Undergraduate Courses - Department of English

Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2026

Upper-Division (3000-4000)

Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below. Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the University Registrar for an explanation of the class period abbreviations. Visit the English Courses page to view undergraduate courses offered in previous semesters.

Course #	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3284	26391	M W F 3	Online	Science Fiction and Fantasy Women Writers: 1960s-1980s	Smith
AML 3285	23038	M W F 4	MAT 0117	Queer Latinx Cultures	Conners
AML 3605	26396	M W F 2	MAT 0114	African American Literature 1	Saunders
AML 4170	26411	M W F 6	WEIL 0279	Black Horror, White Terror	Mollenthiel
AML 4170	23838	M W F 8	MAT 0113	Race and Gender in 20th and 21st Century Paranormal Romance	Hedrick
AML 4242	26368	M W F 2	MAT 0113	Post-Civil Rights Law and Literature	Conners
AML 4311	21025	M W F 9	TUR 2333	The World of James Baldwin Through Critical Intersectional Inquiry	Reid
AML 4311	10214	M W F 6	Online	Ursula K. Le Guin	Smith
AML 4453	21499	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2353	The Pen and the Penitentiary: US Prison Literature	Schorb
AML 4685	26381	M W F 9	MAT 0113	Latinx Feminist Fiction	Hedrick
CRW 3110	26253	W 9-11	WEIM 2050	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	TBA
CRW 3110	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0009	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 3310	DEP-X	R 9-11	MAT 0002	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing	Sokol
CRW 4211	23025	W 6-8	TUR 2305	Creative Nonfiction	Leavitt
CRW 4905	DEP-X	R 9-11	TUR 1105	Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop	Akpan
CRW 4906	DEP-X	M 7-9	MAT 0005	Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop	Hofmann
ENC 3250	26375	Online	Asynchronous	Professional Communications	Gonzales
ENG 3010	23036	M W F 8	ROL 0115	20th-Century Rhetorical Theory	Sánchez
ENG 3011	24023	M W F 5	MAT 0115	Black Diasporan Thought	Saunders
ENG 3125	26234	M W F 3 / M E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	History of Film 3	Bianchi
ENG 4015	26895	M W F 5	MAT 0118	Psychoanalysis and Sexuality	Bianchi
ENG 4015	11624	M W F 7	MAT 0002	Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature	Rudnytsky
ENG 4133	21078	T 5-6 / R 6 / W E1-E3	TUR 2334	AI and Film Criticism	Burt
ENG 4134	26113	M 8-9 / W 9 / R 9-11	TUR 2322 / ROL 0115	Women in French Cinema	Blum
ENG 4135	26111	M W F 7 / W 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Brazilian Cinema	Ginway
ENG 4310	26117	T 7 / R 7-8 / R E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	European Road Movie	Raynard
ENG 4310	26235	T 4 / R 4-5 / T 9-11	TUR 2334	Cavell, Screwball Comedy, Melodrama	Burt
ENG 4310	26236	M W F 8 / T E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	The Unflinching Torch of Cinematic Surrealism: From Luis Buñuel to David Lynch	Mowchun
ENG 4911	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Undergraduate Research	TBD
ENG 4936	DEP-X	T 5-6 / R 6	NRN 1001 / MAT 0007	Honors Seminar: Childhood, Memory, and Children’s Literature	Ulanowicz
ENG 4936	DEP-X	T 6-8	MAT 0012	Honors Seminar: Reading Visual Narratives of American Identity	Galvan
ENG 4940	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	English Internship	Maioli
ENG 4953	26990	M W F 4	ARCH 0213	Literatures of Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism	Schueller
ENG 4970	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Honors Thesis	TBD
ENL 3251	26377	T 4 / R 4-5	TUR 2303	Victorians’ Secrets	Grass
ENL 4221	23032	M W F 8	MAT 0002	Milton: Poetry and Prose	Rudnytsky
LIT 3003	21500	T 4-5 / R 5	TUR 2346 / MAT 0105	Representations of War in Literature and Visual Media	Kligerman
LIT 3031	26395	T 9-11	MAT 0013	Reading and Writing Poetry Criticism	Logan
LIT 3374	26392	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0113	Bible as Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 3383	26986	M W F 7	WEIL 0235 / ROL 0115 / WEIL 0238	Black Women: Transatlantic Literature	Mollenthiel
LIT 3383	26360	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR 2353	Women Writers and the Early Literary Marketplace	Schorb
LIT 3400	27304	M 9-11	AND 0032	AI Before AI	Leavitt
LIT 3400	26387	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0117	The Problem of Freedom: History and Literature of the Caribbean after Emancipation	Rosenberg
LIT 3400	26366	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0003	Animal Stories: The Representation of Other Species in Western Culture	Maioli
LIT 3400	23013	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0117	Hip Hop and Young Adult Literature on the Gulf Coast	Del Hierro
LIT 4188	26386	T 6-8	Online	Nation and Narration	Amoko
LIT 4192	26388	T 10 / R 10-11	MAT 0113	Introduction to Caribbean Literature	Rosenberg
LIT 4194	19851	R 6-8	Online	African Literature and Colonial Anthropology	Amoko
LIT 4333	26385	M W F 7	Online	Literature for the Adolescent	Kidd
LIT 4483	26252	M W F 6	ROL 0115	Rhetoric and Culture	Sánchez
LIT 4930	20008	T 10 / R 10-11	TUR 2322	Vampire Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	20009	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0113	Jewish-American Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	22851	T 7 / R 7-8	WEIM 1070 / FAC 0127	Kafka and the Kafkaesque	Kligerman
LIT 4930	26389	T 7 / R 7-8	FAC 0127 / LIT 0205	#Holocaust: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Film and Literature	Holler

Course Descriptions

AML 3284

Science Fiction and Fantasy Women Writers: 1960s-1980s
Stephanie Smith

During what is now called the Second Wave of feminism in the United States, women began to write and publish in a genre that had heretofore been primarily the domain of men: science fiction and fantasy, and even if fantasy was often seen as open to women, the majority of the writers in the field remained male, like C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. But, as Margaret Atwood has noted, in the 1960s women started entering both genres in numbers or, as she said, “it was as if someone had taken the cork out of the bottle.” In this class we will revisit this cohort of new American women writers in order to think about how their voices reshaped the terrain of the SFF story. Authors will include writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, James Tiptree Jr. and Madeline L’Engle.

