Department of English

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.

Fall 2019

Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses

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

Course Descriptions

AML 3607

Survey of African American Literature 2

Mark Reid

This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by well-known artists as well as writers whose works literary critics and historians overlooked for several 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) ISBN 0385334583
Wesley Brown. Push Comes to Shove (Concord, MA: Concord Free Press, 2009) ISBN:9780981782416
Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Signet, 1959) ISBN: 0679755330
Samuel A. Hay. African American Theatre (NY: Cambridge UP, 1994) ISBN 0521465850
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Dutchman and The Slave. (New York: William Morrow, 1964) ISBN: 9780688210847
Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1959) ISBN: 9781558614987
James McBride. The Color of Water (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) ISBN: 9781594481925
Lynn Nottage. Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Other Plays (NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2004) ISBN: 1559362146
John A. Williams. Clifford’s Blues (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998) ISBN: 1566890802
Shay Youngblood. Black Girl in Paris (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001) ISBN: 1573228516

AML 3673

Eating Asian America: Race, Culture, and Identity

Malini Schueller

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, memoirs, novels, films, advertisements, and cookbooks.

Possible Texts:

Jade Snow Wong Fifth Chinese Daughter
Nora Okja Keller Fox Girl
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The Mistress of Spices
Frank Chin Donald Duk
Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging
Mei Ng Eating Chinese Food Naked
David Louie The Barbarians are Coming
And critical readings on canvas

AML 4242

Novels of the Harlem Renaissance

Mark Reid

This course focuses on novels written during the Harlem Renaissance and contrast them with other contemporary writing during the period. Class discussions will consider how black writers, in redefining the black character in literature, influence how non-black writers construct the racial Other in their works.

Readings and film screenings may cover such writers as Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Leopold Senghor, filmmakers as Oscar Micheaux, painters as Romare Bearden and Aaron Douglas, performers as Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Alberta Hunter, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Valaida Snow, and intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Marcus Garvey, and Charles S. Johnson.

Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize 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: Available at UF BOOKSTORE 1900 MUSEUM ROAD

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun; A Novel Without a Moral (General Books, 2010) ISBN 1152565575
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford UP, 1994) ISBN 019509367
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing (Rutgers, 1986) ISBN 0813511704
Lewis, David Levering. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (Penguin, 1995) I SBN 9780140170368
Locke, Alain LeRoy. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1999) ISBN 0684-83831-1
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1987) ISBN 1555530249
Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry (Dover Books, 2008) ISBN 0486461343
Toomer, Jean. Cane (Liveright, 1993) ISBN 0871401517

AML 4311

Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought

Debra Walker King

“The most common way people give up their power is thinking they don’t have any.”
-Alice Walker

Description: This course introduces students to an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist whose work, both creative and sociopolitical, has shaken the foundations of American literature and liberation theory to reconstitute the boundaries of both. Walker’s work has earned the highest accolades of praise and accomplishment, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983 and induction into the California Hall of Fame in 1993 (among others). As a writer and social activist, Walker remains an international figure of increasing fame and respect.  Her novels, poetry, essays and blogs explore themes of naturalistic fiction while also engaging the more dramatic themes of modernism and Womanist thought:  death, love, rebirth, responsibility, spirituality, and memory.

This semester students will investigate why critics herald Alice Walker as the mother of Womanism and determine, though her writing, what Womanism means. The works we will study are powerful offerings of prose and poetry that move beyond human victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal and revival.  But most importantly, each selected text demonstrates not only what Womanism is or can do but also how one (regardless of color or nationality) can achieve the Womanist vision of vital, human connections that provide access to individual wholeness.  I welcome you to journey with me into the world of Alice Walker’s Womanist thought and discover why she professes, “Everything is a human being.”

AML 4311

Ursula K. Le Guin

Stephanie A. Smith

Once hailed as a ‘living legend’ during her life-time, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin passed away at the age of 88 in January 2018. Now recognized as one of the greatest authors of our time, Le Guin created new and alien worlds that yet always speak to deeply important issues in our own lives, and to what it means to be human. By turns witty and wild, mischievous and yet dangerous, Le Guin’s consummate ability to both entertain and make the reader think is a rare and radiant combination that this class will explore by examining her multi-faceted career as a novelist, poet, essayist and children’s book author. Texts will range from Le Guin’s young adult Earthsea novels, to her Hainish Universe novels, from her essays to select poetry.

AML 4453

Law & American Literature

Susan Hegeman

In this course, we will study works of American literature written between 1850 and 2019 that substantially engage with some aspect of our legal system. We will discuss how these works of literature address important legal and historical issues, and 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 court cases, works of legal theory, literary criticism and short fiction. Longer works of fiction we will read include Melville’s Billy Budd, Twain’s Pudd’n’head Wilson, Richard Wright’s Native Son, E.L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel, David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House.  Course requirements include two papers, and active participation in online and in-class discussion.

