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Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2016 (Upper Division)

Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.

Non-Repeatable Courses

Students may not repeat for credit courses that are not listed as repeatable in the Undergraduate Catalog. If you register for
non-repeatable courses that you have previously taken, you will earn no credit for those courses and they will not count toward fulfillment of degree requirements.

While some upper-division courses taught by the Department of English are repeatable for credit, many are not. You are responsible for knowing which courses may, and which courses may not, be repeated. You should, therefore,
consult the Undergraduate Catalog in order to confirm that courses for which you wish to register more than once are, in fact, repeatable for credit.

Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses

Note: Course numbers listed in the table below are linked to course descriptions. Descriptions will expand when you click the course title.

AML 3607

Survey of African American Literature 2

Mark A. 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: T 6-8

AML 3673

Asian American and African American Interactions

Malini Schueller

Ever since the category Asian-American emerged as a politicized identity in the 1960s, the major pedagogical imperative has been to study the literature and culture of this group on its own in order to legitimize the
field itself and to understand its common histories and tropes. Similarly, African-American literature, affected by legacies of slavery and resistance, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights, has been conventionally seen as
discrete and studied through different forms such as slave narratives, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance or that of the Black Arts movement. Yet from the very beginnings of major waves of Asian immigration,
the two groups have been affected by and interacted with each other. This course seeks to understand the nature of these exchanges through key theoretical readings on race, scholarship on these interrelationships,
and literary and filmic expressions. Some of the questions we will attempt to grapple with will be the following: How do Asian-Americans see African-Americans and vice versa? What cultural characteristics and histories
do they share? How have they been treated as minorities? What are their differences and how have they manifested themselves? What kinds of alliances have these groups created? How have both groups negotiated their
Americanness? Ultimately, the course stresses the importance of interethnic studies.

Possible Texts:

Requirements: One Oral Presentation; Two 6-8 papers; pop quizzes; Class participation.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

AML 4282

Queer Life / Writing

Kim Emery

This course explores autobiography, memoir, and autobiographical fiction produced by LGBTQ writers in the US, focusing on the post-Stonewall era. Because queer self-fashioning has, historically, generally often occurred
within hostile and/or uncomprehending environments, we will seek to contextualize our readings not only in relation to the larger literary tradition of life writing, but also in connection to the theoretical and
historical frameworks of specifically queer self-invention and representation.

In addition to regular attendance and informed participation, two papers, a presentation, and occasional quizzes and homework will be required.

 

Times: T 8-9, R 9

AML 4453

Evil, Villains, and the Monstrous Body

Laura Chilcoat

AML 4453 examines the representation of monsters, villains, and other conceptions of evil in American literature and culture. We’ll analyze how ideas of monstrosity and evilness are constructed and how this construction
has changed over time. Through texts by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Octavia Butler, we’ll examine how images of “evilness” are constructed in relation to human and non-human bodies. By
drawing on works like Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s Skin Shows and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, we’ll analyze how bodies function as sites of Otherness, and thus often become
metonyms for larger cultural fears. Throughout the semester we will focus on the difference between “monsters” and “villains” and analyze how sex, race, and gender factor into creating these separate (but often
overlapping) categories.

 

Times: M W F 7

AML 4685

The World Of James Baldwin

Mark A. Reid

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

 

Times: W 6-8

CRW 3110

Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Padgett Powell

This workshop course, the penultimate in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing, seeks to help you write fiction better than you might already. Time is spent also on correct usage. We also seek to
have you read better: to read for form, recognizing strength and weakness in your own and in others’ writing, and recognizing various technical maneuvers in the published work we will read.

Students write three pieces of fiction, delivering a copy to each class member one week prior to group criticism.  Students participate in that group criticism with wit and cogency and pertinence and deliver a
letter of good criticism for each story read. This criticism has one object: to improve the work.

Assigned readings, from a book or two by a major writer, will also be discussed. This reading will be looked at usually in a somewhat technical manner; it is hoped that in the best of all possible worlds the reading
will inspire a mimicry of correct form as you make the long trek unto your own vision and your own good writing.

