Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2023 (Upper Division)

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

Spring 2023

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

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

Course #	Section	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3285	1SH1	28676	M W F 5	MAT 0116	American Indian Literature	Susan Hegeman
AML 3607	1MR1	26161	T 4/ R 4-5	MAT 0116	Survey of African American Literatures 2	Mark A. Reid
AML 3673	1MS1	10394	T 8-9/ R 9	MAT 0113	Refugees, Aliens, and Impossible Subjects of Asian America	Malini Schueller
AML 4170	1TH1	28680	M W F 8	MAT 0116	Latinx Fantasy and Science Fiction	Tace Hedrick
AML 4242	1MB1	23844	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0115	Modern American Poetry	Marsha Bryant
AML 4311	1SS1	21235	T 4 / R 4-5	Online	Major Figures in Lit/Culture: Ursula K. Le Guin	Stephanie Smith
AML 4453	1SH2	28681	M W F 3	MAT 0115	Law and American Literature	Susan Hegeman
AML 4685	1TH2	28682	M W F 9	MAT 0113	Feminist Latinx Writing	Tace Hedrick
AML 4685	1JM1	30094	T 4-5 / R 4	LIT 0125 / TUR L011	Black Horror: White Terror	Julia Mollenthiel
CRW 3110	1UA1	28697	T 9-11	FLI 0117	Advanced Workshop in Fiction Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Uwem Akpan
CRW 3110	1CB1	12190	M 9-11	FLI 0115	Advanced Workshop in Fiction Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Camille Bordas
CRW 3310	1AM1	12191	M 9-11	TUR 2350	Advanced Workshop in Poetry Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Ange Mlinko
CRW 4905	1UA2	28698	R 9-11	TUR 2305	Senior Advanced Workshop in Fiction Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Uwem Akpan
CRW 4906	1AM2	28699	T 9-11	TUR 2305	Senior Advanced Workshop in Poetry Manuscript submission required; click here for details	Ange Mlinko
ENC 3310	1GS5	28936	M W F 5	MAT 0102	Environmental Nonfiction	Lucas Rodewald
ENC 4212	1VD1	26332	T 10 / R 10-11	MAT 0114	Professional Editing	Victor Del Hierro
ENG 3011	1JM1	21444	M W F 6	TUR 2334	Theorists: From Plato to Practical Criticism	John Murchek
ENG 3122	1TM1	26335	T 9 / R 8-9 / SCR W E1-E3	TUR 2322/ROL 0115	History of Film 2	Trevor Mowchun
ENG 4015	1PR1	24154	M W F 7	MAT 0116	Psychological Approaches to Literature: Fraternity of Chasms	Peter Rudnytsky
ENG 4133	1RB1	24156	M W F 2 / SCR M 9-11	TUR 2334	The Found Art Film	Richard Burt
ENG 4133	1YX1	28896	T 7 / R 7-8 / SCR T 8-10	TUR 2334/ROL 0115	Film Studies: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Global Cinema	Ying Xiao
ENG 4135	1BM1	12696	M W F 4 / SCR W 9-11	TUR 2334/ROL 0115	National Cinemas: New German Cinemas	Barbara Mennel
ENG 4135	1SB1	12697	T 10 / R 10-11 / SCR R E1-E3	TUR 2322/ROL 0115	National Cinemas: Paris is/was a Woman	Sylvie Blum
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	W 6-8	TUR 2333	Honors Seminar: Early American Utopias, Democracies & Revolutions	Jodi Schorb
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	M 6-8	TUR 2336	Honors Seminar: Deep Green: Theory and Literature of More-than-Human Ecologies	Terry Harpold
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Internship	Kenneth Kidd
ENG 4953	1RR1	12466	M 9-11 / W 9-11	ROL 0115 / TUR 2334	Department Seminar: The Movies and Philosophy	Robert B. Ray
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBD	TBD	Honors Thesis Project	Kenneth Kidd
ENL 3112	1RM1	27174	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0115	Before Austen: Eighteenth Century Women Novelists	Roger Maioli
ENL 3122	1RY1	28926	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0113	Experimental Nineteenth-Century British Novels	Rae Yan
ENL 3154	1MB2	26377	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0116	Twentieth Century British Poetry	Marsha Bryant
ENL 3234	1RM2	19984	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0115	Theorizing Education in the Eighteenth Century	Roger Maioli
ENL 4333	1PR2	28933	M W F 8	MAT 0113	Political Shakespeare	Peter Rudnytsky
ENL 4333	1SHA	24187	T 2-3 / R 3	Online	Shakespeare: Learn by Doing	Sidney Homan
LIT 3383	1MG1	18907	M W F 2	TUR 2322	American Women in Comics	Margaret Galvan
LIT 3383	1RL1	29661	T 7-8 / R 7	FLG 0270/MAT 0009	African Women Writers	Rose Lugano
LIT 3383	1JM2	30095	T 7-8 / R 6	BLK 315	Black Women Transatlantic	Julia Mollenthiel
LIT 3400	1EK1	29446	T 7 / R 7-8		The Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature, and Film	Eric Kligerman
LIT 4194	1MR2	19363	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0115	Afro-European Literatures	Mark Reid
LIT 4233	1GS3	20310	M W F 4	MAT 0116	Reclaiming Glocal Spaces: Local Geographies, Global Designs	Cristovão Nwachukwu
LIT 4333	1B85	13715	M W F 7	MAT 0115	Literature for the Adolescent: A Language for the In-Betweens	Lillian Martinez
LIT 4930	1CM1	29253	M W F 3	LEI 0104	From Baba Yaga to Black Widow: Eastern Europe in Western Popular Culture	Corinne Matthews
LIT 4930	1DK1	13716	T 8-9/ R 9	TUR 1120K	Jews in Film	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	1DK2	25061	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 1120K	Ukraine and Jews	Dragan Kujundzic
LIT 4930	1MH1	25063	M 9-11	TUR 2333	Creative Non-Fiction	Michael Hofmann
LIT 4930	1RB2	13717	M W F 3	MAT 0004	From Close Reading to Closed Reading	Richard Burt
LIT 4930	1RH1	2419	T 7 / R 7-8	ROL 0115	Israel Arab Conflict on Stage and Screen	Roy Holler
LIT 4930	1SHB	18184	T 4 / R 4-5	Online	An Evening with William Shakespeare	Sidney Homan
LIT 4930	1SS2	24706	T 6-8	Online	Breaking Boundaries: Science Fiction Workshop	Stephanie Smith
LIT 4930	1WL2	26471	T 9-11	TUR 2346	American Poetry through the Telescope	William Logan

