Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2020 (Upper Division)

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

Fall 2020

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

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

Course #	Section	Class #	Time(s)	Course title	Instructor
AML 3284	8001	23274	M W F 5	African American Women and the Cultural Critique	King
AML 3605	8002	23275	T 7/ R 7-8	African American Literature 1	Steverson
AML 3607	3A30	10429	M W F 4	African American Literature 2	Reid
AML 4242	3A28	10431	M W F 2	Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture	Burton
AML 4311	19CG	10432	M W F 3	Herman Melville	Smith
AML 4453	3A29	10434	T 4/ R 4-5	Law and American Literature	Hegeman
AML 4685	2077	10435	M W F 3	Women Writing About Race: “The Trouble Between Us”	King
CRW 3110	1D80	12504	T 9-11	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Akpan
CRW 3110	2A79	12505	W 9-11	Fiction Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Bordas
CRW 3310	07G0	20954	M 9-11	Imaginative Writing: Poetry Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Logan
CRW 4905	3304	12507	R 9-11	Long Story Short Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Akpan
CRW 4906	19D2	12531	T 9-11	Advanced Senior Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Mlinko
ENC 3310	8009	23546	T 8-9/ R 9	Advanced Exposition: Prose Style	Sánchez
ENC 3312	8062	26756	T 8-9/ R 9	Advanced Argumentative Writing	Shaw
ENC 3414	4C84	13065	M W F 6	Hypermedia	Del Hierro
ENC 4212	8004	23335	M W F 4	Professional Editing	Del Hierro
ENC 4260	8005	23338	M W F 4	Advanced Professional Writing: Writing with Communities	Gonzales
ENG 3122	3A32	12970	T 7 / R 7-8 / W 9-11	History of Film 2	Mowchun
ENG 3125	37C7	12971	M W F 5/ M E1-E3	The New Hollywood	Bianchi
ENG 4015	1H03	12972	M W F 7	Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature	Rudnytsky
ENG 4133	14C8	21556	M W F 6 / T E1-E3	Films of Environmental Crisis	Harpold
ENG 4133	1C26	12973	M W F 2 / R E1-E3	Closely Watched Films	Burt
ENG 4135	8017	24386	M W F 7 / W 9-11	French Cinema	Blum
ENG 4135	8062	26979	M W F 8 / M 9-10	Brazilian Cinema	Ginway
ENG 4136	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 10 / R 10-11 / W E1-E3	Basic Filmmaking: Process and Expression	Mowchun
ENG 4310	8016	24382	T 2-3 / R 3 / M 9-11	From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration	Mennel
ENG 4310	8650	26699	T 8-9 / R 9 / R 11-E1	European Road Movie	Raynard
ENG 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	Independent Study	Kidd
ENG 4911	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	Undergraduate Research in English	Kidd
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	M W F 7	Honors Seminar: Weird, Eerie, Uncanny	Bianchi
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 4 / R 4-5	Honors Seminar: James Joyce’s Delirious Dublin	Wegner
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	Internship	Kidd
ENG 4953	19EB	13034	M W F 7	Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature	Schueller
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	Honors Thesis Project	Kidd
ENL 3235	8008	23536	M W F 5	The English Novel in Context	Maioli
ENL 3251	152D	13071	M W F 3	Victorian Bodies	Yan
ENL 4333	3A84	13073	M W F 8	Shakespeare and Extreme Mental States	Rudnytsky
LIT 3041	8007	23508	M W F 2	All Joking Aside: The Art and Craft of Comedy	Homan
LIT 3043	21FB	16613	M W F 3	Modern Drama: Learning By Doing	Homan
LIT 3400	11BB	16614	M W F 4	Literature of Sustainability & Resilience	Harpold
LIT 3400	3A86	16615	M W F 6	Passing & the Politics of Identity	Holler
LIT 4188	194D	16616	R 9-11	Nationalism and the Novel	Amoko
LIT 4194	37C9	16617	MWF 5	Afro-European Literatures	Reid
LIT 4233	37D0	16619	M W F 9	Postcolonial Theory	Schueller
LIT 4333	8061	26754	M W F 9	Literature for the Adolescent	Elliott
LIT 4334	8014	23557	M W F 5	Golden Age of Children’s Literature	Yan
LIT 4930	042G	16644	M W F 3	Poe Scrypts	Burt
LIT 4930	05G2	16645	T 7 / R 7-8	Florida Children’s Literature	Kidd
LIT 4930	05G2	16646	T 4/ R 4-5	Kafka and the Kafkaesque	Kligerman
LIT 4930	2C20	16647	M 9-11	Contemporary Metamorphoses	Mlinko
LIT 4930	8024	26580	T 8-9/ R 9	Vampire Cinema	Kujundzic

