Department of English

Spring 2022 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	M 6-8	The American Renaissance	Stephanie Smith
CRW 6130	M 9-11	Advanced Fiction Workshop	Camille Bordas
CRW 6331	T 9-11	Graduate Poetry Workshop	William Logan
ENG 6075	W 9-11	Feminist Theory	Tace Hedrick
ENG 6075	F 6-8	Blue Ecocriticsm and Environmental Humanities	Sid Dobrin
ENG 6137	T 9-11, SCR R 9-11	Film History 1930-1965	Robert Ray
ENG 6137	W E1-E3, SCR T E1-E3	The Language of Film: The Art of Film Directing	Trevor Mowchun
ENG 6824	M 9-11	Proseminar: Imagetexts and ImageTexT	Anastasia Ulanowicz
LAE 6947	T 6-8	Women’s Writing & Pedagogy	Marsha Bryant
LIT 6236	F 3-5	Digitizing the Archive of Migration and Resistance	Leah Rosenberg
LIT 6357	R 6-8	Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought	Debra King
LIT 6856	W 9-11	Images, Imaginary, Imagination	Pietro Bianchi
LIT 6856	T 3-5	Cultural Studies: Interventions: A Return to the Scene of the Postmodern; or, Why 1984 Wasn’t Like Nineteen Eighty-four	Phillip Wegner
LIT 6934	W 3-5	The Child on Film	John Cech
LIT 6934	W 6-8	Critical Pedagogy	Victor Del Hierro

Course Descriptions

AML 6017

The American Renaissance

Stephanie Smith

The American Renaissance, written by F.O. Matthiessen, shaped the way in which Americans understood their literary heritage throughout the 1950’s and ’60s, until social forces such as the Civil Rights Movement and Second Wave feminism challenged the ideology of American exceptionalism and sought to revisit the literary legacy of the past. This course will chart the rise of an American ‘canon’ so-called, and then re-examine the ongoing alternation of the concept of an American Renaissance, particularly in light of recent activist calls for social justice in the face of newly re-energized narratives and/or forces upholding out-of-date, unscientific and civilly destructive concepts about racial superiority, eugenics and misogyny, promoted by right-wing think tanks like the New Century Foundation, which publishes a website and a magazine called The American Renaissance (see the SPLC https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/american-renaissance).

Primary texts may include: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience; Child’s Romance of the Republic; Melville’s Moby Dick; Douglass’ Narrative and others. As always, given the fact that I am a published fiction writer as well as a scholar, MFA students are encouraged to sign up; a creative option for final seminar papers available.

CRW 6130

Advanced Fiction Workshop

Camille Bordas

This course is open to MFA candidates in fiction 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 their piece has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it’s ripe for achieving, 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.

Workshop might include in-class exercises.

Readings will be assigned on an individual basis.

CRW 6331

Graduate Poetry Workshop

William Logan

ENG 6075

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, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Patricia Williams, and Anna Tsing. All graduate students are welcome, including MFA students.

One response paper (to be shared with the class), a final paper prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper will be required.

ENG 6075

Blue Ecocriticsm and Environmental Humanities

Sid Dobrin

This course will work toward developing a vital theory of oceanic criticism and methodologies that extend work in environmental humanities. This class is designed to explore blue ecocriticism and its relationship with ecocriticism, in general, and the emergence of the environmental humanities. By way of blue ecocriticism, this course will consider the nascent role the “new thalassology,” blue humanities, and/or blue cultural studies play in the evolution of the environmental humanities. Fundamentally, this course will examine blue ecocriticism’s influence on critical approaches to literary studies and writing studies. At minimum, the course will ask, how have we written about the oceans and what are the ramifications of those writings. Readings and discussions will consider a rich range of subjects all bound by the global ocean to the end of invigorating oceanic thinking. Subjects will include, but are not limited to:

• Atlantic/transatlantic & postcolonial studies
• Climate change and ocean rise
• Constructing ocean
• Ecological literacy/digital literacy
• Indigenous approaches to oceanic knowing
• Marine animal studies
• Materialism, new materialism, and feminist new materialism
• Ocean as media
• Ocean and the human/posthuman
• The alien ocean
• The literary ocean

Students will produce two projects for this class, including a multimodal project and a research project.

ENG 6137

Film History 1930-1965

Robert Ray

This seminar comes in two parts.  The first half will examine the consolidation of the Classic Hollywood style, further enabled by the coming of sound.  The result, the Classic Hollywood film, has defined the definition of a commercial movie.  This part will also look at some alternatives to that style, represented by Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir.  The course’s second half will take up film noir and Italian Neorealism, two principal influences on the French New Wave.

