Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2023 (Upper Division)

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

Fall 2023

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	8DK1	25226	T 6-8	ONLINE	Black Women Writers	King
AML 4170	8DK2	27665	R 6-8	ONLINE	The American Political Novel	King
AML 4311	8SS1	10322	T 4 / R 4-5	ONLINE	Major Authors: Henry James	Smith
AML 4453	8GR1	25242	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0115 / MAT 0114	Black Sound: Black Life	Williams
AML 4685	8JM1	26777	T 4-5 / R 4	FLI 0105 / LIT 205	Black Horror, White Terror	Mollenthiel
CRW 3110	8CB1	12010	T 9-11	ONLINE	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Bordas
CRW 3110	8UA1	12009	T 9-11	MAT 0002	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 3310	8WL1	18225	M 9-11	FLI 0115	Imaginative Writing: Poetry	Logan
CRW 4905	8UA2	12011	R 9-11	MAT 0108	Senior Advanced Workshop in Poetry	Akpan
CRW 4906	8AM1	12030	T 9-11	MAT 0108	Senior Advanced Workshop in Poetry: Tell the Truth, but Tell it Slant	Mlinko
ENC 3250	8LG1	12354	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0118	Professional Communication	Gonzales
ENC 3414	8VD1	12432	M. W F 6	MAT 0113	Hypermedia	Del Hierro
ENG 3125	8PB1	25925	M W F 4 / M E1-E3 (SCR)	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	History of Film 3	Bianchi
EN6 4015	8PR1	12362	M W F 7	MAT 0116	Psychological Approaches to Literature	Rudnytsky
ENG 4134	8SB1	27668	M W F 6 / W 8-10 (SCR)	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	The Films of Agnés Varda	Blum
ENG 4310	8TH3	28315	M W F 5 / T 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Cinema of Environmental Crisis	Harpold
ENG 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Independent Study	Kidd
ENG 4910	8MG4	29708	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR B310	Graphic Archives	Galvan
ENG 4911	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Undergraduate Research in English	Kidd
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	W 6-8	TUR 2350	Honors: Victorian Writing, Publishing, and Book Collecting	Yan
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 6-8	ONLINE	Honors: The Machine in the Garden	Smith
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Internship	Kidd
ENG 4953	8SH1	23435	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0002	The Great American Novel	Hegeman
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Honors Thesis Project	Kidd
ENL 3122	8PG1	27782	T 9-11	MAT 0114	Nineteenth-Century British Novel	Gilbert
ENL 3154	8MB1	27669	M W F 4	MAT 0117	20th-Century British Poetry	Bryant
ENL 4303	8RY2	25489	M W F 3	ZIEG 0112	Major Figures: George Eliot	Yan
ENL 4333	8PR2	12438	M W F 8	MAT 0116	Comedy and Romance	Rudnytsky
LIT 3031	030F	25928	M W F 7	TUR 2334	Twentieth-Century Women Poets	Bryant
LIT 3043	8SHA	27670	M W F 4	ONLINE	Modern Drama: Learning by Doing	Homan
LIT 3173	8JW1	28842	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0117 / MAT 0118	Yiddish New York	Wagner
LIT 3362	8TM1	27671	T 9-11	TUR 2322	The Avant-Garde Film	Mowchun
LIT 3374	8RK1	27672	M W F 8	AND 0019	Bible as Literature	Kawashima
LIT 3383	8JM2	28760	T 7-9 / R 6	NRN 1001	Black Women Transatlantic	Mollenthiel
LIT 3400	8PB2	14986	M W F 7	TUR 2303	The Weird, the Eerie, and the Uncanny	Bianchi
LIT 3400	8TH4	28322	M W F 8	MAT 0117	Literature of Sustainability & Resilience	Harpold
LIT 4188	8AA1	25514	W 6-8	MAT 0003	Literature & Legacy of Empire	Amoko
LIT 4194	8AAY	27674	M 6-8	MAT 0003	African Lit in 21st Century	Amoko
LIT 4233	8MS1	27675	M W F 7	MAT 0113	Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism in the U.S., Hawaii, South Africa, and Palestine	Schueller
LIT 4331	8AU1	14988	M W F 5	MAT 0113	“We’re All Mad Here”: Through the Children’s Literature Looking Glass	Hampshire
LIT 4333	8KK1	21549	M W F 5	Online	Literature for the Adolescent	Kidd
LIT 4483	8SH3	28324	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0116	Ideas of Value, Forms of Evaluation	Hegeman
LIT 4554	8MG1	15003	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0113	Intersectionality: Theory and Visual Rhetoric	Galvan
LIT 4930	8DKA	28336	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2334	Vampire Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	8DKB	28338	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2334	Jewish-American Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	8DL1	15004	W 9-11	MAT 0003	Creative Nonfiction	Leavitt
LIT 4930	8EK1	25535	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0115	Kafka and the Kafkaesque	Kligerman
LIT 4930	8EK2	28342	T 4-5 / R 4	TBA / MAT 0105	Representations of War and Political Violence	Kligerman
LIT 4930	8MR1	27784	M W F 4	MAT 003	The Harlem Renaissance and Western Europe	Reid
LIT 4930	8SHC	28334	M W F 3	ONLINE	Giants of the Theatre: Shakespeare and Beckett	Homan
LIT 4930	8THC	28331	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0113	Feminist Fiction	Hedrick
LIT 4930	8YX1	28763	T 7/ R 7-8	MAT 0006 / FLI 0221	Chinese Film and Media	Xiao
SPC 4680	8RS1	18568	M W F 6	ROL 0115	Rhetorical Criticism: Rhetorical Theory	Sanchez

