Department of English

Fall 2023 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
CRW 6130	M 9-11	Fiction Writing	Bordas
CRW 6166	T 9-11	Secrets of Poetic Craft	Logan
CRW 6331	M 9-11	Poetry Composition	Hofmann
ENC 7760	W E1-E3	From Paper to Publication	Gonzales
ENG 6077	T 9-11	Feminist Theory	Hedrick
ENG 6077	W 6-8	Forms–Being Dialectical; or, How to Read	Wegner
ENG 6824	W 9-11	Writing about Novels: A Pro-Seminar	Maioli dos Santos
ENL 6256	R 9-11	Victorian Popular Novels	Gilbert
LIT 6236	W 3-5	Global Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature	Schueller
LIT 6358	M 6-8	The Harlem Renaissance Novels, Films, and Europe: Color Consciousness and Class Mobility, Gender, and Sexuality	Reid
LIT 6934	F 6-8	Prospectus & Dissertation	Rosenberg

Course Descriptions

CRW 6130

Fiction Writing
Camille Bordas

This course is open to MFA candidates only.

Our workshop will be conducted in traditional workshop fashion: each week, we will discuss two short stories (or novel excerpts), by two different students. Every student will turn in two pieces of fiction over the course of the semester.
The writer whose work is being critiqued is expected to turn in a piece he or she believes to be as close to being finished as possible. The students critiquing the piece will treat it as published work, meaning they will discuss it as if the writer has deep intentions behind every line (which hopefully they do) and they, as readers, want to understand those intentions. Students are expected, each week, to write letters to those who are being critiqued: letters that describe what the piece that is being critiqued has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it might achieve, etc.

Dedication to understanding what each writer is trying to do, regardless of their aesthetic preferences, is mandatory. Also mandatory: that the writers be prepared to hear what the others have to say about their work.

CRW 6166

Secrets of Poetic Craft
William Logan

“The whole frame of the Poem is a beating out of a piece of gold, but the last clause is as the impression of the stamp, and that it is that makes it currant.”
​—John Donne

Poetry workshops discuss aesthetics more than craft. This course will devote itself to the nuts and bolts of poetry: titles, enjambment, syntax, allusion, metaphor, simile, closure, even a little meter and rhyme, everything that contributes to the internal architecture of the poem. Many of these are covered superficially during workshop, but we will look deeper at what in each case causes the effect as well as the affect.

Critics rarely write about these things, perhaps because they are felt to be only craft. Yet there are times when the internal-combustion engine is more relevant to discussion than Detroit’s latest shades of paint. We will concentrate on matters often mentioned only in passing or given a paragraph or two in the front matter of a textbook.

The reading will include a few set texts (Pendlebury on rhyme, Smith on poetic closure, Scott on the poet’s craft, these books out of print but widely available used), as well as a pile of samizdat chapters—Hollander on titles and enjambment, Ricks on hyphens and endings, Brooke-Rose on metaphor, Berry on poetic grammar. Each class will cover one or two subjects, and one student each week will give a short (10-15 minute) presentation, with specific examples for discussion.

There will be 6-10 poetic assignments as well.

CRW 6331

Poetry Composition
Michael Hofmann

This is the graduate poetry workshop, MFA @ FLA. I look forward to a klein aber fein class, with mostly free writing assignments – no flaming hoops, no fantastical obstacle courses – and some invigorating readings on the side: my current thinking is brief individual volumes by Lowell, Bishop, Zagajewski, Schuyler, Hamilton [For Lizzie and Harriet; Geography III; Real Life; The Morning of the Poem; and Fifty Poems or Sixty Poems], but all are subject to change, and perhaps even to appeal.

ENC 7760

From Paper to Publication
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—a combination of learning and doing.

ENG 6077

Feminist Theory
Tace Hedrick

Feminist theory is a rhizomatic, constantly growing, organic field. Here, we will investigate interesting places and moments in that field where questions of gender, sexualities, class, race, and more come together and intersect. In that sense, this will not be an introduction to feminist theory, rather a dive into the midst of it from the late 1990s through the 2000s. We may be reading theorists such as Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Patricia Williams, Elena Zupancic, and Anna Tsing. All graduate students are welcome, including MFA students.