 

Times: T 9-11

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Amy Hempel

We will discuss two short stories and a revision by each student, with emphasis on different narrative strategies. The workshops will focus on matching form and content to produce the most powerful effects in a reader.
A course-pack of contemporary stories and narrative poems will be required, and students will usually be expected to read two stories and a poem each week. Students will choose which of their two stories to revise,
and though the revisions will not be discussed in class, they will be circulated to the entire class.

 

Times: M 6-8

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

Ange Mlinko

This is an intermediate workshop, focussing on student writing and poetic craft, taught by a prizewinning contemporary poet.

Times: T 5-6, R 6

CRW 4905

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Jill Ciment

This course is an advanced fiction workshop only open to students who have already taken CRW 3110. Basically, it will be run in the ‘traditional’ workshop fashion with occasional lectures on structure, metaphor, plot,
etc.

Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished works,
but ONLY after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously
as they take their own writing.

Required reading TBA.

 

Times: M 9-11

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

William Logan

Just as the civilization of the Kelts is revealed to us by their dolmens, and that of the Scandinavians by their mounds and kitchen-middens, so will the antiquaries of future times immediately recognise the spots inhabited
in India by the English by the piles of soda-water bottles heaped up before the cantonments, and the dwellings of the Americans by their deposits of empty meat tins.
Edmond Baron de Mandat-Grancey, Cow-Boys and Colonels,
1887

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

Obree [in manufacturing his record-breaking bicycle] famously used bits from his washing machine and a piece of metal recovered from an Ayrshire road, as well as a training programme fueled by marmalade sandwiches.
TLS, July 14, 2006

Apsley Cherry-Garrard described polar exploration as the “cleanest and most islated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised.”
TLS, July 14, 2006

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

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

Required reading:

 

Times: M 9-11

ENG 3115

Introduction to Film Theory & Criticism

Barbara Mennel

This course introduces students to the principal theoretical and critical issues raised by the first century of the cinema. We will cover the main theoretical strands in the history of film, with a particular emphasis
on contemporary filmmaking. We will study global cinema through close visual analysis of individual films, stressing the historical and international diversity of cinematic approaches and styles. At the same time,
we will study historical and contemporary critical writing on film. We will cover issues, such as viewer identification, ideology, and cultural context, including national cinemas, gender, sexuality, phenomenology,
trauma studies, and postcolonial theory. The midterm will reflect theoretical ground covered in class and the final assignment will be a research paper. Active participation in class discussion is required.

 

Times: M 7-8, W 7, Screenings: T E1-E3

ENG 3125

History of film Part III

Maureen Turim Concentrating on the post-new wave and new Hollywood cinema, this course will
examine the international history of film from 1970 to the present. The goal is to awaken an understanding of the historical use of film form by exploring changes that have taken place in film industries and technologies.
Each week we will view a film, examine its form of expression (looking closely at editing, set design, acting styles, dialogue, and narration). We will examine digital technologies, special effects, and 3D. We will
also look at aesthetics that shun spectacular filmic action in favor of a more minimal approach. This will lead to our discussion of the film’s place in film history, as well as social history. We will look at issues
of industry and audience, considering representations of gender, race and political change. Students will learn how to see films with a greater depth of visual understanding. Films to be screened include genres of Hollywood
filmmaking, Independents, European, and Japanese films. We will look at directors whose talent shaped the development of cinema; we will also examine the role of actors and actresses, screenwriters, designers and producers
in shaping the history of film. Active Participation in class and on CANVAS is required, as is close reading of history texts assigned.   Times: T 4, R 4-5, Screenings: T 9-11