Course Descriptions

AML 3284

African American Women and the Cultural Critique
Debra Walker King

Description: This course engages the work of world-renowned literary theorist Hortense Spillers and, in fact, carries the name of a course she taught while at Emory University. As such, it investigates whether Spillers’ theories concerning Black women’s literary production articulate the theoretical concepts of Afro Pessimism. By focusing foremost on representations of the captive female body within the social and political context of the United States, it examines the subject positions of African American women and the power of transformative rage. As an inquiry generated by Spillers’ work as well as current issues in literary scholarship, it addresses some of the assumptions of womanist and feminist investigation by exploring the following questions. If feminist praxis and epistemology are grounded in notions of “freedom,” “individuality,” and the freedom of the body to “labor,” deeply implicated in the rise of modern capitalism, then what gaps must be brought to light in order for this discourse to achieve a broader articulation? If womanism is both a social change perspective and a way of being in the world, how do texts written by African American women engage that perspective and mode of being? Do they engage either? In other words, what do African American women writers offer as survival strategies for those living in environments that appear content with promoting the “social death” of Black women? Finally, the course considers the points of conversion and foreclosure between Womanism and White feminism.

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. We will focus on the critical work of Hortense Spillers and six novels. As investigators and scholars, our inquiries will play in the spaces between practice and theory in order to address the commonalties, disruptions, gaps, absences, and silences that exist among the primary texts.

AML 3605

African-American Literature 1
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 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.

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 4242

Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture
Rachal Burton

In a vast amount of American literature and film, race is the central or underlying theme that pervades the narratives of countless texts. Moreover, in said works Blackness is often the primary topic. Whether portrayed as stereotypes in order to defend the institution of slavery or conveyed as superheroes to highlight the fact that #BlackLivesMatter, Blackness and, by extension, anti-Blackness, are in no way new concepts vis-à-vis the American imaginary. Still, race, as literary theorist Hortense Spillers crucially notes, “travels: while we are confronted from time to time, with almost-evidence that the age of the postrace subject is upon us, we are just as certain that its efficacies can, and do, move from one position to another and back again.” Indeed, although many considered the U.S. a post-racial society after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, the subsequent 2016 election of Donald Trump, perhaps, suggested otherwise. Discourses concerning (anti-)Blackness in American literature and film, then, persist today and often intersect with conversations about class, gender, and sexuality, to name a few. Keeping this in mind, literary works and films by and about Black people offer a unique perspective on (non-)ontology in the American context: that is, what it means to exist within civil society as Human, or outside of it and positioned, instead, by social death. In other words, Black literature and film importantly demonstrate how “race” and, more specifically, Blackness, “is not simply a metaphor and nothing more; it is the outcome of a politics.”

AML 4311

Herman Melville
Stephanie Smith

Famously, Herman Melville wrote to his friend the author Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned–it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” Yet this is the same author whose works are now held in such high esteem he is often regarded as a giant of American letters, with Moby Dick being acclaimed as the American novel. And yet it is also probably the least-read novel in America today, even if references to Captain Ahab and the White Whale show up frequently in popular culture. In this major author’s class we will re-examine the literary legacy of Herman Melville, with an eye to how his work became so famous, and why his work is still relevant (or ought to be) to readers of the 21^st century. Along the way, we will also take a broader look at how 19^th century American literature became renowned as “the American Renaissance.”

AML 4453

Law and American Literature
Susan Hegeman

In this course, we will study works of American literature written between 1880 and 2012, and one film, that substantially engage with some aspect of our legal system. We will discuss how these works address important themes related to the law including justice, crime, punishment, evidence, and the power of the state. We will also consider the issue of legal censorship of works of art, 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. Course requirements include two papers, a shorter research assignment, and active participation in class discussion.

AML 4685

Women Writing About Race: “The Trouble Between Us”
Debra Walker King

Description: This course surveys women’s writing during the late 20^th 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.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Uwem Akpan

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

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

CRW 3110

Fiction Workshop
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 comments for those who are being critiqued: notes 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 your 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 published short story 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 3310

Imaginative Writing: Poetry
William Logan

“Art Tatum was doing a solo piano record and Oscar Peterson came into the booth to watch. He asked the engineer, ‘Why is Art wearing headphones?’ The engineer said, ‘He’s listening to the World Series!’”

—Composer and pianist Kenny Werner

“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’ll read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Henri Cole to Smy Clampitt to Philip Larkin, 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):

Jay Parini, ed., Columbia Anthology of American Poetry
Seamus Heaney, Field Work
Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992
Anthony Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Workshop in Poetry Writing
Uwem Akpan

CRW 4906

Advanced Senior Workshop
Ange Mlinko

In this advanced workshop, we will read the influential New York School poets and follow their predilection for high art, music, film, and cosmopolitanism. Students will read, imitate, and innovate, and share the results of their experiments with language and imagination.

