Department of English

African American Literature I

Delia Steverson

This course is designed as an introductory survey of texts and discourses within the African American literary tradition. As we explore critical works within this tradition, from the earliest slavery to the Harlem Renaissance, we will frame our close textual readings and literary analyses within the context of critical movements and discourses in social, cultural, and literary history. We will be particularly engaged in examining the manner in which literary works and other forms of African American cultural production reveal and respond to social and cultural ideologies, especially those that impact constructions of difference and the formation of identity, subjectivity, and/or the notion of the self.

Asian-American Studies

Alyssa Hunziker

Between the late-19th and mid-20th centuries, the US would colonize or militarily intervene throughout the Pacific and many parts of Asia: including colonies in Hawai’i and the Philippines, and ongoing wars in Korea and Vietnam. Given this history of US empire in the Pacific, this course examines the relationship between empire and Asian American literature. We will discuss how Asian American authors reflect, historicize, or reject US imperial ideologies through literature. To narrow our historical context, our units will focus on Asian American settler colonialism in Hawai’i, and empire in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Korea. As such, students will be introduced to concepts such as orientalism, militarism, colonial schooling, neo- and post-colonialism, and settler colonialism, while also looking at how racial and gender identities inform colonial relationships.

We will primarily discuss novels and some critical essays, but may also discuss poems and a film. Possible texts include works by R. Zamora Linmark, Gary Pak, Aimee Phan, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jessica Hagedorn, and Peter Bacho. Assignments may include reading quizzes, two short papers, and one final research paper.

Women Writing About Race: “The Trouble Between Us”

Debra Walker King

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. The primary goal of the course is to discover how change and racial relations develop both in our culture and in the manner 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.

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Camille Bordas

Our workshop will be conducted in traditional workshop fashion: each week, we will discuss two short stories (or novel excerpts), by two different students. Every student will turn in two pieces of fiction over the course of the semester.

The writer whose work is being critiqued is expected to turn in a piece he or she believes to be as close to being finished as possible. The students critiquing the piece will treat it as published work, meaning they will discuss it as if the writer has deep intentions behind every line (which hopefully they do) and they, as readers, want to understand those intentions. Students are expected, each week, to write letters to those who are being critiqued : letters that describe what the piece that is being critiqued has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it might achieve, etc

Dedication to understanding what each writer is trying to do, regardless of their aesthetic preferences, is mandatory. Also mandatory: that the writers be prepared to hear what the others have to say about their work. It is hard being critiqued, but we’re all here to help each other become better writers.

Students will be required to read (from a course-packet) one or two short stories a week, which we’ll discuss in class. The focus of these discussions will be on how the stories operate on the reader. In other words, we’ll try to dissect published works to see what makes them work.

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Uwem Akpan

CRW 3110 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.

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

Ange Mlinko

CRW 3310 is a poetry workshop geared to students who have already taken at least one introductory poetry (not fiction) workshop. It is a seminar format, so attendance is important; we will write poems, sometimes in strict forms, and appraise them for their ability to move us and amuse us. We will also be reading individual poems from an anthology, and imitating techniques and genres. Students in this class should be prepared to think about language and its limits, as well as how language disciplines and amplifies emotion.

Imaginative Writing: Poetry

William Logan

“Poorly depicted clouds — which most people would not notice as wrong — are so disturbing to Dr. Thornes that they almost spoil visits to museums. For a meteorologist, the distraction is as great as the ordinary viewer being confronted by a figure with three arms. . . . [He added that] too many artists had painted [clouds] as they would a backcloth in a theatre.”
—Guardian (London), 9 August 2000

They told stories about [the country and western singer] Bill Monroe biting into his first bagel (“Dang! This is the worst doughnut I ever did eat!”).
—Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker, May 14, 2007

In this workshop we will attend to words as closely as a painter attends to paint—or to clouds. You will read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Henri Cole, and write a poem a week. Every week in addition to poems from students the workshop will consider for discussion poems from poets past and present. This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken at least one lower-division workshop (CRW 1301 or CRW 2300) and who want to press their understandings of poetic language even further.

