Department of English

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

Fall 2021

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

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

Course #	Section	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3605	8002	21367	T 7/ R 7-8	ROL 0115	African-Amer Lit 1
AML 4311	37CF	10393	T 10/ R 10-11	MAT 0113	bell hooks	Tace Hedrick
AML 4311	19CG	10392	MWF 5	MAT 0113	James Baldwin & Critical Race Theory	Mark Reid
AML 4453	3A29	10394	MWF 7	MAT 0113	Cultures of US Imperialism	Malini Schueller
AML 4685	2077	10395	T 7/ R 7-8	MAT 0113	Afro-Latinx Literature and Culture	Tace Hedrick
CRW 3110	1D80	12333	T 9-11	TUR 2318	Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Uwem Akpan
CRW 3110	2A79	12334	W 9-11	MAT 0005	Advanced Fiction Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Cassie Fancher
CRW 3310	07G0	19483	M 9-11	CBD 0210	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Michael Hofmann
CRW 4906	19D2	12357	T 9-11	CBD 0212	Senior Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	William Logan
ENC 3250	4C81	12750	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0118	Rhetoric and Social Media	Laura Gonzales
ENC 3310	8009	21548	T 8-9/ R 9	MAT 0118/ MAT 0051	Advanced Exposition	Raúl Sánchez
ENC 4212	8004	21417	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0051	Technical Editing	Victor Del Hierro
ENG 3011	9005	26556	MWF 4	MAT 0117	Allegorical Reading	Phillip Wegner
ENG 3121	9007	26780	T 2-3/ R 3/ M 9-11	TUR 2334	History of Film 1	Kevin Cooley
ENG 4015	9008	26784	MWF 7	WEIM 1070	What is Desire?	Pietro Bianchi
ENG 4015	1H03	12760	MWF 7	MAT 0115	Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature	Peter Rudnytsky
ENG 4130	9009	26782	MWF 5/ T E1-E3	TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Colonial and Postcolonial Cinema	Pietro Bianchi
ENG 4133	1C26	12761	MWF 7/ M E1-E3	TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Capitalism in Contemporary US Film	Milt Moise
ENG 4134	9010	26740	T 7/ R 7-8/ M 9-11	TUR 2334/ TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Women in French Cinema	Sylvie Blum
ENG 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Independent Study	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4911	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Undergraduate Research in English	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	W 6-8	MAT 0004	Honors Seminar: Women in/of Science Fiction	Stephanie Smith
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 9-11	CBD 0220	Honors Seminar: Worldly Victorians	Rae Yan
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Internship	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4953	9015	26789	M 9-11	TUR 2349	Writing Childhood	John Cech
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Honors Thesis Project	Kenneth Kidd
ENL 3251	152D	12844	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0117/ MAT 0003	Victorian Bodies	Rae Yan
ENL 4333	9017	26801	MWF 2	Online	Shakespeare: Learn By Doing	Sidney Homan
ENL 4333	3A84	12845	MWF 8	MAT 0115	Shakespeare	Peter Rudnysky
LIT 3041	8007	21519	MWF 3	Online	Comedy: Learning by Doing	Sidney Homan
LIT 3400	11BB	15852	MWF 6	MAT 0115	The Literature of Sustainability and Resilience	Terry Harpold
LIT 3400	3A86	15853	MWF 4	MAT 0006	Candide’s Eighteenth Century	Roger Maioli
LIT 4194	37C9	15855	T 6-8	TUR 2336	Issues of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in African Literatures	Apollo Amoko
LIT 4233	37D0	15856	T 8-9/ R 9	MAT 0115/ MAT 0114	Tourism, The Caribbean, and Literature	Leah Rosenberg
LIT 4331	13FF	15857	W 9-11	TUR 2354	Children’s Literature	John Cech
LIT 4344	8014	21558	MWF 4	MAT 0113	Golden Age of Children’s Literature	Kelsey Carper
LIT 4483	9019	26855	T4/ R 4-5	MAT 0115	Ideas of Value, Forms of Evaluation	Susan Hegeman
LIT 4483	9021	27544	MWF 6	BEN 328	Representations of Race in Israel	Roy Holler
LIT 4483	19E7	15858	MWF 6	MAT 0113	Seeing is Believing?: Comics Nonfiction	Fi Stewart-Taylor
LIT 4930	042G	15880	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0113	Narratology & (In)Complete Novel	Kevin Cooley
LIT 4930	8024	23685	T 8-9/ R 9	TUR 2334	Vampire Cinema	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	05G2	15881	M 6-8	AND 0032	Breaking Boundaries: SF/F Writing Workshop	Stephanie Smith
SPC 4680	142B	19971	T 7/ R 7-8	LIT 0125	Rhetorical Criticism	Victor Del Hierro

