Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2026 (Upper-Division)

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

Spring 2026

Upper-Division (3000-4000) Courses

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

Course #	Class #	Time(s)	Room	Course title	Instructor
AML 3285	26092	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0003	Native American Literature	Hegeman
AML 3673	10258	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2350 / FAC 0127	Refugees, Aliens, and Other Impossible Subjects of Asian America	Schueller
AML 4170	26091	M W F 3	MAT 0115	The Negro Artist & Racial Mountain, 100 Years Later: Langston Hughes and the Black Poetic	Saunders
AML 4170	26172	TBA	TBA	Afrofuturism	Mollenthiel
AML 4170	26090	T 5-6 / R 6	ANT 0213	American Literary Forms: Autobiography	Schorb
AML 4170	19050	M W F 9	MAT 0113	Latinx Speculative Fiction	Hedrick
AML 4282	26076	T 2-3 / R 3	MAT 0113	Queer Theory and Literature	Conners
AML 4311	26238	T 4 / R 4-5	ONLINE	Edith Wharton	Smith
AML 4685	22790	M W F 5	TUR 2322	Black Horror: White Terror	Mollenthiel
AML 4685	26081	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0115	Is Latinadad Cancelled?	Conners
AML 4685	26082	M W F 8	MAT 0113	Twentieth-Century US Latinx Literature	Hedrick
CRW 3110	DEP-X	T 9-11	MAT 0002	Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing	Akpan
CRW 3310	DEP-X	W 9-11	FLI 0113	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing	Mlinko
CRW 3310	DEP-X	T 9-11	AND 0032	Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing	Hofmann
CRW 4211	DEP-X	M 7-9	MAT 0004	Creative Nonfiction	Hofmann
CRW 4906	DEP-X	M 9-11	FLI 0115	Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop	Logan
ENG 3121	26169	T 5-6 / R 6 / W 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	History of Film 1	Mennel
ENG 3122	26189	W 9-11 / M 9-11	TUR 2334	History of Film 2	Ray
ENG 4015	17384	M W F 7	MAT 0113	David Copperfield: Fiction as Autobiography	Rudnytsky
ENG 4310	22049	T 4 / R4-5 / SCR T 9-11	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration	Mennel
ENG 4910	26220	W 6-8	MAT 0116	Death in the Archives	Rosenberg
ENG 4911	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Undergraduate Research	TBD
ENG 4936	DEP-X	T 7 / R 7-8 / M E1-E3	TUR 2334 / ROL 0115	Honors Seminar: Cinema and Religion	Bianchi
ENG 4936	DEP-X	M W F 8	TUR B310	Honors Seminar: Renaissance Humanism	Rudnytsky
ENG 4940	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	English Internship	Maioli
ENG 4953	26068	T 7 / R 7-8	TUR 2305	Modern American Poetry: Cities	Bryant
ENG 4970	DEP-X	TBA	TBA	Honors Thesis	TBD
ENL 4220	26199	T 8-9 / R 9	FLI 0109 / TUR 2349	Sixteenth-Century Literature: Translating Cultures	Murchek
ENL 4273	22080	T 4 / R 4-5	MAT 0117	Twentieth-Century British Literature: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and the Modernist Revolution	Wegner
LIT 3043	21957	M W F 6	ONLINE	Studies in Modern Drama: Text Against Performance	Amoko
LIT 3400	26243	M W F 4	MAT 0116	Ukrainian History through Ukrainian Literature	Ulanowicz
LIT 3400	26232	M W F 5	MAT 0115	Film Adaptations of African American Literary Texts	Saunders
LIT 3400	20711	T 7 / R 7-8	MAT 0003	Poetics of Justice in Law, Literature,and Film	Kligerman
LIT 3400	22935	T 8-9 / R 9	MAT 0016	Ethics, Utopia & Dystopia	Feller
LIT 3622	26089	M W F 4	TUR 2333	The Literature of Sustainability and Resilience	Harpold
LIT 4192	26222	M W F 5	MAT 0113	Tourism and Caribbean Literature	Rosenberg
LIT 4233	26066	M W F 7	ONLINE	The Postcolonial Bildungsroman	Amoko
LIT 4233	16161	T 4 / R 4-5	TUR 2303	Palestinian Literature & Film	Schueller
LIT 4930	20257	T 10 / R 10-11	TUR 2322	Jews in Cinema	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	20262	T 8-9 / R 9	TUR 2322	Ukraine and Jews	Kujundzic
LIT 4930	25983	T 5-6 / R 6	TUR 2322	SabraVision: Israeli Identities on Film	Holler
LIT 4930	26887	M W F 6	TBA	Black Englishes	Essegbey
LIT 4930	26192	T 9-11 / R 9-11	TUR 2334	Questions about the Movies	Ray
LIT 4930	26242	T 6-8	ONLINE	Breaking Boundaries: Science Fiction Creative Writing Workshop	Smith
LIT 4930	26710	M W F 6	FAC 0127	Science Fiction and Deep Time	Harpold
SPC 4680	21959	T 7 / R 7-8	ROL 0115	Rhetorical Criticism: Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric	Sanchez

