Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
Non-Repeatable Courses
Students may not repeat for credit courses that are not listed as repeatable in the Undergraduate Catalog. If you register for non-repeatable courses that you have previously taken, you will earn no credit for those courses and they will not count toward fulfillment of degree requirements. While some upper-division courses taught by the Department of English are repeatable for credit, many are not. You are responsible for knowing which courses may, and which courses may not, be repeated. You should, therefore, consult the Undergraduate Catalog in order to confirm that courses for which you wish to register more than once are, in fact, repeatable for credit.
Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses
Note: Course numbers listed in the table below are linked to course descriptions. Descriptions will expand when you click the course title.AML 3285
American Indian Literature
This course will acquaint students with some of the history of the American Indian experience and introduce them to literature created by American Indian authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider American Indian literature as a creative and collective interpretation of history and culture. We will also examine how contemporary literature addresses issues of concern to Indian people, including legal sovereignty, cultural survival, representations of Indians in non-native communities, and issues of environmental stewardship. Readings will consist mostly of novels, by authors including D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Tomson Highway, Le Anne Howe, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko. But we will also read works of criticism and historical material that will provide essential contexts and analysis for our literary reading.
Times: M W F 4
African American Literature I
Description: African American writers from 1746 to the present have written in all genres, leaving none unchanged by the appropriation. It is a literature that not only intertextualizes elements of the vernacular tradition (spirituals, folktales and the blues) and its own immediate past, but is a regenerative force of conscious construction and literary beauty within the history of American literature. The goal of this course is to investigate the transformational power of black imagination and artistic genius. Students will gain an understanding of and appreciation for the creative dexterity and conventions of this literature. The period covered begins with Lucy Terry’s 1746 “Bars Fight” and ends with the Harlem Renaissance. Although chronology is obscured by a focus on genre, readings are arranged so that students can trace the development of various genres and various styles, themes, images, and structures across time and within individual author’s works. In this way, the course emphasizes the creative process, intertextuality, and literary history.
Format: Class sessions include lectures but are discussion based primarily. The three-hour block of class time, Mondays, represents three class sessions. Participation in discussion is an important part of your grade. You should listen carefully to others, ask questions of me and other students, and share your ideas. I expect all students to create an environment that encourages the participation of everyone. If you feel uncomfortable with discussion-based classes or feel you cannot contribute successfully, you should drop this course immediately.
Required Texts and materials:
- Norton Anthology of African American Literature 3rd Edition, Vol. 1
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Pack of 3×5 index cards
Times: M 3-5
African American Lit 2
This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by well-known artists as well as writers whose works have been overlooked for various reasons. Readings and film screenings will cover such playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, novelists as James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, James McBride, Toni Morrison, John A. Williams, poets as Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and filmmakers as Spike Lee and Marlon Riggs.
Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize contemporary social and psychological conflicts that occur when individuals and groups resist societal pressures to conform to hegemonic beliefs about race, sexuality, and gender. (To describe a hegemonic belief formation is not to say that a majority supports this belief system about race, sexuality, and gender, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this singular racialized-sexualized-gendered vision of society.)
REQUIRED TEXTS
- James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room (New York: Random House, 1956)
- Wesley Brown. Push Comes to Shove (Concord, MA: Concord Free Press, 2009)
- Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Signet, 1959)
- LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Dutchman and The Slave (New York: William Morrow, 1964)
- Bob Kaufman. Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996)
- Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1959)
- James McBride. The Color of Water (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) ISBN 1-57322-578-9
- Lynn Nottage. Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004)
- John A. Williams. Clifford’s Blues (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998)
- Shay Youngblood. Black Girl in Paris (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001)
Note: Assigned and recommended texts and readings are held at the Reserve Desk on the second floor of Library West. Check the Reserve List for this course to see if any assigned essays or plays are available as PDF files on ARES (ELECTRONIC RESERVE) section on the Smathers Library Website. Look under Reid and this course’s section number.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
1) Pop Quizzes on weekly readings as well as film(s) screened in the previous class [10 points](1pt–3pts each)
2) Individual 5-minute oral presentation and 5 min Q&A. Instructor assigns each student their oral presentation of a required reading (5 minutes) Due Weeks 3–11 [20 points]
The grade on the presentation is based on the following criteria:
- The importance of the material presented to the class. Students must make brief references to primary scenes in a particular literary work (or film) to illustrate important issues and support their argument.
- The clarity of the written and oral work. Here, “clarity” refers to smooth oral delivery, correct use of descriptive terminology and grammar.
- The student’s ability to pose important questions to the class at the end of their oral presentation. Students must introduce the argument/thesis of their oral presentation based on their assigned section.