Course Descriptions

AML 3285

American Indian Literature
Susan Hegeman

This course will provide an introduction to literature, especially novels, created by native North American authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider American Indian and First Nations literature as a postcolonial literature and as a creative and collective interpretation of history and culture. We will also examine how contemporary literature addresses issues of concern to Indigenous people, including cultural and political sovereignty, cultural survival, representations of Indigenous people in non-native communities, and issues of environmental stewardship. Representative authors we will read include D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Tomson Highway, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tommy Orange. Grades will be based on two formal papers, a shorter paper on a social or historical topic, attendance, and active participation in class discussions.

AML 3607

Survey of African American Literatures 2
Mark A. Reid

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

AML 3673

Refugees, Aliens and Other Impossible Subjects of Asian America
Malini Schueller

What constitutes a refugee? How do we think of refugees? Who is an illegal alien? When do immigrants become citizens or “American”? What does it mean to think of the Asian adoptee as “saved?” Asian American literature insistently raises these questions. This course will focus on the ways in which histories of militarism, imperialism, and racial exclusion have informed the making of these impossible subjects of Asian America. We will examine how Asian American literary and cultural production represent the refugee, the illegal alien, and the citizen/citizen. We will also see these texts in relation to specific immigration acts, laws of racial exclusion and restriction, as well as to racialized stereotypes such as “Orientals.”

This course will introduce you to a variety of Asian American novels, short stories, autobiographies, and film. Because Asian American studies is interdisciplinary, we will be drawing on fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, as well as cultural studies.

Beginning with the classic America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, the course will move on to twenty-first century cultural productions. Possible texts will include Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) or The Refugees (2017), Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet (2004), Loung Ung’s Lucky Child (2005), Timothy Linh Bui’s Green Dragon (2001), Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), David Grabias and Nicole Newnham’s Sentenced Home (2006) and Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) as well as online readings.

Requirements: two 7-8 papers; one oral presentation; reading responses; regular attendance.

AML 4170

Latinx Fantasy & Science Fiction
Tace Hedrick

United States Latinx literature until recently lacked a substantive body of fantasy and science fiction. Imagined as having bodies and cultures constantly “behind” modernity, Latinx and Chicanx worlds seemed not to accord with the speculative questions and concerns of a contemporary world, scientifically imagined or not. With the explosion of many different varieties of speculative fiction from the 1990s forward, authors place Latinx bodies front and center in speculative ways that often resist the oppression, invisibility, sexism, and racism that they have faced in the past. These are not imperialist tales of white men conquering our spaces or other worlds; these narratives are told from the other side of conquest. We will be reading at least one anthology of short stories, one play and watching one film, and reading a series of novels from the dystopian to the weird to the explosive. Reading quizzes and 3 take-home exams constitute your grades.

AML 4242

Modern American Poetry: Cities
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at 6-8 American poets (plus a sampling of others) whose work builds, reflects, and reconstructs cityscapes within and beyond the United States. A continuing influence on American poetry since Walt Whitman, cities have inspired new modes of thinking and making. City poems can be fantastic or realistic, experimental or traditional, dynamic or static, utopic or dystopic. Poets we’ll read will include some of the following: Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Marilyn Hacker, Lawrence Joseph, Harryette Mullen, Natalie Diaz. We’ll also take a look at cinepoems by Paul Strand & Charles Sheeler, Helen Levitt, Marie Menken, and Stan Brakhage. And we’ll read some essays on city poetics, architecture, and spatiality. Course assignments will be a short and a long paper, a panel presentation, several Perusall annotations, a parody, and engaged participation in class discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and argumentative writing. I look forward to discussing the poetry, films, and essays with you.

AML 4311

Major Figures in Lit/Culture: Ursula K. Le Guin
Stephanie 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 displays a consummate ability both to entertain and to make the reader think. We will explore this rare and radiant combination by examining her multi-faceted career as a novelist, poet, essayist, and children’s book author.

AML 4453

Law and American Literature
Susan Hegeman

In this course, we will study works of American literature written between 1880 and 2014 — mostly novels, but also a memoir and one film — that substantially engage with some aspect of our legal system. We will also read some trial summaries, works of legal theory and analysis, and some literary criticism. The goal of the course is to juxtapose two kinds of thought and writing, literary and legal, to address such questions as these: how do literary works that represent aspect of the legal system portray, and help us to better understand, concepts such as justice, crime, punishment, evidence, the power of the state, and equality under the law? Conversely, how does the law address issues related to works of literature, such as freedom of speech, parody, and intellectual property? Representative authors we will read include Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Richard Wright, Bryan Stevenson, and Louise Erdrich. Grades will be based on two formal papers, a shorter research paper on a topic related to American law, attendance, and active participation in class discussions.

