Department of English

Spring 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
CRW 6130	T 9-11	Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 6166	M 6-8	Fiction in Drag	Leavitt
CRW 6331	M 9-11	Verse Writing	Mlinko
ENG 6077	W 6-8	Graphic Archives	Galvan
ENG 6077	W 9-11	Theory After 2008	Bianchi
ENG 6137	W E1-E3 / T E1-E3	Avant-Garde Film (and the Question of Avant-Garde Film Studies)	Mowchun
LAE 6947	W 3-5	Writing Theories & Practices	Sanchez
LIT 6236	R 9-11	Entrapped Bodies: Illness, Disability, and the Prisonhouse of Language	Amoko
LIT 6856	T 6-8	Desperate Domesticity: The American 1950s	Bryant
LIT 6934	M E1-E3	The Second Golden Age of Children’s Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 6934	R 6-8	Toni Morrison	King

Course Descriptions

CRW 6130

Fiction Writing
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 6166

Fiction in Drag
David Leavitt

This course will focus on novels and stories that present themselves as things other than novels and stories: diaries, letters, email exchanges, album liner notes, diaries, newsletters, and, in one very famous case, a poem. We will read examples of “fiction in drag” and take a stab at writing it. Poets taking the course are welcome to experiment with “poetry in drag.” Books and stories to be considered may include:

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire ( novel as poem and commentary in footnotes)
Alejandro Zambra, Multiple Choice (novel as standardized test)
John Banville, The Untouchable (novel as journal/private memoir)
Alan Gurganus, “Preservation News” (story as newsletter)
William Boyd, Any Human Heart (novel as collected journals of an imaginary writer, spanning his entire life and including footnotes and index)
William Boyd, Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960 (novel as biography/monograph)
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (novel as diary)
Christopher Miller, Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects: A Novel in Liner Notes
Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (novel as ballad)
Nicholson Baker, Vox (novel as phone-sex conversation)
Michael Frayn, The Trick of It (novel as letters)
Rick Moody, Hotels of North America (novel as TripAdvisor reviews)

 

CRW 6331

Verse Writing
Ange Mlinko

This graduate workshop in poetry will focus on the crafting of a long poem. We will look at models for long poems (blank verse, sonnet sequences, free verse in sections) so that one-third to one-half of each class will focus on close reading. Students should have some notion of a subject or theme that will carry their interest through the course of the semester.

ENG 6077

Graphic Archives
Margaret Galvan

This experiential learning course introduces students to archives and archival research—both the pleasures as well as the difficulty, especially when it comes to studying visual print culture. Due to grassroots distribution, circulation, and publishing methods, archives—not bookstores or libraries—are the necessary place to study radical visual culture. We laud the rise of digital collections and archives, but materials like these remain under-digitized and under-cataloged. Text-based finding systems in traditional finding guides and digital infrastructure do not well support the study of visual culture—especially incidental images nested amongst text. We will work through these obstacles together as students learn how to conduct research in archives. Students will be introduced to relevant archives at UF and in our larger community as well as online.

Across the semester, we will read and discuss theoretical conversations around radical archives and materials that have emerged over the past several years in both monographs and special issues of journals. In a number of these texts, feminist zines of the early 1990s serve as an area of focus for scholars, librarians, and archivists. Because zines as self-produced grassroots media do not conform to mainstream publication information, zine archivists and librarians have developed new protocols for how to catalogue these materials so that important information will not be lost. How might we apply these principles or develop our own for organizing and researching other, diverse visual ephemera—comics, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, buttons, t-shirts, etc.—in digital collections?

Scaffolded professionalization activities and digital approaches to scholarship will accompany the completion of an archivally-informed research paper. This course will be useful for students with an interest in archival research, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, marginalized histories, grassroots publishing, visual and popular cultures, etc.

ENG 6077

Theory After 2008
Pietro Bianchi

In 2008-2009 one of the biggest economic crises of the latest decades hit the global world, reshaping the balance between global powers and opening up a new phase of multi-polar hegemonies. In the same year Mark Fisher, a blogger at the margins of academia, published in London “Capitalism Realism,” a pamphlet that will be enormously influential in the next decade, where he claims that in this phase not only capitalism has become the only viable political and economic system with no credible alternative, but that it has now become even impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Faced with a new mood of hopelessness that at times reached dystopic and apocalyptic tones, Theory after 2008 changed its language and forms: it blurred theory and fiction; it started to be influenced by personal storytelling and worldbuilding; it exploded in a myriad of niches and jargons.

During this semester we will map some of the current trends of Theory that appeared after 2008 (even though in few cases we will need to trace back their origin as back as in 90s). We will traverse a multiplicity of languages, approaches, ideological positions, modes of expression.

