Undergraduate Courses

Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.

Fall 2025

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below.

Course #	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3673	26031	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2334	Popular Culture and Global Martial Arts Film	Xiao
AML 4170	23647	T 5-6 / R 6	ROG 0106	Afrofuturism	Mollenthiel
AML 4213	26286	M W F 8	MAT 0114	Early American Literature to 1830	Schorb
AML 4282	26274	M W F 3	MAT 0115	The Progressive Era	Hegeman
AML 4282	22999	M W F 6	MAT 0113	Queer Literature Before “Homosexuality”	Schorb
AML 4311	10226	M W F 3	ONLINE	Ursula K. LeGuin	Smith
AML 4311	23000	E1-E3	MAT 0113	Octavia Butler	Hedrick
CRW 3110	DEP-X	T 9-11	NORM 1001	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 4211	DEP-X	M 6-8	TUR 2334	Creative Nonfiction	Leavitt
CRW 4905	DEP-X	R 9-11	TUR B310	Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop	Akpan
CRW 4906	DEP-X	T 9-11	MCCA 2186	Advanced Poetry Workshop	Mlinko
ENC 3310	26594	M W F 6	ONLINE	Advanced Exposition	TBA
ENG 3010	26295	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0115	Theory, Literature, and the Art of Reading	Wegner
ENG 3503	26218	T 4 / R 4-5 / W 9-11	TUR 2334	Cinema of Environmental Crisis	Harpold
ENG 4015	11785	M W F 5	MAT 0115	What Is Desire?	Bianchi
ENG 4133	23122	T 2-3 / R 3 / R9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Finding Footage: The Cinematic Paratext	Burt
ENG 4135	26029	M W F 4 / T 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Weimar Cinema	Mennel
ENG 4135	26030	T 5-6 / R 6 / R E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Modern Czech Cinema	Raynard
ENG 4135	26213	M W F 3 / M 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Italian Cinema	Bianchi
ENG 4936	DEP-X	M W F 5	FLI 0115	Honors Seminar: The Great American Novel	Hegeman
ENG 4936	DEP-X	W 6-8	ONLINE	Honors Seminar: Representations of A.I. in Literature	Smith
ENG 4953	26194	W 6-8	TUR 2334	American Women’s Poetry	Bryant
ENG 4953	26271	W 9-11	TUR 2322	bell hooks	Hedrick
ENL 3112	26276	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0114	Before Austen: Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists	Maioli
ENL 3154	21414	M W F 4	TUR 2305	Twentieth-Century British Poetry	Bryant
ENL 3234	26277	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2303	Literature and Animal Rights	Maioli
ENL 4221	26285	M W F 8	MAT 0113	John Milton’s Paradise Lost	Rudnytsky
ENL 4303	24330	M W F 7	MAT 0115	The Brontës	Grass
ENL 4333	26284	M W F 7	MAT 0114	Shakespeare: Divided Selves	Rudnytsky
LIT 3003	23851	T 4-5 / R 4	TBA / MAT 0114	Representations of War in Literature and Visual Media	Kligerman
LIT 3043	23925	T 6-8	TUR 2350	Modern African Drama	Amoko
LIT 3400	26290	M W F 4	MAT 0117	Ukrainian History Through Ukrainian Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 3400	26164	T 5-6 / 6	MAT 0105	Israeli-Arab Conflict on Stage and Screen	Holler
LIT 3400	26253	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0117 / TUR 2303	Hip Hop & Young Adult Literature	Del Hierro
LIT 4332	26282	T 8-9 / R 9	ONLINE	Literature for the Young Child	TBA
LIT 4930	21644	T 10 / R 10-11	TUR 2322	Vampire Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	21645	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2322	Jewish-American Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	26034	T 7 / R 7-8	UST 0105	On the Road: Representations of America Through European Eyes	Kligerman
LIT 4930	26251	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0113	Letters in Literature, Film and Philosophy	Burt
LIT 4930	26163	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0105	Passing: Black, White, Jewish	Holler

Course Descriptions

AML 3673

Popular Culture and Global Martial Arts Film
Ying Xiao

Distinctly Chinese, truly global–martial arts film is one of the most popular and enduring genres from East Asia, but extends its popular appeal far beyond Asia and exerts a sweeping influence on an international audience. The course offers an overview of the film form and film sense and the important themes of martial arts from its roots in the Chinese literary and cultural traditions to its reinventions and proliferations in the context of Hong Kong cinema and moreover its global success, which kicks high, mixes different cinematic techniques and genres, and connects filmmakers and viewers from the world. The first part of the class will be dedicated to a historical survey of martial arts film, with particular emphasis on its formation, transformation, and intersections with Chinese style, Hong Kong cinema, and popular culture in the modern and contemporary eras. We will then turn our attention to the world craze and phenomenon of martial arts film and the broader discourse of Asian American experience, diaspora, migration, Hollywood blockbuster, transnational co-production, and the representation of gender, race, and ethnicity.