AML 4685

Feminist Latinx Writing
Tace Hedrick

Since at least Latinx Civil Rights times, United States Latinas and Chicanas have been writing both feminist literature and non-fiction in order to explore feminist visions that address their own particular stances and situated knowledges. We will be reading novels and non-fiction, at least one play, and poems that show the ways Latinx feminist vision both resists white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and envisions better worlds—critical utopias. Reading quizzes and 3 take-home exams constitute your grades.

AML 4685

Black Horror: White Terror
Julia Mollenthiel

This African American Studies course is an examination of literary and artistic horror by Black artists. We will probe the genre of horror and its trends with a particular focus on representations of racial Otherness and racism. We will also consider the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness and/or the terror associated with being Black in America. This course will study the works of Black authors and producers as a way to explore racial identity and oppression. We will also consider white American literary and cinematic representations of racial Otherness and horror in the works of Gothic writers and film producers. Some underlying questions that will drive our discussion of these texts are: how has the history of American cinema and Gothic literature contributed to the construction of racial identity, the drawing of ethnic boundaries, and affected racialized discourses? How have Black artists developed their own unique horror tradition in response to this history? More specifically, how have Black artists used the horror aesthetic as a means of countering white constructions of Blackness in the horror/Gothic genre? Moreover, how have Black artists used the horror aesthetic to represent the Black experience in the United States, and what does horror as a literary/cinematic mode afford Black artists?

CRW 3110

Advanced Workshop in Fiction
Uwem Akpan

CRW 3110 is a fiction writing workshop where students will be exposed to a particular form of doing fiction. We shall read a collection of African historical novels and short stories. These models shall help us learn how to fictionalize historical events. It will be important to build a community that learns from the myriad African texts and supports how we use this form to tell our stories.

In the course of the semester, the students are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. They are also expected to write a critique of each submission, to help the class discuss the work in depth and to encourage the writer in the important work of rewriting.

CRW 3110

Advanced Workshop in Fiction
Camille Bordas

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: notes that describe what the piece that is being critiqued has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it might achieve, etc.

Dedication to understanding what each writer is trying to do, regardless of your aesthetic preferences, is mandatory. Also mandatory: that the writers be prepared to hear what the others have to say about their work. It is hard being critiqued, but we’re all here to help each other become better writers.

Students will be required to read (from a course-packet) one published short story a week, 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 Workshop in Poetry: Form into Feeling
Ange Mlinko

In this advanced workshop, we will read poems as the intersection of “systems”—linguistic, aural, metonymic, and psychological—to write our own versions of works that continually open up to fresh meanings and interpretations. We will read contemporary poets such as Barbara Guest, Haryette Mullin, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, and others. With these models in mind, we will write and workshop a new poem every week, with emphasis on revision as the semester progresses.

CRW 4905

Senior Advanced Workshop in Fiction
Uwem Akpan

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

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Workshop in Poetry
Ange Mlinko

ENC ENC3310

Environmental Nonfiction
Lucas Rodewald

This course is practice. The authors, texts, and modes we study will generate a sandbox of ideas for experimenting with various compositional forms and techniques to communicate nonfiction stories about the environment, broadly defined. You will read, view, write, and design in this course with an eye on eventually crafting longform projects that blend research, analysis, and creative flair—all in an attempt to communicate a compelling story.

Our work together will consider the contemporary role of environmental nonfiction during an era increasingly marked by global climate change. One of our central explorations will concern the art and practice of storytelling and other narrative practices within this genre; we will examine them not only as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental crises and that prod our ecological imagination, but also as catalysts for emotional responses and pathways to civic engagement.

Our tentative authors include Terry Tempest Williams, Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Pollan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Camille Dungy, David Wallace-Wells, and Elizabeth Rush, but we will also venture into other forms and modalities that fit under this topical umbrella; podcasts, video essays, short and long-form documentaries, and other emergent digital and new media technologies will be contemplated to assess not only their stories and ideas, but also their craft, style, and potential to engage or empower individuals in the face of escalating ecological catastrophe. Course assignments will likely feature 1-2 major composition projects that involve benchmarks, workshops, and smaller elements to be completed en route to their final forms.

ENC 4212

Professional Editing
Victor Del Hierro

This course will help students understand and practice the rhetorical strategies, genres, locations, media, and contexts in which contemporary professional writing happens. Students will conduct research and compose texts that are cohesive, well-designed, and informative while also honoring responsibilities to various audiences. Students will have an opportunity to engage with contemporary topics in social media strategy, information design, and content strategy. Students will leave the course with a digital portfolio that showcases their skills and strengths as professional communicators.

ENG 3011

Theorists: From Plato to Practical Criticism
John Murchek

This course is a prequel to ENG 3010 The Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism. In it, we will read literary criticism and theory drawn from classical Greece to the early twentieth century. We will be especially concerned with the ways in which the texts we read situate their own work and that of the literature they consider in relation to social and political concerns.

While we may not address them all, and we may address others, the kinds of questions we will ask might include: Why did Plato banish poets from his Republic? What is the purpose of the catharsis that Aristotle contends the audience of a tragedy should experience? Why does Sir Philip Sidney argue that poetry is more valuable to the social order than philosophy or history? Why should a concern with purportedly neo-Aristotelian rules for drama have preoccupied the seventeenth century? What, according to David Hume, is involved in establishing a “standard of taste?” How can Percy Bysshe Shelley conclude that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world?” What missions does Matthew Arnold propose for poetry and criticism in the midst of nineteenth-century industrialization and Philistinism? Is it something more than mere hyperbole when Oscar Wilde declares that “all art is quite useless?” How does Alain Locke’s development of a “New Negro” aesthetic challenge W.E.B. DuBois’ emphasis on the propagandistic function of art in the 1920s? What kind of relation does Virginia Woolf propose between the material conditions of a woman’s life and the activity of her imagination? Why does I.A. Richards argue in Practical Criticism that cultivating the art of reading poetry will combat the baleful influences of “mechanical inventions, with their social effects, and a too sudden diffusion of indigestible ideas?”

