Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
Summer 2019
Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses
Note: Course numbers listed in the table are linked to course descriptions below.
Summer A
| Course # | Class # | Time(s) | Room | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AML 3041 | 10302 | MTWRF 2 | TUR 2336 | American War Stories | Charles Acheson |
| ENC 3310 | 11223 | MTWRF 3 | TUR 2336 | Advanced Exposition | Shannon Butts |
| ENL 3132 | 11365 | MTWRF 5 | TUR 2336 | The English Novel: 20th Century | Rafael Hernandez |
| LIT 3003 | 15140 | MTWRF 6 | TUR 2336 | Forms of Narrative | Chesya Burke |
| LIT 4930 | 12625 | MTWRF 4 | TUR 2336 | Native American Literature and the Environment | Alyssa Hunziker |
Summer B
| Course # | Class # | Time(s) | Room | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AML 4242 | 10303 | MTWRF 2 | MAT 0002 | Studies in 20th Century American Literature | Srimayee Basu |
| ENC 3250 | 11189 | MTWRF 3 | TUR 2336 | Professional Communication | Madison Jones |
| ENG 4130 | 11256 | MTWRF 4/ TR 6-7 | TUR 2322/ ROL 0115 | Race and Ethnicity in Film | Olubunmi Oguntolu |
| ENL 3350 | 11366 | MTWRF 5 | PUGH 120 | Age of Johnson | Satit Leelathawornchai |
| LIT 4188 | 15141 | MTWRF 6 | PUGH 120 | World English | Kedon Willis |
Course Descriptions
AML 3041
American War Stories
Charles Acheson
From the nation’s earliest, independent moments, the United States of America was born out of war and has remained its constant companion. Yet, military engagement embodies only a portion of the ongoing conflicts tearing at the nation’s soul. Evolving cultural values continually challenge traditionalist views of the nation, leading to the culture wars over equal treatment of all Americans. American literature has paid keen attention to these differing valences of war, from valorizing bravery in military conflict to representing identities lost or destroyed in cultural struggles. Moreover, American literature offers special attention to how military and cultural conflict often intertwine and inform how national identity is constructed. As such, this course examines American war stories from the past century and a half by paying attention to the breadth of American conflicts, as well as the complex depth of the issues at their heart. The course begins in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, with Mathew Brady’s early photography and stories taken from the battlefields as the nation reconciles with catastrophic bloodshed. From that starting point, the course will move through diverse narratives that contend with military experience and ongoing struggles of individuals marginalized for their race, gender, sexuality, and/or disabilities. Intertwining all these issues, the course concludes with Carol Tyler’s graphic memoir, Soldier’s Heart, a narrative of intergenerational trauma in the aftermath of war. Along the way, several questions will guide how the course interrogates America’s continual relationship with conflict and struggle. How did the Civil War and its aftermath fundamentally alter the American cultural landscape? How has American fascination with battlefield valor shaped views of home front struggles for equality? To what extent is America a nation locked in permanent conflict?
Potential Readings May Include:
Mathew Brady’s Photography
Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War
Stephan Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (too familiar?)
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Nella Larson’s Quicksand
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Another Country
Toni Morrison’s Sula
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
Carol Tyler’s Soldier’s Heart
This course includes critical and creative assignments in addition to a long-format, researched argumentative essay that prepares students for advanced academic study or professional development.
ENC 3310
Advanced Exposition
Shannon Butts
Digital Rhetoric and Embodied Media: Sense and Sense-ability
Expository writing works to describe, explain, and inform. Often portrayed as “setting the scene,” expository writing can introduce the dashing main characters of a film, describe visual elements of a work of art, or even detail relevant facts to help people make informed decisions. Rhetorically, expository writing draws on concepts of ekphrasis and aesthesis – writing practices used to describe sensations and experiences. Drawing on each of the five senses, this course will examine how digital environments have changed the ways that we communicate ideas and make sense of the world around us.
Every day, we interact with computers and mobile devices in visual, verbal, aural, tactile and assorted other sensory ways. We swipe right to go on a date, use voice commands to Google questions, and track physical activity through wearables that rely on motion or gyroscopic input. As interfaces grow increasingly more digital, scholars, artists, and designers have begun to engage bodies, materials, and technologies to analyze how digital environments inform sensory experiences. This course will invoke the senses to help students make sense of rhetorical acts of exposition. Throughout the semester, we will read, research, and write across a variety of media to better understand how digital spaces shape our sense of self and influence ideas of gender, race, class, ability, and more.
All assignments for this class will use a project-based learning model to fulfill the 6000 word Writing Requirement: students will analyze, propose, design, and make texts using emerging writing technologies such as Augmented Reality, 3D printing, and podcasting. Accounting for materials, tools, and technologies, we will reframe acts of ‘writing’ as ‘sense-making’ and examine how digital environments create new ways of experiencing information and new methods for creating sensational texts that inform and persuade.
