Department of English

American Lit. 2 1865–Present: The American War Machine

Najwa Al-Tabaa

The aim of this course is to explore the development of war literature and narratives after reconstruction and up to the present. The main focus of the course will be in the 20^th Century, and we will trace the development of WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the literary responses to them. We will end the course by focusing on the present moment with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will also put contemporary war texts in conversation with both earlier historical moments and texts in order to help us trace both the historical and literary developments and to reflect on the long-lasting, traumatic impact of these wars on individuals and the nation. A large component of war literature is trauma studies, so we will also examine how fiction is not only a vehicle for examining these war moments but also how these authors (and we as readers) are able to work though the traumas of these historical moments. Michael Rothberg, in his book on trauma studies, Traumatic Realism, argues that, “realism, modernism, and postmodernism can also be understood as persistent response to the demands of history. Like the demands themselves, these responses are also social; they provide frameworks for the representation and interpretation of history. In the representation of a historical event, in other words, a text’s ‘realist’ component seeks strategies for referring to and documenting the world, its ‘modernist’ side questions its ability to document history transparently; and its ‘postmodern’ moment responds to the economic and political conditions of its emergence and public circulation” (9). It is this framework and these questions that anchor this course, which will lead us to think about not only the traumatic impact of war but also the development of the American War machine into the 21^st century. While the majority of the reading will be novels, we will also look at non-fiction journalism, poetry, comics, and films.

Times: M W F 5

American Indian Literature

Susan Hegeman

This course will provide an introduction to literature created by American Indian authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider American Indian literature as a postcolonial literature and as a creative and collective interpretation of history and culture. We will also examine how contemporary literature addresses issues of concern to Indian people, including legal sovereignty, cultural survival, representations of Indians in non-native communities, and issues of environmental stewardship. Readings will consist of mostly novels, but we will also discuss some poetry, critical essays, and one film, by authors including D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Tomson Highway, Le Anne Howe, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and Simon Ortiz.

Times: T 7, R 7-8

African-American Literature 2

Mark Reid

This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by well-known artists as well as writers whose works have been overlooked for various reasons. Readings and film screenings will cover such playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, novelists as James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, James McBride, Toni Morrison, John A. Williams, poets as Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and filmmakers as Spike Lee and Marlon Riggs.

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

Times: W 9-11

Women Writing about Race

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, coopt and reject each other, or, simply, ignore each other in literature as they and their characters negotiate gendered social, political, and personal challenges.

Goals: To discover how change and racial relations are developed both in our culture and in the way 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. We will focus on novels, short stories, poetry and essays. As investigators and scholars, our inquiries will play in the spaces between practice, method, and theory in order to address the commonalties, disruptions, gaps, absences, and silences that exist among the primary texts.

Primary Texts: (asterisked texts are available as eBooks)

• *Golden, Marita and Susan Richards Shreve, Eds. Skin Deep: Black and White Women Write about Race (ISBN: 0-385-47409-1)
• *Williams, Sherley Anne, Dessa Rose (ISBN: 0-68-05113-8)
• *Stockett, Kathryn, The Help (ISBN: 978-0-399-15534-5)
• Douglas, Ellen. Can’t Quit You, Baby (ISBN: 0-14-01.2102-1)
• *Walker, Alice. Meridian (ISBN: 0-15-602834-4)
• *Kidd, Sue Monk. The Invention of Wings (ISBN: 978-14-72212746)

Times: M 3-5

Black Drama

Mark Reid

What makes dramas written by Black American playwrights and theater collectives different from those written and or performed by such dramatists and collectives as Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Richard Foreman, Laurie Anderson, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre and Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theater Research? Using recent theoretical and political debates on performance and the construction of identity, the class will trace the historical trajectory of African American theater from the 1950s to the present.

The course covers representative works from the Theater of the Black Experience, the Black Arts Movement, the Free Southern Theatre, and the African American avant-garde and experimental stage. Reading may include works by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, P. J. Gibson, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Kennedy, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Stew, August Wilson, Tracey Scott Wilson, George C. Wolfe, and such performance artists as Fred Holland, Robbie McCauley, John O’Neal, Whoppi Goldberg, and Anna Deavere Smith.

In the writing of their analytical group paper, students must create their own gumbo-like analysis of the lived, imagined, and performed elements found in the assigned readings.

Times: R 9-11

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Amy Hempel

We will aim to amplify the idea of what a story can be, employing a range of narrative strategies, and reading stories and poems from contemporary writers who sound like no one else. Emphasis on use of place, work, logic. and, always, language. Short assignments in the beginning will spotlight ways to listen for stories, as Eudora Welty put it. We will talk about writing at the sentence level, and finding personal ways into the largest concerns. Students will write two stories and submit a revision of one of them.