Students will probably be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, identification tests at midterm and the end of the semester, brief writing assignments intended to provoke discussion of the assigned texts, and a major paper due about two thirds of the way through the semester.

ENG 3122

History of Film 2
Trevor Mowchun

There is no single or exhaustive history, whether it be of film, the arts and sciences, or any field of knowledge. That is why historians are, and have always been, partial storytellers. There is no such thing as fact without fiction, no possibility for truth without the limitations and interests of human perspectives. In this respect, an awareness of the subjectivity of history itself can help us better understand what is revealed, concealed, and sometimes fabricated by the making of history—for history is ultimately a creation as opposed to a recording of the past. Now film presents unique challenges to the conscientious historian, particularly its value as both art and commerce, fiction and documentary, mainstream entertainment and independent or avant-garde expression—values so at odds with each other that the film historian may be at a loss for where and how to begin. We will investigate these and many other concepts through which film history has been framed, and with help from our old friend “imagination,” devise ways to better illuminate darker, less understood areas of film history, without grafting present day ideologies onto historical contexts which have their own complex systems of values, often in direct opposition to our own. In this way, we are more likely to discover films that are as relevant or even more relevant today than when they were produced.

Throughout the semester, we will question familiar and more obscure topics in pre- and post-WWII film history (from around 1930-1965), a highly complex period of cinematic maturation and experimentation. Topics will range from the Hollywood studio system’s first international anomaly, lost/unfinished films, the perils of adapting great works of literature, and the impact of “the film school” on cinematic innovation. The course is structured around historical turning points, or what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts”: historical events of various kinds which reorient and sometimes revolutionize the trajectory of knowledge and culture, in this case an artform like film, rather than guide it along cold rails of fate as if the history of film had no choice but to evolve in the way that it did. As historians we never cease to forget the simple fact that the cinema could have unfolded differently; and if this fact is taken seriously as a method, it still can unfold differently if we remain open to possibilities of the medium not fully appreciated or even repressed by the dominant historical narratives of which it is our task to rethink. To this end, students will write three very short papers called “collisions” (close examinations of a key link between readings and films), and a final essay project. Students will also be introduced to found-footage filmmaking as an alternative approach for doing film history in the digital age.

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature: Fraternity of Chasms
Peter Rudnytsky

Through a reading of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, this course will explore the tragedy of the Holocaust and its aftershocks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The question of identity in all its forms, and how the past lives on in the present, will be a guiding thread of our discussions. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and “The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War” will anchor our reflections on history in a contemporary context. Course requirements: midterm, final, one five-page term paper, and active participation in class discussions.

ENG 4133

Film Studies: The Found Art Film
Richard Burt

This course will trace the history of cinephilia and the formation of a film canon by addressing two central questions posed by two very influential critics, André Bazin and Rudolf Arnheim, namely, (1) What is Cinema? and (2) “Is Film Art?” The working assumption of the course is that the genre of the art film was invented retrospectively, beginning in the 1950s with criticism published in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma with annual lists of the year’s best films, continuing with art house cinemas in the 1980s, and then consolidated by the Criterion Collection in its “essential Janus Films” DVD set. Premises of this course: Film is a lost art. Art films find you. Film is an art that may or may not reveal itself to you. We will explore these premises by watching a wide range of films that critics have either designated “art films” or regarded as works of art, including Sunset Boulevard, Wild Strawberries, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, M, Contempt, The Third Man, Paris, Texas, Stalker, Rashomon, The Cranes Are Flying, Sunrise, Contempt, That Obscure Object of Desire, Dragon Inn, among others. Readings will include essays and chapters by André Bazin, Rudolf Arnheim, François Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Dave Kehr, V. F. Perkins, Stanley Cavell, and David Bordwell, among others. Three short papers. Co-leading class discussion twice during the semester. Discussion questions on the films or readings due the day before each class. Weekly quizzes.

ENG 4133

Film Studies: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Global Cinema
Ying Xiao

The course explores the rise and various aspects of Hong Kong cinema and Taiwanese cinema through the lens of globalization. One of the world’s largest and energetic film industries, Hong Kong cinema has a global presence and impact that has enthralled a broad global audience not only as an epitome of popular entertainment but also through its creativity, craftmanship, diversity, and multifaceted interactions and linkages with other cinemas and international culture. Another example we juxtapose and examine in class is Taiwan new cinema, one of the most imaginative and stylistic films that demonstrates a distinct art and in similar and different ways registers the discourses of postcolonialism, modernity, nationalism, and globalization. How do they draw upon local traditions and identities and on the other hand, significantly connect to global market and Hollywood? How have they contributed to global cinema and the development of film as a medium? This course takes students on a comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinemas to look at their histories, main themes, diverse genres, industrial practice, aesthetic styles, and the transregional/transnational cultural exchange and collaborations. Filmmakers and stars to be discussed include Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee. Screenings cover a wide variety of genres from martial arts, melodramas, comedies, to ghost stories and musicals.

