Department of English

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

Spring 2024

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	26557	M W F 5	MAT 0117	Native American Literature	Hegeman
AML 3673	1MS1	10359	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0115 / MAT 0114	Racial Identities and Asian American Literature	Schueller
AML 4170	1JMA	28964	T 7 / R 7-8	LIT 0125 / AND 0134	Afro-Futurism	Mollenthiel
AML 4170	1MG1	26561	M W F 5	MAT 0113	Feminist and Queer Science Fiction	Galvan
AML 4213	1JS1	28708	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0113	American Literature Before 1800	Schorb
AML 4242	1TH1	22457	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0113	Chicanx Civil Rights	Hedrick
AML 4311	1DK1	20402	T 6-8	ONLINE	Toni Morrison	King
AML 4453	1SS1	26562	M W F 4	ONLINE	Representations of AI in American Literature	Smith
AML 4685	1JMB	27703	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0013	Black Horror, White Terror	Mollenthiel
AML 4685	1TH2	26563	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0115	Race and Gender in Chicanx and Latinx Literature	Hedrick
CRW 3110	DEP-X	DEP-X	R 9-11	FLI 0115	Fiction Workshop	Akpan
CRW 3310	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0014	Poetry Workshop: Feeling Into Words	Mlinko
CRW 3310	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0004	Verse Writing	Hofmann
CRW 4211	1MH2	29321	M 9-11	MAT 0002	Creative Nonfiction	Hofmann
CRW 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0007	The Art of Dialogue	Leavitt
ENC 3250	1LG1	28889	M W F 3	MAT 0113	Professional Communication	Gonzales
ENC 4212	1VD1	24597	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0115	Professional Editing	Del Hierro
ENG 3010	1PW1	28942	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0002	The Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism: Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Art of Reading	Wegner
ENG 4015	1PR1	22700	M W F 7	MAT 0113	Two Autobiographical Novels	Rudnytsky
ENG 4133	1PB1	26723	T 5-6 / R 6 / M E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Cinema and Religion	Bianchi
ENG 4133	1RB1	22702	T 2-3 / R 3 / W 9-11	RNK 0220 / ROL 0115	Shakespeare, Cavell, and Screwball Comedy	Burt
ENG 4135	1EG1	29870	T 5-6 / R 6 / R 9-10	TUR 1105	Brazilian Cinema	Ginway
ENG 4136	DEP-X	DEP-X	F 8-10 / R E1-E3	ROL 0115 / TUR 2334	Introduction to Writing and Directing Film	Mowchun
ENG 4905	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Independent Study	Kidd
ENG 4910	1LR1	28949	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0003 / NRN 1001	Raising History from the Grave: Collaborative Research, Social Engagement, and International Exchange	Rosenberg
ENG 4911	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Undergraduate Research English	Kidd
ENG 4936	DEP-X	DEP-X	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR 2322	Honors Seminar: Langston Hughes: Novel, Essay, Autobiography, and Film	Reid
ENG 4940	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Internship	Kidd
ENG 4953	1PG1	12265	M W F 11	FLI 0117	Department Seminar: Literature and Medicine	Gilbert
ENG 4970	DEP-X	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Honors Thesis Project	Kidd
ENL 3122	1CM1	26746	M W F 6	MAT 0113	Victorian Addictions	Mitchell
ENL 3251	1PG2	29168	M W F 9	MAT 0113	Victorian Literature	Gilbert
ENL 4220	1JM1	30053	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2354	Sixteenth-Century Literature in Its Time and Ours	Murchek
ENL 4221	1PR2	29169	M W F 8	MAT 0113	Milton’s Paradise Lost	Rudnytsky
ENL 4333	1SHA	22731	T 4 / R 4-5	ONLINE	Shakespeare: Learn By Doing	Homan
LIT 3003	1MM1	29987	M W F 4	MAT 0113	European Television on Netflix	Moore
LIT 3041	1SHB	18644	T 2-3 / R 3	ONLINE	The Craft of Comedy: Exploring through Performance the Art of Laughter	Homan
LIT 3173	1JW1	30137	M 7 / W 7-8	MAT 0015 / MAT 0251	Introduction to Yiddish Literature	Wagner
LIT 3173	1RH1	20478	T 7 / R 7-8	MAEB 0234	#Holocaust: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Film and Literature	Holler
LIT 3383	1JS2	27324	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2334	Women in Literature	Schorb
LIT 3400	1AU1	27143	T 4 / R 4-5	LEI 0104	Ukrainian History Through Ukrainian Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 3400	1EK1	13377	T 7 / R 7-8	ROL 0115	The Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature and Film	Kligerman
LIT 4188	1AA1	29236	T 6-8	TUR 2333	Entrapped Bodies: On Illness, Disability and the Prisonhouse of Language	Amoko
LIT 4233	1MS2	19562	T 5-6 / R 6	MAT 0115	Postcolonial Theory	Schueller
LIT 4930	1DKA	29333	T 10/ R 10-11	TUR 1120K	Promise of Israel in Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	1DKB	29339	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 1120K	Ukraine and Jews	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	1MR2	17658	T 4 / R 4-5	TUR 2322	Literature and Film Culture of the African Diaspora in Western Europe–French and British	Reid
LIT 4930	1RB2	13460	T 4 / R 4-5	NRN 1037 / NRN 1001	Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Gothic Fiction	Burt
LIT 4930	DEP-X	DEP-X	W 6-8	ONLINE	Breaking Boundaries: A Science Fiction Creative Writing Workshop	Smith
LIT 4930	1THA	29352	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0113	Strange Weather	Harpold

Course Descriptions

AML 3285

Native American 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 Native American 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

AML 3673

Racial Identities and Asian American Literature
Malini Johar Schueller

Course Description: “Asian-American” is a highly contested, yet necessary category, born of racism, nationalism, and resistance. This course focuses on the ways in which different forms of racialization have constructed Asian American identity. We will examine Asian-American literary and cultural productions in relation to specific immigration acts, restrictions, exclusions, and laws as well as to racialized stereotypes such as model minorities. We will also study how U.S. imperialism in Asia and the Asia Pacific-–the Philippines, Vietnam–have produced different Asian-American cultures. In keeping with the wide range covered by Asian American studies, the course will engage with a variety of cultural materials: novels, autobiographies, short stories, plays, poems, graphic novels, documentaries, newspaper articles, as well as essays.

Possible Texts: Jade Snow Wong Fifth Chinese Daughter, David Henry Hwang M Butterfly, Mine Obuko Citizen 13660, R. Zamor Linmark Leche, Aimee Phan We Should Never Meet, Jhumpa Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies, Frank Chin Chickencoop Chinaman.

AML 4170

Afro-Futurism
Julia Mollenthiel

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of literary and artistic forms of Afro-Futurism. We will probe the genre of science fiction and its trends with a particular focus on representations of racial Otherness. We will consider the relationship between science fiction and African diasporic literary traditions by zoning in on dystopian and utopian visions of the past and future. We will also consider the various ways in which technology intersects with race and how Black artists use science fiction to challenge hegemonic systems of oppression.

AML 4170

Feminist and Queer Science Fiction
Margaret Galvan

As a speculative genre, science fiction is invested in worldmaking and imagining things otherwise. In this course, we will look at how science fiction has been deployed by feminist and queer thinkers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in novels, short stories, film, comics, music videos, etc. From early reckonings with artificial intelligence to retrograde but delightfully campy imaginings of female characters, we will grapple with how artists have engaged the genre of science fiction to think through issues of gender and sexuality. Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), which uses time travel to cast an interracial couple back into the antebellum South, will be a central touchstone as we examine how it has been adapted as a graphic narrative in 2017 and TV series in 2022. Following Butler, students will imagine how they might adapt early science fiction short stories into other media and account for our present moment. In addition to this adaptation project, course assignments will include digital reflections on a shared course website and a short formal essay.

AML 4213

American Literature Before 1800
Jodi Schorb

If you enjoy historical perspectives on literature, are curious about how early Americans entered print, or want to diversify your knowledge of the nation’s first forms of literary expression, this course is well suited to your interests.

Rather than memorization or tests, the class will focus on hands-on activities that allow students to explore generative questions (which we will decide as a group) and create their own ways of exploring the puzzles and pleasures of past lives and literatures. This means handling early manuscripts and books in UF special collections, exploring digitized archives using new digital humanities tools, establishing common questions about the materials that can serve as touchstones across the semester, and having a supportive space to explore questions that most interest you about the study of the past.

Some likely topics include how people made sense of the world around them through self writing, how to grapple with some of the weird or unfamiliar qualities of early fiction and life writing, how drumbeats of revolution and emerging ideas of selfhood and natural rights found expression in a variety of forms, and how excluded populations asserted themselves through print.

Students will write at least three short (3-page) response papers and one longer (8-page) essay, and will also share discoveries in small groups. No knowledge of American literature prior to 1900 is required.

AML 4242

Chicanx Civil Rights
Tace Hedrick

The study of the histories and stories of the Chicanx (Mexican American) Civil Rights Movement(s) should be a fundamental part of how we understand the past of our America—that is, the United States and Latin America–and what has shaped our relationships both within and across these borders until now. In particular, sometimes competing ideas about race, sexuality, and especially gender roles were mapped on to the terrains of movement politics, cultural nationalism, and the Chicano/a artistic renaissance. Delimiting our readings between 1960 and 1990 will allow us to concentrate on some of the most important founding years of the Chicanx political and artistic renaissance, when representations of race and of sexualities were inextricably intertwined with histories, thought, art, and fictions. Attendance, reading quizzes, and three in-class long essay exams will be required.

AML 4311

Toni Morrison
Debra Walker King

Description: This course introduces students to an extraordinary woman whose work, both fictional and critical, has shaken the foundations of American literature (and criticism) to reconstitute both it and the boundaries of its canon. Students will investigate why critics herald Toni Morrison as the “most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature” while also discovering why she is its most renowned. Morrison’s work has earned the highest accolades in contemporary literary circles: The National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon in 1977, the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Beloved in 1988, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012) (among others). Her novels explore themes of naturalistic fiction while also engaging womanist thought, responsibility and respectability, and the more dramatic themes of modernism: death, love, rebirth, and memory. They are lyrical prose memorials to suffering and loss that move beyond characters’ victimization towards rectification, reconciliation, renewal, and revival.

Focus: Before her death in 2019, Toni Morrison published eleven novels, two plays, a libretto, two short stories, five children’s books and several critical pieces. This semester we will read many of her novels, including what critics call the Beloved Trilogy. Our discussions and considerations focus on several themes: the relationship of Morrison’s work to womanist thought, the sacred to the secular, history and heritage, identity, “race, borders and the desire for belonging.” We will evaluate what critics have to say about Morrison (how they construct and reconstruct the artist and her work) as well as evaluate the author’s own critical perspectives on art and society.

AML 4453

Representations of AI in American Literature
Stephanie A. Smith

From the fictional android Data in the Star Trek franchise, regarded as a valuable member of the Enterprise crew, to the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey who appears to have its own will thereby depicting “the future birth of a superior intelligent being,” the question of human intelligence being displayed by a mechanical device has been part of American popular culture for decades. However, prior to the foundation of the genre now called Science Fiction, American writers explored the question of the relationship between humanity and the tools we build or create. This course will explore those representations beginning in the 19th century and working our way to present day representations of artificial intelligence, using such texts as “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce or “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville to the actually existing technology of Sophia, the first robot granted citizenship status by the United Nations.

AML 4685

Black Horror, White Terror
Julia Mollenthiel

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of literary and artistic horror by Black artists. We will probe the genre of horror as well as the Gothic and its trends with a particular focus on representations of racial Otherness and racism. We will consider the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict racial fears and the terror associated with being Black in America.

AML 4685

Race and Gender in Chicanx and Latinx Literature
Tace Hedrick

In the so-called “Latino explosion” in the entertainment and literary industries of the ’90s, the market value of certain U.S. Latino/a and Chicana/o authors and artists began to increase. A select few Chicanx and Latinx writers (the “x” is to designate not just male and female writers, but all sexes/sexualities) have been drawn into the mainstream of United States publishing: writers like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina García, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez are, if not household names, at least better-known than their predecessors. We will be looking at intersections and permutations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary U.S. Latinx and Chicanx writing from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We will also be reading critical and theoretical work in Latino/a and Chicana/o Studies; in doing so, we will examine the ways assumptions—esthetic, social, political, and market-driven—both by, and about, US Chicana/o and Latinx groups and their class, race, sexuality and gender have changed (and in some ways remained the same) over the last decade or so. Attendance, reading quizzes, and three in-class long essay exams will be required.

CRW 3110

Fiction Workshop
Uwem Akpan

This course 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 3310

Poetry Workshop: Feeling Into Words
Ange Mlinko

This is an intermediate workshop that will introduce you to a range of contemporary poems to use as models to hone your skills and deepen your imagination. We will start with a reading of Seamus Heaney’s famous essay, “Feeling into Words,” and discuss the relation of craft to visionary technique, life to language. There will be weekly prompts and exercises, which will derive from our anthology readings. We will emphasize originality of thought, expressed through form; the importance of vivid imagery; and the musical possibilities of American speech.

CRW 3310

Verse Writing
Michael Hofmann 

This is the intermediate/ advanced undergraduate poetry workshop. We will widen our experience and understanding of poetry by reading an anthology by Jo Shapcott and the late Matthew Sweeney, and books by Karen Solie and Jo Shapcott, and you will write poems to a wide array of prompts and subjects (and none).

CRW 4211

Creative Nonfiction
Michael Hofmann 

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

CRW 4905

The Art of Dialogue
David Leavitt

What are the realistic qualities to be imitated (or faked) in dialogue?—Spontaneity. Artless or hit-or-miss arrival at words used. Ambiguity (speaker not sure, himself, what he means). Effect of choking (as in engine): more to be said than can come through. Irrelevance. Allusiveness. Erraticness: unpredictable course. Repercussion.

—Elizabeth Bowen

This section of CRW 4905—the department’s advanced fiction-writing workshop—will focus on dialogue, among the most essential aspects of fiction. Although you will be free to write whatever you like, I am hoping that you will take this opportunity to think about and practice the art of dialogue, bearing in mind the guidelines laid out by Elizabeth Bowen (and quoted above) in her essay “Notes on Dialogue.” Reading will consist of works in which dialogue is the dominant method for moving the narrative forward: stories by Uwem Akpan, Camille Bordas, Raymond Carver, and Mary Robison; novels and excerpts from novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett*, Henry Green, and Muriel Spark; and possibly a play or two

Performance—the reading aloud of dialogue scenes from works of fiction and plays—will be part of this class. I will also assign a certain number of exercises. Your duties are to take an active part in the conversation—the dialogue—that is the class and to write two stories over the course of the semester, the second of which may be a revision of the first.

*Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), though not as well known in this country as in her native England, took the art of dialogue to new and surreal levels. In her 1944 novel Elders and Betters, for instance, she manages the virtuosic feat of rendering a dinner-table conversation with fourteen participants.

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Laura Gonzales

This class is intended to introduce students to the field of technical and professional communication (TPC), emphasizing that communication is mitigated through relationships between various stakeholders and community members. Through our course projects, students will practice TPC in a variety of rhetorical situations, understanding how issues of access, inclusion, and accessibility are at play in all professional communication contexts. Our course will be structured through the following grounding concepts:

• Technical and professional writers build and maintain relationships
  Although things like word choice, visual rhetoric, proper punctuation, and effective use of digital media are important, these abilities amount to nothing if a technical and professional communicator cannot use them to facilitate relationships between organizations and their communities/publics, writers and publishers, experts and lay people, and so on.
• Because technical and professional writers build and maintain relationships, their social interactions and curiosity are just as important as their ability to construct coherent prose or communicate in multiple media.
  Good technical and professional communicators must know how to pose good questions, to listen actively, and at times to observe others’ actions. They must know how to seek information and become versatile in determining where that information might be found.
• Technical and professional communicators write, edit, and design with and on behalf of others
  Some writers (such as novelists and poets) attach their names to their work. Technical and professional communicators usually leave their names unattached because they produce and maintain an organization’s communications. They are essentially stewards of an organization’s rhetorical resources. This means that technical and professional communicators must learn to compose texts that others can access, engage with, use and perhaps reuse.

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.

ENG 3010

Nearly a half-century ago, the literary critic Morton W. Bloomfield observed, “The problem of interpretation is the problem of allegory. . . . Allegory is, in this sense, that which conquers time, that which perpetually renews the written word.” However, even today, because allegory and allegorical reading, or allegoresis, open up onto the possibility of multiple competing interpretations of any literary work or visual text—the perpetual renewal celebrated by Bloomfield—other contemporary readers find a deep threat in such practices. In our class, we will delve into some of the debates surrounding allegory and allegoresis through a careful engagement with a number of different kinds of readings. We will begin the semester by looking at examples of allegory in Walter Scott’s short story “The Two Drovers” (1827) and James Cameron’s film, The Terminator (1984). This will be followed by readings of foundational studies of allegory and allegoresis by, among others, Angus Fletcher, Bloomfield, and Paul De Man. We will then turn our attention to some of the most influential examples of traditional allegorical literature, including Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses (4th century), Dante Aligheri’s early fourteenth century masterpiece Inferno, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I (1590). After that, we will take a deep dive into the major reconsideration of the importance of allegory and allegoresis in our contemporary moment in Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), before concluding the semester with discussions of allegorical fiction and film by Mary Shelley, James Joyce, Ted Chiang, Denis Villeneuve, and Colson Whitehead.

ENG 4015

Two Autobiographical Novels
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will undertake a close reading of the most autobiographical novels by the two greatest novelists of the Victorian period: Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Among the topics we will consider are the depictions of childhood, the social world, gender and class, romantic love, and sibling relationships in the novels. Some supplementary readings will be assigned to illuminate the connections between the lives of Dickens and George Eliot and their confessional masterpieces. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4133

Cinema and Religion
Pietro Bianchi

Since its birth at the end of the 19th century, the history of cinema has always been traversed by religious themes, and films have always narrated stories of mysticism and religious experiences. The reason is simple: religions always had to confront the problem of the image of God. Religions always had the problem of how (or if) to represent God. But is it really possible to represent God in a visual form? Is there an image of God after all? Or is the image of God – as some religions believe – a form of idolatry? Is it possible to create a sensible image of an otherworldly entity?

In this course we will examine the different ways in which film, throughout its history, has represented religious, mystical, and transcendent experiences. We will especially reflect on how the cinema – in dealing with the problem of the representation of God and of transcendence – ended up dealing with what is probably its most philosophical and fundamental question: is it possible to see the invisible?