Email of your manuscript is necessary for early registration. Please submit four poems to wlogan@english.ufl.edu in one attachment in .pdf format. Mention the workshops you have previously taken.

Required reading (tentative):

• American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker
• Donald Justice, New and Selected Poems
• W. H. Auden, Selected Poems
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead
• Louise Glück, The First Four Books of Poems

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Uwem Akpan

CW4905 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.

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

Michael Hofmann

This is the senior undergraduate poetry workshop at UF. Because poetry is like a googly (or ‘wrong’un’ — that’s a curveball to you), because it moves ‘round the corner’ and a little unpredictably, like a knight at chess, I’m proposing to offer two books from Eastern (or Central) Europe: Zbigniew Herbert’s Selected Poems, and Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space. That’s one from Poland, and one from Albania.

If poetry is about restraint, I don’t see why one shouldn’t learn from tyranny and censorship. It’s good practice, anyway.

The course will appeal to enterprising and cosmopolitan souls. You will write poems to a wide array of prompts and subjects (and none).

Advanced Exposition: Makeademia

Emily Brooks

We are already in the habit of daily verbal and textual exposition: describing observations, narrating events, providing instructions, linking causes to effects, comparing and contrasting ideas, illustrating our points of view, defining moments, classifying new experiences, and making connections. We generate these strings of characters, syllables, words to make something that has never quite existed in exactly that combination before—just as makers use the same toolboxes, technologies, or raw materials to make new, unique artifacts. How is writing, then, a form of making? In this course, we will explore how humanist scholars experiment, create, and make things through research.

This course will teach you how to enhance your writing style (clarity, coherence, cohesion, concision, and elegance) and design thinking habits (color, typography, layout, visuals, and medium). You will read a style handbook and select chapters and project snapshots from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. Based on the readings, you will make things like zines, animated GIFs, and 3D prints and write 6000 words as blog posts in various expository exercises.

The Theorists: Anzaldúa and Moraga

Raúl Sánchez

This course examines major texts by chicana feminist writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe L. Moraga, as well as secondary sources about these texts. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios will form the core of the course, around which additional readings will revolve.

Before each class meeting, you will write a detailed question about the day’s reading assignment and post it to the course discussion board for others to read. You will also write an annotated bibliography (15 entries minimum) and a literature review (2500 words minimum) on a topic we will have chosen together.

History of Film I

Trevor Mowchun

The course provides an overview of the history of film from its origin to the coming of sound. The course is designed as the first part of a sequence on the history of film, but does not need to be taken in chronological order. The objective is to gain an overview of the historical development of early cinema, based on an understanding of key concepts in film studies and approaches to early cinema in film theory. Topics will include the beginning of film, the emergence of genres (western, horror, melodrama, comedy); the early social melodrama and the race film; montage and expressionism; and the aesthetics of a silent film language. The course relies on regular required weekly film screenings and readings.

Psychoanalysis and Literature

Peter Rudnytsky

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 feature Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Kohut, and Bowlby, while the literary texts will include Oedipus Rex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Nin’s Winter of Artifice, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man. 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.

ENG 4133

Digital Film Editions

Richard Burt

We will explore digital cinephilia by attending to the many and quite varied ways in which digital film releases have been modelled on the critical literary edition, focusing as much on the supplements as on the films themselves. We look primarily at digital editions published by the Criterion Collection, BFI, and Eureka! Masters of Cinema, but we will also look at other cinephilic editions that default to the literary critical edition (such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Films will range from silent to talking, from black and white to color, and by nation. We will be looking at films closely the way filmmakers do. Requirements: TOTAL ATTENDANCE; co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; two discussion questions; and three Film SHOTS for 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, please click here.​