ENC 3310

Advanced Exposition: Prose Style
Raúl Sánchez

ENC 3310 is a course in exposition, a catch-all term for almost any kind of nonfiction writing except argumentative writing. This course will give you many opportunities to practice various kinds of exposition, on topics you choose.

This particular version of ENC 3310 is also a course in prose style, a term for how writers arrange their sentences and paragraphs. It will offer a few basic lessons in clear and graceful prose style, which you will apply to your writing.

Because guided practice is a great way to improve your writing, and because this course provides 6000 words toward the Writing Requirement (if you earn a final grade of C or better), you will write constantly: 500 words per week, on average.

To help improve your writing, you will share your writing with classmates. Also, you will meet with me weekly to discuss your work-in-progress and evaluate your finished work. Though we will evaluate your writing throughout the semester, your final grade will reflect your writing at the end of the semester.

There are no textbooks for this course. Everything we need will be available for free through Canvas, Ares (UF Libraries Course Reserves), or the Internets.

ENC 3312

Advanced Argumentative Writing
Zach Shaw

Though argumentation has traditionally been associated with newspaper op-eds and essays, it takes many other forms in the digital era. Memes, tweets, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos often convey argumentation in visual and textual formats. The best argumentative composers constantly ask how they can prove the claims they make with compelling evidence that makes sense. This course focuses on making arguments in both written and multimodal formats, with a particular emphasis on visual rhetoric. We’ll spend part of the semester specifically considering the role of media, technologies, and visual culture in composing arguments. We will examine rhetorical argumentative structures and theories, ranging from classical to contemporary rhetoric. Finally, we will consider how we read arguments in order to develop better strategies for composing our own arguments. The assignments for the course will allow students to be creative and think critically through text, images, and a range of media, all while engaging with current sociopolitical ideas and debates.

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.

ENC 4212

Professional Editing
Victor Del Hierro

This course will examine the theory and practice of editing and management of documentation in industry and other organizational settings. With an emphasis on Technical and Professional Communication, students will spend the semester learning best practices and strategies for doing editing work while considering culturally relevant contexts. In addition to editing, the course will also cover user-centered design and user-experience methods for approaching editing work. Readings in the course will include digital and print based texts from a variety of sources. Assignments in the course will include technical reports and project-based editing assignments including but not limited to: community organizations, website, fiction, non-fiction, and other multimodal texts.

ENC 4260

Advanced Professional Writing: Writing With Communities
Laura Gonzales

The focus of this class will be on writing with communities. Students will read about different frameworks that activists, researchers, and teachers have developed for working with particular communities to meet specific goals. Then, students will discuss which communities they write for and with, and they will develop a community engagement project in collaboration with a community partner of their choice. Through course readings and discussions, students will learn various strategies for designing and testing different written tools, platforms, and projects that can benefit community goals and outcomes. No previous experience with community engagement projects is required to take this course, as the class will work together to identify community initiatives and partners.

ENG 3122

History of Film 2
Trevor Mowchun

There is no single or exhaustive film history. That is why historians are, and have always been, partial storytellers. There is no such thing as fact without fiction; no possibility for truth without the limitations of a human perspective. This course will begin with a brief philosophy of history so as to better understand what is revealed, concealed and sometimes fabricated by historical awareness. Film presents unique challenges to the film historian, particularly its widespread popularity and sense of pleasure which render it susceptible to mainstream aesthetics/politics while triggering the subjective biases and tastes of historians. The allure of immortalized film stars and the aura surrounding so-called classic films are but two examples of how film scholars can be blinded by their very own object of study. We will evaluate such categories and, as conscientious historians, reflect on what we are inclined to value historically, ask ourselves what it means to spotlight the past, and how to better illuminate darker, less understood areas of film history without grafting present day ideologies onto historical contexts which have their own complex systems of values, often in direct opposition to our own. It remains the job of film history—and perhaps any history—to make sense of the values which have brought about the present state of affairs. A history written to suit our own political/aesthetic/affective agendas is partial and potentially irresponsible (it fails to respond to the past).

Throughout the semester we will question familiar topics in pre- and post-WWII film history and debate the need for new frameworks of understanding this complex period of cinematic maturation and experimentation. Examples of such topics to be assessed and possibly re-evaluated are as follows: the transition from silent to sound cinema, pre- and post-code aesthetics, canonical vs. marginalized films/histories, historical evolution of film style (from 30’s to 40’s to 50’s), parallel developments in Hollywood and Europe (and beyond), the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of German fascism (ideologies of efficiency), systematic differences in mode and manner across the key Hollywood studios, the seemingly irreconcilable trajectories of post-war cinematic history (especially American film noir, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave, and their crosspollinations).

Weekly readings and screenings are required. Evaluation will be based on quizzes, midterm test, final paper, class participation, and an optional video essay.