Among the films that will be screened and discussed there will be: Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence; László Nemes, Son of Saul; Paul Schrader, First, Reformed; Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Robert Bresson, Diary of a Country Priest; Jessica Hausner, Lourdes; Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly; Bruno Dumont, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc; Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev; Yasujirō Ozu, Tokyo Story; Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet; Marco Bellocchio, My Mother’s Smile; Jasmila Žbanić, On the Path; Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Young Ahmed and some episodes from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog.

The class has a weekly mandatory screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussions (a strong emphasis will be given on active participation). Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 7-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4133

Shakespeare, Cavell, and Screwball Comedy
Richard Burt

This course will focus on marriage in Shakespeare’s comedies and in Screwball comedies from the perspective of philosopher Stanley Cavell. In Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cavell devotes chapters to The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. Although Shakespeare’s comedies have a lot in common with the screwball comedy, it is somewhat surprising that Cavell never wrote on them. In his book Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Cavell wrote about Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, in which marriages never happen or fatally break down and about Eric Rohmer’s film adaptation of the late romance, The Winter’s Tale. We will do what Cavell did not: watch screwball comedies, read selections from Cavell’s many books, and watch film adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Eric Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale. By triangulating Shakespeare’s comedies, Cavell, and Screwball Comedy, we may learn something about marriage. Each point of this triangle will illuminate the others. Requirements: Short writing assignments due the day before each class; class participation; three short papers.

ENG 4135

Brazilian Cinema
M. Elizabeth Ginway

Brazilian cinema first made its mark on the international film scene in the 1950s and has won six awards at the Cannes Film Festival over the following decades, including Bacurau in 2019. This class surveys Brazilian cinema, from the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s which addressed social issues through experimental techniques and allegory as in the 1969 film Antônio das Mortes, through the New Brazilian Cinema of the 1990s, which, similarly concerned with social issues, made a conscious effort to entertain audiences, as seen in the evocative storytelling, sumptuous color and camera work of City of God (2002), to the current wave of cinema, which often abandons the traditional realism of Brazilian cinema to embrace genre films, such as horror and mash-ups of science fiction, fantasy and westerns, as in Bacurau. In this class, films will be analyzed in light of the aesthetic, ideological and practical challenges faced by the three generations of Brazilian filmmakers, with the first group creating a national film industry in the face of censorship imposed by Brazil’s military dictatorship, the second group challenged by its increased privatization, and the current group dealing with increased costs and the continued competition of Hollywood blockbusters. The course will contextualize the industry’s preoccupation with social disparities and violence and trace the efforts of Brazilian filmmakers to reach new audiences and increase national and international visibility. Graded assignments include Canvas discussion board posts, attendance of film screenings, three short papers and a short presentation.

ENG 4136

Filmmaking Workshop
Trevor Mowchun

Students will produce an experimental film under the direction of the instructor, Trevor Mowchun, an experienced and internationally recognized filmmaker-scholar. Throughout this complex endeavor spanning the entire semester, students will be exposed to the various and interrelated moving parts of the filmmaking process. All workshop participants should be willing to act for the camera. Enthusiastic participation and openminded collaboration are essential.

Some of the screening sessions will be allocated to the filmmaking workshop as needed.

Individually and outside of class, students will also produce one short film. The instructor will advise on the content, style, and logistics of this film. Students will be given access to the department’s production/post-production equipment upon completion of tutorials provided by the class technician.

An application process is in place for this course. Interested students should contact the instructor by email (tmowchun@ufl.edu) to request an application. Complete applications are due back to the instructor via email by Monday October 16, 2023.

Prerequisite: At least one upper-division (3000-level and up) film course. If you are unsure about whether you have the prerequisite, you can still request an application as there will be space in the form to include all film or film-related courses you have taken thus far.

ENG 4910

Raising History from the Grave: Collaborative Research, Social Engagement, and International Exchange
Leah Rosenberg

​What can we learn of history from the dead, from graveyards and public records? From the stories their families tell? From the tales literary authors weave?

In this course, we address these questions by examining the lives, the literature, and cemeteries of the Caribbean immigrants who built the Panama Canal. Caribbeans comprised some sixty percent of canal workers. Heralded as the highest engineering achievement of its era, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914 and revolutionized trade, war, and travel across the globe by enabling ships to transit between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in a matter of hours. The work was very dangerous. Many thousands of workers died and were injured – from malaria, yellow fever, accidents, and mudslides. Yet the Caribbean workers who performed the dangerous labor necessary to build the canal have been largely omitted from the official history and literature about the Canal. Even their graves have been buried literally and figuratively by history.

In this course, you will study the history of the construction of the Panama Canal as told by historians, literary authors, and filmmakers. You will also learn research skills and write your own history. Working collaboratively in a group with your colleagues, you will unearth from census, employment, and other records facts about one canal worker buried in one of the Canal Zone cemeteries. Each group will build a digital project to tell that individual’s story. Your digital stories will contribute to the Pan Caribbean Sankofa Oral History Project, a joint project of UF libraries’ Panama Canal Museum Collection and Pan-Caribbean Sankofa a civic organization dedicated to preserving the history of West Indians who worked on the Panama Canal and maintaining their cemeteries.

You will also participate in an International Virtual Exchange with students at St. George’s University in Grenada about the significance of death in the Caribbean and Caribbean literature. In this unit, you will learn how to use historical records like newspapers and historical photographs to enhance literary analysis. In the final project for the exchange, you will make a collaborative presentation with students at St. George’s about historical sources and their relevance to a literary text of your choice Literary readings for the class: Eric Walrond’s Harlem Renaissance masterpiece Tropic Death (1926) and the award-winning children’s book The Silver People (2014); films include Roman Foster’s Diggers (1985) and the American Experience’s Panama Canal (2011); Historical works include: Julie Greene, The Canal Builders (2010) and Joan Flores-Villalobos, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal (Penn Press, 2023).

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Langston Hughes: Novel, Essay, Autobiography, and Film
Mark A. Reid

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach that requires students to familiarize themselves with Langston Hughes’ literary and sociopolitical writings, and apply critical race theory, which scholars such as Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, and essayists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin employ, that signal a burgeoning Afro- Pessimism and or postNegritude moment where the post-racial fantasy of neoliberal gestures have evaporated with the departure of President Barack Hussein Obama.

Lectures and class discussions will explore how artists, using Black vernacular and various other literary and visual strategies, dramatize 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.)