Course Descriptions

AML 3284

Black Women Writers
Debra Walker King

Description: This course examines the subject positions of African American women within the social and political context of the United States, focusing foremost on representations of the captive female body as explored in works published from 1975-1985. Since Feminist and Womanist praxis and epistemology of this period were grounded in notions of freedom of the body to “labor” and achieve full self expression, this course asks: how far have we come in accomplishing such “freedoms”? What can we learn about our progress as cultural and social beings in the twenty-first century by reviewing the culture work of Black women during the twentieth century’s so-called “renassiance” in Black women’s writing and cultural assessment? Have we advanced at all? What gaps must be brought to light in order for the current discourse of Womanist “wholeness” to achieve a broader articulation? What cultural configurations are (and might be) derived from taking a look back at the past and comparing it to the lives and challenges women face today?

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 five novels and one choreopoem. 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.

Tentative Texts:

1. Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, 1975
2. Jones, Gayl. Eva’s Man, 1976,
3. Butler, Octavia. Kindred, 1979
4. Morrison, Toni. Sula, 1982
5. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple, 1983
6. Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills, 1985

AML 4170

The American Political Novel
Debra Walker King

Description: The novel is one of the most powerful ways sociopolitical ideology influences the average American. This influence is reciprocal. Literature has shaped our way of thinking and behaving but our behaviors, social concerns, and political struggles have also shaped it. This course is a survey of the ways in which politics and specific political issues have shaped American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century.

Focus: What qualifies as a political novel is debatable. Are propagandistic works political novels? What about historical romances, novels of sentiment, utopian, docu-novels, or postmodern and experimental fiction, do they fit into this category? Since the category of political novel is not always clearly demarcated, I use the title as a focusing aid. We will address questions of how the texts under survey influence and are influenced by the race, class, ethnic and gender politics of its sociohistorical production. We will seek to discover the connection between a novel’s literary quality and its efficacy as a political tool. Finally, we will discuss the blatant or veiled ideologies the novels under survey advocate. What kind of ideological or political legacies do these texts offer and what have we done with these legacies? What do they offer our future?

AML 4311

Major Authors: Henry James
Stephanie Smith

Long both hated and admired for his unique style, Henry James is a novelist’s novelist, a supreme chronicler of his era, the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. American by birth, British by choice, James was born into a notable Boston, Massachusetts family; his brother William went on to become the first professor of psychology at Harvard University, while his sister, Alice, became a poet. In this class we will read a selection of Henry James’s works, from his earliest novel, Daisy Miller to his late works, like The Golden Bowl in a reexamination of this major American/British author from the perspective of the early 21st century. We will concentrate on his novels, but we shall be reading some of his notable short stories as well as criticism.

AML 4453

Studies in American Literature and Culture
Kimberly Williams

What is sound studies and how does it relate to Blackness? How does sound help us understand geography, power, and culture? How can sound serve as an artifact for history and document a specific time? For this course, we will expand our senses to critically think about Black studies and Black life with an emphasis on listening, studying, and creating sonic research.

We will utilize sound as our entryway to study the histories of sonic terror on the plantation and its relationship to media studies and Black consciousness. However, we will also research sonic healing as testimonial care work through Black feminist studies. This includes oral storytelling, music performance, and Black rest studies. How have Black people curated deliberate sites of sonic joy on the plantation via Negro spirituals or hamboning and later on digital platforms like the 2021 Verzuz battles?

The coursework includes readings and listening(s) from Lucille Clifton, bell hooks, Solange, Notorious B.I.G., and more. We will engage with foundational texts like Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and hear its reverberation into Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid or Childish Gambino’s This is America. Our material is multidisciplinary and spans across slave narratives, contemporary poetry, music performance, and film studies. The units will reflect specific times and placement in Black life. Our major projects encompass research writing, creating sound trees, and digital writings.

