Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2022 (Upper Division)

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

Fall 2022

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 3284	001F	26764	R 6-8	TUR 2303	Survey of American Women’s Literature: African American Women and the Culture Critique	Debra King
AML 3605	002F	26766	T 7/ R 7-8	TUR 2322	Survey of African-American Literature 1	Delia Steverson
AML 4225	026F	27354	MWF 3	Online	Representation of Science in 19th-Century American Literature	Stephanie Smith
AML 4282	004F	26768	MWF 8	MAT 0116	Genders & Sexualities: Queer Lit Before “Homosexuality”	Jodi Schorb
AML 4311	19CG	10351	MWF 4	Online	Major Figures in Lit/Culture: Herman Melville	Stephanie Smith
AML 4311	37CF	10352	W E1-E3	TUR 2354	Major Figures in Lit/Culture: bell hooks	Tace Hedrick
AML 4453	005F	26781	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0113	Studies American Lit & Culture: Consumer Society	Susan Hegeman
AML 4453	006F	26783	MWF 6	MAT 0113	Studies American Lit & Culture: The Pen & the Penitentiary	Jodi Schorb
AML 4685	2077	10354	T 6-8	TUR 2303	Women Writing About Race: “The Trouble Between Us”	Debra King
AML 4685	01AA	28723	T 6-7/ R 7	ROG 0129	Black Horror: White Terror	Julia Mollenthiel
CRW 3110	1D80	12164	T 9-11	FLI 0101	Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Uwem Akpan
CRW 3110	2A79	12165	T 9-11	MAT 0004	Advanced Fiction Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Camille Bordas
CRW 3310	07G0	18740	M 9-11	LIT 0217	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing (Imaginative Writing: Poetry) Manuscript submission required; click here for details	William Logan
CRW 4905	3304	12166	M 9-11	MAT 0009	Senior Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Camille Bordas
CRW 4906	19D2	12185	T 9-11	MAT 0012	Senior Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop Manuscript submission required; click here for details	William Logan
ENC 3250	4C81	12518	MWF 4	MAT 0151	Professional Communication	Victor Del Hierro
ENC 3414	4C84	12601	MWF 6	MAT 0116	Hypermedia	Victor Del Hierro
ENG 3115	4C14	12525	MWF 5/ M E1-E3	TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Introduction to Film Theory	Pietro Bianchi
ENG 3121	9007	24608	T 2-3/ R3	TUR 2334	History of Film 1	Richard Burt
ENG 3125	028F	27697	T 5-6/ R 6/ R 9-11	TUR 2322/ ROL 0115	History of Film 3	Faith Boyte
ENG 4015	1H03	12526	MWF 7	MAT 0115	Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature: Autobiographical Fictions	Peter Rudnytsky
ENG 4133	1C26	12527	MWF 7/ F 8-10	TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Film Studies: European Cinema	Sylvie Blum-Reid
ENG 4136	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 10-11/ R 10/ W E1-E3	TUR 2322/ TUR 2322/ ROL 0115	Film and Video Production: Intro to Independent Filmmaking	Trevor Mowchun
ENG 4310	8650	22349	T 8-9/ R 9/ R E1-E3	TUR 2322/ TUR 2322/ ROL 0115	Film Genres Directors: The European Road Movie	Holly Raynard
ENG 4844	012F	27057	T 5-6/ R 6	MAT 0113	Queer Comics	Margaret Galvan
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	F 6-8	TUR 2346	Honors Seminar: Post-Punk Cultures – The British 1980s	Marsha Bryant
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	W 9-11	TUR 2349	Honors Seminar: Octavia Butler: Race and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction	Tace Hedrick
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Internship	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4953	9015	24614	W 9-11	TUR 2306	Senior Seminar for Majors: Writing Childhood	John Cech
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Honors Thesis Project	Kenneth Kidd
ENL 3251	152D	12606	MWF 4	MAT 0117	Victorian Literature: Classy Victorians	Rae Yan
ENL 4273	031F	27789	MWF 7	MAT 0113	Twentieth Century British Literature: Space as Storyteller	Elizabeth Lambert
ENL 4303	016F	27126	MWF 6	LIT 0101	Major Figures: Charles Dickens	Rae Yan
ENL 4333	3A84	12607	MWF 8	MAT 0115	Shakespeare: Men Behaving Badly	Peter Rudnytsky
LIT 3003	018F	27136	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0117	Forms of Narrative: Narratology & In/complete Novels	Richard Burt
LIT 3031	030F	27701	T 9-11	TUR 2303	Studies in Poetry: Ovid in Contemporary Poetry	Ange Mlinko
LIT 3400	11BB	15325	MWF 7	MAT 0116	Literature of Sustainability and Resistance	Terry Harpold
LIT 3400	3A86	15326	MWF 8	NRN 1037	Passing: Black, White and Jewish	Roy Holler
LIT 4188	019F	27167	MWF 4	MAT 0115	World English Language Literature: Literary and/as Science Fiction	Phillip Wegner
LIT 4305	022F	27184	T 2-3/ R 3	MAT 0113	Seeing Differently: Comics & Identity	Margaret Galvan
LIT 4331	13FF	15330	MWF 6	Online	Children’s Literature	Kenneth Kidd
LIT 4483	19E7	15331	T 5-6/ R 6	TUR 1105	Feasts, Famines, Revolutions: The Hungry Nineteenth Century	Megnha Sapui
LIT 4930	024F	27200	T 7/ R 7-8	TUR 2328/ CSE E119	Kafka and the Kafkaesque	Eric Kligerman
LIT 4930	025F	27201	T 8-9/ R 9	TUR 2334	Vampire Cinema	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	042G	15346	W 9-11	TUR 2305	Creative Nonfiction	David Leavitt
LIT 4930	05G2	15347	T 7/R 7-8	TUR 2334	Introduction to Jewish-American Cinema	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	8024	22279	M 9/W 9-10	AND 0013	Jews and Popular Culture	Rachel Gordan