Discussion topics include the Harlem Renaissance, African American literature, the blues tradition in poetry and life, and the international sociopolitical climate of our quotidian life. In discussing the literary work and political life of Langston Hughes, the seminar participants will critically assess how Hughes fared as an American writer and social critic and how the theoretical application of intersectionality might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. How do Langston Hughes’ writings symbolically expose and fervently articulate a “Black Lives Consciousness” awareness and endgame.

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: Literature and Medicine
Pamela Gilbert

This course will explore the relationship between medicine and literature after 1800. We will read a variety of texts, including fiction, medical writing, critical and historical work. Key questions will be: how does the advent of modern medicine shape literature? How has the role of both clinician and patient changed over time? What are some key themes in the literature? How does the emerging conversation about narrative medicine and medical humanities relate to the history and literature of health and disease? Etc. The reading list may include works by Edgar Allen Poe, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

This course provides upper-division credit in the major, and will be taught with that in mind; however, interdisciplinary work is encouraged, and there is room to tailor your final paper to individual interests. There is a considerable amount of reading: consider your reading speed and the expectations of the other courses you are taking before committing to this course. The course requirements include a short paper, a long paper, reading quizzes and a creative project.

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 3122

Victorian Addictions
Claudia Mitchell

In Victorian England, religious and moral values dominated public life and culture. Moralists and evangelicals sought to reform Victorian society, working to remove what they saw as great social evils–gambling, prostitution, drinking, and drug use. Deviation from dignity and propriety was pathologized; excessively emotional women were diagnosed as hysterical, and obsession with a single object was feared as “monomania.” At the same time, wealthy and middle-class men gambled away huge sums of money, there were thousands of sex workers in London alone, and opium dens and “gin palaces” overflowed with patrons. Sensation fiction of the era which dramatized these deviant behaviors was both extremely popular, and similarly demonized. Why were the Victorians both fearful and fascinated by these preoccupations? And how do Victorian anxieties echo through our culture today?

In this class, we will consider how the Victorians variously constructed sensation, obsession, and addiction through key literature of the period concerned with addiction and obsession, including: Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Thomas De Quincy), Scenes of Clerical Life (George Eliot), and Danesbury House (Ellen Wood). We will examine these novels through interactive class activities like crafting playlists, fan-casting, informal debates, and collaborative Jamboard sessions, learning by analyzing and reimagining the texts we approach and by sharing our perspectives with each other. Throughout this course, students will read, write, and think about cultural attitudes towards addictive and other “deviant” behaviors, and how literature reflects and shapes these attitudes. To that end, the major course assignments will be: discussion board posts on each primary text (500 words), mid-term essay imagining a modern adaptation of a primary course text (1000 words), final project “pitch” presentation, and a thesis-driven final paper that includes both close readings of the primary text and engagement with critical secondary sources (2500 words).

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 do research and attempt the application of critical frameworks. Expect a considerable amount of reading. Assignments will likely include papers, in-class-essays, quizzes, and a presentation.

ENL 4220

Sixteenth-Century Literature in Its Time and Ours
John Murchek

“The past,” L.P. Hartley writes at the outset of his novel, The Go-Between, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Emphasizing the alterity of the past, this insight demands that we preserve what distinguishes the artefacts of the past—including its literary remains–as belonging to a particular time and place. On the other hand, we wouldn’t read literature from the past if we didn’t think that it could communicate something to us across the centuries, if we didn’t think that we could somehow commune with it. And so we find ourselves caught in an oscillation between likeness and difference, familiarity and estrangement.

In this course, we will locate our readings of sixteenth-century English poetry and prose in the space of this oscillation. We will be concerned with the process by which we generate meanings that are at once informed by an understanding of historical contexts and energized by the interests we bring to the texts we read. We will try to understand the extent to which the feelings and emotions that animate the literature we read resemble and differ from those we experience in our early twenty-first century lives. We will also try to tease out the rival claims of concepts such as originality and imitation, individuality and conformity, genius and virtuosity.

Our readings will include poetry and prose by Sir Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset; Isabella Whitney; George Gascoigne; Sir Philip Sidney; Edmund Spenser; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Christopher Marlowe; William Shakespeare; and Aemilia Lanyer. We will also likely read a history of the sixteenth century, either Susan Brigden’s New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (2002) or Lucy Wooding’s Tudor England: A History (2022).

Student work will probably include a close reading of a lyric poem, participation in a panel leading a discussion of one of the assigned texts, brief written provocations to discussions of the readings, and a major paper.

ENL 4221

Milton’s Paradise Lost
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will be devoted to a close reading of what Stephen Greenblatt (in agreement with many others) believes to be “the greatest poem in the English language.” Theological, political, psychological, and gender issues will be all considered as we focus on understanding the language and autobiographical dimensions of Milton’s seventeenth-century epic about “man’s first disobedience.” Course requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENL 4333

Shakespeare: Learn by Doing
Sid Homan

The assumption in all my theatre courses is that the text of a play is not just what is written on the page, but that text in performance, 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.ufl.edu.

LIT 3003

European Television on Netflix
Mandy Elizabeth Moore

From Spain’s crime thriller Money Heist to Germany’s time travel drama Dark, many European television series have found international success through Netflix. This course uses Netflix as an entry point for a conversation about European TV in which students will learn strategies for navigating an increasingly mediated world. The class will introduce the basics of television studies (including methods and vocabulary), explore issues specific to European television (including historical and cultural contexts), and address the recent shifts in the TV industry during the streaming era. In order to ensure easy, consistent, and affordable access to television content, all the shows we watch will be through Netflix. We will end the semester by examining the consequences of only looking at Netflix shows: what’s missing? Which countries tend to get more Netflix original programming and why?

Each week, students will watch one or two episodes from European television programs, paired with readings that provide context and/or introduce new concepts from television studies. Major assignments will include an in-class presentation, brief weekly reflections on assigned episodes/readings, three short analysis papers, and a larger research project that can take the form of an academic paper, public-facing article, or video essay.

LIT 3041

The Craft of Comedy: Exploring through Performance the Art of Laughter
Sidney Homan

What makes us laugh? Why do we laugh? What skills, what techniques, what mind-set does the actor need when performing in stage comedies? The audience for comedies doesn’t have to be silent, as they generally are in tragedies or “serious plays.” Indeed, their laughter, their response, verbal and non-verbal, are a factor, part of the performance. And so what makes comedy a somewhat unique genre?

Our major text in LIT 3041 is the classic Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays, edited by playwrights Eric Lane and Nina Shengold. We’ll explore comedy by staging scenes from the wide range of comedies in this collection: farces, like There Shall Be No Bottom (subtitled “a bad play for worse actors”); parodies like Frederick Stroppel’s satire of detective stories in Chocolate; comedies that are physical (Eric Coble’s Ties That Bind), surreal (Steve Martin’s The Zig-Zag Woman), dark (Elaine May’s The Way of All Fish), about the “New York scene” (Eric Lane’s sardonic The Statue of Bolivar and Garth Winfield ‘s romantic Please Have a Seat and Someone Will Be With You Shortly); sketches about first dates gone wrong (Check, Please); and comic momlologues. And we will perform scenes from one of the most brilliant and witty comedies of the modern theatre, Tom Stoppard’s take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

We do all this through actual performance, taking the medium of comedy, its art and craft, not as literature but as something meant to be staged before an audience. The course is online and my students and I have found that with their fellow actors in close-up on screen, we can tighten our focus on decisions made by the actors on everything from delivery and gesture, to movement, even subtext. Zoom—this is to say—has advantages for a course where we “study” the play through our own performances.

Once performed, the class and I, as co-directors, “work” the scene with the two actors, critiquing their performance, trying out 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.

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-two 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 3173

Introduction to Yiddish Literature
Jason Wagner

This class is a survey of Modern Yiddish literature, focusing on major European and American authors who wrote in the Yiddish language. The course begins with Hasidic tales, then turns its gaze on the three classic writers of 19th century: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz. Through these writers we explore the traditional literary centers of Yiddish: Lithuania-Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. We then survey the Modernist moment in Yiddish writing: How did the widespread destruction and displacement caused by the first World War, pogroms, and the Russian wars affect Yiddish Literature? Finally, the class closes with a section on holocaust and post-holocaust Yiddish literature focusing on three major figures of post-war Yiddish Literature: I.B. Singer, Chaim Grade, and Abraham Sutzkever. The language of this course is English, all texts that were not originally written in English are presented in English translation.

LIT 3173

#Holocaust: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Film and Literature
Roy Holler

The Holocaust’s impact on the Zionist project was profound, serving as a catalyst for the establishment of the Israeli state, which continues to perceive itself as a metaphor for Jewish destruction and rebirth. This raises an intriguing question: What does it mean when a young nation forges its identity by commemorating and seeking retribution for the millions who were murdered, thereby transforming an unprecedented traumatic event into an ideological cornerstone for nation-building?

As time slowly distances us from the Holocaust, this course delves into the utilization and construction of its memory within Israeli society. By exploring Hebrew literature, film and other cultural works produced in parallel with pivotal socio-political events of the 20th century, we will gain insights into how the Holocaust’s memory was employed and shaped. We will then explore the evolving landscape of Holocaust remembrance in the digital age of the Start-Up Nation. With the advent of technology and the rise of social media platforms, the ways in which we remember and engage with the Holocaust have undergone significant changes. We will examine the impact of social media on Holocaust memory, including the role of hashtags, viral challenges, and user-generated content in shaping public discourse and awareness. We will investigate how these platforms have facilitated the sharing of survivor testimonies, fostered connections between generations, and confronted Holocaust denial and distortion.

LIT 3383

Women in Literature
Jodi Schorb

Attributes: General Education – Diversity, General Education – Humanities (D and H)

This course offers a critical and thematic study of women in English and American literature. Students will learn about how women used an array of strategies (from pen names to self publishing, to clever partnerships with editors and advocates, to guerilla publishing tactics) to get their literary creations to audiences. This semester, the class will grant special focus to innovative and impactful work by pre-20th century writers, including Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen, and that enduring figure of importance, “Anonymous.” Short reflective responses, one longer (6-page) essay, discussion boards, and guided assignments help students gain a window into the world of early publication, including hands on work analyzing literatire published in historically significant periodicals (household and domestic guides, anti-slavery journals, upstart literary journals, etc.).

LIT 3400

Ukrainian History Through Ukrainian Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

In July 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in which he proclaimed that Ukraine has no culture, language, or history separate from Russia – and is, in fact, not a nation. As scholars such as Yale historian Timothy Snyder have observed, however, Putin’s essay is an exercise in self-contradiction: that is, by so emphatically denying Ukraine’s existence, it ultimately emphasizes it. More to the point, however, one has only to survey more than two centuries of Ukrainian literature to perceive the richness of the country’s distinct culture and to see how Ukraine existed as a modern nation even before it was recognized as a sovereign nation-state in 1991. ​

The purpose of this class, then, is to trace Ukraine’s history through its literature in English translation. Although any nation’s literature cannot directly reflect its history, it can nevertheless provide insights into the desires, anxieties, and conflicts that shaped its formation. Moreover, as post-colonial scholars have long argued, the study of literature produced by people living under, or emerging from, imperial rule offers insight into fraught and complex struggles of self-definition and self-expression.

This course will begin with a brief overview of Ukraine’s pre-national origins in ninth century Kyivan Rus’ and its succession in the Kingdom of Galicia-Volynia, followed by a more detailed study of the emergence of the modern idea of Ukrainian nationhood in the eighteenth century. We will consider, for example, how playful experimentations with the Ukrainian language in Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneida (1798) – as well as Romantic-era literary transcriptions of Ukrainian folklore – gave way to the sophisticated poetry, prose, and dramas composed by Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, and Ivan Franko. As we study translations of these Ukrainian-language texts that posit Ukraine’s history and literary tradition as distinct from that imperial Russia, we will also discuss how the short stories of Nikolai Gogol (or Mykola Hohol) negotiate the hybrid identity of nineteenth-century Ukrainians living under Russian colonial rule. Likewise, we will question how canonical early Russophone Soviet works of literature such as Issac Babel’s Odesa Stories (1931) draw on distinctly Ukrainian-Jewish themes. Our discussion of (post-) Soviet-era Ukrainian literature will focus on the poetry of the dissident writers Vasyl Stus and Mykola Rudenko as well as on the novel The Moscoviad (1993) by Yuri Androkhovych, the founder of Ukraine’s experimental Bu-Ba-Bu literary movement. A significant portion of the class will be devoted to translations of contemporary Ukrainian literary works – including novels such as Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996) and Nobel Prize nominee Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2020) as well as children’s picture books and comics.

