Department of English

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

Spring 2021

Lower-Division (1000-2000) Courses

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

Course #	Section	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 2070	0473/ M100	10523/ 29316	M W F 3	LEI 0207/ Online	Survey of American Literature	Nicole Green
AML 2070	0535/ M101	10524/ 29318	M W F 8	TUR 2333/ Online	Survey of American Literature	Kelsey Carper
AML 2070	M102	29337	M W F 4	Online	Survey of American Literature	Ashley Clemons
AML 2070	6101/ M103	10526/ 29346	M W F 7	RNK 0110/ Online	Survey of American Literature	John Mark Robison
AML 2410	1615/ M104	10527/ 29925	M W F 6	CBD 0224/ Online	Issues Am Lit and Cult: American Ex-Patriates and the Literary Salon– The Legacy of the Lost Generation	Michelle Lesifko Bremer
AML 2410	4800/ M105	10528/ 29977	T 8-9/ R 9	NORM 1125 & WEIM 1092/ Online	Issues Am Lit and Cult: “Them Crazy Kids”– Neurodiversity in Contemporary American Children’s Literature	Kathryn Hampshire
AML 2410	5700/ M106	10478/ 29982	M W F 7	PHY 1101/ Online	Issues Am Lit and Cult: Culture of Deceit? The Con Artist in 20th-Century American Literature & Popular Culture	Jacqueline Schnieber
AML 2410	9132/ M107	22252/ 29989	T 5-6/ R 6	AND 0032 & MCCA 3194/ Online	Issues Am Lit and Cult: The Home In (And As) American Literature	Laken Brooks
CRW 1101	1632/ M118	12713/ 30135	M 6-8	CBD 0230/ Online	Beginning Fiction Writing	Patrick Duane
CRW 1101	1633/ M119	12714/ 30144	W 3-5	CBD 0234/ Online	Beginning Fiction Writing	Mitchell Galloway
CRW 1101	6730/ M120	12715/ 30269	F 6-8	FLI 0119/ Online	Beginning Fiction Writing	Savannah Horton
CRW 1101	6752/ M121	12716/ 30271	M 9-11	MAT 0114/ Online	Beginning Fiction Writing	Victor Imko
CRW 1101	6754/ M122	12717/ 30277	T 9-11	AND 0032/ Online	Beginning Fiction Writing	Angela Bell
CRW 1301	16E1/ M123	12718/ 30301	W 9-11	WEIM 1092/ Online	Beginning Poetry Writing	John Markland
CRW 1301	6989/ M124	12719/ 30302	R 6-8	CBD 0224/ Online	Beginning Poetry Writing	Sarina Redzinski
CRW 2100	0121/ M125	12720/ 30312	F 3-5	CBD 0230/ Online	Fiction Writing	Django Ellenhorn
CRW 2100	132A/ M126	12748/ 30365	T 6-8	CBD 0224/ Online	Fiction Writing	Daniel Grossman
CRW 2100	1337/ M127	12749/ 30366	M 9-11	TUR 1101/ Online	Fiction Writing	Jackson Armstrong
CRW 2100	7005/ M128	12750/ 30367	T 9-11	AND 0021/ Online	Fiction Writing	Drew Dickerson
CRW 2300	1644/ M129	12751/ 30373	R 2-4	CBD 0230/ Online	Poetry Writing	Erick Verran
CRW 2300 (H)	1645/ M130	12752/ 30378	W 9-11	WEIM 2056/ Online	Poetry Writing	Cheyenne Taylor
CRW 2300	5311/ M131	12753/ 30384	R 6-8	CBD 0238/ Online	Poetry Writing	Ashley Kim
ENC 1136	9122/ M137	22188/ 30433	M W F 3	WEIL 408D/ Online	Multimodal Writing/ Digital Literacy	Brandon Murakami
ENC 1136	9123/ M138	22191/ 30441	M W F 5	WEIL 408E/ Online	Multimodal Writing/ Digital Literacy	Natalie Goodman
ENC 1136	9124/ M139	22193/ 30447	T 4/R 4-5	WEIL 408E & WEIL 408D/ Online	Multimodal Writing/ Digital Literacy	Jacob Hawk
ENC 1145	35G2/ M141	13469/ 30452	M W F 8	TUR 2346/ Online	Topics in Composition: HIV/AIDS Arts and Literature	remus jackson