ENG 3125

The New Hollywood
Pietro Bianchi

In the 1960s Hollywood was in the midst of a crisis generated by the competition of television and the inability of the studios to keep up with the social and cultural turmoil that shook the country (the students movement, the civil right movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests). Since the beginning of the decade new narrative and productive models started to emerge with independent companies (such as the Corman Factory) challenging the power of the studios with new interpretations of reality and a new approach to filmmaking influenced by the European New Waves. The turning point is the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider that between 1967 and 1969 opened up a new era for American cinema. For nearly a decade a group of young filmmakers – Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Monte Hellman, Sidney Lumet, Alan J. Pakula, Sam Peckinpah, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese and many others – dubbed the “New Hollywood”, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past to a more authorial approach similar to European cinema.

This course will give an overview of a unique decade in American cinema, spanning from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969 to William Friedkin’s Cruising in 1980. The focus of our inquiry will not be only the evolution of film aesthetics during this time period but also the evolution of ideological motifs as well as of economic models of production. The class will be discussion-based and a strong emphasis will be given on active participation. Course assignments include a weekly mandatory screening, weekly posts on Canvas, a short in-class presentation, three film reviews, and a final 5-7 pages research paper.

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 are Oedipus Rex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Course requirements are a midterm, final, one five-page paper, and weekly journal entries. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected.

ENG 4133

Films of Environmental Crisis
Terry Harpold

This course is a survey of the semiotics and imaginative ecologies of films of environmental crisis. (Here “crisis” applies to stories of natural and human-made disasters as well as changes in weather and climate that catalyze the plot, images, and sounds of a film.) We will view and discuss primarily narrative fiction films, in which human characters are thrust into conditions of environmental transformation – alienation, upheaval, collapse, extinction, and re-creation – and confront new relations to other humans and other beings of the natural and built worlds. A key emphasis of the course is on learning how to see environmental elements of a film as more than scenery or allegorical doubles of characters’ emotions and actions: as real, determinant situations of subjectivity and agency in the medium of film.

Films we will view and discuss include: Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, Holland, 1929), Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (UK, 1961), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (US, 1972), Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (Australia, 1977), Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime, Japan, 1997), Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand (Casa de areia, Brazil, 2005), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (Sānxiá hǎorén, China, 2006), Sylvère Petit’s The Fanning Bees (Les Ventileuses, France, 2010), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (S. Korea/Czech Republic, 2013), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia 2015), Jennifer Baichwal’s Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (Canada, 2018), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lija’s Aniara (Sweden/Denmark, 2018).

Graded assignments include two short-form responses to assigned films, two short-form replies to other students’ responses, and three long-form analyses of assigned films.

ENG 4133

Closely Watched Films
Richard Burt

Theodor Adorno says somewhere that recent history is the hardest part of history to comprehend. It’s as if the present were always a catastrophe. To see how narrative film can help us begin to grasp the collapse of neoliberalism, we will watch films from very different genres in chronological order that explore recurrent questions in a highly eccentric perhaps even idiomatic manner adopting variously oblique angles usually from a short distance but also from far away. I have grouped films in constellations. The first film of each constellation will be from the 1930s or the 1970s. Here is one constellation concerning investigative journalism, white collar crime, corporate law, libraries, police detectives, and environmental regulation: All the President’s Men (dir. Alan Pakula, 1976), The Mothman Prophecies (dir. Mark Pellington, 2002), Zodiac (dir. David Fincher, 2007), Fahrenheit 11/9 (dir. Michael Moore, 2018), and Dark Waters (dir. Todd Haynes, 2019). Another constellation will be The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin), Bug (dir. William Friedkin, 2006), Hypernormalization (dir. 2016), Wormwood (dir. Errol Morris, 2017), Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster, 2019), and Parasite (dir. 2019). And we will explore the neoliberal penetration of Hollywood film by seeing films in pairs, such as Sorry to Bother You (dir. Boots Riley, 2018) and Black KKKlansmen (dir. Spike Lee, 2018), or Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu, 2019) and Queen & Slim (dir. Melina Matsoukas, 2019). The last film we’ll watch will be Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937). Readings will include Alain Badiou’s The True Life and a few essays by Sigmund Freud. On Fridays, students each use a cell phone camera to take the same shot. Over the course of the semester, we will be making a trailer for a film yet to be titled. You will be the cast. The classroom will be our studio. Using a camera to take different kinds of shots should encourage you to think not only about the film you are watching and hearing but to everything about that went on behind the camera to make the film as well. And to help you appreciate editing as we begin to put shots together in sequence, I have included Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov. 1929) and F for Fake (dir. Orson Welles, 1973)

Requirements: Three short papers, co-leading class discussion twice, and written responses twice a week. If you arrive late, I count you as absent. I allow two unexcused absences. A third may bring down your final grade. A fourth will bring your final grade down a full letter. Miss more than five and you can withdraw or take an E. For more information, go to the course website: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/CloseFilm/

ENG 4135

The Comic in French Cinema
Sylvie Blum

Moving away from film noir in French cinema, I have decided to tackle comedy and humor in French cinema since its inception until today. Comedy is the favorite French genre. The class will examine different facets of what constitutes the comic tradition and if it translates well into American culture. Ethnicity, nationalism, business, culinary, war-time and interracial recent comedies will be subject to analysis and discussion.