Since this course is constructed as a survey of Ukrainian literature that places into relief major flashpoints in Ukrainian history, it will include readings by such historians as Mykhailo Hruchevsky, Serhii Plokhy, and Timothy Snyder. Additionally, it will include critical texts authored by such scholars as Tamara Hunderova, Myroslav Shkandrij, and Mayhill Fowler.

No previous knowledge of Ukrainian literature and history – or in fact, the literature and history of other Slavic nations – is required for this class (although, of course, students with a reading knowledge of Ukrainian and/or Russian are welcome to read the assigned primary texts in their original languages). However, since the texts assigned for this course are English translations, we will periodically discuss translation as a specific art and thus consider how the works we are reading have been mediated by Anglophone translators.

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 4188

Entrapped Bodies: Illness, Disability, and the Prisonhouse of Language
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses bodies in extreme pain; thus, it examines the experience and language of chronic suffering. Around the world, millions feel entrapped in the face of persistent ill-health, escalating disability, and excruciating pain. Fully a third of US residents live with long-term illness, which disabling experiences frequently entail severe pain. Such chronic suffering degrades all aspects of personal, social, and professional life all-too-often amid crushing isolation, diagnostic uncertainty, and therapeutic inadequacy. Highlighting an intractable dilemma, bodies in pain exemplify the pitfalls of representing experience through language: Inevitably, we understand and express even the most intense and excruciating personal circumstances within the confines of socially constructed language. Paradoxically, however, all our descriptions of intense suffering appear to be unfit for the purpose; the meager words we use to signify debilitating pain seem unavoidably inapt, inaccurate, or otherwise inadequate. Thus, these experiences remain largely untold at the same time as vocal sufferers feel unheard—or misunderstood—by interlocutors from ranging from loved ones, caregivers, and friends to medical practitioners to employers, supervisors, and colleagues to various publics. Moreover, women, Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants, the poor, and other disempowered groups endure unacknowledged pain in the wake of dismissive prejudices, most notably, degrading discourses of hypochondria and hysteria. Given this complex—and vexing—background, how do chronic sufferers—and their interlocutors—articulate realities that fundamentally elude, if not, exceed language, logic and meaning? Instructively, the rhetoric of pain routinely turns to imprecise analogies and flawed metaphors, for instance, the arbitrary and opaque numerical scales that define clinical settings, not to mention, images of violence and violation embodied in graphic terms like “stabbing,” “crippling,” “tortuous,” and “unbearable.” Bringing together international writers from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this course integrates multiple lines of inquiry: illness and disability studies; the practice and history of medicine; theories of language and subject formation; theories regarding the construction of experience and meaning; and literary theory and criticism.

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Theory
Malini Johar Schueller

This course introduces you to the field of postcolonial theory. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few European powers had colonized 80% of Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements during the latter half of the century led to territorial, but not necessarily economic, cultural and intellectual decolonization. The continuing cultural, political, and economic effects of colonialism, as well as new forms of colonialism and imperialism sanctioned on the global South constitute the field of postcolonial studies. We will study the ways in which postcolonial theory has intersected with and impacted diverse areas of inquiry such as feminism, historiography, ethnography, politics, and literature. At the same time, this course will stress the importance of historicizing postcoloniality. The course will focus on the central concerns of postcolonial studies: the nature of colonial discourse, the articulation of revolutionary national consciousness, questions of subalternity and history, the relationship of postcolonial studies to gender studies, and the politics of contemporary colonialism and neocolonialism. We will read the works of major revolutionaries and theorists and the debates and arguments about these works. The course will cover writings from and about the major parts of the world affected by imperialism: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, and the U.S.. We will see how postcolonial theory can be useful in analyzing conditions of oppression today.

Required Text: Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory; Other readings on Canvas.

LIT 4930

Promise of Israel in Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic

Cinema in Israel was from the outset of the first Zionist pioneer settling at the beginning of the 20th Century both a civilizing mission and a Promethean construction of the country as the Promised Land. It thus combined a social message about collective labor with a heroic aspiration, blended in a cinematic narrative.

The course will seek to establish a relationship between the early Zionist cinema (The Land of Promise, 1924, Yaakov Ben-Dov) and the subsequent tradition it inspired: (Land of Promise; Judah Lehman, 1934), after WW2, establishing the State of Israel, Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955, Thorold Dickinson); Exodus (1960, Otto Preminger), the Six Day War, the rise of anti-Israeli terrorism, Operation Thunderbolt (Menachem Golan,1976), Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005), Walk on Water (Ethan Fox, 2004), the“Bourekas” films and films with humorous interpretation of immigration to Israel (Sallah Shabbati, 1964), to modern times, e.g. films by Amos Gitai, and the rise of the strong trend of Israeli women filmmakers, e.g. the pioneering work of Ronit Elkabetz. All these will be screened and given thorough examination and discussion in class.

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

Literature and Film Culture of the African Diaspora in Western Europe–French and British
Mark A. Reid

African Diaspora Literature, Film, and Visual Media from the Americas, Britain and France are studied, analyzed, and discussed to ascertain how Black literary and visual forms reflect and or resist contemporary socio-psychological forces that impede a community and its individuals from full participation in society. Course readings cover intersectional Black feminist theory to interrogate anti-Blackness, homophobia, and inter -racial, -multigender. -class forms of interdependence within a relationship that transcends hegemonic analytical regimes that propose monolithic forms of identity.

Course readings and screenings include the works of literary artists as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, filmmakers as Melvin Van Peebles, Ava DuVernay, Isaac Julien, Raoul Peck, Steve McQueen, performance artists as the American Ballet Theater ballerino Gabe Stone Shayer, and British artist and curator Eddie Chambers.