ENG 4133

Touchy Feelings: Aesthetics and Malicious Objects

Richard Burt

This course explores posthuman, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive theory about the human, the machine, and the work of art in relation to questions about aesthetic categories and irrational anger, venting, and so on
(think rant versus clssroom lecture), focusing on literature and film concerning dolls, puppets, toys, automatons, and malicious (possessed?) objects. Readings and films will include Friedrich Schiller, On the Naïve and the Sentimental;
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; Sigmund Freud, The ‘Uncanny’; Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theater; Paul de Man, “Aesthetic
Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater”; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Sean Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting; Jörg Kreienbrock,
Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern LiteratureKarl Theodor Vischer, “A Rabid Philosopher”; E.T.A. Hoffman, The Sandman; Heimito Von Doderer, The Demons;
Cindy Sherman, photos; Hans Belmer, photos; Jean Paul Richter, Self-DescriptionThe Double Life of Véronique(Kristof
Kieślowski,1991); Medium Cool (dir. Haskel Weskler, 1969); Blow Up (Michelangelo
Antonioni, 1966); the automaton in Hugo (2011) http://automatomania.co.uk/http://www.melies.eu/; Bride of Frankenstein (dir.
James Whale, 1931); Bride of Chucky (dir Ronny Yu, 1998); Sullivan’s Travels (dir.
Preston Sturges, 1942); The Missing Picture (dir. Rithy Panh, 2013); Man with a Movie Camera (dir.
Dziga Vertov, 1929); The Devil is a Woman (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935); Ex Machina (Alex
Garland, 2015); Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982); Metropolis(dir.
Fritz Lang, 1927); That Obscure Object of Desire (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1977); The Red Shoes (dir.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948); The Tales of Hoffman (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,
1951);Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982); Black Swan (dir.
Darren Aronofsky, 2010); The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975); À nous la liberté (English:
“Freedom for Us”; dir. René Clair, 1931); Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936); William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale; A Tale of Winter (dir.
Eric Rohmer, 1992); andThe Doll (dir. Ernest Lubitsch, 1919).

Bring copies of any of the required booksand essays to class as required; co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday; a Film Clip Analysis; two
500 word papers; two discussion questions, three shot analyses, and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class; student formulated quizzes each class approved by me; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by
paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films.​

 

Times: T 2-3, R 3, Screenings: M 9-11

ENG 4133
Welles, Shakespeare, Media

Richard Burt

This course celebrates the 400th death-iversary of Shakespeare (1616) and, belatedly, the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Orson Welles (2015). We’ll look closely at Welles’s many Shakespeare adaptations, including
stage productions of Julius Caesar and Voodoo Macbeth; films of MacbethOthello, and Falstaff: The Chimes at Midnight; and
a TV King Lear and a TV documentary Filming Othello. We will also examine some problems in editing Shakespeare that are comparable to those of reconstructing Welles’s films, focusing
on MacbethHenry IV Parts One and Two, and Othello. We’ll also look at them in relation to Citizen Kane (the opening flashbackdevice is repeated in Othello), The Lady from Shanghai (jealousy), Touch of Evil (as
a remake of Othello), and F! for Fake. As they are relevant, we’ll also watch films in which Welles starred but did not direct, including The Third ManJourney into Fear,
and Jane Eyre. And we’ll look at Welles as a case study to reflect more broadly on literature and film and on some of the consequences for film and film criticism of digital archiving, such as websites
devoted to Welles and to Voodoo Macbeth, and video and digital film, looking both at low quality youtube uploads of films, TV interviews, TV commercials, TV programs, often unavailable elsewhere, and
high quality blu-ray critical editions such as the Criterion Othello, the Carlotta Macbeth and Othello, a French 3 disc DVD editon of Macbethwithout English
subtitles for the supplements in French. We’ll examine critical debates over how best to restore and reconstruct some of Welles’ films, including of Touch of EvilOthello, and the Criterion Complete Mr. Akardin (all
of which exist in three different versions). Readings will include excerpts from biographies, film criticism articles, and book chapters of film criticism.

Requirements: Bring copies of any of the required books and essays to class as required; co-lead class discussion once in a two period class; give a report once in a one period class; a Film Clip Analysis; two 500 word papers; two discussion questions, three shot analyses, and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class; student formulated quizzes each class
approved by me; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to texts and films.

 

Times: T 4, R 4-5, Screenings: W 9-11

ENG 4135

CINEMA HONG KONG TAIWAN

Ying Xiao

Description TBA

 

Times: M W F 9, Screenings: W 10-E1

ENG 4135

INTRO JAPANESE CINEMA

Staff

Description TBA

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8, Screenings: W E1-E3

ENG 4136

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 and narratives 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. There will be a public screening of the work you create in the class 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 and put ENG 4136 in the subject line if you are interested in taking the course. The deadline to apply is November 1, 2015.