Course Descriptions

AML 3284

African American Women and the Culture Critique
Debra 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

Survey of African American Literatures I
Delia Steverson

This course is designed as an introductory survey of texts and discourses within the African American literary tradition. As we explore critical works within this tradition, from 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 4225

Representation of Science in 19th-Century American Literature
Stephanie A. Smith

Science fiction as genre is regarded as a mid to late twentieth-century invention of popular fiction, sometimes beginning with the pulp magazines of the 1930s like Astounding or Amazing. But in the 19^th century, authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, among others were already exploring ‘science’ in their stories, even if some of those representations were of what we would now call pseudo-science. A fascination with scientists and progress (both technological and social) took hold of the 19th-century imagination, and that fascination found its way into literature — specifically, literature that would come to be known as some of the earliest pieces of science fiction.

This class will take a look back at how and why these 19^t-century authors represented science in their fiction, while thinking forward to how such representations may still be relevant to a twenty-first century audience.

AML 4282

Queer Literature before “Homosexuality”
Jodi Schorb

This course familiarizes students with the long tradition of LGBT literature before the “invention of homosexuality.”

Most of us take for granted our concepts of modern sexual identity, but the words ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ were not even coined until 1869 and 1880 respectively. Yet before the invention of these terms, literature and letters abound with men who professed their erotic desire for other men, women who seduced other women, and literature exploring diverse forms of gender-variance and expression.

Queer characters that populate the early literary landscape shaped readers’ imaginations about the American frontier, the city, the “far-isles,” during periods of American empire-building, modernization, and urbanization. Sometimes literary queers served as a cautionary tales or warnings; other times, they served as models of virtue and action.

Through a blend of cultural history and close literary analysis, students will analyze the role of same-sex desire and theorize how any given text’s queer plots generate thematic purpose and meaning. Most crucially, we will explore how real individuals sought to articulate same sex love without access to a shared language or shared cultural codes. Sometimes artists looked backward to express same-sex desire (drawing from classical myth, especially, and from the Bible); others looked forward, forging a new language of sexuality, or creating literary utopias where future generations might live more freely and fully.

Much of the reading list will be drawn from nineteenth century American literature (including Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and lesser-known figures). But we will also spend time studying earlier eras and transatlantic traditions that informed the pre-20^th century American LGBT cultural imaginary.

Expect to gain strength in critical reading, writing, and literary analysis. Assignments include reflective papers, two analytical essays, group work, and creative activities.

AML 4311

Major Authors: Herman Melville
Stephanie A. Smith

Famously, Herman Melville wrote to his close friend 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 great American novel—although 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—especially in all the various permutations of Star Trek. In this class we will re-examine the literary legacy of Herman Melville, with an eye to why his work is still relevant (or ought to be) to readers of the 21^st century.

Readings will include Moby Dick, Billy Budd and short stories, at the very least.

AML 4311

Major Authors: 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.

Course Requirements: Three in-class essay exams (75% of final grade) and reading quizzes 25% of final grade).

AML 4453

Studies American Literature & Culture: Consumer Society
Susan Hegeman

The United States is the largest consumer market in the world. Americans have come to expect access to a wide range of goods and services on demand, and we often define our social status, happiness, and well-being in terms of our capacity to buy things. But this state of affairs has a relatively recent history, in which older values and ideals were displaced in favor of a new set of habits and ways of understanding the meaning of the good life. Meanwhile, many Americans have dissented from the values of consumer society, and some have sought alternatives to consumerism. In this course, we will examine a range of objects including novels, films, poetry, and essays, in order to explore the history of consumerism and its sore points. We will consider celebrations of consumerism, as well as ethical, political, aesthetic, and environmentalist criticisms of consumerism. We will also discuss the psychological and social implications of consumerism, and consumerism’s disparate meanings across lines of gender, race, and class. Grades will be based upon attendance, participation, informal responses to the material, and two essays of 2400 words each.