AML 4685

Women Writing about Race: “The Trouble Between Us”

Debra Walker King

Description: This course surveys American women’s writing during the mid 19th Century to the present, focusing on gendered race relations as presented by women in their literature and culture critiques. Students will trace, analyze and discuss how Black and White women talk about each other, co-op and reject each other, or, simply, ignore each other in literature as they negotiate gendered historical, social, political, and personal challenges. The goal of the course is to discover how change and racial relations are developed both in our culture and in the way writers, their characters, and readers respond to those changes and situations. Our discussions will explore Black and White women’s journeys through challenging racial situations and determine the effectiveness of the solutions they engage, including how they define, enter or reject bonding opportunities. What resolutions to racial tensions do the authors suggest that we might emulate or correct as we seek unity and wholeness today?

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. Readings include novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. 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.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar 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.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar 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 a reading by visiting writers.

CRW 3310

Verse Writing

Michael Hofmann

This is the intermediate/ advanced undergraduate poetry workshop. We will widen our experience and understanding of poetry by reading books by Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, and Adam Zagajewski, and you will write poems to a wide array of prompts and subjects (and none).

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

Kayla Beth Moore

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
            -Emily Dickinson 

 “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems /to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
            -Wislawa Szymborska 

In this advanced poetry workshop we will explore both the explosive and mundane aspects of reading and writing good poems. This class, open to anyone who has taken a lower-division poetry workshop, will be in seminar format (which means your presence and participation are critical). We will write poems nearly every week, sometimes to strict forms. Our primary sources of inspiration and conversation will be the works of two great American E’s, Emily Dickinson and Elisabeth Bishop, and the Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska. (Other poets may well be included throughout the semester.) We will engage thoughtfully with their poems and will also take a look at their prose and letters in order to consider how we might cultivate a poetic consciousness, absurd though it may be, for ourselves.

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop

Uwem Akpan

CRW 4905 is a fiction writing workshop where students will be exposed to a particular form of doing fiction.  We shall read to a collection of African historical novels and short stories.  These models shall help us learn how to fictionalize historical events.  It will be important to build a community that learns from the myriad African texts and supports how we use this Form to tell our stories.

In the course of the semester, the students are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts.  They 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.

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop

William Logan

Just as the civilization of the Kelts is revealed to us by their dolmens, and that of the Scandinavians by their mounds and kitchen-middens, so will the antiquaries of future times immediately recognise the spots inhabited in India by the English by the piles of soda-water bottles heaped up before the cantonments, and the dwellings of the Americans by their deposits of empty meat tins.

Edmond Baron de Mandat-Grancey, Cow-Boys and Colonels, 1887

Whenever [the Mauretania] was asked by a French island, “What ship are you?” she would reply, “What island are you?”

Terry Coleman, The Liners

Obree [in manufacturing his record-breaking bicycle] famously used bits from his washing machine and a piece of metal recovered from an Ayrshire road, as well as a training programme fueled by marmalade sandwiches.

TLS, July 14, 2006

Apsley Cherry-Garrard described polar exploration as the “cleanest and most islated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised.”

TLS, July 14, 2006

Poetry must be about hells and heavens, hills and halls, hopscotch and hiphop, and empty meat tins.  We will be looking in language for the equivalent of things felt and seen.  You will seek this in the words used by other poets, and those you invent for yourself.  Be prepared to read until your eyes hurt, to write a dozen poems (one per week), and to find your poems criticized.  Each week the workshop will discuss your work and the work of your predecessors.

This is Florida’s most advanced workshop in poetry, for students who hope to become poets and possibly attend an MFA program—or those who have merely developed an obsessive and perverse interest in writing.  Students from this course have gone on to the University of Iowa, University of Virginia, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of Houston, Johns Hoplins University, and other programs.

Required reading:
an anthology of modern poetry
a selection of contemporary books of poetry

ENC 3250

Professional Communication

Laura Gonzales

Professional Writing is a field grounded in building and maintaining relationships with various stakeholders, including businesses, communities, institutions, industries, and environments. This course will help students understand and practice the rhetorical strategies, genres, locations, media, and contexts in which contemporary professional writing happens. Students will conduct research and compose texts that are cohesive, well-designed, and informative while also honoring responsibilities to various audiences. Students will have an opportunity to engage with contemporary topics in social media strategy, information design, and content strategy.

ENC 3414

Hypermedia

Victor del Hierro

This course will examine the relationship between writing, digital media, and sound. Contemporary cultures like Hip Hop have demonstrated that the link between writing, digital media, and sound can reimagine the world through engaged practice and mastery of technology, community, and expression. In this course, we will take up three main questions: How do critical understandings of writing impact the production of digital media? How does an emphasis on sound impact our understandings of writing? How does access to mass media technologies impact our responsibility to the production and consumption of texts?

Readings for the course will include both print and non-print-based texts including podcasts, videos, web-texts, and traditional articles. Subject areas will include sound studies, rhetoric, Hip Hop, internet studies, and writing. Course assignments will follow a project-based model including creating a variety of digital media including a critical playlist, a podcast, soundscapes and accompanying web-based texts.