ENC 1145	35G3/ M142	13470/ 30455	T 2-3/ R 3	MAT 0105 & MAT 0010/ Online	Topics in Composition:Writing About Today’s (and Tomorrow’s) Environmental Crises	Luke Rodewald
ENC 1145	35G4/ M143	13471/ 30459	T 8-9/ R 9	WEIM 2056 & MAT 0116/ Online	Topics in Composition: Writing About Insanity	Min Ji Kang
ENC 1145	M144	30468	M W F 6	Online	Topics in Composition: Writing about Community Building and Care	Cara Wieland
ENC 1145	35G8/ M145	13473/ 30471	M W F 7	FLG 0220/ Online	Topics in Composition: Writing Through Gainesville’s Rhetorical Monuments	Alexander Slotkin
ENC 1145	6431/ M146	24740/ 30472	M W F 3	PSYCH 0130/ Online	Topics in Composition: Writing about Women’s Lives	Deepthi Siriwardena
ENC 2210	34F7/ M147	13474/ 30525	T 2-3/ R 3	MAT 0011 & MAT 0005/ Online	Technical Writing	Jason Crider
ENC 2210	34GD/ M148	13499/ 30529	T 8-9/ R 9	WEIM 2050 & MAT 0115/ Online	Technical Writing	Zack Shaw
ENC 2210	34GE/ M149	13500/ 30531	M W F 4	FLG 0275/ Online	Technical Writing	Ashley Tisdale
ENC 2210	35F2	13501	UFO	Online Only	Technical Writing	Andrea Medina
ENG 1131	1786/ M152	13368/ 30542	M W F 4/ M 9-11	WEIL 408D/ Online	Writing Through Media: Pixel Mythologies	Lillian Martinez
ENG 1131	1788/ M153	13369/ 30563	M W F 6/ W 9-11	ARCH 116 & WEIL 408D/ Online	Writing Through Media: Sound Stories	Kevin Cooley
ENG 1131	2463/ M154	13370/ 30565	M W F 7/ R E1-E3	ARCH 116 & WEIL 408D/  Online	Writing Through Media: Science Fiction	Amanda Rose
ENG 2300	1793/ M155	13371/ 30590	M W F 4/ W 9-11	LIT 0125 & CBD 0210/ Online	Film Analysis	Faith Boyte
ENG 2300	1794/ M156	13372/ 30591	M W F 5/ W E1-E3	WEIL 0270 & WEIM 2050/ Online	Film Analysis	Vincent Wing
ENG 2300	4784/ M157	13373/ 30592	M W F 5/ R E1-E3	FLG 0275 & CBD 0212/ Online	Film Analysis	Ryan Kerr
ENG 2300	6015/ M158	13394/ 30593	M W F 7/ M E1-E3	FLG 0230 & CBD 0212/ Online	Film Analysis	Felipe Gonzales-Silva
ENG 2300	7308/ M159	13395/ 30594	T 5-6/ R 6/ T E1-E3	TUR 2336, MAT 0003, & CBD 0212/ Online	Film Analysis	Mandy Moore
ENG 2300	7373/ M160	13396/ 30595	M W F 8/ W E1-E3	MCCA 3194 &CBD 0212/ Online	Film Analysis	Tyler Klatt
ENL 2012	9135/ M171	22261/ 30655	M W F 4	WEIM 1076/ Online	Survey of English Literature, Medieval-1750	Kaley Owens-McGinnis
ENL 2022	1215/ M172	13155/ 30656	T 7/ R 7-8	MAT 0016 & LIT 0201/ Online	Survey of English Literature, 1750-Present	Maxine Donnelly
ENL 2022	9133/ M173	22256/ 30657	T 5-6/ R 6	MAT 0107 & MAT 0010/ Outline	Survey of English Literature, 1750-Present	Meghna Sapui
LIT 2000	17B9/ M177	14665/ 30669	M W F 3	MAT 0051/ Online	Introduction to Literature	Burcu Kuheylan
LIT 2000	17CB/ M178	14666/ 30671	M W F 6	MAT 0051/ Online	Introduction to Literature	Cristovao Nwachukwu
LIT 2000	17CD/ M179	14667/ 30672	M W F 7	MAT 0251/ Online	Introduction to Literature	Elizabeth Lambert
LIT 2000	9134/ M180	22259/ 30673	T 8-9/ R 9	MAT 0118/ Online	Introduction to Literature	Suvendu Ghatak
LIT 2110	1951/ M181	14668/ 30676	T 5-6/ R 6	MAT 0103 & MAT 0007/ Online	World Literature, Ancient to Renaissance	Satit Leelathawornchai
LIT 2120	05DA/ M182	14693/ 30677	M W F 8	MAT 0112/ Online	World Literature, 17th Century to Modern	Mosunmola Adeojo

