Undergraduate Courses, Spring 2006
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.
Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses
Note: Only course descriptions are listed below. For a comprehensive summary of course numbers, sections, times and locations, titles, and instructors, see the following web page:
AML 3041
Country, City, and Suburb in American Fiction Since 1865
Andrew Reynolds
Only ten years ago, the critic J. Hillis Miller remarked, “The notion that landscape provides grounding for novels has hardly given rise to a distinct mode of the criticism of fiction, as has the criticism of character, or of interpersonal relations, or of narrators and narrative sequence” (Topographies 9). This course will challenge the accuracy and current relevance of Miller’s perception by introducing students to an established, flourishing mode of literary analysis: spatial criticism. To do so, we will survey literary treatments of three distinctive American environments or geographies: the country, the city, and the suburb.
Our approach to these texts will be twofold. First, we’ll consider how actual, historical geographies appear in fiction and how they might influence the production and interpretation of literature. How does an author use a setting to reveal the actions and motivations of a character as products of a given society or culture? How might additional information about real places provide a better understanding of fictional texts? Second, we’ll consider how fiction represents and even constructs our rural, urban, and suburban geographies. Following this line of thought, Philip Fisher argues that literary texts enable the settlement or “making familiar” of new or alien landscapes such as the modern city. “The cultural work that I am describing,” says Fisher, “is the process by which the unimaginable becomes, finally, the obvious” (Hard Facts 8).
We’ll analyze one such act of social construction at the beginning of the semester when we read William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes. From there, we’ll move on to three early-twentieth-century classics: Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Cather’s O Pioneers!, and Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. We’ll collectively choose what texts we want to read after those; some possibilities include:
- Roth’s Call It Sleep
- Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete
- Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
- Wright’s Native Son
- Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun
- Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus
- Oates’s Expensive People
- Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire
- Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain
- DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Your grades will be based primarily on formal essay writing (70% of the final grade) but also informal reading responses (20%) and class participation (10%). I will assign either two longer essays (approx. 8 pages) or one short close reading (4 pages), one short essay (4 pages), and one longer one. You are allowed to miss six hours of class; after that, your final grade will be penalized. My classes are discussion rather than lecture oriented. I try to foster an open, friendly environment for people to test out new or incomplete ideas and voice their opinions. Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions for the class. My web address is: <http://www.english.ufl.edu/~areynold/>.
AML 3041
American Literatures II: The Immigrant Experience in American Literature
Jessica Livingston
Immigration is again a volatile issue in American politics: Wal-Mart has been locking undocumented immigrants working as janitors in its stores overnight; the Bush administration is pushing for a new guest worker program; the Minutemen, a vigilante militia who believes the government is failing to protect its citizens, is guarding the nation’s borders. Global capitalism is displacing large populations who are forced to migrate to the United States and other Western industrialized countries. This course will examine this subject in the larger context of the twentieth century. While America is often considered a symbol of economic opportunity and political freedom, its history has also been one of economic exploitation and racial/ethnic discrimination. The literature in this course will examine the political tensions surrounding immigration as well as the necessary negotiation of family, identity, and culture. The literature in this course will be from multiple perspectives: immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and “natives.” Readings will consist primarily of novels and memoirs, but it will also include essays and films.
Tentative reading list:
- My Antonia (1917), Willa Cather
- Bread Givers (1925), Anzia Yezierska
- Christ in Concrete (1939), Pietro Di Donato
- Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975), Maxine Hong Kingston
- Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (1983), Edward Rivera
- Continental Drift (1985), Russell Banks
- The Dew Breaker (2004), Edwidge Danticat
Possible films:
- Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917)
- El Norte (1983)
- Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
- Farmingville: POV (2004)
AML 3041
American Fiction Since 1865
This course will focus on twentieth-century fictional narratives of cross-ethnic or cross-cultural experiences. We will begin with Azar Nafisi’s recent best-seller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which passionately engages American novels such as The Great Gatsby and Lolita in the context of the Iranian revolution, We will then turn to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, perhaps excerpted, and James Weldon Johnson’s narrative of passing in America and Europe, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Then we will take up a series of classics: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (unless most students have already read it), William Faulkner’s Light in August, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. The course will conclude with discussions of Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), about a 12-year-old girl who moves from Haiti to Brooklyn, and we’ll probably have time to choose another narrative or two, perhaps Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) or Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988), or other novels suggested by the class (last year students chose Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides). Or we might even end with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.
Work required: an initial close-reading exercise (5%), three 4–6 pp. comparative close readings (25% each, with credit for improvement), possibly weekly take-home quizzes (20%). If I do quizzes, the lowest quiz grade will be dropped. If I don’t assign quizzes, the close readings will be weighted at 30% each, with the best grade getting 35%. No exams. I’m hoping that I can keep you up with the readings and generate lively discussions by starting each class with eight to ten students who have been assigned to say what textual issues you’d like to talk about that day.
Grading will be based entirely on your writing, though late essays or more than four unexcused class cuts (double period = 2 classes) will lower your grade. The more absences over the maximum, the lower the grade becomes. Excused absences can be made up with extra writing about the text(s) discussed that day. I don’t include class participation in the grading because I try to make class sessions non-judgmental and relaxed, so that anyone can try out ideas without feeling silly, weird, or stupid.
I give A’s to essays using an original and spirited argument to illuminate complexities of language as well as theme. I give B+’s to well organized, well developed, relatively error-free essays with sparks of originality or daring, and B’s to competent essays needing more complex development and/or clearer focus. Lower grades mean greater problems with development, organization, and grammar. Recurrent grammatical errors lower the grade; spelling errors and typos don’t, within reason. The best essays sustain complex and/or audacious arguments; a good “B” essay will capably summarize and compare themes. I encourage “prewrites,” if they’re handed in a week before the assignment is due.
To find out more, come by my office at 4362 Turlington. My office hours this Fall are Mondays and Tuesdays, 2–4 p.m., and by arrangement. Please feel free to call me at home (371-7461, before 9:30 PM) or at the office (392-6650 x283), or to e-mail me (see top).
AML 3041
American Literatures II: American Realism & Naturalism
Aron Pease
This course is a survey of American Realism and Naturalism. Our focus will be on understanding the form of these literary movements, which represent, for many critics, the origin of the American novel. Most of the short stories and novels we will read were written between the Civil War and World War I. We will, however, begin the semester by reading excerpts from James Fennimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking romances, as well as critical discussions of Cooper’s work by Mark Twain and D.H. Lawrence. We will conclude by reading two recent novels seen as successors to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Realism and Naturalism.
Literary authors whose writing we will read include:
- Kate Chopin
- Charles Chesnutt
- Stephen Crane
- Theodore Dreiser
- Sui Sin Far
- William Gibson
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- William Dean Howells
- Henry James
- Jack London
- Frank Norris
- Jayne Anne Phillips
- Mark Twain
- Edith Wharton
AML 3270
Survey of African American Literature I
Maisha Wester
African American Literature I surveys significant writings of Black Americans from roughly 1760 (the colonial period) to 1940 (the end of the Harlem Renaissance). The course specifically charts the development of the Black literary tradition through an interrogation of the (dis)continuities and discourses of and between each literary period. The course engages both fictional and theoretical writings as we discover the various challenges and complications early Black writers encountered in their determination to define and describe what it means to be Black and American.
Please note that this course is based upon discussion rather than lecture. In order to succeed in this course students must 1) attend class regularly, 2) complete all assigned work prior to each class session, and 3) participate in class discussion.
AML 3271
Survey of African American Literature II
This course will examine African American literature and culture in relationship to the tremendous social, political, and cultural change that characterized the post-war period. Special attention will be given to the ways in which African American social change movements such as Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Feminism influence African American cultural production and African American aesthetic practices.
AML 4225
American Literature to 1865
In this course we’ll focus on several antebellum American texts and genres: slave narratives, short stories and novels, essays, and poems. My emphasis will be on close readings, with some attention to ideological contexts. We’ll explore how constructions of gender, race, and authorship intersect, and how those intersections affect the emergence of “sensational” and “sentimental” fiction. We’ll begin with close readings of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, from Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Next we’ll discuss a variety of short narratives by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in their Library of America editions, in part to see how white writers handle blackness in their themes and imagery. We’ll examine the interplay of sensational and sentimental modes, and we’ll try to figure out what Poe is doing with all those fragmented body parts in his satires. We’ll also discuss why several of Hawthorne’s sketches were so much more popular than the stories that have since been canonized.
We’ll then turn to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harper Classics ed.) and either Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Penguin ed.) or some shorter texts by Melville, depending on class interest. We’ll conclude with some essays by Emerson and some poems by Whitman. The class may add or substitute other texts and authors, e.g., Olaudah Equiano, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau’s Walden, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. Everyone should already have read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Work required: an initial close-reading exercise (5%), two 4–6 pp. comparative close readings (25% each), and a 12–15 pp. research essay plus notes and/or works cited (45%). Instead of weekly take-home quizzes (20%, if used, with lower percentages for the essays), I’m hoping that I can keep you up with the readings and generate lively discussions by starting each class with eight to ten students who have been assigned to say what textual issues you’d like to talk about that day. If that doesn’t work, I’ll assign take-home quizzes, and the lowest quiz grade will be dropped. No exams. Grading will be based entirely on your writing, though late essays or more than four unexcused class cuts (double period = 2 classes) will lower your grade. The more absences over the maximum, the lower the grade becomes. Excused absences can be made up with extra writing about the text(s) discussed that day. I don’t include class participation in the grading because I try to make class sessions non-judgmental and relaxed, so that anyone can try out ideas without feeling silly, weird, or stupid.
I give A’s to essays using an original and spirited argument to illuminate complexities of language as well as theme. I give B+’s to well organized, well developed, relatively error-free essays with sparks of originality or daring, and B’s to competent essays needing more complex development and/or clearer focus. Lower grades mean greater problems with development, organization, and grammar. Recurrent grammatical errors lower the grade; spelling errors and typos don’t, within reason. The best essays sustain complex and/or audacious arguments; a good “B” essay will capably summarize and compare themes. I encourage “prewrites,” if they’re handed in a week before the assignment is due.