This course takes students on a comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of martial arts, Kung Fu, action films and popular culture from and beyond Sinophone and Asian-American film. Films and filmmakers to be discussed include A Touch of Zen, Kung Fu Hustle, Hero, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Once Upon a Time in China, Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Zhang Yimou, Michelle Yeoh, Ang Lee, etc. All works are read in English writings and films/videos will probably be in multiple languages but with English subtitles.

AML 4170

Afrofuturism
Julia Mollenthiel

TBA

AML 4213

Early American Literature to 1830
Jodi Schorb

This course teaches the literature of the Americas, from indigenous origin stories to the first American novels. A diverse and often strange body of literature, “early American literature” includes diaries and journals, conversion narratives and travel accounts, tales of captivity and enslavement. Types of literary genres that you will read include diaries and other life writing, poetry, sermons, and (later), fiction.

Early weeks introduce students to tales of Mayan, Hopi, and Mi’cmaq encounter, from “Dream of the White Robe and the Floating Island” to the Yucatan sacred text, “Chilam Balam of Chumayel” (1540-1546). You’ll learn about early forms of inscription, from carvings to Codex.

We continue with sermons, diaries, and poetry of early explorer-settler-colonists who navigated their so-called new worlds. From diary excerpts by Columbus and William Bradford to John Winthrop’s sermon, Modell of Christian Charity (1630), to the testimonies of Indian captives, accused witches, Christian converts, and enslaved men and women, we’ll pay special attention to how writers represented their experiences in (often) metaphoric language and sought to make the unfamiliar familiar, the illegible legible.

We’ll also study, with an assist from UF’s Special Collections, early American rare books, including fiction and poetry by “early American celebrity authors” Ann Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Susannah Rowson, and/or Hannah Webster Foster. Learning about early bookmaking and book circulation helps us better understand the role of reading in the early republic and debates over why novels were considered immoral and dangerous. This, in turn, drove early fiction writers to moral, sentimental, and gothic plots.

As the course progresses, we will increasingly engage with debates on what constitutes “authorship,” “literature,” and “the archive.” To assist, we will read from contemporary creative writers, likely Louise Erich (“Captivity”), Lisa Chávez (In an Angry Season), Robin Coste Lewis (“Voyage of the Sable Venus”), and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Age of Phillis), to help us debate and discuss a pressing interpretive question: how do we respond to the gaps and silences of the literary-historic archive?

Assignments include: periodic homework and in-class group work, one or two close reading/literary analysis papers, and a final project that includes both creative and hands-on research options.

If you enjoy historical perspectives on literature, are curious about how early Americans (broadly conceived) entered print, or want to diversify your knowledge of the nation’s first forms of literary expression, this course is well suited to your personal, scholarly, and/or research interests. No knowledge of early American literature is required.

A note about literary periods: the literature in this course precedes the nineteenth-century gothic and Romantic fiction by authors such as Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (though you will certainly see the early emergence of an American gothic in our texts); our readings also precede the more pronounced tradition of anti-slavery oratory, argument, and life writing by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and impactful abolitionists (though you will be invited to ponder the freedom dreams of enslaved men and women as recorded in letters, petitions, runaway advertisements, and more.

AML 4282

The Progressive Era
Susan Hegeman

The Progressive Era in American history (roughly 1890-1920) is so named because of the reformist politics and social activism of the period, which took on corruption in government and big business, and sought to address the impacts of mass immigration, urbanization, industrialization, poverty, and racism. The narrative literature of the period reflected this activist mood, taking on topics including populism, lynching, prostitution, urban housing and sanitation, women’s rights, and the power of corporate trusts. Also notable in this moment was a close connection between journalism and narrative fiction — so close, in fact, that a many of the best-known fiction writers of the period were also journalists. In this class, we will read exemplary works of fiction (novels and short stories) and nonfiction from the Progressive Era, and examine how the social movements of the period affected literary efforts, and vice versa. We will also study the literary periodizing concepts of realism and naturalism.