3) Students are responsible for a typed 1-page outline of their 5-minute discussion. [10 points]
The outline is due on the day when the student presents her/his 5-minute discussion.
4) MIDTERM EXAM 60 MINS [20 points]
5) FINAL EXAM 120 MINS [40 points]
The Final Exam covers all assigned readings, in-class film screenings, class discussions, and the pop quizzes.
Times: W 6-8
Eating, Food, and Asian America: Race, Culture, and Identity
Course Description: Food is necessary for life and hunger is a basic urge but eating and food are not simply about satisfying basic urges. Food is expressive. This course will bring food studies, psychoanalysis, and race studies to bear upon an understanding of Asian-American literary and cultural production. Anthropologists have long recognized that food is a metonym for culture and a way of expressing social identity. Food is also associated with power and control. For Asian Americans, as for other minorities food is often a marker of racial difference. Popular culture often promotes an exoticization of Asian Americans through food and ethnic restaurants in turn offer self-exoticization as a means of luring consumers: dragons abound in Chinese restaurants and geisha drinks in Japanese restaurants. In psychoanalysis images of consumption have related ideas of self to the Other: to consume the food of the Other might signify cultural assimilation and cultural cannibalism. At the same time cooking often means necessity: for Asian-American immigrants restaurants and grocery stores have often been the easiest means of earning a livelihood. This course brings together the cultural and political economies of foodways to examine Asian American literary and cultural production. We will examine works from a variety of Asian American genres including autobiographies, short stories, poems, memoirs, novels, and music videos.
Possible Texts
- Jade Snow Wong Fifth Chinese Daughter
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The Mistress of Spices
- Frank Chin Donald Duk
- Paul Kwon Anatomy of a Spring Roll
- Kim Wong Kelter The Dim Sum of All Things
- Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging
- Readings on canvas
Requirements: regular attendance; class participation; pop quizzes; two 7-8 page papers; one oral presentation
Times: T 2-3, R 3
Animals in American Literature and Culture
Melissa Bianchi
This is an interdisciplinary, discussion-based course that explores animals and human animality in American fiction, culture, and philosophy. Americans have and continue to use animals in a variety of ways—as companions, food, commodities, metaphors, spectacles, entertainment, projections of the self, etc. The course examines how relationships between humans and other animals have been conceived and challenged in American works. Some questions the course will explore include:
- How do animals and human animality in American works intersect with historical constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and class?
- What do animals and animalized humans in the course texts reveal about American identities, biopolitics, and ethics?
- How do American conceptions of animals (or “the animal”) circulate in and influence conversations about economies, exploitation, disability, the Anthropocene, and the post- and non-human turns?
By answering these and related queries, we might turn our attentions to the human-animal divide and consider alternative conceptions of being and ways that humans might engage with other animals. In addition to introducing students to the emerging field of animal studies and its applications in American literature, this course helps students to develop their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through class assignments and service-learning.
Times: T 5-6, R 6
Women Writing about Race: “The Trouble between Us”
Description: This course surveys women’s writing during the late 20th Century to the present, focusing on gendered Black and White race relations as presented in their literature and in American culture critiques. Students will trace, analyze and discuss how Black and White women talk about each other, coop and reject each other, or, simply, ignore each other in literature as they and their characters negotiate gendered social, political, and personal challenges.
Goals: To discover how change and racial relations are developed both in our culture and in the way writers and their readers respond to those changes and situations. Students will discuss how Black and White women, as represented in literature (and film adaptations), move through and solve challenging racial situations and bonding opportunities.
Format: The readings and teaching methods of this course are eclectic in pursuit of a variety of texts and experiences. The class sessions include lectures, discussions, and student reports. Our discussions will focus on novels, short stories, poetry, essays, videos and films. As investigators and scholars, our inquiries will play in the spaces between practice, method, and theory in order to address the commonalties, disruptions, gaps, absences, and silences that exist among the primary texts.
Primary Texts: (asterisked texts are available as eBooks)
- *Golden, Marita and Susan Richards Shreve, Eds. Skin Deep: Black and White Women Write about Race (ISBN: 0-385-47409-1)
- *Williams, Sherley Anne, Dessa Rose (ISBN: 0-68-05113-8)
- *Stockett, Kathryn, The Help (ISBN: 978-0-399-15534-5)
- Douglas, Ellen. Can’t Quit You, Baby (ISBN: 0-14-01.2102-1)
- *Walker, Alice. Meridian (ISBN: 0-15-602834-4)
- *Kidd, Sue Monk. The Invention of Wings (978-14-72212746)
Times: M 9-11
Imaginative Writing: The Short Story
What is a short story? No genre has so consistently eluded definition. Stories can range from eighty pages (Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”) to a single sentence (Amy Hempel’s “Housewife”). The purpose of this workshop will be to explore the parameters of this seductive and evasive form, from the standpoint both of the practitioner and the reader.