Chinese Film &amp Media

Xiao Ying

TBA

ENG 4136

Basic Video Production: Process and Expression

Trevor Mowchun

This course is a meditation on the creative process and an exploration of the unique and inexhaustible ways that the cinematic medium activates such processes and leads the imagination into free uncharted territory. We will begin with a survey of various creative principles, methods, tools and general philosophies of “making” as expressed by artists, teachers, critics and theorists from diverse backgrounds, with particular attention paid to the insights of independent and experimental filmmakers. The goal of this “study phase” is to open a window into the inner workings of the creative process, analyze films from the perspective of their own making, and ultimately enrich, stimulate and guide creativity throughout the entire filmmaking process from concept to screen. Along the way we will be concerned with a view of cinema as a unique, evolving, visionary artform with great individual and social impact. Students will be introduced to the expressive and experimental potential of cinema through a wide range of short exercises exploring the medium’s many technological, aesthetic and hybrid facets (i.e. image, sound, time, space, movement, montage, the frame, the face). These film exercises or “sketches” will be compiled into two film notebooks to be submitted. Students will also be asked to keep a written notebook related to the activities of the film notebooks, documenting creative processes, inspirations, concepts and ideas, research findings, aesthetic and technological problems, etc., in addition to written responses to readings and screenings assigned in class. A final project will grow of a rigorous process of selecting, organizing, revising and expanding material from the film notebooks, resulting in an aesthetically coherent final notebook of filmic expression.

Admission to this course is restricted to students who have taken one of the following 3000-level film and media studies courses: Introduction to Film: Criticism and Theory (ENG 3115), History of Film 1 (ENG 3121), History of Film 2 (ENG 3122), or History of Film 3 (ENG 3125).

Advanced Video Production: Cinematic Consciousness

Trevor Mowchun

In this advanced film production course, we will take seriously and experiment with the radical notion that the medium of film can function not only as a mode of expression but also of thought, in the deepest sense of the word. Through an examination of the resonant connections between film theory and practice, we will explore and perhaps discover a variety of audiovisual configurations which break away from conventional representations of human experience, thus opening new aesthetic horizons of awareness and insight into the world in which we live. Such an endeavor involves building a deeper understanding and appreciation of how film works as a multilayered artistic language, in addition to how such a language might be expanded, refined and rendered amenable to interpretation. Our studies will cover some of the ways classical and contemporary film theorists discuss the old question “What is film?”, as both a bottomless source of inspiration for making new films and as a means for keeping the nature or ontology of film fundamentally open-ended. The speculative power of film theory will also serve as a basis for posing questions of a more philosophical nature through the medium of film, giving way to a form of questioning directed at the medium itself. Exploratory works of film theory will therefore be as vital in guiding the filmmaking process as the achievements of individual films, fueling experimentations with narrative, sound, mise-en-scène and montage. Using the idea of “cinematic consciousness,” students will conceptualize, research and create a fully realized short film with its own singular thought process, one which not only supersedes the narrative logic and ostensible subject matter but also exceeds in some way the limits of human consciousness itself. Substantial material from preproduction, production and postproduction phases of work—i.e. research, annotated bibliographies, journals, treatments, screenplays, graphic designs, storyboards, camera tests, formal experiments, shooting plans, sound design, rushes, rough cuts, music, etc.—are required and must be submitted periodically throughout the semester to ensure that the film is coming together effectively and on schedule. Students will also be required to critique and interpret each other’s work in written form.

Admission to this course is restricted to students who have taken the prerequisite Basic Video Production course (ENG 4136).

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.

Undergraduate Research in English

Undergraduate Coordinator

TBD

Honors Seminar: Blending Boundaries, Breaking Barriers in SF

S.A. Smith

From the inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body, in order to more fully understand what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we call robots, androids or cyborgs, like the novel I, Robot, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, as in the novel Dawn, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this honors seminar we shall revisit older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, read critical theory about such works, and in the end perform some fictional thought-experiments about the body of our own. Readings will include probably include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, C.L. Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederick Pohl, Donna J. Haraway, Octavia Butler, and more.

Honors Seminar: Law and American Literature

Susan Hegeman

In this course, we will study works of American literature written between 1850 and 2018 that substantially engage with some aspect of our legal system. We will discuss how works of literature address important themes related to the law including justice, crime, punishment, and the power of the state. We will also study the formal relationships between legal and literary forms of storytelling, and compare literary interpretation and legal reasoning. Course reading will include novels (Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, among others), court cases, and works of legal and literary theory and criticism.

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.