Times: M 9-11

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

Ange Mlinko

This is the intermediate / advanced undergraduate poetry workshop. We will read from the anthology Western Wind, which emphasizes the sensuality of poems through the precise use of melopoeia (musicality) and phanopoeia (imagery). We will also delve into the history of forms and even words themselves (with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary).

Times: M 3-5

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

William Logan

“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 will read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and write a poem a week. Every week in addition to poems from students the workshop will consider for discussion poems from poets past and present. This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken at least one lower-division workshop (CRW 1301 or CRW 2300) and who want to press their understandings of poetic language even further.

Email or hard-copy submission of your manuscript is necessary for early registration. Please submit four poems to wlogan@english.ufl.eduin one attachment in .pdf format. Mention the workshops you have previously taken.

Required reading (tentative):

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

Times: M 9-11

Senior Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop

Padgett Powell

This course is the last in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing. Its objective is to help you or make you write better fiction, arguably the objective of any workshop worth anything. As the last of our courses, however, this one seeks to make the three or so pieces you will tender lasting, able-bodied fictions you can show off, apply to graduate programs with, or publish. The fall is the time to prepare manuscripts for submission to graduate schools in writing if you are intending to prosecute that voyage. This is also the time you become the best undergraduate writer of fiction you can become.

Standard workshop format. I anticipate full efforts at writing well, at criticizing for the benefit of others, at attending religiously, at speaking cogently when you can, at surrounding yourself in the mantle of intelligent reticence when you can’t.

We will read two books of fiction as technical models selected from among William Trevor, Kent Haruf, Flannery O’Connor, Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. And others, should something come up.

Times: M 6-8

Senior Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop

Ange Mlinko

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.

In this class, you will read two books of poems per week comprising a contemporary poet and his/her precursor (for instance, Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats). You will then be asked to write a poem influenced in content or form by those poets.

Times: R 3-5

Advanced Exposition

Joe Weakland

This is a course in modes and methods of expository writing. We will consider modes of exposition including informing, defining, classifying, analyzing, describing, comparing and contrasting, illustrating and identifying. We will also study principles of written style. You will write five essays to put these modes and stylistic principle to work in your own writing. You will spend time considering the role of emerging technologies and visual culture in designing expository writing projects. Finally, you will frequently collaborate with your peers in class discussions, group activities, and workshops in order to refine your skills in argumentative writing.

Times: T 4, R 4-5

Advanced Argumentative Writing

Laurie Gries

As is evident in The New York Times, Good Magazine, and other on-line news sources, argument takes shape in a myriad of ways in today’s digital arena. In the past ten years alone, new genres of argumentation have emerged as graphic designers, photographers, videographers, bloggers, and reporters employ new media to deliver their informed opinions. With such a wide array of genres to choose from, how do we determine the best genre in which to craft our arguments? Are some strategies of argumentation more effective to use in certain genres than others? If so, how do we learn which strategies to use in specific genres? Drawing on theories of contemporary genre studies, you will spend the first part of the semester analyzing the role argument plays in various genres at work in different online news sources and magazines. Using rhetorical analysis, you will also explore how argument is enacted differently in those genres.

During the rest of the semester, you will work on a team to create and design your own ezine with a targeted audience in mind. To contribute to the ezine, you will also craft arguments in different genres of most interest to you. Among others, genres of focus can include: feature articles, op-eds (print and video), infographics, photo essays, video, reviews, blogs, and cartoons. You will also be encouraged to invent new hybrid genres appropriate for your ezine and the arguments you wish to craft.

Times: T 5-6, R 6

Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism

John Murchek

This course is an intensive introduction to the intellectual history of departments of literature since the mid twentieth century. Though we will read the work of some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers who have proved important for modern criticism and theory (e.g. Marx & Engels, Freud, Nietzsche, de Saussure, T.S. Eliot), our focus will be primarily on developments since the rise of New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, and more particularly on texts written during the heyday of theory—from the mid 1960s to the beginning of the current century. Our trajectory will lead us through readings of formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, reader-response, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, critical race, queer, postcolonial, and posthuman theories and critical practices. However, we will be less concerned with identifying the schools to which texts belong than with carefully reading and assessing the arguments of the texts we encounter. On the one hand, we will work to appropriate the crucial terms of arguments and to understand how those arguments unfold; on the other hand, we will discover perspectives from which to critique these arguments. At the same time that we aim to become more astute critical readers of arguments, we will try to understand the modern history of the discipline within which we work, and to make ourselves more resourceful critics of the literary and cultural texts we read beyond this class.

Our primary text will be The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2^nd Edition (ed. Vincent Leitch et al). As preparation for our discussions of Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” and Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist,” it will be necessary to read Plato’s Phaedrusand Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, two 1000-word summary and critique exercises, a 50-minute midterm, a 2-hour final exam, and an 8–10 page paper due roughly three-quarters of the way through the semester.

Times: M W F 4

History of Film 1

Barbara Mennel

The course provides an overview of the history of film from its origin to the coming of sound. The course is designed as the first part of a sequence on the history of film, but does not need to be taken in chronological order. The objective is to gain an overview of the historical development of early cinema, based on an understanding of key concepts in film studies and approaches to early cinema in film theory. Topics will include the beginning of film, the emergence of genres (western, horror, melodrama, comedy); the early social melodrama and the race film; montage and expressionism; and the aesthetics of a silent film language. The course relies on regular required weekly film screenings and readings.

Times: T 4, R 4-5, Screenings: W E1-E3

Search for the Self

Peter Rudnytsky

This course will center on a psychological reading of four nineteenth-century texts that variously explore questions of selfhood and identity: Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852), Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1873-1884), and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The readings in psychoanalytic theory will be Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and D. W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

Times: M 10-E1

The Disappearing Man

Richard Burt

Course Description: In this course, we will read literature and film on topics about missed lives, lives not lived, related to flight, disappearance, kidnapping, and escape. The films we will watch and the literature we will read question seemingly unquestionable oppositions between escape and containment, lost and found, date and what it means to live a life. Escape turns out paradoxically to be confinement rather than liberation or emancipation; America, the land of opportunity, turns out to be a place of enslavement; disappearance turns out to be a version of escape that leads to imprisonment and entrapment across classes, languages, and bodies. Readings and films will include: Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape; Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped; Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”; Edith Wharton, “The Touchstone”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield”; Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855); Franz Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”; Franz Kafka, Amerika:The Man Who Disappeared; I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932); Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” ; The Wrong Man (dir. Alfred Hitchcock,1956); Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Louis Malle, 1957); A Man Vanishes (dir. Shohei Imamura,1967); They Won’t Forget (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1937); Solomon Northup, 12 Years a Slave; 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013); Sullivan’s Travels (dir. Preston Sturges, 1941); The Face of Another (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966); Georges Simenon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes; The Swimmer (dir. Frank Perry, 1968); Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood; and Missing (dir. Costa-Gavras, 1982).

Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; two discussion questions and three or more “BIG WORDS” and two discussion questions and three or more film shot analyses on each film; student formulated quizzes at the beginning of each class; three 1,00 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films. For more, see http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/burt/DisappearingMan/

Times: T 2-3, R 3, Screenings: M E1-E3

The Music of French Cinema

Sylvie Blum-Reid

The class covers music and sound in French cinema. Theoretical approaches such as sound theory, semiology, psychoanalysis will be used to examine music in narrative cinema. We will watch and listen to different filmmakers; some of whom experimented with sound. Such directors as René Clair, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jacques Tati, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Serge Bozon, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Sautet, and Tony Gatlif will be studied. Topics shall include the beginnings of sound film, the singer in realist films, operas, the French musical, film composers, etc.

The class is crosslisted with FRT 3520.

Times: T 7, R 7-8, Screenings: T 9-11

Turkish German Cinema

Barbara Mennel

The course introduces students to contemporary Turkish German cinema in the context of Turkish labor migration to West Germany. We will begin with a brief survey of Turkish cinema and incorporate discussion about the depiction of so-called guestworkers in 1970s West German cinema. The main focus of the course lies with Turkish German cinema of the generation of the children of labor migrants. We will address questions about the tension between national cinema and transnational film movements, European minority cinema, and global art cinema. We will also discuss questions of gender and sexuality, sounds, and genre, including questions about documentaries. We will conclude with an auteurist case study of director Fatih Akın.

Times: T 5-6, R 6, Screenings: M 9-11

Introduction to Japanese Cinema

Tsutomu Nagata

Times: T 8-9, R 9, Screenings, R E1-E3

Video Production

Lauren DeFilippo

Through a combination of theory and practice, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of digital video production. The class will explore the process of expressing ideas in an audio-visual medium from the concept stage through post-production. You will be introduced to the basics of treatment writing and presenting a pitch. Each student will acquire hands-on experience in directing, shooting, sound recording, and editing in Adobe Premiere. There will also be weekly screenings of nonfiction and experimental films, which we will discuss in class and apply to the work you create. In-class critiques in addition to your participation will form a significant part of the course as well as written responses to the films screened in class. We will have a public screening of your work at the end of the semester.