What to expect: Two response papers apiece with questions at the end (papers to be shared with the class on Canvas the day before), and you can make a PowerPoint too if you want (just don’t put all of your discussion on PowerPoint). Response papers can be around five pages (around 10 minutes). One final paper prospectus (1-2 pages), an annotated bibliography (5 important sources), and a final paper (15-25 pages) will be required. You may write your final paper on the topic you have chosen for your dissertation, or on a topic concerning one (or more) of our readings.

ENG 6077

Forms–Being Dialectical; or, How to Read
Phil Wegner

The premise of our seminar is that the dialectic remains the most creative and dynamic mode of reading and thinking currently available to us. This course thus should be of great interest to any student in all of our graduate programs who—despite the political and institutional pressures to contrary—hopes to take up the untimely vocations of the intellectual and creative reader (and writer). One its most influential contemporary practitioners, Fredric Jameson, describes the dialectic as “a speculative account of some thinking of the future which has not yet been realized: an unfinished project, as Habermas might put it; a way of grasping situations and events that does not yet exist as a collective habit because the concrete form of social life to which it corresponds has not yet come into being.” Our goal in this seminar will be to assist your passage into such a future by “diving in” to the work of some of most important thinkers and readers of the last two centuries. Following a too brief engagement with the work of the founder of the modern dialectic, G. W. F. Hegel, the first part of our seminar will take up the writings of some of the most significant practitioners of dialectical thinking and writing from the first half of the 20th century, including Max Weber, C.L.R. James, and Theodor Adorno. We will then turn to a group of more contemporary intellectuals (Jameson, George Ciccariello-Maher, Andrew Cole, Rebecca Comay, Catherine Malabou, Frank Ruda, and Slavoj Žižek) who advance the claim that it is time to (re)turn to the dialectic in our present, and especially in the aftermath of the great revolution that was structuralist critical theory. Such a movement, as Žižek would have it, involves no simple return to a past practice, but a far more significant effort to repeat it, “to distinguish between what [the dialectic] actually did and the field of possibilities it opened up.”

ENG 6824

Writing about Novels: A Pro-Seminar
Roger Maioli dos Santos

In around 2013, the editor of a prestigious journal in American literature told me and a group of fellow graduate students: “Brilliant readings are a dime a dozen. If you have a brilliant reading of a novel, keep it. I have no need for it.” This was more than a quip. He was revealing to us a hidden rule of academic publishing: that in order to get published, it is not enough for an essay to be good. It also needs to follow certain formal procedures, engage in appropriate ways with the secondary scholarship, demonstrate its relevance given the current state the field, and be directed at the right journal.

This seminar will help you understand and follow these unwritten rules of academic publishing, with a focus on writing about novels. We will begin the semester by reading selected works by Aphra Behn and Jane Austen, and we will focus on essential reading skills such as finding an interpretive problem, locating textual evidence and counter-evidence, identifying relevant secondary scholarship, and defining where your reading fits within current debates in the field. Having practiced reading, we will then practice writing. You will be producing and workshopping short and long writing assignments that will help you structure your paper within the conventions expected by academic journals. Later in the semester you will be focusing on a novel of your choice (not to exceed 400 pages). I will work with you on developing your reading, and at the end of the semester you should have a robust draft. I will be giving you extensive feedback on how to enrich that draft prior to finally submitting it to a journal.

ENL 6256

Victorian Popular Novels
Pamela Gilbert

This course will explore “popular” and emerging genres in the nineteenth century novel, especially between 1840 and 1900. Many of these texts have been immensely influential on more recent literary and media history, from film to comics to games, as well as, of course, novels. We will also interrogate the notion of the popular and the history of “taste.” There is such a variety of material and ways to approach it in this period that I have organized the course around a selection from a few genres, and have arranged the course so as to allow a certain amount of exploration on your own of those that intrigue you. The reading is divided between novels, the history of reading, and some theoretical materials on genre and dissemination. By the end of the semester, you will have read a number of novels that were quite influential in their time (though often unknown now) and thought about their placement vis a vis the more canonical texts of the period. One advantage of studying these novels is that many have not received much critical attention, and thus provide fertile ground for publishable inquiry. You will also have learned a good deal of history of reading and of the period, and you will have had opportunities to think from an informed perspective about ideas of taste, genres and the popular in the development of the novel, as well as to sample some recent scholarship. This course is about working through questions as much as gaining a specific kind of knowledge; sometimes we won’t walk away with “answers” so much as a more sophisticated understanding of the conversations and the issues they entail.