Part I movies: M, 42^nd Street, Grand Hotel, Triumph of the Will (excerpts only), A Day in the Country, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Rules of the Game, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.

Part II movies: It’s a Wonderful Life, The Narrow Margin, In a Lonely Place, Open City, Paisà, The Bicycle Thieves, Les Mistons, Breathless, Shoot the Piano Player, Masculine-Feminine, Vertigo.

Written Assignments: two take-home essay exams, both requiring responses to 3-4 questions.

ENG 6137

The Language of Film: The Art of Film Directing

Trevor Mowchun

Film directing is an immensely varied and mysterious artistic practice. Werner Herzog has compared it to cooking; David Lynch to dreaming. But what is it exactly, especially when the director isn’t very much involved in the creative labor of filmmaking (i.e. writing, cinematography, editing, sound recording, etc.)? This course suggests that film directing is largely misunderstood, obscured by stereotypes of the auteur. The hundreds of books, or manuals, on the subject have for the most part reduced the role to a “giant wheel” in the Hollywood production scheme in which the director is merely an authoritative implementer of preconceived formulas and appeaser of audience expectations. Instead, we will approach the question of what film directing might consist of by studying a niche genre of writings specifically by filmmakers on their craft. Such works take the form of film theory, philosophy, autobiography, experimental writing, artistic manifestos, and certain manuals whose rules are specific to a more personal vision of the cinema. These “directing philosophies” show filmmakers reflecting on the nature of the medium of film, elucidating their creative and technical methods, interpreting their own films, and exposing the various sources of inspiration derived from other filmmakers, movements, and artforms ostensibly unrelated to film. We will perform close readings and assessments of exemplars from this unique genre of film writing, such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, Alexander Mackendrick’s On Film-making, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form, and Maya Deren’s An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. Our understanding of the artistic potential and pitfalls of these exploratory, often challenging texts will be developed through the analysis of the very films made by these theory-practitioners. Here we will assess to what extent a theory of directing has been productively implemented through creative means, whether the films expand or contradict the ideas underlying them, and, more generally, if film art is ultimately enriched by the preconceived theories, principles and, as is sometimes the case, the dogmas of filmmakers. In addition to these texts, our discussion will be guided by some fundamental aspects of film directing, such as intentionality, mise en scène, camera aesthetics, montage, acting, pacing, and the poetics of space and time.

Students will write 1-2 short papers on texts of their choosing and undertake extensive preproduction plans to direct a film based on a previously published full-length screenplay, ideally of a film they have never seen before. Prior knowledge of film equipment is not required as the course gives priority to film theory/analysis, artistic methodology, and preproduction practices. A few workshops with the department’s film equipment may be arranged.

ENG 6824

Proseminar: ImageTexts and ImageTexT

Anastasia Ulanowicz

In 2004, UF Professor Donald Ault founded ImageTexT, an MLA-indexed “university-based, peer reviewed journal that focuses on the theory, history, and critical analysis of comics.” In the past two decades, ImageTexT has received international recognition for its publication of scholarly articles that address crucial topics in the emerging field of comics studies. Moreover, it has co-sponsored (with UF’s Graduate Comics Organization) an annual conference that regularly draws panelists not only from North America but also from such countries as Belgium, the U.K. Russia, and Korea. If ImageTexT has succeeded fulfilling Professor Ault’s founding vision of a journal – or in fact, an institution – that fosters the scrupulous academic study of comics, this is in large part because UF graduate students historically have played a major part in its production.

The purpose of this seminar, then, is to provide graduate students with an opportunity both to study the theoretical and critical texts that inform the journal’s scholarly vision and to gain hands-on practice in its production. To this end, the seminar will involve three major components:

• First, participants will read and discuss major works in comics studies and visual rhetoric (e.g., by W.J.T. Mitchell, Thierry Groensteen, Hillary Chute, Qiana Whitted, Aaron Kashtan, and Lara Saguisag). Students will also read the works of UF faculty members who have variously contributed to the academic study of comics and visual rhetoric.
• Second, participants will take part in tutorials offered by ImageTexT’s managing staff and in turn submit materials that contribute to the production of the journal and its annual spring conference. The purpose of this “hands-on” component is to demystify the academic publication process and provide participants with skills in negotiating it.
• Third, seminar meetings will also involve discussion of recent studies of the profession (e.g., Katina L. Rogers’s Putting the Humanities PhD To Work and Leonard Cassuto’s and Robert Weisbuch’s The New PhD) and workshops/presentations on CV development, public writing, pedagogy, and grant/fellowship applications.