Possible Texts:
Digital Rhetoric. Douglas Eyman, (Online at University of Michigan Press) 2015
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing
Make Magazine (online)
*All other readings/videos will be available on our class page in Canvas or in our course schedule. Unless otherwise noted, bring a fully charged laptop and smartphone/tablet to each class meeting.
ENL 3132
The English Novel: 20th Century
Rafael Hernandez
“Lost in London”
“I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.” – V. S. Naipaul
Authors of the twentieth century English novel took on an array of subjects, from class relations to sexuality, immigration to the horrors of war. Additionally, the twentieth century novel underwent a dramatic series of formal and stylistic changes. The realist novel met its match in the revolutionary modernism of the ’20s and ’30s and post-war novels gave voice to a new postcolonial literary consciousness. At the center of it all is London, home to some of the twentieth century’s most influential creative minds and standing at the center of some of the greatest works of fiction in the English language.
This course surveys a handful of novels set in London at different periods of the twentieth century. In our readings, we will come to understand how authors used London as backdrop to the anxieties, tensions, and challenges of their periods. We will aim to uncover some of the formal literary aspects, political influences, and historical contexts that shaped these works. In doing so, we will come to better understand the role of the city in the literary and aesthetic experience of the twentieth century. Assignments will include several short responses, a short close reading paper, and a final term paper.
Possible readings for this course include:
E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1938)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (1974)
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
LIT 3003
Forms of Narrative
Chesya Burke
# Hashtag Black Girl Magic: The Narrative of Celebration, Community, and Resistance as Empowerment
Severely premature babies are more likely to survive if they are Black and female. Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, smuggled hundreds of slaves to freedom while spying for the Union Army. Furthermore, Tubman never learned to read or write and suffered debilitating seizures and narcoleptic episodes due to being bashed in the head with a two-pound weight by an overseer. Henrietta Lacks’s body continues to produce arguably the most important cell lines in medical history (HeLa). Time and time again, Black women defy odds, spawning seemingly unexplained phenomena with no medical or rational explanation. Throughout history Black women’s accomplishments are overlooked and even derided. The hashtag Black Girl Magic seeks to correct this omission. This course will examine the way Black women use their narratives to voice change and how these narratives themselves have evolved and changed over time. We will attempt to answer the question: Are the narratives for and by black women useful tools for their freedom? Our key figures and texts will include Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and portions of comics written by black women. Titles include Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi and The Living Blood by Tananarive Due.
Writing assignments for this course will include short critical analysis essays, a historical analysis paper, a presentation, mid-term and final.
LIT 4930
Native American Literature and the Environment
Alyssa Hunziker
In literary and popular discourse, Indigenous peoples have often been linked to the environment. From depictions of the pre-Columbian U.S. as an “Environmental Eden” to Iron Eyes Cody’s famous “Crying Indian” anti-littering commercial, Indigenous peoples have been repeatedly cast as passive environmental symbols rather than active environmental advocates. Despite these caricatured representations, Indigenous territories are often at the forefront of extractive industries including oil drilling, uranium mining, fracking, as well as recent pipeline projects which run through the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and Wet’suwet’en territories in British Columbia. In light of these extractive histories, our course will ask: How do Native authors write about the environment, particularly in the face of climate change, resource extraction, and diminishing land and water use rights?
This course will survey fiction by Native American and First Nations authors which focus on Indigenous relationships to land, territory, and non-human entities. We will read works by such authors as Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Cherie Dimaline (Métis), Rebecca Roanhorse (San Juan Pueblo), and Tanya Tagaq (Inuit). We will also pair our literary readings with several short video games (Never Alone and Thunderbird Strike), Viceland’s television series RISE, and contemporary scholarship on the environment. Assignments will include two short essays, presentations, and a final research paper.
Summer B
AML 4242
Studies in 20th Century American Literature
Srimayee Basu
Anarchists, Murderesses, Fugitives: Representations of Female Outlaws in American Literature & Film
Edgar Allan Poe, one of American Literature’s foremost writers of mystery and macabre, writes in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Historically, femininity and criminality have been fundamentally conflicting social constructions, with the former scripted narrowly in terms of helpless victimhood, acquiescence and confinement. This course will examine works of American literature and film which represent the female ‘criminal’—the anarchist, the fugitive slave, the alleged “witch,” the demonically possessed woman, the transgressive sex worker and the radical political dissident, to name a few—to reconsider the relationship between criminal/criminalized women, the civil society and the state. We shall consider the ways in which discourses surrounding race, class and sexuality shape social perceptions of the female criminal and probe how the notion of monstrosity itself is deeply gendered and racialized.
Assignments will include three short position papers, a midterm paper, and a final research paper.