 

Times: T 5-6, R 6, Screenings: T E1-E3

ENG 4146

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 7-10-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 the aesthetic and cinematic vision you choose to pursue.

Shooting on Canon XH-A1 digital cameras and editing in Adobe Premiere, the class will also provide hands-on workshops in cinematography, sound recording and lighting. We will examine filmic and profilmic elements in
weekly screenings, considering how the existing modes of narrative and documentary filmmaking are already present and waiting to be be intermixed or tampered with. 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. There will be a public screening of the work you create
in the class at the end of the semester.

PLEASE NOTE: You must have completed ENG 4136 with a B or better 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 1, 2015.

 

Times: M 4, W 4-5, Screenings: W 9-11

ENG 4310

French Cinema: Jean Renoir

Sylvie Blum-Reid

The life and works of Jean Renoir will be the topic of the class, inclusive of his own thinking, writing and art work. The class covers his French and American period, spanning the course of about five decades of French
film history. Different genres will be covered. New critical reexaminations of the auteur are included. All texts will be in English.

 

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

ENG 4310

Weimar Cinema (Cross-listed with GET 3520, Early German Cinema–1945)

Barbara Mennel

The course offers an historical overview of the most influential films of German classical cinema, including how they relate to the social reality of the 1920s and 30s. We will discuss the classic cinema of the Weimar
Republic organized around the tensions of modernity and addressing early genre films, such as science fiction, melodrama, mountain film, and the city film. We will also pay particular attention to gender and sexuality
in such films as Pandora’s Box, The Blue Angel, and Girls in Uniform. Urban space will feature as a central topic in discussions of Berlin: Symphony of a City and The Last Laugh.
An understanding of orientalism will guide our discussion of Prince Ahmed. While the course offers a survey of canonical films of the period, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem, and M,
it also opens up debates about avantgarde film and marginal genres, such as advertising and the interactive “rebus” films. The course will also include some Nazi films organized around the question of historical
breaks and continuities.

 

Times: M 5-6, W 6, Screenings: W E1-E3

ENG 4905

Independent Study

Faculty Member of Choice

An Independent Study course may be taken for 1 to 3 credit hours, but will only count toward the fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the English major if a student registers for 3 credit hours.

This course is for advanced students who desire to supplement the regular courses by independent reading or research under the guidance of a member of the faculty. The student must find a faculty member who is willing
to supervise the semester-long study, and together, the two create a project. The student must meet with the professor at designated times, agreed upon in advance, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.

 

Times: TBA

ENG 4911

TBA

TBA

TBA

 

Times: TBA

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Science, Race, and Sexuality in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction

Tace Hedrick

In this course we will examine the work of Octavia Butler, black feminist speculative fiction writer. Although few readers were aware of her until well into the 1990s, her work has garnered more and more attention for
its examination of connections between “alien” otherness, theories of genetic interdependence, and race and sexuality. We will be reading her major works including the Xenogenesis trilogy. We
will also be looking at her influences as well as what she herself had to say about racial and sexual politics in the United States.

 

Times: R 9-11

ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Jane Austen

Judith Page

The principle object . . . was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and . . .to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . .—William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)

Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment, is denied to me.—Sir Walter Scott (journal entry, March 14, 1826)

You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of Composition which might recommend me at present, & I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance . . . might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic Life in the Country Villages as I deal in—but I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem.– I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life; & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.—Jane Austen (letter to James Stanier Clarke, April 1, 1816)

Do not be angry with me for beginning another Letter to you. I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.—Jane Austen (letter to Cassandra Austen, March 5, 1814)

Jane Austen lived from 1775 until 1817, but her critics and readers have not always placed her at home during these revolutionary times. Nor have they always recognized the powerful ways that she engages her world as
she creates her own version of “ordinary life.” This course will focus on Austen’s writing (including juvenilia, letters, published novels, and uncompleted texts) in the context of the literature, culture, and politics
of her time. We will particularly study Austen’s relationship to other women writers of the period, including Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will also discuss several recent film adaptations
of Austen’s fiction with a particular focus on Ang Lee’s film version Sense and Sensibility, considering the ways that such films re-imagine the past and envision of the English countryside. As an
honors seminar, this course will include discussion, regular response papers and presentations, and a 15-page seminar paper.