PLEASE NOTE: You must have completed at least one of the following UF courses before you can take this course: ENG 3115, ENG 3121, or ENG 3122. Since space in production courses is limited, I am asking prospective students to apply for the class in order to prioritize for those who are most qualified and most in need of the course at this time. Please contact me at defilipp@ufl.edu and put ENG 4136 in the subject line if you are interested in taking the course. The deadline to apply is November 15, 2014.

Times: M 4, W 4-5, Screenings: T E1-E3

Advanced Video Production

Lauren DeFilippo

This course will be an extension of ENG 4136 with its primary focus on honing students’ production skills within a theoretical and critical framework. Through shorter video and audio projects at the beginning of the semester, you will pursue an interdisciplinary approach to moving image production as you move towards the creation of a 10-minute final film. Pre-production of this film will be in-depth and will include a clearly articulated proposal as well as exercises to develop your aesthetic and cinematic vision.

Shooting on Canon XH-A1 digital cameras and editing in Adobe Premiere, the class will also provide hands-on workshops in sound recording and lighting. We will examine filmic and profilmic elements in weekly screenings of nonfiction and experimental work and will particularly consider the narrative structures of these films. In-class critiques of the work you produce will be a considerable part of the course, and written assignments and complete preproduction proposals will complement class discussions and individual meetings.

PLEASE NOTE: You must have completed ENG 4136 to enroll in this course. Prospective students, contact me at defilipp@ufl.edu and put ENG 4146 in the subject line if you are interested in taking the course.The deadline to apply is November 15, 2014.

Times: M 7-8, W 7, Screenings: R 9-11

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.

Times: TBA

Honors Seminar: Sexing the Past: American Literature and Sexuality to 1900

Jodi Schorb

This seminar introduces students to theories, debates, and texts central to the study of sexuality in American literature prior to 1900. We will begin with formative work by Foucault (on the “acts vs. identities” shift) and Thomas Laqueur (on the transition from the ancient “one-sex” model of gender to the modern two-sex model): Across the semester, we’ll interrogate and complicate these influential texts as new arguments and archives continually force us to propose “more nuanced concepts of identity and [sexual] orientation than early social constructivist accounts have allowed” (Traub, “Present Future” 125).

Sodomites, male “brides of Christ,” monstrous births, hermaphrodites, coquettes, libertines, cross-dressing soldiers, sporting men, true women, romantic friends, inverts, and perverts—these figures populate the cultural imagination of early America. We’ll consider the fears and possibilities these figures embodied as well as how colonization, religion, slavery, the expanding print marketplace, urbanization, cultures of sentiment and moral reform, and newer scientific and medical discourses helped shape sexual knowledge and possibilities. We’ll also consider the relationship between space and sexual epistemology, considering how specific sites (the New World, the borderlands, the slave plantation, the city, the utopian commune, the boarding school) are variously associated with spaces of sexual promise, violence, and/or dread. Secondary readings will provide contexts and frameworks for understanding early sexual knowledges and practices.

Primary works include poetry by Edward Taylor, Hannah Webster Foster’s bestselling novel The Coquette (1797); “The History of Constantius and Pulchera, or Constancy Rewarded: An American Novel” (1789–90), Herman Mann’s Female Review (1797), Edgar Allen Poe’s “Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852), periodical fiction such as “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” (1857), Harriet Jacobs’s influential slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), J.W. Carhart, Norma Trist or Pure Carbon: A Story of the Inversion of the Sexes (1895); and other lesser-known texts.

Requirements include: Periodic short writing assignments (both reflective and analytical), regular participation, and a final research paper (15–20 pages) completed in stages.

Times: W 6-8

Honors Seminar: Chaucer and Censorship

R. Allen Shoaf

“Chaucer,” offered as a senior-level Honors Seminar, will study both Troilus & Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales in their entirety (using both the original Middle English and contemporary modernizations of the poetry) in terms of Chaucer’s career-long resistance to censorship. Censorship will be addressed historically and also theoretically. We will explore different vocabularies for describing and analyzing Chaucer’s resistance, but special emphasis will be placed on the vocabulary of modern “Queer Studies,” since Chaucer is the creator of one of the most memorable “queer” characters in earlier English poetry (The Pardoner of the Canterbury Tales). We will explore the possibility that Chaucer “queers” his poetry, in the Canterbury Tales especially, in order to challenge and subvert canons of normativity that underlie, promote, and support censorship.