Course Descriptions

AML 2410

Survey of American Literature: American Ex-Patriates and the Literary Salon– The Legacy of the Lost Generation
Michelle Lesifko Bremer

In the 1920s, American authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos moved abroad in search of a space to reflect on and critique the widespread corruption in their home country. In Gertrude Stein’s infamous salon in Paris’s Left Bank neighborhood, these ex-pats joined a Modernist community interested in producing art as a response to their collective disenchantment with a cultural moment defined by capitalist greed and outmoded ideologies.

In this course, we will read works inspired and influenced by this community of disenchanted artists in combination with historical, critical, and biographical texts that contextualize these artists’ work in the period of post-WWI disenchantment. Students will write critical responses and close reading essays in an attempt to discover what role the expatriate salon played in novels and poetry from this period.

Finally, we will expand our reading to later 20^th century and contemporary works by authors living abroad from their home countries. What artistic legacy did the ex-patriates of the Lost Generation leave for future ex-pat writers, like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and for our generation’s tumultuous cultural moment? By the end of the semester, we will have developed a working argument for the necessity of art as a means of cultural critique and an outlet for generational outrage and disappointment.

Tentative reading list includes:

• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Sun Also Rises and selections from A Moveable Feast  by Ernest Hemingway
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
• selections from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
• selections from the poetry of H.D. and Djuna Barnes

as well as historical, biographical, and critical texts of the time period and selections by later 20^th century and contemporary authors working in the ex-patriate tradition

AML 2410

Survey of American Literature: “Them Crazy Kids”– Neurodiversity in Contemporary American Children’s Literature
Kathryn Hampshire

Arguably the most important part of the human body is the brain: it’s where we store memories, solve problems, regulate emotions, construct thought…. It pretty much determines who we are. But what about when that squishy mass of cells doesn’t quite function the way that society says is “normal”? How do we come to understand ourselves and others when the cookie cutter just doesn’t fit?

These questions are of particular importance within the context of childhood and young adulthood as key periods of neurological and social development, as well as identity formation. In this course, we will look at the ways in which children’s literature has the potential to tackle issues of neurodiversity by inviting empathy, breaking down barriers, and normalizing difference. We will also discuss the realities that many young people face within education and society from the perspective of critical disability studies, such as: labeling, diagnosis, stereotypes, intersectionality, access, special education, pedagogy, and representation.

Readings for this course may include: Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia, Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin, and Why Johnny Doesn’t Flap by Clay Morton and Gail Morton. These texts range from picture books and middle readers to full-length YA novels (plus one that blends prose and comics) to represent a variety of neurodiverse experiences, including anxiety, depression, and autism, as well as others with which students may be less familiar.

By crossing a spectrum of children’s literature age groups, we will explore the various ways that texts engage with issues related to neurodiversity to a diverse readership; we will pay particular attention to young adult novels and investigate the recent proliferation of neurodiverse YA texts in American publishing.

Assignments for this course may include: exploring new titles that engage with intersectional neurodiverse positionalities, writing and discussing micro response papers on assigned readings with each other, practicing multimodal representations of neurodiversity that move beyond linguistic representation, and constructing a final paper and presentation focused on an issue they identify spanning across several texts.

AML 2410

Survey of American Literature: Culture of Deceit? The Con Artist in 20^th-Century American Literature & Popular Culture
Jacqueline Schnieber

How did George C. Parker manage to convince people that he owned the Brooklyn Bridge? How was it possible for a young Frank Abagnale to play the part of a pilot, doctor, lawyer, and teacher? And why do we keep falling for Ponzi schemes?