AML 4282

Queer Literature Before “Homosexuality”
Jodi Schorb

TBA

AML 4311

Ursula K. Le Guin
Stephanie Smith

100% online

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 4311

Octavia Butler
Tace Hedrick

Course Description: We are reading, discussing, and writing about the work of Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Black feminist speculative fiction writer. Although few readers were aware of her until well into the 1990s, her work has garnered more and more attention for its examination of connections between “alien” otherness, theories of genetic interdependence, and race and sexuality. We will be reading her major works, including her best-known Xenogenesis trilogy. As we read, we will be looking at some of her varied influences—sociobiology and evolutionary biology, even the possibility of telepathy and mind control—as well as what she had to say in interviews about race, gender, and politics in her writing and in the United States.

Course Requirements: Three in-class essay exams (75% of final grade) and reading quizzes (25% of final grade).

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Uwem Akpan

This is a fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. In the course of the semester, we are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. We are also expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewrite. As Steven Gillis, author of Benchere in Wonderland says, “The art of writing is in the rewriting.”

And since good writing or rewriting begins with good reading (or hearing of the story), we will be exposed to the works of celebrated writers and how they have dealt with key issues like craft, motivation, voice, suspense, characterization, etc. We will also be required to attend two readings by visiting writers.

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 (John Lanchester, Cynthia Ozick, Joy Williams), reportage (James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, Joseph Roth, George W. S. Trow), biography (Nicholson Baker, Geoff Dyer, Lytton Strachey), 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

Advanced Poetry Workshop
Ange Mlinko

This is an advanced poetry workshop designed primarily for students who have taken at least two workshops and are familiar with the basics of prosody (meter, stanza forms) and metaphor. We will do close readings of modern and contemporary poems—some from anthologies, some from recent collections—and model our own poems on formal aspects borrowed from our favorites. Assignments may include field trips to museums, nature preserves, and other locations where ideas for poems suggest themselves, grounded in empirical observations.

ENC 3310

Advanced Exposition
TBA

TBA

ENG 3010

Theory, Literature, and the Art of Reading
Phillip Wegner

One of the primary goals of an education in the humanities has been to teach us how to be more effective readers, not only of literature, but of all kinds of cultural productions and even the world we inhabit every day. The problem of reading is also at the heart of the great intellectual endeavor of the last century now known as theory. However, the aim of theory has never been to describe in its “real truth” the nature of reading, but rather to heighten our awareness of what we already do when we read, and then to develop new strategies that will enable us to read otherwise. As one of the most significant theorists of the twentieth century, the French scholar Michel Foucault, puts it, theory involves “the effort to think one’s own history,” the engrained expectations and assumptions that we bring to any everyday activity such as reading, in order potentially, to “free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.” In this course, we will examine the ways that some of the most important theoretical movements of the last century interrogated and thought differently both what we read and how reading takes place. After beginning with an excerpt from Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction and a reading of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, we will turn our attention to the work of some of the last century’s most significant theorists, and explore the various ways they have posed the inseparable questions of literature and reading, as well as the suggestions they offer as to how we might begin to read, and think, differently.

ENG 3503

Cinema of Environmental Crisis
Terry Harpold

This course is a survey of the imaginative ecologies and ethics of the cinema of environmental crisis. (Here, “crisis” applies to stories of natural and human-made disasters, and changes in weather and climate that catalyze the plot, images, and sounds of a film.) We will view and discuss primarily narrative fiction films in which human characters are thrust into conditions of environmental transformation – alienation, upheaval, collapse, extinction, and re-creation – and confront new relations to other humans and other beings of the natural and built worlds.

A key emphasis of the course is on learning how to see environmental elements of a film as more than scenery or allegorical doubles of (human) characters’ emotions and actions: as real, determinant situations of subjectivity and agency – human and more-than-human – in the medium of film.

ENG 4015

What is Desire?
Pietro Bianchi

“Desire is not a simple thing,” Sigmund Freud used to say. Yet, at times, our empirical experience suggests the opposite. It is not difficult to list all the material objects, experiences, and possessions that might fulfill the phrase, “make a wish.” However, psychoanalysis teaches us not to confuse “desire” with “will.” While we live in a society that has monumentalized self-confidence and the notion of “knowing what you want,” desire – distinct from will – remains elusive. Beneath the material goods and commodities we surround ourselves with and long to possess, there is something within us that remains opaque, inexpressible. This is what psychoanalysis calls “desire”: a question about our own identity, a blank spot in our subjectivity.