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

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

What constitutes a refugee? How do we think of refugees? Who is an illegal alien? When do immigrants become citizens or “American”? What does it mean to think of the Asian adoptee as “saved?” Asian American literature insistently raises these questions. This course will focus on the ways in which histories of militarism, imperialism, and racial exclusion have informed the construction of these impossible subjects of Asian America. We will examine how Asian American literary and cultural production represents the refugee, the illegal alien, and the immigrant/non-citizen/citizen.

This course will introduce you to a variety of Asian American novels, short stories, autobiographies, graphic novels, and film. Possible texts include Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, Timothy Linh Bui’s Green Dragon, Loung Ung’s Lucky Child, Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer. Because Asian American studies is interdisciplinary, we will be drawing on fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, as well as cultural studies.

AML 4170

The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain, 100 Years Later: Langston Hughes and the Black Poetic
Catherine Saunders

This course begins with a discussion of Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay: “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain.” Students will then engage Hughes’s theory in relation to his own poems and short stories and the African American writings that emerged in the wake of this essay. Readings include Hughes’ famous poems like “Harlem,” and “I, Too Sing America,” in addition to exploring his short stories and the characters who emerge, like Jesse B. Semple. The course also intertwines the Black poetics of Countee Cullen, Dudley Randall, Sterling Allen Brown, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Dionne Brand to contemplate Black artistry in the afterlife of Hughes’s essay.

AML 4170

Afrofuturism
Julia Mollenthiel

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of literary and artistic forms of Afrofuturism. Students will engage in close examination of texts by Afrofuturists from both academic and popular realms that may include fiction and non-fiction, in addition to non-print sources such as film and music. We will probe the genre of Afrofuturism and its tenets with a particular focus on representations of race and gender through time travel, aliens and space, robots, and more. We will consider the relationship between science fiction, African American history, and African diasporic literary traditions including 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

American Literary Forms: Autobiography
Jodi Schorb

Puritans and heretics, ministers and merchants, settlers and displaced American Indians, exemplary citizens and criminals, captives, prisoners, and slaves: how did the diverse populations of early America “compose” themselves and translate the messiness and vicissitudes of their lives into print?

This course will introduce students to a range of American life writing, with strong emphasis on life writing before 1840, including conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies, captivity and slave narratives, travel diaries and explorer accounts, and secular accounts of exemplary lives. We will pay attention to the forms of “self making” at work in each text, as authors adapt complex personal experiences into legible literary forms.

Questions include: What is a “self”? (an exemplary self? an autonomous self?) What forms of ‘personhood’ were available to a range of aspiring early American authors, male and female, white and nonwhite? And how did the conceptual transformation of “selfhood” (in particular, the rise of self-determining, individualist models of the self) impact the form and function of life writing by century’s end?

In short, students will gain facility analyzing the form, function, and development of American life writing, from its earliest origins through the late-eighteenth-century emergence of modern autobiography, and contemporary/later autobiographies that draw from and adapt/experiment with earlier genres and forms.

Likely textbooks:

1. Colonial American Travel Narratives, ed. Wendy Martin. Penguin Classics; ISBN 0-14-039088-X
2. Autobiography and Other Writings, by Benjamin Franklin. Penguin Classics; ISBN 9780142437605
3. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century, ed. Vincent Carretta. U Press of Kentucky; ISBN 9780813190761
4. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010, 2nd ed.)

AML 4170

Latinx Speculative Fiction
Tace Hedrick

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

AML 4282

Queer Theory and Literature
Thomas Conners

The last fifty years have seen vast changes in gender and sexual politics in the United States: bar windows have been broken, bras burned, homosexuality decriminalized, marriage equality legalized. With many of these topics in the news again, our course queries how queer scholarship has developed alongside this shifting sociopolitical landscape. As such, the central aim of this discussion-based seminar is to examine the key debates, questions, and issues animating queer theory of the last century. We will read more expansively than exhaustively, engaging theoretical texts that are foundational to the study of gender and sexuality (Butler, Crenshaw, Foucault, Freud); relevant scholarship from legal studies, performance studies, feminist theory, disability studies, and critical geography (Cohen, Eng, Hanhardt, Kim, Muñoz); and select literature and poetry (Machado, Monalisa Ojeda, Torres, Veasna So, Washington, and others).

AML 4311

Edith Wharton
Stephanie Smith

Like her older friend, the American/British author Henry James, Edith Wharton (née Edith Newbold Jones 1862-1937) was a writer’s writer and a novelist’s novelist, a chronicler of The Gilded Age, both ahead of her time and quintessentially of it. Born into a well-to-do, white New York City family—the phrase “keeping up with the Jones” was coined about her family’s holdings—she grew up a child of privilege among the American aristocracy of the city, which she would later ruthlessly skewer in her novels. At the late age of twenty-three she dutifully married Edward (Teddy) Wharton, a family friend, and an older man from an old Boston family, with whom she had little in common except for their mutual adoration of small dogs and a love of nature and traveling. The marriage didn’t last; Teddy’s mental health had never been stable, and it slowly fell apart. Wharton was granted a divorce in 1913, which was unusual for a woman, and moved to Paris out of New York society, where, as a divorcée she was no longer entirely welcome. Wharton won the first Pulitzer prize awarded to a woman and was given an honorary doctorate by Yale; during WWI, instead of retreating into her wealth, she became a war correspondent and a humanitarian and was awarded the Legion of Honor by France in 1916, an award rarely given to either a woman or a foreigner.

Popular in her lifetime, Wharton’s works were quickly translated into the new medium of film; unfortunately, all of the silent versions of her novels have been lost. But she continued to and continues to inspire filmmakers. The House of Mirth was made twice (silent film 1918, lost and a 2000 version, staring Gillian Anderson and Eric Stolz); The Age of Innocence was made three times (1924 silent version, lost; a 1934 version starring Irene Dunne and the 1993 version with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder). In 2014, Scarlett Johansson reportedly took on The Custom of the Country as an 8-part TV mini-series for Sony, but so far as I can see, it was never made.

In this class we’ll read a selection of Edith Wharton’s most important works in a re-examination of this major American author from both an historical perspective and from the perspective of the 21st century.

AML 4685

Black Horror: White Terror
Julia Mollenthiel

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

AML 4685

Is Latinadad Canceled?
Thomas Conners

In an Instagram post in 2018, AfroZapotec artist Alan Pelaez Lopez declared “Latinidad is Cancelled.” In doing so, they affirmed what many have long known: that latinidad has disavowed Blackness and erased indigeneity by relying on a whitewashed construct of Latin America migrated north. Debate ensued as some came out in defense of latinidad, while others lauded its cancelation, all the while blurring the bounds between Latinx and Latin America. This course takes “Latinidad is Cancelled” as a point of departure, not to decide whether or not that should be the case, but rather to study the histories of Latinx inclusions and exclusions that “cancellation” emphasizes. We will engage, for example, government documents and legal cases that have created “official” definitions of Latinidad, alongside US-based works by Honduran-Garifuna writers, Haitian authors, Brazilian storytellers, Indigenous and AfroLatinx poets, and AfroIndigenous artists that think through, against, and beyond latinidad. The course will culminate in a multimedia final project focused on creating and questioning (non)dominant historical and cultural narratives.

AML 4685

Twentieth-Century US Latinx Literature
Tace Hedrick

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

CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
Uwem Akpan

This is a rigorous fiction writing workshop. The purpose is to make your writing better. It is important that we build a community that supports this mode of storytelling. So, come ready to learn from each other. During the semester, we are expected to submit two or three short stories or novel excerpts. We 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 rewrite. As Steven Gillis, author of Benchere in Wonderland says, “The art of writing is in the rewriting.”

And since good writing or rewriting begins with good reading (or hearing of the story), we will be exposed to the works of celebrated writers and how they have dealt with key issues like craft, motivation, voice, suspense, characterization, etc.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Ange Mlinko

This is an intermediate poetry workshop requiring a lively interest in poetry past and present, as well as strong compositional skills and an intrinsic love of metaphor. Prompts will be based on close readings of assigned poems.

CRW 3310

Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
Michael Hofmann

This is the intermediate/ advanced undergraduate poetry workshop. We will widen our experience and understanding of poetry by reading the selected poems of the great Australian Les Murray and the great Canadian Karen Solie (Learning Human and The Living Option are the respective titles), and you will write poems to a wide array of prompts and subjects (and none).

CRW 4211

Creative Nonfiction
Michael Hofmann

“Adam was often drunk at this time. He had been abroad a year but nobody much wanted to hear about it, least of all Mary, who did not like abroad and could manage only a smile of puzzled sympathy.” – James Buchan

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, including Joseph Roth, Ryszard Kapuscinski, W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Hardwick, Annie Ernaux, and Geoff Dyer, among possibly others. Spoken contributions will be encouraged. Participants will do much writing of and on their own, either on an array of different projects, or perhaps on a single task. Reading and writing, research and style, should all benefit. (I would rather you came wanting to write a book about cuttlefish than on the first twenty years – or indeed the first six months – of your lives, but the latter may be allowable under certain circumstances; I should like it, however, not to preponderate.)

CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Poetry Workshop
William Logan

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
Henri Cole, The Visible Man
Donald Justice, Collected Poems [or] New and Selected Poems
Robert Lowell, Selected Poems
R. S. Gwynn, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology [5th edition or before] Other poems will be distributed, as well as a weekly worksheet.

We’ll discuss three or four poems a week from the books above, as well as some poems from the weekly worksheet. I’ll give you an assignment each week at the end of class, due the follow week. Please bring enough copies of your poems for the entire class. From these I’ll choose for or five for the weekly worksheet. I’ll let the books above, as well as your poems, direct discussion. Do buy them as cheaply as possible–you should be able to find most at under $10. Buy the 5th (or an earlier) edition of Gwynn unless you already have a copy of a later one.

Learn to tax your imagination, which will never develop if you don’t. I’ll expect competent use of English grammar and spelling. Assignments are a task rendered toward a goal–the ability to write in poetic language without suffering. Most of the assignments will be in free verse, but I may throw in a metrical form or two to keep you awake. It ain’t that hard. If we don’t laugh a few times in each class, I’m not doing my job.

The books have been chosen because they’ve long been in print, are widely available, and should not set you back more than a used Pontiac. I shouldn’t have to add this; but, if I detect signs that you’ve used AI to complete your assignment, you’ll fail the entire workshop. Late poems will be penalized. I grade only the revised version, which you will turn in with all the other poems at the final meeting of the workshop. The new worksheet will be distributed to your mailbox each week, a few days after the class meeting, beginning the second week. My office hours will be Monday, 5-6 periods, or other days by arrangement.

ENG 3121

History of Film 1
Barbara Mennel

The course provides an overview of the history of film from its origin to the coming of sound. The course is designed as the first part of a sequence on the history of film but does not need to be taken in chronological order. The objective is to gain an overview of the historical development of early cinema, based on an understanding of key concepts in film studies and approaches to early cinema in film theory. Topics will include the beginning of film, the emergence of genres (western, horror, melodrama, comedy); the early social melodrama and the race film; montage and expressionism; and the aesthetics of a silent film language. The course relies on regular required weekly film screenings and readings.

ENG 3122

History of Film 2
Robert Ray

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

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

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

ENG 4015

David Copperfield: Fiction as Autobiography
Peter Rudnytsky

This course will undertake a close reading of Charles Dickens’s great metafictional novel in which he tells the story of his own life—his childhood traumas, his erotic history, and how he became a famous novelist—through the persona of a protagonist (who has his own initials in reverse) who is doing the same thing within the frame of the novel. A posthumously published manuscript by Dickens himself and Jane Smiley’s short biography will provide the pillars for our reading, while two essays by Freud will allow us to compare the lives and work of these troubled geniuses. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4310

From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration
Barbara Mennel

This course introduces students to the relationship between filmmaking in the Weimar Republic of Germany and the Hollywood studio system. We will study the films and lives of filmmakers who left Germany to make films in Hollywood, analyzing continuities and breaks from German filmmaking to classic Hollywood. A significant section of the course will focus on film emigration during the “Third Reich” and films noirs, as well as B-movies, anti-Nazi films, and films exploring questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Filmmakers include Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk, Josef von Sternberg, and Billy Wilder.

ENG 4905

Independent Study
TBD

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 4910

Death in the Archives
Leah Rosenberg

We go to archives to find the dead. Archives hold their records– birth and death certificates, newspaper stories and photographs of their accomplishments and misdeeds, letters they wrote. Archives are implicated also in a second type of death, a snuffing out: if archives do not contain records, it can be hard to know about the dead, hard to prove they mattered or even existed. This is a course about death and mourning in the African Diaspora and the archival record. In it we examine the significance of death and mourning, the paucity of archival records, and the desecration of burial sites through two case studies.

The first is the history of Caribbean immigrants who comprised some sixty percent of the work force on the US Construction of the Panama Canal. Their work was essential and was dangerous; they died at a much higher rate that US workers on the canal. Yet their lives and contribution have been largely omitted from the official history of the Canal. Even their graves have been buried literally and figuratively by history. In in the first half of the semester, we will collaborate with the CGM cemetery Preservation Foundation and the Panama Canal Museum Collection to study the lives and contributions of West Indians who worked on the US Construction of the Panama Canal. We will improve the archival record of their contribution by curating an exhibit of photographs documenting their work. We will also employ those photographs to enhance our understanding of literature written about West Indians workers.

Our second case study is the Grenada eight. In 1983, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and seven other leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government were executed in a coup by a leftist faction. Six days later the US invaded. The bodies of the eight are still missing. Their families and nation continue to mourn without closure, unable to bury their loved ones or find answers in the archives. In the second half of the semester, we will collaborate to enhance archival records of the Grenada Revolution and the Grenada eight with students St. George University in Grenada through an international virtual exchange.

ENG 4911

Undergraduate Research
TBD

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: Cinema and Religion
Pietro Bianchi

Since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema has been profoundly marked by religious themes, often narrating stories of mysticism, transcendence, and spiritual experience. This is hardly accidental: religions have always wrestled with the problem of the image – how, or whether, to represent God. But can God truly be represented in visual form? Is there such a thing as an “image of God”? Or, as some traditions insist, is every attempt at representation already a form of idolatry? What would it mean to fashion a sensible image of what is, by definition, otherworldly?

This course explores how cinema, across its history, has engaged with these questions by depicting religious and mystical experiences. At the same time, it asks how the problem of representing God and transcendence confronts cinema with what is perhaps its most fundamental and philosophical question: can the invisible be seen?

Among the films that will be screened and discussed there will be: Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence; 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, The Seventh Seal; Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev; Yasujirō Ozu, Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon; 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.

This honors seminar 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 4936

Honors Seminar: Renaissance Humanism
Peter Rudnytsky

This honors seminar will provide students with an in-depth introduction to some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the Renaissance period. Among the authors and texts to be studied are: Petrarch (“Ascent of Mont Ventoux”), Pico della Mirandola (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”), Erasmus (Praise of Folly), Machiavelli (The Prince), Castiglione (Book of the Courtier), Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), and Montaigne (Essays). Students will write one-page weekly response papers and, upon demonstrating the requisite writing skills, one five-page seminar paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.

ENG 4940

English Internship
Roger Maioli

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 Professor Roger Maioli at rmaiolidossantos@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 Professor Maioli 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

Modern American Poetry: Cities
Marsha Bryant

This survey course offers a close look at 6 American poets (plus a sampling of others) whose work builds, reflects, and reconstructs cityscapes within and beyond the United States. A continuing influence on American poetry since Walt Whitman, cities have inspired new modes of thinking and making. City poems can be fantastic or realistic, experimental or traditional, dynamic or static, utopic or dystopic. We’ll read poems by Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Marge Piercy, Lawrence Joseph, Ange Mlinko, and Harryette Mullen. We’ll also look at films by Paul Strand & Charles Sheeler, Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Radiohead, and Sabine Gruffat. And we’ll read some essays on city poetics, architecture, and spatiality.

Course assignments: a brainstorming exercise in collaboration with The Repurpose Project, a short and a longish paper, a panel presentation,6 Perusall Annotations, 2 Discussion Posts, a parody, and engaged participation in class discussions. Our work together will sharpen your skills in literary analysis and argumentative writing as well as tap your creativity. I look forward to discussing the poems, films, and essays with you.

ENG 4970

Honors Thesis
TBD

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 4220

Sixteenth-Century Literature: Translating Cultures
John Murchek

You probably haven’t read much sixteenth-century English literature, except, perhaps, for some plays by William Shakespeare from the 1590s. If that’s the case, it is a pity because the sixteenth century was a period of intense intellectual and imaginative ferment, seeing the first flowering of the English Renaissance, and culminating in what C. S. Lewis calls a “golden” period that shades away into something more ironic, witty and dark in the closing years of the century.

It was a century of innovation, often, paradoxically enough, through translation, imitation and adaptation of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts, as well as of texts written by writers producing literature in the vernaculars of Italy and France. Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote the first sonnets in the English language (among which were translations of the Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch), as well as the first epistolary satires (satirical poems written as if they were letters to other people, and in imitation of the Roman poet Horace and the Italian poet Luigi Alamanni) and paraphrases of the penitential psalms, along with epigrams, songs, and ballades. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, composed love poetry, Biblical paraphrases, and elegies. He invented what we now call the Shakespearean sonnet. He also translated Books II and IV of Vergil’s Latin epic, the Aeneid, composing the first blank verse (unrhymed pentameter lines) in English. Isabella Whitney was the first English woman writer to publish a secular text. Sir Philip Sidney wrote what is probably the single most important work of literary theory and criticism in the whole of the English Renaissance, The Defence of Poetry. He also composed a sonnet sequence, “Astrophil and Stella,” that ignited a vogue for sonnet sequences in the 1590s. Sidney and his sister, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, undertook a joint translation/versification of the Biblical psalms, but he was killed in war after writing 43, and Mary completed the remaining 107 in a dazzling variety of verse forms. Though Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is an allegorical poem in which heroic and romance narratives unfold, it is, above all, the first English epic, deriving from diverse classical, European, and English sources. Not published until 1609, Shake-speares Sonnets were, nonetheless, commenced in the 1590s, and arguably inaugurate a new stage in the history of sonnets. Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which narrates the betrayal, trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, also attempts to create a community of women readers in its dedicatory epistles, and defends Eve against the charge that she was responsible for the fall of man. “The Description of Cookham,” included in the same volume, is the first published English country-house poem.