While the con artist is not a solely American phenomenon, they have prospered, to the astonishment and often admiration, of the American public. Students enrolling in this class will have encountered the con in old or recent Hollywood iterations such as The Hustle (2019), or classics, such as The Great Gatsby (1925). However, these various revivals of the con story do not simply betray America’s continuing interest in the figure of the con artist. Quite similar to the rags-to-riches stories, the con story is part of the very fabric of the country’s imagination.

This course draws on what students may know of contemporary or classic con artists or schemes in popular culture and literature, broadly defined. The central questions this course seeks to answer is: Why have American authors, screenwriters, dramatists, and even game developers chosen to use the con story as a way of portraying or debating social issues, such as upward mobility or the indeterminacy of identity? Since convincing storytelling is at the heart of the con game, what does this betray about our complex relationship with storytelling art forms?

In order to contextualize our analysis, the course will investigate the beginnings of the con story at the New World frontier. Students will learn to identify different types of confidence games and how they have been interpreted in the context of national debates about the role of religion, class, gender, sexuality, and race. Other questions we will seek to answer include:

• How does the con story draw on, mimic, or satirize literary genres such as detective/crime fiction?
• How do these tales make us think about identity and the boundaries between reality and fiction?
• What roles do race and gender passing play in these stories?

Course Material
The course will cover a wide range of texts from different time periods, but with a focus on the twentieth century. Texts discussed in class likely include:

• Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
• Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People” (1955)
• Langston Hughes, “Who’s Passing for Who?” (1956)
• Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake (2000)
• R. Weil and W. T. Brannon, Conman: A Master Swindler’s Own Story (2004)
• Michael Gracey, The Greatest Showman (2017) (film)
• A selection of scenes from the BioShock series (video game)

Writing Requirements
Students will develop their writing skills in short response papers that will ask them to make connections between texts throughout the semester. There will also be an approximately 3-page midterm paper that will be a response to one of three prompts, based on topics discussed in class.

However, this course will also include creative ways of critical thinking, such as designing a movie poster and a group project to create a “con game” for the entire class, based on the knowledge students will have acquired about different cons. Towards the end of the semester, students will individually design a final project that will involve research into a con artist of the student’s choice. The latter can be a con artist not discussed in class, and a list of potential cons will be provided to students beforehand.

AML 2410

Survey of American Literature: The Home In (And As) American Literature
Laken Brooks

Home is a recurring theme throughout literature. From the search for home in Huckleberry Finn to messages of a house as a prison in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the household (re)emerges as an important setting in American classics. But in this class, we will explore home not just as a setting, but as its own character. Home is a site that we construct, a place where we build our own meaning.

To begin, we will analyze larger topics of gender, race, and class in the American home in texts like Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” among Little House on the Prairie and Little Women. Through these readings, we will investigate how society views a home vs. a house, homelessness, and family.

Later in the semester, students will turn their attention inward to analyze the literary artifacts that we might find in our own homes. These artifacts will include home and garden magazines, the Farmer’s Almanac, Netflix’s Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, ghost stories, your grandmother’s sewing patterns, cookbooks, and more. Students learn more about how these texts shape our perspective of identity and home, and we will question why such household documents are often not considered “literature” in the first place.

Students will explore both MLA-style reading responses and more creative assignments and like quilting, cooking, or land-storying. Other class projects include a critical community service assignment in which students will volunteer virtually with the Library of Congress to transcribe digitized versions of letters, recipes, and other domestic texts.

Ultimately, this class will encourage students to question not only how we make homes, but how homes make us.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition: HIV/AIDS Arts and Literature
remus jackson

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, LGBTQ activist group ACT UP drew attention to the parallels between our ongoing pandemic and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s-90s. Though in the U.S., the AIDS crisis is largely considered to have passed, there remains much to be learned from the queer community’s response to HIV/AIDs through the cultural artifacts of a generation left for dead. Because much of queer history has been institutionally repressed, this course takes up for study a variety of cultural artifacts by queer and trans organizers, activists, theorists, and artists responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis and a generation left for dead. We’ll begin by tracing the historical context of the AIDS crisis through both secondary analysis and primary accounts. From this, we’ll consider the forms that art, film, theory, and activism have taken—and continue to take—in response to the AIDS crisis, which encompassed not only the illness but stigma and discriminatory lack of care. Through engaging these sources, students will critically analyze how HIV/AIDs shaped queer and trans community, history, and future. Students will also examine how these responses are shaped in turn by the mediums their creators engage with, from underground film, to comix and zines, to prose and performance art. Potential sources include Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, David Wojnarowicz’s Seven Miles a Second, the Strip AIDs anthologies, the art work of Félix González-Torres and Tessa Boffin, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, and Oli Rodriguez’s The Papi Project.