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 Seminar in Fiction Writing
Camille Bordas

Our workshop will be conducted in traditional workshop fashion: each week, we will discuss short stories (or novel excerpts). Sometimes, we will do in-class exercises inspired by formal constraints, or questions raised by the pieces we’ve read. 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 down comments for those who are being critiqued: notes that describe what the piece that is being critiqued has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it might achieve, etc. Dedication to understanding what each writer is trying to do, regardless of personal aesthetic preferences, is mandatory. Also mandatory: that the writers be prepared to hear what others have to say about their work

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
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 3310

Imaginative Writing: Poetry
William Logan

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

—Composer and pianist Kenny Werner

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

—Guardian (London), 9 August 2000

They told stories about [the country and western singer] Bill Monroe biting into his first bagel (“Dang! This is the worst doughnut I ever did eat!”).

—Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker, May 14, 2007

In this workshop we will attend to words as closely as a painter attends to paint—or to clouds. You’ll read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Gjertrud Schnackenberg to Ishion Hutchinson, 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@english.ufl.edu> in one attachment in .pdf format. List the workshops and professors you have previously taken.

Required reading (tentative):

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

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Workshop in Fiction
Uwem Akpan

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

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Workshop: in Poetry Tell the Truth, but Tell it Slant
Ange Mlinko

In this advanced poetry workshop, we will work from poetic models in contemporary idioms, taking landscape and weather as a theme: not only as a psychological and aesthetic mirror of human subjectivity, but as the ground of survival in an ecologically threatened century. The Florida poems of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill will feature as well as the Caribbean poems of Derek Walcott and the antipodean poetry of Les Murray. Meanwhile, we will take Emily Dickinson’s well-known ars poetica, “tell the truth but tell it slant,” as our axiom as we forge a new language for the natural world.

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Laura Gonzales

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 3125

History of Film 3
Pietro Bianchi

The 1960s were an era of social turmoil: the Civil Rights movement and the pacifist protests against the Vietnam war in the United States; the student movement of May ’68 in France; the working-class revolts in the factories of Italy; the attempts of reforming the socialist countries initiated by the Prague Spring; the anti-colonial movements of national liberation in the Global South. Cinema was not foreign to this atmosphere of revolutions and inspiring events, and during the same years started to reflect on its social mission and its form. A new wave of filmmakers questioned the language of film, the industrial system of its production and its commercial distribution. After more than 60 years since the invention of the Lumière brothers, film became adult, or to use a term dense of consequences, it became modern.

In this course we will study the history of film initiated at the beginning of the 1960s until the end of the 1970s: two decades where almost everything changed in the world of motion pictures. The course will be divided in three sections: we will start with films by Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti; we will then move to study the New Waves of France (Jean-Luc Godard), Germany (Alexander Kluge), Czechoslovakia (Věra Chytilová), Yugoslavia (Živojin Pavlović), Japan (Nagisa Ōshima), Turkey (Yılmaz Güney) and Iran (Abbas Kiarostami); and at the end of the semester we will focus on the New Hollywood of 1970s, a decade of tremendous artistic innovation that ended in 1977 with the release of Star Wars, the first contemporary commercial blockbuster.

The class has a weekly mandatory screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussions (a strong emphasis will be given on active participation). Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 7-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature
Peter Rudnytsky

This foundational course has three aims: (1) to introduce students to major schools of psychoanalytic thought; (2) to use these theories to read classic literary works; and (3) to see how literature can deepen our understanding of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic readings will be drawn primarily from Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Kohut, and Bowlby, 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 4134

The Films of Agnés Varda
Sylvie Blum

The class covers French director Agnès Varda, a predecessor to the New Wave, and member of the Left Bank group. The class critically examines her entire filmic and photographic production, covering various genres and styles made in France and the United States, from the 1950s all the way to the 2010s.

ENG 4310

Cinema of Environmental Crisis
Terry Harpold

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

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

ENG4910

Graphic Archives
Margaret Galvan

This experiential learning course introduces students to archives and archival research—both the pleasures as well as the difficulty, especially when it comes to studying visual print culture. Due to grassroots distribution, circulation, and publishing methods, archives—not bookstores or libraries—are the necessary place to study radical visual culture. We laud the rise of digital collections and archives, but materials like these remain under-digitized and under-cataloged. Text-based finding systems in traditional finding guides and digital infrastructure do not well support the study of visual culture—especially incidental images nested amongst text. We will work through these obstacles together as students learn how to conduct research in digital archives. Students will be introduced to relevant archives at UF and in our larger community as well as online.