 

Course Descriptions

AML 4311

bell hooks
Tace Hedrick

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

AML 4311

James Bladwin & Critical Race Theory
Mark Reid

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with James Baldwin’s literary and sociopolitical writings. The course expects that students apply critical race theory in their analysis. Such theorizing will borrow from writing by scholars as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class discussion and written work will discern whether there exists evidence of Afro-Pessimism and or postNegritude moments in Baldwin’s oeuvre that easily dismisses postracial fantasies and the machination of neoliberal gestures.

The seminar critically surveys James Baldwin’s writings, lectures, and selected biographies that explore Baldwin’s life in the United States, France, and Turkey. Baldwin was engaged in the socio-political world that surrounded and sometimes consumed his artistic and moral energies. He was active in the U.S. Civil Rights movement and international concerns about the construction of nation, race, and sexuality. One critic wrote of Baldwin in these words: “Following publication of Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s literary star approached its peak during the turbulent 1960s. His burgeoning role as celebrity, prophet, and leader heaped an unsustainable amount of pressure and responsibility onto his slight frame in an American landscape that doubly punished Baldwin for being both black and gay, and he often turned to Turkey for sanctuary.”

This course will reveal the artistry, compassion, and moral commitment of one of America’s greatest writers. Students will critically study how James Baldwin fared as an American writer and social critic. and how critical race theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-black violence in words and deeds. Class discussion will consider how Baldwin imaginatively exposed and fervently articulated the coming consciousness that generates “Black Lives Matter” awareness and endgame.

AML 4453

Cultures of US Imperialism
Malini Schueller

This course takes its title from the well-known collection published in 1993 which transformed the field of American studies by making colonialism and imperialism central to conceptions of nation, culture, and identity. By reading a broad range of works of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, we will examine different tropes of empire such as going native, colonial domesticity, pornotropics, tutelary colonialism, exhibiting empire and remasculinization; at the same time, we will focus on the specific sites of empire such as the “frontier,” Hawai’I, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam. The course will engage with different forms of U.S. imperialism such as North American settler colonialism, Pacific and continental expansionism, control of far-flung colonies, and empire without colonies. We will also examine some cultural expressions of resistance to empire. The purpose is to examine the different ways in which, at historically specific moments, cultural texts (memoirs, novels, and films) and empire are imbricated and to raise a number of questions: How are travel and exploration implicated in empire? What are the differences in how the sites of U.S. empire are constructed in the national imaginary? How does contemporary literature register histories of, and ongoing US imperialism? How might literature resist cultural imperialism?

Some of the texts we will read include Mary Helen Fee’s A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines (1910), Luis Rafael Sanchez’s Macho Camacho’s Beat (1980), R. Zamora’s Linmark Leche (2011), Assata Shakur’s Assata: an Autobiography (1987), Nora Okja Keller Fox Girl (2002), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (2018)

Requirements: Regular attendance, pop quizzes, one oral presentation, two 8 page papers.

AML 4685

Afro-Latinx Literature and Culture
Tace Hedrick

Although U.S. Latinx Studies is beginning to find a more secure foothold in universities, U.S. Afro-Latinx Studies is still relatively new. In this course, we will examine how Afro-Latinas/os born and/or raised in the United States negotiate a complex race, class, and gender identity through representations in both United States literature and United States (popular) culture. We will be looking as well to the roles African-heritage peoples play in countries like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and how such roles affect the histories of their negotiations with racialized identities in the United States.

CRW 3110

Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop
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

Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop
Cassie Fancher

This is a small workshop for serious writers. Over the course of the semester, students will submit two stories for workshop. In addition, we will read and discuss elements of craft in a selection of published short stories. George Saunders said, “Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature.” The goal of this class is to lean into questions without answers, to develop and analyze complex characters, and to support each other creatively in becoming better writers and readers. Admission by manuscript review during advanced registration (refer to department website); by prerequisite during drop/add.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Michael Hofmann

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

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 Hopkins University, and other programs.

Required reading:

• an anthology of modern poetry
• a selection of contemporary books of poetry

ENC 3250

Rhetoric and Social Media
Laura Gonzales

Social media has long been leveraged by organizers, activists, scholars, and community members to foster connections and create change across physical locations. Social media movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, #SayHerName, #CriptheVote, and many more represent the ingenuity of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who innovate rhetorical infrastructures, including social media, to fight for justice.

At the same time, social media algorithms are consistently manipulated to perpetuate stereotypes and misinformation, particularly in current times. This course will establish a space for analysis, discussion, and content development surrounding the intersections of rhetoric and social media. Students will read scholarship about social media activism, algorithmic design, artificial intelligence, and rhetorical velocity. Using this research, students will then trace social media events and movements of their choice, to develop a digital installation showcasing the intersections of rhetoric and social media in relation to their own scholarly and activist interests.

ENC 3310

Advanced Exposition
Raúl Sánchez

This is a writing-intensive course that operates on a writing center or writing studio model, in which the instructor meets individually with each student each week to discuss and assess the student’s writing.

It is a course in exposition, a catch-all term for almost any kind of nonfiction writing except argumentation. You will practice various kinds of exposition, on topics that you choose.

It is also a course in prose style, the artful arrangement of sentences and paragraphs. You will learn a few basic concepts, which you will apply to your writing.

The substance of any writing course is feedback, revision, and practice. This course offers plenty of all three. You will write, revise, and evaluate ten 600-word essays. At the end of the semester, you will revisit two of these for further revision.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Write clearer and perhaps more graceful expository prose than you currently do.
• Write in a voice that is more your own than someone else’s.
• Describe and evaluate your own writing.

ENC 4212

Technical 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.

ENG 3011

Allegorical Reading
Phillip Wegner

Nearly a half-century ago, the literary critic Morton W. Bloomfield observed, “The problem of interpretation is the problem of allegory. . . . Allegory is, in this sense, that which conquers time, that which perpetually renews the written word.” However, even today, because allegory and allegorical reading, or allegoresis, open up onto the possibility of multiple competing interpretations of any literary work or visual text—the perpetual renewal celebrated by Bloomfield—other contemporary readers, ranging from literary critics to members of the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court, find a deep threat in such practices. In our class, we will delve into some of the debates surrounding allegory and allegoresis through a careful engagement with a number of different kinds of readings, beginning with Pierre Bayard’s manifesto for a new relationship to reading more generally, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007). We will then turn our attention to some of the most influential examples of traditional allegorical literature, including Dante Alighieri’s early 14th century masterpiece Inferno and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I ( 1590); allegorical reading practices advocated by the fourth century Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa in A Life of Moses and Dante in his celebrated letter to Can Grande della Scala; and a number of more recent efforts to theorize the nature of allegory and allegoresis, including essays by Bloomfield, Erich Auerbach, and Paul De Man, and two of the most significant book-length studies: Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) and Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019). Finally, we will undertake our own allegorical readings of works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” (1827), James Joyce’s “The Sisters” (1907-1914), the first two Terminator films (1984; 1991), and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019).