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Plato’s Symposium, from Hamlet to St. Augustine, from Christianity to Romanticism, and from David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, contemporary feminist and queer thought, Gill Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality, this course will explore the multifaceted concept of desire.

This course will be a combination of philosophy, history, anthropology, psychoanalysis and film studies. Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, a 5-minute in-class presentation, two quizzes and an in-class final paper.

ENG 4133

Finding Footage: The Cinematic Paratext
Richard Burt

This course will primarily be about film trailers considered as a film genre in their own right. The emphasis will be on shot selection, narrative sequence (linear or not), title, and editing. We will also consider other parts of narrative films that may be considered paratexts, a term coined by French literary theorist Gérard Genette. Paratexts are parts of the film that are outside the film’s narrative such as studio logos, opening and end titles, film titles, chapter titles, and also outside the film such as film trailers. In other words, these are texts that usually go unfound, unnoticed, or dismissed by film viewers. We will consider film trailers as radical abridgements of films that are part of the film and yet also an adaption of it. Music videos that use footage from films to give the song new meaning will also be considered. Bryan Ferry’s cover of “I Fooled Around and Fell in Love” consists almost entirely of shots taken from 1940s films noir including The Letter (William Wyler, 1940), The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1947) and Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourner, 1948). This is not a film production course, but you will learn enough about film to make your own trailers.

ENG 4135

Weimar Cinema
Barbara Mennel

The course offers an historical overview of the most influential films of German cinema of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). We will discuss the classic cinema of the Weimar Republic organized around the tensions of modernity and addressing early genre films, such as horror, science fiction, melodrama, and the city film. We will also pay attention to gender and sexuality in such films as Pandora’s Box and The Blue Angel. Urban space will feature as a central topic in discussions of Berlin: Symphony of a City and Metropolis. An understanding of orientalism and animation will guide our discussion of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. While the course offers a survey of canonical films of the period, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem, and M, it also introduces debates about avantgarde and experimental films, as well as marginal genres, such as advertising and the interactive “rebus” films.

ENG 4135

Modern Czech Cinema
Holly Raynard

Hailed as the “Hollywood of Europe,” Prague has been an internationally recognized hub for cinema since Machatý’s provocative Ecstasy (1933). This course will introduce students to the Czech cinematic tradition—from the establishment of the Barrandov Studios “Dream Factory” in the 1930s to the Czech New Wave to recent post-transition hits like Kolya (aka “Coca-Kolya”). We will analyze the cinematic language of storytelling and explore uniquely Czech approaches to film narrative. We will also examine how Czech cinema has responded to foreign influences—from Nazi Aryanization to the “Normalization” demanded by the Soviet Union to the genre system and big budgets of Hollywood—and compare Czech trends to their Western counterparts.

ENG 4135

Italian Cinema
Pietro Bianchi

When fascism fell in 1943, Italy was reborn as a new nation – as a Republic, with a new Constitution – rebuilt by the generation that had opposed and resisted the regime during the war years. During this period, an artistic movement emerged that would revolutionize cinema worldwide: neorealism. Film began to tell the stories of the lower classes and depict the marginalized communities of a country that was still largely rural and underdeveloped. A new cinematic language took shape, minimizing the use of film sets and bringing production outdoors, onto the streets of a nation undergoing reconstruction, often relying on non-professional actors to enhance realism.

The 1950s brought an economic boom to Italy, but the 1960s and 1970s saw intense social conflict – particularly in factories and universities – that radically transformed the country both socially and culturally. Cinema, too, reflected this shift, capturing a growing sense of disenchantment and a desire for radical political change. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the momentum for social transformation gave way to a new conformism, leading to a crisis in the film industry – one from which Italian cinema still struggles to recover today.

Through film, this course will trace Italy’s transformation from a predominantly agricultural nation at the fall of fascism to a modern, industrialized country that became part of the European Union at the turn of the millennium. We will explore works by Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City), Vottorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves), Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers), Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowup), Federico Fellini (La Strada), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Mamma Roma), Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution), Carlo Lizzani (La Vita Agra), Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket), Ettore Scola (La Terrazza), Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), the Taviani brothers (The Night of the Shooting Stars), Nanni Moretti (Ecce Bombo), and Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah).