Across the semester, we will read and discuss theoretical conversations around radical archives and materials that have emerged over the past several years in both monographs and special issues of journals. In a number of these texts, feminist zines of the early 1990s serve as an area of focus for scholars, librarians, and archivists. Because zines as self-produced grassroots media do not conform to mainstream publication information, zine archivists and librarians have developed new protocols for how to catalogue these materials so that important information will not be lost. How might we apply these principles or develop our own for organizing and researching other, diverse visual ephemera—comics, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, buttons, t-shirts, etc.—in digital collections?

Scaffolded professionalization activities and digital approaches to scholarship will accompany the completion of an archivally-informed research paper. This course will be useful for students with an interest in archival research, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, marginalized histories, grassroots publishing, visual and popular cultures, etc.

ENG 4936

Honors: Victorian Writing, Publishing, and Book Collecting
Rae Yan

This research-intensive course is designed to introduce advanced honors undergraduate students to the expansive world of Victorian publishing and writing to consider the ways in which art has been inflected by social, political, and personal needs as much as artistic desires. In our class, we will read works by some of the most famous Victorian writers of the age—Dickens, Eliot, the Brownings, George Gissing, to name a few—as we explore the fascinating periodical and print culture that made their names flourish during the nineteenth century and into our present. We will not only look into famous literary magazines and newspapers where major authors published and influenced the Victorian public, but also the depths of the history of the book that will bring us to consider the world of the circulating library and the “triple-decker” novel, the place of the railroad system in distributing popular fiction, and the grimier and grimmer implications of publishing markets.

This course is designed in a workshop model. Students will be given the opportunity to pursue a hands-on experience with independent research into this world of Victorian writers and publishers via the library’s rare books and special collections. As a part of their work for the semester, students will design their own research agenda with instructor support and pursue an evolving creative project of their choice—a podcast, livestream, a YouTube video series, or similar digital project—to persuade a modern-day public to investigate the same materials and texts students will study and research in class.

ENG 4936

Honors: The Machine in the Garden: Representations of Technology in Turn of the 20th-Century American Literature
Stephanie Smith

Famously in his book of criticism, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx examined the tensions between the pastoral and the progressive ideals of 19th century American literature. Using his ideas to structure this course, we will examine how American authors of late 19th and early 20th century American literature represented the burgeoning technologies of their day, with an eye to thinking through the same sort of tensions and debates about the technologies of our own time. How do authors like Ambrose Bierce, whose short story “Moxon’s Master” is the first in the United States to represent the robot speak to us still about the fears or promises of robotics or AI? Or how does Mark Twain’s use of the technology of fingerprinting in his novel Puddin’ Head Wilson speak to contemporary fears of identity theft or computer profiling?

ENG 4953

The Great American Novel
Susan Hegeman

The term “the Great American Novel” originated in 1868, in an essay by a minor novelist named John William DeForest, whose disappointing conclusion was that such a thing did not exist — or at least not yet. Since that time, there have been many candidates for this title, so much so, that it is a cliché of literary marketing. In this class, we will investigate DeForest and others’ criteria for the “Great American Novel,” and consider them in historical and social context. We will also read novels that have at various times been identified this way, beginning with DeForest’s half-hearted nominee for the title, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Other likely texts include William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, John dos Passos, The Big Money, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We will also work together to identify another text to read as a class. Because this is a seminar, active attendance and participation is expected. Written work will consist of at least one research paper.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis Project
Faculty Members (2) of Choice

Students must 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 choosing, and another as the second reader.

ENL 3122

Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Pamela Gilbert

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

The Victorian period was the great age of the novel’s emergence as a dominant popular form within a newly extensive literary marketplace, and Victorian novelists were consummate entertainers driven to sell widely and well. They were also preoccupied with the condition of their own culture; to paraphrase Richard Altick, rarely is the Present so much present in literature as it is in the novel of this period. Victorian novelists considered it their duty and pleasure to criticize, praise and generally comment upon current issues, and they developed new forms and genres to accommodate their purposes. These issues represent the formative phases of social concerns which we have inherited and which still define us: for example, the role of mass media, the ethics of capitalism, gender roles, the responsibilities of liberal government, the welfare state, pollution, the role of nation in the global community, etc. We will read a range of representative genres and consider them not only in the light of the emergence of the novel as a dominant form, but as documents of a culture’s attempts to represent and work out these issues of contemporary importance—aesthetically and ethically—and consider the ways in which Victorian ideas resonate for us today. This course provides upper-division credit in the major, and will be taught with that in mind; therefore, students will be expected to know how to do research in the field and to attempt the application of critical frameworks. Due to the nature of the material, there is a considerable amount of reading. Carefully consider your reading speed and the expectations of the other courses you are taking before committing to this course.

Possible texts:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
other critical readings to be provided.

ENL 3154

20th-Century British Poetry
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Carol Ann Duffy, and UF’s own Michael Hofmann. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts as we take on a wide range of styles. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of gender, family, and nation will shift as definitions of “British poetry” change. Course assignments will be a short and a long paper, a panel presentation, several Perusall annotations, a parody, and engaged participation in class discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and argumentative writing. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you.

