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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Department of English

Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2025 (Upper-Division)

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

Spring 2025

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 3607 1MR1 24591 T 4 / R 4-5 TUR 2322 African-American Literature 2 Reid
AML 3673 1MS1 10275 T 4 / R 4-5 ONLINE Asian American and African American Interactions Schueller
AML 4170 1TH1 20510 M W F 4 MAT 0115 Eco-Poetry & Eco-Poetics Harpold
AML 4685 1JMA 26013 T 4 / R 4-5 MAT 0113 Black Horror, White Terror Mollenthiel
CRW 3110 1MF1 20514 M 9-11 TUR B310 Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing TBA
CRW 3310 DEP-X DEP-X T 9-11 TUR 2354 Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing Mlinko
CRW 4211 1MF2 22139 W 9-11 FLI 0113 Creative Nonfiction Lane
CRW 4905 1UA1 22659 T 9-11 FLI 0115 Historical Fiction Workshop Akpan
ENC 3250 1LG1 21805 ASYNCH ONLINE Professional Communications Gonzales
ENC 4212 1VD1 19411 T 10 / R 10-11 MAT 0113 Professional Editing Del Hierro
ENG 3011 1JM1 24727 M W F 6 TUR 2334 Theorists: Plato to Practical Criticism Murchek
ENG 3125 1PB1 24729 T 4 / R 4-5 / T E1-E3 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 History of Film, Part 3: Cinema of the 80s/90s/00s Bianchi
ENG 4015 1PB2 24730 T 5-6 / R 6 MAT 0114 What is a Dream? Bianchi
ENG 4015 1PR1 18390 M W F 7 MAT 0115 Reading Freud Closely Rudnytsky
ENG 4133 1AA1 20609 T 2-3 / R 3 / M 9-11 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Survey of African Cinema Amoko
ENG 4136 DEP-X DEP-X M W F 8 / M E1-E3 TUR 2334 / ROL 0115 Introduction to Filmmaking Mowchun
ENG 4310 1TM2 25054 W E1-E3 / T E1-E3 TUR 2334 Contemporary Avant-Garde Film Mowchun
ENG 4905 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Independent Study TBA
ENG 4911 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Undergraduate Research TBA
ENG 4936 DEP-X DEP-X T 6-8 TUR 2305 Honors Seminar: Desperate Domesticity Bryant
ENG 4936 DEP-X DEP-X M 9-11 / W 9-11 TUR 2334 Honors Seminar: Questions about the Movies Ray
ENG 4940 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Internship Gilbert
ENG 4953 1JS1 11680 T 4 / R 4-5 TUR B310 Department Seminar: Early America Genre and Gender Schorb
ENG 4970 DEP-X DEP-X TBA TBA Honors Thesis Project TBA
ENL 4273 1GS4 25101 M W F 4 MAT 0113 Interspecies Modernity: Animals in Twentieth-Century British Literature Ghatak
ENL 4333 1PR2 18405 M W F 8 MAT 0116 Reunions in Death: Othello & King Lear Rudnytsky
LIT 3003 DEP-X DEP-X M W F 3 MAT 0117 Race and Narrative Form Grass
LIT 3043 1MR2 24922 T 5-6 / R 6 TUR 2322 African American Theatre Reid
LIT 3173 1RH1 17440 T 7 / R 7-8 MAT 0012 / ROG 0106 Jewish Literature: Make Love, Not War Holler
LIT 3374 1RK1 25757 T 8-9 / R 9 AND 0019 Bible as Literature Kawashima
LIT 3383 1JS2 20911 T 8-9 / R 9 TUR 2353 Women in Literature Schorb
LIT 3400 DEP-X DEP-X M W F 4 LEI 0104 Ukraine History Through Ukrainian Literature Ulanowicz
LIT 3400 1EK1 22882 T 7 / R 7-8 WEIM 1076 Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature, and Film Kligerman
LIT 3400 1YF1 26185 T 10-11 / R 10 FLI 105 / AND 134 Ethics, Utopia and Dystopia Feller
LIT 4188 1AA2 22080 T 4 / R 4-5 TUR 2303 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies Amoko
LIT 4233 1MS2 16297 T 8-9 / R 9 MAT 0113 Postcolonial Literature, Culture, and Theory: Literature and Colonialism Schueller
LIT 4334 1GS3 25973 M W F 8 MAT 0010 Golden Age of Children’s Literature Khorasani
LIT 4930 1DK1 22149 T 10 / R 10-11 TUR 2322 Jews and Cinema Kujundzic
LIT 4930 1DK2 22154 T 8-9 / R 9 TUR 2322 Ukraine and Jews Kujundzic
LIT 4930 1RB1 25073 M W F 2 TUR 2334 Forgery, Painting, Film Burt
LIT 4930 1RB2 25074 M W F 3 TUR 2334 Wicked Women Burt
LIT 4930 1THB 25075 W 9-11 TUR 2336 Feminist Fiction Hedrick
LIT 4930 1YX1 25076 T 7 / R 7-8 TUR 2334 Chinese Film and Media Xiao
SPC 4680 1VD2 24924 T 8-9 / R 9 TUR 2350 Mexican American and Chicanx Rhetorics Del Hierro

Course Descriptions

AML 3607

African-American Literature 2
Mark A. Reid

​This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by well-known artists as well as writers whose works critics and scholars have overlooked for assorted 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.)

AML 3673

Asian American and African-American Interactions
Malini Johar Schueller

Ever since the category Asian-American emerged as a politicized identity in the 1960s, the major pedagogical imperative has been to study the literature and culture of this group on its own in order to legitimize the field itself and to understand its common histories and tropes. Similarly, African-American literature, affected by legacies of slavery and resistance, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights, has been conventionally seen as discrete and studied through different forms such as slave narratives, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance or that of the Black Arts movement. Yet from the very beginnings of major waves of Asian immigration, the two groups have been affected by and interacted with each other. At the same time, African-American and revolutionary Asian politics have intersected in different historical periods. This course seeks to understand the nature of these exchanges through literary and filmic expressions as well as key readings on race and scholarship on these interrelationships.

Some of the questions we will attempt to grapple with will be the following: How do Asian-Americans see African-Americans and vice versa? What cultural characteristics and histories do they share? How have they been treated as minorities? What are their differences and how have they manifested themselves? What kinds of alliances have these groups created? How have both groups negotiated their Americanness? We will seek answers to these questions by dealing with issues of masculinity and nationalism, discourses such as Orientalism, the politics of anti-colonialism, events such as the LA riots, and cultural expressions such as hip hop. Ultimately, the course stresses the importance of interethnic studies. Possible texts will include W. E. B. Du Bois The Dark Princess, Frank Chin Chickencoop Chinaman, Anna Deveare Smith Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, Paul Beatty The White Boy Shuffle, Nina Revoyr Southland as well as online readings.

AML 4170

Eco-Poetry and Eco Poetics
Terry Harpold

An introduction to and eclectic survey of modern poetry addressing human relations with the more than human world in an age of planetary transformation.

We’ll read mostly poetry by American writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, though we’ll turn back in time for a few important historical precursors. Most of the assigned readings will be from Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s monumental, doorstop of an anthology, The Ecopoetry Anthology (rev. ed., 2020); we’ll supplement this with texts from other sources. We’ll also read selected short critical texts on the history, poetics, and practice of this vital, diverse literary genre.

Individual graded course requirements include three short critical readings of poems selected by the student: two of poems we’ve discussed in class, one of a poem from Fisher-Wirth and Street that we’ve not discussed in class.

The primary class project is a collaborative undertaking inspired by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s 2024 “Poetry in Parks” project (https://www.nps.gov/subjects/literature/poetryinparks.htm), which installed site-specific poems on signage in seven US National Parks. Working in small and large teams with the staff of UF’s Field and Fork Farm (https://fieldandfork.ufl.edu) students will select appropriately site-specific poems from Fisher-Wirth and Street’s anthology that, following a process of review by the class as a whole, will be posted to signage positioned around the Field and Fork Farm. This “poetry in the garden” will be revealed to the public in a farm open house event at semester’s end.

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.

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
TBA

TBA

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Ange Mlinko

This is an intermediate poetry workshop. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar once said, “Books are a way of learning to feel more acutely.” Poems are a kind of ancient technology to get feeling into words effectively, passionately, memorably. We will explore some different ways of doing so by reading poems and modeling our own efforts after them, methodically exploring one craft element at a time. We will follow Frost’s dictum: “Give it a pain, a laugh, a thrill.” That will be an ongoing prompt, in addition to which you will follow other prompts based on our readings.

CRW 4211

Creative Nonfiction
Chloe Lane

Essays, but sexy! A reading list of nature writing, art & music writing, the personal essay, and writing about Florida will provide entry points for participants to do much writing of and on their own, either on several different projects, or on a single larger task. Core book-length texts by Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Annie Ernaux, and Susan Orlean will be supplemented by texts from Harry Crews, Peter Schjeldahl, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams, among others. This course will be reading, writing, research, and discussion heavy. The goal is that participants will leave it writing with more depth, style, and surprise than they were previously.

CRW 4905

Historical Fiction Workshop
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.

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.

ENC 3250

Professional Communication
Laura Gonzales

This asynchronous online 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. Each week, students will watch a video lecture and complete one writing assignment on their own schedule. Weekly office hours with the professor will be available. Note: If the registration system prevents you from registering for this course because you do not meet the prerequisites stated in the undergraduate catalog, please contact Dr. John Murchek, the English Department’s undergraduate advisor, after you have tried to add the course to your schedule on ONE.UF to request that he add you to the course. He cannot add you to the course until after you have tried to make use of your registration appointment time. The English Department does not want to circumvent the schedule of registration appointment times assigned to undergraduates by the Registrar’s Office. Dr. Murchek can be reached at murchek@ufl.edu

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.

Note about Prerequisite: If the registration system prevents you from registering for this course because you do not meet the prerequisites stated in the undergraduate catalog, please contact Dr. John Murchek, the English Department’s undergraduate advisor, after you have tried to add the course to your schedule on ONE.UF to request that he add you to the course. He cannot add you to the course until after you have tried to make use of your registration appointment time. The English Department does not want to circumvent the schedule of registration appointment times assigned to undergraduates by the Registrar’s Office. Dr. Murchek can be reached at murchek@ufl.edu.

ENG 3011

Theorists: 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? When John Dryden defines a play as a “just and lively image of human nature,” or Samuel Johnson writes, “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature,” what does it mean for an image or a representation to be “just?” 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 face 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 insidious influences of “mechanical inventions, with their social effects, and a too sudden diffusion of indigestible ideas?”

The critical and theoretical texts that we will be reading are mostly, but not exclusively, prose nonfiction arguments. Reading them requires skills that both overlap with and differ from those that we employ when reading narrative, drama, or poetry. The skills that differ involve analyzing and making arguments. While one usually asks if an argument proves the plausibility of its claims by presenting adequate evidence, the most interesting questions about arguments often have little to do with the sufficiency of the evidence. What assumptions do arguments make? What would persuade us to accept or refuse them? How does one claim follow—or not follow–from the one that precedes it in a chain of reasoning? In what ways can an argument contradict itself? What are the implications of an argument? The skills that are similar involve close attention to language both when one is reading and when one is writing arguments. Why do writers use the particular words they use rather than others (after all, every word in a text could have been different)? How can we use the most precise, evocative, and resonant language possible when we advance arguments? What is prose style? How do stylistic choices affect the reception of an argument and create a persona for the writer? What makes a persona persuasive or unpersuasive? What role does figurative language, which typically works differently from reasoning, play in argumentative writing?

Students will probably be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, six or seven discussion posts on Canvas responding to prompts and intended to provoke discussion of the assigned texts, brief assignments dealing with issues of prose style and figurative language in the texts of criticism and theory (which might involve stylistic imitation, translation, or parody), and a major paper due in early April.

ENG 3125

History of Film, Part 3: Cinema of the 80s/90s/00s 
Pietro Bianchi

When on 25 May 1977 George Lucas’ Star Wars was released and quickly became a surprise commercial hit, it symbolically declared the end of the New Hollywood and the beginning of a new era. After a decade of artistic inventiveness and small-budget movies, the 1980s marked the return of the blockbusters (large-budget films with wide commercial appeal and massive advertising campaigns). On the other hand, the 1980s and 90s were also the years of the transition to digital (first in the distrubition with VCRs and DVDs, and then in the production process with digital cameras) where declining production costs made possible for smaller budget films to reach new markets through home video, and for independent art-house films to get distribution through a network of art-house theaters and film festivals. Lastly, starting with the late 2000s, the film industry was revolutionized once again by the emergence of streaming media platforms and a new mode of consumption of media and images.

In this course, we will study the history of film that goes from the beginning of 1980s until the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The course will be divided in four sections: we will start with the return of the blockbuster in American cinema of the 1980s (Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma); then we will then move to study European and Asian art-house cinema of the 1980s (Krzysztof Kieślowski, Béla Tarr, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien); the third section, which will be the largest, will be devoted to cinema of the 1990s (Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Theo Angelopoulos, Emir Kusturica, Pedro Almodovar, Lars Von Trier, Michael Haneke), while in the last section we will study the recent transition to digital in the 2000s.

The class has a weekly mandatory screening and will heavily rely on in-class discussions (a strong emphasis will be placed on active participation). Course assignments include weekly posts on Canvas, a 5-minute presentation, two in-class quizzes, and a final in-class paper.

ENG 4015

What is a Dream?
Pietro Bianchi

Dreaming has always attracted the curiosity of scientists and intellectuals since ancient history, and has been a subject of study in philosophy, psychology, anthropology and cognitive sciences. What is, in fact, a dream? At first sight, it seems merely to be a succession of images, emotions, and sensations that occur in the mind during certain stages of sleep. But, if we consider it more closely, a dream is also an experience where we articulate wishes and desires that we would not be able to accept in our waking life. It is this particular aspect that, at the beginning of the 20th century, interested Sigmund Freud and the discipline of psychoanalysis: how is it possible to experience thoughts and ideas that we are normally not aware of? How is it possible to treat ourselves as enigmas and not as transparent beings?

In a journey that goes from the Bible to the Epic of Gilgamesh, from Christianity to Medieval Philosophy all the way to David Lynch, Wes Craven, Federico Fellini, contemporary feminist thought, Slavoj Žižek and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, we will analyze all the multi-faceted understandings of the concept of a dream.

This course will be a combination of critical theory, history, anthropology, psychoanalysis and film studies. Assignments include weekly discussion posts on Canvas, a 5-minute in-class presentation, two quizzes and an in-class final paper.

ENG 4015

Reading Freud Closely
Peter Rudnytsky

​Freud’s masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, is at once a scientific treatise and an autobiography. In this course, we will undertake a close study of the first edition, published in November 1899, supplemented by other shorter works from 1898 to 1901, in order to be able to situate the book in the context of Freud’s life and thought at the time. A central theme will be the thesis of Peter J. Swales that Freud had a clandestine love affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, in 1900. No previous background in Freud or psychoanalysis is required, but it would be desirable if students were interested in trying to understand “what makes people tick.” Course requirements are weekly journals, a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4133

Survey of African Cinema
Apollo Amoko

In “The African Writer and His Public,” Cheikh Hamidou Kane calls attention to an instructive paradox at the heart of modern African literature from the late colonial 1950s to the postcolonial present: the pre-eminent Senegalese novelist insightfully highlights the enduring reality of two distinct communities of readers: an ideal African readership that remains largely imaginary beyond a small educated elite vis-à-vis relatively privileged Westerners who have historically comprised a decisive majority of actual readers. Kane contends that, even as African writers rhetorically drew ethical and aesthetic inspiration from the former, their choices invariably reflected the imperatives and prejudices of the latter. The binary opposition pitting largely imaginary African readers against actually existing Western readers was especially stark amid colonial oppression and inequality. It endures in diverse postcolonial polities where access to literacy, literature, and “literariness” continues to be unevenly distributed. As the highly influential Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o polemically proclaimed, he—and his assorted literary peers–arguably knew what they writing about, but they rather effaced critical questions regarding conflicting readerships. Against this background, this course critiques the emergence of African cinema as an ostensibly democratic means of production that potentially transcends the pitfalls of rarified literature. We will study the work of such filmmakers of Sembene Ousmane, Youssef Chahine, Med Hondo and Wanuri Kahiu.

ENG 4136

Introduction to Filmmaking
Trevor Mowchun

Cinema is a unique, complex, evolving, and visionary artform with great individual and cultural impact. Cinema is also a language, and speaking it with imagination and conviction requires far more than mastering its technical equipment. To learn to “speak” cinema clearly and evocatively, the student filmmaker must develop a wide array of skills, such as conceptualization, visual thinking, dramatic construction, acting, (dis)continuity, cinematography, stylistic expressivity, spatial and temporal manipulation, to name but a few. An understanding of the traditional artforms from which film has grown and with which it continues to intersect – i.e., photography, literature, poetry, painting, music, theater – is no less crucial. This course explores both the artistic and technical aspects of filmmaking in tandem, considering the varied and inexhaustible ways that the medium of film activates the synergy between art and technology and leads the imagination into free, perhaps uncharted territory. Throughout the semester we will open a window into the inner workings of the creative cinematic process, analyze films from the perspective of their own making, and continually search for ways to enrich, stimulate and guide creativity throughout the entire filmmaking process from script to screen.

Students will discover the expressive potential of cinema through a combination of theoretical and practical instruction and the creation of a series of short films in different aesthetic modes, such as microform, silent film, narrative fiction, experimental/poetic, and documentary. The instructor will advise on the content, style, and logistics of the film work. Weekly readings and film screenings are essential components of the course and their understanding will constitute a portion of the coursework as well.
Students will be given access to the English Department’s film lab, fit with ample production and post-production equipment to make films. Our lab technician will hold weekly office hours to provide equipment tutorials one-on-one, manage the borrowing and timely returning of equipment, and resolve any technical issues that come up. Students are permitted to borrow equipment and use the editing suites upon completion of tutorials held in class or by the technician.

*Interested students must request an application for the course from the instructor, Dr. Trevor Mowchun (tmowchun@ufl.edu). Complete applications are due to the instructor by Monday October 28th. In determining a class roster, preference will be given to applicants who have previously completed 3/4000-level coursework in film and media, and subsequently to students who have taken ENG 2300: Film Analysis.

ENG 4136

Contemporary Avant-Garde Film
Trevor Mowchun

This course is a continuation of LIT 3362: Avant-Garde Film, a course offered during the Fall 2023 semester and which traced the rich history of avant-garde film, starting from the major movements of the 1920s (i.e., Surrealism, Dada), through the visionary and structuralist movements of the 60s and 70s, to experiments in flicker and found-footage filmmaking practices. The films covered in the first course are all, literally, films, which is to say they were made on celluloid, a medium which vied with the advent of TV/video and has now been all but supplanted by the digital revolution. Contemporary Avant-Garde Film (this new course) will begin with the shift in medium from celluloid to video art in the 70s and will follow this technological current through the various digital experiments in form and subject matter from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, as the digital turn in the medium solidifies, experimental films made on celluloid (short and feature length works) do not disappear completely; in fact, their continued existence can serve to bring the medium of celluloid to the forefront in ways that were not possible when celluloid was the dominant or only medium of choice. Running parallel to contemporary avant-garde film is also “expanded cinema”—films made for the art gallery or public spaces, often displayed on multiple screens and in performative or participatory contexts. A key question throughout will be how the medium of film (be it celluloid or digital or expanded) impacts the avant-garde, and how the digital medium in particular can continue to cultivate the avant-garde’s radical spirit into the 21st century.

Readings and film screenings (shown weekly in a separate screening session) are essential to the course. The films will be surprising and/or challenging in form and content. The avant-garde being fueled in part by innovations in 20th century thought means that the readings, too, require time and attention. Coursework will focus on the understanding of the readings, constructive methods of applying philosophy/theory to avant-garde film, speculative essays on select films screened in class, and the effective analyzing of the concrete structures and particulars of these films which seem to defy analysis. An experimental filmmaking assignment may be possible with approval from the instructor. Students may also have an opportunity to research and present a contemporary film/video in class that embodies the spirit of the avant-garde in our present moment.

*Students who completed LIT 3362 in Fall 2023 are encouraged to take this course. Students who did not take the first course should not feel dissuaded from studying contemporary avant-garde film. While students from the first course will have more background knowledge of the field, new students who are open to the obscurity and novelty of this type of cinema, holding high ideals for the arts in general, are welcome.

ENG 4905

Independent Study
TBA

An independent study registration is appropriate when you and a member of the English Department faculty have developed an idea for an individualized course on a topic which is not being covered in English Department course offerings for the semester in which you will be registered for the independent study. The independent study can focus on literature or other textual and/or visual media, creative writing, projects in advanced composition or rhetoric, or film production. It is like any other course inasmuch as the instructor will assign readings and/or screenings and writing or other assignments that you must complete by deadlines, but unlike other courses to the extent that you are the only student taking it and the meetings with the instructor will not take place at times given in the schedule of courses or in classrooms. Typically, faculty members will only agree to direct independent study projects when they have come to know students through teaching them in ordinary upper-division English courses.

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://english.ufl.edu/forms-and-links/). Follow these instructions:

  • Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
  • On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing the independent study, provide a description of the work you will be doing in the independent study. The description should include the topic of the independent study, the texts you will be reading, the media you will be viewing (if required), the assignments you will be completing, and the grading breakdown.
  • Ask the faculty member directing the independent study to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
  • Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4905 for the faculty member directing the independent study, and register you for it.

Grading for ENG 4905:

  • At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the independent study for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research
TBA

An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in two different situations.

On the one hand, you can register for undergraduate research as a free-standing project, in which a member of the English Department faculty agrees to oversee your research on a topic of interest to you and related to the faculty member’s areas of expertise. A student will approach a faculty member with a research topic or question they want to explore, and, in conversation with the faculty member, refine that topic or question, develop a research plan and schedule, and determine the kind of work that will be submitted in the course of the semester. This kind of project differs from independent study primarily by being less predetermined than an individualized course. It will be more open-ended because pursuing research can always lead you to materials you don’t anticipate at the beginning of the project.

On the other hand, faculty members now regularly require that students who want to write scholarly, critical, or theoretical honors theses under their direction register for the undergraduate research course in the semester prior to the one in which they will be registered for the honors thesis course. An undergraduate research registration is appropriate in this situation because it allows students attempting to graduate magna or summa cum laude to do the preliminary reading, research and drafting of materials necessary to complete an honors thesis of 30-50 pages in the semester for which they are registered for the honors thesis course. Because most UF English majors will not have had the experience of writing a 30-50 page essay in their previous English Department coursework, they will need to confront novel research, argumentative, organizational, and rhetorical problems when they write honors theses. When one acknowledges the facts that most students take a week or two at the beginning of a semester to settle into their schedules, and that the readers of honors theses will want to see completed drafts of these projects no later than week 11 or 12 of the thesis-writing semester, it becomes clear that there is relatively little time in that semester to do all the work necessary to complete an honors thesis The undergraduate research registration gives students time to develop their honors theses patiently, methodically, and deliberately, rather than in a desperate rush.

As with the independent study course, most English Department faculty do not agree to direct undergraduate research projects unless they know the students requesting the guidance from previous coursework for the major.

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://english.ufl.edu/forms-and-links/). Follow these instructions:

  • Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
  • On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the faculty member directing your undergraduate research project, provide a description of the work you will be doing during your undergraduate research registration. The description should include the topic or question the research will address, the materials you will be researching to explore this topic or question (a preliminary bibliography might be helpful here), the work you will submit to receive a grade for the course, and an account of how that work will be assessed.
  • Ask the faculty member directing the undergraduate research to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
  • Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4911 for the faculty member directing your undergraduate research, and register you for it.
    Grading for ENG 4911:
  • At the end of the semester, the faculty member directing the undergraduate research for which you are registered will submit a grade for you in the UF grading system.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Desperate Domesticity
Marsha Bryant

This course explores fraught constructions of domesticity in American literary and popular culture of the 1950s: including the nuclear family, gender roles, consumerism, the rise of suburbia, the civil rights movement, and alternative domesticities. In addition to a lively range of literature, we’ll explore fifties family sitcoms (Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver) plus the teen rebellion films Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle. Our unit on Campus Life features an archive visit to explore UF student publications from the 1950s. Toward the end, we’ll consider how the American 1950s in plays out in contemporary culture.

Our literary texts will include: Stories of John Cheever, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

Assignments: Archive Worksheet, Class Participation, Digital Annotations, Presentation on one of our texts, Seminar Paper Proposal, Seminar Paper (13-15 pages), Parody.

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Questions about the Movies
Robert B. Ray

​This course will ask us to think collectively about questions raised by the cinema. What counts as acting? How would we teach a child to distinguish between documentary and fiction? Does it matter what an actor is thinking about when he or she performs a scene? Should we try to define film genres? How is pretending related to acting, lying, courtship? How do a filmmaker’s choices affect a movie? Why can the same script yield entirely different results in the hands of different directors, in a way that a play may not? For what things is photography better suited than painting.

​To address these and other questions, we will use brief writings by certain philosophers: Plato, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Emerson, and Stanley Cavell. Films will include People on Sunday, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Rules of the Game, Blow-Up, Close-Up, and Anatomy of a Murder.

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

ENG 4940

English Internship
TBA

The internship course allows English majors to earn credit towards fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the major by gaining work experience in an area related to the skills they are acquiring as English majors and to the career goals they aim to pursue once they have graduated from the University of Florida. Because the transferable skills students acquire as English majors are both diverse (depending on the areas in which they have concentrated their coursework) and valuable in a variety of different kinds of workplace settings, the English Department is quite liberal in its interpretation of what kinds of work experiences will be appropriate for students wanting to earn internship credit. Internships allow students to get a sense of the demands and rewards of particular kinds of careers, and, if the internships go well, can provide students with possible letters of recommendation written by their supervisors that could prove valuable when they are applying for work before and after graduating from UF. The English Department encourages students to take advantage of this opportunity.

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://english.ufl.edu/forms-and-links/). Follow these instructions:

  • Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, select the number of credits for which you want to be registered (keeping in mind that the course will only count as one of the 10 courses for the major if you register for 3 credits), and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.

For three* credits of Internship credit, submit the following to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu along with the Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form:

  • An offer to hire (from the employer) which states that the student will be working at least 12 hours per week for the entire semester (Fall, Spring, or Summer C), or 24 hours per week for a Summer A or B term. Said document should be produced on the company letterhead, outline the job duties for the internship position, and be signed by the student’s supervisor.
  • A personal statement explaining why the student wants to take the internship and how it relates to the student’s future plans.

Once Dr. Murchek has approved the internship requested by the student and signed and dated the Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form, he will register the student for the internship credits.

Upon completion of the internship:

  • The supervisor of the student must submit a job performance evaluation to the Undergraduate Coordinator by Wednesday of finals week so that a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory may be submitted to the Registrar. Like the offer to hire, the evaluation must be on company or institutional letterhead. It may be faxed, mailed, emailed, or hand delivered.
  • The student must submit a personal assessment of the work experience provided by the internship by the same day as above.

*For two credit hours, the student would need to work 8 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 16 hours per week for Summer A or B.

*For one credit hour, the student would need to work 4 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 8 hours per week for Summer A or B.

Please note the following limitations on the English Internship:

  • A student may register for the English Department Internship for three credits ONLY ONCE; no more than three hours’ worth of internship credit may be counted toward coursework in the major.

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: Early American Genre and Gender
Jodi Schorb

This seminar is designed for students seeking to deepen their understanding of earlier American literature (to 1900).

English department seminars offer a unique learning environment, with a smaller enrollment cap. (Note: this is not an honors seminar; it is open to any English major who has completed 9 hours of 3/4000-level English department coursework.). Seminars, as the name suggests, provides a more conversational, participatory, and active learning environment. Expect a mix of instructor-led guidance and student-led discussion, frequent opportunities for hands-on learning and/or experiential learning, short in-class research or applied-learning activities, and shorter “reading response” writing assignments, building up to a longer, final seminar paper (15 pages), which you will learn how to design and accomplish in stages.

Primary text readings will likely include life writing (captivity narratives, personal letters, slave narratives, travel accounts), poetry, and fiction (short stories and novels) along with subgenres (gothic fiction, domestic fiction, detective stories). You’ll learn more about the conventions of early America’s most prominent literary genres, and we’ll pay special attention to how texts create interpretive possibilities, often by adapting, pushing against, or experimenting with the expectations of genre. Likely texts include fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman; poetry by Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman; life writing by Mary Rowlandson, John Marrant, Harriet Jacobs, John Swanson Jacobs.

As the title suggests, we’ll also pay attention to gender as a category of analysis, especially when it helps us understand how artists adapt literary conventions or develop their core themes (i.e. the nature of writing, the role of religious conversion, encountering violence or terror, the constraints of domesticity, the power of the sublime, etc.)

Class activities likely to include: a hands-on session in UF Special Collections and/or the Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature; hands on work in electronic archives; manuscript transcription, and more.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis Project
TBA

Honors theses give students the opportunity to work independently on original scholarly, critical, or creative projects under the direction of faculty members who work in the relevant fields. Students’ honors theses can be the culmination of their undergraduate experiences, and even anticipate the interests they will pursue in graduate studies.

In the English Department, honors theses may take a variety of forms. Most often, students write essays of 30–50 pages in length dealing with topics in literary criticism, history, or theory; film and media studies; or, cultural studies. Such essays are appropriate for students who hope to go on to graduate or professional degree programs. However, students who have pursued creative-writing coursework for the major may write short stories, poetry, or even a novella to fulfill the thesis requirement, and students who have concentrated in film and media studies can produce a short film or video (often accompanied by a brief essay providing a rationale for the project).

Students who register for honors thesis projects must have a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and have earned a grade of “B” or better in at least one English Department Honors Seminar (ENG 4936). Students work with two readers (known as the first and second readers), whom they choose from among the members of the English Department faculty. These two readers may co-direct the thesis, or the first reader may direct the work, with the second reader offering suggestions for revision and improvement only when the project is fairly well-advanced. Faculty members generally agree to serve as readers for honors thesis projects only when they know students from prior coursework for the major.

If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has finished one honors seminar with a minimum grade of B, submits an honors thesis that earns a minimum grade of B+, that student can graduate magna cum laude (with high honors). If a student who has a 3.5 upper-division GPA, and has completed two honors seminars, earning a grade of A in one and no less than a B in the other, submits an honors thesis that earns a grade of A, that student can graduate summa cum laude (with highest honors).

You will need to complete and submit an Undergraduate Special Registration Request Form (available at https://english.ufl.edu/forms-and-links/). Follow these instructions:

  • Complete the first page of the form. Provide the personal information the department needs to register you, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the page.
  • On the second page of the form, and in consultation with the first and second faculty readers of your honors thesis project, provide a description of the argument you anticipate making in the thesis.
  • Ask the first and second readers of the honors thesis to print their name, and sign and date the form at the bottom of the second page.
  • Send the form to Dr. John Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu. If everything is in order, he will sign and date the form, set up a section of ENG 4970 for the first reader of your honors thesis, and register you for it.

Submission of honors thesis and grading for ENG 4970:

  • Your readers will determine a deadline by which you need to submit a final draft of your honors thesis to them so that they can turn in a final grade to Dr. Murchek by the Monday of the last week of classes. They submit this grade to Dr. Murchek so that he can make a final honors recommendation for you to the graduation coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences by the last day of classes. Your first reader will also submit your grade for the honors thesis course in the UF grading system by the grades submission deadline for the semester.
  • You need to submit a copy of the final, approved version of the honors thesis to the English Department by the Monday of the last week of classes. This document can be submitted to Dr. Murchek at murchek@ufl.edu as an email attachment.
  • In the semester in which you graduate, Dr. Murchek will inform you of the deadline by which you need to submit the honors thesis to the UF Institutional Repository.

ENL 4273

Interspecies Modernity: Animals in Twentieth-Century British Literature
Suvendu Ghatak

Animals are a ubiquitous presence in British literature of the twentieth century. They scutter across cities as companions or stray into the wilderness. They lurk in the twilight of a waning empire, creep in the grief of postwar devastation, often take apart the barriers of gender, class, and race, and always ask what it means to be human. While animals have always held an important place in the literary imagination, this course treads across the canonical and the popular, writings meant for the children and for the grownups, poetry, and prose, to explore how encounters with animals play a key role in the shaping of late modernity. The course has five clusters. In the first cluster on “Insects,” we read Katherine Mansfield’s postwar short story “The Fly” alongside A.S. Byatt’s historical novella Morpho Eugenia. In the cluster “Mammals,” we pair Virginia Woolf’s imaginative biography of a cocker spaniel, Flush, alongside George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant.” In the cluster “Reptiles,” we read D. H. Lawrence’s poems “Snake” and “Lizard” alongside Roald Dahl’s novel on a pet tortoise, Esio Trot. In the cluster on “Birds,” we read Ted Hughes’s poems “Hawk in the Rain” and “Hawk Roosting”, alongside short sections from Derek Walcott’s poem collection White Egrets and Benjamin Zephaniah’s collection Talking Turkeys. We sign off with “Marine Animals,” reading Samuel Beckett’s short story “Dante and the Lobster” along with Ian Fleming’s short story “Octopussy.”

Assignments will include weekly discussion posts, a close reading assignment, a critical analysis assignment, a creative project, and a final paper.

ENL 4333

Reunions in Death: Othello and Lear
Peter Rudnytsky

Othello and King Lear are two of Shakespeare’s greatest, and most excruciating, tragedies. In the former, the hero dies reunited with the wife he has murdered; in the latter, he is reunited with the daughter he has rejected. We will undertake an in-depth study of both plays from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint, in which issues of gender and sexuality are paramount, but we will likewise focus on the question of race in Othello. Above all, the aim will be to enhance students’ enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s art. Course requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

LIT 3003

Race and Narrative Form
Sean Grass

This course will explore the complex racial landscape of nineteenth-century British fiction and the ways in which that racial complexity and uncertainty provoked extraordinary creativity and innovation in the novel. Readings will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in addition to relevant essays on narrative form, race, and colonialism in the nineteenth-century novel. Evaluation will be based upon class participation, brief reading quizzes, 3-4 short (~3-pp.) response-style essays, and a research-based final paper/project.

LIT 3043

African American Theatre
Mark A. Reid

​What makes dramas written by Black American playwrights and theater collectives different from those written and or performed by such dramatists and collectives as Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Richard Foreman, Laurie Anderson, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre and Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theater Research? Using recent theoretical and political debates on performance and the construction of identity, the class will trace the historical trajectory of African American theater from the 1950s to the present.

The course covers representative works from the ‘Theater of the Black Experience’, the ‘Black Arts Movement’, the ‘Free Southern Theatre’, and the ‘African American avant-garde and experimental stage’. Assigned readings may include works by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, P. J. Gibson, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Kennedy, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Stew, August Wilson, Tracey Scott Wilson, George C. Wolfe, and such performance artists as Fred Holland, Robbie McCauley, John O’Neal, Whoopi Goldberg, and Anna Deavere Smith.

In drafting the analytical group-paper and organizing the group-dramatic performance, student-groups must create a Gumbo-like analysis through the group-performance of the lived, imagined, and performed elements found in the assigned dramas.

LIT 3173

Jewish Literature: Make Love, Not War
Roy Holler

In light of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, which continues to dominate headlines with its relentless violence and bleak outlook, this course seeks to uncover past and present voices that challenge and critique the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and resist the status quo. We will explore literary and artistic works that confront the conflict from its early days to the present. Our readings will include anti-war literature by soldiers, veterans, and war victims. We will examine how gender dynamics shape the conflict through literary and artistic works of women writers and directors. We will see plays and modern dance to investigate how love is represented in these challenging and often dire scenarios. Students will engage with Hebrew literature in translation, view Israeli films, write weekly journal responses, and collaborate on a final group presentation.

LIT 3374

Bible as Literature
Robert Kawashima

This course will introduce students to the literary study of the Hebrew Bible within its ancient Near Eastern context. It contains some of the great literary works to come down to us from antiquity, on par with the Homeric epics. And biblical narrative constitutes the oldest prose literature that we know of at present. Our primary focus will be on a wide and varied reading of biblical narrative — along with a bit of poetry — but students will also be introduced to the scholarly study of the Bible from a literary perspective. More generally, this course will introduce students to the scholarly, interdisciplinary study of literature. That is, if the solutions and interpretations proposed will be specific to the Bible, the problems and ideas raised will have relevance for the study of literature in general.