Times: T 10-E1

Internship

Undergraduate Coordinator

The English Department at the University of Florida offers three* credit hours of internship to its majors who provide the following to the Undergraduate Coordinator for approval:

• An offer to hire (from the employer) which states that the student will be working at least 12 hours per week for the entire semester (Fall, Spring, or Summer C), or 24 hours per week for a Summer A or B term. Said document should be produced on the company letterhead and should outline the job duties for the internship position.
• A personal statement (submitted along with the offer of hire) about why the student wants to take the internship and how it relates to the student’s future plans.

Once the Undergraduate Coordinator has approved the internship requested by the student, the department will register the student for the internship credits.

Upon completion of the internship:

• The supervisor of the student must submit a job performance evaluation to the Undergraduate Coordinator by Wednesday of finals week so that a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory may be submitted to the Registrar. The evaluation may be faxed, mailed, or hand delivered.
• The student must submit a personal evaluation of the work experience provided by the internship by the same day as above.

*For two credit hours, the student would need to work 8 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 16 hours per week for Summer A or B.

*For one credit hour, the student would need to work 4 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 8 hours per week for Summer A or B.

Please note the following limitations on the English Internship:

• A student may register for the English Department Internship for three credits ONLY ONCE; no more than three hours worth of internship credit may be counted toward coursework in the major.
• Because no English Department course carrying fewer than 3 credit hours counts towards the major, your internship will not count as part of your major coursework if you register for fewer than 3 credits.

Times: TBA

Department Seminar: Philosophy, Dialogues, and the Cinema

Robert Ray

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

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

This seminar will take up perplexing questions posed by the movies and ask you to write dialogues about those questions. We will start by reading two of Plato’s Socratic dialogues before reading Matthews’s accounts of his work with children. We will also look at Wittgenstein’s seminars, which often involve questions posed to, or by, imaginary interlocutors, and at some of the writings by Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, who has written extensively about film. And, of course, we will watch some movies.

Assignments: Weekly reading quizzes, class participation, bi-weekly two-page papers, a final 8-page paper.

Times: T W 9-11

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.

Times: TBA

20th-Century British Poetry

Marsha Bryant

This course provides in-depth analysis of W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and UF’s own Michael Hofmann. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts. As we move through the semester, gender, family, and nation become increasingly dislocated as traditional concepts of “poetry” and “British” continue to shift. Course assignments are two papers, a panel presentation, a parody, reading quizzes, and engaged participation in discussion. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and offer strategies for writing more clearly and effectively. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you!

Times: T 7, R 7-8

Victorian Literature

Gareth Hadyk-DeLodder

The primary purpose of this course is to survey some key literary works and ideas under the umbrella of Victorian empire and adventure fiction. The focus partially finds its roots in England’s status at the time as “the empire on which the sun never sets,” which catalyzed (and reflected) exploration and expansion through much of the century. Correspondingly, bodies of literature began to emerge in which Victorians wrote prolifically on all aspects of travel, empire, and adventures abroad, as well as adventures set in the past and future. These narratives often participated in contemporary debates about gender, race, class, and more, which we will discuss in depth. To that end, we will read a combination of popular novels, poetry, short essays, and comics in order to determine the cultural capital that these works possessed. At play are a number of issues that still resonate for us today, including the nature and role of empire, the ideological foundations of the adventure story, and the ways in which literature (especially colonial) constructs and articulates alterity.

This course provides upper-division credit in the major, and will be taught with that in mind. Consequently, students will be expected to know how to perform research and to attempt the application of critical frameworks to readings. We will read some literary criticism, including excerpts from Edward Said, Franco Moretti, James Eli Adams, and several other figures. There will be a substantial reading load each week, and course requirements include several short papers, a long paper, reading quizzes, and a project/presentation.

Possible Texts:
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Other readings to be provided

Times: M W F 7

Milton’s Major Poems

Peter Rudnytsky

This course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost, along with Paradise Regained and Milton’s prose work Areopagitica. Theological, political, and psychological aspects of the epic will be considered. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

Times: T 9-11

Shakespeare: Doing It

Sid Homan

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

In approaching Shakespeare’s plays as actors and directors, charged with building a character, enacting that character through delivery, gesture, stage movement, and subtext, we will look at A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and also Tom’s Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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

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.