Writing Childhood

John Cech

Through a number of genres of writing for young people as well as through works intended for adults, this seminar will explore some of the ways that we write about childhood. In a sense, this creative process is an act of memory, of recovering those feelings and experiences — real, imagined, archetypal — that guide each of us in our construction and reconstructions of our own childhoods as well as in our larger, cultural understanding of childhood. This course is meant to inspire your own journeys into that past that still lingers within each of us and that may find expression through narrative, poetry, drawing, music, autobiography, drama, film, photography, and other acts of the imagination. The focus of the seminar will be on the wide-ranging creative works that you will produce during the semester. ​

Queer Life/Writing

Kim Emery

This course explores autobiography, memoir, and autobiographical fiction produced by LGBTQ authors in the United States during the latter 20th and early 21st centuries. Because queer self-fashioning has, historically, very often occurred within hostile and/or uncomprehending environments, we will seek to contextualize these works not only in relation to the broad literary tradition of life writing, but also in connection to specifically queer concerns, including theoretical and historical frameworks, genre conventions, and life expectations especially influential in shaping queer self-invention and representation.

As a department seminar, this class will be reading intensive and discussion based. Several informal reading responses, one class presentation, and two analytical papers are required. Please email the instructor with any questions: Prof. Kim Emery, kimemery@ufl.edu

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.

Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Pamela Gilbert

This course samples key developments in the British novel through the nineteenth century. We will examine the novels within three contexts: historical, literary-historical, and critical. If you have not had English 2022, you should plan to familiarize yourself with the period: the Norton Anthology introduction to the period is a good place to start. Gilmour’s and Houghton’s books are also very useful and are on reserve in the library.

The Victorian period was the great age of the novel’s emergence as a dominant popular form within a newly extensive literary marketplace, and Victorian novelists were consummate entertainers driven to sell widely and well. They were also preoccupied with the condition of their own culture; to paraphrase Richard Altick, rarely is the Present so much present in literature as it is in the novel of this period. Victorian novelists considered it their duty and pleasure to criticize, praise and generally comment upon current issues, and they developed new forms and genres to accommodate their purposes. These issues represent the formative phases of social concerns which we have inherited and which still define us: for example, the role of mass media, the ethics of capitalism, gender roles, the responsibilities of liberal government, the welfare state, pollution, the role of nation in the global community, etc. We will read a range of representative genres and consider them not only in the light of the emergence of the novel as a dominant form, but as documents of a culture’s attempts to represent and work out these issues of contemporary importance—aesthetically and ethically—and consider the ways in which Victorian ideas resonate for us today.

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 texts:

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House
• M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
• George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
• H. Rider Haggard, She

other critical readings to be provided.​

Before Jane 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 Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Penelope Aubin, and Mary Davis; we will then proceed to Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple, novels of manners by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and 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.

Victorian Bodies

Rae Yan

During the Victorian Era, Britain saw a population boom—in the city of London alone, the population exploded from roughly 1 million people in 1800, to over 6 million by the century’s end. The change in demographics brought Britons to a new awareness of the diversity of bodies now a part of the Empire and the diversity of bodies that lived just outside the Empire. As we will see, Victorian texts are crowded with this self-consciousness about bodies that are old, young, global, classed, gendered, pathologized, and racialized. We will read broadly across the Victorian age in order to explore the political, historical, and cultural significance of these myriad bodily representations. In the process, we will study literary texts (novels, short stories, poems), alongside essays, political tracts, and scientific treatises. Course texts will likely include works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Please note that this is a seminar-style class that requires active participation and daily attendance. Assignments include (a) submitting notes taken during the reading of each text; (b) short response papers; and (c) a final paper that synthesizes literary analysis, historical contexts, and literary criticism.