ENG 3010

The Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism: Theory, Literature, and the Art of Reading

Phillip Wegner

One of the primary aims and pleasures 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 a brief excerpt from Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction and a reading of Pierre Bayard’s joyful book, 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 Shklovsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Elaine Showalter, 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, Franco Moretti, Sianne Ngai, and Carolyn Lesjak.

ENG 3115

Introduction to Film: Theory and Criticism

Trevor Mowchun

This course introduces students to the study and appreciation of film as a complex and evolving artform through three phases of investigation: Aesthetics (“What are the formal aspects of film? In what sense is film an expressive language”?), Theory (“What is the nature of film? What was film, what is film now, and what might film become?”), Criticism (“What can films do to individual and cultural consciousness? What are some of the ways we can write about the meaning of films for us and for the time in which they were made?”). These distinct yet overlapping investigations will involve the close analysis of film form, the major film theories throughout the 20th century (with an emphasis on classical film theory), and exemplary acts of film criticism (emphasizing both the applications and avoidances of theory in the analysis of individual films and film corpuses). Take-home tests will cover material from the three phases of study, which can then serve as tools in the analysis of a single film for a final essay project.

ENG 3122

History of Film 2

Robert Ray

This part of the film history sequence covers the years 1930-1965.  Topics include:

Part I:

1. The consolidation of the Hollywood Studio System, derived from the model of Frederick Taylor’s industrial management and Henry Ford’s mass production.  (Readings: Taylor, Ford, Schatz’s The Genius of the System) (Films: 42^nd Street, Grand Hotel, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca)

2. The rise of Hitler, the issue of documentary, and the emigration of filmmakers and actors to Hollywood.  (Readings: Stern’s Hitler) (Films: M, Triumph of the Will)

3. Jean Renoir (Readings: interviews with Renoir) (Films: A Day in the Country, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Rules of the Game)

Part II:

1. Film noir and Sartre’s existentialism.  (Readings: Vernet on film noir, Sartre’s “Existentialism Is a Humanism”)  (Films: It’s a Wonderful Life, In a Lonely Place, The Narrow Margin)

2. Italian Neorealism.  (Readings: Zavattini’s manifestos, Cahiers du Cinéma essays on Rossellini and Neorealism)  (Films: Rome, Open City; Paisà, The Bicycle Thieves)

3. The French New Wave.  (Readings: Cahiers du Cinéma essays by Truffaut, Godard, et.  al.; interviews with Truffaut and Godard) (Films: Breathless, Les Mistons, Shoot the Piano Player, Masculine-Feminine)

Assignments: 1. Brief daily quizzes on readings and screenings (20%).  2. Class participation (20%). 3. Two essay exams based on questions distributed in advance (60%).  Attendance required: after two unexcused absences, further absences will reduce your course grade.

Note:  ENG 3122 is a film history course that involves regular, and often lengthy, readings detailing the historical contexts of the movies we will watch.  If such readings and the quiz and participation requirements do not suit your interest or habits, you should not take this particular course.

Note to Journalism Students:  Many Journalism students, especially those in Telecommunications, take English Department film courses.  In the past few years, some of these students have disliked and ignored ENG 3122’s requirements; the result has often been failing grades.  While I have seen many fine Journalism students in this course, the numbers of the discontented and failing have recently increased.  Like any university course, taking ENG 3122 involves a commitment.  Look over the syllabus (when it appears over the summer) to see if you want to make this particular commitment.

ENG 3125

History of Film 3

Kel Martin

In this course, we will examine the history of film as an medium since 1960. We will focus on key components of film history from this time period, including The New Hollywood; European arthouse; film production (including advancements in special effects and computer technology); and the rise of these popular genres: the ‘high-concept’ film, the blockbuster, action movies, exploitation cinema, slasher movies, and Japanese anime. We will also consider independent, experimental, and underground cinemas (e.g., New Queer Cinema, Dogme 95, No Wave); and contemporary global cinema (roughly 2000-present). Our writing assignments will include short close readings where you will consider a given film as an aesthetic, cultural, and historical artifact. Here you will pay attention to both the form and content of a given film in relation to its position in the history of the medium. Other assignments will include reading quizzes and a final research paper (8-10 pages). Some of the directors we will study may include the following: Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Dennis Hopper, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, the Wachowski sisters, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Katsuhiro Otomo, Melvin Van Peebles, Robert Altman, Mary Harron, Stephen Soderbergh, Derek Jarman, Pedro Almodóvar, Julie Dash, Dee Rees, Wes Anderson, Abbas Kiarostami, Barry Jenkins, Alfonso Cuarón, Claire Denis, etc.

