as bound to augmentation.

This seminar will examine histories of memory and the relationship between writing technologies/digital technologies and memory. This seminar will consider the very idea of augmentation ranging from the prosthetic augmented body to information augmenting technologies like augmented reality applications. Encumbered in these discussions, we will address issues of identity, posthumanism, the body, digital media, circulation, delivery, telepresence, and extension.

Leah Rosenberg

Archives are the foundation of the humanities. They are essential for the production of literature, film, and popular culture; for the formulation of critical theory; and for the quantitative and qualitative research used to study culture across diverse contexts. This course examines the archive in theory and in practice. It also serves as an introduction to research methods and writing in the Humanities, with an emphasis on archival resources at the University of Florida. Our topics may include the roles the archive has played in generating fields from critical theory to more recent work in African American, Postcolonial, modernist, and feminist studies– as well as recent innovations in digital humanities. Additionally, students will learn to identify and assess archives (at UF and beyond) relevant to their individual research and teaching interests. We will use archival material to produce scholarly writing and teaching assignments. In the process, students will identify and assess current debates in their respective fields and develop a bibliography or archive for their future research. There is the potential as well for students to contribute to the UF archives through enhancing metadata and writing about archival material. This proseminar will fulfill the requirement for a Digital Breadth seminar for the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities.