Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2022 (Upper Division)

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

Spring 2022

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

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

Course #	Section	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3284	S201	30134	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0002	Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought	Debra King
AML 3607	S202	30135	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0117	African-American Literatures 2	Mark Reid
AML 3673	1C15	10412	T 7/ R 7-8	MAT 0115	Asian American Women Writers	Malini Schueller
AML 4242	S203	26886	MWF 5	MAT 0113	The Progressive Era	Susan Hegeman
AML 4311	6446	22436	MWF 3	FLG 0270	Major Figures: Ursula K. Le Guin	Stephanie A. Smith
CRW 3110	2A96	12374	T 9-11	MAT 0014	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Camille Bordas
CRW 3310	08B3	12375	M 9-11	CBD 0210	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	William Logan
CRW 3310	M134	27222	T 9-11	MAT 0005	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Ange Mlinko
ENC 3312	M151	27342	MWF 6	MAT 0113	Advanced Argumentative Writing	Raúl Sánchez
ENC 4212	S204	30347	MWF 4	MAT 0113	Professional Editing	Victor Del Hierro
ENC 4260	9104	20030	MWF 5	MAT 0051	Advanced Professional Communication	Laura Gonzales
ENG 3011	6452	22716	MWF 5	MAT 0117	The Theorists: Rhetoric and Design	Raúl Sánchez
ENG 3011	S206	30349	T 7/ R 7-8	PUGH 170/ PUGH 170	Critical Theory & the Jew	Dragan Kujundzic
ENG 3122	S207	30350	T 7/ R 7-8/ M 9-11	TUR 2334/ TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	History of Film 2	Robert B. Ray
ENG 4015	M165	27398	MWF 7	MAT 0113	Psychological Approaches to Literature: Reading Freud Closely	Peter Rudnytsky
ENG 4134	S208	30362	MWF 2/ W 9-11	TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Women and Film	Barbara Mennel
ENG 4135	12HA	12937	T 2-3/ R 3/ T 9-11	TUR 2334/ TURN 2334/ ROL 0115	Japanese Cinema	Richard Burt
ENG 4135	13EC	12938	T 8-9/ R 9/ R E1-E3	TUR 2333/ AND 0032/ ROL 0115	Modern Cech Cinema	Holly Raynard
ENG 4310	S209	30367	T 5-6/ R 6/ R 9-11	TUR 2334/ TUR 2334/ ROL 0115	Films of Environmental Crisis	Terry Harpold
ENG 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Independent Study	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4911	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Undergraduate Research in English	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	MWF 3	CBD 0212	Honors Seminar: The “Great American Novel”	Susan Hegeman
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 7/ R 7-8	CBD 0212	Honors Seminar: Identity & Society in the 18th Century	Roger Maioli
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Internship	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4953	1G49	12678	T 8-9/ R 9	TUR 2354/ TUR 2349	Department Seminar: Michel Foucault	John Murchek
ENG 4953	S211	30376	MWF 4	CBD 0212	Department Seminar: Community Engagement	Laura Gonzales
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Honors Thesis Project	Kenneth Kidd
ENL 3112	S225	31366	T 2-3/R 3	MAT 0113	Before Jane Austen: 18th-Century Women Novelists	Roger Maioli
ENL 3154	S212	30419	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0003	20th-Century British Poetry	Marsha Bryant
ENL 3251	13E4	12713	MWF 9	MAT 0113	Victorian Literature	Pamela Gilbert
ENL 4221	154A	12714	MWF 8	MAT 0116	Milton’s Paradise Lost	Peter Rudnytsky
ENL 4333	M176	27459	T 2-3/ R 3	Online	Shakespeare: Learning by Doing	Sidney Homan
LIT 3003	S214	30438	T 5-6/ R 6	MAT 0003	Images & Stories of Labor	Pietro Bianchi
LIT 3043	9117	20117	T 5-6/ R 6	MAT 0002	Black Drama	Mark Reid
LIT 3043	S215	30439	T 4/ R 4-5	Online	Modern Drama: Learning by Doing	Sidney Homan
LIT 3173	6450	22530	T 5-6/ R6	CBD 210/ MAEB 0234	Make Love Not War: Israeli Antiwar Literature and Art	Roy Holler
LIT 3383	44A9	19671	T 7-8/ R 7	FLI 0101/ TUR 2346	African Women Writers	Rose Lugano
LIT 4194	9120	20217	T 4/ R 4-5	TUR 2303	African Literature in English: The Drama of Africa	Apollo Amoko
LIT 4233	9142	21319	T 5-6/ R 6	TUR 2303	Introduction to Postcolonial Studies: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman	Apollo Amoko
LIT 4233	S226	31370	T 5-6/ R 6	MCCB 1108	Postcolonial Francophone African Literature in Translation	Alioune Sow
LIT 4331	S217	30926	W 9-11	Online	Children’s Literature: Diverse BookFinder	Kenneth Kidd
LIT 4332	S219	30946	MWF 3	MAT 0113	Questions of Representation in Literature for the Young Child	Kathryn Hampshire
LIT 4333	1B85	14043	W 9-11	TUR 2353	Literature for Adolescent	John Cech
LIT 4483	S218	30934	T 8-9/ R 9	Online	Europe from Margins: Representations of the Second World War	Minji Kang
LIT 4930	017C	14044	T 8-9/ R 9	TUR 2322	Jewish American Cinema	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	06A5	14045	MWF 8	MAT 0113	Feminist Fictions	Tace Hedrick
LIT 4930	4E67	18856	T 4/ R 4-5	FAC 0120/ ROG 0129	Ghosts & Other Missing Persons	Richard Burt
LIT 4930	9787	28312	M 6-8	TUR 2342	The Child on Film	John Cech
LIT 4930	9788	28760	T 4/ R 4-5	TUR 2334/ TUR 2334	Introduction to Israeli Cinema	Roy Holler
LIT 4930	9789	28764	M 9-11	TUR 2303	Creative Non-Fiction	Michael Hofmann
LIT 4930	S216	30530	M 9-11	AND 0019	Rhetorcial Devices in Contemporary Poetry	Ange Mlinko
LIT 4930	S227	31720	MWF 6	MCCB 1108	Modern Chinese Fiction and Film	Ying Xiao
LIT 4930	M192	27478	T 6-7/ R 6	LIT 0125/ LEIGH 0104	African Film and Media	Kole Odutola
LIT 4930	M193	27479	MWF 5	UST 0034	Black Englishes	James Essegbey

Course Descriptions

AML 3284

Alice Walker’s Womanist Thought
Debra King

Description: This course introduces students to an internationally renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and activist whose work, both creative and sociopolitical, has shaken the foundations of American literature and feminist theory to reconstitute the boundaries of both. Walker’s work has earned the highest accolades of praise and accomplishment, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983, induction into the California Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame (2001) among others. Her works include seven novels, four children’s books, four collections of short stories, and innumerous essays and collections of poetry. Notably, one of American literature’s most prolific writes, her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. As a writer and social activist, Walker remains an international figure of increasing fame and respect. Her novels, poetry, essays and blog (www.alicewalkersgardens.com) explore themes of naturalistic fiction while engaging dramatic (and often problematic) themes of Humanism; Gnostic Psychology (Jungian thought, for instance), Spirituality; Ontology, and, of course, Womanism.

This semester students will investigate why critics herald Alice Walker as the mother of Womanism and determine, through her writing, what Womanism means. The works we will study are powerful offerings of intellectual engagement that move beyond human victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal and revival. But most importantly, each selected text demonstrates not only what Womanism is, or can do, but also how one (regardless of color or nationality) can achieve the Womanist gift of vital, human connectedness that provides access to individual and communal wholeness. I welcome you to journey with me into the world of Alice Walker’s Womanist thought and discover how, as an elder, she pursues the survival whole of all humanity while professing, “Everything is a Human Being” (essay in Living by the Word).

AML 3607

African-American Lieratures 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 literary critics and historians overlooked for several 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.)

REQUIRED TEXTS

James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room (New York: Random House, 1956) ISBN 0385334583
Wesley Brown. Push Comes to Shove (Concord, MA: Concord Free Press, 2009) ISBN:9780981782416
Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Signet, 1959) ISBN: 0679755330
Samuel A. Hay. African American Theatre (NY: Cambridge UP, 1994) ISBN 0521465850
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Dutchman and The Slave. (New York: William Morrow, 1964) ISBN: 9780688210847
Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1959) ISBN: 9781558614987
James McBride. The Color of Water (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) ISBN: 9781594481925
Lynn Nottage. Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Other Plays (NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2004) ISBN: 1559362146
John A. Williams. Clifford’s Blues (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998) ISBN: 1566890802
Shay Youngblood. Black Girl in Paris (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001) ISBN: 1573228516

AML 3673

Asian American Women Writers
Malini Schueller

This course will focus on Asian American women’s cultural productions—novels, critical essays, short stories, memoirs, films—from the early twentieth century to the present. In our discussions of these texts we will explore questions of identity formation in relation in relation to factors such as racial discrimination, military conflict, sexuality, immigration, and colonialism. We will attend to how Asian American women negotiate multiple affiliations whether ethnic, familial, or national. In addition to looking at works that emphasize forms of national belonging we will also examine the afterlives of US colonialism in Asia and the literary portrayal of geopolitics. Some of the texts we will study are Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Aime Phan’s We Should Never Meet, Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, Elaine Kim’s Sa-I-Gu, and Hisaye Yamamot’s Seventeen Syllables.

Course Requirements: Regular attendance and class participation; two 7-8 page papers; one oral presentation; pop quizzes.

AML 4242

The Progressive Era
Susan Hegeman

The Progressive Era in American history (roughly 1890-1920) is so named because of the reformist politics and social activism of the period, which took on corruption in government and big business, and sought to counteract some of the worst effects of mass immigration, urbanization, industrialization, poverty, and racism. The narrative literature of the period reflected this activist mood, taking on topics including populism, lynching, prostitution, urban housing and sanitation, women’s rights, and the power of corporate trusts. Also notable in this literary moment was a close connection between journalism and narrative fiction — so close, in fact, that a many of the best-known fiction writers of the period were also journalists. In this class, we will read exemplary works of fiction (novels and short stories) and nonfiction from the Progressive Era and examine how the social movements of the period affected literary efforts, and vice versa. Authors will include Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan Glaspell, William Dean Howells, James Weldon Johnson, and Upton Sinclair. We will also watch several historical documentaries and one silent film. Course requirements include two longer papers, one shorter paper focused on a primary source, and active participation in online and in-class discussion.

AML 4311

Major Figures: Ursula K. Le Guin
Stephanie A. Smith

Hailed as a ‘living legend’ during her lifetime, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin passed away at the age of 88 in January 2018. Now recognized as one of the greatest authors of our time, Le Guin created new and alien worlds that yet always speak to deeply important issues in our own lives, and to what it means to be human. By turns witty and wild, mischievous and yet always dangerous, Le Guin’s consummate ability to both entertain and make the reader think is a rare and radiant combination that this class will explore by examining her multi-faceted career as a novelist, poet, essayist and children’s book author.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Camille Bordas

In this workshop, we will focus on essential aspects of fiction writing: specificity, intentionality, and the art of tension-building.

Our workshop will be conducted in traditional workshop fashion: each week, we will discuss two short stories (or novel excerpts), by two different students. Every student will turn in two pieces of fiction over the course of the semester.

The writer whose work is being critiqued is expected to turn in a piece he or she believes to be as close to being finished as possible. The students critiquing the piece will treat it as published work, meaning they will discuss it as if the writer has deep intentions behind every line (which hopefully they do) and they, as readers, want to understand those intentions. Students are expected, each week, to write comments for those who are being critiqued, and share them with the class. Participation in class-discussion is mandatory.

Over the course of the semester, students will also be required to read (from a course-packet) a few short stories, which we’ll discuss in class. The focus of these discussions will be on how the stories operate on the reader. In other words, we’ll try to dissect published works to see what makes them work.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar: Imaginative Writing: Poetry
William Logan

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

—Composer and pianist Kenny Werner

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

—Guardian (London), 9 August 2000

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

—Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker, May 14, 2007

In this workshop we will attend to words as closely as a painter attends to paint—or to clouds. You’ll read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Gjertrud Schnackenberg to Ishion Hutchinson, and write a poem a week. Every week in addition to poems from students the workshop will discuss poems from poets past and present. This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken at least one lower-division workshop (CRW 1301 or CRW 2300) and who want to press their understandings of poetic language even further.

Email of your manuscript is necessary for early registration. Please submit four poems to <wlogan@english.ufl.edu> in one attachment in .pdf format. Mention the workshops you have previously taken.

Required reading (tentative):

Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter ed. Ferguson
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984
Geoffrey Hill, Canaan
Sylvia Plath, Poems
Michael Hofmann, Selected Poems

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Ange Mlinko

This is an intermediate workshop that will introduce you to a range of contemporary poems to use as models to expand your skills and deepen your imagination. Weekly prompts might incorporate dreams, descriptions of famous art works, historical events, centos, abedecarians, sonnet dialogues, and much more. Strong compositional skills are recommended, as well as a passion for stylish language.

ENC 3312

Advanced Argumentative Writing
Raúl Sánchez

This is a writing-intensive course that works on a writing-center or writing-studio model in which, every week, you write a new essay and revise an old essay. Altogether, you will write and revise ten (10) essays.

Rather than meet as a group in the traditional way, every week each student will meet with me individually. At this weekly meeting, we will discuss how to revise your new essay, and we will assess how you did with your old essay.

The main idea of the course is that arguments require trust. The main question of the course will be how to build trust.

You won’t have to buy any books. Everything you need will be available for free through Canvas and/or Ares (UF Libraries Course Reserves).

ENC 4212

Professional Editing
Victor Del Hierro

This course will examine the theory and practice of editing and management of documentation in industry and other organizational settings. With an emphasis on Technical and Professional Communication, students will spend the semester learning best practices and strategies for doing editing work while considering culturally relevant contexts. In addition to editing, the course will also cover user-centered design and user-experience methods for approaching editing work. Readings in the course will include digital and print based texts from a variety of sources. Assignments in the course will include technical reports and project-based editing assignments including but not limited to: community organizations, website, fiction, non-fiction, and other multimodal texts.

ENC 4260

Advanced Professional Communication
Laura Gonzales

This class threads together concepts, practices, and methods from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), technical and professional communication (TPW), user-experience (UX), as well as community literacy (CL). The goal of this course is to help students understand how technology designers, professional writers, and researchers can collaborate with communities to design tools, technologies, and other media to benefit a specific community’s goals, needs, and desires. Students will read about and practice different research methods to develop their own orientation to community-based research that is grounded in contemporary technology design principles. Ultimately, students will leave this course with experience innovating, designing, testing, revising, and presenting a tool or technology of their choice, as well as an online portfolio showcasing their skills as professional communicators.

ENG 3011

The Theorists: Rhetoric and Design
Raúl Sánchez

The fields of rhetoric and design deal with symbols. Rhetoric deals with verbal symbols, mostly. Design deals with visual symbols, mostly. Lately, the two fields have intertwined a bit.

This course examines that intertwining. It will be divided into three parts. In the first, we will read and discuss contemporary essays that develop theories of rhetoric. In the second, we will do the same with essays that develop theories of design. In the third, we will think and talk about how rhetoric and design intertwine, aided by some essays that do this explicitly.

The format of the course is discussion. There are no lectures. Generally, here is how each class session works:

I provide a framework for the day’s discussion. (10 minutes)
You break out into groups of 4-6 to discuss some aspect of that framework. I move from group to group, helping your discussion along as needed. (30 minutes)
We reconvene to review what each group discussed. (10 minutes)

The work of the course is writing, in the following forms:

three 1000-word essays, each worth 25 points
twenty-five 150-word responses to the reading assignments, each worth 1 point.

The cost of the course is nothing. All reading materials will be free and available through Canvas, the UF Libraries, or the internet.

ENG 3011

Critical Theory & the Jew
Dragan Kujundžić

The course discusses and explains major philosophical texts concerned with the figure of the Jew, in the works by Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Memmi, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Derrida or Shoshana Felman, among others. It also includes relevant theoretical as well as literary texts or films to discuss anti-Semitism and illustrate issues of representation of race before and after the Holocaust.

ENG 3122

History of Film 2
Robert B. Ray

This course covers the years from 1930-1965. The first half examines the consolidation of the Studio System and the emergence of Classic Hollywood, whose model of filmmaking came to define what most people still think of as “a movie.” We will also look at some alternatives to that model, especially in the work of Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir. The second half takes up film noir and Italian Neorealism, concluding with the French New Wave, a movement that self-consciously drew on the earlier filmmaking we will have studied. Movies will include Grand Hotel, 42^nd Street, M, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Rules of the Game, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, In a Lonely Place, The Narrow Margin, Open City, Paisà, The Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Shoot the Piano Player, Masculine-Feminine, all in black-and-white, and at least eight with subtitles.

Assignments: daily quizzes on readings and film showings, class participation, and two three-hour essay exams based on questions distributed in advance.

ENG 3122 is not a film appreciation course, but rather a course in film history. Like most history courses, it involves a lot of reading, much of it in primary source materials (as opposed to textbooks). I give daily reading quizzes (which last five minutes), so if you don’t like to do a lot of reading that you get tested on, this course may not be for you.

As an upper-division class, ENG 3122 is intended for juniors and seniors. I’ve seen freshmen do well in the course, but I’ve seen others have difficulties. If you have doubts about where to begin film study, you should probably take ENG 2300, the introductory course. You do not, however, need to have taken ENG 3121 (Film History I), which covers the silent era.

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature: Reading Freud Closely
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will undertake a close reading of Freud’s masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, supplemented by “Screen Memories,” On Dreams, and selected chapters of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. We will study Freud’s theoretical ideas but also his biography, centering on his relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, with whom he in all probability had a love affair in 1900. No previous background in Freud or psychoanalysis is required, but it would be desirable if students were interested in trying to understand “what makes people tick.” Course requirements include weekly journals, a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected.

ENG 4134

Women and Film
Barbara Mennel

Women and Film will introduce students to the history of German women film directors. We will begin in 1931 with the classic Girls in Uniform and engage with questions regarding gender and fascism with the films by Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. An emphasis on 1970s New German Cinema will focus on emergence of explicit feminist filmmaking. The course will conclude with a discussion of diverse genres (comedy, drama, biopic, art film) by contemporary German, Austrian, and Swiss directors. The class will focus on gender and sexuality on the one hand and aesthetics and politics on the other.

ENG 4135

Japanese Cinema
Richard Burt

We will mostly watch films by canonical Japanese filmmakers, including Kurosawa, Ozu, Kobayashi, Naruse, Oshima, Mizoguchi, Teshigahara, Kore-eda, Suzuki, among others. We will also see some cult films like House, Sword of Doom, and Onibaba. The central question the course is what is Japanese about Japanese cinema? Or is there such as Japanese cinema any more than there is French or German cinema? We will spend a week on each film. I will ask you to watch each film twice each week. All films will in Japanese with English subtitles. Most will be in black and white. We watch not watch any anime. Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Monday and once on a Wednesday; two discussion questions; and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class; student formulated quizzes each class; three 500 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to the films.

https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/stanford-libraries-blog/2016/11/disappeared-poet-weldon-kees-surfaces-san-francisco-0

ENG 4135

Modern Cech Cinema
Holly Raynard

Hailed as the “Hollywood of Europe,” Prague has been an internationally recognized hub for cinema since Machatý’s provocative Ecstasy (1933). This course will introduce students to the Czech cinematic tradition—from the establishment of the Barrandov Studios “Dream Factory” in the 1930s to the Czech New Wave to recent post-transition hits like Kolya (aka “Coca-Kolya”). We will analyze the cinematic language of storytelling and explore uniquely Czech approaches to film narrative. We will also examine how Czech cinema has responded to foreign influences—from the “Aryanization“ of the Nazis to the “normalization” of the Soviet Union to the genre system and big budgets of Hollywood—and compare Czech trends to their Western counterparts. By the end of the course, students will understand the central socio-political and economic issues underlying Czech film culture from the 1930s to the present, be familiar with the major movements, genre and filmmakers in Czech cinema and think critically about various approaches to cinema.

ENG 4310

Films of Environmental Crisis
Terry Harpold

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

Films we will view and discuss may include: Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928), Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, Holland, 1929), Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (UK, 1961), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (US, 1972), Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (Australia, 1977), Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime, Japan, 1997), Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand (Casa de areia, Brazil, 2005), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (Sānxiá hǎorén, China, 2006), Sylvère Petit’s The Fanning Bees (Les Ventileuses, France, 2010), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (S. Korea/Czech Republic, 2013), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia 2015), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lija’s Aniara (Sweden/Denmark, 2018).

ENG 4905

Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice

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

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

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research in English
Undergraduate Coordinator

TBD

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: The “Great American Novel”
Susan Hegeman

The term “the Great American Novel” was coined in 1868, in an essay by a minor novelist named John William DeForest, whose disappointing conclusion was that such a thing did not exist — or at least not yet. Since that time, there have been many candidates for this title, so much so, that it is a cliché of literary marketing. In this class, we will investigate DeForest’s and others’ criteria for the “Great American Novel,” and consider them in historical and social context. We will also read novels that have at various times been identified this way, beginning with DeForest’s half-hearted nominee for the title, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though the reading list may change, some other possible texts include William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John dos Passos, The Big Money, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, and Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Active attendance and participation is expected. Written work will consist of several research papers.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Shaping Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century
Roger Maioli

Note: This is an advanced seminar involving a substantive reading load. You will be expected to read an average of 200 pages a week, including texts with a considerable level of theoretical complexity. Frequent participation will be a requirement.

Combining literature and social and intellectual history, this course will consider how a range of eighteenth-century authors reflected on the problem of individual identity. Our governing question will be: how are identifies defined and challenged by the cultures and social norms in which they take shape? What was it like to be Black or Jewish in predominantly white Christian cultures? What did it mean to be a woman in societies that closely policed the range of acceptable female behaviors? How were identities differently imagined by insiders and outsiders? And what did it mean to be American from an eighteenth-century European perspective? In order to examine these questions, we will be pairing historical and theoretical works with a wide variety of eighteenth-century literary sources. These will include fictional narratives by Henry Fielding, the Abbé Prévost, and Maria Edgeworth, as well as semifictional and nonfictional narratives by James Boswell, Frances Burney, Olaudah Equiano, and St. John de Crèvecoeur.

ENG4940

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.

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: Michel Foucault
John Murchek

The editors of prestigious anthologies both reflect and shape the common wisdom about the writers whose work they republish. So, when the headnote to the selections from the work of Michel Foucault in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism claims that “Foucault is arguably the most influential European writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century,” the editors are not simply indulging in hyperbole. They are adopting and perpetuating an evaluation that has widespread acceptance. Even now, thirty-seven years after his death in 1984, Foucault’s work continues to be analyzed, elaborated, applied and contested.

In this department seminar, we will read a number of Foucault’s works, likely including the unabridged History of Madness (1961, full trans. 2006), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), the four volumes of The History of Sexuality (volume 1 in 1976, volumes 2 and 3 in 1984, and volume 4 in 2018—translation appearing in February, 2021), and selected volumes of Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France (perhaps those from 1983 and 1984).

We will, to take up the terms of the Norton editors, consider Foucault as both a thinker and a writer. While I acknowledge the objection that one can hardly write without thinking or think without writing, I mean this distinction to designate both the what and the how of Foucault’s arguments: on the one hand, the logic that might be summarized, and on the other hand, the rhetorical practices that make his texts so very “written.” In the former case, we will analyze the arguments that Foucault’s histories make about such things as madness, the social sciences, penality, and sexuality. In the latter case, we will examine the ways in which Foucault describes, narrates, or stages the histories of these phenomena. These histories are variously called archaeologies and genealogies, and we will ask after the nature of such historical practices. What relations do they establish between the past and the present? What kinds of interventions do they stage in our knowledge of the phenomena whose formations and transformations they recount? What are the politics of these interventions? What kinds of configurations of power relations obtain in the fields Foucault’s histories narrate? How do his analyses of these power relations invite us to think about the nature of power relations in the world we inhabit?

Students will be evaluated on attendance and active participation, two or three brief writing assignments shared with the rest of the class, a presentation, and a substantial essay due roughly three-quarters of the way through the semester.

The course will not presume any previous experience reading theory. Indeed, we may try to determine what theory might be on the basis of reading Foucault.

This course should be of interest to students pursuing the following undergraduate models of study: Studies in Theory, Cultural Studies, and Feminisms, Genders and Sexualities.

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: Community Engagement
Laura Gonzales

Emphasizing the role of humanities professionals as public intellectuals, this course provides frameworks, methods, and strategies for practicing community engagement not as service, but as reciprocal research. This course will ask students to consider what communities they belong to, what audiences fuel their work, and how our research in English studies can contribute to the good work that is already taking place in communities outside the ivory tower. Drawing on frameworks and methodologies that thread together Chicana feminism, Black womanist epistemologies, and decolonial theory (among others) with emerging practices in information and technology design, this course will ask students to consider who the communities and publics that we are all accountable to as members of the academy. Particular emphasis will be placed on developing public-facing materials and portfolios that demonstrate students’ preparation for both academic and pubic-facing work in community organizations, justice-driven businesses, and other public venues. No prior experience with community engagement is required, as we will all begin the course by learning about each other and the communities we currently inhabit. Course projects will include a research-driven community researcher positionality statement, digital materials demonstrating community commitments, as well as a literature review based on community-engagement research.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis Project
Faculty Members (2) of Choice

Students must have have completed at least one semester of ENG 4936, Honors Seminar. Open to English Honors students.

The student must select two faculty members: one to direct the reading, research, and writing of a thesis on a topic of the student’s and director’s chosing, and another as the second reader. An abstract (100 to 200 words) must be delivered to the CLAS Academic Advising Center on Fletcher Road at least 10 days before graduation.

ENL 3112

Before Jane Austen: Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists
Roger Maioli

Jane Austen is now firmly established as one of the supreme novelists in the English language. The influential critic F.R. Leavis placed her at the beginning of a “Great Tradition” in the British novel, a highly exclusive club with a total membership of four. Other Austen admirers viewed her instead as the climax of an earlier novelistic tradition dating back to the early eighteenth century. On this view, Austen’s predecessors — or the “early masters of English fiction,” as one critic called them — included Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. Notice that these are all male names. Fair as twentieth-century critics often were to Austen, they also implied that she was the first woman to have written novels worth reading. Today, thanks to decades of hard work by feminist critics, that picture has changed. Scholars of the British novel have come to acknowledge the central role played by earlier women novelists in shaping the conventions that Austen brought to perfection. Austen’s female predecessors, however, remain little known outside specialist circles. This course will introduce you to their work, their accomplishments as novelists, and the range of social and political issues they addressed. We will read novels and proto-novels written by women between 1689 and 1811 (the year of Austen’s first appearance in print). We will begin with shorter fiction by Penelope Aubin, Aphra Behn, and Mary Davys; we will then proceed to novels of manners by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth and to Ann Radcliffe’s thrilling Gothic masterpiece The Mysteries of Udolpho; and we will close by reading (or re-reading!) Austen’s timeless Pride and Prejudice.

ENL 3154

20th-Century British Poetry
Marsha Bryant

This survey course provides in-depth analysis of poems by W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Linton Kwesi Johnson -or- Grace Nichols (depending on book availability), Carol Ann Duffy, and UF’s own Michael Hofmann. We will examine their poems, lives, and cultural contexts. As we move through the syllabus, perceptions of gender, family, and nation will shift as definitions of “British poetry” change. Course assignments include a long and a short paper, a panel presentation, several Perusall annotation assignments, a parody, reading quizzes, and engaged participation in discussion. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and argumentative writing. I look forward to discussing the poetry with you.

ENL 3251

Victorian Literature
Pamela Gilbert

This course will survey several genres of Victorian literature, including fiction, drama, poetry and non-fiction prose. It will be organized thematically. The reading list may include Browning, Tennyson, Barrett-Browning, Rossetti, Gaskell, Dickens, Braddon, Eliot, Oliphant, Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw, Pater, Carlyle, Ruskin, and/or others. This is not a course on the novel (that course is ENL 3122), and we will be reading some fiction, but mostly in forms other than the novel itself. Themes may include the following: nature and culture; sex and gender; class, economics and poverty; science and morality; past and future/nostalgia and utopia; race and empire. 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. Expect a considerable amount of reading. Assignments will likely include three short papers, quizzes, and one presentation.

ENL 4221

Milton’s Paradise Lost
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will consist of a close reading of Milton’s seventeenth-century epic, generally agreed to be the greatest poem in the English language. Theological, political, psychological, and gender issues will be considered as we focus all the while on understanding Milton’s language. Course requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are expected.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Learning By Doing
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, in the collaboration of actors and audience. This means that the play’s full text includes: sub-text (the inner voice of a character, the character’s history before the play, that shapes and colors the playwright’s actual dialogue), gestures, movement, the entire “stage picture.” In the theatre we would further supplement this text with lighting, sound, costume, props, and make-up.

To be sure, one can approach a play in various ways—as literature, as a repository for the thinking of an age, as a springboard for political or cultural issues. But since I work on campus and in the theatre as an actor and director, and since the theatre is a medium with its own aesthetic principles, I approach plays with my students as something meant to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience.

In this class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. In my course, then, we study the theatre from the perspective of actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, and enacting that character through delivery, gestures, movement, and, most especially, subtext.

Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” the scene with the two actors, trying out options, rehearsing options of interpretation. The emphasis, therefore, is on learning by doing, and I assess student work by intent, what goes into the performance—not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is consider a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal. Performances and the scene-work paper count equally.

I’ll provide commentary on the theatrical and critical history of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the historical context of his theatre. I will also draw on my own experience as an actor and director. We will study through performance: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, and King Lear. We will also stage scenes from Tom Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in his 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 script. Please have no fear on this issue.

Chosen as the University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Sidney Homan is Professor of English and author of some eighteen books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He also works as an actor and director in professional and university theatres.

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

LIT 3003

Images & Stories of Labor
Pietro Bianchi

How many times did we see a blue–collar worker (or a pink or a white-collar worker) on the screen of a movie theater? How many times did the story of a TV show take place in a factory? When did it happen that a movie was about migrant workers spending their days on an agricultural field? And when was the last time that the protagonist was a nurse in a hospital, a USPS mail carrier or a janitor?

The representation of labor has always constituted a symptomatic place in American ideology, traversing the history of the 20th and 21th century in a conflicting and contradictory way. Most of the time workers have been rejected and reduced to invisibility, but their stories also continuously reappeared, sometimes in the most unexpected places.

This course will address the different forms of representation of labor in the history of the United States (with few examples from Europe and UK as well). From John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley to The Wire, from Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA to John G. Avildsen’s Rocky, from the songs of Bruce Springsteen and Loretta Lynn to contemporary hip-hop and country music we will interrogate how the representation of labor has evolved through time, and what this process tells us about the contemporary transformation of American society.

This course will be a combination of cultural studies, critical theory and film studies. Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, three short quizzes and a 5-pages final research paper.

LIT 3043

Black 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. Assigned readings 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 drafting the analytical group-paper or in the group-dramatic performance, student-groups must create a gumbo-like analysis/performance of the lived, imagined, and performed elements found in the assigned dramas.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun (NY: Signet, 1959)
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Dutchman and The Slave (NY: William Morrow, 1964)
Lynn Nottage. Crumbs From the Table of Joy and Other Plays (NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2004)
Ed Bullins, The Taking of Miss Janie (1975) in William B. Branch, Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama (NY: Penguin, 1992)
Anna Deveare Smith. Fires in the Mirror (NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1993)
Anna Deveare Smith. Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1994)
Stew. Passing Strange: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical (NY: Applause Books, 2009)
James Baldwin. Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play (NY: Signet, 1964)
August Wilson. The Piano Lesson (NY: Penguin, 1990)
August Wilson. Fences (NY: Penguin, 1986)

LIT 3043

Modern Drama: Learning By Doing
Sidney Homan

In his class each student will have a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. In my course, then, we study the theatre from the perspective of actors and directors, charged with memorizing lines, building a character, and enacting that character through delivery, gestures, movement, and, most especially, subtext.

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

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

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

LIT 3173

Make Love Not War: Israeli Antiwar Literature and Art
Roy Holler

We are constantly bombarded with news about the raging battles between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, with no end in sight. Even Fauda, one of Netflix’s biggest hit shows, presents the Israelis and Palestinians living in a limbo of grim violence, with little hope for a better future. Is anybody opposing the war? In this course we will seek literary and artistic voices that are criticizing and demonstrating against the conflict, from the early days of Israeli until contemporary times. We will read anti-war literature written by soldiers and victims of war, explore the peacenik fallacy of “shooting and crying,” move on to focus on women writers to ask how gender effects the conflict, and end the course by seeking representations of love in impossible scenarios. Students will read Hebrew literature in translation, view Israeli films, write weekly blog posts and submit a final creative project.

LIT 3383

African Women Writers
Rose Lugano

In this class we will explore African women writers and critics, looking at their theoretical priorities and cultural positions. The course is designed to provide students with both a specific and a general view of the perspectives, status, achievement and experiences of African women in fiction. In exploring African women’s literary tradition, we will use a diverse set of texts from different genres, which include novels, poems, movies, and plays selected across the vast continent. 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, oppression, resistance, exile, gender roles, the role of religion, colonialism and Neo-colonialism. The framework for classroom discussion will revolve around two central issues

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

LIT 4194

African Literature in English: The Drama of Africa
Apollo Amoko

This course will critique a diverse catalogue of contemporary African plays. Novels have long come to dominated African literary studies. In what ways would placing drama center stage alter the critical and theoretical terrian? In a sense, the high profile enjoyed by the novels merely reflects the overall (but perhaps temporary) decline of poetry and drama in contemporary literary studies. However, this development enacts specific distortions in an embattled postcolonial context where the canonical novel continues to implicate a small intellectual class, what Kwame Anthony Appiah has contemptuously termed the “comprador intelligentsia.” According to Appiah, high cultural African art inhabits and reflects the world of “a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.” The preoccupations of that rarified class would seem to be fundamentally at odds with the practices and politics of everyday life in the bewilderingly diverse continent. To what extent does drama escape the limits of elite culture? Simon Gikandi suggests that plays can perform an important mediating function in contemporary African culture: “Conceived as an instrument for change, drama, more than the novel, could be formalized to overcome the historical and social gap between intellectuals and workers, between popular culture and elite forms of artistic expression.” The course critique Gikandi’s provocative contentions against the backdrop of Appiah’s sweeping claims. We will focus on such landmarks in the history of African theater as the First and Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac) that were in Algiers, Algeria in 1969 and Lagos, Nigeria in 1977). As well, we will examine the various national theater movements established in postcolonial Africa with particular emphasis on the Kenya National Theatre controversy of the 1970s, the Kamiriithu Theatre Experiment, the Popular Theater Movement, the Theatre for Development Movement.

LIT 4233

Introduction to Postcolonial Studies: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman
Apollo Amoko

This addresses the emergence of the Bildungsroman as a dominant aesthetic formation in late colonial and early postcolonial Africa literature. We will examine pertinent issues and concepts in postcolonial studies by focusing on diverse novels published between the 1950s and 1980s as the beleaguered continent transitioned from oppressive European colonial to incomplete, uncertain, and disappointing independence. In what uncanny ways did historically European aesthetic formation come to powerfully embody the complex and embattled realities of a putative independent African postcolony? In a foundational critique in the bildungsroman in European culture, Franco Moretti contends that the genre represents a paradigmatic shift in which, for the first time, “youth came to constitute the most meaningful part of life.” Not only was the protagonist in 18^th and 19^th century European fiction invariably a young man, but also, his youth was a decisive condition of formation. Moretti asserts that in stable societies, youth is but a relatively unremarkable prelude to mature adulthood with: “Each individual’s youth faithfully repeats that of his forebears, introducing him to a role that lives on unchanged: it is a ‘pre-scribed’ youth.” However, during periods of radical transformation and social upheaval, youth takes center stage supplanting adulthood. In the wake of modernization, industrialization, urbanization, secularization, democratization and so on, the 18^th and 19^th centuries were periods of sweeping change and widespread uncertainty in Europe. Against that background, youth became, as it were, modernity’s essence, “the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in that past.” Moretti’s addresses the conditions for the existence of the European bildungsroman. But they seem to apply with uncanny precision to the rise of the bildungsroman in postcolonial Africa and elsewhere. Like its European forebear, the emergence of the African bildungsroman coincided with a period of radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously undermined, if not forever transformed. Like its European counterpart, the African bildungsroman focuses on the formation of young protagonists in an uncertain world. In a sense, the genre marks the death of the father as a symbol of stable, unquestioned, patriarchal traditional authority.

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Francophone African Literature in Translation
Alioune Sow

This course explores recent developments in contemporary Francophone African literature. Focusing mainly on the novel and autobiography, the course examines the new forms, modalities of writing, literary configurations, and processes in relation to the introduction of the new topics convoked by African authors to engage with contemporary African experiences in and out of the continent. The critical perspective adopted is interdisciplinary and draws from Senghor, Moretti, Newell, Mbembe and Sarr to identify renewed literary forms and practices and uncover contemporary thought. Authors include Alain Mabanckou, Gael Faye, Léonora Miano, David Diop, Tierno Monénembo. The course is taught in English.

LIT 4331

Children’s Literature: Diverse BookFinder
Kenneth Kidd

This section of LIT 4331, Children’s Literature, will support a collaborative expansion of the Diverse BookFinder (DBF) project: https://diversebookfinder.org/. DBF began under the direction of Dr. Krista Aronson at Bates College and focused on the representation of BIPOC characters and themes in picturebooks published since 2002. The primary goal of DBF is to enhance the discoverability and visibility of these titles for both specialists and general readers. Our course will work toward the addition of middle-grade and young adult titles to the DBF database, while also studying the practical, philosophical, and ethical challenges involved with supporting greater diversity in children’s and young adult literature. The course will function like a lab course, in a way, with students both working together and pursuing individualized research. Students will read relevant scholarship and social commentary and will receive training in coding practices used for the identification and annotation of DBF texts. Each student will read, analyze, and provide information about 10 titles of their choosing, for a total of 150 books to be added to the database (75 per genre). The data for those books will also be used to develop and/or evaluate operational categories for the project. As students read and work independently, they will also be in regular conversation with each other, with the instructor, and with the project’s Advisory Council. Assignments will include the coding data itself, expository cultural and critical contextualization for the books read independently, and a reflection paper on the experience of participating in the project.

This course will be delivered fully online, as the course involves a good bit of collaboration with colleagues at Bates College.

LIT 4332

Questions of Representation in Literature for the Young Child
Kathryn Hampshire

In all forms of literature, representation matters. This is especially true in picture books, where the stories are visual as well as textual and the readers are often young children as well as adults. In this class, we will examine the multiple layers and facets of representation that make these texts so generative for young readers and scholars alike. Why is diverse representation important in children’s literature, and how to picture books seek to meet this need? How do picture books use representational beings like monsters to embody abstract and invisible experiences? What formal elements of the picture book influence how they represent stories through word and image? In what ways do picture books attempt to re-present stories in a new way to a new audience?

As we search the pages of picture books for answers to these questions, we will apply analytical frameworks from literary theory to these texts to further explore their generative and representational potential. This class will also include research in UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, creative projects, and examinations of specific categories of picture books, like pop-up books, parody books for adults, controversial texts, and recent Caldecott Medal candidates.

Possible texts include My Brother Charlie by Denene Millner, The Arrival by Shaun Tan, Pat the Beastie by Henrik Drescher, The WorryWoo Monsters series by Andi Green, The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin, The Proudest Blue by Ibtihaj Muhammad and S.K. Ali, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, Our Subway Baby by Peter Mercurio, I am Jazz by Jessica Herthel, and illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Assignments may include writing micro response papers and giving informal presentations on selected texts, creating our own picture books, participating in online discussion boards, reviewing new titles, and applying literary theory in a final paper that focuses on each student’s interests about picture books.

LIT 4333

Literature for Adolescents
John Cech

This course is designed to provide you with a survey of some major figures, historical trends, and critical approaches to that vibrant, edgy, immensely popular field of literature that occupies the shifting, transitional ground between works for children and adults. We will look at a broad range of genres and styles intended for or chosen by the adolescent reader, beginning with some canonical “classics” from the mid-twentieth century, and ending with some innovative novels from our own literary present. Taken together, these works will raise many of the questions (psychological, social, philosophical) in our discussions that are asked by adolescents themselves about their own challenging, demanding, and often defining experiences. A principal interest of the course will be to examine the ways in which successive generations have “constructed” their ideas of the adolescent through a variety of cultural forms, among them: literature, film, television, music, and, most recently, the internet.

LIT 4483

Europe from Margins: Representations of the Second World War
Minji Kang

WWII was a war that encompassed all of Europe, as well as Asia and America. Even though more than half a century has passed since WWII occurred, we still feel the lasting effects of the war through political disputes about reparations, literary works, as well as memorials and museums. We know the dominant narrative about WWII being a fight between Allied and Axis powers, but how much do we know about the lesser known Eastern European and Asian spheres of this global war? The European and Asian fronts of WWII may be more connected than we think. Some examples include how “comfort women” were sent from various parts of East and Southeast Asia to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military and how women from Eastern Europe were sent to German military brothels. The course will investigate the lesser-known Eastern European sphere during WWII through areas known as bloodlands, and the ongoing controversy surrounding reparations for “comfort women” in parts of Asia. This course reveals how the study of Eastern Europe informs the study of Asia and vice versa, as we trace transnational connections through looking at WWII. We will also look at Afro-European connections and the issues surrounding race and gender identities of mixed race children post-WWII.

This course invites students to revisit WWII through international perspectives to make cross-cultural ties and trace diaspora communities formed as a result of war. Selected course materials urge us to see WWII from the perspective of those on the front lines to those at home, as well as those feeling the reverberating affects of the war in the present day.

We will interrogate broader concepts of migration, globalization, memory, and postcolonialism, as well as race, and gender identity formation through books, films, and museums centered on WWII. Assignments will consist of weekly discussion posts, 10-15 minute presentations, a 5-page midterm synthesis paper, and a creative research project on the student’s deeper investigation of an aspect of WWII.

LIT 4930

Jewish American Cinema
Dragan Kujundžić

The course will screen and discuss masterpieces of world cinema such as films by Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator, Norman Jewison Fiddler on the Roof, the Coen Brothers Serious Man, Billy Wilder Some Like It Hot, Mel Brooks The Producers and Blazing Saddles or Quentin Tarantino Inglorious Basterds. Films at the Jewish Film Festival organized online by the
Center for Jewish Studies at UF in the Spring 2021 will be screened and discussed as well.

LIT 4930

Feminist Fictions
Tace Hedrick

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

LIT 4930

Ghosts & Other Missing Persons
Richard Burt

In this course we will focus on ghosts to explore the question of close reading and textual evidence, of whether what you see there in the text is really there or not, as a question of recognition, resemblance, and faith: Do you see it? Can’t you see it? Is it really there? Or are you hallucinating it? Or are you perhaps mad? Is that really the face of Jesus you see in a piece of toast? Is it a miracle? Or a hoax? Can you ignore it or refuse to let it matter? Is it art? Or is it a fake? Questions of audibility will also arise: Are you a good listener? Or are you hearing things? Turning to canonical ghost stories, mystery stories, and detective stories, many with frame narratives, what does it mean to be haunted? Not only by the dead but the disappeared, missing, absentee, murder victims, and people who may have checked out. Literature and films will include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield; Edgar Allan Poe’s William Williams and The Man of the Crowd; John Buchan’s The Strange Adventure of Mr. Andrew Hawthorn; Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla; Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece and Sarrasine; La Belle noiseuse; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”; The Cat and the Canary; Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, A Ghost Story, The Haunting, selected ghost stories by Edith Wharton; Henry James’ The Friends of the Friends, The Way It Came, and The Turn of the Screw; The Others; selected stories by M.R. James, F for Fake; poems by Weldon Kees; Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait; Jacques Derrida’s “Ghost Dance”; and selections from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Ghost Stories, among Others. . . . We will also discuss the telephone and the occult, spirit photography and the Victorian vogue for seances and selected chapters from Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons. Requirements: Co-lead class discussion twice, once on a Monday and once on a Wednesday; two discussion questions; and three or more “BIG WORDS” for each class; student formulated quizzes each class; three 500 word papers; and a willingness to reflect, think, respond, by paying very, VERY, VERY close formal attention to the readings.