ENG 4135

Brazilian Cinema
M. Elizabeth Ginway

From the gritty Cinema novo to the moving films of the New Brazilian Cinema, this class focuses on the socio-economic, political and ideological issues that have characterized Brazilian filmmaking from the 1950s to the present. Students are expected to participate in weekly screenings, class discussion, blog posts to debate and understand one of the most influential cinemas of Latin America.

ENG 4136

Basic Filmmaking: Process and Expression
Trevor Mowchun

This course is a meditation on the complexities of 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. Alternating between theory and practice, students will be introduced to the basic equipment and techniques of filmmaking through workshops which will also cover the fundamental principles of dramatic construction for both narrative and experimental film. Throughout we will be concerned with a view of cinema as a unique, evolving, visionary artform with great individual and social impact.

Students are exposed to the expressive potential of cinema through a variety of short exercises or “sketches” exploring the medium’s technological, conceptual, aesthetic and hybrid facets (i.e. image, silence, sound, time, space, movement, montage, the frame, the face). These short films (approximately 1 minute each) will be compiled and arranged into two project timelines to be submitted as film sketchbooks throughout the semester: the first installment requires minimal editing whereas the second installment should be more cohesive. Students will also be encouraged to keep a written notebook related to the activities of the film sketchbooks, 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. The final project will be a short film that emerges from a rigorous process of selecting, organizing, revising and/or expanding material from the film sketches, resulting in a thematically and aesthetically unified work of filmic expression.

Students will be provided with access to the English department’s production and post-production equipment. Students are also free to use their own film equipment with prior approval from the instructor.

Those eligible and interested should contact the professor, Trevor Mowchun, by email as soon as possible to receive an application for the course. Please write to tmowchun@ufl.edu. The deadline for the submission of applications is March 13, 2020. 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).

ENG 4310

From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration
Barbara Mennel

This course introduces students to the relationship between filmmaking in the Weimar Republic of Germany and the Hollywood studio system. We will study the films and lives of filmmakers who left Germany to make films in Hollywood, analyzing continuities and breaks from German filmmaking to classic Hollywood. A significant section of the course will focus on film emigration during the Nazi period and films noirs, as well as B-movies, anti-Nazi films, and films exploring questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Filmmakers include Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk, Josef von Sternberg, and Billy Wilder.

ENG 4310

European Road Movie
Holly Raynard

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

ENG 4905

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.

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research in English
Undergraduate Coordinator

TBD

ENG 4936

“The Weird, the Eerie and the Uncanny”: Contemporary Narratives of Horror and Extinction
Pietro Bianchi

What happens when the world ceases to be perceived as a substance but starts to appear as a shadow? What if another dimension of existence suddenly arises in the texture of reality but is unable to fully disclose? In 1919 Freud referred to this dimension as the uncanny: something that, while being overly familiar, appears as weirdly out of place. Something – Mark Fisher would say almost a century later – that is at the same time frightening and promising another world.

This course will be an overview of the emergence of figures of weird, eerie and uncanny in contemporary imaginary: from David Lynch to True Detective; from the Lovercraftian literature of Thomas Ligotti, to contemporary pessimist neo-rationalists philosophers such as Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier; from Jordan Peele’s horror films to narratives about anthropocene and climate catastrophes. Our guiding question will be: why today it is easier to imagine horrors, supernatural creatures and human extinction instead of revolutionary social transformations?

The class will be discussion-based and a strong emphasis will be given on active participation. Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, three in-class quizzes, and a final 5-7 pages paper.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar:James Joyce’s Delirious Dublin
Phillip Wegner

This seminar will undertake an intensive examination of the major works of the greatest English language author of the twentieth century, James Joyce. Although Joyce spent the majority of his adult life outside of his birthplace of Ireland, all of his work returns obsessively to his native land, and especially its capital city, Dublin. Joyce even said of his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922)—selected in 1998 by the Modern Library as the greatest novel of the twentieth century—that he gave in it “a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” In our seminar discussions, we will test the validity of Joyce’s claim, reconstructing through our readings the complex and dynamic historical situation to which all these works represent such extraordinary responses. Special attention will be paid to questions of Joyce’s relationship to the international cultural phenomenon of modernism, the events that culminate in Ireland’s independence in 1922 (also the year of the publication of Ulysses), and the global political context of empire and decolonization. Readings will include Joyce’s major works of fiction: his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), his groundbreaking semi-autobiographical, Künstlerroman, or novel of the artist, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (as well as its first draft manuscript, Stephen Hero [1904-06]), Ulysses (1922), and sections from his final and highly experimental “book of the dark,” Finnegans Wake (1939). I will also be asking students to engage with both some of the conversation surrounding Joyce’s work and some critical tools that might help us most effectively come to grips with it.

