Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations. Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| IDS 2935 | T 4, R4-5 | 1950s Domesticity and UF Life | Bryant |
| IDS 2935 | M W F 3 | Consumer Society | Hegeman |
| IDS 2935 | T 6, R 6-7 | Placing Florida | Kidd |
Course Descriptions
IDS 2935
1950s Domesticity and UF Life
Marsha Bryant
Essential Question: How would your life change if you lived during the American 1950s, and how would that shape your UF experience?
Our interdisciplinary course will explore this question through a lively sampling from literary and popular culture, along with archival material of UF student life in the 1950s. The course draws perspectives from the fields of cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, history, and literary studies. We will consider key cultural dynamics through which domesticity shaped American life, including consumerism, gender roles, the nuclear family, the rise of suburbia, the Civil Rights movement, and the Cold War. Our writers will include John Cheever, Sloan Wilson, Flannery O’Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. We’ll look at 1950s print advertising, classic family sitcoms (Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver), and the iconic teen rebellion film Rebel Without a Cause. In the University Archives we’ll explore student magazines, yearbooks, and other materials to get a sense of how your UF predecessors experienced our campus in the 1950s. Our course fits the Quest theme Identities by exploring how new understandings of domesticity shaped individual, household, and national identities in postwar America.
Assignments: short Ad Analysis, medium-length Reflection paper, digital participation, archive Worksheets, group Presentation on University Archive material, a Faux Fifties ad pitched to a college student
Quest & General Education Credits
• Quest 1
• Humanities
• Writing Requirement (WR) 2000 words
This course accomplishes the Quest and General Education objectives of the subject areas listed above. A minimum grade of C is required for Quest and General Education credit. Courses intended to satisfy Quest and General Education requirements cannot be taken S-U.
IDS 2935
Consumer Society
Susan Hegeman
The United States is the largest consumer market in the world. Americans have come to expect access to a wide range of goods and services on demand, and we often define our social status, identities, values, and personal well-being in terms of our ability to buy things and the consumer choices that we make. But this state of affairs has a relatively recent history, and consumer habits, identities, and beliefs have often come into conflict with other value systems and social attitudes.
This interdisciplinary Quest 1 course will use the methodologies of film and literary studies, media studies, and history to address the essential question: what does it mean to live in a consumer society? We will explore this question through reading and discussing novels, short stories, poetry, essays, film, and works of academic and popular history. We will learn about what a consumer society is, and how it emerged in the early 20th century United States. We will examine some of its key features, including advertising across media from newspapers to the internet, the development and spread of consumer debt, consumer politics, the problems of junk and waste, and criticisms of consumerism from ethical, spiritual, political, and environmentalist perspectives.
IDS 2935
Placing Florida
Kenneth Kidd
What is place, and how does the idea of place help us understand and write about ourselves and the lives of others? In this course we’ll explore this question by focusing on the place called Florida, and thinking about how our ideas about Florida inform our understanding of ourselves as individuals and members of a geographical and human community. Floridians have diverse origins and histories and are a representational subset of the US population, and we will consider how the factors such as geography, region, and economic status affect the opportunities for and constraints on Floridians. To what extent are we the products of place, and to what extent do we place ourselves, as it were, both in Florida more broadly and with respect to particular areas?
Florida is at once part of the U.S. South (originally a slave state) and part of the Caribbean, with South Florida especially having close ties to Cuba, other Caribbean nations, and Central and South America. Florida is often considered a land of enchantment and opportunity but it also has a complicated history of settler colonialism, frontier violence, land speculation, racial segregation, and ongoing migration. Across the state’s geographical and cultural diversity it remains as much a state of mind or fantasies as a physical place, fashioned first as a semi-exotic frontier and then as a semi-exotic destination for leisure and tourism. And, of course, locations in Florida differ vastly, from the Panhandle to north Florida to the Space Coast to Orlando to Key West. There are many and diverse Floridas, even as those many/mini Floridas have a family resemblance. The geographical complexity of Florida goes hand in hand with the state’s human diversity.
We’ll draw on multidisciplinary writing about Florida, including literary genres. Florida claims not only the nation’s oldest city (St. Augustine) but also the nation’s oldest literary tradition. We’ll explore how authors, especially authors for children and teenagers, write Florida – and how we do, too, whether we are native Floridians or transplants. As part of the course’s commitment to experiential learning and multidisciplinary commitment we will visit and write about a Florida-themed art collection on the UF campus, and for another assignment you will have the option of visiting and writing about a Florida historical place of your choice.
Books
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (1938)
- Betsy Carter, Swim to Me (2007)
- Enrique Flores-Galbis, 90 Miles to Havana (2010)
- Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon, Zora and Me (2011)
- Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State: Essays (2017)
- Tyler Gillespie, Florida Man: Poems (2018)
- Carl Hiaasen, Squeeze Me (2018)
Films
- Hoot (Shriner, 2006, run time 91 minutes)
- Pahokee (Bresnan and Lucas, 2019, run time 102 minutes)
Assignments include several reflection essays as well as analyses of texts as appropriate. Writing assignments constitute most of the course grade.