LIT 3383

Women Authors and the Literary Marketplace Before 1900
Jodi Schorb

This course will introduce students to literature in English written by American and British women’s writers who published or circulated their work prior to the twentieth century, with a special thematic emphasis what it took for artists to cultivate networks, get compensated, gain critical recognition and a public voice, build a literary career, and successfully navigate a rapidly growing literary marketplace.

Each selection has a compelling publication history, and we’ll study this history as well as analyze and discuss all our primary texts (fiction, poems, essays).

Likely authors include: “Anonymous,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (translated from Spanish), Phillis Wheatley, Jane Austen, Catharine Sedgwick, Charlotte Brontë, Sarah Louise Forten Purvis, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Zitkala-Ša/Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, plus select secondary scholarship.

Students will gain knowledge of the social and cultural history of female authorship in England and/or America prior to the 20th century: What were some of the common attitudes about female authors? Who got to be an “authoress” or “lady novelist” and who didn’t? Why did so many women publish anonymously or with a pseudonym? What did it take to make a living as professional writer? How did aspiring writers cultivate networks that helped open doors, promote their ideas and their writings, and get their work to audiences? In what format did their work circulate (manuscript, book, periodical, specialized newspaper, other?), and how might the works’ print medium influence form and content?

Students can expect to 1) gain useful historical and literary knowledge of the changing and growing literary marketplace and women’s literary history, 2) analyze literature in depth, 3) gain experience with primary sources by working in digital humanities databases and online historical periodicals (domestic, literary, anti-slavery, labor, etc.), handling rare books, and interpreting digitized manuscripts. 4) gain strength as discussants and respondents, 5) develop your own arguments and interpretations of the texts and authors by workshopping ideas and major assignments with peers.

Likely assignments: Two 5-7 page essays, occasional reading responses/discussion boards, and short homework that emphasize experiential learning and independent thought.

This course is an upper-level elective General Education course that offers 3 credits H (Humanities).

Prereq: 3 credits of ENC or CRW or AML or ENG or ENL.

LIT 3400

Ukraine 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

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 (Plato, 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 3400

Ethics, Utopia, and Dystopia 
Yaniv Feller

Utopias, imagined ideal societies, are staples of political thought, religion, and literature. But what makes for a good society? In this interdisciplinary class, we explore the relation between utopias, dystopias, and ethics by drawing on a variety of readings such as Plato, Thomas More, John Winthrop, Theodor Herzl, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and N. K. Jemisin. Of special interest for our discussion are modern attempts to realize utopian ideals, and how they often fail, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, the socialist settlement known as the kibbutz in Israel, and the contemporary space race between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

LIT 4188

Introduction to Postcolonial Studies
Apollo Amoko 

This course will examine canonical theories and fictions in postcolonial studies. The field refers to an effort by scholars in diverse disciplines to come to terms, from a global perspective, with the legacy of European colonialism. In the wake of the voyages of exploration and “discovery” from the fifteenth century onwards, a handful of European powers (England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands), came gradually to exercise sovereignty over vast territories covering roughly eighty percent of the world. In political, social, economic and cultural terms, the colonial situation effected epochal transformations of not only the conquered societies but also imperial Europe. The colonial encounter resulted in the consolidation of the idea of a European or Western modernity at the apex of human civilization. It also resulted in incomplete, chaotic, and traumatic attempts forcibly to transform other societies in the image of Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, virtually all formerly colonized territories had become independent nations, but the effects of colonial rule continue to be powerfully felt at multiple levels. For example, the practice of everyday life in vast sectors of the both the imperial and the colonized worlds continues to be governed, often with devastating consequences, by ideas about racial, national, continental, gender, sexual and other identities invented in the context of the colonial encounter. As well, the political economies of many formally independent nations continue to be characterized by fundamental contradictions, inequalities and dependencies brought about by colonial rule. We will study diverse canonical writers such as Mark Twain, Joy Kogawa, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee and Tsitsi Dangaremba.

LIT 4233

Postcolonial Literature, Culture, and Theory: Literature and Colonialism 
Malini Johar Schueller 

This course will focus on the literature of settler colonialism and the indigenous resistance to it in such different locations as U.S. North America, South Africa, and Palestine. Reading literary works by both the colonized and the settlers, we will attempt to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, autonomy, occupation, nationalism, and empire. We will attend to the different practices and literatures of settler colonialism both past and present, and learn how indigenous populations have confronted settler colonialism and its legacies. We will also examine the complex relation between indigenous and environmental studies.

The course will begin with a brief foray into nineteenth-century literature of settler colonialism and native resistance in the US which will serve as a foundation to reading twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Possible literary texts will include Liliuokalani Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (1898), Lois Ann Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging (1997), Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), Peter Abrahams Mine Boy (1946), Raja Shehade Palestinian Walks (2007), Susan Abulhawa Mornings in Jenin (2006), Ibtisam Azem The Book of Disappearance (2014)

LIT 4334

Golden Age of Children’s Literature
Maryam Khorasani

The first “Golden Age” of children’s literature (approximately 1860-1920) marked a transformative period in the publishing world, characterized by the emergence of classic works that shaped children’s fiction. This era witnessed an increasing recognition of children as distinct readers with unique needs and interests, leading to the creation of imaginative, didactic, and sometimes cautionary tales that often addressed their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. In this course, we will explore the first Golden Age of children’s literature through the theme of health, exploring how physical well-being, mental health, disability, and emotional development were portrayed in classic works of the period. We will examine how these stories engage with Victorian and Edwardian ideas about the body, illness, and the mind—ranging from medical anxieties to natural healing—and how these texts reflect broader societal attitudes toward childhood and health. Key texts include Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates (1865), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Dinah Craik’s The Little Lame Prince (1874), Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). Assignments include Perusall annotations, a comparative analysis, archival research in UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, and making a “Children’s Health Guide” for a Victorian or Edwardian audience.