Readings (subject to possible change):

 

Times: T 2-3, R 3

ENG 4940

Internship

Undergraduate Coordinator

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

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:

*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:

 

Times: TBA

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: Desperate Domesticity: The American 1950s

Marsha Bryant

This course explores fraught constructions of domesticity in American literary and popular culture of the 1950s, focusing on the nuclear family, gender roles (especially Housewife and Organization Man), the rise of
suburbia, and alternative domesticities. Our history text is Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. Our writers will include John Cheever, Gwendolyn Brooks, Patricia
Highsmith, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Sloan Wilson, Robert Lowell, Evan S. Connell, and Sylvia Plath. Our magazine readings come from EbonyLadies’ Home JournalThe New Yorker,
and One. And we’ll explore the sitcoms The Adventures of Ozzie and HarrietFather Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, as well as James Dean’s breakthrough
films East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. We end with retrospective images of the American 1950s in contemporary culture.

Assignments:

Active participation in discussion Short Paper
Short Paper—magazine ad analysis from EbonyLadies’ Home Journal, or New Yorker
Seminar Report—frame and lead discussion
for a designated portion of class material
Seminar Paper Proposal
Seminar Paper—tailor your own 12–15 page paper in consultation with instructor
Creative Assignment—Faux Fifties Ad!

 

Times: T 6-8

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis Project

Faculty Members (2) of Choice

Students must have have completed at least one semester of ENG 4936, Honors SeminarOpen 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

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:

other critical readings to be provided.

 

Times: T 9-11

ENL 3240

The Romantic Period: Privilege and Resistance

Sabrina Gilchrist

Spanning a timeline that (for some scholars) includes the American Revolution, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and the ending of slavery in England, the Romantic Period reflects a national landscape undergoing
significant change and upheaval. This was a period of radical thinking and action. Therefore, we will first look to foundations of privilege (in race, gender, class, nationality, etc.) as a way to better understand
how writers like Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Byron, Equiano, and Burney attempted to dismantle certain institutions of power. This course will examine the political, ecological, racial, intellectual, poetical, and
gendered resistances that define this period of revolutions.

Our readings will span fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose. Using the availability of digital archives, we will be able to discuss the reactions of our Romantic authors’ contemporaries, who are beginning to discern
the impact that these works could have on the public. We will also consider some contemporary scholarship and theoretical lenses that will provide the necessary vocabulary to unpack these trends and changes.

 

Times: T 8-9, R 9

ENL 3251

Victorian Literature

Chris Snodgrass

This course will attempt to define the world-views, beliefs, doubts, anxieties, and paradoxes of the Victorian Age through a survey of a few representative artists and different literary genres. We will also probe related
cultural issues such as the crisis of religious and scientific faith, gender relations, the “Woman Question,” and fin-de-siècle Decadence. We will be reading poetry, short fiction, drama, pictures, and critical
theory but no novels—novels are addressed in an entirely different course (ENL 3122). The artists studied in the Spring semester will be Alfred Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson,
George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], Ella D’Arcy, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as various “Pre-Raphaelite” and High Victorian painters. Mandatory attendance (enforced cut
limit), formal study groups. Final grades will be calculated as follows: 25% on weekly posted 1-page “insights” papers and a 7-10-page paper on the writers studied in the 1st 6 weeks; 30% on weekly
posted 1-page “insights” papers and a 7-10-page paper on the writers studied in the weeks 7-12; 35% on a comprehensive final exam; 10% on class participation.

 

Times: T 5-6, R 6

ENL 4273

20th-Century British Literature

Chris Snodgrass

This course will attempt to define the world-views, beliefs, doubts, anxieties, and paradoxes of British Modernism, through a survey of recognized “great works” in different literary genres by a few representative poets,
novelists, and playwrights. The artists studied in this course will be James Joyce, several WWI poets, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith,
and Samuel Beckett. Mandatory attendance (enforced cut limit), formal study groups. Final grades will be calculated as follows: 25% on weekly posted 1-page “insights” papers and a 7-10-page paper on the writers
studied in the 1st 6 weeks; 30% on weekly posted 1-page “insights” papers and a 7-10-page paper on the writers studied in the weeks 7-12; 35% on a comprehensive final exam; 10% on class participation.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

ENL 4311

Chaucer

Richard Allen Shoaf

“Chaucer” will study both Troilus & Criseyde, in its entirety, and the Canterbury Tales, Fragments I, III-IV, VI, VII, and X (using both the original Middle English and contemporary
modernizations of the poetry). The guiding thesis of the course will be 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 to censorship as we reveal his agenda for challenging and subverting canons of normativity that underlie, promote, and support censorship.