The class will be built around the idea that writers learn by reading. Therefore you may find the reading load heavier than is typical for a fiction workshop. Each week you will be asked to read a selection of stories by an established writer, and to arrive in class prepared to discuss them cogently. This conversation will take up roughly a third of our allotted time; the other two-thirds will be devoted to discussion of your own work and occasional in-class exercises.
The requirement of the class, in terms of writing, is that you complete two stories, the first by midterm and the second by term’s end. (The second may be an outgrowth of the first.) It goes without saying that attendance is mandatory, and that failure to show up (along with failure to do the reading) will have an adverse effect on your final grade. Grading will be based on your informed participation in the seminar, the critical acuity you show when judging other students’ writing, and your willingness to work hard.
The reading many include stories by Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, and Denis Johnson.
Times: M 6-8
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This workshop course, the penultimate in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing, seeks to help you write fiction better than you might already. Time is spent also on correct usage. We also seek to have you read better: to read for form, recognizing strength and weakness in your own and in others’ writing, and recognizing various technical maneuvers in the published work we will read.
Students write three pieces of fiction, delivering a copy to each class member one week prior to group criticism. Students participate in that group criticism with wit and cogency and pertinence and deliver a letter of good criticism for each story read. This criticism has one object: to improve the work.
Assigned readings, from a book or two by a major writer, will also be discussed. This reading will be looked at usually in a somewhat technical manner; it is hoped that in the best of all possible worlds the reading will inspire a mimicry of correct form as you make the long trek unto your own vision and your own good writing.
Times: M 9-11
Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
This is the intermediate poetry workshop for undergraduates. Successful applicants will have absolved two or more workshops, and be thoroughly conversant with workshop practice and etiquette (make copies of your poems; come to class with prepared comments on each other’s work; keep silence while being discussed). In addition to the workshop component, we will read work by Joseph Brodsky (A Part of Speech), Karen Solie (The Road in is not the Same Road Out), and Derek Walcott (Midsummer).
Times: T 9-11
Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
This workshop is intended for students who are serious about writing fiction and (or) who are contemplating attending MFA programs in creative writing. It is assumed that most students will already have fiction projects underway or in mind, though this is not a requirement. The reading may include stories by Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Mary Robison, and Denis Johnson.
Times: T 6-8
Advanced Poetry Writing
In this course we will read single volumes of poetry by English and American poets, and write poems and workshop them. Strong compositional skills are required, and close reading will be a large component of this course.
Times: M 3-5
Professional Communication
This is a course in workplace writing that aims to help you improve your prose style generally. You will learn basic concepts of style including cohesion, coherence, emphasis, and concision. You will write memos, letters, reports, instructions, and the like. You will learn to analyze and evaluate your own writing.
Texts will include Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (5th ed.), by Williams and Bizup, and material gathered from the internet. Work will include weekly writing assignments.
Provided you earn a final grade of C or better, this course can contribute 6000 words toward your fulfillment of the university’s Writing Requirement.
Times: T 2-3, R 3
Advanced Argumentative Writing
In this course, you will develop and write a research-based essay on a topic of your choice. You will draw this topic from one of the English Department’s many areas of study. While developing your topic and preparing to write your final essay, you will write several supporting documents. These include an annotated bibliography, a bibliographic essay (or literature review), and a review essay.
Texts will include The Craft of Research (3rd ed.), by Booth-Colomb-Williams, and material gathered from the internet.
Provided you earn a final grade of C or better, this course can contribute 6000 words toward your fulfillment of the university’s Writing Requirement.
Times: T 5-6, R 6
The Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism
Theory, Literature, and the Art of Reading
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 everyday. 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. Course readings will likely include essays and short books by, among others, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, Victor Shlovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, Louis Marin, Julia Kristeva, Paul de Man, Mikhail Bahktin, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Nancy K. Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Laura Mulvey, Slavoj Zizek, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Barbara Smith, Hortense Spillers, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Lisa Lowe, Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Michael McKeon, Rey Chow, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Janice Radway.
Times: T 5-6, R 6
History of Film 3
Daniel Norford
Concentrating on new Hollywood, post-new-wave French film, and post-independence cinema, this course will examine the international history of film from 1970 to the present. The goal is to sharpen understanding of the historical contexts and uses of film form. By exploring the changes that have taken place in film industries and technologies, students will begin to grasp the historical significance of important films and stylistic movements. This will lead to a consideration of each film’s place in film history, as well as social history. We will look at issues of industry and audience, considering representations of gender, race, and political change. Students will learn how to see films with a greater depth of visual understanding. Films to be screened include genres of Hollywood filmmaking, European cinema, and the cinemas of the formerly colonized world. We will look at directors whose talent shaped the development of cinema; we will also examine the role of actors and actresses, screenwriters, designers and producers in shaping the history of film.