The class includes a mandatory weekly screening and places a strong emphasis on in-class discussions, with active participation being essential. Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a five-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final paper.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: The Great American Novel
Susan Hegeman

The term “the Great American Novel” originated in 1868, in an essay by a minor novelist named John William DeForest, whose disappointing conclusion was that such a thing did not exist — or at least not yet. Since that time, there have been many candidates for this title, so much so, that it is a cliché of literary marketing. In this seminar, we will investigate DeForest and others’ criteria for the “Great American Novel,” and consider them in historical and social context. We will also read novels that have at various times been identified this way, beginning with DeForest’s half-hearted nominee for the title, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Other likely texts include William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, John Dos Passos, The Big Money, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We will also work together to identify another text to read as a class. Because this is a seminar, active attendance and participation is expected. Written work will include a research paper.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Representations of A.I. in Literature
Stephanie Smith

From the fictional android Data in the Star Trek franchise, regarded as a valuable member of the Enterprise crew, to the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey who appears to have its own will thereby depicting “the future birth of a superior intelligent being,” the question of human intelligence being displayed by a mechanical device has been part of American popular culture for decades. However, prior to the foundation of the genre now called Science Fiction, American writers explored the question of the relationship between humanity and the tools we build or create. This course will explore those representations beginning in the 19th century and working our way to present day representations of artificial intelligence, using such texts as “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce to the actually existing technology of Sophia, the first robot granted citizenship status by the United Nations.

ENG 4953

American Women’s Poetry
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at 8 American poets who launched their careers in the 20th century. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts as we take on a wide range of styles. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of domesticity, gender, family, mythology, and poetic language will shift as “women’s poetry” becomes a marketing category and an academic field. We’ll read Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Sonnets), Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons), H.D. (early poems online), Gwendolyn Brooks (Selected Poems), Sylvia Plath (Ariel, Restored edition), Anne Sexton (Selected Poems), Rita Dove (Mother Love), and UF’s own Ange Mlinko (Distant Mandate). As we move across the semester, we’ll see the poets offering confluent and divergent takes on domesticity, form, myth, and relationships. Course assignments will be a short and a long paper, a panel presentation, digital participation (including Perusall annotations), a parody, and engaged participation in class discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis, argumentative writing, and creative thinking. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you.

ENG 4953

bell hooks
Tace Hedrick

Course Description: In this class, we are reading the works of feminist, public intellectual, race theorist and cultural worker bell hooks (1952-2021). I envision this course as one which looks not only at the many concerns which hooks addresses (race, feminism, love, writing, teaching, cultural criticism) but also investigates certain ideas and roles: how a Black intellectual career is shaped over time; how a reader balances, and/or values, the varied moments of an intellectual career; the presumed split between the intellectual and the public (“mind” and “body”); what it means to be a public feminist Black woman; and others. We may see a couple of short films and may watch some videos. We will also be doing some of what I call “reading around/with hooks”: looking at other writers who have influenced her work in one way or another.

Course Requirements: Because this is a small undergraduate seminar, it will be intensive, research-oriented, and will require you to participate more extensively both in class and out. Each student will give one short presentation (8-10 minutes) to the class on the reading for the week they choose, and hand in a 1–3-page prospectus for their final paper, an annotated bibliography for that paper, (8 works), and a 10–12-page final paper. Your presentation, as well as your written work, should focus on your particular interest in studying bell hooks.

ENL 3112

Before Austen: Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists
Roger Maioli

Jane Austen is now firmly established as one of the supreme novelists in the English language. The influential critic F.R. Leavis placed her at the beginning of a “Great Tradition” in the British novel, a highly exclusive club with a total membership of four. Other Austen admirers viewed her instead as the climax of an earlier novelistic tradition dating back to the early eighteenth century. On this view, Austen’s predecessors — or the “early masters of English fiction,” as one critic called them — included Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. Notice that these are all male names. Fair as twentieth-century critics often were to Austen, they also implied that she was the first woman to have written novels worth reading. Today, thanks to decades of hard work by feminist critics, that picture has changed. Scholars of the British novel have come to acknowledge the central role played by earlier women novelists in shaping the conventions that Austen brought to perfection. Austen’s female predecessors, however, remain little known outside specialist circles. This course will introduce you to their work, their accomplishments as novelists, and the range of social and political issues they addressed. We will read novels and proto-novels written by women between 1689 and 1811 (the year of Austen’s first appearance in print). We will begin with shorter fiction by Penelope Aubin, Aphra Behn, and Mary Davys; we will then proceed to novels of manners by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth and to Ann Radcliffe’s thrilling Gothic masterpiece The Mysteries of Udolpho; and we will close by reading (or re-reading!) Austen’s timeless Pride and Prejudice.