Times: T 2-3, R 3

The Art and Craft of Comedy

Sid Homan

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

This course, “All Joking Aside: The Art and Craft of Comedy,” grows out of, and will also be contributing to a book of the same name on which Professor Homan is collaborating with his friend Brian Rhinehart, a well-known actor and director in New York who teaches at the Actor’s Studio. The aim of LIT 3041 parallels the twin concerns of that book, namely: 1. to consider comedy as an art form, with its own aesthetic principles, whose message or purpose, its function in terms of its audience is inseparable from the medium of comedy; and to consider the place of comedy in the modern theatre; and 2. To explore the “rules” of comedy, what the actor does–and doesn’t do–to make it work with an audience; comedy as a style of acting; ways in which a comic character in the script can be brought to life onstage. The major texts of the course are the manuscript of the book in process and Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays, which collects some thirty-six short works by playwrights like Christopher Durang, Steve Martin, and Elaine May, as well as other popular practitioners of the art and craft of comedy. We will also work with what is surely one of the most brilliant comedies of the modern theatre, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Times: T 5-6, R 6

Modern Drama: Doing It

Sid Homan

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

In this course, we will thus consider Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Embers, All That Fall,Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Come and Go; Harold Pinter’s The Lover, Old Times,Betrayal, and No Man’s Land, Sam Shepard’s True West, Curse of the Starving Class, and Buried Child; and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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

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 atshakes@ufl.edu.

Times: T 4, R 4-5

Women Writers and Classical Myth: Traditions & Inventions

Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly

Our interdisciplinary course challenges students to examine women and Classical myth through ancient and modern materials: including poetry, literary criticism, art, and film. We give equal weight to our respective academic fields and their connectivity, focusing on legendary characters such as Athena, Pandora, Helen, and Penelope. By linking Hesiod and Homer with former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and contemporary novelist Margaret Atwood, we learn how the Classical tradition challenges and sustains women writers. Because this rich source material is visual as well as literary, we will include materials from UF’s Harn Museum of Art through our custom gallery for this course, “Classical Convergences: Traditions and Inventions.” We will also engage Classical myth through epic film. Texts will include Homer’s epic poems, Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Dove’s Mother Love, Powell’s Classical Myth, and the NBC miniseries The Odyssey. UF’s newest poet on faculty, Ange Mlinko, will visit us. Assignments include a short paper tied to our Harn gallery, a term paper, reading quizzes & participation, and a Pinterest board.

In this course, students will:

• Familiarize themselves with major Greek myth cycles
• Encounter key modern writers who reinvent the Classical tradition
• Interpret literature and visual culture
• Learn to synthesize diverse materials
• Learn to write more clearly and convincingly

Times: T 4, R 4-5

African Women Writers

Rose Sau Lugano

This course is designed to provide students with both a specific and a general view of the status, achievements, and experiences of African women in fiction. We will explore African women writers and critics, looking at their theoretical priorities and cultural positions. Using different genres (novels, poems, and plays) we will endeavor to understand how women’s literary expression has been shaped by history, culture, and their personal experiences, as well as see how they are addressing issues of gender in their respective societies. Our discussions will focus on issues of identity, socialization, oppression, resistance, exile, colonialism, etc., using as points of entry a diverse set of texts. The framework for classroom discussion will revolve around two central issues:

1. The way in which women authors represent gender as a crucial variable for social stratification, and
2. The use of writing itself as a tool for social transformation and critique.

Times: T 7-8, R 8

Internet Literature

Gregory Ulmer

The general topic for this seminar is the relationship of technology to literature. Specifically, we will focus on what happens to literary forms and their study in the medium of the World Wide Web. Our interest in part is in the migration of print forms and modes onto the Internet, and also in the emergence of new forms of creativity native to the Internet. Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media, observes that the cut-and-paste tools of hypermedia authoring embody the aesthetics created by the experimental arts of 1920s modernism. This observation provides a point of departure for our own experiments, investigating the relationship between experimental poetics, the digital medium, and Internet creativity. The primary goal of the course is to adapt the practices of new media creativity to the design of a mode of study native to the Internet. The course is taught in a CIRCA classroom. The course project is created in the blog medium, supplemented by basic photoshop. We will experiment with the design of a new mode of study that takes advantage of the resources of hypermedia and the aesthetics of popular culture and surrealism. The semester project is to design and test the “learning screen,” that does for Internet culture what the “research paper” did for print education. Previous experience with Web authoring (blog, photoshop) is helpful but not required. However, beginners should expect to spend some extra time learning to use the authoring environment.