ENG 3121

History of Film 1
Kevin Cooley

This course will cover canonical silent film shots, serials, and feature films.   We will spend a good deal of time comparing alternate soundtracks composed for these films when they were restored and released on DVDs and blu-rays.  Among the films we will watch are the Lumiere Brothers, Lumière ! Le cinématographe 1895-1905 Georges Melies, A Trip to the Moon; Abel Gance, Napoleon; Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger; Blackmail (silent version); Anthony Asquith, A Cottage on Dartmoor, Shooting Stars; Frank Borzage, Lucky Star, Secrets; Louis Feuillade, Fantomas, Les Vampires; Robert Siodmak, People on a Sunday; G. W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box, The Lost Girl; Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage, The Scarlet Letter, The Wind; Raoul Walsh, The Thief of Baghdad; Tod Browning, The Unholy Three, The Unknown, Outside the Law; King Vidor, The Big Parade; William Wellman, Wings; Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou;  Diaga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera; Carl Dreyer, Passion of Joan of Arc; Rupert Julian, The Phantom of the Opera; Paul Leni, The Cat and the Canary, The Last Warning; Wallace Worsley, The Penalty; Benjamin Christensen, Häxan; Sergei Eisenstein, Strike!, October; Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Hands of Orlac; Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, City Lights; Buster Keaton, The General, Sherlock, Jr., The Cameraman, The Haunted House; Fritz Lang, Metropolis, Testament of Doctor Mabuse; D. W. Griffith, Way Down East; Friedrich Murnau, Sunset, The Last Laugh, City Girl; William Dieterle, Sex in Chains; Eric von Stroheim, Greed; Josef Von Sternberg, Underworld, The Last Command. Readings will include selections from books on sound in film by Michel Chion. Discussion questions on the reading due before each class; co-lead class twice; three short papers.

ENG 4015

What is Desire?
Pietro Bianchi

“Desire is not a simple thing” Sigmund Freud used to say. Still, sometimes our empirical experience seems to be the opposite. It would not be difficult to list all the material objects, things and experiences that would fulfill the phrase: “make a wish”. Yet, psychoanalysis teaches us not to confuse “desire” with “will”. If it is true that we live in a society that has monumentalized self-confidence and “knowing what you want”, the place of desire, as separate from will, seems to remain elusive. Beyond all the material goods and at the bottom of all the commodities that surround us and that we would like to have, there is something about ourselves that remain opaque and cannot be expressed. This is what psychoanalysis calls “desire”: a question about our own identity; a blank spot in our own subjectivity.

In a journey that goes from the story of Alladin in One Thousand and One Nights to Plato’s Symposium, from Hamlet to St. Augustin, from Christianity to Romanticism and German Idealism all the way to David Lynch, The Sopranos, Girls, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread, contemporary feminist thought, Slavoj Žižek and Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality, we will analyze all the multi-faceted understanding of the concept of desire.

This course will be a combination of critical theory, psychoanalysis and film studies. Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, three short quizzes and a 5-pages final research paper.

ENG 4015

Psychological 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 4130

Colonial and Postcolonial Cinema
Pietro Bianchi

This course examines how European Colonial powers (French, British, Italian and German) in their cinematographic history represented the occupation and colonizing of other territories, and visually racialized colonized populations. From the idealization of life in the colonies for propagandistic purposes in pre-WWII cinema to the emergence of films about anti-colonial resistance in the 60s, 70s and 80s, we will analyze how the colonial project has traversed the history of Western Cinema in a neglected and conflicting way. Our task will be to investigate the role of cinema in constructing the “political unconscious” of European Colonial Empires. After a two weeks general introduction to colonial history, in the first part of the course we will focus on propagandistic films produced in the 30s and 40s. However, we are convinced that every account of colonial history will always be incomplete if it does not give voice to the forms of representation of the colonized, given that every colonial occupation is always traversed by conflicts and antagonisms. In the second part of the course we will therefore analyze several examples of anti-colonial cinema from France, United Kingdom, Senegal, Ethiopia, Algeria, Palestine.

The course will be based on the analysis of a series of films – usually one long-feature a week, but at times they can also be two – that students will be required to watch beforehand and that will be contextualized and discussed together in class (along with excerpts from chapters of monographic volumes and scholarly articles). Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, three short quizzes and a 5-pages final research paper.

ENG 4133

“Money Never Sleeps”: Capitalism in Contemporary American Film
Milt Moise

The tentacles of capitalism have spread across the world, yet the depths to which it has permeated every facet of American life bears special consideration.  American cinema is not immune from capital’s influence, and from its inception, the art form has not only been heavily implicated in disseminating its unique iteration to cultures far and wide, but it has also been a source of complex critiques of market driven economies, and their insidious hold on human life. There is also the inescapable fact that movie going is indeed a business, often funded by the financial “masters of the universe” who govern the global system and get to see themselves portrayed on the big screen as cautionary tales, examples of The American Dream, or what is actually most common, an amalgamation of both.

The relationship between Hollywood and Wall Street is now well-worn territory, and the seductive powers of film and capital have given us many indelible movies that grapple with some important, confounding questions: How did we get to this point? How does one depict capitalism onscreen? Can there be ethical consumption under capitalism? Can we imagine a world without the rapacious form of American capitalism that currently exists, or is capitalism itself an unsalvageable, corrosive force? Who is excluded from the halls of high finance, and once they break down these walls, where do their allegiances lie?

In this course, we will look at films from some of the giants of American cinema, such as Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and its complicated sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, along with Paul Thomas Anderson’s treatise on American capitalism and masculinity, There Will Be Blood. But we will also pay close attention to lesser known, equally insightful films from the perspective of those who have been largely excluded from this rarefied space, with women-lead efforts like Meera Menon’s Equity and Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, as well as George Nolfi’s recent account of a key moment in African American history, The Banker. Hopefully in the process of our cinematic deliberations, we can arrive at a few answers to the increasingly relevant questions these films pose, and enjoy some wonderful movies.

ENG 4134

Women of French Cinema
Sylvie Blum

Course Description Forthcoming.

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

Honors Seminar: Women in/of Science Fiction
Stephanie A. Smith

As the late author Ursula K. Le Guin once said, in the 1960s and ‘70s, women science fiction writers were at first believed (by male writers) to be a mythical species, like the “Tribble or the Unicorn.” That disbelief and disdain for women’s voices rapidly changed in the 1970s, as a number of powerful women writers entered the genre, and made it their own.

But this narrative is also an historically short-sighted one, since the very first SF female writer was arguably a romantic, goth teenager named Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at the age of 19. Certainly, Frankenstein is one of the first novels in English that explores the way in which humankind has tried to rewrite, revise, or otherwise bend nature to its will.

Starting with Mary Shelley’s foundational novel, this honors seminar re-examines the ways in which women writers and female characters have engaged in the once male-dominated literary genre of science fiction. Authors will include C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, among others.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Worldly Victorians
Rae Yan

For the past several years, Victorianist scholars have been drastically reconfiguring what can and should be included in Victorian studies by arguing for the significance of more “worldly” and, more recently, “undisciplined” Victorian perspectives. Thus, scholars have explored the possibilities of Victorian cosmopolitanism, internationalism, globalism, planetarity, transnationalism, and world literature. At the heart of such field-redefining expansion remains a series of questions about reimagining the study and teaching of Victorian literature to reflect a much broader view of the world of the Victorians. How should we approach such reimagining? What terms should we be focusing on? What texts help us understand the more worldly “Victorian” era? This honors seminar will explore such questions by looking at what we might want to call worldly narratives by a selection of worldly Victorians. We will read works by authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Mary Seacole, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Sarah E. Farro, and Fakir Mohan Senapati among others to consider the horizons of Victorian worldliness. The workload will be in keeping with an honors-level course and each student will be required to engage in active class discussion every session. Students may expect the equivalent of 300-450 pages of primary text fiction/non-fiction reading and 25-50 pages of literary criticism or theory per week. Students will compose weekly reflections, give two formal 15-minute presentations in front of the class, and write two 10-page papers.

ENG 4940

Internship
Undergraduate Coordinator

ENG 4953

Writing Childhood
John Cech

This course will examine a number of the familiar genres of writing for young people — poetry, the picture book, realistic and fantasy fiction, biography, and non-fiction — as well as more experimental and innovative forms, like moveable and artist’s books and the graphic novel. Readings will be drawn from key children’s books and criticism and will make use of holdings in UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The emphasis in the course will be on weekly writing assignments and critiques. Participants will need to bring to the course an open, creative spirit, an energized work ethic, and a commitment to producing exceptional writing.

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 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 Oscar Wilde. Please note that this is a seminar-style class that requires active in-class participation and daily attendance. Assignments include weekly reflections; two short response papers; and a long final paper that synthesizes literary analysis, historical contexts, and literary criticism.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: 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, in the collaboration of actors and audience. This means that the play’s full text includes: sub-text (the inner voice of a character, the character’s history before the play, that shapes and colors the playwright’s actual dialogue), gestures, movement, the entire “stage picture.” In the theatre we would further supplement this text with lighting, sound, costume, props, and make-up.

To be sure, one can approach a play in various ways—as literature, as a repository for the thinking of an age, as a springboard for political or cultural issues. But since I work on campus and in the theatre as an actor and director, and since the theatre is a medium with its own aesthetic principles, I approach plays with my students as something mean to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience.

In his class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. In my course, then, we study the theatre from the perspective of actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, and enacting that character through delivery, gestures, movement, and, most especially, subtext.

Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” the scene with the two actors, trying out options, rehearsing options of interpretation. The emphasis, therefore, is on learning by doing, and I assess student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is consider a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal. Performances and the scene-work paper count equally.

Professor Homan will provide commentary on the theatrical and critical history of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the historical context of his theatre. He will also draw on his own experience as an actor and director.

We will study through performance: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, and King Lear. We will also stage scenes from Tom Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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 script. Please have no fears on this issue.

Chosen as the University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Sidney Homan is Professor of English and author of some eighteen books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

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

ENL 4333

Shakespeare Substitutions
Peter Rudnytsky

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet turns on the idea that Shakespeare’s tragedy is in part a response to the death of his son.  We will use O’Farrell’s novel as a springboard to contemplate this possibility and to open up informed speculation on how Shakespeare’s works might be read biographically.  The course will delve into the Sonnets, King John, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, supplemented by critical essays by Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Wheeler, and Robert Paul, as well as the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.  Emphasis will be given to enhancing 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

Comedy: 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, in the collaboration of actors and audience.  This means that the play’s full text includes: sub-text (the inner voice of a character, the character’s history before the play, that shapes and colors the playwright’s actual dialogue), gestures, movement, the entire “stage picture.”  In the theatre we would further supplement this text with lighting, sound, costume, props, and make-up,

To be sure, one can approach a play in various ways—as literature, as a repository for the thinking of an age, as a springboard for political or cultural issues.  But since I work on campus and in the theatre as an actor and director, and since the theatre is a medium with its own aesthetic principles, I approach plays with my students as something mean to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience.

In his class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester.  In my course, then, we study the theatre from the perspective of actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, and enacting that character through delivery, gestures, movement, and, most especially, subtext. In doing so, we consider various issues raised by the genre of stage comedy: what makes people laugh at the stage illusion? what is the actor’s role in producing that laughter? what is the range of comedy? how is it distinguished from “serious” drama? does the comic character know he or she is comic? since in comedy audience can make noise, respond with laughter, how is their role here distinguished from that when they are watching, say, Hamlet?  The subtitle of a recent book that Professor Homan wrote with a New York director friend, Comedy Acting for Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2018) suggest the boundaries and concerns of the course: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies.

Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” the scene with the two actors, trying out options, rehearsing options of interpretation.  The emphasis, therefore, is on learning by doing, and I assess student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is consider a bonus.  Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal. Performances and the scene-work paper count equally.

The main text is the collection Laugh Lines (edited by Eric Lane and Nina Shengold) which has a variety of short comedies and sketches by playwrights like Steve Martin, Elain May, and Christopher Durang, works ranging from farce and parody to psychological and experimental comedy that unerscore the “serious” side of the medium.  We also study Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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 script.  Please have no fear son this issue.

Chosen as the University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Sidney Homan is Professor of English and author of some eighteen books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights.  He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

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

LIT 3400

The Literature of Sustainability and Resilience
Terry Harpold

“Dystopia is for losers.” – Doug Henwood

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 human literary and ethical imaginations are among our species’ most powerful and adaptive responses to the planetary realities of the twenty-first century and the possibility of a more just, sustainable, and resilient future for all living beings.

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, the geological epoch marked by the influences of humans on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Authors we will read include activists, ecologists, ecopoetics scholars, conservationists, and naturalists such as Stephanie Kaza, Elin Kelsey, Aldo Leopold, Bénédicte Meillon, Natasha Myers, Arne Næss, and Suzanne Simard; fiction authors and graphic novelists such as Jean Giono, Leena Krohn, Ann Pancake, and Joe Sacco; artists and poets such as John Ashbery, Sandra Beasley, Louise Glück, Robinson Jeffers, Ayelen Liberona, Donato Mancini, W.S. Merwin, François Villon, and Walt Whitman.

Graded assignments include three critical essays on assigned readings and a writing project centered on “Plant Life,” an ongoing exhibit at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art.

This course qualifies as a 3-credit Humanities core course for UF’s Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies.

LIT 3400

Candide’s Eighteenth 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 in Candide, the most famous of Voltaire’s 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 4194

Issues of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in African Literatures
Apollo Amoko

This course hinges on vexed questions pertaining to issues of gender and sexuality in modern African literature. Since the inauguration of the field in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, sex and sexuality have constituted a central creative and interpretative discursive formation. The representational economies these diverse literatures have been called into question on account of their normative gender and/or sexual logics. Much of this critique has been dependent, for its authority, on theories developed in the Western academy. To what extent can such ostensible “western” theories as feminism and queer theory provide critical paradigms and parameters for the study of putatively African aesthetic objects? Are such theories necessarily inappropriate on their account ostensible Eurocentricism”? From the perspective of Western feminism and queer theory, is African literature doomed to seem sexist and heteronormative, if not, homophobic (in silent contradistinction perhaps to more enlightened Western literature)? Is a critique of sexism and heteronormativity in African letters conceivable outside the bounds of Western theory? Alternately, is it not problematic to conceive of African literature in terms its radical difference from the so-called Western tradition? In the name of contesting Eurocentricism, do allegedly nativist theories of African literature risk normalizing historical and contemporary social inequalities, not to mention a certain anti-intellectualism? What accounts for the lingering hostility to feminism and especially queer theory in certain prominent quarters of African studies? Is the opposition pitting Western theory and African literature itself part of the problem it purports to resolve? To what extents are the texts in question “African”; to what extent is the theory in question “Western”? We will seek to answer these questions by looking at a range of canonical African fictions and Western theories of gender and sexuality. In addition to such hypercanonical Western thinkers as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we will focus on lesser known but insightful and provocative theorists situated in Africa. Authors studied will include such diverse figures as Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Mariama Ba, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chamamanda Ngodi Adichie and Yvonne Awour Odhiambo.

LIT 4233

Tourism, The Caribbean, and Literature
Leah Rosenberg

In his Nobel Prize speech, Derek Walcott condemns tourist brochures for reducing the Caribbean’s historical complexity and cultural diversity to a happy paradise. “This,” he laments, “is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile.”  Many contemporary Caribbean writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff, have voiced this same protest. Contemporary literary critics see such critiques as an important challenge to the dominant neocolonial enterprise in the Caribbean and the 500-year old colonial discourse it appropriates. In taking on tourism, critics address a central—contemporary— dilemma confronting the Caribbean: the region’s dependence on tourist dollars even as the industry’s economic, human, and environmental exploitation jeopardizes the region’s future and undermines national sovereignty and citizenship. Yet the connection between Caribbean literature and tourism is significantly older and more fundamental than scholars suggest.  Writers have commented on tourism—promoting, condemning, and strategically making use of it—and literary form has been influenced by tourism since the emergence of the industry in the late nineteenth century.

This course will engage in an interdisciplinary examination of the development of tourism and its relationship to culture and the rise of U.S. power in the Caribbean from the 1890s to the present.  It will begin with an examination of influential theoretical works on tourism.  The course will include an analysis of the continuity between tourism and previous forms of colonialism and imperialism and between genres and aesthetics of tourism (the guide, the tourist postcard) and earlier colonial aesthetics such as the travel narrative and engravings. It will examine the role of tourism in Caribbean nationalism; the introduction of mass market tourism and Cold War politics; the impact of the Cuban revolution on tourism; and tourism in the age of globalization with an emphasis on the question of sex tourism.

Readings will likely include the poetry of Una Marson and Claude McKay; Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place; Trevor Rhone’s Smile Orange, Derek Walcott’s Pantomime; Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, and Tiphanie Yanique’s The Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the films Mikhail Kalatozov’ Soy Cuba (1964), Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun, and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972).

LIT 4331

Children’s Literature
John Cech

Children’s literature has become, in recent years, one of the most dynamic areas of publishing and media production.  Currently, one of the wealthiest people in the world is a writer of children’s books, and each year films and television series drawn from stories for children or adolescents are among the biggest box office hits and highest rated shows.  There is even a television channel devoted to the entertainment of babies.  Children’s literature has, of course, been with us from the beginning and is the oldest and first form of literature that we experience.  This course is meant to take you on a journey through this essential part of our literature — its history, genres, major figures, and some of its more familiar and celebrated works.   We will be especially interested in how children’s books contribute to the prevailing mythologies of our own and other cultures.

LIT 4334

Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Kelsey Carper

The Golden Age of children’s literature, spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, marks a major shift in the genre. Before this period, children’s literature was more focused on adapting adult stories for a younger audience rather than appealing to the imagination of a child. However, writers during the Golden Age began to develop works focused more specifically on children’s interests and considered children’s development outside of the morality tales seen in previous generations. In this class we will examine the impact that Golden Age children’s literature had on the world and consider how the world was reflected back in these stories. We will work together throughout the semester to define exactly what separates children’s literature from what we consider adult literature. This class will revisit many stories we are all familiar with in the hopes of providing a fresh perspective on beloved children’s classics.

Course texts will likely include J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Gardenas well as shorter works by C. S. Lewis, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, and Louisa May Alcott. In addition to the assigned primary texts, we will also look at more modern adaptations of these works, such as Netflix’s Anne with an E, parts of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, or The Secret Garden (2020). This will allow us to consider and discuss why these Golden Age tales are still so prevalent in media and culture today.

Utilizing the University’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, we will be able to get up close and personal with a variety of archived texts, toys, and other ephemera that was published/created during the Golden Age. Students will then create a blog post about a chosen work or item from the archive and connect it to our larger class discussions. Potential assignments also include brief weekly reflections, a close reading essay, a casual class presentation, and a final creative multi-media blog post project. Since this is a discussion based seminar class, participation and attendance will also be important.

LIT 4483

Ideas of Value, Forms of Evaluation
Susan Hegeman
As consumers of culture, we make regularly judgments of taste, preference, and value, and we rely on others’ value judgments: what’s this movie’s freshness rating? How many stars does it have on Amazon? What did the New York Times say about it? And yet, in English courses, we are often somewhat nervous about questions of value and evaluation, moving past questions about whether is this novel or poem or film is good, or beautiful, or valuable in some way in favor of considerations of meaning, form and context. In this class, we will have the opportunity to consider this question of value, especially as it relates to cultural forms including films, music, TV, poetry and fiction. We will explore how people make day-to-day evaluations of cultural objects, and also how theorists and critics have addressed the problem of trying to make lasting claims about what is of value. Readings will be theoretical, historical, and sociological in nature. We will read about and discuss such topics as fashion, youth culture, popular and mass culture, subcultural styles, propaganda, education, fandom, prizes and rankings, and (of course) money.

LIT 4930

Narratology & (In)Complete Novel
Kevin Cooley

Pierre Bayard wrote an optimistic, clever book of criticism entitled: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.  This course will ask questions sparked by his title:  What happens if the author of the book you haven’t read never finished the book?  What if it was published posthumously by different editors who didn’t agree on what the author did or did not write?  More broadly, what is the relation between narration and narrative completion, between talking about a book and telling someone about it?  We will pursue these questions by reading Gerard Genette’s works on narrative and on a novel to which Genette frequently turns, namely, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,  Genette’s description of Proust’s novel an “incomplete complete novel” is the inspiration for this course.  We will also read selections from an unfinished novel Bayard discusses written by Robert Musil and entitled The Man without Qualities.  And we will also devote some time to occasionally humorous controversies over English translations of Proust’s novel. Discussion questions on the reading due before each class; co-lead class twice; three short papers.

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

Course Description Forthcoming.

LIT 4930

Breaking Boundaries: SF/F 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)

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. This course will have three main areas of focus: Rhetorics of Food, Digital Media, and Activism.