The texts for this course will include:
Lucy Parsons, “Crime, Violence and Suicide” and “Crimes and Criminals”
Nella Larsen, Passing
Estelle B. Freedman, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965”
John Huston (director), The Maltese Falcon
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers (excerpts)
Billy Wilder (director), Double Indemnity
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Melissa Harris Perry, “Bad Black Mothers”
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (excerpts)
ENC 3250
Professional Communication
Madison Jones
Professional communication is the study and practice of relaying technical information to a wide range of public audiences. This course provides instruction and practice in professional communication, focusing on clarity and style across professional writing environments. This course will explore traditional professional documents, such as reports, letters, memos, and evaluations, which are part of everyday acts of professional communication. By analyzing writing situations, this course is designed to prepare students for communicating in professional environments.
The final section of this course will be devoted to the role of emerging media in professional communication, focusing on mobile, location-based technologies. Increasingly, government agencies and private institutions are utilizing the mobile affordances of locative media to transform locations into places of writing. Through reports, proposals, a usability test, and a presentation, students will learn about user localization and the role of place in professional communication. This course satisfies 6000 words of the University Writing Requirement. This course uses Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup. All other course texts will be drawn from online, open-access resources.
ENG 4130
Race and Ethnicity in Film
Olubunmi Oguntolu
Female Filmmakers Producing, Performing, and Screening Racial Identity
From early cinema to modern motion pictures, film’s shifting landscape has offered a place for crafting, obscuring, reflecting, and subverting ideas of race and ethnicity. Those in front and behind the camera depict and perform race and ethnicity through production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. These actions, along with considerations of gender, class, and sexuality, reflect and replicate social constructions and identities. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies and critical race theory frameworks, this course will examine the ways film language and behavior construct racial and ethnic identities. We will explore how both film and filmmaking inform our reception of these identities and the radical essence of who and for whom the films are made. We will further question how ethnicity is performed in film, how film racializes groups, and how groups are treated on film from various global perspectives. We will examine race and ethnicity from the positions of the filmmaker, film, and spectator.
Our course screenings include cinematic works hailing from or set in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. Within this global catalogue, we will focus on works written, produced, and/or directed by female filmmakers: Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Claire Denis’s 35 Rhums (2008), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007). And our readings will incorporate texts and excerpts from film, media, and new media critical approaches by Richard Dyer, Ed Guerrero, Linda Williams, and Lola Young. We will use seminar discussions to navigate the questions and interpretations we derive from critically engaging with our course texts. From these discussions, screenings, and readings, we will produce rhetorical analyses, visual and oral presentations, and analytical critiques to help us engage dialectics of race and ethnicity in film.
ENL 3350
Age of Johnson
Satit Leelathawornchai
The Long Eighteenth-Century: The Culture of Sensibility
The eighteenth-century Britain is often called an age of sensibility. Philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and imaginative writers such as Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen emphasized the importance of the feelings for morals, politics and social life. Sentimental prose and poetry were written not only to entertain but also to soften the heart and edify the reader’s moral character. Political authors such as the abolitionists also made a heavy use of emotional appeal to incite the moral duty of ending the transatlantic slave trade. Many believed that the world would be a better place if people would bond together in fellow-feeling. Despite such aims, critics took aim at the culture of sensibility. Contemporary critics ridiculed the movement for lacking a genuine concern for the sufferings of real people, while more recent critics have pointed to its association with the politics of empire.
This course will explore the culture of sensibility through fictional and nonfictional works from long eighteenth-century Britain. We will read the works of key sentimentalists including Aphra Behn (Oroonoko), Sarah Scott (Millenium Hall), and Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting Narrative) along with moral theories, travelogues and political essays that reflect the culture of sensibility. We will trace in these works the relation between sensibility, morality, politics and social life, examining many inconsistencies and controversies that underlie the texts. Assignments will include a presentation, a short response paper, and a longer critical analysis paper.
LIT 4188
World English
Kedon Willis
Whispers from the Verandah: Queer Writing in the Caribbean
The Caribbean culture is famous for its vibrant carnivals, friendly people and dynamic music forms such as reggae and calypso. What’s not as famous or evident is its gay culture. In fact, the Caribbean has garnered a reputation of hostility towards queer lives. Time Magazine even once labeled Jamaica as the most homophobic place on earth. With this idea in mind, what does it mean to be gay and living in the Caribbean? The course uses this question as a call to engage with queer authors within the region or of Caribbean heritage. How do they articulate not just the politics of queer activism but also the reality of queer existence within that geographical space? What local traditions are already embodied as “queer”? Moreover, how does the possibility of ‘queer being’ on a postcolonial island differ from the political concept of queer in North American and Western European contexts? The course will briefly engage with critical texts from the library of North American and European queer thinking before delving into the literature from the region. Furthermore, the course will rely on a variety of genres and media to reflect the incredible political, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean space. Possible novels, poems, short stories, music videos, art works and critical essays will include the works of: Audre Lorde (Grenada/Barbados), Marlon James (Jamaica), Rajiv Mohabir (Guyana), Gloria Wekker (Suriname), Rita Indiana (The Dominican Republic), Krys (Guadeloupe), Gabby Rivera (Puerto Rico), Dionne Brand (Trinidad and Tobago) and Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba). And assignments will include short response papers, a book review, a creative work and a final research paper.