LIT 4930

Jews and Cinema
Dragan Kujundzic

The course will introduce students to the rich history of Jewish cinema and the latest critical and theoretical literature about it. Particular attention will be paid to the ways cinema constructs the figure of the Jew in terms of gender, race, politics or citizenship (Israel). It will be organized thematically, and chronologically, starting with the topics of Jewish Diaspora, emigration to the US and integration, the first sound film, and then films about the Holocaust, comedy, Israeli Cinema.

LIT 4930

Ukraine and Jews
Dragan Kujundzic

Fascinating literature, art and films have been produced by the Jews living in Ukraine and the territories of Russia and East and Central Europe. The course will discuss these works, sometimes written in Yiddish but deeply steeped in Ukrainian and Russian history, (Tevye the Dairman by Sholem Alechem) and watch the films based on them (Fiddler on the Roof). Paintings by Marc Chagall will be discussed, as well as writings by Isaak Babel. Particular accent will be placed on issues of Ukraine Jews, in film and media (Loznitsa, Volodimir Zelenski), in the context of the Holocaust (“Babin Yar” film by Sergej Loznitsa ) and the current Russian aggression on Ukraine. The class will be held in the form of a seminar with active student participation, presentations and class discussions.

LIT 4930

Forgery, Phantoms, Film, Painting
Richard Burt

You can forge paintings. You can counterfeit money. But can you forge a film? Do AI films count as forgeries? We will explore these questions by reading a number of essays, short stories, and films. Films will include When Citizen Kane met Bambi : The Lost Paintings of Tyrus Wong [CONTAINS SPOILERS]; I’m Thinking of Ending Things; The Grand Budapest Hotel; Pandora and the Flying Dutchman; Mr. Klein; Laura; Portrait of Jennie; The Uninvited: Three Cases of Murder; Corridor of Mirrors; La Main du diable (The Devil’s Hand); The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Vertigo; F for Fake; The Story of a Cheat; T-Men; Lady on Fire; Andrei Rublev; Melancholia; The Train; Nightwatching; Don’t Look Now; La Belle Noiseuse; (The Beautiful Troublemaker); Scarlet Street; and Schalcken the Painter, among others. For more information, please go to https://richardburtphd.com/indexforgeryphantomspaintingfilm.html

LIT 4930

Wicked Women
Richard Burt

We will explore the relation between the sexual and moral notion of wickedness and the literary notion of worldly women in literature and film: women characters who narrate stories of their lived experience in unusual and extremely interesting ways. The stories may include multiple marriages, sexual promiscuity, derelict husbands, sex work, crime, and travel. While the formally complex novels, poems, short stories, and film adaptations we’ll read about transgressive heroines do not tell misogynistic cautionary tales about the terrible fates that await bad women, they cannot be recuperated as stories about “strong women” either. Some of the women characters take the law into their own hands and get violent when they take revenge. The stories are not courtship stories. Male characters are often the objects of scorn and derision. Both the household and the convent are put into question as pleasant places to reside. But they raise challenges and questions both for patriarchy and feminism. In one hilarious moment, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tells us she made one of her husbands burn his copy of his favorite book, the Book of Wicked Wives. (The book actually exists.) She makes a lengthy, learned, and forceful self-defense. Our attention will be on the formal aspects of the literature and films: how the stories are told matters most of all. It’s the story that sticks.

Readings will include Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” using an interlinear modern translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English; Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress; John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair; Denis Diderot’s The Nun and the episode about Madame de la Pommeraye in his novel Jacques the Fatalist; and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s story “A Woman’s Vengeance” from his collection Diaboliques, translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie as “A Woman’s Revenge,” in Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence (2015). We will also read brief selections from Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler’s edition of Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves: The Primary Texts; Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and Cora Kaplan’s essay ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’ in her book Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism, (London: Verso, 1986). Films will include The Wicked Lady (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945), the BBC mini-series Fanny Hill (dir. James Hawes, 2007); The Devil Is a Woman (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935); That Obscure Object of Desire (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1977), Becky Sharp (dir. Rouben Mamoulian,1935); La Religieuse (The Nun) (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1966); Benedetta (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2021), loosely based on Judith C. Brown’s acclaimed book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (dir. Robert Bresson,1945), with English subtitles; and Diabolique (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzet, 1954), also with English subtitles. For more information, please go to http://richardburtphd.com/indexwickedwomen.html

LIT 4930

Feminist Fiction
Tace Hedrick

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

LIT 4930

Chinese Film and Media
Ying Xiao

This course examines Chinese film and media in a broad sociohistorical and global context. As China reopened to the world and became the newly-emergent superpower in recent decades, Chinese films have not only attracted worldwide scholarly and artistic interest but also they have been embraced by a wide range of popular tastes internationally. We will look at such film productions, media representations, and cultural phenomena from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, by emphasizing an interdisciplinary and transnational approach. With the aid of a wide diversity of readings and multimedia tools, the course introduces students to the fundamental framework of film and media studies and facilitates an in-depth understanding of Chinese culture and society and an enhanced appreciation of international culture and identity.

On top of the critical reflections on the important concepts and themes, including urban modernity, youth culture, gender, ethnicity, national identity, the interactions between Shanghai and Hollywood, media ecology, and cross-cultural representation, the instructor will provide an insider’s point of view and share her insights about the structure and operation of film festivals and industries drawing upon her connections and professional experiences of working in the international film and media circles. No knowledge of Asian languages or prior background is required. All works are read in English translation and films/videos are in Chinese with English subtitles.

SPC 4680

Mexican American and Chicanx Rhetorics
Victor Del Hierro

This course will examine the rhetorics and rhetorical practices of Mexican American and Chicanx communities. To start the course, we will define what “rhetorics” and “rhetorical practices” are/mean. Then, the course will cover a brief history of Mexican American and Chicanx people over the past 50 years. The course will then focus on the study and analysis of Mexican American and Chicanx culture and cultural practices to work towards developing an understanding of these communities rhetorics. The course will draw on the fields of rhetoric and composition with a special emphasis on cultural rhetorics. The learning outcomes of the course will be to understand and define the meaning of cultural rhetorics along with an understanding of how this works within the context of communities. We will read and watch a wide variety of texts in the course including books, poems, art, films, and television shows. Some examples include tv shows like Primo and This Fool, books like I am Not your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez, We Are Owed by Ariana Brown, and films like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, The Curse of La Llorona, and Selena. Students will have a midterm exam and final essay.