ENL 3154

Twentieth-Century British Poetry
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at W.B. Yeats (Selected Poems), Wilfred Owen (Collected Poems), T. S. Eliot, (The Waste Land), W.H. Auden (Selected Poems), *Stevie Smith (Best Poems), Philip Larkin (Collected Poems), Linton Kwesi Johnson (Mi Revalueshanary Fren), Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife), and UF’s own *Michael Hofmann (Selected Poems). We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of gender, family, and nation will shift as definitions of “British poetry” change. Course assignments are: a long and a short paper, a panel presentation, digital participation (including Perusall annotations), a parody + optional performance, and engaged participation in classroom and digital discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis, argumentative writing, and creative thinking. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you. (*You’ll need hard copies of these books.)

ENL 3234

Literature and Animal Rights
Roger Maioli

Animals in literature are as old as the written word itself. From the cats of Egypt and the doves that fly out of Noah’s ark, and from Odysseus’s dog to Aesop’s fables, they are everywhere, feathered and furry extras for the telling of human stories. But literature has sometimes endeavored to treat animals as serious protagonists, without making their stories mainly about us. This course engages with literary works from various periods that attempt to capture the experience of non-human animals living in a world dominated by humans. Such works include Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the ancient tale of a man metamorphosed into a donkey; Virginia Woolf’s biography of a cocker spaniel, Flush (1833); and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (1956), an entertaining chronicle of the wildlife on a Greek Island. In talking about these works, we will be reading secondary sources that describe the borders between human and non-human animals; pieces of legislation that illustrate the reach and limits of animal rights; and a variety of sources that shed light on the conditions of wild, domesticated, and farmed animals. These voices will include modern thinkers such as Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum, as well as activists such as Chris Cooper and Trish O’Kane. The course will also include activities focused on animal engagement, such as visits to sanctuaries and birding expeditions. The final assignment will be a reflective essay on your relationship with animals on any level, both before and after taking the course.

ENL 4221

John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will be devoted to a close reading and in-depth study of what Stephen Greenblatt has rightly called “the greatest poem in the English language.” Theological, political, psychological, and gender issues will be all considered as we focus on understanding the language and autobiographical dimensions of Milton’s seventeenth-century epic about “man’s first disobedience.” Course requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENL 4303

The Brontës
Sean Grass

This course studies in detail the lives and literary works of the Brontës: Anne, Charlotte, Emily, and yes, even their wayward brother Branwell. It is hard to imagine a literary family who had a greater impact on the Victorian period than the Brontës, though they all died relatively young, and though they wrote at a time when it remained difficult for women to be taken seriously as literary artists. Yet the novels that came particularly from the three extraordinary sisters—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Villette, among others—just between 1847 and 1855 constitute a stunning body of literature. In this course, we will trace their literary accomplishments from their remarkable juvenilia, which involved poetry and extensive worldbuilding and mythmaking, through this rich and extraordinarily creative body of fiction. Assignments for this course will also include small-group presentations on lesser known works, a medium-length critical essay, and a final project that can be completed individually or in pairs and that can take the form of critical or creative work.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Divided Selves
Peter Rudnytsky

In Richard III, Richard II, and Hamlet, Shakespeare engages in an ever-deepening exploration of the paradoxes of identity, where the “I” both is and is not “I.” Richard III concludes the first tetralogy of history plays on the Wars of the Roses, while Richard II begins the second tetralogy and takes us back to the “second Fall of cursed man” that sets the entire sequence in motion. In Hamlet, Shakespeare builds on these earlier explorations of psychological and political conflict to achieve a radically original representation of inwardness that inaugurates his series of major tragedies. We will engage in a close reading of these three plays to try to appreciate them in all their psychological, political, and linguistic complexity. Course requirements are a midterm, a 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 3043

Modern African Drama
Apollo Amoko

TBA

LIT 3400

Ukrainian History Through Ukrainian Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

In July 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in which he proclaimed that Ukraine has no culture, language, or history separate from Russia – and is, in fact, not a nation. As scholars as Yale historian Timothy Snyder have observed, however, Putin’s essay is an exercise in self-contradiction: that is, by so emphatically denying Ukraine’s existence, it ultimately emphasizes it. More to the point, however, one has only to survey more than two centuries of Ukrainian literature to perceive the richness of the country’s distinct culture and to see how Ukraine existed as a modern nation even before it was recognized as a sovereign nation-state in 1991.