LIT 4930

The Child on Film
John Cech

The purpose of this course is to explore and, in a sense, to map, depictions of the child as the subject of visual texts. We will begin with early photography, such as the works of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Jacques Henri Lartigue, and Lewis Hine. We will screen a number of silent movies in which children play important roles. The course will devote considerable time to the emergence of the child as an important film and photographic archetype during the 1930s — from the movies of Shirley Temple to the WPA photographs of Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt, as well as to the contemporary photographs of such artists as Sally Mann, Sheron Rupp, Wendy Ewald, Maggie Taylor, and others.

The second half of the course will consider the portraits of children in the works of filmmakers like Truffaut, Fellini, Spielberg, and Babenco; the documentaries of Apted, Briski, and Burstein; the autobiographical and experimental films of Davies, Madden, and Gondry. Among the questions that we will be asking during the course are why has the child been such an enduring and powerful subject for visual artists, from the first images of children that began to appear among the first images on film, to the mega-star children of the movies today.

LIT 4930

Introduction to Israeli Cinema
Roy Holler

Israeli cinema doesn’t have superheroes, there are no Israeli zombies, no dinosaurs or elaborate CGI effects. There’s not a lot of money, fame or glory involved in Israeli film either. Still, Israeli cinema has a lot going for it. You’ve got love and loss, trauma and rebirth, racial and gender tensions and political conflicts. There is plenty of war, little bit of peace, there are intimate stories and stories that affect an entire nation. Most of all, Israeli film provides a picture-perfect image of Israeli identity, and it holds some of the deepest insights about that little piece of land in the Middle-East. In this course we will learn about the development of Israel as reflected in its film industry and discover a diverse and multi-faceted Israeli existence through the silver screen. Students will watch most assigned movies prior to class meetings and will be expected to write weekly film reviews. The final project will be a creative cinematic production exercise.

LIT 4930

Creative Non-Fiction
Michael Hofmann

A course on writing about people and places. We will read Joan Didion, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Joseph Roth, Andrzej Stasiuk, Annie Ernaux, W.G. Sebald, Will Burns, 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.)

LIT 4930

Rhetorical Devices in Contemporary Poetry
Ange Mlinko

Poets have deployed rhetorical devices to illustrate and amplify emotions since ancient times. This seminar will examine a different trope every week, using examples from contemporary poetry in English. We will notice metaphor and metonym, paranomasia and paradox, prosopopoeia and apophasis, and study deconstructions of idiom and cliché. We will see how these rhetorical devices may organize language in the absence of older, song-based modes like meter, rhyme, and stanzaic patterning — or work in tandem with them. Students will write an imitation of the weekly trope and write a final paper on a contemporary poet’s use of particular tropes. Strong compositional skills are recommended for this course, as well as a proclivity for literature of mystery, ambiguity, and high style.

LIT 4930

Modern Chinese Fiction and Film
Ying Xiao

This course presents an overview of key literary, cultural and cinematic patterns in modern China of the first half of the twentieth century. By engaging in close readings of fictions, essays, and films, we will trace the changes that have occurred in China from the early 20th century to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). As we discuss various transformative moments in modern Chinese history, we will discover how the influx of Western ideas merges with persisting classical Chinese aesthetics to mold the form and content of modern Chinese literature and intellectual thought. Together, we will study the origin and development of Chinese films and also the ways in which the visual/cinematic is interconnected with historical, political and cultural events. We will also examine the various modes of modernist innovation and experimentation that are taking place in Chinese literary and cinematic art well as women’s writing and gender representation. All works are read in English translation and all films will be in Chinese but have English subtitles.

Cross listed as CHI4930.

LIT 4930

African Film and Media/span>
Kole Odutola

Two issues demand critical attention: films by Africans and films about Africans. Both types of creative expressions project different production values and modes of representation. This course, African Film & media, looks at the issue of representation in selected moving images and printed materials.

Ousmane Sembène movies, Xala (Sembene, Senegal 1974).
Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood (2006).
Missing in America (2004- a migration narrative).
Hotel Rwanda (2005).
The Constant Gardener (Kenya, 2005).
White wedding (2011- written by Kenneth Nkosi, Rapulana Seiphemo & Jann Turner ; directed by Jann Turner.
“Nollywood: Just doing it” (Directed & produced by Jane Thorburn).
Flame (Zimbabwe 1996, 1hour 27minites).
Seasons of life-by C. Shemu Joyah (Malawi, 2008).
Cape Verde My Love, 2007 (Ana Lucia Ramos Lisboa ), 81 minutes (compare the language used in the law court in Malawi (week 10 with the one used in the court in Cape Verde)

LIT 4930

Black Englishes
James Essegbey

Unlike Danish which is the language spoken by the Danes or Japanese which is the language the Japanese, English is not just a language of the English, even if that is where it originates. Today, the language has spread across the globe and has been appropriated by regions such that we can talk of Australian English, Nigerian English, etc. While most of the varieties of English can be understood for the most part by every English speaker, there are restructured varieties such as Sranan spoken in Surinam that are more difficult to follow. In fact, these have developed into different languages.

The aim of this course is to present students with varieties of Englishes spoken by Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Students will learn about the structure of these varieties as well as the social histories which underpin them. They will be made to appreciate difficulties in using terms like dialect versus language to describe these varieties. Further, they will watch movies and interact with native speakers of these varieties with a view to identifying features that set them apart. Students will also be introduced to such concepts like “pidgins” and “creoles”. Students will also learn to distinguish between “broken English” and Pidgin or Creole English.