Times: T 5-6, R 6, Screening: M E1-E3
Psychoanalysis and Literature
This course has three aims: to introduce students to the 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 from Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, and Bowlby, among others, while the literary texts will include Oedipus Rex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, “The Purloined Letter,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, Peter Pan, and Maus. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper, plus weekly nongraded journal entries. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
Times: M 10-E1
I See Deaf People: Disability and Silent Cinema
Richard Burt The class will begin or end with the films The Sixth Sense and White Noise focus on the way Bruce Willis’s death is linked both to his being a bad listener both to the patient who ended up murdering him and to other people being deaf to his attempts to communicate from beyond the grave (deafness is linked to death and the impossibility of mourning one’s own death). Over the past several years, I’ve been going deaf. Several recent surgeries have left me nearly blind in one eye. This course is both about silent film (Michel Chion calls it “deaf cinema” in his book Film, a Sound Art) and about how it has inadvertently been reinvented by closed captioning (CC) and audio description (AD) (like a silent film explainer for the blind). Foreign language subtitles only cover dialogue. Native language subtitles intended for the hard of hearing now regularly appear on DVDs. But CC does it all, dialogue, description, and music. AD works similarly. CD and AD are more and more a part of everyday life for everyone. You may also see CC on rows of TVs in front of treadmills and other Sisyphean exercise machines at gyms or at airport gates; you may ask why is my television talking to me?; or you may be surprised to learn that some who signed on TV didn’t know how to sign (fake Nelson Mandela interpreter); and there are special matinee CC screenings of films at movie theaters targeted to old people who can’t hear well). What happens if we think of Chion’s “deaf cinema” in sound film for the blind, the deaf and hard of hearing? What happens if we actually pay attention to CC and AD rather than ignore it if we do not need to use them? On youtube sound films scenes have been “unrestored” as silent films. http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/star_wars_as_silent_film.htmlJapanese anime films sometimes use “dubtitles” instead of subtitles. We will also look how music soundtracks are composed for silent films released over the past decade or so and we will explore the relation between player piano rolls and braille (see the player piano in Welles’s Touch of Evil). If you are not blind or deaf, I want you to watch whatever you watch during the semester on CC whenever possible and keep a journal of whatever you notice. If you are blind or deaf, I want you to experiment with watching films on a TV or computer while turning off the audio or CC. I will also ask you to write take some scenes from a silent film and be a silent film explainer for the close (I’ll ask you to write a script and turn it in to me before you deliver it to the class from memory). We will necessarily explore the history of U.S. disability law and its impact on the history of film and virtual film. I will ask you to keep a journal using paper notebook, not digital. CC and AD pose anew the question of film description (ekphrasis), foregrounding sound, the aspect of film that typically gets marginalized in film criticism and film theory, in silence, noise; ambient noise; ambient music; and music. See V. F. Perkin, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies and Wittgenstein. We will also liken deaf cinema and blind cinema to the deterioration of analog cinema and the recycling of film so deteriorated you can’t even see what was originally on it in avant-garde films such as Decasia: The State of Decay. And Lisbon Story, in which a director and soundman invent a new silent film that is identical to the end of Wim Wenders’ film Lisbon Story (1994). And we will devote some time to the reinvention of radio broadcasts by archived podcasts.
Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; two discussion questions and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each assigned reading each class and / or two discussion questions and three film shot analyses for each assigned film; student formulated quizzes each class; three 700 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films. For more information, go to http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Iseedeafpeople/. Times: T 2-3, R 3, Screening: T E1-E3
Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic
Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola, Anne Rice and Twilight. 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, etc.
The course will discuss the figure of the vampire in cinema and literature (Bram Stoker’s Dracula will be read or screened and analyzed, among others), as well as the rendering of the vampire in cinema (from Murnau’s Nosferatu, to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Shadow of the Vampire, and Twilight among others). The course will introduce students to the classics of vampire literature and cinema.
Times: T 8-9, R 9, Screening: W 9-11
Nazis in Film
Eric Kligerman
TBD
Times: W 6-8, Screening: R 9-11
Women in Film
This course will examine how women have been represented in film, how they have participated in film production, and how they consume film images. We will look at several feminist approaches and the range of debates as to how to address these issues.