AML 4453

The Pen & The Penitentiary: US Prison Literatures
Jodi Schorb

This upper division course introduces students to US prison literature.

Beginning in the 1780s, American prison reformers participated in a transatlantic debate about the value and promise of reformative incarceration. These debates and reforms birthed the modern prison and its long literary legacy. The course is divided into four units designed for breadth and depth of engagement: How was the modern prison first envisioned: by whom, and for what purposes? How did the prison influence the development of American literature? How did convict authors seek to effectively convey and represent the experience of incarceration to unfamiliar readers? And how are those impacted by the justice system imagining a world without mass incarceration? Overall, the course will help students understand the significance of the prison in the American cultural imagination while strengthening their reflective and analytical writing.

Readings are drawn from three areas: historical and cultural history of the US prison (primary and secondary sources), select readings from the interdisciplinary and emerging field of prison studies, and extensive imaginative literature (from memoir, to realist fiction, to speculative fiction, poetry, and more). Authors include Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Austin Reed, Malcolm X, Etheridge Knight, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and many lesser-known inmate artists.

Expect Two (6-8 page) essays, two reflective responses, and heavy participation via discussion, discussion boards, and collaborative group work.

(Note: This course is also an elective for students involved in Intersections on Mass Incarceration through the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere.)

AML 4685a

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

AML 4685

Black Horror: White Terror
Julia Mollenthiel

This African American Studies course is an examination of literary and artistic horror by Black artists. We will probe the genre of horror and its trends with a particular focus on representations of racial Otherness and racism. We will also consider the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness and/or the terror associated with being Black in America. This course will study the works of Black authors and producers as a way to explore racial identity and oppression. We will also consider white American literary and cinematic representations of racial Otherness and horror in the works of Gothic writers and film producers. Some underlying questions that will drive our discussion of these texts are: how has the history of American cinema and Gothic literature contributed to the construction of racial identity, the drawing of ethnic boundaries, and affected racialized discourses? How have Black artists developed their own unique horror tradition in response to this history? More specifically, how have Black artists used the horror aesthetic as a means of countering white constructions of Blackness in the horror/Gothic genre? Moreover, how have Black artists used the horror aesthetic to represent the Black experience in the United States, and what does horror as a literary/cinematic mode afford Black artists?

CRW 3110

Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop
Uwem Akpan

CRW 3110 is a fiction writing workshop where students will be exposed to a particular form of doing fiction. We shall read to a collection of African historical novels and short stories. These models shall help us learn how to fictionalize historical events. It will be important to build a community that learns from the myriad African texts and supports how we use this Form to tell our stories.

In the course of the semester, the students are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. They are also expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewrite.

CRW 3110

Advanced Fiction Writing 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 write comments and suggestions for those who are being critiqued: notes that describe what their piece 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.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing: 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 and write a poem a week. Every week in addition to poems from students the workshop will discuss 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@ufl.edu> in one attachment in .pdf format. Mention the workshops you have previously taken.

Required reading:

An anthology of modern poetry

Four books by contemporary poets

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Fiction Workshop
Camille Bordas

In this workshop, we will focus on concision, specificity, intentionality, and the art of tension-building in fiction.

The class will be part traditional workshop (we’ll read and discuss student work, as well as published stories) part craft class (in-class exercises will be assigned). The class relies on student participation and your close-reading of the material at hand.

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop
William Logan

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

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

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

Terry Coleman, The Liners

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

TLS, July 14, 2006

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

TLS, July 14, 2006

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

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

Required reading:

an anthology of modern poetry

four books of contemporary poetry

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Victor Del Hierro

This course will help students understand and practice the rhetorical strategies, genres, locations, media, and contexts in which contemporary professional writing happens. Students will conduct research and compose texts that are cohesive, well-designed, and informative while also honoring responsibilities to various audiences. Students will have an opportunity to engage with contemporary topics in social media strategy, information design, and content strategy. Students will leave the course with a digital portfolio that showcases their skills and strengths as professional communicators.

ENC 3414

Hypermedia
Victor Del Hierro

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

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

ENG 3115

Introduction to Film Theory
Pietro Bianchi

What happens when, after leaving a movie theater, we talk to our friends about the film we have just seen? And what happens when at the end of a movie seen on Netflix we send a text message to a friend sharing our thoughts on what we have just experienced? What do we do when we write a post on a social network about a film, or maybe when we write a review for a journal or a website? A movie is (usually) experienced in silence, but what follows are discourses and words (and texts, articles and books) that try to understand it, to reflect on it, even to philosophize and create theories on it. Film theory and film criticism are two different practices that deal with the production of discourses on films and on the cinematographic art as a whole.