ENG 4135

New German Cinema
Barbara Mennel

In 1962, a group of young filmmakers at the Oberhausen Film Festival in West Germany boldly declared: “The old cinema is dead! We believe in a new cinema!” Out of this movement to overcome the 1950s legacies of fascism emerged a wave of filmmaking that became internationally known as New German Cinema. Its filmmakers were indebted to the student movement and a vision of filmmaking and distribution based on the notion of the director as auteur. This course offers a survey of the films from this brief period of enormous output and creativity, including films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Helke Sander, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders. We will trace the influence of the women’s movement on feminist aesthetics and situate the films’ negotiations of history and memory in postwar West German politics.

ENG 4135

National Cinemas: Paris is/was a Woman
Sylvie Blum

The course examines the lives and work of women artists, filmmakers, performers, and writers (expatriates or not) that were part of the artistic community in Paris between the 1920s-1940s. We will discuss and critically analyze the cartography of the city and how their contributions shaped French intellectual history. (4 CRH)

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Early American Utopias, Democracies, & Revolutions
Jodi Schorb

This course takes as its subject the literary legacy of the “Age of Revolution,” a period in the late-eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century, often linked with the American revolution and its rippling aftereffects.

Less concerned with the philosophical and political import of the American Revolutionary War, this seminar explores the myriad ways that a diverse array of early American writers seized on themes of democratic revolt and social rebellion to imagine new worlds and to contest the historical present. From Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin—A Dialogue (1798), in which a schoolteacher and a bluestocking debate the merits of female emancipation; to “Equality–A Political Romance” (1802), a potent socialist utopia inspired by Pennsylvania’s radical immigrant communities; to The Heroic Slave (1853), Frederick Douglass’s only published work of fiction, early writers thoughtfully explored the utopian possibilities and unfulfilled promises of the revolutionary present.

The second half of the course offers a sustained examination of early Black uprising and resistance on the nineteenth-century literary imagination. White Nat Turner’s rebellion (1831) and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859) have garnered much critical attention, earlier events such as The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804); the Igbo Landing at Dunbar Creek, Georgia in 1803; and the 1822 antislavery insurrection in Charleston known as the “Denmark Vesey Conspiracy” fueled the fever dreams of pro-slavery apologists, provided important models of resistance to the transatlantic abolitionist movement, and inspired novels such as Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), pamphlets such as “The Late Contemplated Insurrection in South Carolina” by “A Colored American” (1850); and gothic fiction, including Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1856).

Students will lead a portion of weekly discussions (presenting on relevant secondary scholarship) as we discuss the week’s readings, seminar style. Students will also locate examples of how the revolutionary past informs the contemporary present in poetry, fiction, performances, and/or legacy sites and monuments, documenting their findings in a short report which to be shared with classmates. Additional assignments include occasional discussion prompts or interactive text annotations, a short paper (5 pages), a seminar paper proposal, and a seminar paper (15 pages).

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Deep Green: Theory and Literature of More-than-Human Ecologies
Terry Harpold

We will read from a range of nonfiction texts in anthropology, critical animal and plant studies, ecopoetics, and eco-philosophy that focus on the vitality of worlds that include and exceed humans, and fictional texts that explore these ideas in speculative and posthumanist modes. The principal aim of the course is to develop and nuance our understanding of experiences of humans and other-than-human beings beyond reductionist human/nonhuman dichotomies, and to explore how speculative and posthumanist fiction might depict human futures arrayed by more-than-human relations. Course requirements include collaborative moderation of class discussions and a long-form research project on themes of the course.

Keywords: Ecopoetics, eco-philosophy, More-than-human, science fiction, speculative fiction

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: The Movies and Philosophy
Robert B. Ray

Stanley Cavell, who wrote more often about the cinema than any other philosopher, often reminded his students “how mysterious these objects called movies are, unlike anything else on earth.” He also offered a definition of philosophy itself “as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them.” Cavell went on to insist that learning how to think about such things “requires only a willingness to care.”

In this course, we will read some philosophers: Plato (two of the early Socratic dialogues and The Apology), Wittgenstein (The Blue Book), Emerson (selected essays), J.L. Austin (on excuses and pretending), and selections from Cavell himself. Movies will include People on Sunday, two by Buster Keaton, The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, Anatomy of a Murder, The Lady Eve, Vertigo, and Close-Up. These movies raise questions about how to recognize when someone is acting or pretending or lying; about how to distinguish between doing something by mistake and doing something by accident; about what happens when someone says one thing while meaning another; about how photography differs from painting.

Assignments: bi-weekly two-page papers responding to provided prompts; one final four-page paper.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis Project
Faculty Members (2) of Choice

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

The student must select two faculty members: one to direct the reading, research, and writing of a thesis on a topic of the student’s and director’s choosing, and another as the second reader.

ENL 3112

Before 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 3122

Experimental Nineteenth-Century British Novels
Rae X. Yan

If the eighteenth century was the era of the rise of the novel—as the literary critic Ian Watt argued—the nineteenth century is often seen as the era of the novel’s consolidation as genre and form. Our course for this semester will take a different view to argue for understanding the nineteenth century as an era still ripe with novel experimentations. Over the semester, we will examine a wide range of novels from the nineteenth century that experiment with form and, additionally, think about the nature of experimentation as literary, philosophical, and scientific subject matter. We will consider what nineteenth-century writers understood about going against the grain, working against conventions, and also what the creation of conventions allows, suppresses, and/or addresses. Course text may include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Assignments will likely include weekly reading posts and three experimental papers.