Even though the seminar will be mainly dedicated to the reading of theoretical texts, it is a survey course intended for students with a variety of interests (cultural studies, literature, visual culture, decoloniality, political ecology, etc.). In principle anyone who is working on contemporary cultural, ideological, or political formations could find useful the reading of the texts that will be part of this course.

Some of the material that will be discussed throughout the semester will be: Mark Fisher (Capital Realism and excerpts from K-Punk blog); The Xenofeminist Manifesto; Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble; a selection of Communization theory; Andreas Malm (excerpts from How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Fossil Capital); Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics; Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee and the contemporary Anarchist debate; Franco “Bifo” Berardi; Slavoj Zizek; the documentaries of Adam Curtis; Nick Land, Sadie Plant and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit; Frank Wilderson’s Afropessism; Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China An Essay in Cosmotechnics; Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.

The seminar will be discussion-based, with 30 minutes of lecture by the instructor every session. Students should expect to read around 150 pages per week, introduce the readings to the class once in the semester, and write a 15-18 pages final paper (a draft for a scholarly article, a conference presentation or a long book review).

ENG 6137

Avant-Garde Film (and the Question of Avant-Garde Film Studies
Trevor Mowchun

Bubbling beneath the mainstream marketplace of commercial and consumable cinema lies the alternative realm of the avant-garde: experimental, unpredictable, daring, defiant, dangerous. If everyday waking life with its familiar patterns of thought and recurrent habits of action is analogous to mainstream popular cinema in its most derivative and derelict form, then the unconscious world of insight, intuition, and dream—revealing to us, each night, our inner repressed truth—is the avant-garde film confronting us, interrupting the status quo, freeing thought and feeling from external constraints and pressures towards “normalcy.” To study the avant-garde film, therefore, is to lose our senses, as it were, to abandon formulaic ways of seeing and understanding the world and ourselves. As there is no single stable meaning fixed to the avant-garde, we will explore a variety of possibilities to ensure our path through avant-garde film history and culture remains open to surprise and destined for the underground where no amount of prior knowledge will safely light the way to the certitudes we may long for (but will learn to relinquish in favor of “non-knowing”). Some theoretical frameworks and artistic forms of expression to help guide our investigations into avant-garde film are as follows: aesthetics, non-narrative or anti-narrative discourse, formal experimentation/innovation, self-reflexivity, political transgression, apolitical abstraction, poetry, shock, phenomenology, corporeality, and the unconscious. The influential (and sometimes infamous) avant-garde movements of the 20th century (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Conceptual Art) will also be discussed in their crosspollinations with film. Running parallel to this investigation will be a question pertaining to the study of films that confound or altogether resist study. Does avant-garde film call for the cultivation of what we may refer to as “avant-garde film studies”? Beyond the question of how to analyze avant-garde film through the various avenues of critical discourse, can the discipline of film studies take on the spirit of the avant-garde by “un-disciplining itself”?

Eschewing the class/screening dichotomy of film studies pedagogy in the English department, this seminar will not have a separate screening session to accompany the class meetings. Instead, all films will be shown in class. Occasionally I will provide links to films which students canview outside of class.

LAE 6947

Writing Theories & Practices
Raúl Sanchez

The catalog title says Writing, but in fact this course is about pedagogy.

We’ll discuss issues related to teaching in various college and university contexts: General Education, English Studies, the Humanities, and so on. We’ll address topics that are by turns practical, conceptual, immediate, and enduring.

We’ll certainly tackle Generative AI, but beyond that we’ll determine course content—what we read, what we produce—as we go along, according to your concerns and interests. We’ll probably devote the first full class meeting to setting a tentative agenda.

I don’t want this course to add unduly to your studying and teaching responsibilities. I do want it to help you deal with current teaching issues and long-term teaching questions. Think of it as a forum for bringing some order, context, and focus to our already-existing conversations.

LIT 6236

Entrapped Bodies: Illness, Disability, and the Prisonhouse of Language
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses bodies in extreme pain; thus, it examines the experience and language of chronic suffering. Around the world, millions feel entrapped in the face of persistent ill-health, escalating disability, and excruciating pain. Fully a third of US residents live with long-term illness, which disabling experiences frequently entail severe pain. Such chronic suffering degrades all aspects of personal, social, and professional life all-too-often amid crushing isolation, diagnostic uncertainty, and therapeutic inadequacy. Highlighting an intractable dilemma, bodies in pain exemplify the pitfalls of representing experience through language: Inevitably, we understand and express even the most intense and excruciating personal circumstances within the confines of socially constructed language. Paradoxically, however, all our descriptions of intense suffering appear to be unfit for purpose; the meager words we use to signify debilitating pain seem unavoidably inapt, inaccurate, or otherwise inadequate. Thus, these experiences remain largely untold at the same time as vocal sufferers feel unheard—or misunderstood—by interlocutors from ranging from loved ones, caregivers, and friends to medical practitioners to employers, supervisors, and colleagues to various publics. Moreover, women, Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants, the poor, and other disempowered groups endure unacknowledged pain in the wake of dismissive prejudices, most notably, degrading discourses of hypochondria and hysteria. Given this complex—and vexing—background, how do chronic sufferers—and their interlocutors—articulate realities that fundamentally elude, if not, exceed language, logic and meaning? Instructively, the rhetoric of pain routinely turns to imprecise analogies and flawed metaphors, for instance, the arbitrary and opaque numerical scales that define clinical settings, not to mention, images of violence and violation embodied in graphic terms like “stabbing,” “crippling,” “tortuous,” and “unbearable.” Bringing together international writers from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this course integrates multiple lines of inquiry: illness and disability studies; the practice and history of medicine; theories of language and subject formation; theories regarding the construction of experience and meaning; and literary theory and criticism.

LIT 6856

Desperate Domesticity: The American 1950s
Marsha Bryant

LIT 6934

The Second Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

When the discipline of children’s literature was first established in the 1970s and early 1980s ,most scholarly studies and under/graduate courses in this new-found area focused primarily ontexts produced in the Golden Age of children’s literature – that is, the period between 1868 and 1926 that marked an outpouring of creative works for child audiences in North America, Britain, and Europe. In the past half-century since the discipline’s founding, scholars, teachers, and librarians have largely shifted their focus to multicultural, transnational, and otherwise global works of literature for young people produced in the so-called “Third Golden Age” – that is, the last decade of the twentieth-century and the two first decades of the twenty-first.

Significantly, the institution of children’s literature as a legitimate scholarly discipline coincided with what many of its practitioners have termed the “Second Golden Age of Children’s Literature” – that is, that post-war period of children’s literature whose works demonstrate the various possibilities, losses, and dangers faced by young people in an increasingly globalized world. And yet – perhaps ironically, given this coincidence – this rich moment of creative production remains comparatively under-periodized and under-theorized in children’s literature studies.

The primary objective of this class, then, is to study mid-twentieth-century works of children’s literature in their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. In doing so, we will discuss how (or whether) they demonstrate a distinct period of creative production – and for that matter, consider the history and significance of periodization and canonization in literary and cultural inquiry. We will read key texts by authors and/or illustrators such as Beverly Cleary, Virginia Hamilton, Madeline L’Engle, Scott O’Dell, Phillipa Pearce, and Maurice Sendak alongside the scholarly interventions of Kate Capshaw, Marah Gubar, Kenneth Kidd, Valerie Krips, Michelle Martin, Julia Mickenberg, Qiana Whitted, and Sara L. Schwebel. We’ll also delve into the archival holdings of UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature to propose both individual and collective projects that might bring further attention to both this library and the Second Golden Age.

Graduate students from throughout the PhD and MFA programs are welcome to join this course: no previous experience in children’s literature studies is necessary. In fact, this class will be enriched by the perspectives offered by students who work in areas like fiction, poetry, American studies, African-American literature, Latinx literature, gender studies, post-colonial and diaspora studies, Victorian studies, visual rhetoric, archival/museum studies, and digital humanities.

LIT 6934

Toni Morrison
Debra Walker King

Description: This course introduces students to an extraordinary woman whose work, both fictional and critical, has shaken the foundations of American literature (and criticism) to reconstitute both it and the boundaries of its canon. Students will investigate why critics herald Toni Morrison as the “most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature” while also discovering why she is its most renowned. Morrison’s work has earned the highest accolades in contemporary literary circles: The National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomonin 1977, the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Beloved in 1988, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012) (among others). Her novels explore themes of naturalistic fiction while also engaging womanist thought, responsibility and respectability, and the more dramatic themes of modernism: death, love, rebirth, and memory. They are lyrical prose memorials to suffering and loss that move beyond characters’ victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal, and revival.

Focus: Before her death in 2019, Toni Morrison published eleven novels, two plays, a libretto, two short stories, five children’s books and several critical pieces. This semester we will read many of her novels, including what critics call the Beloved Trilogy. Our discussions and considerations focus on several themes: the relationship of Morrison’s work to womanist thought, the sacred to the secular, history and heritage, identity, “race, borders and the desire for belonging.” We will evaluate what critics have to say about Morrison (how they construct and reconstruct the artist and her work) as well as evaluate the author’s own critical perspectives on art and society.