This course will offer a survey of the different ways in which films have been conceived, defined, studied, and observed from the beginning of the XX Century to the digital age of streaming platforms. We will also inquiry how the thought of cinema interacted with other areas of culture and with society in general. After a couple of weeks of introduction of the basic themes of the semester, we will follow a chronological order with a focus on specific theorists and schools of thought: we will familiarize with terms such as modernism, realism, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, ideology, ecocriticism, humanism and posthumanism and we will also learn what does it mean to write (i.e. producing words) about cinema (i.e. experiencing images). During the semester we will watch films (among others) by D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Ernst Lubitsch, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, Martin Scorsese, Barbara Loden, Tsai Ming-Liang, Hong Sang-soo, Barbara Kopple.

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, two quizzes, and a final 5-7 pages research paper.

ENG 3121

History of Film 1
Richard Burt

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; 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.Requirements Co-Leading Class twice; two discussion questions and three shots for each class; student formulated quizzes each class; three 700 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to films. All assigned work for the course must be completed, turned in on time, and be of passing quality to pass the course.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a class in close reading literature. We will pay attention to the aesthetic form of the work and appreciate its brilliance, no matter the ideological leanings. We will focus on complexities of narrative and language, not on policing ideology or tone or “relatability.” We will not be affirming or dismissing authors or characters as good or bad people; we will be considering practices of language and style in context. For resources on close reading, please see https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading “Close reading is an activity that keeps you focused on and within a text—appraising individual words, shapes of thought, rhetorical devices, patterns of description and characterization, and so forth, in order to understand the text’s artistic achievement. For more on the history and practice, see the JHU Guide’s article on Practical Criticism or this HOLLIS search for “close reading” and literary criticism.”

ENG 3125

History of Film 3
Faith Boyte

This course considers the ways that film—as an art form, an industry, and a cultural artifact—has changed and grown over the past sixty years. Beginning in the 60s after the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, we will examine…

various global “waves” and schools of thought,
technological advancements including the shift to digital,
new or transformed genres,
changing practices of distribution including the advent of streaming,
the development of multiple film “industries,” both mainstream and independent, global and domestic, popular and underground,
the relationships between film and social, political, and economic issues,
and shifting cultural expectations of and engagement with movies.

We will move roughly chronologically, covering films from a wide range of genres and locations (including films in languages other than English). The class will focus both on the history itself and on how that history was recorded, paying attention to gaps and biases in the way people talk about “film history.” Our texts will include films as well as other primary historical texts like reviews, production accounts, and marketing materials, along with secondary critical readings. Assignments may include film responses, a creative project, a primary source analysis (in conjunction with the Popular Culture Special Collections in the library), and a research paper.

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature: Autobiographical Fictions
Peter Rudnytsky

Using a psychoanalytic approach, this course will explore the autobiographical roots of creativity. After considering the role of subjectivity in literary criticism and disguised autobiography as a genre of psychoanalytic writing, our focus will shift to literature. We will read George Eliot’s Silas Marner and several works by Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man, and Operation Shylock, in order to ask to what extent it is legitimate—and illuminating—to interpret these novels as autobiographical fictions as well as freestanding works of art. Course requirements include weekly journals, a midterm, final examination, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected

ENG 4133

Film Studies: European Cinema
Sylvie Blum-Reid

Since World War II, European cinemas have struggled to maintain the prestige they had earlier acquired and are now considered Hollywood’s rivals. Strengthened by the establishment of the European Union, many films are now destined for a larger ‘global’ market and its national communities. The class will emphasize European cinemas’ distinct aesthetic qualities as an ‘art cinema’ in which political and philosophical poetics are present to a degree not found in American cinema. The course examines what constitutes ‘Europeanness’ and in order to do so, we will analyze critical texts surrounding this notion.

As designed, the class does not intend to be a survey of best-selling films made in different countries nor to sample films made in Europe after WWII. It will seriously study texts (films included) and their European agendas in a critically and historically informed fashion. Part of the focus of the class this year is on food, and fashion. The course is offered in English only. It counts towards the European Union Studies union certificate and the French studies major/and minor. All films discussed will have subtitles. They will need to be screened either at home, in their streaming version or during the ‘regularly’ scheduled extra screen time allotted for the course. Class is cross listed with FRT 4523 and EUS 3100.

ENG 4136

Film and Video Production: “Introduction to Independent Filmmaking”
Trevor Mowchun

Cinema is a unique, complex, evolving, and visionary artform with great individual and social impact. Cinema is also a language, and speaking it with conviction requires far more than mastering its technical equipment. To learn to “speak” cinema clearly and evocatively, the student filmmaker working within an independent production model must develop a wide array of skills, such as conceptualization, visual thinking, dramatic construction, acting, continuity, cinematography, stylistic expression, spatial and temporal manipulation, to name but a few.