We will read these writers’ works as well as the works of others (perhaps Anne Lock, George Gascoigne, Fulke Greville, Sir John Davies and/or Christopher Marlowe), using the idea and the practice of translation (derived from the Latin “translatio,” meaning “to carry over”) as ways of thinking about, on the one hand, the act of inhabiting and being inhabited by the texts of other cultures, and, on the other, the inescapability of interpretation in the practices of translation, imitation and adaptation. We will be concerned not only with sixteenth-century writers’ interpretive translations of prior texts, but with our interpretive translations of sixteenth-century writers’ works in this historical moment. Reading different translations of the same earlier text, we will be forced to reflect on how seemingly minor differences in such things as word choice, rhythm, and rhyme produce translations that are dramatically different in meaning and effect– so much so in some cases that we might have to conclude that we are dealing with essentially different poems.

Assignments will include a number of discussion posts responding to specific prompts, an interpretive close reading of a sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a translation of the essence of that same sonnet into a modern idiom and cultural context, pairs of students leading class discussions, and a meditation on the experience of reading sixteenth-century literature at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Consistent attendance and participation will be very important.

ENL 4273

Twentieth-Century British Literature: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and the Modernist Revolution
Phillip Wegner

In one of her best-known interventions in the literary debates of the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf claims “that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” As a consequence of this change, Woolf goes on to suggest, “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” It would be the project of the variety of artistic and cultural movements that we now describe as modernism to give voice to the experience of these and many other of the explosive social and cultural changes of the new century. In this course, we shall investigate some of the issues surrounding the modernist revolution, while also considering modernism itself as a kind of revolution, as they are raised in the work of three of the most important “British” authors of the first half of the twentieth-century: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In addition to exploring the rich aesthetic and formal issues raised by these writers’ work—what, for example, did T. S. Eliot mean when he wrote that Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses (1922) is “not a novel?”—we shall look at the way that these writers’ works respond to and help us understand the cultural and social histories in which they unfold. Indeed, one of the first questions these writers force us to confront is what is “British” about British literature in this moment—after all, Conrad is the child of exiled Polish patriots and only learns English as an adult; Joyce is Irish, writing in a language that is always for him, as his character Stephen Dedalus puts it, “an acquired speech;” and Woolf tirelessly interrogates the status of the woman artist in relationship the traditional centers of English cultural power. Similarly, these works will lead us into an investigation of the relationship between literature and the fundamental realties of the new century: British imperialism; the creation of a global culture; industrial technology; the rise of mass culture; the experience of the city; the proximity of social revolution; new media, such as radio and film; the threat of fascism; and the changing place of women in culture and society. Finally, all of these works will ask us important questions about the roles of the artist and the work of art in this emerging world. Our readings will be divided into three roughly five week sections and will include, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow cycle of Youth (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900); James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) and Ulysses (1922); and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). Students will be required to keep on pace with the readings, be present and engaged in class discussion, and produce three critical analytic papers.

LIT 3043

Studies in Modern Drama: Text Against Performance
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses wide-ranging 20th century playwrights across the English-speaking world. It draws inspiration from Wei Chee Dimock’s provocative challenge affirming the need to liberate literary studies from the tyranny of numbers, most prominently historical dates and latitudes and longitudes. In other words, her approach contests the self-evidence of dominant paradigms that routinely classify literature according to each writer’s national identities and birth date. Paradoxically, writers who are separated by vast distances in time and space often have more in common than those in close historical and geographical proximity. Against this backdrop, this course deploys a transnational/cross-cultural critical perspective in bringing together texts from such putatively distinct and self-contained national contexts as the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Australia. We will study playwrights like Tony Kushner, Anna Deaver Smith, Michel Trembley, Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Tawfik Al Hakim.

LIT 3400

Ukrainian History through Ukrainian Literature
Anastasia Ulanowicz

TBA

LIT 3400

Lost in Literary Translation: Contemplating Film Adaptations of African American Literary Texts
Catherine Saunders

This course examines key African American literary texts and their film adaptations. Physical and visual texts include Passing (Nella Larsen), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), The Wedding (Dorothy West), Native Son (Richard Wright), The Color Purple (Alice Walker), If Beale Street Could Talk (James Baldwin), Fences (August Wilson), For Colored Girls (Ntozake Shange), American Fiction (Erasure by Colson Whitehead), and Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead). Students will examine the texts individually and in comparison to consider: what, if anything, gets lost in literary translation?