To find out more, come by my office at 4362 Turlington. My office hours this Fall are Mondays and Tuesdays, 2–4 p.m., and by arrangement. Please feel free to call me at home (371-7461, before 9:30 PM) or at the office (392-6650 x283), or to e-mail me (see top).
AML 4242
Modern American Poetry
This course covers these poets: Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Rita Dove. Assignments include an explication paper, comparative paper, panel presentation, tests, and a parody.
AML 4453
Patriotism, Internationalism, and U.S. National Literature from 1790 to 1925
Lloyd Willis
During the first half of the nineteenth century, authors in the United States were torn between the ideas of creating an absolutely new national literature in the U. S. and continuing European literary traditions on North American soil. In this course will explore the debates that authors like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Cornelius Mathews staged in periodicals like the North American Review and the Democratic Review between 1825 and 1850; engage the literary texts that they and other authors produced in defense of such positions; and confront the trajectory of “American Literature” from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth century from the perspective of these early nineteenth century debates. As we pursue these goals, we will question the enduring value of the arguments posed by those like Longfellow and Mathews, we will work to find ways of recovering the largely forgotten work of Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow, and we will investigate the ways that the persistent canon of “American Literature” that we still confront in the twenty-first century often fulfills an early nineteenth-century call for patriotic literature that incited stiff resistance then as it continues to today.
Texts (Tentative):
- J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer
- Timothy Dwight: Greenfield Hill
- Joel Barlow: The Columbiad
- Cornelius Mathews: Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound Builders
- James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Evangeline, Hiawatha
- Emerson: Nature, The American Scholar
- Whitman: Leaves of Grass
- Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Shorter critical essays by:
- Henry Wadsworth Longefellow
- Cornelius Mathews
- C. C. Felton
- Edgar Allen Poe
- Margaret Fuller
- Mark Twain
- George Santayana
- Van Wyck Brooks
- D. H. Lawrence
Assignments:
- Daily response papers: 25%
- Oral Presentations: 25%
- 2 major papers: 25%
- 2 exams: 25%
AML 4453
Title TBA
No course description is available at this time.
AML 4685
Pedagogy of the Wretched: Literacy, Narrative, and Class in Black and Brown Communities
This class combines literary and cultural studies to examine the importance of literacy and its evolution in specific racialized populations. We will determine broader meanings of literacy, and we will speculate on the role literacy plays in the formation of identity and issues of self-determination stemming from class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Students will complete textual analysis and interpretive performances of select films, literature, music, and comics. The class begins with an investigation of oral narratives and early extended written narratives in Black and Brown communities. Once we have located the initial strategies used to make communities literate, we will then examine how recent cultural phenomena of lower-class masses repeat and revise such methods in ways that continue to encourage literacy in traditional and non-traditional manners.
For updated information on course, see the following link: <http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/stalling/syllabi.html>.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
No course description is available at this time.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This course will be run in the ‘traditional’ workshop fashion with occasional lectures on structure, metaphor, plot, etc. Writing exercises will be assigned at the beginning, but the primary emphasis is on self-generated work. Each student will be expected to write two short stories, as well as complete a final draft of each.
Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished works, but only after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously as they take their own writing.
Reading will be assigned.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3310
Imaginative Writing: Poetry
Text: The only text for this course is Ellmann and O’Clair’s Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the latest edition. It is available at Goering’s Bookstore.
Mechanics: The course is essentially a workshop; that is, the emphasis will be upon improving your own creative work. You are expected to turn in a poem of moderate length (say 1/2 page, typed in dark ink on white paper) or a substantially rewritten version of an earlier poem each week during class, to be discussed during the following week’s class. Submit the poems to my mailbox (TUR 4012) before 4:00 on the Friday preceding class. About half of these poems will be prescribed exercises. You may, if you wish, turn in several poems each week; in fact, I encourage this. Failure to turn in your work when it is due will adversely affect your grade.
From among the submissions each week I will prepare a worksheet of poems to be discussed during the next class. You must purchase this worksheet at University Copy, across from campus, before class. I will expect you to annotate the poems you read with questions, comments, suggestions, and so forth, before class begins. There should be enough of these so that everyone would have plenty to say if called upon. Of course, you will also be expected to have looked up words of whose meaning you are unsure and allusions with which you are not familiar. Although not everyone’s poem will be discussed each week, I will try to ensure that everyone’s work appears regularly. I prefer that each poem be discussed before the author is identified; only after discussion has finished will the author be identified and allowed to respond to the comments or questions. In any case, I will make written comments on the original submitted copies of everyone’s poems each week. Save these copies; I will want to see them at midterm, when I will meet with everyone to give an assessment of your progress in the course, and again at the end of the term. If you have a particular reason to request that the poem you turn in for a particular week not be discussed in class, or be discussed anonymously, please make a note to that effect on the poem you turn in to me.
In the first half of class we will discuss poems by the writers assigned for that week, and we will discuss the particular writing assignment or exercise (if any) for the following week. You should be familiar with the poems from Ellmann and O’Clair assigned that week; unless I state otherwise, read all the selections for each poet. Your own work will be a mixture of specific assignments (sonnet, sestina, sustained metaphor) and open assignments.
Absences: You are allowed two absences, which must be cleared in advance with me; call me at the office or at home. Any uncleared absence (including lateness over 1/2 hour) lowers your grade by half a letter. If you miss a class, your work for the following week should still be in my box in the English Department by Friday afternoon.
Grades: I will try to give you an idea of the grade you might expect (assuming you continue working at the same level) when we meet around midterm; at the end of term I will collect from you a notebook with copies of all your work, including my comments, and your own revisions of whichever poems you wish. The more poems you revise successfully, the more positively I am impressed. There are no papers and no exams. Your final grade will be determined by the quality and/or improvement in your writing; by your attendance and participation in class; and by the wit, passion, and seriousness you bring to writing. My quantification of these elements may be somewhat subjective.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4905
Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
This course will be run in the ‘traditional’ workshop fashion with occasional lectures on structure, metaphor, plot, etc. Some writing exercises will be assigned at the beginning, but the primary emphasis is on self-generated work. Each student will be expected to write two short stories, as well as complete a final draft of each.
Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished works, but only after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously as they take their own writing.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it whelp us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4905
Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing
No course description is available at this time.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
ENC 3310
Advanced Exposition
This is a standard, traditional (old-fashioned) composition course focusing on familiar rhetorical modes of development (narrative, description, analysis, etc.) with a heavy emphasis on style and rhetorical effectiveness and perhaps a nod towards “creative nonfiction.” Four or five papers plus analysis of selected essays and assorted in-class writing activities.
ENC 3312
Title TBA
No course description is available at this time.
ENC 3312
Advanced Argumentative Writing
In this course, the first three weeks will be spent reading, discussing, and otherwise learning a specific theory of argumentation, most likely that of philosopher Stephen Toulmin. The remaining eleven and a half weeks will take the form of an ongoing workshop in which each student applies her or his newly acquired knowledge to the writing of five or six arguments and to the critical reading of other students’ arguments.
ENC 4956
Overseas Studies
Undergraduate Coordinator
Prerequisite: This course must be approved by the Undergraduate Coordinator before the student travels overseas. It may be repeated with a change of topic up to a maximum of 15-credit hours.
This study, which may count towards the English major, involves course work taken as part of an approved study abroad program.
ENG 3010
Modern Criticism
Modern Criticism (and Literary Theory) provides an introduction to some of the major theoretical schools in twentieth-century literary criticism. Central to our study will be the historical trajectory of structuralism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Also of importance will be psychoanalysis, myth or archetypal criticism, and various forms of historical criticism or historicism. Students will learn how approaches in critical theory are themselves historically derived. With that end in mind, we will use as our main text the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Vincent Leitch, general editor). We will also develop this theoretical knowledge with practical application by studying a small group of poems, films, and novels (such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula) intensively for the term. Two papers and a final examination. Attendance is required.
ENG 3011
Critics: Roland Barthes
The career of Roland Barthes offers a fascinating overview of contemporary cultural theory, ranging from structuralism and narratology, to materialist semiotics, to postructuralism and queer theory, to cultural studies of music, fashion, and photography. In the words of one reader, “Barthes interests us precisely because he is stimulating, and it is hard to spearate what engages us in his work from his perpetual attempt to adopt new perspectives, to break with habitual perceptions. A lasting commitment to particular projects would have made Barthes a less productive thinker.”
This course will provide an introduction to critical theory through the work of Barthes (emphasis on introduction: no great familiarity with theory is assumed or expected). This will also be a writing-intensive course, with weekly writing assigments rather than one or two concentrated projects; a central goal of the course is the improvement of your critical writing skills.
ENG 3063
Advanced Grammar: Theory & Application
This course is intended primarily for students planning to be writing teachers or professional editors and who will need to know essential terminology and reasons for grammatical changes to enhance their credibility as teachers and editors. We will cover as many aspects of formal grammar as we can cram into one semester, covering topics ranging from parts of speech and sentence patterns to diagramming, modification, and rhetorical grammar. No exams or major papers are required but some work – take-home or in-class exercises, editing work, reading tests, etc. will be required for every class and the final grade will be based simply on the success of these accumulated activities.
ENG 3115
Introduction to Film Theory
This course will offer a broad introduction to various strategies for interpreting films contextually. While the focus of the course will be largely methods that may be termed “historical,” the meaning of that term is greatly divergent within the various approaches. These approaches will encompass a range of extratextual influences including aesthetic, technological, industrial, and social history. But whatever the specific approach, the course will focus on the importance across these various methodologies of looking at a film as an always contextualized, never simply “textual” artifact.
Readings will span the history of film theory from the “classics” to the contemporary and will include readings from a number of scholarly traditions including genre theory, auteurist criticism, apparatus theory, scholarship on race and gender, postmodern theory, political economy, &c.
ENG 3121
History of Film I
Nora Alter
(This course is cross-listed with GET 2290/sec. 1890)
History of Film I will survey the silent era of film from 1895 to sound film (1927).
ENG 3122
History of Film 2
This course asks you to use the movies Casablanca and Breathless as memory theaters for storing and recalling (1) the events of the 1930s, especially the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of German fascism; and (2) the course of post-War cinematic history, especially American film noir, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave.