The course begins with some meditations on the creative cinematic process, considering the varied and inexhaustible ways that the medium of film activates such processes and leads the imagination into free uncharted territory. This includes a survey of creative principles, methods, tools and general philosophies of “making” as expressed by artists, teachers, critics and theorists from diverse intellectual/artistic backgrounds, with particular attention paid to the insights of independent 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. At the same time, students will be introduced to the basic equipment of filmmaking (the filmmaker’s intricate palette) through hands-on workshops and take-home exercises. Students will then explore the expressive potential of cinema through the creation of a series of short “film sketches” based on simple themes, concepts, or micro-narratives. These sketches are an opportunity to explore the medium’s inherent aesthetic characteristics or “grammar” (i.e., image, movement, silence, sound, time, space, montage, the frame, the face) without one’s attention being diverted by the demands of a complex storyline or overly ambitious themes. One or more of these micro-films (approximately 1-2 minutes each) will then be used as raw material and/or inspiration for a larger scale short film project which students will create collectively in groups of two, allowing everyone a chance to experience the various roles of preproduction, production, and postproduction in the context of meaningful collaboration. Throughout the semester, students are required to keep a weekly written or digital notebook for the purpose of recording responses to assigned readings/films, the activities of the film sketches (made individually), and the final film project (made collectively). The notebook is meant to think openly, routinely, and “out aloud”; and when the time comes to start collaborating, it will help facilitate the sharing and communicating of creative cinematic processes, inspirations, proposed ideas/narratives, research findings, aesthetic/dramatic/technical problems, etc.

Students will be given access to the English Department’s media lab, fit with ample production and post-production equipment. A lab technician will hold weekly office hours to provide workshops with the equipment and answer any technical questions that come up. Students are also free to use their own film equipment with prior approval from the instructor.

* An application process is in place for this course. Students should contact the instructor, Dr. Trevor Mowchun, by email (tmowchun@ufl.edu) to receive an application consisting of a brief series of questions and a space to include links to past film work, if available. Prior filmmaking experience is not required but is of interest to the instructor. The deadline to submit applications is March 21, 2022.

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

ENG 4310

Film Genres Directors: The 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 4844

Queer Comics
Margaret Galvan

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

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

ENG 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: Post-Punk Cultures – The British 1980s
Marsha Bryant

This Honors seminar will explore poetry, fiction, film, television, and popular music that emerged alongside major cultural shifts in the U.K. during the 1980s. It was a time of “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the new social identity “Black British,” and the New Wave. In the wake of Johnny Rotten’s declaration of No Future, Derek Jarman proclaimed The Last of England. The emergent discipline of cultural studies assessed the social meanings of style, and Bloodaxe Books marketed “poetry with an edge.” We will work across artistic and popular media to map key cultural intersections of the British 80s, considering how they are reconfiguring in the wake of Brexit. Our writers include Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Carol Ann Duffy, and our UF colleague Michael Hofmann. We’ll read Dick Hebdige’s iconic Subculture: The Meaning of Style plus a selection of essays. We’ll discuss films by Derek Jarman, Stephen Frears, and Neil Jordan, plus episodes of the TV show The Young Ones. And we’ll engage with Gainesville’s annual punk rock festival (The FEST). Assignments will include a seminar report on an 80s singer/band, a few Perusall annotations, a short paper, a seminar paper proposal, and a seminar paper.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Octavia Butler: Race and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction
Tace Hedrick

Because this is a small honors course, it will be run as an undergraduate seminar. This means it will be intensive, research-oriented, and will require you to participate more extensively both in class and out. Each student will give a short presentation to the class on the reading for the week they choose, and hand in a prospectus for their final paper, an annotated bibliography, and a 10- page final paper.

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

ENG 4940

Internship
Undergraduate Coordinator

ENG 4953

Writing Childhood
John Cech

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

Classy Victorians
Rae Yan

This course will examine the subject of class as represented in British literary works produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). We will investigate a diverse selection of Victorian literary fiction, journalism, memoir, poetry, scientific writing, and travel writing that address the complicated relationships between the lower, working, middle, and upper classes. Our goal for this course is to understand the unique Victorian cultural contexts that have shaped our literary texts, as much as how literary genres and tropes contributed to the representation of Victorians and Victorian class structures. This requires us to dig deeply into British histories of empire, industrialization, and labor. We will also need to ask ourselves how social constructions of disability, gender, and race lend themselves to shaping discourse on class. Possible readings will likely include works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Mayhew, Arthur Morrison, Mary Seacole, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. Students of this upper-division course should expect a heavy reading load. Assignments will include active participation in daily discussion, regular reading responses, and two argumentative papers.

ENL 4273

Twentieth-Century British Literature: Space as Storyteller
Elizabeth Lambert

We often think of setting as a secondary feature of storytelling—a simple backdrop working in service to a narrative’s plot or characters. But can setting be more than just an inert background? Can space be a storyteller?