ENG 4015

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

Peter Rudnytsky

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

ENG 4015

Introduction to Psychoanalysis Through Popular Culture

Pietro Bianchi

Our subjective life is full of malfunctions, small crises, things that do not work or that break down. The hypothesis of psychoanalysis – already from its forefather Sigmund Freud at the turn of the XX century – is that these moments, no matter how small or insignificant, hold the truth of a subject. And that in order to listen to this truth, it is necessary not to fix these small events as soon as possible, but to let them speak freely. Psychoanalysis is a practice that takes the time to hear – and to render productive – these symptoms, because it believes that critical moments are a great opportunity and not an accident.

In this class we will attempt to recognize and to listen to the critical and symptomatic occurrences of our world, as they appear and are represented in contemporary ideologies and fantasies: in literature, cinema, TV shows, pop music, contemporary art and media. All the terminologies and concepts that characterize the practice of psychoanalysis (unconscious, desire, death drive, symptom, libido etc.) are already present in our world and already inform our lives. It is just a matter of recognizing their presence and reflecting on them. This course will teach you how to familiarize yourselves with the Freudian unconscious through horror films or video-art; to reflect on the Lacanian concept of desire through stand-up comedy shows or social media; to see the appearance of the “death drive” in trap music or performance art.

ENG 4133

Versions: Re-editing Analog and Digital Literature and Film

Richard Burt

Film Adaptation Studies tends to assume that a film’s source text, usually a novel or a short story, has only one edition.  The film adaptation is similarly assumed to have a single version. Film adaptations are sometimes criticized for abridging the source text, or for retelling it for “easy reading.”  But what happens when there are different versions of the same novel or the same film, all published under the same title?  We will explore these questions these by reading novels that were revised, sometimes shortened, sometimes lengthened, sometimes posthumously restored, and watching film adaptations that were recut by the director or the studio and sometimes posthumously reconstructed for a vareity of reasons. We will also examine novels that have been abridged, selectively edited, or left unfinished when the author died.  And we will also listen to radio adaptations of novels as well.  Films and novels will include William Makepeace Thackeray’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon; Franz Kafka’s and Orson Welles’s The Trial; two abridged editions of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady , one edited by Toni Bowers and John Richetti and the other edited by Shiela Ortiz-Taylor as well as a BBC TV adaptation; Alison Castle’s edition of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made; the battle of Waterloo chapters in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma and film adaptations of both; Lost in La Mancha and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood and several film and TV versions; and three different versions of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.  Requirements: TOTAL ATTENDANCE; no computers or iphones in class (the text will be available on the screen in the front of the classroom); co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Monday and once on a Wednesday; one discussion question; and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class there is an assigned reading, three shots if a film; student formulated quizzes each class; three assignments (see below); and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films.  All assigned work for the course must be completed, turned in on time, and be of passing quality to pass the course. For more information, go to http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/VersionsAnalogDigital/​

ENG 4133

Provincializing Hollywood

Pietro Bianchi

“World cinema” is a strange expression: despite the name, it is not applied to the entire world but only to those cinematographic traditions outside Hollywood or Europe. It would be hard to think of Avengers: EndgameorStar Wars: Rogue Oneas examples of “world cinema”, while any film produced in Africa or in the Middle East, no matter if it is a blockbuster or a small independent production, would fit in that category. While contemporary uneven development is questioning the division between First and Third world, there is little doubt that the entertainment industrial complex (increasingly under-pressure from a few monopolistic multinational groups) needs a strong push toward multipolar imaginaries. Borrowing (and rephrasing) a term from post-colonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, this class will aim at provincializing Hollywoodand seeing how cinematographic fantasies can be as diverse as the world itself.

This course will offer a critical approach and diverse mapping strategies for the study of contemporary world cinema in all its differences and complexities, and introduce students to theoretical debates about global circulation of films, aesthetics, audiences, authorship, and concepts of the transnational. Among the filmmakers that will be studied: Abdellatif Kechiche, Teresa Villaverde, Lav Diaz, Jia Zhang-ke, Anurag Kashyap, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pablo Larraín, Michael Haneke, Ava DuVernay, Haile Gerima, Elia Suleiman, Miguel Gomes, Elia Suleiman, Asghar Farhad.

ENG 4136

Basic Video Production: Process, Expression, Collaboration

Trevor Mowchun

ENG 4844

Queer Comics

Margaret Galvan

In the past several years, there’s been a surge in publishing of queer comics—that is, “comic books, strips, graphic novels, and webcomics that deal with LGBTQ themes from an insider’s perspective,” as cartoonist Justin Hall puts it. These contemporary works are part of a genealogy that stretches over four decades, reaching back before the Stonewall Riots in 1969 that catalyzed the modern LGBTQ movement. This course will introduce students to this rich and often overlooked history of queer comics in America from the 1960s through the present.