ENL 3154

Twentieth Century British Poetry
Marsha Bryant

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

ENL 3234

Theorizing Education in the Eighteenth Century
Roger Maioli

Education is a central value in modern democratic societies. It is also a highly contested value. Should education be available to all or to only a few? Is its purpose to form well-rounded citizens or technically trained professionals? How does one educate adults as opposed to children? How about single-sex education — does it make sense for boys and girls to be educated separately? These are all pressing questions in contemporary debates about education, and some have been around for centuries. In this course we will look at the pre-history of these debates by engaging with a foundational moment in the history of educational theory: the eighteenth century in Britain and France. This period witnessed substantial improvements in literacy in both of these countries, leading a growing number of authors to imagine educational models that could serve the needs of the many. Philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote passionately on how to raise children for their roles in complex societies; political theorists such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft pushed for improved education for women; and novelists joined this conversation by dramatizing the challenges faced by young protagonists in their journeys of self-discovery. We will discuss these issues by reading both educational treatises and fiction that thematizes education, including Rousseau’s influential treatise Émile and Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, one of the very first full-length novels for children.

ENL 4333

Political Shakespeare
Peter Rudnytsky

Through a close reading of three plays, Henry VI, Part 2, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, we will consider Shakespeare as a political writer from the beginning of his career to the end of his tragic period. What, if anything, can we conclude about his political ideology and attitudes from this early play on English history and two Roman tragedies? Course requirements: midterm, final, one five-page term paper, and active participation in class discussions.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Learn 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 considered a bonus. Each actor also writes a short paper assessing his or her experience during rehearsal. Performances and the scene-work paper count equally.

Professor Homan will provide commentary on the theatrical and critical history of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the historical context of his theatre. He will also draw on his 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 fears 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 twenty 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 3383

American Women in Comics
Margaret Galvan

Despite a long history of female creators, readers, and nuanced characters, women’s participation in American comics has frequently been overlooked. Contemporary scholars have focused on recovering these forgotten women. In this class, we will explore why women’s contributions have not been visible in comics histories. We will start by reading how comics have been variously defined. Reading these definitions alongside this understudied tradition of women’s comics, we will ask: is there something about the definitions that exclude women in comics? We will read comics by women in addition to reading comics for and about women, since female fandom and characters have also been minimized. We will read a variety of forms, both print and digital, and consider how we might wield this digital space to right the balance.

Course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website, a short formal essay, and a research project with a digital component.

LIT 3383

Black Women Transatlantic
Julia Mollenthiel

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

In this course, we cross national boundaries in order to focus on a range of issues that surface in Black women literatures of the U.S., Africa, and the Caribbean in order to address connections between these cultures especially as it relates to slavery, Black women’s identity and sexuality, nation/narration, home and location/dislocation. This involves taking account of myth and history, politics and language, in relation to the connected worlds of the U.S., Africa, and the Caribbean. Both Africa and the Caribbean have occupied the place of fantasy for European and American audiences. This course looks more closely at literatures that confront and challenge white hegemonic narratives of Black femininity. Ultimately, this course will provide students with a cross-cultural and evolutionary exposure to the works of Black women writers across these geographical regions. Through literature and documentaries, students will gain exposure to the diasporic works of Black women writers, the societal concerns and barriers that are illustrated within their writing, and the contexts that influence their work.

LIT 3400

The Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature, and Film
Eric Kligerman

In his brief yet complex parable “Before the Law” Kafka describes how a man from the country searches for the law but is stopped outside the gates by a menacing guard, never to gain entrance to the law. What is the significance of this failure to grasp the law? How does Kafka’s perplexing tale shed light on questions pertaining to the interplay between justice, law and violence, and how do we as individuals encounter these conflicts within the social and political spaces in which we live?

This interdisciplinary course sets out to explore these very questions and collisions by juxtaposing shifting modes of representations. By turning to the works of history (Thucydides), Religion (Book of Job), philosophy (Nietzsche and Arendt), literature (Sophocles, Dostoyevsky and Kafka) and film (Tarantino and the Coen brothers), our objective is to trace the narrative of justice through ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, the modern and postmodern periods. In particular, we will examine the realm of trials (both real and imaginary) to probe the relation between justice and ethics along with the various questions pertaining to law, guilt, responsibility, violence and punishment. How do writers critique the institutions of law and justice through works of literature and art? Our goal is to rethink these dynamic relationships by turning to the spaces of history, philosophy, political thought, literature and film.

LIT 4194

Afro-European Literatures
Mark Reid

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

Students will critically assess how the assigned readings and film screenings depict immigration, citizenship, and intergenerational conflict and its resolution or lack thereof. How do newly arrived populations integrate into unfamiliar national spaces? How are social, religious, economic, and judicial conventions kept? How do the newly arrived contest, comply with, or avoid the border police of the ‘welcoming’ nation?

REQUIRED TEXTS
Amara, Fadela. Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room
Begag, Azouz. Shanty Town Kid
Bouraoui, Nina. Tomboy
Guene, Faiza. Kiffe, Kiffe Tomorrow
Hügel-Marshall, Ika. Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany
Smail, Paul. Smile
Stew. Passing Strange: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical
Williams, John A. The Man Who Cried I Am
Youngblood, Shay. Black Girl in Paris

LIT 4233

Reclaiming Glocal Spaces: Local Geographies, Global Designs
Cristovão Nwachukwu

To justify colonization, imperialist countries such as England and France created distorted literary images of the places and people they subjugated. But writers from those places have used the same tool, literature, to challenge the systems that oppress them, to reclaim communal spaces, and to reassert their humanity. These competing uses of literature prompt common questions in postcolonial studies: What are the aesthetic and thematic features that categorize postcolonial literature? How do different colonial systems affect postcolonial writers’ stylistic choices? In this course, we will pay particular attention to the geographical spaces where postcolonial narratives take place. This will let us examine how spaces define identities in local and global contexts.