The course covers film history from 1930–1965. After beginning with two movies of German origin, Fritz Lang’s M and MGM’s Grand Hotel, the course’s first half will trace the parallel developments in Hollywood and Europe, using the biography and writing of Walter Benjamin as an allegory of popular culture’s appeal and Nazism’s danger. Part I ends with the Fall of Paris, both the historical event (which drove Benjamin further into a fatal exile) and its Hollywood representation (in Casablanca). Part II traces the two roads that diverge from that moment: the film noir of movies like The Big Sleep and the neorealist rejection of Hollywood Cinema. These two filmmaking practices, apparently so contradictory, converge in the French New Wave, whose most famous movie, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, explicitly invokes the image of Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca.
Some students, especially non-majors, have complained about the course’s significant reading requirements. That reading provides the larger historical context for the cinema’s development. But if you don’t like to do reading and have daily quizzes on it, you might think about taking a different class.
Readings:
- Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
- Schatz, The Genius of the System
- Stern, The Fuhrer and the People
- Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca
- Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s
- Photocopy packet
Assignments and Grading:
I. 60% of the final grade will result from two written projects:
- a two-hour mid-term essay exam
- a two-hour final essay exam
II. 40% of the final grade will result from the following:
- class participation (quality as well as quantity)
- brief, short-answer daily reading quizzes
- one oral presentation, which counts as five quiz grades
You are allowed one unexcused absence. Each additional absence will deduct four points from your final course grade.
ENG 4015
Psychological Approaches to Literature
This course will focus on major works by Philip Roth. Texts to be read will include:
- Goodbye, Columbus
- Portnoy’s Complaint
- My Life As A Man
- Zuckerman Unbound
- The Anatomy Lesson
- The Facts
- Patrimony
- Operation Shylock
- Sabbath’s Theater
- And I Married A Communist
Emphasis will be placed on Roth’s depictions of psychoanalysis and on the biographical dimensions of his fiction. Course requirements: regular attendance and class participation, midterm, final exam, and one ten- to twelve-page term paper.
ENG 4110
Animation and Comics
Required Texts:
- Course Packet (Xerographic Copy Center, 927 N.W. 13th Street)
- Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde
- Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons
This experimental course will focus on a highly selective social history of animated cartoons, comic strips, comic books, and animated cartoons through a consideration of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological implications of close readings of specific works. The course will emphasize USA productions from 1900–1975 with special emphasis on productions authorized through the Walt Disney Company, especially the animation and comic book work of previously anonymous artist/writer Carl Barks (who worked in the Donald Duck story unit and wrote and drew over 500 Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic book stories), Barks’s work will be used as a touchstone to explore the theoretical and historical issues addressed in the course, such as – what kinds of cultural work do animated cartoons and comics perform? What different narrative possibilities and limitations enable and constrain artists producing comics, animated cartoons, and “live-action,” especially in relation to technological innovation? And how did Disney animation differ from work produced at Warner Brothers, the Max and Dave Fleischer Studio at Paramount, the Hugh Harmon/Rudolph Ising unit at MGM, the Van Beuren Studio, and the Ub Iwerks Studio?
We will be taking advantage of the large selection of comics and animation on Reserve and the recently acquired rare comics materials (1800s–1930s) that are housed in Special Collections in Library East.
Requirements include several writing experiments, quizzes, and a final project.
The class will meet two periods each day, three days a week, which should provide a time-format that will work for screening cartoons and other digital projections and for discussing them the same day they are screened.
ENG 4110
The Film Epic and U.S. Imperialism
On November 6, 2004, U.S. Marines in Iraq prepared for an attack on Fallujah by dressing up as gladiators and reenacting the famous chariot scene from Ben Hur, using confiscated Iraqi horses. The connection here between a U.S. war, justified by its proponents as a means of establishing a global American empire, and the film epic is far from accidental. This course will chart the rise and fall of the film epic genre in relation to the history American imperialism as it has morphed from American exceptionalism (bringing liberty through empire) to an open celebration of American empire (exporting “free-dumb”). Our focus will largely be on the Hollywood film epic and its intersections with various low-budget exploitation genres, but some attention will be given to anti-epic alternatives in other cinemas and to television mini-series such as HBO’s Rome. In addition to genre, we’ll consider the cinematic fantasies of masculinity, supersizing, greatness, liberation, and empire as a site of Orientalist spectacle and decadence.
Films include
- Alexander
- Ben Hur
- Gladiator
- The Ten Commandments
- El Cid
- Spartacus
- Citizen Kane
- The Fall of the Roman Empire
- Aguirre, Wrath of God
- Walker
- Columbus: 1492
- Battle of Algiers
- Contempt
- Troy
- Kingdom of Heaven
- selections from Star Wars I-III; Sign of the Cross; and Demetrius and the Gladiators
Readings include
- selections from Amy Kaplan and Don Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism
- Niall Ferguson, Colossus: the Price of American Empire
- Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
- Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters
- Martin M. Winkler, ed. Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema
- Sandra R, Joshel ed., Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture
- Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History
- John Belton, Widescreen Cinema
- Robin Lane Fox, The Making of Alexander
- Ridley Scott, Kingdom of Heaven
- Martin M. Winkler, Gladiator
- Mark Janovich, “‘The Purest Knight of All’: Nation, History, and Representation in El Cid”
- Viven Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic”
- Martin M. Winkler, “Star Wars and the Roman Empire”
- Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans?: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus”
For more information, go to <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~rburt/filmepic/>.
ENG 4130
Race and Ethnicity In Film: Hollywood Whiteness
We will examine the white self as it is represented in Hollywood films across the twentieth century, using the techniques of “critical white studies.” Our focus is on major films by white directors featuring white protagonists interacting with people of another color.
Objectives:
- To learn how to analyze film narratives from a sociological perspective.
- To develop skills required for intellectual collaboration.
- To gain an understanding of the complex nature of the white American self.
- To gain an understanding of the process of cinematic representation of whiteness.
- To gain a self-reflexive understanding of the way in which we read narrative representations of the world.
Introduction:
According to Richard Dyer, “Racial imagery is central to the organization of the modern world.” In the U.S., we cannot understand religion, the economy, the shape of our families, or our politics unless we learn something about our peculiar ideas about race and the difference it makes. The circumstances of our lives, from the level of our education to the place where we live, the air we breathe, and the quality of our life and death, are all shaped by race.
Hollywood movies are one of the central ways in which “images of whiteness” are disseminated across American culture and around the world. In this course, we will examine the way in which “whiteness” has been portrayed in Hollywood movies between 1915 and 2005 in which both whites and people of another color are portrayed in major roles. The analysis of “whiteness” and the privileges attached to it is a difficult task because, until recently, “race” was only applied to non-white peoples. In addition, after WW II the practice of racism was ardently denied by those who engage in it.
Readings (at Goering’s Books):
- White by Richard Dyer (Routledge)
- White Guys By Fred Pfeil (Verso)
- Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness by Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon (Rowman and Littlefield)
- Performing Whiteness by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster ( State University of NY Press)
Films:
- Birth of a Nation
- The Littlest Rebel
- King Kong (1933)
- Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
- Guess Who (2005)
- Bulworth
- Pulp Fiction
- Amistad
- The Last Samurai
- Eight Mile
- Tears of the Sun
- Crash
Required viewing outside of class (any two):
- Glory
- Imitation of Life
- Mississippi Burning
- Ghosts of Mississippi
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- The Man Who Would be King
- Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
- A Patch of Blue
- White Men Can’t Jump
- Broken Arrow
- The Searchers
- The Last of the Mohicans
- Nothing to Lose
- Love Field
- The Long Walk Home
- American History X
- Trading Places
- Lethal Weapon 2
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Lone Star
- A Touch of Evil
- South Pacific
- Sayonara
- The World of Suzie Wong
- A Band of Angels
- Show Boat
- Training Day
Requirements:
- Twelve weekly one-page response papers (five on required films, five on readings, and two on viewing out of class from the above list). Late papers lose 3% per school day. Counts 36% of the grade.
- Team work: pairs of students will report on a movie to the class using video clips (also to be submitted in writing, four-page maximum). Counts 24%.
- Final research paper, seven pages long, comparing and contrasting two or three films. Counts 30%.
- Attendance and class participation. You are allowed three hours unexcused absences. Each unexcused absence after that costs 2% of the final grade. Counts 10%.
There will be no quizzes or examinations. The final paper will count as final exam.
ENG 4130
African Cinema
This course employs a comparative approach to study narrative and non-narrative films made about Africans. Most of the screenings will be films made by African filmmakers (i.e., filmmakers who are citizens of an African country). However, the course also includes a few films made by such European filmmakers as Claire Denis and Mathieu Kassovitz and Afro-European filmmakers as Med Hondo and John Akomfrah.
Lectures and discussions will consider how the films explore generational conflicts that result from migration, globalization and western education. Ideas about ethnicity, race, nation, class, gender and sexuality will be discussed in relation to how they transform notions about Africa and Africans. Additionally, the class will examine how movies construct different narrative forms as comedy, melodrama, documentary, by using both verbal and visual narrative strategies. Students are expected to learn and correctly employ film and theoretical terminology when they discuss and write about film.
Course Goals:
Students will analyze how various types of films imitate, appropriate and or resist the dominant representational regimes and film genres. The course provides an introduction to cultural theory and contemporary African film history. Students will hopefully leave this course with a sharpened critical understanding of how filmmakers and video artists visually imitate, appropriate, and or resist certain dominant representational paradigms.
Required Books: All books are available at T.I.S. Bookstore
- Barlet, Olivier. African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze. New York: Zed Books, 2000.
- Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
- Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Sixth Edition. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2003
- Ukadike, N. Frank. Black African Cinema. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
- ENG4130 sec. 6272: African Cinema Course Pack (if available) otherwise articles are held on reserve
Course Requirements and Grading
I. Papers, Oral And Video Presentations Are Graded On [20 Points]:
The importance of the material presented to the class or introduced in the written essay. To illustrate important issues and to support their statements, students must make brief references to primary scenes in a literary work, film or video.
The clarity of the written and oral work. Here, “clarity” refers to smooth oral delivery, correct use of descriptive terminology and grammar.
The ability to pose important questions in the written work and to pose questions to the class during the oral presentation. Students should develop their initial statement of purpose (which is the initial statement that describes her/his argument). This statement must be included in the introductory section of the final paper, the written portion of the oral presentation outline, and any request for permission to do a film or video project.
II. Pop Quizzes On Assigned Readings And Films [20 Points]
“Pop” quizzes are unannounced mini-exams on the day’s assigned readings, lectures and screenings. There will be seven or more pop quizzes at one to three points per quiz.
III. Presentation: Readings & Film Screenings (Weeks 3–9, 11–13) [20 Points]
Each student will lead a 10-minute discussion on an assigned class reading, film or video.
IV. Typed Outline Of The Group Research Paper (Week 11) [10 Points]
V. Group Research Paper (Week 13) [30 Points]
ENG 4135
National Cinemas: The Second World War in French Cinema
Sylvie Blum
(This course is cross-listed with FRT 3520 sec. 7483)
The course covers the representation and the writing of World War II in France and its impact in Europe. Key European directors and writers have tackled the topic such as Cavani, Céline, Fassbinder, Godard, Grass, Levi, Malraux, Renoir, Resnais, Rossellini, Seghers, Semprun, Truffaut and Wenders to name a few. The readings will treat the persistence of memory and the recurrent trend to depict World War II (or I) in films. French cinema as an industry underwent significant changes during the German Occupation of France and during the Vichy government. The course examines some of the key texts and documents that witnessed the transformation of Western European countries and their cinema during the war. It will address writing about the war during and after the period, as well as the way that some of the major European powers dealt with cinema as a tool for propaganda. French society was deeply transformed by the defeat in 1940, the Vichy laws and government, its policies toward refugees and other ‘undesirable’ nationals, as well as the arrival and presence of a German occupational force. Comparative analysis will be done of similar situations occurring in Italy, England, Spain and Germany during wartime struggles. Films discussed will include a few excursions to earlier and later wars (such as WWI, the Spanish civil war, the colonial wars and the cold war), respectful of different points of view, such as German, English, Italian and Spanish.
The FLAC course (FRE 3224) accompanying the film class covers cultural, historical and literary readings in more detailed analysis and in French only.
ENG 4135
Brazilian Cinema
M. Elizabeth Ginway
(This course is cross-listed with PRT 3930 sec. 7680)
This class is designed to illustrate the effects of modernization on Brazilian society during the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) through film. Students will learn how to analyze a film through its esthetic and ideological content. The course will be centered on the comparison of the sertão (rural backlands) and favela (urban ghetto) settings from 1959–present – from the political to the postmodern. Readings and discussions will reinforce the social and political forces at work in Brazil as it undergoes its modern metamorphosis in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Requirements:
- Mid-term and final exam, 40%, short answer, essay format
- Two papers (in Portuguese or English) 3–5 pages 40%. Late papers will be penalized
- Film journal: short reaction paper (1 paragraph to one page) about each film must be sent to me via e-mail by each Friday following a screening, printed and kept in a journal handed in at the end of the semester, 15%
- participation 5%
- Screenings are part of the course and count as attendance. Absence policy: 3 absences, no penalty; after that, a half point will be subtracted from your final grade per absence
Texts:
- Brazilian Cinema (1995) by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam
- The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), Lúcia Nagib, ed.
- Xerox pack
Recommended:
- Tropical Multiculturalism: a Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture by Robert Stam.
ENG 4135
National Cinemas: Introduction to Japanese Film
Joseph Murphy
(This course is cross-listed with JPN 3391 sec. 1462)
This course is designed to introduce the student to the formal, historical and cultural features of Japanese film that have combined to give this tradition a unique and privileged place in western film criticism. As such we will have to prosecute two tasks in parallel: First will be acquiring the formal, technical and critical tools to talk about filmtexts as film. Second, we will be working to acquire a wide enough acquaintance with the context of Japan’s 20th century to satisfy our desire to be culturally and historically accurate. We will use Bordwell/Thompson’s Film Art as a basic text for the first task, and Anderson/Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry as a basic text for the second. However, a required course reader will provide weekly readings that will reinforce, supplement, question and criticize the perspectives we find there.
The course has four basic units:
- Intro: Theoretical set (weeks 1–2)
- Part I: In-depth comparison of Japanese and Hollywood styles in the 1930s and 40s (weeks 3–7)
- Part II: survey during the heyday of international popularity in the 50’s and 60’s (weeks 8–12)
- Epilogue: On Japanese film after 1975 (weeks 13–15).
Film screenings take place during scheduled lab. All film and video screenings are mandatory.
ENG 4135
Three Polish Directors – Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, Andrzej Zulawski
Christopher Caes
(This course is cross-listed with PLT 3520 sec. 6824)
This course is an examination of the work of three Polish directors of international renown, with special focus placed on the artistic representation and transformation of the Polish cultural and historical imaginary in three separate cinematic contexts: the Polish domestic industry, European cinema, and the cinema of Hollywood. The films of Andrzej Wajda, the premier director of postwar Polish cinema, mold a vibrant strain of Polish popular Romanticism to an eclectic blend of international cinema styles, from surrealism and neorealism to the New Wave and postmodernism, with each film restaging anew the problem of artistic means and narrative ends. The work of Agnieszka Holland, a “cinema of identities,” finely embeds narrative conflicts that cross gender, ethnic, and confessional boundaries into a variety of historical and cultural contexts ranging from the nineteenth century in Poland, France, and the US, through World War II and communism in Poland, to the contemporary US and Europe. The controversial career of Andrzej Zulawski, a maverick European director, has ranged widely over a number of genres from science fiction, fantasy, and horror/cult films to historical drama, melodrama, and opera, while consistently representing and probing extremes of violence and sexuality. Finally, each of these directors is still actively involved in filmmaking and the premier of a film by each of them has been announced for the first half of 2006 – Agnieszka Holland’s Copying Beethoven, a film based on events in the last year of the life of the great composer, Andrzej Zulawski’s Mistress of the House, the story of a renowned émigré director who returns to Poland and renews a relationship with a former lover, and Andrzej Wajda’s Postmortem, a work dealing with the Katyn massacre of 1940.
Films:
Andrzej Wajda
- Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
- Innocent Sorcerers (1960)
- Man of Marble (1976)
- Danton (1982)
- Holy Week (1995)
Agnieszka Holland
- Provincial Actors (1979)
- A Woman Alone (1981)
- Europa, Europa (1990)
- Washington Square (1999)
- Julie Walking Home (2002)
Andrzej Zulawski
- The Third Part of the Night (1971/1988)
- The Devil (1972)
- L’Important c’est d’aimer (1975)
- The Silver Globe (1977/1987)
- Szamanka (The Shamaness) (1995)
ENG 4136
Film and Video Production
This course is designed as an introduction to a broad range of practices sometimes labeled “experimental video.” The focus of the course will be exclusively on non-narrative approaches to the theory and practice of videomaking. Students will work on a number of short projects throughout the semester (about one every two weeks) that engage simultaneously with different theoretical problems, technological challenges, and aesthetic strategies. The projects will span all of the stages of video production from conception to sound editing as well as a wide variety of aesthetic forms. The course will conclude with a short final project of your own devising that grows out of one or a number of the theories and formal approaches that we have explored during the semester.
ENG 4905
Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice
An Independent Study course may be taken for 1 to 3 credit hours, but will only count toward the fulfillment of the 10-course requirement for the English major if a student registers for 3 credit hours.
This course is for advanced students who desire to supplement the regular courses by independent reading or research under the guidance of a member of the faculty. The student must find a faculty member who is willing to supervise the semester-long study, and together, the two create a project. The student must meet with the professor at designated times, agreed upon in advance, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Servitude and Power
Power has been a topic of primary concern for Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and other theorists. Of equal interest has been the question of whether power can be subverted; this interest has manifested itself in scholarship about non-dominant groups and their attempts to achieve agency and freedom. In this course, we will take a new approach to the perennial problem of power by thinking about servitude in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonial territories. In the eighteenth century, almost all individuals participated in some form of servitude. The spread of the British empire in North America, South America, and the Caribbean led to the laboring of slaves and indentured servants on plantations and in towns. Servants and apprentices populated Britain as well. Moreover, most women lived as the legal and economic dependents of fathers and husbands, while children relied on the mercy of parents, caretakers, and communities. In fact, the number of people who could claim political and economic independence during the eighteenth century was very small. Examining some of the numerous works from the period that foreground servants, apprentices, slaves, women, and orphans – and their struggles with masters, fathers, husbands, and parents – we will consider what eighteenth-century depictions of domination and resistance can tell us about the nature of power in everyday life.
Eighteenth-century readings will include
- Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados
- Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
- Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
- Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
- William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
- Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette
- William Earle’s Obi
- Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray
Contemporary readings will include writings by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Michael Taussig, Ranajit Guha, Michel de Certeau, Marcus Rediker, and Judith Butler.
Assignments will include eight weekly response papers (2 pp.), two longer papers to be handed in during the semester (5–7 pp.), and a final paper (8–10 pp.).
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
The approach to Dickinson’s 1789 poems and 1049 letters is historical, interdisciplinary, biographical, and formalistic. Topics included are: tones, voices, punctuation, meters, metaphors, controlling ideas; dashes, compression, nonrecoverable deletions, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, variant words and phrases; rhymes; riddles; fascicles (or manuscript books); biographical criticism (an overview); the issue of morbidity; love; nature and consciousness; God and self; death; pain and aftermath; creativity; the enigma of self and other; feminist perspectives on recurring questions; gender and multiple meaning; Dickinson as comic poet; and biographical/cultural contexts. Fifteen-to-twenty pages of critical/scholarly response are required, together with a twenty-minute oral report on these pages.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Thomas Hardy: Mnemotechnics, Materiality, and the Textual Archive
While the critical reception of Thomas Hardy has varied throughout the twentieth century, there has been an insistent and recurrent sense that his writing is in some manner flawed. Resisting the hitherto dominant aesthetic-organic approach to Hardy’s writing, we will attempt to examine Hardy’s texts on their own terms, rather than by imposing presupposed ideas of what constitutes the novel, the short story, ’good writing’, and so on. Hardy’s fictions and poetry demand that we rethink our positions as readers to the materiality of the text and that we do so, moreover, in the broader context of thinking we have a sense of what fiction or the novel might look like in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century.