Twentieth Century British Literature: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and the Modernist Revolution

Phillip E. Wegner

In one of her best-known interventions in the literary debates of the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf claims “that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” As a consequence of this change, Woolf goes on to suggest, “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” It would be the project of the variety of artistic and cultural movements that we now describe as modernism to give voice to the experience of these and many other of the explosive social and cultural changes of the new century. In this course, we shall investigate some of the issues surrounding the modernist revolution, while also considering modernism itself as a kind of revolution, as they are raised in the work of three of the most important “British” authors of the first half of the twentieth-century: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In addition to exploring the rich aesthetic and formal issues raised by these writers’ work—what, for example, did T. S. Eliot mean when he wrote that Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses (1922) is “not a novel?”—we shall look at the way that these writers’ works respond to and help us understand the cultural and social histories in which they unfold. Indeed, one of the first questions these writers force us to confront is what is “British” about British literature in this moment—after all, Conrad is the child of exiled Polish patriots and only learns English as an adult; Joyce is Irish, writing in a language that is always for him, as his character Stephen Dedalus puts it, “an acquired speech;” and Woolf tirelessly interrogates the status of the woman artist in relationship the traditional centers of English cultural power. Similarly, these works will lead us into an investigation of the relationship between literature and the fundamental realties of the new century: the massive institution of British imperialism; the creation of a global culture; industrial technology; the rise of mass culture; the experience of the city; the proximity of social revolution; new media such as film; and the changing place of women in culture and society. Finally, all of these works will ask us important questions about the roles of the artist and the work of art in this newly emerging world. Our readings will be divided into three roughly five week sections and will include, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow cycle of Youth (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900); James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) and Ulysses (1922); and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931).

Shakespeare and Extreme Mental States

Peter Rudnytsky

This course will undertake close readings of one early comedy and selected major tragedies and romances to explore Shakespeare’s depiction of the outer—and inner—reaches of human experience, from various forms of severe mental illness to problems of identity and 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 likely be The Comedy of Errors, 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.

All Joking Aside: The Art and Craft of Comedy

Sid Homan

The assumption in all my theatre courses is that the text of a play is not just what is written on the page but that text in performance, delivered by actors before an audience. This means the play’s text also includes gestures, movement, blocking (the stage picture), and sub-text (what the character is saying inwardly, beneath the lines delivered onstage, as well as the “history” for that character invented by the actor). In the theatre, we would further supplement this text with lighting, sound, set, costumes, props, and make-up. To be sure, one can approach a play in a thousand ways—as literature, as a repository for the thinking of an age, as the springboard for political or cultural issues. But, since I work both on campus and in the theatre as an actor and director, and since the theatre itself is a unique medium with its own aesthetic principles, I approach the plays, with my students, and as a fellow “student,” as something meant to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience. In the class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” that scene with the two actors, trying out options, rehearsing it. The emphasis, therefore, is on learning by doing, and I judge student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is considered a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal for a scene. Performances and the scene papers count equally.

In LIT 3041 we explore through such in-class performances the genre of stage comedy. What makes us laugh? Why do we find this character or this situation funny? How does the general term “comedy” manage to include everything from farce to satire, from romantic or sentimental or surreal comedy to the profound comic world of, say, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencratnz and Guildenstern Are Dead? These questions come under the “Art” in the course’s subtitle.

But of equal importance is that other word, “Craft.” How can we make something comic on stage? What is the “craft” (the particular skill, the various strategies, the “rules” of enactment, the styles) of the comic actor? As actors and directors, how do we establish a comic “world”? How do you make a joke or a comic situation work with an audience?

Along with Stoppard’s play mentioned above, we use as our text the book Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays, edited by Eric Land and Nina Shengold. There we will try our hands at performing everything from a parody of the psychologist/patient relationship in Alan Ball’s Your Mother’s Butt, from the physical comedy of the circus contortionist in Eric Coble’s Ties That Bind, to Christopher Durang’s take off of all unwelcomed former lovers in Wanda’s Visit, from the bitter-sweet comic meeting of a teenager and an older woman in Eric Lane’s The Statue of Bolivar, to Elaine May’s savage satire on the 1% in The Way of All Fish, not to mention Steve Martin’s “wild and crazy” The Zig-Zag Woman. And more!

Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida and an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

Modern Drama: Learning by Doing

Sid Homan

The assumption in all my theatre courses is that the text of a play is not just what is written on the page but that text in performance, delivered by actors before an audience. This means the play’s text also includes gestures, movement, blocking (the stage picture), and sub-text (what the character is saying inwardly, beneath the lines delivered onstage, as well as the “history” for that character invented by the actor). In the theatre, we would further supplement this text with lighting, sound, set, costumes, props, and make-up. To be sure, one can approach a play in a thousand ways—as literature, as a repository for the thinking of an age, as the springboard for political or cultural issues. But, since I work both on campus and in the theatre as an actor and director, and since the theatre itself is a unique medium with its own aesthetic principles, I approach the plays, with my students, and as a fellow “student,” as something meant to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience. In the class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” that scene with the two actors, trying out options, rehearsing it. The emphasis, therefore, is on learning by doing, and I judge student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is considered a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal for a scene. Performances and the scene papers count equally.

In this course, we will thus consider Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Embers, All That Fall, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Come and Go; Harold Pinter’s The Lover, Old Times, Betrayal, and No Man’s Land, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; and a variety of short comic sketches by Steve Martin, Elaine May, Christopher Durang, and others in the collection Laugh Lines (edited by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold).

A word of comfort: whether you have acted before or not, experience in the theatre is not a factor in the class. We use acting as a way of studying the text. Have no fears on this issue!

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail Professor Homan at shakes@ufl.edu.

The Bible as Literature

Anastasia Ulanowicz

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

The purpose of this class, then, is to analyze the disparate forms and genres contained within the Judeo-Christian biblical canon (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.

American Women in Comics

Margaret Galvan

Despite a long history of female creators, readers, and nuanced characters, women’s participation in American comics has frequently been overlooked. Contemporary scholars have focused on recovering these forgotten women. In this class we will explore why women’s contributions have not been visible in comics histories. We will start by reading how comics have been variously defined. Reading these definitions alongside this understudied tradition of women’s comics, we will ask: is there something about the definitions that exclude women in comics? We will read comics by women in addition to reading comics for and about women, since female fandom and characters have also been minimized. We will read a variety of forms, both print and digital, and consider how we might wield this digital space to right the balance.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and a research project that includes an annotated bibliography, proposal, Wikipedia edits, and formal paper.

Imaging Climate, Seeing the Anthropocene

Terry Harpold

We live in an age of growing ecological instability. Climate change, accelerating environmental degradation, and mass extinction are reshaping the collective futures of humans and other living things of the Earth on a scale that is without precedent in the memories of our civilization and our species. As we enter this new phase of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by human influence, our former habits of mind and body are incompatible with new situations on the ground, in the air, and under the water. But humans are by nature conservative and timorous; creating new habits is difficult for us, who find willful neglect, cynicism, and despair the easier solutions. In this course we will start with the fundamentally humanist conviction that how we prepare for and respond to the world to come depends on how we may (re)envision that world and our roles in it. Hopeful resolve to think and act differently, and the ability to do so, come to us first by way of the creative imagination.

This course will focus principally on visual imaginaries of the late Anthropocene. We will read widely in contemporary graphic fiction and — nonfiction on the subject of global climate change and ecological crisis, and view a small number of fiction films on these themes. Our principal model for the work of bearing witness and renewed insight will be a landmark art exhibition at UF’s Harn Museum of Art, “The World to Come” (September 18, 2018 – January 6, 2019). The exhibition, which features works by more than 45 contemporary international visual artists, will challenge us to discard assumptions about human privilege and mastery of nature, to rethink the bond of humans to non-human life, and to locate an openness and sense of wonder that may lead to critical reflection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of a *planetary* humanism.

Course writing assignments include participation in threaded discussions of weekly readings, a short research paper on selected works and artists exhibited in “The World to Come” and a take-home final exam.

South African Literature

Apollo Amoko

TBA

Postcolonial Bildungsroman

Apollo Amoko

TBA

Children’s Literature

Kenneth Kidd

This course considers Anglophone children’s literature from its beginnings to its current interdisciplinary and popular material forms. We will use literary theory and criticism to illuminate children’s literature (and vice versa) and to think about how written and multimedia texts are circulated and institutionalized. We will sample from a number of historical and contemporary genres, including picture books and graphic novels, and across national contexts. Requirements include response papers, regular participation, and several longer essays. Students will undertake one research project based in our local and very fabulous Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature.The course will be conducted as a seminar and active involvement is crucial.