ENG 4940

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.

ENG 4953

Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature
Malini Schueller

One of the most important issues in our time is that of indigenous resistance against settler colonialism. This seminar is a global literature course exploring diverse literatures of indigeneity and resistance to settler colonialism. To give the course some focus, we’ll look at four very different sites: US North America, Hawai’i, Algeria, and Palestine. We will read fiction and nonfiction by both the colonized and settlers, and talk about a range of complicated issues such as sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, and nationalism. We will try to get a handle on the theoretical debates about settler colonial studies. We will also follow present-day activism and think about tactics of resistance. What forms does resistance to settler colonialism take, and why? To what extent might the dynamics or strategies of one situation transfer to those of another? And what about environmental issues; what are the connections between environmental defense and resistance to settler colonialism?

The course will begin with nineteenth-century literature of settler colonialism and native resistance in the US which will serve as a foundation to reading the contemporary literature and theory. Our contemporary materials will include twenty-first century novels such as Kristina Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013), David Truer’s Prudence (2015), Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation (2013), a memoir–Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2007) and twentieth century literature such as Assia Djebar’s novel, Children of the New World, Simon Ortiz’ Fight Back and short stories of Ghassan Kanafini. We will also read the works of some theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, Jodi Byrd, Craig Womack, Kehaulani Kanui, Achille Mbembe, Rob Wilson, and Edward Said. We will end by examining settler colonial use of the COVID 19 to further dispossess indigenous populations. The course should interest anyone interested in histories of oppression and violence, Native American studies, post-colonial studies, race studies, and diasporic studies.

ENG 4970

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.

ENL 3235

The English Novel in Context
Roger Maioli

Few literary genres have been as responsive to their historical context as the novel. Classical genres like tragedy and epic poetry had focused on the lives of gods, heroes, kings, and queens, while medieval romance featured knights rescuing damsels from sorcerers, dragons, and other supernatural entities. The world described by such genres was very different than that inhabited by readers. By contrast, the English novel, since its origins in the early eighteenth century, focused on characters resembling real-life individuals. Rather than Troy or Arcadia, such characters lived in London or Bath, and they navigated an everyday reality very much like that of novel readers. For this reason, novels serve as a valuable window into the historical reality of their times. In this course we will read four representative English novels from the long eighteenth century (1660–1820), in order to achieve two goals. The first is to understand how the novel evolved as a genre with certain defining characteristics (in other words, this is a course on the history of the eighteenth-century novel). Our second goal is to use these novels to debate the historical issues they engage with. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) will give us a glimpse into the horrific bubonic plague epidemic that ravaged London in 1665; the thrilling Gothic novel The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, will help us discuss how the English were haunted by their complicated Catholic heritage; the anonymous The Woman of Colour (1808) will confront us with the complexities of imperial relations and the difficulties of being a black woman in a predominantly white British society; finally, we will discuss how English politics and customs restricted the liberty of women by reading Jane Austen’s masterpiece Pride and Prejudice (1813).

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, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

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 and Extreme Mental States
Peter Rudnytsky

The course will consist of a close reading of three plays—one comedy, one tragedy, and one romance—about love and madness. Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale all portray jealous lovers or husbands who accuse their partners of infidelity based on mistaken perceptions and beliefs. In opening up the themes of murderous rage, loss, and (possible) redemption from philosophical, psychoanalytic, political, and feminist perspectives, 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 expected.

LIT 3041

All Joking Aside: The Art and Craft of Comedy
Sidney 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.

LIT 3043

Modern Drama: Learning By Doing
Sidney 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

Literature of Sustainability and Resilience
Terry Harpold

This course takes as its founding premises two unassailable principles. First, we live in a time of increasing environmental instability, mass extinction, food insecurity, forced migration, 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, ecologists, and journalists such as Erle Ellis, Greta Gaard, Aldo Leopold, W.S. Merwin, John Muir, Natasha Myers, Arne Næss, Roy Scranton, and Henry David Thoreau; fiction authors such as Jean Giono, Leena Krohn, Ann Pancake, and Richard Powers; artists, graphic novelists, and poets such as Madhur Anand, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Sandra Beasley, Robinson Jeffers, Ayelen Liberona, Donato Mancini, Ed Roberson, Joe Sacco, François Villon, and Walt Whitman.

Graded assignments include four critical essays on assigned readings and a creative photo-essay project.