This course, will, then, propose a study of Hardy’s writing as an exemplary transitional mode of experimental writing between realism and modernism, placing it in various cultural, historical, philosophical and ideological contexts. At the same time, in order to address other ways of reading Hardy while identifying those aspects of Hardy’s text which disturb aesthetic and formalist critical assessments (and the ideological and epistemological grounds on which such assessments are based), we will also look at recent critical and theoretical approaches to Hardy, as well as the theoretical issues which Hardy’s writing appears to raise, thereby anticipating issues with which much current critical discourse concerns itself.
As is implied in the title, we will be looking at the novels as archival repositories for collective and impersonal memory; beyond the immediate contexts of every narrative there are potentially countless resonances that inform Hardy’s writing as if those texts were constituted from the traces, material and immaterial, of the many, heterogeneous and conflicting cultural pasts of the region referred to in the novels as Wessex. Thus the course will set out to examine how the past’s traces pervade the present, unsettle and destabilize it, and how Wessex is to be read as the signature for an otherwise ineffable attestation of the historicity of being.
Course Reading:
We will attempt to read as much of Hardy as possible. Reading will include (but not necessarily be limited to):
- Desperate Remedies (1871)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
- A Pair of Blue Eyes( 1873)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
- The Return of the Native (1879)
- The Trumpet Major (1880)
- A Laodicean (1881)
- Two on a Tower (1882)
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
- The Woodlanders (1887)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
- The Well-Beloved (1892)
- Jude the Obscure (1896)
There will also be a photocopy packet and various handouts throughout the semester.
All texts will be available at Wild Iris Books, 802 West University Avenue . They will not be available at any other book store. Specific editions of the texts have been ordered and it is important that you work from those editions.
This is clearly a heavy reading course, and only those who are organized, enjoy reading, and are attentive to detail, can do well in this course. We will be reading a novel a week more or less, so anyone interested in this course beforehand would do well to get the measure of the material, and have at least a 1/4 of the reading list read before the semester starts.
Course Requirements:
- Attendance: 10% (you may take two unexplained absences, but after that you incur penalties)
- 3 Essays (8–12 pp.): 50%
- Weekly journals (2–3 pp.) 20%
- Group presentation: 20%
There is no final exam.
ENG 4940
Internship
Undergraduate Coordinator
The English Department at the University of Florida offers three* credit hours of internship to its majors who provide the following to the Undergraduate Coordinator for approval:
- 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 and should outline the job duties for the internship position.
- A personal statement (submitted along with the offer of hire) about why the student wants to take the internship and how it relates to the student’s future plans.
Once the Undergraduate Coordinator has approved the internship requested by the student, the department 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. The evaluation may be faxed, mailed, or hand delivered.
- The student must submit a personal evaluation 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.
- Because no English Department course carrying fewer than 3 credit hours counts towards the major, your internship will not count as part of your major coursework if you register for fewer than 3 credits.
ENG 4953
Department Seminar: The Wyoming Massacre
This course introduces early American culture through a case study of Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. “Wyoming” became infamous in early America as the site of a 1778 “massacre,” when a combined British and Iroquois force of warriors engaged about 400 Connecticut militiamen in the middle of Pennsylvania. After a thirty-minute confrontation, 227 Connecticut soldiers were dead – there were maybe a dozen casualties on the Iroquois-British side – and within weeks the legend of the “massacre,” with detailed accounts of rape, torture, and mutilation, was taking shape. The “massacre” was eventually immortalized internationally by the French writer D’Auberteuil (in Miss McCrea, 1784) and the Scottish poet Campbell (in “Gertrude of Wyoming,” 1809). The conflict and its legend did not emerge out of the blue. In the preceding decades, the Wyoming Valley had become a thriving multicultural region where Native Americans from throughout the northeast mingled; it was a critical zone for one of the first waves of pan-nativist revivalism formulated by a series of Delaware prophets; it was the site of the assassination of the Delaware leader Teedyuscung; it was the center of the Connecticut colony’s attempts to extend its westward boundaries to the Alleghanies; it became a flashpoint in the colonial civil conflict known as the Yankee-Pennamite War; it was where leaders of the Paxton Riots – one of the most infamous murders of Indians in colonial America – fled to resettle; it was the site of extensive and competing missionary efforts by the Quakers, German Pietists, and New England Puritans; it was an early testing ground for the Revolutionary scorched earth policy destroying Native American communities. In short, the Wyoming Valley, while relatively unknown today, saw extreme expressions of white and Native American conflicts in the eighteenth century.
These conflicts will be explored through study of a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. The class will begin with several contemporary accounts of the “massacre” to pose some basic questions for the rest of the semester: Why was the battle misrepresented as a massacre? Why did this conflict become so central to contemporary views of the War of Independence, and what does this tell us about the Revolution? What were militiamen from Connecticut doing in Pennsylvania? Who were the Indians who fought with the British, and why did they do so? How did American religious cultures (white and Native American) influence these events? How did American military cultures (white and Native American) influence these events? Why did this event achieve international notoriety? And, most basically, what does this event tell us about American colonization and its purported termination with the American Revolution?
Writing assignments will include two research papers and a take-home midterm.
ENG 4970
Honors Thesis Project
Faculty members (2) of Choice
Students must have have completed at least one semester of ENG 4936, Honors Seminar. Open to English Honors students.
The student must select two faculty members: one to direct the reading, research, and writing of a thesis on a topic of the student’s and director’s chosing, and another as the second reader. An abstract (100 to 200 words) and one copy of the thesis (30 to 50 pages) must be delivered to the CLAS Academic Advising Center on Fletcher Road at least 10 days before graduation.
ENL 3112
Eighteenth Century British Novel
The theme for this semester will be good sex/good families. In the past twenty-five years, influential historians and literary scholars have described the eighteenth century as a period which witnesses the rise of “companionate marriage” and new versions of masculinity. We will look at a wide range of eighteenth-century British novels and analyze how they portray male and female roles in courtship and marriage.
We will read seven novels, one of them being Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Because of the length of Clarissa, we will take it in sections, reading roughly one hundred pages per week. We will study how these novels reflect and speak to changes in British society described by Aphra Behn in her late seventeenth-century prose narratives Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt. Most particularly, we will analyze the changing role of social status (which these writers typically use the word “quality” to reference) in courtship and marriage, as economic and social changes create new kinds of wealth. But we also will observe how these novels repeat plots and characters of earlier literature, notably the birth-mystery plot. By the end of the semester, students should have a full sense of these novels as, at once, products of a specific culture and of a long-enduring literary tradition.
Students will write two papers (between eight to ten pages each) on topics that I offer. They also will keep a response journal in which they record their reactions to their daily readings. If the class is small enough (under twenty students), that journal will provide the basis for a one-half hour final oral examination. Should the class enroll more than twenty students, a written final examination will be offered. Students will be expected to participate in a Clarissa study group and to contribute to class discussions.
All papers must be word-processed. I am happy to read and comment upon early drafts of papers and encourage e-mail submission of them via attachments in rich text format.
Books:
All books will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1711 N. W. 1 st Avenue.
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (California)
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works (Penguin)
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Penguin)
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Penguin)
- Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Norton)
- Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Norton)
- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Penguin)
- Francis Burney, Evelina (Oxford)
- Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
ENL 3154
British Poetry: Twentieth Century: Voices of Dissonance and Difference
This course will examine a range of late 20th century British poetry, looking at a number of different voices, including Selima Hill, Fleur Adcock, Tess Gallagher, R.S. Thomas, Brendan Kennelly.
Each will be considered for the ways in which they appropriate modes of address, poetic models, and traditional forms to invent dissonant voices that in differing ways offer a challenge to poetic and cultural orthodoxy.
We will in part be looking at the poetry in order to raise questions of cultural, national, ethnic, and sexual identity, as well as to look at the ways in which, in the twentieth century, poets receive and transform traditional themes and interests in the canon of British poetic matter.
Texts will probably include (according to availability) but will not be limited to:
- Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960–2000
- Selima Hill, Portrait of My Lover as a Horse
- Tess Gallagher, Portable Kisses
- R.S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies
- Brendan Kennelly, Familiar Strangers
Course Requirements:
- Attendance: 10% (you may take two unexplained absences, but after that you incur penalties)
- 3 Essays (8–12 pp.): 50%
- Weekly journals (2–3 pp.) 20%
- Group presentation: 20%
There is no final exam.
ENL 3230
Age of Dryden and Pope
We will read plays, poems, and prose fiction by British authors of the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. While we will study the individual works in considerable detail, we also will establish backgrounds – aesthetic, political, religious – from which those works emerge. In particular, we will attend to the growing social and literary power of what we today call the middle class and to a corresponding diminution of aristocratic/patriarchal authority.
Students will write two papers (6–8 pages each). They also will write briefly at the opening or closing of most class sessions, responding to questions about the reading or about the class itself. The course concludes with a two-part final examination. Part 1 (Identification and Short Answer) will be based upon my lectures. Part 2 (Essay) will ask for a comprehensive response to one of three questions about the Age. Participation in class discussions is expected. Students who have difficulty speaking in class should see me about other options.
Books:
All these will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1717 N.W. 1 st Avenue.
- Restoration and 18th Century Comedy, 2nd. ed., ed. Scott McMillin (Norton)
- Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730, ed. Paula Backscheider and John Richetti (Oxford)
- The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Vol 1C, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (Norton)
ENL 3241
The Romantic Period
This is an undergraduate survey of English romantic writers. It is roughly divided into nine parts: an introduction to romanticism, and then eight sections on individual writers. There is, relative to other English courses, little outside reading, as the main concern of the course is a careful reading of selected representative works. This is deceptive, for students might assume that the course will therefore be easy. There will be weekly quizzes (embarrassingly objective for an English course) and two short papers (not necessarily research papers). The quizzes give me a chance to get answers to questions I think are important; the papers give you a chance to form answers to questions you think are important. The class is informal and relaxed, but the quizzes and papers are not. The quizzes stress material covered in class and so it might be suggested that you take good and careful notes.