The course will have several goals:
- To introduce you to the history of women in film,
- To increase your skills in viewing and reading film, and in reading critical writing about film,
- To increase your understanding of feminist theory
- To teach you how to appreciate different genres of filmic expression
- To engage you in debates and discussion, and to stimulate you to think
- To give you a deeper understanding of the struggles of women in the twentieth century
- To help you write your best research papers
Emphasis will be on such basic issues as viewer identification, the articulation of social values, and the function of cultural context, as currently formulated through various feminist and post-structuralist methodologies. We will explore how feminism intersects with psychoanalysis, ideology, deconstruction, and related approaches. We will examine the conjuncture of theoretical issues with an experience of specific films. We will look at the function of these films in the past, and in present reworkings of history.
Times: T 4, R 4-5, Screening: M 9-11
Modern Czech Cinema
Holly Raynard
When is film “propaganda,” and when does social experiment qualify as “art”? Does the Holocaust belong on the silver screen? How has Hollywood affected national cinemas? Is Prague a particularly apt location for reality genres?
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 more 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 the Aryanization of the Nazis to the “normalization” of the Soviet Union to the genre system and big budgets of Hollywood—and compare Czech trends to their Western counterparts. By the end of the course, students will understand the central socio-political and economic issues underlying Czech film culture from the 1930s to the present; be familiar with the major movements, genre and filmmakers in Czech cinema; and think critically about various approaches to cinema.
Course requirements include: attendance & participation, definition of terms, exam, course research paper.
Times: T 5-6, R 6, Screening: R E1-E3
Film & Video Production
Lauren DeFilippo
This beginning production course will combine practice and theory to introduce students to the fundamentals of nonfiction filmmaking. Learning how to shoot on Canon XH-A1 HD cameras and editing in Adobe Premiere, the class will explore the process of actualizing ideas in an audio-visual medium from the concept stage through post-production. You will acquire hands-on experience in directing, shooting, editing, and sound design as you move towards the creation of a five-minute (maximum) non-sync piece that will be screened publicly at the end of the semester.
In addition to production projects, we will also view films and discuss approaches that incorporate documentary, portraiture and/or performance. These screenings are mandatory and will inform the work you create. Class time will also consist of critiques of your creative work to emphasize the conceptual, aesthetic and technical aspects of production. A meaningful part of your final grade will depend on your participation in class discussions, critiques of your fellow classmates’ work and your ability to collaborate as a filmmaker. The overarching goal of the course is to consider an array of perspectives, disciplines, influences and filmmaking tools present in nonfiction filmmaking, while also honing your creative skills and cultivating your artistic vision through intensive practice. Please email instructor Lauren DeFilippo at defilipp@ufl.edu before April 15 in order to enroll in this course.
Times: T 7, R 7-8, Screening: T 9-11
Creating the Cinema of Climate Change
DeFilippo
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed an evolution in public discourse on climate change. Typically discussed in the media solely as a scientific, environmental, or political issue, climate change (aka global warming, climate crisis, climate disruption, carbon pollution—take your pick) is now in the midst of being reframed as a moral and creative challenge. How can we as humans on planet Earth react to the most overwhelming crisis of our time in an individual and affecting way? Such a challenge demands creative responses.
In this course, we will spend the semester developing your individual response to climate change in a cinematic form. To be clear, this is not a class about eco advocacy and activism in its conventional forms. You will instead learn about and engage with ways filmmakers, writers, and artists have begun to navigate the tumultuous landscape of imaginatively responding to climate change. With this awareness, and in conjunction with other smaller audio-visual projects throughout the semester, you will ultimately develop and produce a short 5–7 minute film—narrative, nonfiction, or in an experimental form—that encompasses your individual response. These final films will be screened publicly at the end of the semester where your attendance will be required to pass the class. Much of the course will be dedicated to in-class discussion as we develop our thoughts about this newly emerging discourse, and your participation and contributions will be essential. As a class, we will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through the stories we create that we weave reality.
Times: M 4-5, W 5, Screening: R 9-11
Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice
An Independent Study course may be taken for 1 to 3 credit hours, but will only count toward the fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the English major if a student registers for 3 credit hours.
This course is for advanced students who desire to supplement the regular courses by independent reading or research under the guidance of a member of the faculty. The student must find a faculty member who is willing to supervise the semester-long study, and together, the two create a project. The student must meet with the professor at designated times, agreed upon in advance, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.
Times: TBA
TBD
Undergraduate Coordinator
TBD
Times: TBA
Honors Seminar: Imagetexts
In this course, we will examine various textual forms – for example, comic books, graphic novels, illustrated novels, picture books, and photo books – whose mode of representation involves the combination of words and images. We will read these primary texts alongside works of critical theory in order to question how their study might contribute to scholarly discussions of narrative, literacy(s), perception, and ideology. Although the majority of the course will be devoted to seminar discussion, it will also involve visits to UF’s archival collections as well as guest lectures delivered by faculty and graduate students involved in the production of ImageTexT, an MLA-indexed journal housed at the University of Florida. Course requirements include a seminar presentation, an archival research assignment, and a final seminar paper.