The purpose of this class, then, is to trace Ukraine’s history through its literature in English translation. Although any nation’s literature cannot directly reflect its history, it can nevertheless provide insights into the desires, anxieties, and conflicts that shaped its formation. Moreover, as post-colonial scholars have long argued, the study of literature produced by people living under, or emerging from, imperial rule offers insight into fraught and complex struggles of self-definition and self-expression.

Although this course cannot possibly cover the history of Ukraine and its literature within one semester, it is nevertheless designed to give students an introductory framework through which they can continue to expand and develop their knowledge of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in general. Each week will involve readings and lectures on key periods of Ukrainian history (e.g., the rise of the Cossacks, the birth of a modern national idea, and Ukraine’s colonial rule by the Tsarist Russian and Soviet empires) as well as discussions of selections from major literary works produced in those periods.

LIT 3400

Israeli-Arab Conflict on Stage and Screen
Roy Holler

The stage and screen have long served as platforms for reimagining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, offering perspectives that challenge state narratives and complicate mainstream representations. Through films, plays, and readings, we will explore how theater and cinema engage with themes of identity, displacement, resistance, and national myths.

Students will analyze how these works reflect the realities of war, occupation, and cultural conflict, while also considering how media serves as a tool for social change and political critique. By examining a range of theatrical and cinematic portrayals, this course encourages critical engagement with the ways national narratives are constructed, contested, and reshaped in both Israeli and Palestinian contexts. Through discussions, screenings, and written analysis, students will gain a deeper understanding of how art intersects with history, politics, and social movements in times of conflict.

LIT 3400

Hip Hop and Young Adult Literature
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 4332

Literature for the Young Child
TBA

TBA

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic

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 Kujundzic

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). 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

On the Road: Representations of America Through European Eyes
Eric Kligerman

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how both American and European writers represent the concept of the American Dream in 20th and 21st century literature and visual media. We will situate iconic works of American literature (Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Baldwin, Didion, Delillo and Coates) next to how the American dream is experienced by European writers and filmmakers, including Kafka, Adorno, Brecht, Nabokov, Baudrillard and Herzog. How has the American dream been re-imagined and represented by European writers and artists?

LIT 4930

Letters in Literature, Film and Philosophy
Richard Burt

In this course we’ll consider letters as posted documents and letters from the alphabetical: We’ll cover postcards, stolen letters; love letters, poison pen letters, blackmail; missing letters; letters in the dead letter office, and so on. Films include Trenque Laquen: Parts 1 and 2 (dir. Laura Citarella, 2022); Le Corbeau (The Raven); Letter from an Unknown Woman; The Letter; The Shop Around the Corner; Letter Never Sent; Lettres d’amour (Love Letters); and A Letter to Three Wives, among others. Nearly all the films we will watch are in black and white. Many of them are in French with English subtitles. The literature includes Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter; psychoanalytic philosophical essays on Poe’s short story by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida; Hermann Melville’s short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener; Henry James’s novella, The Aspern Papers; Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and The Whalestoe Letters; and two of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear and Twelfth Night.

LIT 4930

Passing: Black, White, Jewish
Roy Holler

Aren’t we all passing? Every day, we shift identities—adapting to expectations, altering how we present ourselves, and navigating what is accepted and what is taboo. But in a world where everyone passes in some way, how do we know when we’ve gone too far? This course begins with reviewing the history of African Americans passing as white, exploring narratives of mixed-race slaves, memoirs of passers, poetry, legal debates, and even an Ice Cube reality show on race-swapping. We then expand our lens globally, examining how minority groups, particularly transnational Jewish identities, have negotiated identity and survival.

Students will keep weekly journals, submit a comparative paper, and collaborate on a class podcast exploring the complexities of passing.