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

ENG 4936

Honors Race(ing) Through the Nineteenth Century

Malini Schueller

This course will focus on race as a signifier in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. We will examine the diverse deployment of racial categories in nineteenth century legal, literary, anthropological, and political texts in order to analyze race both as social structure and cultural representation.  Taking race to be an ever-changing and adaptive social construct, we will focus both on the fluidity and mobility of racial categories, as well as their disciplinary powers. Throughout the course, we will deal with some of the questions raised by the concept of race: What are the problems and gains of racial identity politics? How do questions of race and gender intersect/collide? What is the difference between the politics of race and ethnicity? A second major component of the course will be to address the question of what it means to “read” race in literary and cultural texts.  The course will focus on different aspects of race: constructions of the Other, race and empire, whiteness, race and sexuality, blackface, and race and class.

Although the course will focus mainly on nineteenth century U.S. culture, the theoretical issues regarding race and questions about the importance of race in the formation of identity will be of use in thinking about early twentieth century as well as contemporary U.S. culture.

Possible Texts:

Herman Melville Bartleby and Benito Cereno Dover
Herman Melville Typee
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Thrift edition
James Fenimore Cooper The Pioneers
Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Kate Chopin The Awakening
William Wells Brown The President’s Daughter
Mark Twain Puddn’head Wilson
Horatio Alger Ragged Dick
And critical readings on Canvas

ENG 4936

Honors Narrative Games

Rae Yan

In recent years, a wide range of narrative video games, or video games that focus on bringing together interactivity and storytelling, have exploded onto the ‘indie’ video game scene. This course will study the possibilities that these narrative video games offer to scholars, players, and creators alike. We will analyze the formal elements of narrative video games through the perspective of narratologists (scholars of narrative theory) and ludologists (scholars of gameplay) to consider the methods narrative video games use to represent lived experiences. We will also take into consideration the social and cultural impact of narrative video games. As a genre that explores narrative possibilities, such games have been embraced by women, POC, and LGBTQ+ gamemakers commonly underrepresented in the mainstream gaming and game-making industry. We will even try to make our own narrative games to experiment with the affordances of the form.

Assignments for this course will include short response papers, a Twine essay, and a video essay. Games have not been finalized, but will likely include works such as Bioshock Infinite; Depression Quest; Gone Home; Her Story; Papers, Please; alongside a variety of Twine games. Students do not need to have technological proficiency to take this course nor do they need to be expert gamers; however, students taking this course must create a Steam account and own computers/laptops with specifications that allow them to run video games and capture video/images without issue.

ENG 4953

Gender and Sexualities in African American Literature

Delia Steverson

This course will explore how African American authors have engaged in the politics of representing gender and sexualities in the 20^th century. We will begin with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) because it was one of the first African American literary texts to explicitly introduce alternative forms of sexualities. During this class, we will explore the myriad ways that African American authors have constructed gender and asserted sexualities while establishing complex black identities at multiple intersections. Possible texts and authors include Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her, Daniel Black’s Perfect Peace, Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man, Marci Blackman’s Po Man’s Child, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, Pearl Cleage’s What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, among others. Although this course is centered on African American literature, we will also juxtapose the literary depictions with film representations to explore cultural perceptions of black sexualities across genres. Possible films include Moonlight, Ethnic Notions, She’s Gotta Have It, Tongues Untied, Coffy, Push, How Stella Got Her Groove Back and others. Students will lead discussion once throughout the semester, complete a film review, maintain a reading journal, and complete a longer seminar-length paper with a creative project.

ENG 4953

Octavia Butler

Tace Hedrick

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

ENL 3122

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.​

ENL 3251

Victorian Bodies

Rae Yan

Victorian texts are self-consciously crowded with bodies that are old, young, classed, gendered, pathologized, and racialized. Over the course of the semester, we will read broadly across the Victorian period in order to explore the cultural, historical, and political significance of these myriad bodily representations. In the process, we will study literary texts (novels, short stories, poems) alongside art, essays, political tracts, and scientific treatises. Course texts will likely include works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Wilkie Collins, 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 notes taken during the reading of each text; short response papers; and a final paper that synthesizes literary analysis, historical contexts, and literary criticism.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: 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 ENL 4333 we “study” Shakespeare by staging scenes from his plays, considering his plays as actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, enacting that character through delivery, gesture, stage movement, and 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, The Merchant of Venice, 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 sixteen books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories

Peter Rudnytsky

The course will consist of a close reading of selected comedies by Shakespeare, probably including Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida, and his second tetralogy of history plays, Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.  The approach will be primarily psychoanalytic and feminist, and emphasis will be given to developing students’ skills of critical thinking and literary analysis.  Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper.  Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

LIT 3003

The Limits of Representation: The Holocaust in Literature and Film

Eric Kligerman

This course is designed to give students an understanding of the historical, political and aesthetic import surrounding the attempted destruction of the European Jewish community by Nazi Germany. Through an analysis of Holocaust literature, film and visual media, we will investigate the connections between history, trauma, witnessing and representation. How do authors, filmmakers and artists depict events that shatter traditional forms of perception and comprehension? How do history, memory and imagination coalesce in their respective texts? The course will begin with a discussion of controversial issues of historiography of the Holocaust, including the uniqueness of the event, the nature of anti-Semitism, and the role of “ordinary Germans” in the Nazi genocide. 2) Afterwards, we will investigate various examples of Holocaust film and literature, moving from documentary to figurative forms of representation. Among the topics we will discuss are the aestheticization of trauma, the function of testimony, narrative and witnessing, and the transformation of the Holocaust into a metaphor for other types of suffering. How has the Holocaust been appropriated and reconfigured by artists, poets and filmmakers over the past seven decades? The course will constantly shift from how Germany itself remembers and constructs its representation of the Holocaust to how other European writers and artists represent the destruction of the European Jewish community.