LIT 3400

Passing in Israel: Connecting Modern Israeli and African American Cultures
Roy Holler

Aren’t we all passing? Moving between identities daily, changing our personalities, hiding behind masks and presenting ourselves to be different than who we are? In some cases, passing between identities help us adjust to certain demands of a mainstream culture. But at what cost? Which parts of us are being lost when dealing in such ventures? In this course we will define passing through its historical African American roots, and then seek manifestations of the phenomena in modern Israeli cultures, examining the complex relationships between various global and Israeli identities. We will begin our session talking about the implications and the possible outcomes of comparing unique and different experiences. We will see the extreme stakes of African American passers at the turn of the 20th century and ask what passing means today. With this new knowledge we will move to Modern Israeli society, seeking to define national integrationist narratives through passing, looking to reevaluate our own negotiation of identity/difference in today’s world.
Students will achieve these outcomes through class discussions and assignments that emphasize:

The cultural and historical context through which modern Israeli society evolved.
Key Israeli texts, histories and literature, that correspond with, and help us understand different  forms of Modern Israeli culture, society and identity.
The complex relationships between different models of Israeli identity—culture/ethnicity/race  and gender—and the interpretation of ideas on which they are based.
Familiarity with passing, a key historical and contemporary American phenomenon.
Exploration of one’s own connection and identification with the intersection of the Black/Jewish  experience, and (re)assessing the intellectual and cultural framework that constructs our personal and political views.  Students will gain the skills needed to show deeper appreciation of unfamiliar cultural production in both oral and written form, while learning to recognize and respond to key elements of Judaism through a comparative lens.

LIT 4188

Nationalism and the Novel
Apollo Amoko

This course explores the relationship imagined between “nation” and “narration.” In Imagined Communities, a landmark study on the origins and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson appears to suggest that the novel (along with the newspaper) was central to the possibility of imagining the modern nation. The aesthetic of the novel made it possible to think and narrate the nation in “homogeneous empty time.” Further, Anderson seems to contend that the canonization of literary texts through the school system was instrumental for enabling the intelligentsia to “take the nation to the people.” From this perspective, it is not surprising that literature has historically conceived of its objects of study in fundamentally nationalist terms. In Cultural Capital, a landmark study on the logic of literary canon formation, John Guillory contends that the effect of nationalist legitimation cannot be understood as a property inherent in the aesthetic of the novel (or the newspaper), but rather, is the product of a certain context of reading, “a pedagogical imaginary.” Specific literary works, Guillory insists, must be seen as “the vector of ideological notions which do not inhere in the works themselves but in the context of their institutional presentation, or more simply, in the way in which they are taught.” He makes a firm distinction between pedagogical and national imaginaries, between school and national cultures. In his argument, school culture “does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of artifact-based knowledge an imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state.” While for Anderson, the novel enables the emergence of national culture, for Guillory, the cultural institutions of the novel reflect a highly restrictive school culture. Which of these two theorists presents the more persuasive argument regarding the connection between nation and narration? We will attempt to answer this question by looking at a range of canonical texts from a variety of national and continental contexts.

LIT 4194

Afro-European Literatures
Mark Reid

This course surveys contemporary literature about Afro-Europeans and African American expatriates in Western Europe. Weekly readings will cover literature, critical theory, philosophy, and political essays that discuss and imaginatively represent the socioeconomic and cultural integration or non-integration of Afro-Europeans (citizens and immigrants of Western European countries) who have ancestral ties to North and sub-Saharan Africa.

We will explore the intersectional character of immigration from South to North in Europe as well as North America.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Amara, Fadela. Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room

Begag, Azouz. Shanty Town Kid

Bouraoui, Nina. Tomboy

Guene, Faiza. Kiffe, Kiffe Tomorrow

Hugel-Marshall, Ika. Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany

Smail, Paul. Smile

Stew. Passing Strange: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

Williams, John A. The Man Who Cried I Am

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Theory
Malini Schueller

By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few European powers had colonized 80% of Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements during the latter half of the century led to territorial, but not necessarily economic, cultural and intellectual decolonization. The continuing cultural, political, and economic effects of colonialism, as well as new forms of colonialism and imperialism sanctioned on the global South constitute the field of postcolonial studies. We will study the ways in which postcolonial theory has intersected with and impacted diverse areas of inquiry such as feminism, historiography, ethnography, political science, and literature. At the same time, this course will stress the importance of historicizing postcoloniality. The course will focus on the central concerns of postcolonial studies: the nature of colonial discourse, the articulation of revolutionary national consciousness, questions of subalternity and history, the relationship of postcolonial studies to gender studies, the vexing nature of settler colonialism, and the politics of contemporary colonialism. We will read the works of major revolutionaries and theorists and the debates and arguments about these works. The course will cover writings from and about the major parts of the world affected by imperialism: Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the U.S. A major goal of the course will be to see how postcolonial theory can be instrumental in affecting cultural changes in conditions of oppression today.