Required readings (tentative):

• Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium
• Ellen Lupton & Jennifer Phillips, Graphic Design: The New Basics
• Richard Krevolin, How To Adapt Anything into a Screenplay
• Joan Sommers, The Joseph Cornell Box: Found Objects, Magical Worlds
• Electronic Literature Collection

Times: W 9-11

Tourism and Caribbean Literature

Leah Rosenberg

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

This course will engage in an interdisciplinary examination of the development of tourism and its relationship to culture and the rise of U.S. power in the Caribbean from the 1890s to the present. It will begin with an examination of influential theoretical works on tourism such as John Urry’sThe Tourist Gaze; studies of Caribbean tourism in particular such as Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, and Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation. The course will include an analysis of the continuity between tourism and previous forms of colonialism and imperialism and between genres and aesthetics of tourism (the guide, the tourist postcard) and earlier colonial aesthetics such as the travel narrative and engravings. It will examine the role of tourism in cultural nationalism in Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the early twentieth century; the introduction of mass market tourism and Cold War politics in the postwar period in the British West Indies which fueled the calypso craze; the impact of the Cuban revolution on tourism; and tourism in the age of globalization with an emphasis on the question of sex tourism.

Students will also be asked to do original research involving digital and traditional archives.

Class materials will likely include:

• Black, Stephanie. Life and Debt. (film 2001)
• Figueroa, Esther. Jamaica for Sale. (film 2009)
• Gmelch, George. Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism
• Laferriere, Dany & Laurent Cantet. Heading South (novel and film)
• Kalatozov, Mikhail. Soy Cuba (1964)
• Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place
• Marshall, Paule. Praise Song for the Widow
• Naipaul, V.S. A Flag on the Island
• Perez, Louis. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
• Walcott, Derek. Pantomime
• Graham Greene & Peter Glenville. The Comedians (novel and film)

Times: T 4, R 4-5

Afro-European Literature and Culture

Mark Reid

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

Times: W 6-8

Fictions of Africa

Apollo Amoko

LIT4194: African Literature in English: Literature of Crises

This course turns on a foundational question in literary studies: what is the relationship between the realm of art—aesthetics—and the politics of everyday life—the lebenwelt. In an attempt to answer this question, we will undertake a genealogy of the contemporary literatures of Africa. As such critics as V. Y. Mudimbe and Simon Gikandi have contended, modern African literature emerged in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties as a discourse designed to liberate African subjects from the colonial order of things. Written in the context of triumphant or, at any rate optimistic, anti-colonial nationalism, this literature predominantly deployed the aesthetics of realism. In hindsight, this deployment does not seem either accidental or co-incidental. These, it would seem, were literatures of radical possibility and profound optimism. Diverse critics such as Fredric Jameson, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Benedict Anderson all argue that realism is the preeminent aesthetic mode of nationalism. Both the nation and the realist novel are narratives of linear progress across time. Anderson appears to suggest that the novel (along with the newspaper) was central to the possibility of imagining the modern nation. The aesthetic of the novel made it possible to think and narrate the nation in “homogeneous empty time.” To what extent are the founding texts of modern African literature causally linked to the discourses of African nationalism? If the first generation of modern African emerged in the context of triumphant anti-colonial nationalism, then, succeeding generations have been written in the wake of what has come to be known as the Africa crisis. From the late nineteen sixties onwards, the promise of postcolonial plenitude gives way to pessimism and despair as everyday African life came increasingly to be characterized by abject poverty, horrific violence, endemic corruption, repressive governance, crumbling infrastructure, extreme deprivation and other forms of mass misery. From one perspective, the African postcolony has come to be defined by an interminable, if not terminal, crisis. What has the aesthetic dimension of this crisis been? To what extent have Afro-modernism, magical realism and other forms of anti-realism displaced realism in the realm of African art? To what extent can these non/anti-realist modes been seen as symptomatic of a continent in crisis? Is it possible to trace a one-to-one correspondence, if not a causal relationship, between the dominant forms of African art and the politics of everyday African life? Authors to be studied may include such writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Yambo Ouloguem, Ben Okri, Sony Labou Tansi, Calixthe Beyala, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Nurridin Frarrh, J. M. Coetzee, and Cyl Cheney Coker.