LIT 3043

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. In LIT 3043 we “study” the modern playwrights by staging scenes from their plays, considering the plays as actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, enacting that character through delivery, gesture, stage movement, and subtext.

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!

Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida, the author of some sixteen books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

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

LIT 3400

The Literature of Sustainability & Resilience

Terry Harpold

“Dystopia is for losers.” – Doug Henwood

This course takes as its founding premises two unassailable principles. First, we live in an time of increasing environmental instability, mass extinction, food insecurity, and social and economic unrest fostered by climate change. Second, the literary imagination is among our most powerful and adaptive responses to the planetary realities of the twenty-first century and a path forward to a more just, sustainable, and resilient future.

We will read widely from an established and emerging canon of literary nonfiction, fiction, poetry, criticism, and theory that address the perils and vitality of the late Anthropocene. Authors we will read include conservationists, naturalists, and ecologists such as Erle Ellis, Aldo Leopold, Ayelen Liberona, John Muir, Natasha Myers, Arne Næss, Roy Scranton, and Henry David Thoreau; fiction authors such as Chris Bachelder, J.G. Ballard, Jean Giono, Lauren Groff, Ursula K. Le Guin, Emmi Itäranta, Richard Powers, and Alexis Wright; poets and filmmakers such as Madhur Anand, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Frédéric Back, Sandra Beasley, Robinson Jeffers, Wanuri Kahiu, and Ed Roberson.

Graded assignments include three short essays on assigned readings, a creative exercise in flash climate fiction, and a take-home final exam. Extra credit is available for students participating in Imagining Climate Change’s sponsored volunteer tree plantings in and around Gainesville.

LIT 3400

Candide‘s 18th Century

Roger Maioli

Is human nature essentially good or evil? Is the history of the world a narrative of progress or a random record of mistakes and crimes? Does life have a meaning? And is it okay to eat human flesh? These are some of the many questions humorously explored by Voltaire in Candide, the most famous of his philosophical tales. Published in 1759 at the height of Voltaire’s fame, Candide confronts the central philosophical dilemmas of the Enlightenment, through the story of a naïve protagonist who wanders through the ruthless world of the eighteenth century. From Germany to Paraguay and from Suriname to Turkey, the young Candide witnesses and suffers all sorts of natural and human evils — war, pestilence, slavery, the Inquisition, pirates, earthquakes. Through the painful yet hilarious account of Candide’s adventures, Voltaire challenges the optimistic worldview of his contemporaries, lashing out against abuses of power, the Catholic Church, the ceaselessness of war, and the exploitation of the Americas by European powers. In this course we will read Candide in connection with a vast range of primary and secondary sources that elucidate the book’s targets and goals. We will read the books Voltaire satirizes, learn about the historical events at the heart of the story, and consider other contemporary views on the book’s various topics; equally importantly, we will discuss the persisting relevance of these questions for our times. Contextualized this way, Candide will serve as a window into the material and intellectual history of the eighteenth century in Britain, France, and the Americas, and also as a springboard for considering the Enlightenment’s complex legacy today.

LIT 4188

World Literature in English

Amrita Bandopadhyay

The World in the Home: Women, Intimacies and Domesticity in a Globalized Context

Archetypal notions of home evoke images of love, intimacy and comfort. But the realities of home reveal that domestic spaces are also fraught units where personal relationships are negotiated within larger socio-political forces. This course focuses on 20^thcentury literature from different countries that show how the domestic space reveals the tangled intersections of gender, class and sexuality. This entanglement proves especially significant in a globalized world where mobility enables individuals to wear multiple badges of identity. How does literature contribute to our understanding of intimate negotiations? What role does the aesthetic value of literature play in connecting home and global politics?

This course will attempt to see how the “private” sphere of the home interacts with the world of political events, society and community. It will further examine how everyday human experiences are influenced by the interaction of domestic and public spheres. The course will include texts by authors like Shani Mootoo, Shyam Selvaduari, Amy Tan, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tsitsi Dangaremba among others. These texts would also enable students to examine issues of diaspora, gender, class and global cultures. Assignments will include panel presentations, a close reading, an annotated bibliography and a final paper.

LIT 4194

African Literature in English

Apollo Amoko

Description not provided.