This class will consider the spaces of Twentieth-Century British Literature in order to better understand what literary settings tell us about the period’s politics, culture, mood, and creative endeavors. Employing a broad definition of space, we will consider not just the physical and imagined settings in British Literature, but also the mental landscapes that British authors depict in their work. Our journey through the spaces of Twentieth-Century British Literature will take us through colonial spaces, modernist headspaces, fantasy lands, warzones, cityscapes, and to the spaces of contemporary, postcolonial Britain. Along the way, we’ll begin to see the plays, novels, short stories, and poems that we read as textual spaces in and of themselves, and we’ll ponder whether these literary spaces have the potential to (re)shape the actual world we live in.

Primary texts for our class will include: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Wilfred Owen’s WWI poetry, selections from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Jean Rhys’s “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds,” and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “Decolonizing the Mind.”

ENL 4303

Charles Dickens
Rae Yan

Charles Dickens has long been understood as the quintessential Victorian: he has shaped our visions of nineteenth-century London, our understandings of class inequality, our sense of what a novel should be—even our modern notion of Christmas. The purpose of this upper-division course is to offer students an opportunity to dig more deeply into the study of Charles Dickens in order to understand how his literary works have defined much of British culture. To that end, our class will explore the author’s personal history, impact on Victorian literature, and representation of nineteenth-century life through a broad range of his writings across different genres. The literary works we will read will likely include The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Chimes, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We will speak to issues of class, empire, gender, labor, law, medicine, race, science, and sexuality. Students taking this upper-division course should expect a challenging reading load given Dickens’s authorial productivity that requires students complete an average of 200-350 pages of fiction and 20-30 pages of literary criticism or theory per week. Assignments will likely include a presentation, weekly reading responses, and 2 long papers (a comparative close-reading paper and a research paper).

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Men Behaving Badly
Peter Rudnytsky

Shakespeare’s plays often center either on unfaithful men, who then are forgiven and taken back by their partners, or on women who are justly or unjustly accused of adultery. We will trace the first pattern through the early comedy, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the “problem plays” All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure of Shakespeare’s middle period, before turning to the second pattern in his late romance The Winter’s Tale. The theoretical perspectives will be primarily feminist and psychoanalytic, but emphasis will be placed above all on a close reading of Shakespeare’s language. Course requirements include a midterm, final examination, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected.

LIT 3003

Forms of Narrative: Narratology & In/complete Novel
Richard Burt

NO KNOWLEDGE OF FRENCH IS REQUIRED FOR THIS COURSE.

This is an intellectually and emotionally ambitious class. You will need to have the ambition to read Proust and Genette if you want to take this class. You have to want to learn.

The aim of the class is to read Marcel Proust together with Gérard Genette. To achieve that aim, we will alternate between reading Proust and reading Genette much of the time. The assigned readings by Genette focus on Proust and narration.

In most classes on a novel, students are told to read the novel the same way they would read any book, namely, from beginning, starting on the first page, and ending on the last. A critical edition would supply annotations, and guides to the Recherche include summaries, quotations, and commentaries. Everything is directed toward basic reading comprehension. This kind of reading is criticism at it its most basic, and although limited, it has the benefit of being very close to the text. we will be doing what Gérard Genette calls “structured reading.” Instead of reading the Recherche head on by reading it in order, we will overcome its difficulty by reading it out of order, breaking up Swann’s Way with digressions, so to speak, into literary theory (mostly essay and boook chapters by Genette), and leaping ahead to the last novel, Time Found Again, aka Time Regained. We will read also read scenes from other novels related to the title of this course that bear on the novel’s completion and incompletion. By proceeding in this eccentric manner, we will be able to read the Recherche in two ways, attending not only to any one of the seven novels we are reading but also gaining a sense of that novel relates to the Recherche as a whole. And we will then be in a position to ask not only what is Proustian but the more interesting and challenging question, What is Proustian about Proust?

We will not read the novel in chronological order, nor will we read the entire novel. Why not? Well, it’s too long. In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Modern Library Classics) is 4,211 pages and a 1,052,750 word count; the novel made the Guiness Book of World Records). One writer of a reader’s guide to Proust asks “How many of the three thousand pages do you need to read?” His answer is “No,” and offers his reader his own prime cuts. Nor will we read skip ahead and read the novel’s “greatest hits” in the order in which they occur. We will read all of Swann’s Way, but we interrupt our reading of it several times. The problem with reading Proust one page at a time is that you may give up, as many people have. This course is a kind of advanced introduction to the novel. I will ask you to pretend that you have already novel and are now rereading. We will use Proust’s metaphor of binoculars to read the novel with two perspectives, reading for comprehension and appreciation (characterization, plot, theme, beauty) but also reading with a particular critical issue in mind, like Proust’s digressions, for example. Or his use of metaphor. Or his syntax.