 

Times: T 5-6, R 6

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Doing It

Sidney Homan

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

In 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 DreamTwelfth NightMuch Ado about NothingThe Taming of the ShrewHamletMacbethOthello,
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!

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.

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

 

Times: T 2-3, R 3

LIT 3031

Lyric Poetry / Lyric Theory

John Murchek

What is a lyric poem? Can we identify characteristics of lyric that persist over time or do poems described as lyrics differ dramatically from one age to the next? Do lyrics share features or do we realize poems as
lyrics only through certain strategies of reading that make up the lyric experience? Are lyric poems essentially about private experience or can they speak to public issues? These are the kinds of questions that
we will be addressing in this course, and we will do so by reading both poems categorized as lyrics, and literary theory that attempts to define the lyric.

Since the reading of poetry is not widely taught in the department, we will begin the semester with an intensive introduction to poetry. We will use the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (2010)
as our primer. Vendler has a working theory of lyric, and we will go on to situate that theory in relation to other theories of lyric as we find them in texts by twentieth- and twenty-first- century thinkers whose
work is collected in Virginia Jackson’s and Yopie Prins’ The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology(2014).

I imagine that students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, a detailed reading of one of the poems anthologized in Vendler, a group presentation, a single-page provocation to discussion of
one of the theoretical essays, and an 8-page theoretically-oriented final paper.

 

Times: T 5-6, R 6

LIT 3041

All Joking Aside: The Art and Craft of Comedy

Sidney Homan

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

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.

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

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

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

 

Times: T 4, R 4-5

LIT 3043

African American Drama

Mark A. 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.

 

Times: W 9-11

LIT 3383

AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Rose Lugano

Description TBA

 

Times: T 7-8, R 8

LIT 4194

AFRICAN LIT IN ENGLISH

Apollo Amoko

 

Times: T 9-11

LIT 4233

NATIONALISM & NOVEL

Apollo Amoko

 

Times: R 9-11

LIT 4331

Children’s Literature

John Cech

Children’s literature has become, in recent years, one of the most dynamic areas of publishing and media production. Currently, one of the wealthiest people in the world is a writer of children’s books, and each year
films 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

LIT 4332

Literature for Young Children

John Cech

This course is meant to be an introduction to and an exploration of the child’s earliest experiences with literature, from birth until her/his first years in school. We will be interested in the relationships between
children’s books and oral literature and the imaginative, aesthetic, moral, and psychological growth of their young audiences. The course is designed to involve you actively, analytically, and creatively in the
study of this subject. You will be encouraged to develop a first hand sense of how some forms of children’s literature are created; you will be asked to look at works for children with a critical eye; and you will
be urged to do your own field work, testing assertions, questions, and ideas that are raised in the course. Literature for Young Children is intended for the children in your classrooms, the children in your home,
and the child who still lives somewhere within you.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

LIT 4483

Issues & Methods in Cultural Studies

Susan Hegeman

This course will provide an introduction to the theory and practice of cultural studies, with an emphasis on its relationship to literary studies. Students will develop their skills in reading, analyzing, and writing
about critical texts and a variety of non-literary and textual objects. Topics to be addressed: what is “culture,” and what is “literature”? What is the methodology of cultural studies? How do the methods of cultural
studies inform the study of literature? How do methods of literary interpretation inform our interpretation of culture? This course should be of interest to students studying all types of literature, literary theory,
cultural studies, and popular culture.

 

Times: T 4, R 4-5

LIT 4930

Cradle and Grave: Childhood and Death in the Baldwin Archives

Suzan Antionette Alteri

Both childhood and death are fraught concepts entangled in shifting ideologies and pervasive cultural anxieties. Literary explorations of these subjects offer us valuable insights into our history and reveal the powerful
effects of death and childhood on the cultural imagination. This class will focus specifically on the presence of death in literature about and for children. These texts are particularly interesting for our study
because of modern Western society’s impulse to protect childhood from death.