By focusing the art and literary forms generated by queer/trans creators, students will develop critical reading and media analysis skills, and to further practice developing strong, argument-driven analyses from our readings. Though HIV/AIDS is an expansive topic to address, the course seeks to consider two key questions—how HIV/AIDS impacted, and continues to impact, queer and trans communities, and what can we still learn from studying the responses to those impacts. Anchoring the course to those questions will give students a solid foundation and help them connect more strongly with the topic, whether they identify with the subject materials or not. This course will also be of particular benefit to students studying public health and health disparities in society, as well as students in the humanities and social sciences.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition: Writing About Today’s (and Tomorrow’s) Environmental Crises
Luke Rodewald

While the global pandemic justifiably dominated the world’s attention throughout the past several months, an equally distressing reality has been pushed back out of the spotlight: 2020 was a(nother) very bad year for the planet. The past several months alone have seen a record-breaking number of destructive oceanic storms plague the country’s southern states while much of the American West has gone up in flames. Beyond national borders, deadly heat waves ravaged Europe, mirrored by increasingly unstable wet and dry seasons plaguing the Middle East, India, and Asia. As the encroaching disasters of climate change become more visible and unavoidable, questions of justice, accountability, and futurity are pushed to the forefront of our domestic and global political debates.

In addition to exploring these intersecting catastrophes, this course will centrally consider these questions: What does it mean to be “human” in an era of escalating ecological crisis? What does it mean to be an “animal?” Through what forces and structures are some considered more human—or more animal—than others? How do developments in science and technology blur the boundary between human and non-human? How can we talk about ethics or justice when it comes to our treatment of our environment, of animals, and of other (human) beings? Might the intensifying impacts of climate change demand that we re-think what it means to be human immediately?

The course’s texts and films of study are from the late 20th– and early 21st-century and grapple with the very concerns that accompany contemporary environmental issues, most likely including Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (2010), novels by Margaret Atwood, Ann Patchett, and Louise Erdrich, and films such as Interstellar (2015) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Our major assignments will include several short critical response papers, a visual-analytical essay of a work of bio-art, and a semester-length term project that braids literary and scientific research with personal history.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition:  Writing About Insanity– From Victorian literature to Korean Dramas
Min Ji Kang

As Octavia E. Butler states, “Sanity is that combination of perceptions, interpretations, teachings, and beliefs that we share with others of our community.”  People who fall outside of the ‘norms’ of society have often been labeled as insane, outcasted, and locked up in asylums. We see tropes of insanity from the 17^th century British literature, with Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798) and later popularized during the Victorian era by Bertha in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Contemporary American culture also depicts the trope in works including novel (1962) and film (1975) versions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, neo-slave narrative Stigmata (1998) by Phyllis Alesia Perry, even to the recent Korean drama It’s Okay Not to Be Okay (2020). This course will challenge students to think about insanity and sanity, and how these labels have been constructed based on time period and culture. How and why are certain characters ‘othered’ through being seen as insane? This course will explore what popular cultural works depicting insanity tell us about larger concepts such as (dis)ability, gender, incarceration, and slavery.

Readings will integrate theoretical works of Michel Foucault, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar and Angela Davis with works of popular culture including novels, short stories, film, and TV shows. Assignments will consist of short response papers, weekly discussion posts, and a creative final project discussing ones own reflection on the trope of insanity based on course material, mad maps, and personal experience.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition: Writing about Community Building and Care
Cara Wieland

This course focuses on representations of community, looking into a variety of sources including (but not necessarily limited to) social media, games, film and television, fiction and creative essays, and academic scholarship. In examining these sources, we will first determine the meaning of ‘community’ and how it changes based on different contexts. Some questions we will ask are: Whose community? How are the interests of a community determined, and by whom? When is a community assigned to us based on location or identifiers we were born with, and when is it chosen? What does it mean to form new communities? To pose answers, we will consult writings in sociology, anthropology, post-colonial theory, and grassroots activism alongside weekly readings and viewings. In turn, course conversation will examine how various forms of media are in themselves used to build and sustain community, as well as how media sharing has been adapted to foster community remotely following the impacts of the novel Coronavirus. We will also discuss media’s role in nuanced topics such as collective care and accountability in call out/in culture. How do communities navigate care, safety, and acceptance when the needs of different members conflict?