What does all this mean? It means that we will read the novel in a fragmentary way (see Adorno) and follow critics who have an incredible command of the novel and who touch on many of the most important parts of the novel, often the parts writers of guides to the novel or overviews of it miss, and making connections between parts that may be hundreds of pages or even several novels apart. And we will also compare Proust’s famously long sentences to his relatively brief one sentence aphorisms or to passages that may be aptly regarded as what Harold Bloom calls “wisdom literature.” (The novel is kind of an encyclopedia.)

Requirements:

Two DQs and Three BIG WORDS on an assigned reading are due every Monday by 5:00 p.m. and every Wednesday by 5:00 p.m.
Students will co-lead class twice.
Three papers, 500 words each.

LIT 3031

Studies in Poetry: Ovid in Contemporary Poetry
Ange Mlinko

This course will explore contemporary poets’ 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 Demeter—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, Alice Owald, and others. Students will read a number of poems each week, write response papers, and give presentations.

LIT 3400

The Literature of Sustainability and Resistance
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, cultural theorists, naturalists, and philosophers, such as Stephanie Kaza, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Aldo Leopold, Arne Næss, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jade Sasser, and Blanche Verlie; visual artists, fiction authors, and graphic novelists such as Kate Beaton, Ann Pancake, Joe Sacco, and Margaret Tolbert; and poets such as John Ashbery, Sandra Beasley, Louise Glück, Donato Mancini, W.S. Merwin, Robinson Jeffers, François Villon, and Walt Whitman.

Graded assignments include two short critical essays on assigned readings and a creative photo-essay project. Service learning activities in the course include opportunities to take part in supervised volunteer tree plantings in and around the city of Gainesville, and a guided tour of one of Alachua County’s land conservation preserves.

LIT 3400

Passing: Black, White and Jewish
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? Why do we have this urge to pass and how do we know if and when we’ve passed too far? Looking to answer these questions, our class will explore real and fictional narratives of passing in literature, film and media. We will start the course by defining passing through its racial African American roots and continue to review passing as a global phenomenon, focusing primarily on transnational Jewish identities.

LIT 4188

World English Language Literature: Literary and/as Science Fiction
Phillip Wegner

In this course we will explore the increasingly prominent place of science fiction within the global English language literary output of the early twenty first century. For many years, there was an implicit divide between what was understood by some critics and readers to be “serious” literature and genre fiction, including science fiction. However, a growing number of the most prominent writers of the last two decades or so have drawn more and more upon the figures, tropes, and devices of science fiction; and some have even produced works that would be identified by most readers as science fiction. At the same time, established writers previously enjoyed only by fans of science fiction have garnered wider and more diverse audiences as their work begins to move into new territories. The result has been a tremendous revitalization of contemporary world English language literature, as it has been able to respond in ever more productive ways to the rapidly changing realities of our increasingly planetary lives. Readings will include many of the following: Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (1998); David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004); George Saunders, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006); Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2006); Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010); Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011); Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2006; 2014); Emmi Itäranta, The Memory of Water (2014); N.K. Jamesin, The Fifth Season (2015); Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (2017); Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017); Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (2018); John Lanchester, The Wall (2019); Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021); and Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise (2022).

LIT 4305

Seeing Differently: Comics & Identity
Margaret Galvan

Comics studies has emerged as a scholarly field of inquiry over the past 25+ years, but many foundational thinkers considered only the form of the comic in their scholarship. Recent scholarship has both extended and challenged this formalist approach by engaging with how race, class, ideology, gender, sexuality, etc. shape comics. Indeed, comics has become a flashpoint for identity-focused theoretical investigations. In this class, we will ask how these theories shift our understanding of comics and how comics themselves represent issues of identity.

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

LIT 4331

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 R. Goulding, Robert and Harold: or, The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast (1853)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (1938)
Lois Lenski, Strawberry Girl (1945)
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Freedom River (1953)
Carl Hiaasen, Team Rodent (1998)
Jean Craighead George, The Missing ‘Gator of Gumbo Limbo (2000)
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot (2002)
Betsy Carter, Swim to Me (2007)
Enrique Flores-Galbis, 90 Miles to Havana (2010)
Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon, Zora and Me (2011)
Hope Larson et al, Goldie Vance, Volume 1 (2016)
Pablo Cartaya, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora (2017)
The Florida Project (film), 2017
Celia Pérez, Strange Birds (2019)
Romina Garber, Lobizona (2020)

LIT 4483

Feasts, Famines, Revolutions: The Hungry Nineteenth Century
Megnha Sapui

Bookended by two Europe-based events, the French Revolution and the First World War, this course seeks to reimagine the long nineteenth century in Europe as one driven by its hunger. Focusing on different manifestations of hunger in this period—famines, feasts, food riots, and rebellions—gives us a truly international, and visceral, understanding of its history, culture, and politics. This course begins by evaluating the revolution, of regimes and tastes, by looking at how the French Revolution was rooted in food shortages and led to the development of the art of gastronomy and the figure of the gourmand. From a discernment of taste and love for good food, we move on to an examination of literal and metaphorical sweetness vis-à-vis sugar and the enslaved bodies that produced it in texts of French and British Abolition. This is followed by a careful analysis of hunger, starvation, and migration, ushered in by the European potato failures of the 1840s, particularly devastating in Ireland. Then, we look at the role that tea and meat play in Britain’s self-representation and colonial administration. Finally, we close with a discussion of how gastronomy, in the hands of fin de siècle writers, develops into texts and tropes of desire, decadence, and disease.

This course encourages students to revisit and reimagine the gustatory lives and afterlives of the nineteenth century, and to do so with cognizance of Europe’s expansive and contested borders and relations. We will use textual, visual, and archival materials to assess how food shapes individual and national identities. Assignments will include short weekly responses to readings; using and developing an academic or public- facing essay from eighteenth and nineteenth-century materials available through digital archives;1 utilizing social media tools to examine the present “life” of one of the foods/concepts we encounter in this course in a creative collaborative project; and a final research paper.

LIT 4930

Variable Topics: 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

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. The course will address issues of vampire and vEmpire (the imperial politics behind vampirism), vampirism and psychoanalysis, vampirism and modernism, vampirism and cinema, queer, gay and lesbian vampires, vampires of East and Central Europe, vampirism and anti-Semitism, vampirism and religion, vampirism and nationalism, history of blood in religion, film and literature, etc.

The course will discuss the figure of the vampire in cinema and literature (Bram Stoker’s Dracula will be read or screened and analyzed, among others; particular attention will be given to the novel as a proto-cinematic medium), as well as the rendering of the vampire in cinema (from Murnau’s Nosferatu, to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Slayers Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Twilight among others). The course will introduce students to the classics of vampire cinema as well as to the contemporary production in the genre of vampire films, television series, etc.

LIT 4930

Creative Nonfiction
David Leavitt

The goal of this course is to clarify, through practice and reading, the parameters of creative—as opposed, one presumes, to non-creative—nonfiction. Most works designated as creative nonfiction are memoirs. Yet whatever it is that distinguishes the creative in creative nonfiction can also be found in travel writing (Bruce Chatwin, Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris), essays on literature (John Lanchester, Cynthia Ozick, Joy Williams), reportage (James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, Joseph Roth), biography (Nicholson Baker, Geoff Dyer, Lytton Strachey), and even book reviewing (Michael Hofmann, Patricia Lockwood, Lorrie Moore). The goal of the course is to provide with a broader sense of the genre’s range as well as a clearer idea of how to move forward in their own creative work.

LIT 4930

Introduction to Jewish-American Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

The course will introduce students to the rich history of Jewish-American cinema and the latest critical and theoretical literature about it. It will be organized thematically, and chronologically, starting with the topics of Jewish Diaspora, emigration to the US and integration, the first sound film, and then films about the Holocaust, comedy, Israeli Cinema. During the course, we will screen and discuss films involved with the representation of the Jews (not necessarily made by Jewish American cineastes; thus a screening and discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino are anticipated) and those of course made by prominent Jewish American filmmakers. The course will cover the screening and discussion or reference classics such as Fiddler on the Roof, or Barbara Streisand’s Yentl (together with reading the novel by Sholem Aleichem and the story by Isaac Bashevis Singer on which each film was respectively based); the extensive analysis of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, including critical and theoretical responses by Irvin Howe and Susan Gubar; Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg and The Pianist by Roman Polanski. The second part of the course will be dedicated to screening films reflecting Jewish humor by Ernest Lehman (Portnoy’s Complaint, based on the novel by Philip Roth), Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters and Allen’s latest film Whatever Works with Larry David), and films by Paul Mazursky, Sidney Lumet, Billy Wilder (Some Like it Hot) and Mel Brooks—The Producers, Blazing Saddles). The course will conclude by the screening and discussion of recent TV series, such as Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David), and Bored to Death with Jason Schwartzman, and the latest film by the Coen Brothers, Serious Men. The course will also make use of the Israel Film Festival organized by the Center for Jewish Studies in the Fall of 2022 and screen and discuss the current Israel and International Jewish Film Production.

LIT 4930

Jews and Popular Culture
Rachel Gordan

What is Jewish popular culture and what does it tell us about Jews, American cultural history, and popular culture? In this class, we’ll be learning about 20^th century American Jews through the lens of popular culture (popular fiction and film, in particular), and we’ll be learning about popular culture while thinking about Jews, religion, and ethnicity. Our focus will be on changes that occurred at midcentury (as well as the “before and after” to those changes), but students are invited to think about more contemporary examples of Jewish popular culture in their individual, end-of-semester projects. A special feature of this course is that we will also be learning from some guest speakers, from all over the world, about different aspects of Jews and popular culture.