Texts
- Individual selections of Romantic poets
- Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- Stoker, Dracula
- Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
- Shelley, Frankenstein
ENL 3241
Romantic Poetry
We will be reading in breadth and depth four major Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The course will concentrate on the form as well as the content of the poetry, and will attempt to answer one particular question: why has poetry been of vital importance to every generation of readers for centuries until our own time, when it has been displaced by video games and cartoons? Students will be quizzed on their daily reading, and there will be a take-home midterm and final exam. English majors who do not like to read and do not like literature should not take this course.
ENL 3251
Victorian Literature
Lisa Hager
This course will seek to define the contours of Victorian literature – its obsessions, tensions, particulars, and world views. Since literature reveals the workings of culture, we shall endeavor to create an ongoing conversation on the nature of those workings as we piece together the conversation in which the work itself participates through both in-class discussions and weekly written responses. We will focus on a number of issues that were vitally important to the Victorians and continue to be debated in our own time, such as the Woman Question, class conflicts, Crisis of Faith, and degeneracy/decadence.
The goal of this course is encourage an understanding of each individual work within the larger context of English literature and, by doing so, learn how to read poetry, drama, and fiction critically. In order to communicate these interpretations, we will also focus on how to write about literature. Thus the goal in this endeavor is to construct essays that write about these genres in a thoughtful, convincing, and effective manner.
Requirements will include reading responses, three exams, and a final paper. Possible texts include but are not limited to:
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd
- Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi”
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
- John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
- Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Allan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
ENL 4221
Seventeenth-Century Poetry
In this course we will be reading Paradise Lost plus what are often regarded as the greatest lyrics in English. We will attend first to understanding the poems, and second to establishing contexts within which and approaches from which to read poetry and write about it.
Students will be responsible for eleven unannounced quizzes or brief take-home assignments and three papers. The brief unannounced quizzes/take-home assignments will occur intermittently and take a variety of forms (40% of the grade); one may be dropped. The three papers should be tightly argued, fully exemplified, and persuasively styled (each is to be approximately 2,500 words long and is worth 20% of the grade). The first will answer a take-home question about Paradise Lost; the second will interpret a single or several related secular lyrics of the era not covered in class; the third will interpret a single or several related sacred lyrics of the era not covered in class. The syllabus is on line.
ENL 4273
Twentieth Century British Literature: (Hi)stories, Memories, Biographies
Doris Bremm
“Perhaps history is just storytelling.”– Graham
Swift, Waterland 53
“All there will be left to us will be
stories. Stories will be our only reality.” – Graham Swift, Waterland 257
Literary critic Linda Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as “novels [that] both install and then blur the line between fiction and history” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 113). This course will focus on texts that engage with the question of the (im)possibility of representing the past in self-reflexive and performative ways. We will discuss a range of texts by British authors from the modernist period to the present that explore different ways of narrating the past and playing with genres such as historical fiction, personal memoir, and biography.
In addition to the primary texts we will read excerpts from literary theory by: Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh,. Mark Currie, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Nicholas Royle.
Tentative reading list:
- Virginia Woolf, Orlando
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land & Four Quartets
- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
- Harold Pinter, Old Times
- Graham Swift, Waterland
- Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
- Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
- A.S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale
- Ian McEwan, Atonement
- Trezza Azzopardi, Remember Me
Requirements for this class include attendance and active class participation, regular response papers to the readings, and two essays.
ENL 4311
Chaucer
This course will familiarize students with the major narrative poetry of Chaucer. We will devote most of our study to several of The Canterbury Tales and to Chaucer’s great romance, Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine at least one of Chaucer’s long allegorical poems, The House of Fame, along with Latin and Italian source materials included in our main textbook. Students will learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English (the form of the English language from about 1100–1500 CE), and they will be introduced to the principal methodological issues constitutive of contemporary Chaucer studies. That is, they will investigate how Chaucer studies incorporate modern critical theory – especially involving issues of narrative complexity, figurative discourse, the formalism of Chaucerian genre (especially the frame narrative or novella) and the poetic representation of gender. Particular focus will fall upon the issue of subjectivity, since Chaucer, who is often seen as the forerunner of modern novelistic art, lays claim to being the first major author in English to cultivate the poetics of the subjective, the personal, and the psychologically realistic. Class meetings will include lectures, discussion, and, especially early in the term, recitation and spot translation of Middle English. We shall also view together (most likely only in part) and study I Racconti di Canterbury (P. Paolo Pasolini, dir., 1971), the only film version of Chaucer’s grand novella.
Required texts, which will be available at Goerings’ Bookstore, will include the Norton Critical Edition of The Canterbury Tales (Kolve and Olson, eds.); the Penguin edition (“original spelling”) of Troilus and Criseyde (Windeatt, ed.); The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, 2nd. ed. (Boitani and Mann, eds.); and The House of Fame in a course packet.
Major course work includes: class participation and regular, unannounced quizzes (20%); translation exam (in late January or early February 2006, 20%); three papers–the first (5–7 pages) on The House of Fame; the second (5–7 pages) on classical myths, biblical stories, or folktales that served as sources for Chaucer (20%; note that this second project might take the form of an in-class midterm exam); the third (5–7 pages) on any critical or thematic problem concerning The Canterbury Tales (5–7 pages) or on Pasolini’s film (20%). All three papers combine to represent 60% of final grade.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare
The course will offer a close reading of Shakespeare’s “greatest hits.” The plays to be studied are
- Comedy of Errors
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Romeo and Juliet
- Richard II
- 1 Henry IV
- As You Like It
- Hamlet
- Twelfth Night
- Othello
- King Lear
- Macbeth
- Antony and Cleopatra
- The Winter’s Tale
- The Tempest
Please note that this will be a “no frills” literature course – no movies, no acting, no secondary sources, just learning to read Shakespeare. The theoretical approach will be primarily feminist and psychoanalytic. Course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five- to seven-page term paper.
LIT 3003
Narratology of New Media
A survey of critical and theoretical issues posed by narrative genres and operations of interactive digital media. Critical readings for the course will include print and digital texts in narrative theory, new media theory and criticism, and human-computer interaction. Literary readings for the course will include an important example of stylistically- and formally-constrained print narrative (Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa), classic interactive and hypertext fictions (Zork, afternoon, Patchwork Girl) and several computer-based videogames (Bad Mojo, MYST; Riven). Students should have a basic knowledge of the WWW and other interactive digital media. All students must have access to a desktop computer system outside of the class meeting times (Windows 98 or XP, Mac OS 9 or X, OS X’s “Classic” layer is required for some Mac-compatible texts). Course requirements include two take-home exams.
Please take note: this is not a “videogames” course. We will undertake careful, systematic narratological analysis of these representative texts of the emerging digital field. A devotee of videogames will have no more advantage in this course than would an enthusiast of popular films in a course on cinema theory and criticism. Critical readings for the course will be challenging; the digital texts we will discuss will require at least as much of your attention and time as an equal number of long and complex print narratives.
LIT 3041
Studies in Drama: Citizen Comedy and Domestic Tragedy in the Age of Shakespeare
A study of a group of plays unified by being set in the contemporary London and environs of their authors in the late sixteenth century or the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The main focus will be upon the texts and their social, political, historical and cultural contexts.
It has been suggested that City Comedy (however we define it) moved to the center of the Elizabethan Stage when Londoners started to reflect upon their new social roles and their urban setting. Social mobility with its attendant pretensions, hypocrisy, greed, pathos etc, arose in the midst of the new middle class society of trade and commerce and gave substance to these plays, as did the threatened state of an increasingly impoverished and newly dependent gentry.
The plays to be studied will be
- William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor
- Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
- Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fair
- Phillip Massinger, A New Way To Pay Old Debts
- Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
- Anon, Arden of Faversham
- Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness
Two essays will be set (ca. 2000 words) and in addition there will be a number of in-class tests and oral reports. There will be no final exam.
LIT 3043
Modern Drama: Learning by Doing
The focus of this course is on performance, on plays as not just texts but as something happening in space and time, and ratified by an audience. Therefore, we learn about modern drama by doing it, and so each student works with a scene partner, with whom they rehearse a scene, stage it for the class, and then work with the director to polish and evaluate their work. No experience in the theatre is required, and, historically, Mechanical Engineering majors have done as well as Theatre majors, who have done no better than English majors. Scene work will be graded on the intent of the actors, what they put into it – not finesse. The course’s major paper will be an assessment of your experience doing the scenes.
Again, the assumption is that a play is not just the words on the page but also the sub-text (the history of the character as devised by the actor), movement, gesture, blocking, as well as the physical dimensions of the stage itself – set, lighting, props, costumes.
Students will also assist Professor Homan in two plays he will be directing at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre spring semester: Suckerfish, by W. T. Underwood, about the encounter between a homeless man and a business executive who has just had a car accident – the play calling up Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Albee’s Zoo Story; and John Cech’s stage adaptation of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Secret River, about a little girl who, through magical adventures in the forest, restores the depressed town of Cross Creek to prosperity. Students will attend some rehearsals, serve as “assistant directors,” and assist in other aspects of the production.
Author of books on Shakespeare and the modern theatre, Professor Homan also works in commercial and university theatres as an actor and a director. Students in the course often go on to work with him in the theatre.
LIT 3374
The Bible as Literature
The Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) is emphasized. The approach is historical and formalistic. Topics include: narrative (Samuel, Judges, Ruth, Jonah, Genesis); prophecy (Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah); Poetry (Psalms, Lamentations, Song of Solomon); and wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes, Job). Two six-page papers are required, or one twelve-page paper. Directions for the midterm and the noncumulative final are as follows: “Identify the following fifteen passages in no more than two sentences. Comment on two. Take class discussion into account and go beyond it.” The text is the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
LIT 3400
Internet Literature
The topic for this seminar is the relationship of technology to literature. Specifically, we will focus on what happens to literary forms in the medium of the World Wide Web. The interest is not in the circulation of print forms by means of new media, but in the emergence of new forms native to the Internet. Since the course is taught in the Networked Writing Environment (NWE), we will not only compose a poetics of online composition (doing for the Internet what Aristotle did for theater), but we will test this poetics by composing our own work of Internet literature. No previous experience with Web design is required.