In Western Attitudes toward Death, Philippe Aries notes that both the individual dread of death and the desire to keep children ignorant of death are relatively recent phenomena. It was not until the eighteenth
century that adults started to shelter children from the moment of death, and the desire to keep children ignorant of death entirely is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century impulse. This is reflective of shifting
attitudes towards death and towards the child. Aries argues that the eighteenth century marks a moment of transformation in Western cultural attitudes towards death. Prior to the eighteenth century, death was a
collective, natural process that was not to be feared; afterwards it became the end of an individual’s existence, a cause of anxiety. By the twentieth century, death has become shameful and forbidden. At the same
time that these shifts in attitudes towards death were occurring, our conceptualization of childhood also changed. In the nineteenth century, declining child mortality rates and the decreased need for child labor
in the home led to a more sentimentalized view of childhood. In this modern conceptualization of childhood, children became emotionally valuable and vulnerable and childhood became a sacred space of protection.
As death became fearful, shameful, and forbidden, childhood became protected and sacred, and thus death was forbidden access to the sacred realm of childhood.

This course will examine materials in the Baldwin Archive that bring the child in contact with death in order to explore this tension. The Baldwin collection grants us access to both rare and popular eighteenth-, nineteenth-,
and twentieth-century texts that grapple with childhood and death in interesting ways. Students will conduct archival research in the Baldwin to work towards an individual text analysis and a group digital archive
project. Readings will include primary texts from the Baldwin collection, digitized historical documents, secondary scholarship, and supplementary literature.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

LIT 4930

Creative Non-Fiction

Michael Hofmann

A popular course combining the reading of cult books set on five continents (W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Peter Handke’s Once Again for Thucydides,
Andrzej Stasiuk’s Fado, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life, and one or two more) with a workshop element. Doubles as remedial geography.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

LIT 4930

Early LGBT Literatures (Cross-listed with WST4930)

Jodi Schorb

This course might playfully be called “queer lil before the invention of homosexuality,” given that the words “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” were not coined until 1869 and 1880, respectively.

Most of us take for granted the concept of modern sexual identity, assuming sexuality is central to personal identity. Artists writing before the 1880s would find such thinking queer indeed. Their literature helps us
think about how earlier eras understood the relationship between biological sex, gender expression, and sexual identity. Moreover, early LGBT literature requires us to think richly about how artists who felt personally
removed from normative definitions of sex imagined their own erotic or sexual selves, sought models through past cultures and literatures, and invented a new language of sexual possibility through literature.

We will begin with a brief unit on Greek and Roman myths, Renaissance poetry, and neoclassical satire in order to identify cultural models and literary precursors that inspired later generations of writers to imagine
diverse representations of sexual desire and to imagine gender beyond binary categories of “male” and “female.”  We continue with a sustained unit on the literature of romantic friendship across the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. We then explore how the medicalization of sexuality left its mark on literature, and vice versa. Finally, we study “lost novels”—queer fictions that have largely fallen into obscurity—and
weigh what might be gained through their literary recovery.

Likely authors include: Plato, Ovid, Sappho, American Indian songs; poetry by William Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman; letters
and diaries of Anne Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Rebecca Primus, and Addie Brown; fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather,
and Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June.

Secondary readings in theory and cultural history will strengthen skills in critical reading, writing, and literary analysis and improve your ability to work in depth on literary genres of interest. I value prewriting
and creative writing as a means into a text and as a means of honing your ideas and arguments. Thus, you will have opportunities for workshopping papers and devising group projects.

Two essays (5–7 pages); short creative assignments; group presentations; regular preparation and attendance required.

 

Times: T 7, R 7-8

LIT 4930

Dante for English Majors

Richard Allen Shoaf

“Dante for English Majors” will cover the VITA NUOVADE 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: e.g., Chaucer,
Milton, Shelley, Eliot, Heaney, et al. There is no final examination.

Nota Bene: This is not a course in Italian language or Italian culture. It is a course in medieval European culture as represented in and by Dante’s
towering achievement.​

 

Times: M W F 6