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? Must every utopia be someone else’s dystopia? What is the relation between messianism and utopia? We will explore the relation between utopias, dystopias, and ethics by drawing on a variety of alternative histories, speculative fiction, and political manifestos by writers such as Philip Roth, Ursula Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, Thomas More, John Winthrop, and Theodor Herzl. Of special interest for our discussion are modern attempts to realize utopias, and how they often fail, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, the socialist settlements, and the contemporary space race between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

LIT 3622

The Literature of Sustainability and Resilience
Terry Harpold

“Dystopia is for losers” – Doug Henwood

This course takes as its founding premises two unassailable facts. First, we live in a time of increasing environmental instability, mass extinction, food insecurity, forced migration, and social and political unrest fostered by climate change. Second, the human literary, artistic, and ethical imaginations are among our species’ most powerful and adaptive responses to the planetary realities of the twenty-first century and the possibility of a more just, sustainable, and resilient future for all living beings.

We will read widely from an established and emerging canon of literary nonfiction, fiction, memoir, and poetry that addresses the perils and vitality of the late Anthropocene, the geological epoch marked by the influences of humans on the Earth’s planetary ecosystems.

This course qualifies as a 3-credit Humanities core course for UF’s Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies

LIT 4192

Tourism and Caribbean Literature
Leah Rosenberg

The Caribbean has become the region on our planet most penetrated by tourism and most dependent on it. Tourism has shaped the Caribbean’s image and culture, its shorelines, infrastructure and economy. This course focuses on the anglophone Caribbean, where cultural nationalism and literature emerged almost simultaneously with the industry in the late nineteenth century. Between the 1890s and the 1960s, both tourism and the region’s countries underwent extraordinary change. In politics, the region transitioned to independence from Britain. The region’s writers earned international acclaim, becoming highly influential in the Caribbean, North American, Britain and beyond. In the same period, tourism became a year-round, mass market industry eclipsing sugar and many other industries.

This course will introduce the history of anglophone Caribbean literature from the early 1900s to the 2010s through a study of how the growth of tourism has influenced the content and form of literature and how writers have negotiated the growing power of the industry. You will learn how to assess the influence on literature of political and economic history as well as popular culture such as film, advertising, and music. We will study the work of Derek Walcott, Claude McKay, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, VS Naipaul, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson, among others. You will write about your experience of tourism.

LIT 4233

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman
Apollo Amoko

This course addresses postcolonial texts by focusing on a detailed critique of an insightfully influential genre, that is, the bildungsroman. To what extent do these so-called novels of formation evince the complex and embattled politics of everyday life in the postcolony amid the disruptions and uncertainties that emerged in the wake European colonialism? In The Way of the World, a foundational critique in the bildungsroman in European culture, Franco Moretti contends that the genre represents a paradigmatic shift in which, for the first time, “youth came to constitute the most meaningful part of life.” Not only was the protagonist in 18th and 19th century European fiction invariably a young man, but also, his youth was a decisive condition of formation. In stable societies, youth is but a relatively unremarkable prelude to mature adulthood with: “Each individual’s youth faithfully repeats that of his forebears, introducing him to a role that lives on unchanged: it is a ‘pre-scribed’ youth.” However, during periods of radical transformation and social upheaval, the youth take center stage supplanting adulthood. In the wake of modernization, industrialization, urbanization, secularization, democratization and so on, the 18th and 19th centuries were periods of sweeping change and widespread uncertainty in Europe. Against that background, youth became, as it were, modernity’s essence, “the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in that past.” Moretti’s addresses the conditions for the existence of the European bildungsroman. Nevertheless, these insights seem to apply with uncanny precision to the rise of the bildungsroman in postcolonial contexts including Africa and the Caribbean. Like its European forebear, the emergence of the African bildungsroman coincided with a period of radical transformation and social upheaval when, in the wake of colonialism, the traditional ways of being were seriously undermined, if not forever transformed. Like its European counterpart, the African bildungsroman focuses on the formation of young protagonists in an uncertain world. In a sense, the genre marks the death of the father as a symbol of stable, unquestioned, traditional authority. The authors studied will likely include Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ferdinand Oyono, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga. Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie

LIT 4233

Palestinian Literature and Film
Malini Schueller

This course will introduce students to literature written by Palestinians both in Palestine and in the diaspora. While much of this literature is written in Arabic and is translated, the course will focus more on literature written in English. We will begin by reading works by renowned poet Mahmoud Darwish and acclaimed novelists Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habiby before moving on to contemporary works by Isabella Hammad, Susan Abulhawa, Susan Daraj, Randa Jarrar, Ibtisam Azem, and Raja Shehadeh. We will explore the genres of Palestinian literature ranging from allegoric nationalist poetry to historical fiction to speculative fiction and essay. We will also watch and analyze recent Palestinian films and read some critical essays. Throughout the course we will discuss the major themes of Palestinian literature: dispossession, the homeland, generational differences, diaspora and identity, and traumatic memory.