LIT 4930

Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Gothic Fiction
Richard Burt

The Gothic novel speaks to our present authoritarian times. What can’t we read? Should we even read literature? Should we just cancel it because the writer was a bad person? Is aesthetic form important? Can reading be harmful or dangerous? These questions emerged in response to the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, a form of literature some people thought improper, even harmful, to young girls who wished to learn about conduct and courtship. Some novels had trigger-warnings. The titles of two tracts about women reading novels will give you some idea of the kind of panic the novel could occasion: “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing” (1798) and “Terrorist Novel Writing” in The Spirit of the Public Journals (1797). The potentially good and bad effects novels might have on women readers are explored in the Gothic novels we will read in this course: Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho; Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Reading Gothic novels almost destroys the heroine’s chances of marrying Mr. Tilney, her suitor in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Does she keep a journal to draw on for her letters?, Mr. Tilney asks her, with gentle irony. Austen’s eponymous heroine asks in Emma, “What should a girl read?” How much does Emma actually read of the many fine books she lists, her suitor Mr. Knightley wonders. Reading habits and writing letters, so central to the epistolary novel did not simply vanish in the Gothic novel. Austen and the Brontë sisters not only wrote about how reading made young women and young men attractive, or how women readers might cut and paste literary extracts into albums or purchase collections of extracts, but also, they read novels as literary critics, sometimes judging a novel very harshly. In their literary criticism, letters, and novels, Austen and the Brontës made their literary preferences quite clear. Sir Walter Scott, Austen’s main literary competitor and a champion of her work, read Pride and Prejudice three times. Charlotte Brontë, however, severely criticized Austen in a letter to a friend who liked her novels. Charlotte added a postscript to Emily’s Wuthering Heights when it was published after Emily died. The modern novelist Virginia Woolf lambasted both Austen and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in A Room of One’s Own. Gender did not enclose or circumscribe the vast imaginative and literary freedom Austen and the Brontës took when judging other novels and novelists, nor did they give women novelists special treatment. Rather than work chronologically through the novels to address these questions and others, we will begin the semester by reading the latest of them, namely, Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, alongside Cora Kaplan’s “Wild Nights” and Georges Bataille’s illuminating and original chapter on Wuthering Heights in Literature and Evil. We will then turn back to the beginning of the Gothic Novel with selections from the UrGothic novel, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Moving directly to Austen’s engagement with Radcliffe in the posthumously published (mock?) Gothic novel Northanger Abbey, we will then jump forward to Austen’s last finished novel, Persuasion, considering it as a ghost story. We will end the semester reading the most famous Gothic novel of them all, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will also pay attention to the reception of these novels by modern critics (see Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s landmark book, Madwoman in the Attic); to the importance of Shakespeare to Austen and to both British and German Gothic novelists; and to the often difficult choices these incredibly gifted writers made to live unmarried as writers and critics. Since the reading and writing practices in Austen’s novels involve letters, we will also examine the epistolary novel and Samuel Richardson. Historical supplements to the required novels will be provided in informational annotations written by modern editors of critical editions.

Required readings and viewings: Selections from Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel Mysteries of Udolpho; Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Belknap Harvard UP), Austen’s Persuasion (Belknap Harvard UP); Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Norton); Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Belknap Harvard UP); The Terrorist System of Novel-Writing (1797); Terrorist Novel Writing (1798); Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s chapter on Jane Eyre in Madwoman in the Attic (1979); Cora Kaplan’s “Wild Nights,” in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism; “Ghost Narratives and the Gothic Novel: Print Culture and Reading Addiction” in Stefan Andriopoulos’s Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (2013); Georges Bataille’s chapter on Wuthering Heights in Literature and Evil; and a few film adaptations of Austen novels we won’t be reading during this course. Recommended: Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2016)

LIT 4930

Breaking Boundaries: a Science Fiction Writing Workshop
Stephanie A. 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, 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).

While there is no official prerequisite for this course, the previous completion of a 1000- or 2000-level creative-writing workshop is desirable. To be considered for inclusion in the workshop, prospective students should request an application form from the instructor at ssmith@ufl.edu and submit the completed form along with a five-page writing sample to the instructor by Oct. 15, 2023. Students selected for inclusion in the workshop will be notified by Oct. 24. If seats remain open in the workshop after the manuscript review process is complete, they will be released to general registration early in the advance registration period.

LIT 4930

Strange Weather
Terry Harpold

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs” – Charles Fort, Lo! (1931)

This course is a survey of and a reflection on the modern literary imaginary of strange weather, by which I don’t mean merely “unseasonal” wind, rain, sleet, or snow. I mean the sorts of outlandishly unexpected and heretofore never seasonal phenomena that have manifested in one form or another in a long history of stories about the lower and upper atmospheres.

For example, the matter reported to have fallen from a region just beyond the Earth’s atmosphere that the American chronicler of occult phenomena and renegade philosopher of science Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932*) christened the “Super-Sargasso-Sea.” This included a parade of “damned projectiles” such as fish (small and large, live, dead, fresh and rotting), frogs, insects, periwinkles, snakes, gobbets of flesh, blood, mud, colored rains, edible solids, ice, punk, cannonballs, unworked and worked pieces of stone, etc. – there is a lot more of this kind of thing in centuries of credible reports of anomalous falls, torrents of weird stuff that shouldn’t ever have been up there and shouldn’t ever have fallen down here.

(A related history of damned projectiles. In the first century of the Common Era Pliny the Elder claimed that the Greek poet Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise falling on his head from an open sky. It took nearly all of the 18th century and most of the 19th for European scientists to agree that rocks do sometimes fall from the heavens, even though the Greeks had documented the reality of meteorites as early as the fifth century BCE, and the Sumerians had done so two and half millennia earlier. Perhaps Aeschylus was watching out for the wrong sort of space junk?)

We will read from Fort’s resolutely digressive and unsystematic writings on anomalous falls and strange weather, and from a related canon of short and long fiction recounting these phenomena – mostly early aeronautic fiction and science fiction from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the first half of the twentieth century, when Fort’s influence on Anglo-American sf was considerable – and from modern scientific literature that tries to make sense (i.e., explain in rational terms or explain away altogether) honest reports of odd detritus falling from over-crowded skies.

And then we’ll turn to atmospheric anomalies and the emerging aerial imaginary of the late Anthropocene epoch when, as a common and unnervingly accurate cliché puts it, “abnormal [weather] is the new normal.” We’ll ask this question: what might we learn from fictions of the early technoscientific era, when human bodies first ventured into the skies, about the sources of our anxieties regarding unstable and unpredictable planetary weather, and from the abundant evidence of a deep human dread, as ancient as storytelling itself (e.g., The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oral traditions of Aboriginal Australians), of an abject plenitude wandering above our heads?

Graded writing requirements include three short papers in response to assigned readings, and a short report on a UF virtual symposium on Fortean topics. Extra-credit service learning activities in the course include opportunities to take part in supervised volunteer tree plantings in and around the city of Gainesville.

* 2024, you’ll note, is the sesquicentennial of Charles Fort’s birth.