Times: W 9-11
Internship
Undergraduate Coordinator
The English Department at the University of Florida offers three* credit hours of internship to its majors who provide the following to the Undergraduate Coordinator for approval:
- An offer to hire (from the employer) which states that the student will be working at least 12 hours per week for the entire semester (Fall, Spring, or Summer C), or 24 hours per week for a Summer A or B term. Said document should be produced on the company letterhead and should outline the job duties for the internship position.
- A personal statement (submitted along with the offer of hire) about why the student wants to take the internship and how it relates to the student’s future plans.
Once the Undergraduate Coordinator has approved the internship requested by the student, the department will register the student for the internship credits.
Upon completion of the internship:
- The supervisor of the student must submit a job performance evaluation to the Undergraduate Coordinator by Wednesday of finals week so that a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory may be submitted to the Registrar. The evaluation may be faxed, mailed, or hand delivered.
- The student must submit a personal evaluation of the work experience provided by the internship by the same day as above.
*For two credit hours, the student would need to work 8 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 16 hours per week for Summer A or B.
*For one credit hour, the student would need to work 4 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 8 hours per week for Summer A or B.
Please note the following limitations on the English Internship:
- A student may register for the English Department Internship for three credits ONLY ONCE; no more than three hours worth of internship credit may be counted toward coursework in the major.
- Because no English Department course carrying fewer than 3 credit hours counts towards the major, your internship will not count as part of your major coursework if you register for fewer than 3 credits.
Times: TBA
Poetry, Government, and the Origins of “Sexuality” in the Sixteenth Century
Historian of sexuality Michel Foucault has argued that early modern men and women in the West started to focus ever-increasing attention on their bodies, pleasures, sensations and impressions, and that they did so with the goal of governing their own behavior and the behavior of others. According to Foucault, this heightened attention to sensations, impressions, and pleasures would, approximately 200 years later, result in the emergence of an object of knowledge and an experience called “sexuality”—a term that no sixteenth-century Englishman or Englishwoman would have understood.
This course takes Foucault’s historical sketch as its point of departure, and explores the hypothesis that sixteenth-century poetry and poetic theory also participate in this intensified focus that people brought to bear on their desires, sensations and pleasures, and thus helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual emergence of “sexuality.” In order to elaborate and test this hypothesis, we will ask such questions as: How do texts that defend and attack poetry in the period conceptualize poetry’s effect on its readers? In what ways are readers’ pleasures and desires supposed to be stimulated by poetry, and how are poetic pleasure and the desires it excites related to the government of the self and others? What are the implications of the fact that rhetorical, educational and poetic theories privileged the imitation and translation of authoritative models? How do poets and poetic theorists conceptualize imagination? What do disputes over poetic diction reveal about what one might call the “government of the tongue?” How does “love poetry”—primarily imitative of Petrarch—define relations between lover and beloved, beauty and desire, desire and reason, desire and virtue? What kinds of bodies and psyches are assumed or produced by such “love poetry,” by religious verse (translations of the Psalms, for example), and by allegorical epic?
Readings will include the first two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as selected lectures and essays by Foucault; materials drawn from early modern English social and political history; and, of course, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poetry and poetic theory by such writers as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Richard Sackville, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke), George Puttenham, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon. If students want to get a head start on the work for the semester, they can read New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603, Susan Brigden’s history of sixteenth-century Britain.
In all likelihood, the following will be the assigned texts for the semester:
- Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism
- Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603
- Danielle Clark (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
- —., The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure
- William Shakespeare, The Sonnets
- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
- Richard S. Sylvester (ed.), English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology
- Xerox packet of materials
Given the topic of this course, it should be of interest to students pursuing any of the following English Department Undergraduate Models of Study: British Literature, Cultural Studies, Studies in Theory, or Feminisms, Genders and Sexualities.
I anticipate that students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, a 6-page paper at midterm, an in-class presentation, and a 12-page final paper.
Times: T 8-9, R 9
Honors Thesis Project
Faculty Members (2) of Choice
Students must have have completed at least one semester of ENG 4936, Honors Seminar. Open to English Honors students.
The student must select two faculty members: one to direct the reading, research, and writing of a thesis on a topic of the student’s and director’s chosing, and another as the second reader. An abstract (100 to 200 words) must be delivered to the CLAS Academic Advising Center on Fletcher Road at least 10 days before graduation.