LIT 4930

Jews in 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 and World Jewish Cinema. The students benefit from integration of the Gainesville Jewish Film Festival in screening activities.

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

SabraVision: Israeli Identities on Film
Roy Holler

This course examines Israeli cinema as a site of conflict and creativity, from early patriotic films to today’s fractured visions of war, occupation, exile, and protest. We’ll explore how film grapples with the Holocaust, the Oriental–European divide, Palestinian representation, gender politics, and queer identity. Israeli cinema doesn’t just reflect society, it questions, resists, and sometimes undermines it.

LIT 4930

Black Englishes
James Essegbey

TBA

LIT 4930

Questions about the Movies
Robert Ray

This course will ask us to think together about questions raised by the cinema in general and by particular movies:

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”? To “lying”? To courtship?
For what things is photography better suited than painting?
Why can the same script yield entirely different results in the hands of different directors, in a way that a play may not?
How do we learn the rules of certain activities? Can we tell by observation whether a rule is being properly obeyed?
How do our standards of measurement function?
Can you pretend to be yourself?
If Wittgenstein is right to say that “The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” and that “An `inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria,” how can we assess someone whose behavior is contradictory?
How do Emerson’s ideas get realized in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story?
When does it become important to distinguish between an excuse and a justification?

To address these and other questions, we will use the work of certain philosophers: Plato, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Emerson, and Stanley Cavell. Films will include People on Sunday, 1001 Grams, Anatomy of a Murder, The Lady Eve, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Blow-Up, The Rules of the Game, Vertigo, It Happened One Night, and Close-Up.

Assignments: to be decided, but probably two three-hour essay exams.

LIT 4930

Breaking Boundaries: Science Fiction Creative Writing Workshop
Stephanie Smith

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

LIT 4930

Science Fiction and Deep Time
Terry Harpold

An eclectic survey of the influence on modern science fiction (sf) of two scientific concepts that emerged with the genre in the nineteenth century as its near-contemporaries: *deep time,* a measure of geological history that reaches far beyond humanity’s narrow slice of the universe’s calendar, and *entropy*, the tendency of isolated systems to evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium and maximum disorder. The under-appreciated penultimate chapter of H.G. Wells’s *The Time Machine* (1895) is the model here: the Traveler journeys thirty million years into Earth’s future to the shore of a frigid sea below a dim, swollen, red sun, where the only sign of life is a repulsive football-shaped creature, the last descendant of *homo sapiens* hopping fitfully in the surf. The extinction of humanity coincides, Wells proposes, with the coming stillness of thermodynamic equilibrium. Wells’ vision of unidirectional energy dispersal – the Traveler’s posthistorical leap to the entropic shoreline – owes much to physicist Lord Kelvin’s comparison of the universe to a clock inexorably winding down.

We will read selected long and short sf by authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries from whom shocks to the system produced by these concepts elicited important future histories of decline and dispersal, including Wells, Camille Flammarion, William Hope Hodgson, J.–H. Rosny, *aîné*, Olaf Stapledon, and several lesser-known authors writing in the Radium and pulp sf eras. We’ll consider the influences of that literature on others writing in the mid-to-late 20th century, such as J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harry Martinson, and Pamela Zoline. We’ll conclude with a brief reflection on a legacy of these concepts in the fatalist arc of contemporary environmental sf, in works by authors such as Fernanda Trías and Claire Vaye Watkins.

As the century progresses sf’s version of entropy morphs into mostly a metaphoric and taxonomic, no longer a thermodynamic, principle of inevitability, so long as the climate crisis is kept at arm’s length. All the while, visions of a long future are held fast but stripped of their notes of doom; deep time divided from the laws of physics makes for a reassuring just-so story in the twilight of the Anthropocene. The challenge for writers and readers, as we will see, it to imagine how the epoch can draw to a close and that not be felt as world-ending tragedy. (It can be; we’ll develop methods of reading that make this clear.)

Writing requirements include two short essays and one longer research paper on assigned readings.

SPC 4680

Contemporary Theories of Rhetoric
Raul Sanchez

This course introduces you to rhetoric. Specifically, it introduces you to writers and works from the discipline of rhetoric that try to shed light on the contemporary practice of rhetoric.

We practice rhetoric whenever we use symbols—words, images, sounds, gestures—to communicate with each other. We practice rhetoric when we write or read literature, but also when we make or watch reels, and even when we greet each other in the hallway. We all practice rhetoric. Every day. All the time.

The discipline of rhetoric studies how we use these symbols, and in doing so, it tries to better understand rhetorical practice in general: how it changes or stays the same over time, how it’s affected by new technologies, how it appears in different cultures, and so on. It’s a rich, deep, and diverse discipline that reaches into every area of human activity and thus tells us important things about who we are.