Literature for the Adolescent

Anastasia Ulanowicz

In this course, we will account for major themes and trends in American “young adult” (or “YA”) literature. As we analyze each of the assigned texts, we will pay particularly close attention to the ways in which works of YA literature draw on culturally-constructed notions of adolescence to shape the adolescent characters within them — and how, in turn, they seek to draw in and interpellate the adolescents who read them. Additionally, we will address issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, national identity, and consumerism implicit within the assigned texts.

Golden Age of Children’s Literature

Rae Yan

The “Golden Age” of children’s literature in Britain and the United States ran from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, producing some of the most enduring representations of children and childhood in our cultural imagination. Alice, Mowgli, Dorothy, and Peter Pan are just a few of the characters from that Golden Age who challenge readers to question their basic assumptions about culture, economics, gender, politics, society, and understandings of the self. In our course, we will turn to works of the Golden Age by Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and A. A. Milne to explore the construction of childhood during the Golden Age. Additionally, we will contextualize this formative era in children’s literature by dipping into other literary traditions. For example, we may want to ask: how does Golden Age literature respond to earlier Augustan (eighteenth century) and Romantic (early nineteenth century) configurations of children and childhood? How and why do references to Classical literature impact the interpretation of this Golden Age? In what ways do traditions of periodical or serial literature shape the production of such children’s literature?

Please note that this is a seminar-style class that requires active participation and daily attendance. Assignments include (a) a brief presentation on the historical/biographical context behind one of the works we study; (b) four workshops on textual, biographical, historical, and formal analysis; and (c) a final project based on research conducted using materials from UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature or electronic archives of children’s literature.

Cultural Studies & Comics

Margaret Galvan

Comics studies has emerged as a scholarly field of inquiry over the past 25+ years, but many foundational thinkers considered only the form of the comic in their scholarship. Recent scholarship has both extended and challenged this formalist approach by engaging with questions of cultural studies that prioritize how race, class, ideology, gender, sexuality, etc. shape comics. In this class, we will read these cultural studies-infused approaches along with the comics that they focus on and ask how these theories shift our understanding of comics and how the comics themselves represent ideas of culture.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and a research project with a digital component.

Loser Literature

Richard Burt

As we have witnessed the destruction of the liberal welfare state and its replacement by the neoliberal warfare state, the self-help movement, or what could be called moral studies, has gained an increasingly firm hold on academia. To understand why this should me so, we will begin with the Victorian origins of self-help and contrast it to a subaltern, counter-history I call shelf-help. In the bookshelves of a good library, one finds all kinds of literary and philosophical losers, writers who have no interest in “getting ahead.” Sometimes they have a physical illness. Sometimes they have a mental illness. Sometimes they have both. But they all have achieved the highest (and lowest) distinction of all: LOSER! Anyone can try to become a loser: it’s an equal opportunity affirmative action position open to all races, genders, classes, and sexualities. All UF students are welcome to enroll. Films and readings will include, Office Space (dir. Mike Judge, 1999); Idiocracy (dir. Mike Judge, 2006); The Lady Vanishes (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1939); 20 Feet From Stardom (dir. Morgan Neville, 2013); Walter Benjamin, “Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Collection” Selected Writings; Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; Avital Ronell, Loser Sons; Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wakefield; Adam Phillips, Missing Out in Praise of the Unlived Life; Thomas Bernhard, The Loser?; Thomas Bernhard, My Prizes; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Robert Montgomery, Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself; Jack Black, You Can’t Win (Foreword, William S. Burroughs); Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”; Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility”; Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde; Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility”; Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony”; Jörg Kreienbrock, Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature; Seneca, “On Anger”; Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Eight Attacks of Rage” and “The Torture of the Little Leather Pouches”; Alexander Pushkin, Queen of Spades; Stefan Zweig, Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman; E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gambler’s Luck; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler; Franz Kafka, The Verdict; Stefan Zweig, Amok; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Michel de Montaigne, “That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.”​ Requirements: Two papers; discussion questions due before each class; two co-led classes; two unexcus​ed absences (three or four will mean a drop in your final grade; more than four and you have failed the class). To get a higher final grade than a “C,” you will have to participate productively in class discussion. For more information, please click here.