Times: TBA
The Nineteenth-Century English Novel
Sarah Kniesler
This course traces how the British novel evolved during the long nineteenth century. The nineteenth century saw significant changes in the literary marketplace; more people gained access to and began reading newspapers, magazines, and books. During this time, the British novel emerged as a dominant popular form even as the press, religious leaders, and novelists themselves disparaged the novel as (at times) silly, shocking, and addictive. With this context in mind, we will consider the novel both as a form and as a tool for negotiating the significant social, political, and technological changes that occurred over the course of the Victorian era. We will read a range of genres and explore the shifting understandings of issues like: class conflicts, gender roles, sexuality, and the role of the nation.
This course provides upper-division credit in the major, and will be taught with that in mind; therefore, students will be expected to know how to do research in the field and to attempt the application of critical frameworks. Due to the nature of the material, there is a considerable amount of reading. Carefully consider your reading speed and the expectations of the other courses you are taking before committing to this course.
Possible primary texts include: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, H. Rider Haggard’s She, and Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. In addition to the novels, you will also be expected to read and engage with critical articles.
Times: T 4, R 4-5
Sweetening the Pill: Literature and Ethics in the Long Eighteenth Century
Roger Maioli
Modern readers usually resent it when an author pauses the plot of a novel to wax didactic. Nothing could be more distant from eighteenth-century sensibilities, however. From Eliza Haywood to Samuel Johnson and Henry Mackenzie, British authors from the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1800) insisted that literature should be a vehicle for moral lessons—the sugarcoating that made the pill of instruction more palatable. This course will examine how these authors endeavored to direct literature towards an ethical mission. We will begin by reading a selection of “immoral” pieces from the Restoration (such as the pornographic poems of the Earl of Rochester and Sir John Vanbrugh’s scandalous play The Relapse), together with the responses they elicited from moralistic critics. We will then consider how subsequent writers endeavored to purify literature and subordinate its pleasures to the cause of instruction. In many cases, they brought prose fiction, drama, and poetry to bear on urgent moral issues, offering cautionary tales, providing young readers with guidelines for conduct, and developing sophisticated responses to contemporary moral philosophy. Just as often, however, they paid lip service to the cause of instruction while prioritizing entertainment. We will consider their successes and failures, as well as the implications of both for our current conception of literature and its ends. Readings will include poems by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Charlotte Smith’s radical novel Desmond, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedic masterpiece The School for Scandal.
Times: T 4, R 4-5
Shakespeare and Extreme Mental States
This course will undertake close readings of selected major tragedies and romances to explore Shakespeare’s depiction of the outer reaches of human experience, from various forms of severe mental illness to radical forgiveness and love. We don’t need psychoanalysis to understand Shakespeare, but if we can understand Shakespeare we will grasp the essence of psychoanalysis. The plays will be Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, with perhaps a few supplementary critical essays. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
Times: T 10-E1
Shakespeare—Learning by Doing
We “study” Shakespeare by staging scenes from his plays. Each student works with an acting partner—the couple is responsible for performing 3-4 shortened versions of scenes, then working with me as their director.
In effect, we approach Shakespeare’s plays as actors and directors, charged with building a character, enacting that character through delivery, gesture, stage movement, subtext.
We will look at Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and also Tom’s Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Students are graded equally on their scene work and a short paper in which they assess their rehearsal experience with the scene, from the perspective of both the character and their decisions as an actor.
Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida, the author of some eleven books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.
Times: T 2-3, R 3
The Bible as Literature
According to conventional wisdom, the Judeo-Christian Bible is a book. Indeed, in certain religious communities, it is regarded as TheBook. 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 (New Oxford Annotated edition, with apocrypha). We will examine such different literary forms as origin myths (Genesis), romance/quest narrative (Exodus), lyrical poetry (the Psalms), erotic poetry (Song of Songs/the Song of Solomon), prophecy (Isaiah), fairy tales (Job), gospel tales (the synoptic gospels and the Book of John), epistolary writing (Paul), and apocalyptic literature (Daniel and the Revelations of St. John the Divine). We will also study the influence of these forms on secular works of literature (e.g., those by Kafka, 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.
N.B. This is a literature course—not a course on religion or theology. Previous familiarity with the Bible is not a prerequisite.
Times: T 7, R 7-8
Afro-European Literatures
This course surveys contemporary literature about Afro-Europeans and African American expatriates in Western Europe. Weekly readings will cover literature, critical theory, philosophy, and political essays that discuss and imaginatively represent the socioeconomic and cultural integration or non-integration of Afro-Europeans (citizens and immigrants of Western European countries) who have ancestral ties to North and sub-Saharan Africa.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
1) Pop Quizzes on weekly readings as well as film(s) screened in the previous class [10 points] (1pt–3pts each)
2) Individual 5-minute oral presentation and 5 min Q&A. Instructor assigns each student their oral presentation of a required reading (5 minutes) Due Weeks 3–11 [20 points]
The grade on the presentation is based on the following criteria:
- The importance of the material presented to the class. Students must make brief references to primary scenes in a particular literary work (or film) to illustrate important issues and support their argument.