Course requirements: 2 substantial Websites, 2 in-class presentations, regular email contributions.
Readings may include such books as:
- N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines
- Keith A. Smith, Structure Of The Visual Book
- A study of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi
- A collection of Franz Kafka’s short works
LIT 4183
Tourism, the Caribbean and Literature
Documenting the devastating effects of globalization and tourism on the Jamaican economy and autonomy, Stephanie Black’s 2001 film Life and Debt sets in sharp relief the contrast between tourists’ vision of Jamaica and that of Jamaicans in the late 20th century. It reveals the most recent developments in a long cultural and economic history. From Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Walt Disney’s The Pirates of the Caribbean, travel and tourism to the Caribbean have been surprisingly prominent and spectacular in European and U.S. culture. This strong and changing image of the Caribbean has in large part been a consequence of the economic position of the Caribbean vis-à-vis first world nations – first a wondrous new world, then a site of slave and sugar factories, now a pleasure destination. Not surprisingly, Caribbean writers have also given a significant place to tourism and travel in their work, often exposing the sharp disjunction between Caribbeans’ experiences and those of tourists. Recently this distinction has been complicated by the many Caribbeans living outside the region who visit their homelands as tourists for carnival and other events like Reggae Sunsplash. This course examines the economic and literary history of tourism in the Caribbean through an analysis of theoretical and literary texts which will likely include works by Shakespeare, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Anthony Trollope, Anthony Winkler, Paule Marshall, Terry Mcmillan, Colin Channer, Dean MacCannell, Cynthia Enloe, James Clifford and Kamala Kempadoo.
LIT 4194
African Literature in English: South African Literature
This course explores the literatures of South Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine, on the one hand, the literature of conquest and colonization and, on the other hand, the literature of accommodation and resistance; on the one hand, the literature of apartheid, and, on the other, the literatures of anti-apartheid and post-apartheid. In what ways have South Africa’s rich and varied literatures embodied its turbulent political past and present? In their variety and complexity, these literatures invite consideration of important questions concerning the ethics and efficacy of art in the context of racialized inequality and oppressive violence. What is the connection between the realm of art – aesthetics – and the politics of everyday life – the lebenswelt in the particular instance of a highly volatile and systematically oppressive polity? To what extent is this body of written literatures “African,” that is, an integral part of tradition of modern African letters? To what extent is it exceptional? What can the problematic classification of these literatures tells us about identity and difference, race and aesthetics, coloniality and postcoloniality in contemporary Africa? The writers to be studied may include Olive Schreiner, Thomas Mofolo, Mazisi Kunene, Althol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, J. M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Bessie Head, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda.
LIT 4322
The Folktale
For the purposes of this course, the term folktale will be held to encompass all forms of orally transmitted prose narratives including myths, legends, memorates and wonder-tales. No knowledge of the folktale nor of the general field of folklore studies is assumed by the instructor. The first week or so of the course will attempt to orient all students to the place of the folktale in folklore studies. The three required texts have been chosen to give a representative collection of all types of prose narrative. While covering the major aspects of the familiar European tradition, the texts will also bring to our attention the ethnic traditions of the United States, particularly the oral narratives recorded from Native Americans in Wisconsin at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries and African Americans in Eatonville, Florida in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In addition, we will address those issues that have for half a century kept theorists and analysts struggling with the complexities of these “simple forms.”
Texts:
- Maria Tatar. The Classic Fairy Tales. Norton p/b.
- Zora Neal Hurston, Mules and Men, Harper p/b.
- Paul Radin, The Trickster : A Study in American Indian Mythology, p/b
- William Bernard McCarthy. Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales & Their Tellers. p/b (UNC Press)
All the above texts are available from Goering’s Bookstore.
In addition to the study of tales within the texts above, we will address the following topics:
- The general field of folklore studies
- The types of oral narratives
- Varieties and characteristics of folktales
- The classification of folktales: Type and Motif indexing.
- The collection of folktales.
- Methods of analysis; typological, taxonomical, structural, historic/geographic, functional, psychoanalytical, contextual &c.
- The sublimated style of the folktale
There will be 3 tests given at roughly three week intervals during the course. In addition two reports, each of about 2500 words, will be required. Grades will based upon the tests (10% each test), the reports (30% each report) and class participation etc.
I will be available on class days between 9.00 and 10.00 AM. In addition I can arrange appointments if you phone me at 392-6650, ext. 267. My office is in Turlington Hall 4342. Email <rthomson@english.ufl.edu>.
LIT 4333
Literature for the Adolescent
This course is designed to provide a survey of major figures, historical trends, and critical approaches to that field of literature that occupies the shifting, transitional ground between children’s and adult literatures. This class examines a broad range of styles and genres intended for or chosen by the adolescent reader, beginning with classics from the 19th century and ending with some innovative novels from our own literary present. Taken together, these works will raise many of the questions (psychological, social, philosophical) that are asked by adolescents about their own challenging, demanding, and often defining experiences.
LIT 4333
Literature for the Adolescent
Aaron Talbot
This section of LIT 4333 will focus on misfits in adolescent literature. Specifically, we will concentrate on literature that contains characters that are not accepted, both within their individual texts and in the field of adolescent literature, yet are consumed and searched for by adolescents. Acceptance is a common theme and we will examine these characters and novels in relation to hegemonic discourses of power, sexuality, gender, and race. We will explore the terms “misfit,” “adolescent literature,” “market” and how these terms define what adolescence is and its function within academia and culture.
Possible texts:
- The Outsiders
- Weetzie Bat
- Witch Baby
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- Sunday You Learn How to Box
- Bud, Not Buddy
- Holes
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
- Annie on My Mind
- A Separate Peace
- The House on Mango Street
Exerts from the following:
- Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites
- The Case of Peter Pan: or, the Impossibility of Children’s Literature by Jacqueline Rose
- From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature by Michael Cart
LIT 4535
Rebuking Heteropatriarchy: Pleasure and Militancy in Female Popular Culture
In this course, we will examine the importance of militancy and revolutionary rhetoric in the construction of female-centered communities in popular culture produced by women. Through our study of the female body, eros, creativity/creation, and utopian/dystopian communities, we will interrogate the systematic dismissal and resistance to heterosexual and patriarchal established “norms” in society. The class texts will derive from comedic performances, popular fiction and non-fiction, and film, supplemented by popular music, comic books, television and webpages. We will concentrate on texts from the 20th century to the present, while briefly considering historical precedents for these texts. The central issues of revolution, pleasure, and the body will be accompanied by other theoretical concerns such as the role of the reader versus the producer of these images; the sexuality, gender, race, and class of the creator(s) and consumers; the relationship between subcultures and mainstream culture; the use of devices such as intertextuality, mimicry and appropriation; and the importance of genre.
LIT 4930
Virginia Woolf
We will be reading seven novels by Virginia Woolf, some famous, some not-so-famous, including To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando. We will also be reading some prose writings, including A Room of One’s Own and the Common Reader. The purpose of the course is to read Woolf in depth in order to discover her as an artist and a thinker rather than as a feminist or “woman’s writer” – it is a distinction that comes from her own work, and seems worth pursuing if we are to read Woolf as more than a stalking horse for our own political or social interests. Students will be quizzed on their daily reading, and there will be a take-home midterm and final exam. English majors who do not like to read and do not like literature should not take this course.
LIT 4930
Visual Textuality
Required Texts:
- Course Packet (Xerographic Copy Center, 927 N.W. 13th Street)
- Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde
This course will emphasize the close reading of texts that open up interpretive opportunities by virtue of their visual narrative properties and material production (including poems with “illuminations” and/or marginal glosses, texts that exist in different “versions,” texts with complex visual uses of punctuation, syntax, spatial layout, “panel” divisions, cinematic discontinuities, etc.). These texts call attention to (or efface into “invisibility”) their own self-revision and self-reflexivity, address (on the “static” printed page) the problem of “transformation,” and proceed by displacement and interruption of the space of the page. These texts will allow exploration of traditional literary and philosophical problems of sequentiality and simultaneity, temporality and spatiality, and the enigma of “now.”
Texts will include the prophetic works of William Blake, poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay, Krazy Kat, by George Herriman, and mainstream and avant-garde/alternative animation and comic books.
LIT 4930
Eccentric Spaces and Spatialities
Flectere si nequeo superos, Aceronta movebo – Virgil,
The Aeneid
We shall pick up an existence by its frogs – Charles Fort, Lo!
Angered by Aeneas’s impertinent foray into the underworld and by Jove’s disinterest in punishing him, the goddess Juno summons furies to wreak her revenge upon the errant Trojan: “If I can sway no heavenly hearts, I’ll rouse the world below.” Her threat has become a classic reminder of the unhappy consequences of crossing forbidding boundaries. Sigmund Freud’s choice of Virgil’s line as the motto of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams is an acknowledgment of the seductive force of the spatial taboo: the other scene, the space over there, irresistibly draws our eye and mind towards it; but our journey over the threshold is perilous.
Charles Fort, the twentieth century’s greatest chronicler of occult phenomena, suggests that the spirit of an age is best understood by looking to the rubbish that spills from its edges. To match the well-behaved domains of modern physics and geography, he wryly proposed a contrarian region he called the “Super-Sargasso Sea,” located somewhere above the Earth’s upper atmosphere. From there tumble falls of fish, frogs, periwinkles, insects, blood, colored dusts, ice, stones, bricks, and myriad edible stuffs – flotsam and jetsam well-documented in the popular and scientific record that appears to defy “reasonable” explanations. Within those superabundant terrains Fort also located the waystations of fairy lights and improbable airships, the shadowy towers of the Fata Morgana, and the battlefields of angelic armies.