Assignments will include an analysis of 1-2 assigned works, a literature review on a relevant topic, shorter reflective responses, and discussion posts. In addition to analyzing how ‘community’ is represented and sustained through a variety of media, we will also create self-articulations of our own ties to community/ies with a creative “unessay” final project.

Possible readings we will discuss are Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and excerpts of texts by radical femmes of color such as Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Viewings may include Sense8 and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, as well as case studies from TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition: Writing Through Gainesville’s Rhetorical Monuments
Alexander Slotkin

Monuments are all around us, ranging from the Turlington Rock (“The Potato”) outside of Turlington Hall to the graffiti on Gainesville’s 34^th Street Wall. But recent conversations surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments both here and elsewhere remind us that monuments are claims to both land and power. To write about monuments is to write about how a community remembers the past, envisions the present, and (re)imagines the future. What can we learn about Gainesville and even the university by studying their monuments? And what exactly is a monument anyway? This rhetoric and writing course will tackle these questions and more as we explore Gainesville’s monuments, in person (on your own) or online.

During this course we will read various texts that seek to explore what counts as monuments, how cultural values and systems of belief are memorialized and circulated, and why our city’s monuments matter. Each unit will pose specific focuses centered on one or more monuments or types of monuments in Gainesville to better help us place reoccurring themes into conversation with one another. To begin thinking through what monuments are, we will first explore Gainesville’s monumental structures and the way(s) in which they repurpose space. Building on this first unit, the second unit shifts our attention toward Gainesville’s murals and graffiti, texts that do not immediately scream “monuments.” While critically examining the role of paint in creating and repurposing monuments, we will also be discussing public rhetoric and the circulation of writing. Lastly, we will engage with critical race theories and perspectives on Confederate and colonial monuments near and far to highlight the role monuments play in creating or dividing our communities.

Texts for this class will include selected articles from edited collections and special journal issues such as Rhetorical Bodies (1999), Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric (2018), and “Special Issue: Mobilizing Museum Anthropology” (2018). Students can also expect to read articles from Gainesville’s local newspaper, the Gainesville Sun, and the University of Florida’s independent student newspaper The Alligator. Other readings will include films like Brutality in Stone (1991) and a handful of relevant miscellaneous articles.

Writing assignments will include short reading responses, a rhetorical analysis of a monument, an op-ed article on a local monument, a blog post or podcast episode discussing Gainesville’s memorialized history, and a final (creative/artistic) research project.

ENC 1145

Topics in Composition: Writing about Women’s Lives
Deepthi Siriwardena

Changing the world is a lofty ambition. Yet, as implied in the words of Carolyn See above, women wielding the pen have striven to transform the world. For this, they have often paid the price of getting notoriety ascribed to them. This is a course that asks you to become increasingly aware of the ways in which women’s writing has endeavored to achieve this transformative effect in many different socio-political and temporal contexts. The course expects to generate classroom discussion based on critical appreciation of literature which are written by women in English by exploring key preoccupations and concerns of the feminist discourse. We will begin by understanding what makes a text feminist and learn to identify and appreciate the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which women writers draw attention on the socio-political and ideological fetters defining women’s lot in life and strain against them, calling for the creation of a more just and equal world.

Although feminism and the feminist movement are generally associated with the West, our readings and discussion will not be limited to British and American texts. On the contrary, our approach will be global in scope as we will explore writings by African, Middle Eastern and Asian women, who will at times concur and at times contend with the western women writers . Thus, as the semester progresses, we will learn to adopt and develop intersectionality as a mode of feminist analysis. In discussing the works of a diverse group of women writers we will trouble the stereotypes and biases regarding feminism and the lot of women in “other” parts of the world, and come to a more nuanced understanding of feminism and women’s rights.