- The clarity of the written and oral work. Here, “clarity” refers to smooth oral delivery, correct use of descriptive terminology and grammar.
- The student’s ability to pose important questions to the class at the end of their oral presentation. Students must introduce the argument/thesis of their oral presentation based on their assigned section.
3) Students are responsible for a typed 1-page outline of their 5-minute discussion. [10 points]
The outline is due on the day when the student presents her/his 5-minute discussion.
4) MIDTERM EXAM 60MINS [20 points]
5) FINAL EXAM 120MINS [40 points]
The Final Exam covers all assigned readings, in-class film screenings, class discussions, and the pop quizzes.
Times: T 6-8
Postcolonial Theory
Course Description: This course introduces you to the field of postcolonial theory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few European powers had colonized 80% of Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements during the latter half of the century led to territorial, but not necessarily economic, cultural and intellectual decolonization. The continuing cultural, political, and economic effects of colonialism, as well as new forms of colonialism and imperialism sanctioned on the global South constitute the field of postcolonial studies. We will study the ways in which postcolonial theory has intersected with and impacted diverse areas of inquiry such as feminism, historiography, ethnography, politics, and literature. At the same time, this course will stress the importance of historicizing postcoloniality. The course will focus on the central concerns of postcolonial studies: the nature of colonial discourse, the articulation of revolutionary national consciousness, questions of subalternity and history, the relationship of postcolonial studies to gender studies, and the politics of contemporary colonialism and neocolonialism. We will read the works of major revolutionaries and theorists and the debates and arguments about these works. The course will cover writings from and about the major parts of the world affected by imperialism: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the U.S. We will see how postcolonial theory can be useful in analyzing conditions of oppression today.
This is an intensive discussion course. Please come to class prepared to raise questions about the readings for the day. I am interested in your active responses to the materials you are reading.
Possible Required Texts
- Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
- Edward Said Orientalism
- Moira Ferguson History of Mary Prince (This edition only)
- Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions
Essays put on sakai or electronic books, both of which you need to print and bring to class.
Readings on Canvas
Course Requirements: regular attendance; class discussion; pop quizzes; two take home essay exams; one oral presentation.
Times: T 7, R 7-8
Children’s Literature
KaTosha O’Daniel
In the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, an entire sequence was devoted to children’s literature, an artistic choice that confirms the cultural significance of the genre on a global scale: children’s literature is more than entertainment; it is embedded in our culture and across multiple mediums.
This course aims to provide breadth and depth of the children’s literature genre as we evaluate the shifting ideologies of the child and their literatures. Throughout the course, we will examine texts written for and embraced by the child reader as we consider the major issues and themes, publishing histories, and cultural backdrop in which each text was written. As a genre written by adults for the intended child audience, this course will also consider the implications of writing “for the child.”
Course readings will draw from American, English, and World Literatures and include a range of canonical and noncanonical fairy tales, graphic novels, novels, novellas, picturebooks, poems, and short stories. Readings and class discussions will be supplemented with critical, secondary texts and excerpts from adaptations via new medias.
Tentative course assignments include several short writing assignments, a mid-term and final exam, and reading quizzes.
This class is heavily discussion based; a significant portion of your grade will be determined by active class participation.
Times: T 7, R 7-8
Black Englishes
James Essegbey
Description
Unlike Danish which is the language spoken by the Danes or Japanese which is the language the Japanese, English is not just a language of the English, even if that is where it originates. Today, the language has spread across the globe and has been appropriated by regions such that we can talk of Australian English, Nigerian English, etc. While most of the varieties of English can be understood for the most part by every English speaker, there are restructured varieties such as Sranan spoken in Surinam that are more difficult to follow. In fact, these have developed into different languages.
Objectives
The aim of this course is to present students with varieties of English spoken by Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Students will learn about the structure of these varieties as well as the social histories which underpin them. They will be made to appreciate difficulties in using terms like dialect versus language to describe these varieties. Further, they will watch movies and interact with native speakers of these varieties with a view to identifying features that set them apart. Students will also be introduced to such concepts like “pidgins” and “creoles.” Students will also learn to distinguish between “broken English” and Pidgin or Creole English.
Times: M W F 7
Death Sentences: Philosophy and Free Speech from Socrates to Derrida
Richard Burt We will read all dialogues by Plato and Xenophon related to Socrates’ trial and death sentence alongside Jacques Derrida’s Seminar on the Death Penalty, Vol. 1. We will also examine a number of texts taken up by Derrida in his seminar. Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; two discussion questions and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class; student formulated quizzes each class; three 700 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts? and films. For more information, go to http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Iseedeafpeople/ Times: T 4, R 4-5