No background knowledge of comics/studies is required, and graduate students from throughout the PhD/MFA programs are very welcome.

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
• Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
• Ariel & The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
• Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove
• The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
• Marvelous Things Overheard, Ange Mlinko
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (linked with Professor Ulanowicz’s Image-Text proseminar)

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 3 Beta assignments for undergraduates, generated from keywords that connect our literary texts (domesticity, city, myth); do 2 Perusall annotations; 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 6236

Digitizing the Archive of Migration and Resistance

Leah Rosenberg

The archives play a pivotal role in critiquing the history and legacy of colonialism; their detail and diversity have the potential to complicate and transform long-accepted colonial and national versions of history. Open-access Digital archives are making archival information accessible to a much wider public than traditional archives which necessarily limited access to a relatively small, elite cohort of users. By opening the archives to the public, digital archives have the potential to transform and decolonize our understanding of history and the present.  Yet in digitizing the archives, librarians and archivists risk reproducing the colonial omissions and biases of the traditional archive.  They face, as well, the challenge of including materials relevant to the libraries’ many publics, of publicizing those materials, and of providing materials to make them meaningful.

This seminar will engage the theory and practice of the digital archive as it pertains to migration and resistance in the Caribbean.  We will read contemporary scholarship on the digital archive, migration, and resistance. Students will work with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, an international partnership of over 80 libraries, archives, universities, and other institutions for which the University of Florida serves as technological and digital Scholarship hub. You will have the opportunity to research archival materials in dLOC relevant to your own interests. You will also collaborate with dLOC librarians and its partner organization PanCaribbean Sankofa to develop materials (oral histories, social media, videos) for the public concerning the West Indian migration to Panama and a newsletter on current projects and events at dLOC. In the process, the seminar will be working to decolonize UF’s Panama Canal Museum Collection, a museum and library created by former employees of the Panama Canal and acquired by the UF libraries.(For a discussion of the collection, see “Finding the Silver Voice” Vargas-Betancourt, 2013).  Readings may include:  The Digital Black Atlantic (Risam and Baker Josephs, 2021), Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Remappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Figueroa-Vásquez, 2020); Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Brown 2020); Imperial Intimacies: A tale of Two Islands (Carby, 2019); Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Lasso, 2019); The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lowe, 2015); Silencing the Past (Trouillot, 2001). This seminar will address public humanities, Digital humanities, Postcolonial, African Diaspora, and American studies.

LIT 6357

Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought

Debra King

This course introduces students to an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and activist whose work, both creative and sociopolitical, has shaken the foundations of American literature and feminist theory to reconstitute the boundaries of both. Walker’s work has earned the highest accolades of praise and accomplishment, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983, induction into the California Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame (2001) among others. Her works include seven novels, four children’s books, four collections of short stories, and innumerous essays and collections of poetry.  Notably, one of American literature’s most prolific writes, her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. As a writer and social activist, Walker remains an international figure of increasing fame and respect.  Her novels, poetry, essays and blog (www.alicewalkersgardens.com) explore themes of naturalistic fiction while engaging dramatic (and often problematic) themes of Humanism; Gnostic Psychology (Jungian thought, for instance), Spirituality; Ontology, and, of course, Womanism.

This semester students will investigate why critics herald Alice Walker as the mother of Womanism and determine, through her writing, what Womanism means. The works we will study are powerful offerings of intellectual engagement that move beyond human victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal and revival.  But most importantly, each selected text demonstrates not only what Womanism is, or can do, but also how one (regardless of color or nationality) can achieve the Womanist gift of vital, human connectedness that provides access to individual and communal wholeness.  I welcome you to journey with me into the world of Alice Walker’s Womanist thought and discover how, as an elder, she pursues the survival whole of all humanity while professing, “Everything is a Human Being” (essay in Living by the Word).

LIT 6856

Images, Imaginary, Imagination

Pietro Bianchi

 According to Plato images were meant to confuse ideas not to clarify them: a belief from which a long history of suspicion toward images in Western thought derived. Still, as it is evident even in the realm of sciences, our intelligible ideas have to go through our sensible experience, and most of the time abstract concepts make their way first through their visual approximation or exemplification. Despite a long attempt to get rid of the alleged confusive nature of images, modern thought has always been haunted by the presence of something that is at same time deceiving and revealing, misleading and captivating, elusive and erotic.

The main question that will be addressed during the semester is: what is an image? What do we do when we work with images? And which kind of knowledge do we use when we “know visually”? What makes an image different than a being or a substance? And above all, the most complex question of them all: what does it mean “to appear”?