ENG 1131

Writing Through Media: Pixel Mythologies– Video Games and Narrative
Lillian Martinez

Myths and fairy tales of wandering warriors, rare creatures, and automaton futures saturate the literary imagination; from Homer’s Odysseus to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to Netflix’s Lucifer, heroic figures and the landscapes they venture through have received poetic, comic, and visual renderings. But what differentiates video games from other written or visual forms of media? How does the act of play participate in the creation of contemporary mythologies? This course will read video games as engaging in creations of new cultural fables that address aspects of the human condition—including but not limited to morality, suffering, and the meaning of life and death. The language of game studies and literary theory will aid in our critical interrogations into these pixel mythologies, putting video games into conversation with theoretical frameworks of the hero, the monstrous, and the ludic to uncover the way they engage in discourses of borders, marginality, representation, identity, and agency.

Possible texts we will cover are: Papers, Please (2013), Ori and the Blind Forest (2015), Undertale (2015), Inside (2016), Little Nightmares (2017), Pyre (2017), Brawlhalla (2017), Nier: Automata (2017), A Raven Monologue (2018), Grimm’s Hollow (2019), Disco Elysium (2019), Untitled Goose Game (2019), Hades (2020), and The Supper (2020).

Assignments will include discussion posts/responses, an in-class presentation of an outside game, a game review, two essays on assigned games, and a critical analysis paper. Students are not required to have previous experience with video games or game studies for this course.

ENG 1131

Writing Through Media: Sound Stories– Podcasting, Broadcasting, and the Public Radio
Kevin Cooley

“When two millennials get divorced, who gets the podcast?” Jokes like this one—a tongue-in-cheek play on the stereotype that the only thing millennials love as much as avocado toast is making and listening to podcasts—make the rounds on social media, racking up likes and shares.

But are podcasts and stories told with sound really the exclusively millennial/Gen Z fare they are often pegged as?

This course will establish and investigate the long history of stories told and circulated through sound, from the origins of the audio drama on public radio (like Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast and The Little Orphan Annie Radio Show) to the contemporary boom in podcasting (in investigative journalism podcasts like This American Life and Serial, and in narrative podcasts like Welcome to Nightvale). This deep dive into stories told with sound will also focus on podcasting as social justice and activism (in 1619 and in Native America Calling), audio dramas as a form of adaptation (the NPR Star Wars radio drama), and the visualization of podcasts and radio in other media (like Jean Shepherd’s radio work leading into A Christmas Story, and Duncan Trussel’s “spacecast” animation, The Midnight Gospel.)

Throughout the course, students will be responsible for analyzing a regular news media podcast (like NPR’s On Point: Week in News or The New York Times’ The Daily) and for composing a research paper on sound-related media. Students will also have the opportunity to create their own podcast and participate in workshops on operating audio-editing software like Audacity. Class-wide interviews with podcast hosts and with an Advertising Operations Specialist at FiscalNote will give students a taste of the larger media and communications world and the position of sound stories within it.

ENG 1131

Writing Through Media: Science Fiction
Amanda Rose

Why does the science fiction genre continue to remain so popular, even today? What is it about science fiction, and its general association with the future, which somehow continues to attract the interests of a contemporary audience? How can a narrative that is set in the future help to provide readers with unique insights into the historical conditions of the past and present-day? Why does this narrative form seem to be so adaptive to the changing mediums and technologies of the 20th and 21st century?

Throughout the semester, we will be reading sf stories (such as Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report and Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life), we will be watching film adaptations (such as the 2016 adaptation of Minority Report and the 2016 adaptation of Ted Chiang’s work, Arrival), and we will also be watching sf films (such as Starship Troopers and 12 Monkeys), considering science fiction’s evolution as a genre over time, and particularly assessing how sf has evolved based upon the utilization of different narrative forms. Ultimately, throughout this course, we will seek to better understand how our present-day engagement with the sf genre (its content, form, and use of particular narrative conventions) can be seen to change its meaning or value based upon the communicative mediums through which it is portrayed.

By examining the genre of science fiction through a range of different mediums (short stories, television shows, graphic novels, and films), students will gain a better understanding of how the science fiction genre has become increasingly popular in the 21st century, as well as how this narrative form can better serve to best reflect the unique conditions of the historical moment. As students examine science fiction through a range of forms, they will consider not only how to define a science fiction story, but also how the incorporation of the science fiction genre into different media may provide artists with unique opportunities for stylistic experimentation and ideological expression.