Children’s Literature of Florida

Kenneth Kidd

This course explores children’s literature set in the Sunshine State, with attention to how Florida’s environment, history and culture has shaped writing for young people and vice versa. We’ll likely begin with Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s The Yearling (1938) and collected folktales by Zora Neal Hurston (e.g. What’s the Hurry, Fox?) and move on to texts such as Lois Lenski’s Strawberry Girl (1945), Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s Alligator Crossing (1959), and Carol Ryrie Brink’s The Pink Motel (1960). More contemporary texts might include Edward Bloor’s Tangerine (1997), Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie (2000), and Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot (2002). We may also work with the Florida Book Awards winners and/or the Sunshine State Young Readers Award Books. Assignments will likely include short response papers and several longer critical essays.

Israeli History and the Contemporary Novel

Dror Abend-David

The course will discuss a number of the leading Hebrew novels (but not necessarily Historical Novels) since the 1950’s and their representation of Israeli History. The course will first provide some background about the relation between history and fiction, and the place of the novel (of various subgenres) as a tool for historiography. The discussion will then place the Hebrew novels within this context and ask students to apply theoretical methods to draw their own conclusion about the representation of Israeli history in the texts that they read.

Vampire Cinema

Dragan Kujundzic

TBA

From Nuremberg to South Park: Representations of Nazism In Film and Literature

Eric Kligerman

This course examines the representation of the Nazi epoch in pre- and postwar visual culture and literature. In addition to exploring the historical, political and ideological implications of how National Socialism is recollected and represented, we will also track the transformation of the Nazi perpetrator in the cultural imagination of Europe and America. This course shifts attention from the debates regarding the commodification of the victims of the Holocaust, which has led to the provocative terms “Shoah business” and “Holocaust industry,” to what Susan Sontag describes as “fascinating fascism”: our commercial fascination with the perpetrators of genocide. How have those responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich been represented, theorized, turned into metaphors as well as clichés through the space of film and literature? By shifting our attention from the tragic images of the victims to the figure of the perpetrators, we will examine the ethical implications as well as moral ambiguities behind various representations of Nazism.

Beginning with Riefenstahl’s documentary films, we will examine the circulation of the Nazi aesthetic and its associations with questions of beauty, power, gender and eroticism. How has this aesthetic been re-circulated in postwar cinema? How does the Nazi figure function in documentary films, German cinema (the rubble films, New German Cinema and contemporary German film), Italian neorealism, and American popular culture? Does the representation of Nazism in shifting periods and forms critique, explain or bring about an understanding of those who committed the crimes of the Third Reich? Or, do they perpetuate the spectator’s obsession with the horrors of Nazism while circumventing issues of guilt, responsibility and historical comprehension? Our probing of the Nazi aesthetic along with the stereotype of unimaginable evil will be conjoined to how such concepts like Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Sontag’s “fascinating fascism” are treated in films that focus on iconic Nazi imagery and the central perpetrators: Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann.

Interrogating the boundaries of representation, where the figure of the Nazi is not outside the frame of the imagination but occupies our day-to-day world, our objective is to explore how these films position the spectator in relation to the Nazi past. What moral and aesthetic complexities arise when the Nazi figure inhabits such genres as documentary, comedy, horror and erotica?

Kafka & Kafkaesque

Eric Kligerman

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

After our in-depth analysis of Kafka’s works, we will explore the major role Kafka played in the construction of the modern and postmodern literary canon of the twentieth century. The course will explore Kafka’s impact on World literature and aesthetic culture, whereby his writing has triggered multiple responses in shifting languages and media. We will trace “the Kafkaesque” in the narrative fictions of selected authors, including Jorge Luis Borges and Albert Camus, and filmmakers such as the Coen brothers and David Lynch.

Black Englishes

James Essegbey

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.

The aim of this course is to present students with varieties of Englishes 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.