AML 3285

Queer Latinx Cultures
Thomas Conners

This course asks two major questions: first, how has our understanding of Latinx been shaped by Latin American and North American ideas about racial identity, gender roles, and sexual norms? And second, how have queer Latinx writers, scholars, musicians, and filmmakers responded to these roles and norms by daring to imagine beyond the constraints of racialized cis-heteromasculinity? We will engage historical, archival, and legal documents to explore the first question, and theoretical, literary, and filmic texts from Latinx and queer studies to respond to the second. In this way, “queer Latinx” describes both our objects of study (norms and their deviations, queer stories and films), and also the work we will do with and to latinidad, queering its historical and canonical understandings. This course encompasses Central American, Chicanx, Cuban, DominiYork, Nuyorican, and South American histories and collectives to do so.

AML 3605

African American Literature 1
Catherine Saunders

This course examines African American writing from Lucy Terry’s poem “Barsfight” to Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. Together we will examine the continuity of Black writing over two centuries to consider its contribution to both the cultural specificity of the Black experience and the nation at large. This course will feature short stories, speeches, poems, and novels by a plethora of authors including, but not limited to: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Wallace Thurman, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Jesse Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston.

AML 4170

Black Horror, White Terror
Julia Mollenthiel

This African American Studies course is an examination of literary and artistic horror by Black artists. We will probe the genre of horror and its trends with a particular focus on representations of Otherness. We will consider the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions. We will also consider literary and cinematic representations of horror in the works of Gothic writers and early American film producers. Some underlying questions that will drive our discussion of these texts are: How has the history of American cinema and Gothic literature contributed to the construction of racial identity, the drawing of ethnic boundaries, and affected racialized discourses? How have Black artists developed their own unique horror tradition in response to this history? Moreover, how have Black artists used the horror aesthetic to represent the Black experience in the United States, and what does horror as a literary/cinematic mode afford Black artists?

AML 4170

Race and Gender in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Romance
Tace Hedrick

The study of popular genres within women’s writing has been something of a minor but consistent theme in feminist theory. We will be reading and discussing how both white women and women writers of color and of differing sexualities and classes attempt to operate within, while also having to change, an emotional and deeply rooted investment in the conventions, that is the different but necessary parts, both of the genre of the paranormal and the genre of the white middle-class romance. Here, we will discuss women’s popular writing in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century via the paranormal romance, the gothic, and gothic romance, as it is imagined not just by white women writers but women writers of color as well as of differing classes and sexualities. Our understandings of the constraints of genre fiction—through our readings in theory and criticism–in particular, will help inform us where questions about feminism, race, class, and sexualities might be brought to bear in this particular area of popular writing. Attendance, three essay exams and reading quizzes will constitute your grades.

AML 4242

Post-Civil Rights Law and Literature
Thomas Conners

This course offers a close examination of how US laws and multi-ethnic US literatures respond to and represent problems of racial inequality, gender disparity, and homophobia. Students will analyze Latinx, Native American, Asian American, and African American novels and short stories alongside state and federal laws to weigh literary and legal discourses against each other. We will study legal cases relating to education law, immigration law, marriage law, and civil rights protections, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Loving v. Virginia, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges. Literary texts will likely include works by Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, Carmen María Machado, and others—authors writing in the wake of Civil Rights legislation, yet still grappling with persistent inequalities. We will therefore pay careful attention to how their literary works engage concepts like post-racialism, colorblindness, homonormativity, and dystopia. Extensive knowledge of US law is not required: even as we focus primarily on US Supreme Court decisions and legislative acts from the 1950s onward, we will also discuss legal protocols and precedents established by the Declaration of Independence, Plessy v. Furguson, the 14^th Amendment, and more.

AML 4311

The World of James Baldwin Through Critical Intersectional Inquiry
Mark 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 continental and American theories in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from continental scholars such as Jean Baudriard, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, and American theorists such 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 post-racial fantasies and the machinations of neo-liberal 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 sociopolitical 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 (B)lack and (G)ay, 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. Students will also consider how critical 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 rejuvenation of moral, ethical, and Christian awareness as an endgame.

AML 4311

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stephanie Smith

Hailed as a ‘living legend’ during her lifetime, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin passed away at the age of 88 in January 2018. Now recognized as one of the greatest authors of the late-twentieth century, Le Guin created new and alien worlds that yet always speak to deeply important issues in our own lives, and to what it means to be human. By turns witty and wild, mischievous, and always dangerous, Le Guin’s consummate ability to both entertain and make the reader think is a rare and radiant combination that this class will explore by examining her multi-faceted career as a novelist, poet, critic, essayist, and children’s book author.

AML 4453

The Pen and the Penitentiary: US Prison Literature
Jodi Schorb

Beginning in the 1780s, American prison reformers participated in a transatlantic debate about the value and promise of reformative incarceration. These debates and reforms birthed the modern prison and its long historical, cultural, and literary legacy.

This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of US prison literature, from the penitentiary movement to today. Readings are drawn from three areas: primary and secondary sources on the birth of the penitentiary and subsequent prison history, select readings from the interdisciplinary field of prison studies, and, above all, fiction, poetry, life-writing, and other imaginative literature of the prison, with emphasis on contributions by incarcerated writers and artists.

Students who complete this course will gain substantial understanding of how the first “modern” US prisons were developed and debated by early prison reformers: by whom, for whom, and for what purposes. Students will be able to identify common tropes in American prison writing and distinguish between different theories of carceral consciousness. Students will gain command over the literary history of the prison, especially literary movements and eras when the prison loomed large in public consciousness, from the American Romantic movement in the nineteenth century, through the Progressive and Civil Rights eras in the twentieth century, to the post-1980s turn to mass incarceration and detention. Students will hone their own thinking and their own original arguments about prison literature through close reading, in-class discussion and debate, reflective writing, and sustained literary analysis papers.

Primary texts likely to include fiction, poetry, memoir by Edgar Allan Poe, Austin Reed, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, Agnes Smedley, Malcolm X, Etheridge Knight, Assata Shakur, Kathy Boudin, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Hogan, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Catherine LaFleur, Mariame Kaba, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and more.

Assignments include biweekly homeworks or short reflective writing assignments, two literary analysis essays of 6-8 pages, presenting at a student-led, in-class panel discussion, and conducting archival research in digital prison collections.

This class welcomes students from a variety of majors, minors, fields, and disciplines. (Please note that the course will not focus on true crime or detection fiction.)