Times: R 9-11

The Folktale

John Cech

Fairy tales are everywhere in our contemporary media – in films, television shows, and books – often in extensively reimagined versions of the “originals” that were first printed in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries. Aside from commercial fads in publishing and media production, there are powerful reasons to explain why these stories, many of them with ancient roots, have become touchstones for our contemporary imaginations. Many of these narratives have their origins in the oral tradition and were first told—widely and often across countries, cultures, and historical periods—before they were eventually collected and written down. Taken together, this vast catalog of stories provides us with one of the primary sources for many of our cultural values, concerns, and aspirations. The overarching intent of this course is to explore the rich variety of these traditional stories that are generally known as folktales and that include not only fairy tales, but also fables, parables, jokes, trickster stories, and tall tales.

Times: T 7, R 7-8

Children’s Literature

John Cech

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

Times: T 4, R 4-5

Literature for Adolescents

Anastasia Ulanowicz

Times: M 9-11

Public Culture, Writing, and (Viral) Circulation

Laurie Gries

This course is designed to accomplish three goals:
a.) study why circulation matters in what Henry Jenkins calls a participatory culture
b.) learn how discourse circulates, transforms, and constructs public life
c.) learn how to design and distribute your own discourse with the hope of it “going viral” and affecting consequences in localized settings.

Throughout this course, we will read a number of theoretical perspectives concerning why circulation matters to both publics and a functioning democracy. We will also develop a theoretical and practical understanding of how to compose materials for social campaigns intended to address a local problem and construct a specific public. As we engage with such scholarship, we will consider contemporary debates over intellectual property, copyright, and fair use, especially in relation to remix.

During the course, we will also focus on putting discourse into circulation to attract a public and presenting our work to the public. We will specifically explore how discourse can be designed to attract a public and be distributed in physical spaces to increase chances for viral circulation. You will also learn how social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter and other digital technologies can be used to accelerate circulation. Putting this knowledge into practice, you will work collaboratively on a team to produce your own media campaign and attempt to make it go “viral” on the UF campus.

Times: T 8-9, R 9

Bibliomania! Swift, Sterne, & c.

Richard Burt

Course Description: Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne’s works are usually discussed in relation to satire and the history of authorship and editing. In this course, we will think of their writings as “bibliomaniacal” both in terms of their self-reflexivity, illegibility, and their explicit thematization of narrative digression and other kinds of interruption. Linking literature and book history to literary theory, we will first examine the eccentricity of Swfit’s tables of contents, especially with respect to disgressions, in A Tale of aTub and The Battle of the Books and then proceed to examine how Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman resists being read in relation to its publication, materials, and graphic design: paper, drawings that are also writings, marbled pages, a black page, alphabetic letters, lines, type font, punctuation, page layout, and missing chapters. In addition to reading a modern, scholarly paperback edition of Tristram Shandy, we will “read” / look at digital reproductions of the first edition. We will proceed to read sections of Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and interrupt our readings of them at irregular intervals and digress by reading short stories by Miguel de Cervantes, a major precursor of Swift and Sterne, irregularly return to Strene, and then digress further and further by reading French, German, and Russian stories and novels haunted by Tristam Shandy, including Honoré de Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin [Le peau de chagrin; The Skin of Sorrow]; E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr; Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’sThe Life of Felix Quintus (trans. Thomas Carlyle); Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus; Nikolai Leskov’s “Lefty”; and Gerard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers. We will also periodically digress further to read Victor Shkolvsky’s essay “The Art of Technique,” selections from work in book history, and essays in Jacques Derrida’s Paper Machine and Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. We will also watch Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2005 and pay some attention to Sternemania in the ninetenth century). For more, see http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/burt/Bibliomania!/

Times: T 4, R 4-5

Creative Nonfiction

Michael Hofmann

A course on writing about people and places. The reading-list might have been drawn from nature writing or science or biography, but I have come down in favour of history: from Tacitus and John Aubrey (if available), to Ryszard Kapuscinski and George Packer. We will read the late cult-author W.G. Sebald, Joseph Roth, and Bruce Chatwin, and others. Spoken contributions will be encouraged. Participants will do much writing of and on their own, whether on an array of different projects, or on a single task. Reading and writing, research and style, should all benefit. (I would rather you came wanting to write a book about cuttlefish than on the first twenty years—or indeed the first six months—of your lives, but the latter may be allowable under certain circumstances; I should like it, however, not to preponderate.)

Times: M 9-11

Dante for English Majors

R. Allen Shoaf LIT 4930, “Dante for English Majors,” will cover the VITA NUOVA, DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, the “rime petrose” (“stony rimes” to the “stony Lady”), and all three canticles of the COMMEDIA. Three papers are required, one on each canticle of the COMMEDIA. Students should aim to involve at least one major British poet influenced by Dante in at least one of the three essays: Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, Eliot, Heaney, e.g. There is no final examination.   Times: R 10-E1