Possible works will include Weep Not, Child (1964) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; Lost Names: Scenes of a Korean Childhood (1970) by Richard E. Kim; The House of Hunger (1978) by Dambudzo Marechera; Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Edwidge Danticat; The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy; and Home Is Not a Country (2021) by Safia Elhillo.

Assignments will consist of weekly posts about the materials, a digital community map to explore the postcolonial spaces in the works we read, a term paper, and a final project in the form of a video essay, a podcast, or an artistic composition.

LIT 4333

Literature for the Adolescent: A Language for the In-Betweens
Lillian Martinez

Iconotexts, or works combining complementary words and images, saturate our contemporary moment; illustrated novels, comics, graphic novels, and manga from across the world continue to flood the American market. The “comics boom” at the beginning of the mid-twentieth century especially attracted young adult readers. This audience found themselves well represented in various protagonists who work to articulate the murky sense of being a “young adult”: not yet a child and not yet an adult. Adolescence occupies this in-between, and iconotexts as dually verbal and visual are especially well-suited to navigate this difficult territory.

This course will focus on major themes and trends in American “young adult” (or “YA”) iconotexts. We will closely read the image of the adolescent in novels, illustrated editions, comics, manga, and related paratexts directed towards teenage audiences. We will delve into quotidian and familiar experiences, while also addressing why we often find stories about teens intertwined with magical institutions, ghosts and vampires, and epic myth. We will consider the yet very real social commentaries on national identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and consumerism implicit in these texts. What culturally-constructed notions of adolescence shapes the characters within these texts? What new ways of imagining and understanding adolescence does the language of iconotexts provide us?

Possible texts we will cover include: Archie (1941), The Outsiders (1967), Forever (1975), SuperMutant Magic Academy (2015), Witch Hat Atelier (2016), Hooky (2021), Monster (1999, 2015), The Graveyard Book (2008, 2014), A Monster Calls (2012), My Favorite Things is Monsters (2017), The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), On a Sunbeam (2018), The Magic Fish (2020), Lore Olympus (2018), American Born Chinese (2006), Speak (1999, 2018), and A Silent Voice (2013).

As a part of this course, students will complete unit reflections, a close reading, an iconotext review, an oral presentation on an outside-of-class YA text, and a critical analysis paper.

LIT 4930

From Baba Yaga to Black Widow: Eastern Europe in Western Popular Culture
Corinne Matthews

When you think about Eastern Europe, what do you imagine? Do you picture the witch Baba Yaga, infamous for her hut with its spindly chicken legs? Do you think about the long, dark winters of the Siberian tundra? Do you envision the Marvel superheroes Black Widow and the Scarlett Witch of Avengers fame? More soberingly, do you think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Or do you picture something else entirely? Whatever you imagine, whether you realize it or not, your conception of Eastern Europe has no doubt been shaped by how Eastern Europe has been depicted in popular culture over time. As scholars like Larry Wolff and Anita Starosta note, Eastern Europe has historically been depicted as an ‘uncivilized Other’ to Western Europe, something alternately confirmed and subverted in contemporary Western imaginings of Eastern Europe. As the global reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, that perception has real consequences for the lived realities of all Eastern Europeans.

In this class, we will track how different periods of Eastern Europe’s history have been imagined and depicted in western popular culture and how that depiction affects conceptions of half of a continent often pushed aside or forgotten. We will consider questions like: what stereotypes do these texts perpetuate or subvert? Which countries receive more focus, and which are more often overlooked? Why do so many Eastern Europe based properties illustrate Eastern Europe as a land of fantasy, and how does that depiction affect how we view that portion of the world? How has the region’s fraught history shaped how we show Eastern Europe in the present? To answer these questions, we will examine texts across a range of genres, including realism, fantasy, and nonfiction. We will also explore a variety of mediums, including novels, television shows, films, comics, and even musicals. By the course’s end, we will develop a better understanding of both what Eastern Europe is and isn’t and why the way we imagine it in Western popular culture matters.

Possible texts include:
• The Americans (FX—selected episodes)
• Anastasia (animated film and Broadway musical)
• Baba Yaga’s Assistant by Marika McCoola and Emily Carrol
• Black Widow (film)
• Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin
• Fiddler on the Roof
• The Great (Hulu—selected episodes)
• Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch
• Maus by Art Spiegelman
• Shadow and Bone (Netflix—selected episodes)
• Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M.T. Anderson
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik
• The Witcher (Netflix—selected episodes)
• War and Peace (BBC—selected episodes)

Assignments will include reading response memos, a traditional analysis paper, and a multimodal final assignment. With each assignment, students will use close reading and analytical skills to develop critical arguments and engage with the class theme.

LIT 4930

Jews in Film
Dragan Kujundzic

Jews in Film: in Jewish Diaspora, emigration to the US, the first sound film, the Holocaust, Israeli Cinema, Jewish women in film, Jewish humor and comedy. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino; Fiddler on the Roof, (and the novel by Sholem Aleichem); the extensive critical analysis of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer; Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg and The Pianist by Roman Polanski. Jewish humor (Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters and Whatever Works with Larry David), films by Paul Mazursky, Sidney Lumet, David Mamet. Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) and Mel Brooks (The Producers, Blazing Saddles), the Coen Brothers, (Serious Men). Particular attention will be given to films by or about Jewish women, (Yentl by and with Barbara Streisand), Vita Activa (Hannah Arendt), Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman) Golda Meir (Golda with Helen Mirren) and Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination, among others.