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Literature, Theory, and Culture

Raúl Sánchez

Life Writing in the Time of Coloniality

This course examines the concept of coloniality through examples of life writing. The term coloniality, as articulated by Peruvian writer Aníbal Quijano and others, describes the pervasive influence that European ideas continue to exert on formerly colonized nations. The term life writing refers to forms of non-fiction that describe all or part of an author’s lived experience.

We will begin by reading and discussing a handful of essays about coloniality and life writing, in order to build an interpretive framework. Then, using that framework, we will read and discuss several book-length texts, which may include the following:

• Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines
• Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
• Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus
• Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors
• Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir
• Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries: A Memoir

Work for the course will include daily reading responses, two take-home exams, and a short (5-7 page) research project.

LIT 4233

Introduction to Postcolonial Studies

Apollo Amoko

Description not provided.

LIT 4331

Children’s Literature

Anastasia Ulanowicz

This course will provide an introduction to major works of American children’s literature written from 1868 to 2000. As we examine these texts, we will consider how and why (or even whether) they might be read specifically as children’s books – and how, moreover, their study might prompt us to evaluate the American literary canon in its various historical permutations.  Additionally, we will question the ways in which these texts represent race, class, gender, and – perhaps most significantly – national identity.  Of particular interest will be the question of how these texts use the figure of the child to support (or contest) notions of nationhood and citizenship.

LIT 4483

Seeing Differently: Comics and Identity

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 how race, class, ideology, gender, sexuality, etc. shape comics. Indeed, comics has become a flashpoint for identity-focused theoretical investigations. In this class, we will ask how these theories shift our understanding of comics and how comics themselves represent issues of identity.

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

LIT 4554

Lesbian-Feminist Thought

Kim Emery

Although lesbian-feminist thought of the 1970s and ‘80s informs much of today’s feminist and queer theory, its primary texts are now not widely read. As a result, the movement is often mischaracterized as uniformly trans exclusionary, white dominated, sex negative, essentialist, and atheoretical. This special section of LIT 4554 seeks to complicate that picture by recalling a variety of work that contests such stereotypes, by writers such as Cheryl Clarke, Marilyn Frye, Barbara Smith, Cherríe Moraga, Adrienne Rich, Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, Sandy Stone, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Monique Wittig. Although assigned readings will reflect various perspectives from historically significant debates, our focus will be on attending to voices more often left out of the homogenizing revisionist histories common today, and on US-based writers. We will also consider the historical contexts in which this work emerged and, as the semester progresses, endeavor to put our readings in lesbian-feminist thought into dialogue with more recent work in queer and trans studies.

This is a discussion-based course requiring thorough preparation, consistent attendance, and regular participation. Assigned readings will vary considerably in length, difficulty, perspective, and genre. Students should be prepared to engage with points of view with which they disagree, as well as those they find more amenable. Frequent short quizzes, occasional homework, a class presentation, and two 5-page papers will be required.

LIT 4930

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 20^thcentury. 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 Castleand 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.

LIT 4930

Philosophy & Cinema

Robert Ray

This seminar will have two starting points: (1) Even after the first century of its existence, the cinema still presents us with perplexities – What is the task we call “movie star performance”?  How do the movies distinguish between the real and the fictional?  (Is, for example, a saddle in a western “fictional”?)  How do we distinguish “acting” from “lying”?  (2) Philosophy begins with Socrates’s practice of a method, the dialogue, a series of questions and answers intended to sharpen the understanding of the virtues Socrates wanted to define.

In the fall of 1982, the philosopher Gareth Matthews undertook an experiment involving philosophical dialogues with middle-school children.  Like Socrates before him, Matthews assumed that “To do philosophy with a child, or with anyone else for that matter, is simply to reflect on a perplexity or a conceptual problem of a certain sort to see if one can remove the perplexity or solve the problem. . . .  Sometimes one succeeds, often one doesn’t.  Sometimes getting clearer about one thing only makes it obvious that one is dreadfully unclear about something else.”  Matthews also discovered that young children took naturally to philosophical questions until their subsequent education trained them to regard such matters as “wastes of time.”

This seminar will take up perplexing questions posed by the movies.  We will start by reading two of Plato’s Socratic dialogues before reading Matthews’s accounts of his work with children.  We will also look at Wittgenstein’s seminars (which often involve questions posed to, or by, imaginary interlocutors), J.L. Austin’s essay on excuses, and at some of the writings by Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, who has written extensively about film.  And, of course, we will watch some movies, including Anatomy of a Murder, Blow-Up, The General (Keaton), People on Sunday, and It Happened One Night.

Assignments:   Some combination of short papers and essay exams, depending on the class size.

This course will involve at least as much philosophy as cinema; it does not require a background in either.  Don’t be afraid of the course’s philosophical approach.  If, as Matthews showed, 10-12-year-olds can “do philosophy,” so can we.