After three weeks of brief historical overview of different significant theories of the image in the history of philosophy (the problem of the image as a copy in Plato; Christianity and the debate surrounding the Second Council of Nicaea where the use and veneration of icons was restored in the Christian doctrine; Hegel and the concept of appearance) we will focus on the 20^th Century and on the contemporary debate in visual studies through Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Freud’s concept of fantasy and Lacan’s concept of the gaze, Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Hito Steyerl, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Laura Mulvey and Alenka Zupančič.

Readings will be limited to 50-70 pages per week but they will always be accompanied by a film that will be considered integral part of the assignment and will be discussed in class: among them we will see Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Rublev, David Lynch INLAND EMPIRE, Alfred Hitchcock Read Window, Jean-Luc Godard Histoire(s) du cinéma, Claude Lanzmann Shoah (excerpts), László Nemes Son of Saul, Carl Theodor Dreyer Ordet, Chris Marker The Last Bolshevik, Krzysztof Kieślowski Dekalog (excerpts), Ingmar Bergman Face to Face.

This seminar will be a combination of visual studies, philosophy, art history and film studies and should be useful both to students interested in visual culture and cinema as well as to those interested in cultural studies and critical theory. Students will be responsible for leading a class discussion once throughout the semester, posting weekly short response papers on Canvas, and writing a final paper of 15-20 pages which could serve as an article draft.

LIT 6856

Cultural Studies: Interventions: A Return to the Scene of the Postmodern; or, Why 1984 Wasn’t Like Nineteen Eighty-four

Phillip Wegner

The title for this seminar is taken from both Michael North’s important study Reading

1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999) and the pathbreaking 1984 Apple

Macintosh Superbowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott. Following the example North and others, this seminar will focus on diverse cultural productions—fiction, film, art, theory, and popular culture—that share one feature: they all first appear in the annus mirabilis, the year of miracles, that was 1984. And as the final title card in the Macintosh commercial maintains, the works we will study show that the realities of 1984 and what followed were to be very different than what George Orwell only thirty-five years earlier could have imagined.  The year 1984 saw not only the publication of such key theoretical statements as Fredric Jameson’s essay, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” the special Social Text double issue, “The 60s Without Apology,” the English translation of Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, and the posthumous publication of the second and third volumes of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité, but also an extraordinary range of novels and films by established figures and the debut works of others who would become vitally important in the years to follow. In addition to the works listed above, we will be engaging with many of the following:   Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, the Coen brother’s Blood Simple, James Cameron’s The Terminator, Brian de Palma’s Body Double, John Sayles’ Brother from Another Planet, John Alvidsen’s The Karate Kid, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and David Lodge’s Small World. I directed an earlier version of this seminar in the spring of 2016 that involved both doctoral and MFA students and I am currently completing a monograph on the topic. Requirements include two group seminar presentations, and two shorter seminar papers or one longer final essay. Non-traditional seminar projects (keep in mind that all forms of writing, all projects are creative) are also an option.

LIT 6934

The Child on Film

John Cech

The purpose of this course is to explore and, in a sense, to map,  depictions of the child as the subject of visual texts.  We will begin with early photography, such as the works of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Jacques Henri Lartigue, and  Lewis Hine.   We will screen a number of silent movies in which children play important roles.  The course will devote considerable time to the emergence of the child as an important film and photographic archetype during the 1930s — from the movies of Shirley Temple to the WPA photographs of Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt,  as well as to the contemporary photographs of such artists as  Sally Mann, Sheron Rupp, Wendy Ewald, Maggie Taylor, and others.

The second half of the course will consider the portraits of children in the works of filmmakers like Truffaut,  Fellini, Spielberg, and Babenco; the documentaries of Apted, Briski, and Burstein; the autobiographical and experimental films of Davies,  Madden, and Gondry. Among the questions that we will be asking during the course are why has the child been such an enduring and powerful subject for visual artists, from the first images of children that began to appear among the first images on film, to the mega-star children of the movies today.

LIT 6934

Critical Pedagogy

Victor Del Hierro

This course will be a broad survey of Critical Pedagogy within English studies. The course will examine classic and current theory in critical pedagogy drawing on scholars of higher education as well as K-12. Throughout the semester, students will produce ideas and deliverables related to all facets of teaching including understanding and implementing theories of critical pedagogy to assignments, lesson plans, course development, and classroom management. Over the course of the semester, students will learn about the various types of teaching that happens under the English studies umbrella including literature, composition, rhetoric, English education, creative writing, and digital humanities. Other related social science and humanities fields will also contribute to the classes understanding of critical pedagogy including but not limited to Education, History, Queer studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies. Students in the course will spend time designing a course of their choosing while learning about and experimenting with different pedagogical approaches.