Possible Texts

Mary Prince The History of Mary Prince (Dover edition)

Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Colonial Discourse and Post– Colonial Theory

Nawal El Saadawi Woman at Point Zero

Joe Sacco Palestine Collection

Additional readings will be loaded on canvas

Requirements: Pop quizzes; two essay exams; one oral presentation

LIT 4333

Literature for the Adolescent
Jaquelin Elliott

This course will examine some of the major themes and trends in American “Young Adult” literature (or “YA”). Concentrating on culturally-constructed understandings of adolescence, our course will trace the emergence of the YA genre from the 1950s onward with special attention paid to contemporary works of the last 15 years. Students will be asked to consider the ways in which young adult literature serves a multiplicity of material and sociopolitical functions and in what ways YA’s heroes and villains both inform and react to a particular historical moment’s conceptions of adolescence, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and class.

Discussions will include examinations of YA’s often fraught definitions and its early roots in Victorian fiction (Jane Eyre); the birth of the “All-American” teenager in the mid-twentieth century (Rebel Without a Cause; The Outsiders); the popularity of paranormal romance and the fairy tale remix; the history of LGBTQ representation in YA (Annie on My Mind; Stay Gold); the Black Lives Matter movement and young adult literature as activism (Tyler Johnson Was Here); YA initiatives like “We Need Diverse Books” (American-Born Chinese) and recent remixes of Young Adult classics with an eye towards improving inclusivity (Carry On; Akata Witch; Every Heart a Doorway); and of the popularity of the genres still dominating the Young Adult market, including contemporary romance (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), fantasy and magical realism (Blanca y Roja), and dystopia (The Hunger Games; The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes).

Texts our course will engage with includes literature, film, academic scholarship/cultural commentary, and graphic narrative. Class assignments will consist of short response papers, presentations or projects with a creative component, and a final research paper.

LIT 4334

Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Rae Yan

The “Golden Age” of children’s literature in Britain and the United States tends to be defined as a period 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 class, culture, gender, nation and understandings of the self. In our course, we will turn to works of the Golden Age by authors such as Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, L. Frank Baum, Louisa May Alcott, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, Edith Nesbit, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes to explore the construction of childhood during the Golden Age. Additionally, we will contextualize this 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? In what ways do traditions of periodical or serial literature shape the production of such children’s literature?

Please note that this is a class involves both research work and seminar-style discussion that requires active participation and daily attendance. Assignments include (a) short presentations on critical readings; (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.

LIT 4930

Poe Scrypts
Richard Burt

We will read Edgar Allan Poe’s major shorts stories and his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in relation to their posthumous reception (Baudelaire, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida), cryptography, crypts, and race theory. For comparative purposes, relevant short stories by M.R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.P. Lovecraft as well as the novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself will also be included. Requirements: Three short papers, co-leading class discussion twice, and written responses twice a week. If you arrive late, I count you as absent. I allow two unexcused absences. A third may bring down your final grade. A fourth will bring your final grade down a full letter. Miss more than five and you can withdraw or take an E. For more information, go to the course website: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Poescrypts/

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 – Disney included — has shaped writing for young people and vice versa. We’ll sample a range of texts published from the nineteenth century forward. Our approach will be analytical but also exploratory, in that we’re inventing as much as discovering the category. We will also think about what stories haven’t been told sufficiently or even at all. Paper options include a site visit and reflection, an analysis of Florida book awards, and a creative project, alongside more conventionally critical projects.

Possible Texts

Francis Robert Goulding, Robert and Harold: or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast (1853)
Walter Brooks, Freddie Goes to Florida (1927)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (1938)
Lois Lenski, Strawberry Girl (1945)
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Freedom River (1953)
John Cech, Django (1994)
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)
T. R. Simon and Victoria Bond, Zora and Me (2010)
Jennifer Holm, Turtle in Paradise (2011)
Barbara Shoup, Looking for Jack Kerouac (2014)
N.D. Wilson, The Boys of Blur (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

Kafka and the Kafkaesque
Eric Kligerman

This seminar will explore the writings of Franz Kafka and the effect that his literary legacy has had on literature and film. Our objective will be to analyze how elements of modern consciousness and “the Kafkaesque” reappear in selected texts of other writers and filmmakers. Our readings of Kafka will center on such topics as law and justice, family and solitude, humans and animals, travel, the crisis of modernity, and questions pertaining to German-Jewish identity. 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. 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

Contemporary Metamorphoses
Ange Mlinko
This course will explore contemporary writers’ continuing fascination with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the epic poem that has arguably shaped western literature, music, and visual art more than any other. While some myths are well known—Icarus and Daedalus, Daphne and Apollo, Orpheus and Eurydice, Persephone and Demter—others still remain untapped resources. We will touch on translations and versions from the Renaissance (Arthur Golding, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare) before turning to Ezra Pound, Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, Ann Carson, and others. Lots of reading and short response papers will be required, along with class presentations.

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic