Department of English

Fall 2024 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 6017	W 3-5	Representations of Science in 19th C. American Literature	Smith
AML 6027	R 6-8	Contemporary U.S. Literature and Cultures of Imperialism	Schueller
AML 6027	T 6-8	American Modernisms	Hedrick
CRW 6166	M 9-11	The Iliad and Contemporary Poetry	Mlinko
CRW 6331	T 9-11	Poetry Composition	Hofmann
LAE 6947	W 6-8	Women’s Writing and Pedagogy	Bryant
LIT 6358	M 6-8	James Baldwin: Novels and Plays and the Silenced Intersectional Critiques	Reid
LIT 6934	W 9-11	Prospectus and Dissertation	Rosenberg

Course Descriptions

AML 6017

Representations of Science in 19th C. American Literature
Stephanie A. Smith

Data-driven, experimental science and the technologies that arise from that science, as well as more esoteric scientific theories are frequently under attack. America’s communal acceptance of what science is ‘real’ remains a moving target in contemporary political and cultural debates (well, shouting matches.) What does it mean to know a scientific fact, when said facts are often subject to violent political revisions (the earth is flat; no, it’s round! no it’s flat!) or socio-historical change (doctor: abortion can be a necessary medical procedure; anti-abortion activist: it is never necessary, we can provide in-uterine palliative care)?

Galileo’s reaffirmation of the Copernican heavens gained him severe censure from the Catholic church; Newton’s theory of gravity was scoffed at; AIDS was initially and widely believed to be a disease that would only infect gay men, a dangerous belief that epidemiologists at the time warned was farcical; Covid can be treated by taking a horse de-wormer. Few today would argue that the earth and not the sun is the center of the universe , or that gravity doesn’t exist or that only gay men can die of AIDS, or that a horse de-wormer is an effective treatment of a corona virus (one can only hope).

But scientific facts can and do change. Still, those changes should always “be based on demonstrable and reproducible data,” as has been standard scientific practice since at least the 17th century (if not before). Of course, how such scientific data is acquired, revised, revisited or rejected has also changed drastically over time, so that what was once considered a fact in 1848 can seem quaint in 2024 (to some of us anyway). In this class, we shall read 19th c. American literature(s) which questioned, revised, revisited or even invented what the majority in that time considered “scientific” knowledge, in order to shed some historical and cultural light on our similar, current debates.

Oh, and if you’ve never read Moby Dick: Or The Whale before, here’s your chance.

AML 6027

Contemporary U.S.  Literature and Cultures of Imperialism
Malini Johar Schueller

This course takes its title partly from the well-known collection published in 1993 which transformed the field of American studies by making colonialism and imperialism central to conceptions of nation, culture, and identity. The theoretical basis for the course will be the broad field of postcolonial studies and the smaller, but burgeoning field of U.S. empire studies. By reading a broad range of works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, we will examine different tropes of empire such as going native, colonial domesticity, pornotropics, tutelary colonialism, exhibiting empire and remasculinization; at the same time, we will focus on the specific sites of empire such as Hawai’I, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, South Korea, and Vietnam. The course will engage with different forms of U.S. imperialism such as North American settler colonialism, Pacific and continental expansionism, control of far-flung colonies, empire without colonies, and base camp colonies. The purpose is to examine the different ways in which, at historically specific moments, cultural texts (memoirs, novels, and films) and empire are imbricated and to raise a number of questions: How are travel and exploration implicated in empire? What are the differences in how the sites of U.S. empire are constructed in the national imaginary? How are questions of empire and gender related? How does contemporary literature register histories of, and ongoing US imperialism? How might literature resist cultural imperialism?

We will read a variety of multiethnic and indigenous US texts including David Henry Hwang’s play M Butterfly (1988), Gina Apostol’s historical novel Insurrecto (2018), Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017), Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorportated Terriroty [hacha] (2008), Aimee Phan’s short story collection We Should Never Meet (2004), and Nora Okja Keller’s novel, Fox Girl (2002).

The course should be of interest to students in postcolonial studies, contemporary American literature and culture, multiethnic literature, and US empire studies.

AML 6027

American Modernisms
Tace Hedrick

We will be looking at period connections (around 1890-1930) between certain United States American modernists and their counterparts (in translation) in Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean. We may read such writers as Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, Pauline Hopkins, Puerto Rican American William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, Cuban writer Jose Marti, Waldo Frank, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, and more. Within this literature we will be addressing a couple of key questions: first, the theoretical question of what constitutes modernism for artists concerned with a sharper understanding of what it meant to be “American”; second, the question of the relationship between esthetic modernism, period discussions of race and gender, and a temporal and broadly understood sense of the Americas and the “modern.”

Recent scholars have focused attention on the fact that early 20th-century United States and Latin American modernist writers, artists, and intellectuals were deeply and consciously concerned with issues of race and gender, often in the context of what Benedict Anderson and others have referred to as the work of imagining nationhood. As we will see, hemispheric American notions of modernization and a sense of modernity often coincided with racialized discourses of hybridity, eugenics, race mixing (in Latin America, mestizaje) and Afro-European mixing (in the Caribbean, mulatez), indigenism, and negritude. Course requirements include two response papers and two essay papers.

In our work, we will move across several of the Department of English areas of study: Africana, American Literature (looking at a broader sense of “America” in studies of Modernism, race, and gender), Feminisms, Gender and Sexualities, and Critical Theory and Cultural Studies.

CRW 6166

The Iliad and Contemporary Poetry
Ange Mlinko

In this graduate poetry seminar, we will read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad and study the influence of Homeric epics on contemporary poets, including Derek Walcott, Alice Oswald, Seamus Heaney, A.E. Stallings, and others. Presence and verbal participation in class discussions are required. A creative work or short paper on our readings will be due at the end of the semester

CRW 6331

Poetry Composition
Michael Hofmann

This is the graduate poetry workshop, MFA @ FLA, #12 and #35. I am thinking, mostly free assignments – no flaming hoops, no fantastical obstacle courses – and a regimen of poetry from the North of Ireland: Paul Muldoon’s willful and wonderful anthology, The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, beefed up by more Heaney and Paulin and MacNeice, some Muldoon, some Vona Groarke, some Leontia Flynn…

LAE 6947

Women’s Writing & Pedagogy
Marsha Bryant

This hybrid seminar-workshop has three aims: (1) to study post-1900 literary texts by women writers from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. + relevant critical conversations; (2) to brainstorm new pedagogies individually and collaboratively; (3) to further professional development by reading and writing about teaching.Toward these ends, we will read women’s literary writing in diverse forms:

* Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein * Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf * Best Poems, Stevie Smith (same text as New Selected Poems) * Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks * Ariel & The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath * The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter * Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove (also in her Selected Poems) * The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood * Distant Mandate, Ange Mlinko * Fun Home, Alison Bechdel *

We’ll also read journal articles and book chapters about teaching these writers and texts. Through the Mary Sue Koeppel Papers in UF Special Collections, we’ll explore issues of Kalliope (1978-2005), a Florida-affiliated journal that published women’s literature and art. Since this is a seminar-workshop, you’ll do a series of short assignments throughout the semester rather than build toward a long paper. Individually, you will: design 4 Beta assignments for undergraduates, generated from keywords that connect our literary texts (domesticity, city, myth, literary magazine); do several digital annotations with Perusall; write a conference paper proposal about pedagogy; make a draft syllabus. Collaboratively, you will work on a Study Guide for one of our texts that we’ll share with the Department. Rather than doing a seminar report, you’ll co-lead one of our discussions about the Beta assignments. You’ll leave this course with critical contexts + practical strategies for teaching and writing about women’s literature.

LIT 6358

James Baldwin: Novels and Plays and the Silenced Intersectional Critiques
Mark A. Reid

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin’s literary and sociopolitical writings. The course expects that students apply critical race theory in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from writing by scholars as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class discussion and written work will discern whether there exists evidence of Afro-Pessimism and or postNegritude moments in Baldwin’s oeuvre that easily dismisses postracial fantasies and the machination of neoliberal gestures.

The seminar critically surveys James Baldwin’s writings, lectures, and selected biographies that explore Baldwin’s life in the United States, France, and Turkey. Baldwin was engaged in the socio-political world that surrounded and sometimes consumed his artistic and moral energies. He was active in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and international concerns about the construction of nation, race, and sexuality. One critic wrote of Baldwin in these words: “Following publication of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s literary star approached its peak during the turbulent 1960s. His burgeoning role as celebrity, prophet, and leader heaped an unsustainable amount of pressure and responsibility onto his slight frame in an American landscape that doubly punished Baldwin for being both black and gay, and he often turned to Turkey for sanctuary”.

This course will reveal the artistry, compassion, and moral commitment of one of America’s greatest writers. Students will critically study how James Baldwin fared as an American writer and social critic. and how critical race theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. Class discussion will consider how Baldwin imaginatively exposed and fervently articulated the coming consciousness that generates “Black Lives Matter” awareness and endgame.

LIT 6934

Prospectus and Dissertation
Leah Rosenberg

TBA