ENL 4303

Major Figures: George Eliot
Rae Yan

This upper-division course explores the work of one of the most renowned intellectual minds of the Victorian era: George Eliot. As an experimenter, literary critic, novelist, philosopher, poet, scientific thinker, theorist, translator, and more, Eliot’s representations of nineteenth-century Britain are perhaps some of the most striking of the English canon. We will consider Eliot’s vision of the novel as the intellectual and moral center of nineteenth-century British life—a site to contextualize changing attitudes toward gender, government, medicine, religion, science, and sexuality. The literary works we will read will likely include Scenes of Clerical Life, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda as well as some of her most well-known critical essays on literature. Students taking this upper-division course should expect a challenging reading load, with an average of 300-400 pages of fiction and 20-30 pages of literary criticism or theory per week. Assignments will likely include weekly reading responses, class discussion leading, and 2 long papers (a comparative close-reading paper and a research paper).

ENL 4333

Comedies and Romances
Peter Rudnytsky

From The Comedy of Errors through Twelfth Night to the coauthored Pericles and the valedictory Tempest, Shakespeare’s comedies and romances explore such themes as identity, twinship, incest, and the rupture and repair of familial bonds. We will undertake a study of these four plays to trace some prominent threads in Shakespeare’s artistic development and to discover how, at least sometimes, “Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love.” The theoretical approach will be primarily psychoanalytic and feminist, but emphasis will be placed above all on enhancing students’ skills of close reading and critical thinking through a close reading of the language of the plays.

LIT 3031

Twentieth-Century Women Poets
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at 6-8 poets from the U.S. and U.K. who launched their careers in the 20th century. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts as we take on a wide range of styles. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of domesticity, gender, family, mythology, and poetic language will shift as “women’s poetry” becomes a marketing category and an academic field. Poets we’ll read will include some of the following: Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, and UF’s own Ange Mlinko. Course assignments will be a short and a long paper, a panel presentation, a Repurposing activity, several Perusall annotations, a parody, and engaged participation in class discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and argumentative writing. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you.

LIT 3043

Modern Drama: Learning by Doing
Sid Homan

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

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

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

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

LIT 3362

The Avant-Garde Film
Trevor Mowchun

Bubbling beneath the mainstream marketplace of commercial and consumable cinema lies the alternative realm of the avant-garde: experimental, unpredictable, daring, defiant, dangerous. If everyday waking life with its familiar patterns of thought and recurrent habits of action is analogous to mainstream popular cinema in its most derivative and derelict form, then the unconscious world of insight, intuition, and dream—revealing to us, each night, our inner repressed truth—is the avant-garde film confronting us, interrupting the status quo, freeing thought and feeling from external constraints and pressures towards normalcy. To study the avant-garde, therefore, is to lose our senses, as it were, to abandon formulaic ways of seeing and understanding the world and ourselves. As there is no single stable meaning fixed to the avant-garde, we will explore a variety of possibilities to ensure our path through avant-garde film history and culture remains open to surprise and destined for the underground where no amount of prior knowledge will safely light the way to the certitudes we may long for (but will learn to relinquish in favor of “non-knowing”). Some theoretical frameworks and artistic forms of expression to help guide our investigations into avant-garde film are as follows: aesthetics, non-narrative or anti-narrative discourse, formal experimentation/innovation, self-reflexivity, political transgression, apolitical abstraction, poetry, shock, phenomenology, corporeality, and the unconscious. The influential (and sometimes infamous) avant-garde movements of the 20th century (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Conceptual Art) will also be discussed in their crosspollinations with film.

Class will meet once a week for 3 hours. The first part of class will consist of a film screening (mostly short films) followed by lecture and discussion in the second part. Students will also be required to view some films outside of class. Film screenings will be linked with weekly readings from theorists and practitioners of the avant-garde. Students will keep a weekly “film journal” in which written responses to readings and films are recorded (not unlike dreams). A short paper analyzing the intricate formal language and production context of a specific avant-garde film. A final exploratory theoretical/research paper or an avant-garde film with a clear written plan/script to be approved by the instructor. For film projects, production and post-production equipment will be provided through the department’s film lab.

LIT 3374

Bible as Literature
Robert Kawashima

This course will introduce students to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern context. It contains some of the great literary works to come down to us from antiquity, on par with the Homeric epics. And biblical narrative constitutes the oldest prose literature that we know of at present. Our primary focus will be on a wide and varied reading of biblical narrative — along with a bit of poetry — but students will also be introduced to the scholarly study of the Bible from a literary perspective. More generally, this course will introduce students to the scholarly, interdisciplinary study of literature. That is, if the solutions and interpretations proposed will be specific to the Bible, the problems and ideas raised will have relevance for the study of literature in general.

LIT 3383

Black Women Transatlantic
Julia Mollenthiel

This course will survey African American, African, European, and Caribbean literature written by Black women from the 18th century to the present. Students will read a variety of texts, each of which centers on materials that are thematically and historically related. Whether considering subjects of an historical, social, psychological, or literary nature, students engage in close examination of texts by Black female artists from both academic and popular realms that may include fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, drama and autobiography, in addition to non-print sources such as film and music. We will examine how Black women across these regions utilize certain aesthetics, styles, techniques, genres, and structures, as well as how these traditions explore ideas around freedom and identity. This course is organized thematically, with an emphasis on the movements and ideas of Black feminine social thought and political protest that contextualize Black women’s writing across the diaspora.

LIT 3400

The Weird, the Eerie, and the Uncanny
Pietro Bianchi

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

This course will be an overview of several figures and examples of weird, eerie and uncanny in modern and contemporary culture: form the gothic literature of E. A. Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street; from David Lynch’s Lost Highway and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to the literature of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; from philosophers and cultural critics such as Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani to the horror films of Jordan Peele; from pessimist theorists like Eugene Thacker to contemporary narratives about climate catastrophes and human extinction. Our guiding question will be: why today it is easier to imagine horrors, supernatural creatures, and human extinction instead of envisioning a social transformation of our world?

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

LIT 3400

Literature of Sustainability and Resilience
Terry Harpold

This course takes as its founding premises two unassailable facts. First, we live in a time of increasing environmental instability, mass extinction, food insecurity, forced migration, and social and political unrest fostered by climate change. Second, the human literary, artistic, 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, memoir, poetry, psychology, and philosophy that addresses the perils and vitality of the late Anthropocene, the geological epoch marked by the influences of humans on the Earth’s planetary ecosystems.

Graded assignments include a short “family carbon biography,” two critical essays on assigned readings and a creative photo-essay project. Extra-credit service learning activities in the course include opportunities to take part in supervised volunteer tree plantings in and around the city of Gainesville. This course qualifies as a 3-credit Humanities core course for UF’s Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies.

LIT 4188

The Literatures and Legacy of Empire
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses the legacy of European colonialism. Specifically, we will critique wide-ranging representation of Empire by authors from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, South Asia and Africa. In the wake of the voyages of exploration and ‘discovery’ from the fifteenth century onwards, a handful of European powers—England, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands—gradually to exercise sovereignty over roughly 80 percent of the world. In political, social, economic, and cultural terms, the colonial situation effected epochal transformations of not only the conquered societies but also imperial Europe. The colonial encounter resulted in the consolidation of the idea of European or Western modernity at the self-defined heart of human civilization. It also resulted in incomplete, chaotic, and traumatic attempts remake the world in the image of Europe. Most—but by no means, all—polities had attained varying degrees of independence by the end of the 20^th century. But the legacy of European colonial endures in settler nations like the United States and Canada as well as the impoverished and disempowered nations of Africa whose national boundaries and linguistic communities defy coherence. The course brings together diverse writers including Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, J. M. Coetzee, and Jamaica Kincaid.

LIT 4194

African Literature in the 21st-Century
Apollo Amoko

This addresses the complex relationship between works of arts and the politics of everyday life by highlighting late 20^th century and early 21^st century African fiction. In a complicated and vexing dynamic, aesthetics reflects, reproduces and critiques cultural, political, and economic realities. Modern African literature emerged as colonial rule gradually faded in volatile but hopeful 1950s and 60s. Beginning in the 19^th Century, imperial powers, most notably, England and France, fundamentally remapped and remade the beleaguered Africa African continent in the image of Europe. In an irreversible transformation, colonial sovereignty disrupted longstanding communities to create incoherent nation states and transnational linguistic communities. Writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa came of age in optimistic late colonial contexts. Their realist fiction reproduced the anti-colonial nationalism that defined a continent on the cusp of freedom, self-determination, and prosperity. In stark contrast, successive generations of post-realist writers came of age in postcolonial contexts variously marred by disillusionment, disappointment, and pessimism. Against this backdrop, we will examine the work of art in of the era of globalization amid enduring neo-colonial relation between disempowered Africa and West. The course focuses on writers like Uwem Akpan, Tsitsi Dangaremba, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Yvonne Awuor Odhiambo.

LIT 4233

Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism in the U.S., Hawaii, South Africa, and Palestine
Malini Schueller

This course will focus on settler colonialism and the indigenous resistance to it in such different locations as U.S. North America, Hawai’i, South Africa, and Palestine. Reading literary works by both the colonized and the settlers, we will attempt to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, nationalism, the politics of recognition, and revolutionary solidarity. We will attend to the different practices and literatures of settler colonialism which persists into our present, and to the activism and advocacy campaigns of indigenous populations confronting settler colonialism and its legacies. We will also examine the conversations and disagreements between indigenous and environmental studies. We will also examine settler colonial use of the COVID-19 pandemic to further dispossess indigenous populations. The course should interest to anyone interested in Native American studies, postcolonial studies, race studies, and diasporic studies.

Possible texts: Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer, stories of Zitkala-Sa, Taurog’s Blue Hawaii, Liliuokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy, Raja Shehade’s Palestinian Walks, and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.

LIT 4331

Children’s Literature
Kathryn Hampshire

In this course on children’s literature, we will go down a series of rabbit holes to close read a diverse array of texts and the cultures that surround them. From board books and picture books for young readers to young adult novels, the texts for this class may seem eclectic at first glance. But by applying analytical frameworks such as critical disability studies, queer theory, monster theory, feminist theory, and more, we will trace themes of marginalization, madness, monstrosity, and magic in the wonderland of children’s literature.

This class will predominantly focus on discussion and tactile engagement with texts. Among other types of assignments, students can expect to write micro response papers and give informal presentations on selected texts, providing them with the opportunity to actively shape in-class discussion to meet individual and group interests. We will also have the privilege of exploring archival materials from UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature several times over the course of the semester. The final project will offer several options based on what each student sees as most personally enriching, such as a creative work, a research paper, a theory-based essay, or a pedagogical project.

LIT 4333

Literature for the Adolescent
Kenneth Kidd

This synchronous online (Zoom) course examines literature primarily for but also about adolescents, across a range of genres and with attention to the political and social history of adolescence as a concept and a lived experience. We’ll concentrate on what’s now called “young adult” (YA) literature from the 1960s forward in light of earlier narrative traditions. The modern adolescent is of course intimately connected to material culture in particular ways. We will focus especially on contemporary literature in the hopes of assessing what’s happening in YA publishing and media culture. The course will be conducted as a seminar and participation is crucial. We will read one YA book per week, plus some criticism and theory. Requirements include active participation, weekly response papers, and several longer projects.

Possible Texts (titles subject to change; please check with me before purchasing):

Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak (1999)M.T. Anderson, Feed (2002)
Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After (2021)
Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer (1942)
Romina Garber, Lobizona (2020)
E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)
Maria Ingrande Mora, The Immeasurable Depth of You (2023)
Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008)
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch (2011)
Celia Pérez, Tumble (2022)
Erika L. Sanchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017)
Mariko and Jill Tamaki, Skim (2008)
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (2017)
Mariko Turk, The Other Side of Perfect (2021)

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, how theorists and critics have addressed the problem of trying to make lasting claims about taste and value, and how institutions shape our ideas of value. Readings will be theoretical, historical, and sociological in nature. We will read about and discuss such topics as youth, popular, mass culture and subcultures; education and meritocracy; fandom; prizes, rankings, and reviews; and (of course) money.

LIT 4554

Intersectionality: Theory and Visual Rhetoric
Margaret Galvan

In feminist theory, the concept of intersectionality (used to describe individuals’ multivalent identities) is prevalent in contemporary conversations. First theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, conceptualizations of intersectionality can be traced across earlier texts including the 1977 “Combahee River Collective Statement” where the authors develop an analysis of the interlocking oppressions that “creates the conditions of our lives” as well as the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. In this course, we will study the evolution of these theories across the 1980s and then focus on their deployment in a wide variety of visual forms from the 1990s onward.

The 1990s, often marked as the start of third wave feminism, fostered a flourishing of women self-publishing hybrid, image-text creations that often focused very personally on issues of identity. Known as zines (a shortening of “magazine”), these do-it-yourself (DIY) creations circulated widely across America as part of the Riot Grrrl movement even prior to the connectivity of the Internet. Throughout the course, students will learn how to make zines and use this knowledge of process to heighten their analytical skills.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and multiple zine-making assignments culminating in a larger-scale assignment.

LIT 4930

Vampire Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. The course will address issues of vampire and Empire (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.

LIT 4930

Jewish-American Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic

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, like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino) and those of course made by prominent Jewish-American filmmakers.

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, George W. S. Trow), 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 students 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

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

Representations of War and Political Violence
Eric Kligerman

This course sets out to probe the cultural, social and political functions of horror in relation to shifting moments of historical violence. In addition to exploring the horror genre in literary and cinematic works of the imagination (Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hitchcock’s Psycho), we will ultimately apply the aesthetic, epistemic and ethical questions arising in the genre to shifting representations of traumatic history. As we map out the history and themes behind this popular genre, our aim is to probe the intersections between horror and its socio-cultural and historical contexts. How is political violence represented, conceptualized and memorialized across shifting linguistic and visual texts? What ethical questions arise in our engagement with representations of traumatic limit events and the experience of horror these events entail?

After reading and screening central works from the horror genre, we will examine some of the emblematic scenes of historical violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. Turning to such instances as the legacies of colonialism (Heart of Darkness), First World War (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) the Holocaust (Survival in Auschwitz and Eichmann in Jerusalem) the Vietnam War (Michael Herr’s Dispatches) and 9/11 (Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), this seminar investigates the intersection between narratives of horror in the realms of both fantasy and history. In our inquiry into representations of horror, we will examine how this genre in European and American culture is employed to express both individual and national anxieties in the face of political violence. Finally, what does our fascination with the horrors of historical violence reveal about ourselves?

LIT 4930

The Harlem Renaissance and Western Europe
Mark Reid

This is a collaborative research class that critically studies the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance and its relationship to postwar Western Europe. Students will consider these central questions that emphasize Black creative production and its effects. How literature, art, and music are produced and performed in different geographical regions that enable transnational understanding about shared cultural experiences during the postwar years. To what extent did Black artists and intellectuals redefine the racial Other in their works.

Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize social and psychological conflicts that occur when individuals and groups resist societal pressures to conform to hegemonic beliefs about race, sexuality, and gender. (To describe a hegemonic belief formation is not to say that a majority supports this belief system about race, sexuality, and gender, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this singular racialized sexualized-gendered vision of society.)

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

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

LIT 4930

Giants of the Theatre: Shakespeare and Beckett
Sid Homan

Let’s look at William Shakespeare, the finest playwright of the Renaissance theatre, and surely theatre in general, as even his rival Ben Jonson admitted, and Samuel Beckett, considered by many the playwright of the modern theatre, whose Waiting for Godot set the standard, and who took theatre to its frontiers in various media. Almost predictably, Beckett had on his bedside table a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (along with Dante’s Divine Comedy), and Hamm, his central character in Endgame, reworks both Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark and King Lear. But at issue here is more than just influence, or even reputation. I would like to explore with my students what we learn from these two giants about the nature theatre, its range, how it reflects the world offstage, what experience it offers both actors and audience. We will look at several of Shakespeare’s plays, from Hamlet to The Merchant of Venice, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Macbeth, and all of Beckett’s plays for the stage as well as his work in the media of television and radio. In doing so, I will also share with my students my own work as an actor and director in commercial and university theatres.

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

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

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

LIT 4930

Feminist Fiction
Tace Hedrick

We will be reading some of the better-known United States feminist narratives published from around 1973 through the first decades of the twenty-first century. These may include Rita Mae Brown’s classic lesbian text Rubyfruit Jungle, Ntozake Shange’s For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and more. We will be looking at critical and historical scholarly work as well as at the intersections of race, class, genre, and sexuality in these novels. Narrative style, and the re-shaping of several of these feminist texts into movies or network shows, will help us understand how narrative has and continues to both mirror and shape the concerns of feminism over the last fifty years. One of the overarching questions of the course will ask how issues faced in previous decades of feminist movement are both the same and different today. Attendance, weekly reading notes, short reading quizzes, and three take-home exams (essay style) will be required.

LIT 4930

Chinese Film and Media
Ying Xiao

This course examines Chinese cinema and media in a broad sociopolitical and historical context. As China reopened to the world and becomes the newly emerged superpower in the recent few decades, Chinese films have not only attracted worldwide scholarly attentions and artistic interests, but also they have been embraced by a wide range of popular tastes internationally. While focusing specifically on film productions, cultural consumptions, and media representations in the contemporary era of mainland China, we place these discourses within a general framework of national tradition and identity and track their evolutions from the beginning of the twentieth-century. We will look at these distinct yet interrelated phenomena from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, by emphasizing the heterogeneous and hybrid nature of Chinese society and culture. An interdisciplinary approach (with the assistance of a wide diversity of readings and multimedia tools) will be incorporated into our discussions that are especially concerned with the concepts and configurations of urban modernity, youth subculture, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, national identity, global cinema, and the interactions between Shanghai and Hollywood.

SPC 4680

Rhetorical Criticism: Rhetorical Theory
Raúl Sánchez

This course examines theories of rhetoric by examining rhetoric’s relation to culture. If the term rhetoric refers to systems of symbol use, and if the term culture refers to forms of social organization, then the relation between rhetoric and culture must be intimate, because you need symbols to organize societies. To explore the details of this idea, we’ll read and discuss a wide variety of essay-length texts, all of which will be available for free via Canvas and/or Ares.

Work for the course will include the following:

informal questions which you post to Canvas before every reading assignment
three take-home essays in which you analyze and synthesize reading assignments
one literature review for which you do in-depth library research on a narrow topic.