LIT 4930

Florida Children’s Literature

Kenneth Kidd

This course explores children’s literature about and/or set in “La Florida”/The Sunshine State, with attention to how Florida’s environment, history and culture has shaped writing for young people and vice versa. We’ll sample a range of texts published across the twentieth-century and into the current moment. Our approach will be analytical – so, you will write papers with arguments and evidence – but also exploratory. One major task will be to get a sense of the broader tradition of Florida children’s and young adult literature, its themes and genres and tensions and possibilities, which will involve description and summary as well as analysis. We will also think about what stories haven’t been told sufficiently or at all, and you will have a chance to design a creative project, too. Course projects are designed to reflect our commitments to analysis, description, and invention.

Possible Texts (please check with me before purchasing)

Walter Brooks, Freddie Goes to Florida (1927)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (1938)
Lois Lenski, Strawberry Girl (1945)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, illustr. Leo and Diane Dillon, The Secret River (1955; 2011)
Wilma Pitchford Hays, illustr. Peter Cox, Siege! The Story of St. Augustine in 1702 (1976)
Edward Bloor, Tangerine (1997)
Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn Dixie (2000)
Elizabeth George Speare, The Missing ‘Gator of Gumbo Limbo (2000)
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot (2002)
Zora Neal Hurston, What’s the Hurry, Fox? And Other Animal Stories, with Joyce Carl Thomas, illustr. Bryan Collier (2004; stories collected in the 1930s)
Jennifer Holm, Turtle in Paradise (2011)
Edwina Raffa and Annelle Rigsby, Kidnapped in Key West (2012)
Barbara Shoup, Looking for Jack Kerouac (2014)
Harvey E. Oyer III, The Adventures of Charlie Pierce: Charlie and the Tycoon (2016)
Hope Larson and Brittany Williams, Goldie Vance, Vol. 1 (2016)
The Florida Project (film), 2017
Pablo Cartaya, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora (2017)
Meg Medina, Merci Suárez Changes Gears (2018)

LIT 4930

Audible Reading: A Phenomenology of Sounds and Voices

Richard Burt

Book history and Textual Criticism have focused our attention on what they call the material text, opening the area of what is readable to include not only the letters on the page but   including font size, page layout, punctuation, typos and other errors, title pages, and so on. Reading practices include annotations and marginal notes left by given readers, and now readers can make them in electronic editions in pdf.  In this course, we will go even further by asking what the material text sounds like, how we listen when read silently.  How do you read deliberately illegible poetry? What is the threshold of making out a pun?  How close in sound do two words have to be in order to consider one to be a pun on another? How do we tell a typo from a pun? How do we hear accents and dialects?  Vocal mimicry? Do we hear gender or race when we read literature?  We will read in immersive and yet highly intellectual ways as we read aloud in class and also listen to radio broadcasts, podcasts, audiobooks and recordings of works made by their own authors.  We will spend some time on the history of reading aloud and reading silently, but our main approach will be phenomenological, our main focus will be on literary texts ranging somewhat randomly from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Talesto James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  Readings will include selections from Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card; Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible; Garret Stewart’s Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext;and Peter Szendy’s Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience. Requirements: TOTAL ATTENDANCE; no computers or iphones in class (the text will be available on the screen in the front of the classroom); co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Monday and once on a Wednesday; one discussion question; and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class there is an assigned reading, three shots if a film; student formulated quizzes each class; three assignments (see below) ; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films.  All assigned work for the course must be completed, turned in on time, and be of passing quality to pass the course.

LIT 4930

Breaking Boundaries, an SF Creative Writing Workshop

Stephanie Smith

From that 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 and/or soul, 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, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, or psychological ones, in which human perception plays a significant role, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this writing workshop we shall revisit some older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, while we perform some fictional thought-experiments of our own. We will workshop those experiments, read and critique our own works, and strive to create fictions about our future(s).

Students who want to apply to take this class must send a writing sample of no more than 5 pages to Professor Smith at ssmith@ufl.edu by March 20, 2019. Your name and UFID number must appear on the writing sample.

LIT 4930

Special Topics

STAFF

…

LIT 4930

Feminist Fictions

Tace Hedrick

…

SPC 4680

Rhetorical Criticism

Victor del Hierro

This course will take up the call of Cultural Rhetorics to think about how we might simultaneously center multiple historical and cultural traditions. Specifically, this course will open up space to critically analyze the rhetorical elements and processes of a variety of rhetors, communities, and cultures. Focused specifically on contemporary contexts, this class will ask students to identify an important figure, movement, and/or moment, and ask them to trace a genealogy or trajectory for their chosen topic. By doing this, students will work to understand what discourses are in dialogue as well as working towards possible recovery of marginalized discourses.

Some possible questions we will take in this course include: What does it look like to engage with contemporary figures like Roxanne Gay, Issa Rae, Desus and Mero, and Shea Serrano to understand their perspectives situated in the rhetorical traditions they invoke through their media platforms? How do we connect these contemporary figures to historical counterparts as well as movements? Readings in this course will cover a range of topics including Hip Hop, popular culture, internet studies, and Cultural Rhetorics. In addition to the genealogy/trajectory project, students will complete bi-weekly reading response and end the class with an in class presentation.