Authors and texts may include Dickens, Charles The Old Curiosity Shop, Corelli, Marie The Sorrows of Satan, Wood, Mrs. Henry East Lynne, Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins, Yonge, Charlotte Mary The Heir of Redclyffe, Ouida (Marie de la Ramee) Under Two Flags/Moths, Ainsworth, Harrison Jack Sheppard Broadview​, GWM Reynolds and others. Scholarship may include Kate Flint, Richard Altick, Nancy  Armstrong, Pierre Bourdieu, Daniel Hack and others.​

The course will likely require a turn at discussion leading, eight short response papers, and a seminar paper of 21-25 pages.​

LIT 6236

Global Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature
Malini Schueller

Settler colonialism has often been marginalized within postcolonial studies which have focused largely on colonization and decolonization in places such as Kenya, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, or French Indochina. This course attends to the different theories, practices, and literatures of settler colonialisms–marked by large populations of Europeans who have moved to places not simply as functionaries of a colonial power but to live permanently while enjoying the privileges of a ruling race. While the structures of some settler colonialisms have been dismantled and others still continue, the effects of settler colonialism are present to date. Indeed one of the most important global connections of the twenty-first century is that of indigenous resistance against settler colonialism. North American Indian, Hawaiian, Palestinian, Maori, and Kashmiris speak a similar language of dispossession and activism and are often involved in advocacy campaigns that connect different indigenous spaces. This course focuses on the literatures and theories of indigeneity and settler colonialism by focusing on four very different sites: US North America, Hawai’i, South Africa, and Palestine. We will study the specific constructions of race in different settler colonial contexts and the intersection of colonial racism and gender. We will read works by both the colonized and settlers in order to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, nationalism, the politics of recognition, and revolutionary solidarity. We will study the current, often contentious theoretical debates about the different politics of settler colonial studies and indigeneity studies and some conversations between indigenous and environmental studies. We will also follow present-day activism against settler colonialism and see how settler colonial and indigeneity studies continue to develop tactics against forms of oppression today.

The course will begin with a brief foray into nineteenth-century literature of settler colonialism and native resistance in the US which will serve as a foundation to reading the contemporary literature and theory. We will put into conversation twenty-first century contemporary global literature of resistance to settler colonialism and twentieth century literature. We will also read the works of theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, Jodi Byrd, Craig Womack, Kehaulani Kanui, Achille Mbembe, Rob Wilson, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Ghassan Hage, and Eyal Weizman.

Possible Texts include Sherman Alexie Indian Killer , Liliuokalani Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging, Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country, Peter Abrahams Mine Boy, Raja Shehade Palestinian Walks, Susan Abulhawa Mornings in Jenin

LIT 6358

The Harlem Renaissance Novels, Films, and Europe: Color Consciousness and Class Mobility, Gender, and Sexuality
Mark Reid

LIT 6934

Prospectus & Dissertation
Leah Rosenberg

This course is designed with the goal of empowering students who have completed their course work and providing them with practical assistance as they produce their exam materials, dissertation proposals, and dissertations. Students will begin the semester identifying their semester goals and develop an individual plan for achieving these goals Each week,
will work collaboratively and as individual scholars, writers, and researchers to achieve these goals.

The course will address the needs of the diverse fields, projects, and needs of doctoral students and takes into account that dissertation projects may comprise digital humanities projects, films, or other non-traditional components. Students will become familiar with external sources of support for research and writing as well as resources here at UF, including grants and fellowships, such as the UF Libraries, The National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, the Office of Graduate Professional Development, and Center for the Humanities and Public sphere). We will also inform ourselves about the debate over changing requirements, formats, and possibilities for the dissertation.

Course Objectives. By the completion of the semester, students will have:

• Analyzed dissertation prospectuses and chapters as well as grant/fellowship proposals
• Evaluated the changing expectations and possibilities for the dissertation
• Created and implemented a semester plan
• Identified research methods, needs, and resources
• Established a writing routine.
• Completed at least one major project (prospectus, chapter, exam materials, film, DH project)
• Composed a grant or fellowship proposal to support that project
• Presented their work in a formal setting