LIT 4930

Ukraine and Jews
Dragan Kujundzic

Ukraine is at the center of current world politics. Ukraine’s politics in light of Russian occupation and war, as well as the roles Jews play in the current Ukrainian politics (President Zelensky is a Ukrainian Jew), will be given extensive analyses. Ukraine and Jews in Cinema and Politics will discuss the rich tradition associated with Ukrainian Jews, their descendants, and the impact on modern times: from Sholem Aleichem (Tevye Stories, Fiddler on the Roof), Isaak Babel (Odessa Stories, Benya Krik), Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, “The Odessa Steps”), Golda Meir and the foundation of Israel (Golda with Helen Mirren will be screened and discussed), to Steven Spielberg (the Holocaust and Schindler’s List), Rock Music and Bob Dylan (b. Robert Allen Zimmerman), contemporary American-Jewish life (the Coen Brothers, A Serious Man). The Jewish Trilogy by the leading Ukrainian filmmaker, Sergey Loznitsa, will be screened and analyzed (Small Jewish Cemetery, Austerlitz, and Babi Yar) as well as films by Kira Muratova. Volodimir Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, will be featured and discussed both as a politician of world stature and as a prominent Ukrainian filmmaker (Servant of the People–on Netflix–where Zelensky is the leading actor and the series producer).

LIT 4930

Creative Non-Fiction
Michael Hofmann

A course on writing about people and places. The reading-list might have been drawn from nature writing or science or biography, but this time I have come down in favour of a mulch of history, geography and politics, including Ryszard Kapuscinski, Andrzej Stasiuk, Joseph Roth, Svetlana Alexievich, Joan Didion, Peter Handke and Annie Ernaux, among possibly others. Spoken contributions will be encouraged. Participants will do much writing of and on their own, either on an array of different projects, or perhaps 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

From Close Reading to Closed Reading
Richard Burt

This course will examine the difference between paraphrasing a text and reading it closely, beginning with the New Critics, focusing on William Empson, and ending with the notion, posed by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man that reading closely means arriving at an impasse, at “unreadability,” and hence closure. We will also read Stephen Booth’s celebrated Yale edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a masterpiece of close readings (without reading) that productively frustrates any reader’s attempts to make use of it. Three short papers. Co-leading class discussion twice during the semester. Readings will include canonical literature as well as canonical works of literary criticism and literary theory. Discussion questions on the films or readings due the day before each class. Weekly quizzes.

LIT 4930

Israel Arab Conflict on Stage and Screen
Roy Holler

Many encounters between Israelis and Palestinians take place on the theater stage and the silver screen. The playhouse and the cinema host a rich tradition of fictional and documented depictions of the conflict. These artistic expressions provide us with an intimate view of complex realties and shed new light on our mostly limited understanding of an extremely delicate situation.

This course will give students a unique opportunity to learn about the origins of the people’s struggle over that small stretch of Middle Eastern land, through an exposure to various cinematic and theatrical narratives from the region. We will discuss how global and local traumas contributed to the development of this century old conflict, and how these stories and traumas are perceived and told from each side of the border. We will talk about the importance of visual arts informing us about world events, but also learn to recognize and evaluate some of the biases and agendas that many of these mass art forms bring to the table.

Students will view mainstream and indie movies in English, Hebrew and Arabic. They will read and watch classic and modern stage plays, along with one extraordinary piece of modern dance. All of these will be accompanied with secondary readings for historical grounding, and an always lively class discussion. Course assignments include (but are not limited to) weekly journal entries, a midterm paper, and a final creative project.

LIT 4930

An Evening with William Shakespeare
Sidney Homan

The project of this seminar will be a production of An Evening with William Shakespeare, a two-hour show offering a collage of scenes from his various plays, including a few scenes from Tom Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It will be staged towards the end of the spring semester. Our rehearsals would be conducted through Zoom at class-meeting times. Acting couples could also rehearse on their own outside of class (by various means: in person but at safe distances, or through Zoom, or face-time, or even over the phone). I take into account, and compensate for the unusual rehearsal conditions. I will also provide a script for the production—no need to purchase Shakespeare’s plays. Each student will get to perform in a variety of scenes—plenty of acting time for everyone! The cap for the course is 15 students. If you love to act, have experience as an actor, this would be ideal.

At the end of the semester we will record a video performance of the show. I would want to use this video in my courses. We could also make copies available to anyone in the department. That is, the performance, even if recorded, would have an audience—would be witnessed.

As in all of my courses, we “learn” about the theatre by “doing it,” experiencing the play from the perspective of the actor and director. So, our focus will be on delivery, movement (albeit limited, short of full stage movement), gesture, along with your creating a subtext, a history, an inner voice for your various characters.

LIT 4930

Breaking Boundaries: Science Fiction Workshop
Stephanie Smith

From that inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body and/or soul, in order to more fully understand what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we call robots, androids or cyborgs, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, or psychological ones, in which human perception plays a significant role, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this writing workshop we shall revisit some older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, while we perform some fictional thought-experiments of our own. We will workshop those experiments, read and critique our own works, and strive to create fictions about our future(s).

LIT 4930

American Poetry through the Telescope
William Logan

This course in American poetry will begin with Walt Whitman, perhaps taking a look over his broad shoulders at the poets who stood behind him. We shall end, more or less, with Robert Lowell, picking up along the way Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Arna Bontemps, W. H. Auden (who, though English, lived for decades in New York), Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht. We may pick up others as we go along.

The course will proceed largely by discussion (I may yak a bit about a particular poet or poem); but the course meeting each week will advance over, under, around, and through poems. You must be committed to reading a certain number of poems each week and making notes on them, as well as to come up with at least a reasonable answer to unreasonable questions.

The assignments will be creative in nature, but this course by nature is structured as lecture and discussion (heavy on the latter) rather than a workshop.

Books

One compendious anthology of American poetry, TBD