AML 4685

Latinx Feminist Fiction
Tace Hedrick

Since the 1970s, there has been an explosion of United States Latina/Chicana feminist literature and feminist non-fiction in order to explore feminist visions that address their own histories, geographies, particular stances, and situated knowledges. We will be reading novels, non-fiction, and poems that show the ways US Latina/Chicana feminist vision critiques and resists white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and envisions better worlds. Attendance, reading quizzes and three take-home exams constitute your grades.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
TBA

TBA

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Uwem Akpan

This is a rigorous fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to make your writing better. It is important that we build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. So, come ready to learn from each other. During 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 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Jacob Sokol

TBA

CRW 4211

Creative Nonfiction
David Leavitt

What makes creative nonfiction creative?

The goal of this course is to clarify, through practice and reading, the parameters of creative—as opposed, one presumes, to non-creative—nonfiction. Most works designated as creative nonfiction are memoirs. Yet whatever it is that distinguishes the creative in creative nonfiction can also be found in travel writing (Bruce Chatwin, Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris), essays on literature (Janet Malcolm, Cynthia Ozick, Joy Williams), reportage (James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, George W. S. Trow), biography (Geoff Dyer, Janet Malcolm), food writing (MFK Fisher) and even book reviewing (Michael Hofmann, Patricia Lockwood, Lorrie Moore). The goal of the course is to provide students with a broader sense of the genre’s range as well as a clearer idea of how to move forward in their own creative work.

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop
Uwem Akpan

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop
Michael Hofmann

This is the senior undergraduate poetry workshop at U.F.

Serious (and good-humored) students will write poems both to prompts and without benefit of prompts. Inspiration and an example will be provided by Charles Simic (New and Selected Poems) and Jo Shapcott (Her Book), with others perhaps to follow.

ENC 3250

Professional Communications
Laura Gonzales

This asynchronous online course will help students understand and practice the rhetorical strategies, genres, locations, media, and contexts in which contemporary professional writing happens. Students will conduct research and compose texts that are cohesive, well-designed, and informative while also honoring responsibilities to various audiences. Students will have an opportunity to engage with contemporary topics in social media strategy, information design, and content strategy. Students will leave the course with a digital portfolio that showcases their skills and strengths as professional communicators. Each week, students will watch a video lecture and complete one writing assignment on their own schedule. Weekly office hours with the professor will be available.

Note: If the registration system prevents you from registering for this course because you do not meet the prerequisites stated in the undergraduate catalog, please contact Dr. John Murchek, the English Department’s undergraduate advisor, after you have tried to add the course to your schedule on ONE.UF to request that he add you to the course. He cannot add you to the course until after you have tried to make use of your registration appointment time. The English Department does not want to circumvent the schedule of registration appointment times assigned to undergraduates by the Registrar’s Office. Dr. Murchek can be reached at murchek@ufl.edu.

ENG 3010

20th-Century Rhetorical Theory
Raúl Sánchez

This course addresses the wide span of rhetorical theory produced in what we might call “the long 20th century” (1895-ish to 2005-ish), when established forms and conditions of rhetorical practice changed, often drastically, and scholars in the field of Rhetoric worked to make sense of it.

This period saw the rise of mass media such as broadcast radio, broadcast television, film, and comics, as well as the continued growth and influence of legacy media such as newspapers and magazines. It also produced such transformations as a world war, a world-wide economic depression, a second world war, a cold war (lasting five decades), the decolonization of formerly European territories, the Civil Rights movement, the rise of feminism, the emergence of LGBTQ rights, and so on.

In short, there was a lot of new rhetorical activity for the field of Rhetoric to track. We’ll examine some of this work, and we’ll assess how well the field acquitted itself in the task.

ENG 3011

Black Diasporan Thought
Catherine Saunders

Critical thought maintains its global significance for its ability to articulate the unspoken and to analyze the cultural and social architectures that comprise the human experience. This course examines theory as it appears in prose, speeches, novels, music, short stories, and films by Black authors and artists throughout the diaspora. Our course will engage a wide palette of authors and artists such as: W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Wynter, Edouard Glissant, Kamau Braithwaite, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adiche, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o to examine how Black critical theory contemplates the shared experience of Black identity across the diaspora.

ENG 3125

History of Film 3
Pietro Bianchi

By the beginning of the 1960s, cinema entered a phase of radical self-reflection. After more than half a century of institutional and formal consolidation, filmmakers across different national contexts began to question the transparency of classical narration, the stability of cinematic language, and the spectator’s position in relation to the image. The crisis of action, the emergence of new temporalities, the disjunction of sound and vision, and the foregrounding of the materiality of the filmic medium mark what film theory has defined as the passage from the classical to the modern — a transformation in which cinema becomes conscious of its own conditions of possibility.

In this course we will study the history of film from the beginning of the 1960s until the end of the 1970s, two decades in which almost everything changed in the world of motion pictures. The course will be divided into three sections: we will start with films by Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, and Luchino Visconti; we will then move to the New Waves of France (Jean-Luc Godard), Germany (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Czechoslovakia (Miloš Forman), Poland (Krzysztof Kieślowski), Japan (Nagisa Ōshima), Turkey (Yılmaz Güney), and Iran (Abbas Kiarostami); and at the end of the semester we will focus on the New Hollywood of the 1970s, a decade of tremendous artistic innovation that ended in 1977 with the release of Star Wars, the first contemporary commercial blockbuster.

The class has a weekly mandatory screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussion, with a strong emphasis on active participation. Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 5-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4015

Psychoanalysis and Sexuality
Pietro Bianchi

Since the early twentieth century, psychoanalysis has radically transformed the way we understand sexuality. No longer reducible to reproduction or biological instinct, sexuality designates a complex field of drives, fantasies, and desires that traverse the entire human experience. For Freud and the Freudo-Lacanian tradition, sexuality is not a natural fact but a structural dimension of subjectivity: it emerges at the intersection of the body, language, and the unconscious, and is marked by conflict, displacement, and the impossibility of full satisfaction. In this perspective, sex is less an identity than a problem — a question that concerns the formation of the subject, the relation to others, and the organization of pleasure and enjoyment.

This course offers an introduction to the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality and to some of its major cultural and cinematic elaborations. Through readings from Freud, Lacan, and later psychoanalytic thinkers, we will explore concepts such as the drive, the unconscious, infantile sexuality, fantasy, the Oedipus complex, castration, object relations, desire, and jouissance. These theoretical frameworks will be put into dialogue with a selection of films that stage the dynamics of desire, identification, repression, and enjoyment (including works by Hitchcock, Lynch, Buñuel, Powell, Kieślowski, Cronenberg and others), allowing us to examine how cinema gives form to unconscious processes and to the conflicts that structure sexual life.

Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, a 5-minute in-class presentation, two quizzes and an in-class final paper.

ENG 4015

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature
Peter Rudnytsky

This foundational course has three aims: to introduce students to major schools of psychoanalytic thought, to use these theories to read classic literary works, and to see how literature can deepen our understanding of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic readings will be drawn primarily from Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Kohut, and Bowlby, while the literary texts are Oedipus Rex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Course requirements are a midterm, final, one five-page paper, and weekly journal entries. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected.

ENG 4133

AI and Film Criticism
Richard Burt

To be clear, this course is not about learning how to become an influencer; nor is it about how to make movies generated by AI. This course expands the meaning of film to include music videos, recaps, trailers, and teasers. All reward close reading. It creatively expands film criticism to include film essays, audiocommentaries, and documentaries on the making of films. We will learn how a computer screen can become comparable to an editing table using free software like quicktime. We will also reflect on the use of image captures in shot-by-shot analyses of canonical film sequences and on how editing celluloid to be projected at 24 frames a second differs from editing digital films with much higher frame rates. When do you cut? What is the relation between frame, shot, and sequence? We will think about what AI can and cannot do in film production.

ENG 4134

Women in French Cinema
Sylvie Blum

The class is tailored to the topic of women in French cinema from the silent era to the 1990s. It will develop such aspects as French women directors, scriptwriters, actors and producers. Among the topics of interest: fashion, style, mannequins, textiles, theater, performance and writing. One third of class this term will focus on Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a performer, scriptwriter, writer, and cultural critic.

The course is taught in English; there is a set screening time for class every week outside class time. The class is designed for third + fourth year students who are already versed in exploring and analyzing literary and cultural texts. It might be an introduction to film for some who never took a film class.

ENG 4135

Brazilian Cinema
M. Elizabeth Ginway

Brazilian cinema first made its mark on the international film scene in the 1950s, earning some 40 Cannes Film Festival nominations over the following decades. Emerging out of the Third Cinema movement of the 1960s, the Brazilian film industry continues to garner success with recent wins and nominations at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes with films such as Bacurau, I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent.

This course begins with Brazil’s popular genre cinema and the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s, as we study films from each decade central to the country’s cinematic history, particular esthetics and success. Combining entertainment with politics, contemporary Brazilian cinema remains engaged with social issues, producing evocative films that alternate between compelling realist tales and those infused with elements of horror, science fiction, neo-noir and the western.

Films will be analyzed based on Brazilian film criticism and the context of Brazil’s socio-political conditions. Graded assignments include reaction posts on Canvas, class attendance and film screenings, four short papers based on film criticism and a short class presentation. (4 credits)

ENG 4310

European Road Movie
Holly Raynard

Like its American predecessor, the European road film has typically served as a powerful vehicle for cultural criticism, personal introspection and transformation. Yet the European map—replete with national borders, linguistic differences and imposing barriers like the Berlin Wall—hardly evokes the “open road” of America’s mythical frontier, where a traveler can venture some 3000 miles without a foreign phrasebook, passport, travel visa or police authorization. Social inequality, migration, and border security have further complicated the notion of European mobility even as globalizing forces seem to promise increased cross-cultural traffic. In sum, European travel narratives offer a new perspective on the journey as such and the cultural issues engaged by travelers. This course will explore Europe’s dynamic cultural terrain from the 1950s to the present as it maps the essential coordinates of European travel and the road movie genre.

ENG 4310

Cavell, Screwball Comedy, Melodrama
Richard Burt

In this course we will read selected chapters from two books on classic Hollywood cinema by the philosopher Stanley Cavell: Pursuits of happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) and Contesting Tears: the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996).

We will watch most of the films Cavell discusses in these two books and a few he does not discuss. These films include three thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock that could be considered comedies of pre-marriage: The 39 steps; Rebecca; and North by Northwest. And we will watch a classic Hollywood film noir that overlaps with melodrama, namely, Mildred Pierce.

ENG 4310

The Unflinching Torch of Cinematic Surrealism: From Luis Buñeal to David Lynch
Trevor Mowchun

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and David Lynch (1946-2025) are two of cinema’s renegade surrealists whose work is as distinct from each other as surrealism is from realism. Of course, there are many other (though not as many as we would like!) surrealists throughout film history, but what this course draws attention to, and what it seeks in its own way to experiment with, is the uncanny historical succession (what I call the passing of the surrealist torch) between these two audacious and confrontational filmmakers: Buñuel begins relatively early in the history of film with the explosive short Un Chien Andalou (1929, in collaboration with Salvador Dali), a film made during the heyday of modernist experimentation enjoyed by all the arts during this period; and after many dramatic evolutions in his career, Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), appears the very same year that his successor, David Lynch, elevates his eccentric and experimental foray into the art of film with his first feature Eraserhead (also 1977). This is not a historical coincidence so much as surrealist persistence operating on a psycho-historical level. Given the sheer breadth of Buñuel’s filmography and the sense of Lynch inheriting, while also rediscovering, the former’s spirit of cinematic surrealism on his own terms, this course pursues the possibility that a remarkably substantial chronological picture of film history (given the relative brevity of this history compared to, say, literature or theater) can be told through the vision of surrealism, specifically a split-vision between the distinct yet resonant worlds of its two most committed practitioners in Buñuel and Lynch. With the recent passing of Lynch, the following questions might lurk in the back of our minds: who bears the torch of cinematic surrealism in the 21^st century, what hidden or repressed aspects of contemporary human life need accounting for, and how are these aspects of ourselves to be boldly if not shockingly revealed on film?

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research
TBD

An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in two different situations.

On the one hand, you can register for undergraduate research as a free-standing project, in which a member of the English Department faculty agrees to oversee your research on a topic of interest to you and related to the faculty member’s areas of expertise. A student will approach a faculty member with a research topic or question they want to explore, and, in conversation with the faculty member, refine that topic or question, develop a research plan and schedule, and determine the kind of work that will be submitted in the course of the semester. This kind of project differs from independent study primarily by being less predetermined than an individualized course. It will be more open-ended because pursuing research can always lead you to materials you don’t anticipate at the beginning of the project.

On the other hand, faculty members now regularly require that students who want to write scholarly, critical, or theoretical honors theses under their direction register for the undergraduate research course in the semester prior to the one in which they will be registered for the honors thesis course. An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in this situation because it allows students attempting to graduate magna or summa cum laude to do the preliminary reading, research and drafting of materials necessary to complete an honors thesis of 30-50 pages in the semester for which they are registered for the honors thesis course. Because most UF English majors will not have had the experience of writing a 30-50 page essay in their previous English Department coursework, they will need to confront novel research, argumentative, organizational, and rhetorical problems when they write honors theses. When one acknowledges the facts that most students take a week or two at the beginning of a semester to settle into their schedules, and that the readers of honors theses will want to see completed drafts of these projects no later than week 11 or 12 of the thesis-writing semester, it becomes clear that there is relatively little time in that semester to do all the work necessary to complete an honors thesis The undergraduate research registration gives students time to develop their honors theses patiently, methodically, and deliberately, rather than in a desperate rush.

As with the independent study course, most English Department faculty do not agree to direct undergraduate research projects unless they know the students requesting the guidance from previous coursework for the major.

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/). Follow these instructions:

Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing your undergraduate research project, provide a description of the work you will be doing during your undergraduate research registration. The description should include the topic or question the research will address, the materials you will be researching to explore this topic or question (a preliminary bibliography might be helpful here), the work you will submit to receive a grade for the course, and an account of how that work will be assessed.
Ask the faculty member directing the undergraduate research to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4911 for the faculty member directing your undergraduate research, and register you for it.

Grading for ENG 4911:
At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the undergraduate research for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Childhood, Memory, and Children’s Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

The child’s entrance into the world, as Marah Gubar has observed, is always belated: young people, she writes, are born into a world in which stories about who they are (and what they should become) are already in circulation (6). The task of children’s literature, then, involves introducing the young reader to — and suturing her firmly within — a social formation whose existence preceded her own. Little wonder, then, that so many works of children’s literature have taken as their subject the (often idealized) past.

In this course, then, we will study representations of memory and history in children’s literature. How do books for young people represent the – often traumatic – past to emerging generations? How do they draw on collective memory, and what is the relationship between memory and history? How does the child become a figure of memory, and how may works of children’s literature be considered “sites of memory?”

We will discuss these and other questions as we read studies in historical fiction, memory theory, and trauma theory alongside key works of global children’s literature. This course will involve group discussion, individual presentations, short response papers, and a final seminar project.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Reading Visual Narratives of American Identity
Margaret Galvan

This honors seminar examines how artists have depicted American identity in visual narratives over the course of the twentieth century. We will build a community of inquiry as we scrutinize photobooks, comics, and illustration that document diverse American experiences in fictional and non-fictional modes. We will start with the economic freefall of the Great Depression that changed the fortunes and dreams of many Americans, move through World War II and wartime considerations of who counted as American, and then spend much of our time with media made in and about the intertwined periods of the Cold War and Civil Rights writ large.

This course will help students develop the habits of mind for sustained academic inquiry as students learn how scholars read, research, and theorize visual culture and hone their own analytical toolbox. In scaffolded writing assignments leading to a larger project, students will practice intensive close reading and thick description to unpack how a picture is worth a thousand words and how these different pictures form a complex, collective sense of what it means to be an American.

ENG 4940

English Internship
Roger Maioli

The internship course allows English majors to earn credit towards fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the major by gaining work experience in an area related to the skills they are acquiring as English majors and to the career goals they aim to pursue once they have graduated from the University of Florida. Because the transferable skills students acquire as English majors are both diverse (depending on the areas in which they have concentrated their coursework) and valuable in a variety of different kinds of workplace settings, the English Department is quite liberal in its interpretation of what kinds of work experiences will be appropriate for students wanting to earn internship credit. Internships allow students to get a sense of the demands and rewards of particular kinds of careers, and, if the internships go well, can provide students with possible letters of recommendation written by their supervisors that could prove valuable when they are applying for work before and after graduating from UF. The English Department encourages students to take advantage of this opportunity.

ENG 4953

Literatures of Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism
Malini Johar Schueller

This course will focus on settler colonialism and the indigenous resistance to it in such different locations as U.S. North America, Hawai’i, South Africa or Algeria and Palestine. Reading literary works by both the colonized and the settlers, we will attempt to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, nationalism, the politics of recognition, and revolutionary solidarity. We will attend to the different practices and literatures of settler colonialism which persists into our present, and to the activism and advocacy campaigns of indigenous populations confronting settler colonialism and its legacies. We will also examine the conversations and disagreements 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.

Some texts might include Liliuokalani Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging , Albert Camus The Stranger, Kamel Daoud The Mersault Investigation, Raja Shehade Palestinian Walks, Susan Abulhawa Mornings in Jenin and Ibtisam Azem The Book of Disappearance.

Requirements: Class participation, one exam, one paper and an oral presentation

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis
TBD

Honors theses give students the opportunity to work independently on original scholarly, critical, or creative projects under the direction of faculty members who work in the relevant fields. Students’ honors theses can be the culmination of their undergraduate experiences, and even anticipate the interests they will pursue in graduate studies.

In the English Department, honors theses may take a variety of forms. Most often, students write essays of 30–50 pages in length dealing with topics in literary criticism, history, or theory; film and media studies; or, cultural studies. Such essays are appropriate for students who hope to go on to graduate or professional degree programs. However, students who have pursued creative-writing coursework for the major may write short stories, poetry, or even a novella to fulfill the thesis requirement, and students who have concentrated in film and media studies can produce a short film or video (often accompanied by a brief essay providing a rationale for the project).

Students who register for honors thesis projects must have a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and have earned a grade of “B” or better in at least one English Department Honors Seminar (ENG 4936). Students work with two readers (known as the first and second readers), whom they choose from among the members of the English Department faculty. These two readers may co-direct the thesis, or the first reader may direct the work, with the second reader offering suggestions for revision and improvement only when the project is fairly well-advanced. Faculty members generally agree to serve as readers for honors thesis projects only when they know students from prior coursework for the major.

If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has finished one honors seminar with a minimum grade of B, submits an honors thesis that earns a minimum grade of B+, that student can graduate magna cum laude (with high honors). If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has completed two honors seminars, earning a grade of A in one and no less than a B in the other, submits an honors thesis that earns a grade of A, that student can graduate summa cum laude (with highest honors).

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://forms.english.ufl.edu/forms-links/). Follow these instructions:

Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the first and second faculty readers of your honors thesis project, provide a description of the argument you anticipate making in the thesis.
Ask the first and second readers of the honors thesis to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4970 for the first reader of your honors thesis, and register you for it.

Submission of honors thesis and grading for ENG 4970:

In the semester in which you graduate, Dr. Murchek will inform you of the deadline by which you need to submit the honors thesis to the UF Institutional Repository.

Your readers will determine a deadline by which you need to submit a final draft of your honors thesis to them so that they can turn in a final grade to Dr. Murchek by the Monday of the last week of classes. They submit this grade to Dr. Murchek so that he can make a final honors recommendation for you to the graduation coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences by the last day of classes. Your first reader will also submit your grade for the honors thesis course in the UF grading system by the grades submission deadline for the semester.

You need to submit a copy of the final, approved version of the honors thesis to the English Department by the Monday of the last week of classes. This document can be submitted to Dr. Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu as an email attachment.

ENL 3251

Victorians’ Secrets
Sean Grass

This course will introduce students to the major social, cultural, and literary events—especially the grim ones—of the Victorian period in England. Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities that “[i]t was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” He meant both the period of the French Revolution and the time of Queen Victoria’s reign. The Victorians gave us Dickens and Darwin and Marx, railroads and public schools, and key expansions of voting rights, women’s rights, personal freedoms, literacy, and social opportunity. They also lived at a time of enormous upheaval, when rapid urbanization and industrialization were destroying England’s old agrarian society and driving the lower classes to poverty and despair. Literature is our window onto this complicated world. We will use it to see into the material, mental, and sexual truths that shaped the Victorian age.

To that end, we will read from several authors this semester: Dickens, Darwin, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. We will also work extensively with Victorian history and culture by reading from Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew and orienting some assignments around especially significant historical moments. By the end of the term, we shall arrive at an excellent understanding of Victorian literature and culture—and, spoiler alert, will likely discover that the Victorians’ world looks startlingly like our own.

ENL 4221

Milton: Poetry and Prose
Peter Rudnytsky

The first part of a two-semester sequence on Milton, this course will read many of his major writings other than Paradise Lost. These include the masque known as Comus, the elegy “Lycidas,” the brief epic Paradise Regained, and the biblical tragedy Samson Agonistes, as well as his prose works defending divorce, freedom of the press, and the execution of King Charles I. We will consider how, after breaking his vow of celibacy that he believed was the precondition for being a poet-priest, Milton threw himself into politics and became the foremost spokesman for the Puritan Revolution, only to return to poetry after the Restoration and write the late masterpieces in which he encodes his spiritual and sexual autobiography. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

LIT 3003

Representations of War in Literature and Visual Media
Eric Kligerman

This course sets out to probe the cultural, social and political functions of horror in relation to shifting moments of historical violence. In addition to exploring the horror genre in literary and cinematic works of the imagination (Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hitchcock’s Psycho), we will ultimately apply the aesthetic, epistemic and ethical questions arising in the genre to shifting representations of traumatic history. As we map out the history and themes behind this popular genre, our aim is to probe the intersections between horror and its socio-cultural and historical contexts. How is political violence represented, conceptualized and memorialized across shifting linguistic and visual texts? What ethical questions arise in our engagement with representations of traumatic limit events and the experience of horror these events entail?

After reading and screening central works from the horror genre, we will examine some of the emblematic scenes of historical violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. Turning to such instances as the legacies of colonialism (Heart of Darkness), First World War (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) the Holocaust (Survival in Auschwitz and Eichmann in Jerusalem) the Vietnam War (Michael Herr’s Dispatches) and 9/11 (Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future”), this seminar investigates the intersection between narratives of horror in the realms of both fantasy and history. In our inquiry into representations of horror, we will examine how this genre in European and American culture is employed to express both individual and national anxieties in the face of political violence. Finally, what does our fascination with the horrors of historical violence reveal about ourselves?

LIT 3031

Reading and Writing Poetry Criticism
William Logan

TBA

LIT 3374

Bible as Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

According to conventional wisdom, the Judeo-Christian Bible is a book. Indeed, in certain communities, it is regarded as The Book. However, as both theologians and secular literary critics have observed, the Bible is not so much a singular book as it is a collection of many different literary forms composed during various historical periods and only later anthologized by representatives of dominant socio-religious communities. Moreover, the Bible can be defined as much as by what it excludes as by what it includes: indeed, different communities read different editions of the Bible.

The purpose of this class, then, is to analyze the disparate forms and genres contained within the Judeo-Christian biblical canon. For example, we will examine such different literary forms as origin myths (Genesis), romance/adventure stories (Exodus), lyrical poetry (the Psalms), prophecy (Isaiah), fairy tales (Jonah and Job), gospel writing (the synoptic gospels and the Book of John), and epistolary literature (Paul). We will also study the influence of these forms on secular works of literature (e.g., those by Blake, Kierkegaard, Melville, and Milton). In doing so, we will consider how the formation of the Biblical canon influenced the formation of the secular literary canon.

LIT 3383

Black Women: Transatlantic Literature
Julia Mollenthiel

This course will survey African American, African, European, and Caribbean literature written by Black women from the 18th century to the present. Students will read a variety of texts, each of which centers on materials that are thematically and historically related. Whether considering subjects of an historical, social, psychological, or literary nature, students engage in close examination of texts by Black female artists from both academic and popular realms that may include fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, drama and autobiography, in addition to non-print sources such as film and music. We will examine how Black women across these geographical regions utilize certain aesthetics, styles, techniques, genres, and structures, as well as how these traditions explore ideas about freedom and identity. This course is organized thematically, with an emphasis on the movements and ideas of Black feminine social thought and political protest that contextualize Black women’s writing across the diaspora.

LIT 3383

Women Writers and the Early Literary Marketplace
Jodi Schorb

This course will introduce students to literature in English written by American and British authors who published or circulated their work prior to the twentieth century, with a special thematic emphasis on what it took for these artists to cultivate networks, get compensated, gain critical recognition, get their work into print, support themselves as professional writers, and navigate a rapidly commercializing literary marketplace.

All our primary texts are chosen for both their literary importance and their storied path to circulation and/or publication.

Students will gain knowledge of the social and cultural history of female authorship: What common assumptions and stereotypes did they face? What distinguished an “author” from an “authoress,” “scribbling woman,” or “lady novelist”? Why publish anonymously or under a pseudonym? In what formats (manuscript, book, periodical, serial, underground, other?) did authors before 1900 circulate or publish their work, and how does circulation format shape the form and audience reception of the texts? What did it take to make a living as professional writer? Which writers were especially adept at cultivating networks with male or female sponsors, publishers, editors, literary societies, or reform movements? By considering the role of the literary marketplace and the rigors of publication, students will gain a fuller understanding of not only what our primary texts are about and why they are important, but how they got to print in the first place (if they got to print at all).

Primary texts are likely to include literature by “Anonymous,” poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis, and Emily Dickinson; fiction by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), Louisa May Alcott (“Behind the Mask,” Hospital Sketches, Work), Catharine Sedgwick (“Cacoethes Scribendi”), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”); self-writing by Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), and essays or letters by Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, Maria W. Stewart, Fanny Fern, Margaret Fuller, and others. We will supplement our primary texts with secondary scholarship on publishing prior to 1900.

Likely assignments: Two 6-8 page essays, periodic reading reflections, student-led panel presentations, and short homeworks based on creative or experiential learning and archival discovery.

LIT 3400

AI Before AI
David Leavitt

TBA

LIT 3400

The Problem of Freedom: History and Literature of the Caribbean after Emancipation
Leah Rosenberg

After emancipation in 1838, freed people in the British Caribbean faced daunting challenges: lack of work, land, and money; the importation of indentured Asian laborers that undercut their leverage with the planter class. These circumstances led many Afro-Caribbeans to leave their homelands and some to rebel. In this course, students will examine the historical records of critical examples of indenture, migration, and rebellion in the Caribbean between the 1850 and 1900: the migration of Jamaicans to build the Panama railroad in the 1850s that transformed trade and communications between the Pacific and Atlantic side of the Americas; the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica that transformed Jamaican and British politics; and the mysterious death of a indentured Indian woman named Maharani, on her voyage from Calcutta to colonial Guyana in 1885. Students will assess the significance of Caribbean literature representing these three historical phenomena — through a comparative analysis with British Royal Commission reports, court documents, newspapers, photographs, and family papers d

They will compare these with Caribbean novels and memoirs written about these events The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), Vic Reid’s 1949 novel New Day, Ramabai Espinet’s 2003 novel The Swinging Bridge. This course includes a unit on digital humanities.

LIT 3400

Animal Stories: The Representation of Other Species in Western Culture
Roger Maioli

An old story circulating in the US since the 1840s told of a bald eagle who kidnapped a girl and fed it to its chicks. Rumors that eagles posed a threat to human children encouraged Americans to kill them indiscriminately, and the bird was brought to the verge of extinction in the early twentieth century. To this day, black cats are tortured and killed due to stories that portray them as portents of bad luck, or as the devil in disguise. These are just two examples of how the stories we tell about other species directly affect their lives. The most venerable of these stories—that God gave Adam dominion over other creatures—still shapes modern interspecies relations, both for those who regard humans as stewards of nature and for those who regard animals as resources.

Animal stories have power. This course looks at four centuries of animal representation in Western culture to consider the impact of storytelling on the beings we share this planet with. Stories about animals have been told not only in the obvious literary genres – fables, fairy tales, children’s stories, short stories, and novels – but also in religious, philosophical, scientific, and legal texts, not to mention painting, advertising, film, and a range of other formats and media. We will be reading and analyzing selections from this multifarious archive, from the King James Version of the Bible (1611) and René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) to Upton Sinclair’s depiction of slaughterhouses in The Jungle (1906) and E.B. White’s classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web (1952). We will read these primary sources together with works by intellectual historians, journalists, animal activists, and philosophers of animal rights. And we will consider how much has changed and how much persists as our stories about animals have mutated over time.

A word of caution: this course will approach the human treatment of other animals without euphemism. We will read about practices such as bear baiting, a pastime from Shakespeare’s day when bears were torn to pieces by dogs for the amusement of London audiences; we will learn about experiments performed on animals, from Victorian vivisection to modern psychological studies and the cosmetic industry; and we will juxtapose historical and modern examples of how animal stories have justified the exploitation of both animals and animalized humans.

LIT 3400

Hip Hop Rhetoric and Young Adult Literature on the Gulf Coast
Victor Del Hierro

Over the last 50 years Hip Hop culture has grown from its humble South Bronx beginnings into a global force of music, dance, and art. Since its inception, Hip Hop has always been a voice for local communities to express their experiences and first-hand accounts of the spaces and places that they inhabit. Furthermore, these voices are often the voices of youth and young adults who are finding their voice as they tell their stories.

As Hip Hop culture has grown, the most prominent regional voice to emerge over the last 25 years is the area around the Gulf Coast. From Texas to Florida, Southern Hip Hop has emerged as the dominant voice and sound in rap music. In this course, we will explore Hip Hop’s Third Coast through a young adult literature and rhetoric lens. Through the music of rap artists from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, this class will engage in a broad range of learning outcomes including deepening knowledge of the Gulf region from the perspective of Gulf coast artists and promoting intercultural competence as we engage with the broad perspectives that exist across the Gulf coast states. This course explores the cultural and entrepreneurial impact of Gulf Coast Hip Hop, examining artists like UGK, Master P, and T-Pain through a lens of regional identity, innovation, and resilience. Students will analyze music, mixtapes, and literature to uncover themes of community, environmental storytelling, and intercultural competence. This course is part of the Gulf Coast Scholars Program and open to any student.

LIT 4188

Nation and Narration
Apollo Amoko

This course explores the relationship imagined between “nation” and “narration.” In other words, we will critique two entwinned discourses, namely, the rhetoric of official nationalism on the one hand and the aesthetics of the realist novel on the other. Both discourses are predicated on notions of linear progress along time. In Imagined Communities, a landmark study on the origins and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson appears to suggest that the realist novel was central to the possibility of imagining the modern nation. The aesthetic of the novel made it possible to think and narrate the nation in “homogeneous empty time.” Further, Anderson contends that the canonization of literary texts through the school system was instrumental for enabling the intelligentsia to “take the nation to the people.” From this perspective, it is not surprising that literature has historically conceived of its objects of study in fundamentally nationalist terms. In short, we will attempt to answer this question by looking at a range of canonical texts from a variety of national and continental contexts. We will study such diverse authors as Mark Twain, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Joy Kogawa, Arundathi Roy, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Uwem Akpan.

LIT 4192

Introduction to Caribbean Literature
Leah Rosenberg

Beginning with a consideration of the eighteenth-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams and the poetry he wrote in Latin, this course provides a history of anglophone Caribbean literature and illuminates the social, political, and cultural history of the region. The course focuses on migration, empire, and climate change, experiences that have shaped and continue to shape the region. It illuminates the contributions of Caribbean writers to modernism, postmodernism, speculative fiction, and children’s literature. Authors will include Michel Maxwell Philip, Claude McKay, CLR James, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul, Michelle Cliff, Jean D’Costa, Pauline Melville, Olive Senior, Edwidge Danticat, Kerry Young, Nalo Hopkinson, and Diana McCaulay.

LIT 4194

African Literature and Colonial Anthropology
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses the vexed relationship between the canonical texts of Western anthropology and the founding texts of modern African literature. Beginning in the 19^th century Influential Western scholars like French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, German anthropologist Leo Frobenius and British anthropologists E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Bransilow Malinowski help defined the idea of Africa amid European colonialism from the 19^th century onward. On the one hand, these scholars overturned longstanding racist depictions of Africans as fundamentally irrational, congenitally mystical, and atavistically violent. On the other hand, they helped justify the “civilizing mandate” of colonialism by perpetuating primitivist discourses predicated on notions of redeemable African inferiority and backwardness. The specter of colonial anthropology loomed large in the work of pioneering African writers as Chinua Achebe, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Leopold Sedar Senghor. In an instructive paradox, this resolutely anti-colonial writing simultaneously debunked and reproduced various aspects of the colonial library.

LIT 4333

Literature for the Adolescent
Kenneth Kidd

This synchronous online (Zoom) course examines literature primarily for but also about adolescents, across a range of genres and with attention to the cultural and social history of adolescence as a concept and a lived experience. We’ll concentrate on what’s now called “young adult” (YA) literature from the 1960s forward in light of earlier narrative traditions. We will try to figure out what’s happening in YA publishing and media culture. The course will be conducted as a seminar and participation is crucial. We will read one YA book per week, plus some criticism and theory. Requirements include active participation, regular short response papers, a panel presentation, and several longer critical or creative projects.

Possible Texts (titles subject to change; please check with me before purchasing)

M.T. Anderson, Feed (2002)

Edward Bloor, Tangerine (1997)

Judy Blume, Forever (1975)

Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After (2020)

Kristen Cashore, Jane, Unlimited (2017)

Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer (1942)

Romina Garber, Lobizona (2020)

John Green, Paper Towns (2008)

S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)

Maria Ingrande Mora, A Wild Radiance (2026)

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch (2011)

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (2017)

LIT 4483

Rhetoric and Culture
Raúl Sánchez

It’s relatively easy and probably not newsworthy to say that rhetorical practice is related to cultural practice, especially if you define rhetoric and culture broadly, as many scholars currently do. We all act rhetorically, and we all live in cultures.

It’s trickier to relate theories of rhetoric to theories of culture. Yet, for the past few decades, this is what various scholars in Rhetoric and other disciplines have tried to do, as they have tried to develop new ways to understand human communication in its fullest possible complexity. Their work is the subject of this course.

And human communication is very complex indeed. It includes interactions between and among humans, of course, but it also includes human interactions with land, with built environments, and with other species. The fields involved in these studies include Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Communication Studies, Literary Studies, Sociology, and, last but certainly not least, the various disciplines of Design.

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundzić

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. The course will address issues of vampire and vEmpire (the imperial politics behind vampirism), vampirism and psychoanalysis, vampirism and modernism, vampirism and cinema, queer, gay and lesbian vampires, vampires of East and Central Europe, vampirism and anti-Semitism, vampirism and religion, vampirism and nationalism, history of blood in religion, film and literature, etc.

LIT 4930

Jewish-American Cinema
Dragan Kujundzić

The course screens and discusses films related to Jewish emigration to the US, the first sound film, the Holocaust, Israeli Cinema, Jewish-American women in film, Jewish humor and comedy. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino; Fiddler on the Roof, (and the novel by Sholem Aleichem); the extensive critical analysis of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer; Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg and The Pianist by Roman Polanski. Jewish humor (Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters and Whatever Works with Larry David), films by Paul Mazursky, Sidney Lumet, David Mamet. Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) and Mel Brooks (The Producers, Blazing Saddles), the Coen Brothers, (Serious Men). Marty Supreme and Bad Shabbos will be screened. Particular attention will be given to films by or about Jewish women, (Yentl by and with Barbara Streisand), Vita Activa (Hannah Arendt), Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman) Golda Meir (Golda with Helen Mirren) and Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination, among others.

LIT 4930

Kafka and the Kafkaesque
Eric Kligerman

This seminar will explore the writings of Franz Kafka and the effect that his literary legacy has had on literature and film. Our objective will be to analyze how elements of modern consciousness and “the Kafkaesque” reappear in selected texts of later modern and postmodern writers and filmmakers. The first part of the seminar will focus on understanding Kafka’s complex narratives and his place and influence in literary and cultural history of Jewish-German-Czech Prague in the first decades of the 20^th century. Our study of Kafka’s work will be situated alongside the debates regarding European modernity within the context of Jewish languages, culture and identity. In addition to reading short stories (including The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Hunger Artist), we will turn to his novels Amerika and The Trial, personal diaries and correspondences. Our readings of Kafka will center on such topics as law and justice, family and solitude, humans and animals, modernity, travel, the crisis of language and Judaism.

After our in-depth analysis of Kafka’s works, we will explore the major role Kafka played in the construction of the modern and postmodern literary canon of the twentieth century. The course will explore Kafka’s impact on American literature, cinema and literary criticism. We will trace “the Kafkaesque” in the narrative fictions of selected authors, including W.H. Auden, Zadie Smith, Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov, and filmmakers such as Orson Welles, David Lynch and the Coen brothers.

LIT 4930

#Holocaust: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Film and Literature
Roy Holler

Selfies at Auschwitz. @eva.stories turning a real teenage Holocaust diary into Instagram content. Twitter flooded with Holocaust denial in 140 characters or less. The ways we remember the Holocaust have become messy. Not that they were ever simple.

Long before the digital age, the Holocaust profoundly shaped the Zionist project and played a central role in the establishment of the Israeli state, which continues to understand itself through narratives of destruction and rebirth. We will begin #Holocaust by examining how Holocaust memory has been used and constructed in Israeli society. Through Hebrew literature, film, and other cultural works produced alongside key twentieth century political events, we will explore how Holocaust memory was shaped, mobilized, and woven into the story of the Jewish nation.

We will then turn to the digital era, from viral Instagram projects to the spread of denial through podcasts and social media. We will investigate how these platforms enable the circulation of survivor testimony, connect different generations, and create new battlegrounds for confronting denial and distortion.