To ask if Fort “really” meant to claim that the heavens are chock-full of angels, frogs, and other junk is to miss a broader significance of eyewitness testimony that the sky is falling. Looking up or down, to the center or the periphery, the other scene insists on being attended to. Reasonable imaginaries of space are bounded, are supported, by more fractious and unreasonable forms. These we commonly treat as fables, mirages, or the products of madness or artistic perverseness. The more interesting problem, as Freud and Fort understood, is not why eccentric spaces appear undisciplined, mischievous or nugatory; but how it is that “normal” spaces do not.
This course is an eclectic survey of spatial imaginaries in modern fiction. (Though our discussions will touch on the conceptual genealogy of “cyberspace,” we will not address that vexed spatial tradition directly.) Readings for the course will include novels, novellas and short stories by J.G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, Jorge Luis Borges, Shelley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Xavier de Maistre, Georges Perec, Edgar Allan Poe, Herbert Read, Marilynne Robinson, Jules Verne, and Elinor Wylie, and most of Peter Fitting’s excellent 2004 edited collection, Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology.
Course requirements include a take-home midterm, an annotated research bibliography, and a final research paper.
LIT 4930
Advertising and Culture
Although there are courses in advertising and advertisements, this course attempts to chart the history of a culture – our popular culture – as it has been defined and conveyed by commercial speech. We will discuss the history and changing definition of advertising; the effects of commercial discourse on our sense of self, time, and place; and essentially argue that advertising has become, like religion, one of the primary institutions of our “sociosphere.” The course is not a criticism but an exploration. “Advertising and Culture” is not a course intended to teach advertising techniques and practices to professional or pre-professional students.
Texts
- Subliminal Seduction
- Ways of Seeing
- Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising
- Gender Advertisements
Requirements
- Mid-term = 20%
- Final exam = 30%
- 10 page paper = 40%
- Attendance and participation = 10%
LIT 4930
Nineteenth Century British Literature and Judaism
Traci Klass
This course will explore the representations of Jews and Judaism in the literature of late-eighteenth and nineteenth century England. We will be concerned with the way in which Jewish and non-Jewish writers used fiction, particularly novels, both to shape social conceptions as well as to “educate” the British nation about Jews. We will examine missionary and evangelical texts (novels, sermons, memoirs, and stories for the young) devoted to narrating and further promoting the successful conversion of Jews. We will also explore the ways in which non-Jewish authors like Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, and Anthony Trollope promoted negative Jewish stereotypes. In addition, we will read works by Anglo-Jewish writers Grace Aguilar, the Moss sisters, and Amy Levy among others as we define how Jewish writers themselves used fiction and non-fiction prose in their attempt to combat conversionist efforts and re-write, and thus right, the false representations, histories, and stereotypes of Jews that were being circulated.
Though the list is subject to change, readings will include:
- Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
- Grace Aguilar, Selected Writings, and *The Vale of Cedars
- *Celia and Marion Moss, select short stories
- *Amelia Bristow, Emma de Lissau
- *Osborn Trenery Heighway, Leila Ada, The Jewish Convert
- *The British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews, selections from Lectures on the Conversion of The Jews
- *Select missionary and evangelical essays, tracts, sermons, newspaper articles, etc.
- *Anthony Trollope, Nina Balatka
- George Elliot, Daniel Deronda, The Modern Hep Hep, *selected letters
- Amy Levy, selected works
- Maria Edgeworth, Harrington
- Michael Ragussis, selections from Figures of Conversion and select critical essays
- Michael Galchinsky, select critical essays
- *Todd Endelman, selections from Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945
- Frank Felsenstein, selections from Anti-Semitic Stereotypes
* These works are out of print and will be provided in a course pack. All materials will be available at Goerings bookstore.
LIT 4930
Queer Theory and Politics
Nishant Shahani
This course proposes to engage with some of the uses of queer theory and lesbian/gay studies across various cultural, political and institutional contexts. The class will serve as an introduction to the works of the field’s major practitioners (Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, just to name a few) and illuminate some of its central theoretical and political interventions—i.e its recognition that the division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is always a political one, that affective desire is fundamentally linked to and regulated by institutional practices, that binaries between hetero/homo, masculine/feminine, nature/nurture are informed by a heteronormative logic that requires deconstruction. While this class is obviously pre-occupied with what queer theory says, we will also attempt to grapple with what queer theory can actually do – in classrooms and universities, ideological and political conflicts, reformulations of disciplines and histories. Even though the class will be theoretical, and at times, even meta-theoretical in its scope, we will engage in what Michael Warner has called a “practical social reflection” from a queer affirmative perspective. Thus we will ask questions of the following nature:
- What are some of the productive relations between queer theory and activist movements such as ACT UP, Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers?
- What are the epistemological claims of queer theory in relation to the politics of gay marriage, the mainstreaming of the LGBT movement, and the visibility of queer representations in popular culture?
- How does queer theory propose, in David Halperin’s words, to “do the history of homosexuality”?
- How can queer theory provide an insight into the various historical and material relations that enable and foreclose the production of LGBT possibilities?
This class does not attempt to provide easy solutions; instead we will try to articulate non-programmatic, tentative and historically contingent responses to the relationship between queer theory and social change.
Tentative readings will include:
- Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter
- Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
- Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol I
- Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal
Course Packet readings will include works by Judith Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, Patrick Califia, Sarah Schulman, and Riki Anne Wilchins.
Assignments include 2 research papers, a class presentation, and regular quizzes on the readings. Class participation is a crucial part of this course.
LIT 4930
Romanticism and Popular Culture
Roger Whitson
“Romanticism” is associated with a very particular type of discourse that stresses imagination, transcendence, and the sublime. English departments continue to use the word in the shadow of a multiplying number of alternatives (the long 18th century, for example) and despite the fact that only Coleridge ever identified himself with the term. This class will take up the question of romanticism by examining its complicated relationship with popular culture. Literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had to contend with a growing literate public who celebrated and demonized its writers. The first part of this course will look at how these writers reacted to the public and how this impacted what came to be understood as the aesthetics of romanticism.
For the latter part of the class, we will look at more contemporary artifacts of popular culture – movies, video games, music, comics – that cite and acknowledge the continuing presence of romanticism in the popular imagination. What is it about romanticism that makes it so desirable and marketable? The requirements for this class include one ten minute presentation and two essays (one five pages and a final ten page paper).
Some possible texts:
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
- Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
- William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen
- Percy Shelley, The Defense of Poetry
- George Gordon Byron, Manfred; selections from Don Juan
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, selections from Biographia Literaria
- Shelley Jackson, The Patchwork Girl
- Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
- Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
- Brian Talbot, The Adventures of Luther Awkright
- Alan Moore, Angel Passage
- Music from Rush, The Cure, Kate Bush, Tangerine Dream
- Episodes of Angel; Star Trek: The Next Generation; Doctor Who
- Films: Gothic; Dead Man; Don Juan de Marco; Gods and Monsters; Red Dragon
LIT 4930
Gaming Cultures
Laurie Taylor
This course will focus on video games as textual and literary artifacts. In particular, we will study recent video games as part of a longer history of games and gaming – including word games, puzzles, board games, card games, computer, console, portable, and mobile games. The course will emphasize both critical analysis and production. We will conduct close readings of games to study how games both draw upon and represent culture and cultural artifacts, including film, comics, and literature. Throughout the course, we will address theoretical and historical issues such as: what kinds of cultural work do games perform? What is the function of seriality for games? How does the placement of games as “for children” affect their use, reception, and canonicity? What different narrative possibilities and limitations enable and constrain game designers, especially in relation to technological innovation? How does the form of the interface/artifact affect reception (gaming interfaces, emulation, platform differences)?
Requirements include several writing experiments and projects, including weekly blog posts on games and group-project development of a game proposal. This class will be very hands-on. No prior gaming experience and no game systems are required. Please email the instructor for further information.
LIT 4930
Creative Non-Fiction
“Creative non-fiction” is one of those terms that people use without ever bothering to define them. Usually creative non-fiction means memoir, and, to some extent, this class will involve both reading and writing memoir. At the same time, we’ll consider what other types of imaginative writing might be said to fit under the rubric of creative non-fiction, including biography, history, and journalism.
In addition to exercises, students will be expected to write two pieces over the course of the term; one piece if significant revision is undertaken. Participation will be an important aspect of the course, which will be taught in the traditional workshop style. While having taken one or more fiction workshops is not a requirement, it is advisable.
Reading may include such works as Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task, Marc Romano’s Crossworld, and Edmund White’s The Flaneur.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the October 12, 2005 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
SPC 3605
Speechwriting
Speechwriting is an advanced composition course. In SPC 3605, students acquire stylistic prowess by which their sentences have increased potential for memorability and quotability, ease and accuracy of comprehension, as well as overall persuasiveness. The course is called Speechwriting because models of eloquence to be imitated are in sentences of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for examples. Although you practice these stylistic skills while writing speeches, the acquired prowess is applicable in virtually any future communication endeavors, as speakers or writers, regardless of profession.
SPC 3605 is not about supporting arguments or organizing them into broader discourse. If you seek those skills, other courses are more appropriate. Speechwriting is about how to select the best words and arrange them in their best orders – within sentences – to achieve optimal impress of your ideas upon readers or listeners. These stylistic skills are practiced and perfected in drafts that you read aloud among peers (and for me) during our “lab” periods, wherein you should acquire a refined sense of how to achieve the final product desired at the semester end. Thus, present drafts when due; listen carefully to other students’ drafts, comparing yours with theirs; participate in rewriting others’ sentences; and heed my commentary about all drafts. Do not assume that “participation” means simply presenting your drafts and listening only to commentary about them.
How a draft is presented, vocally and physically, has no bearing on your grade (for help with delivery skills other courses are appropriate; I may make suggestions about how to improve your platform presence, however). The important point is that Speechwriting is an advanced composition course, wherein you read drafts aloud as bases of discussion by which all students understand how and why some sentences are better than others. For initial and final drafts, I require word processing available in computer labs on campus (if you do not have your own computer). Revision on your disk is easier; spelling is accurate; and word lengths of drafts are known.
From past experience, I know that reasonably diligent students achieve a substantial measure of the stylistic skills taught in this course. Final grades are higher, however, as you (1) demonstrate refined prowess as the competent stylist on exams and in final drafts, (2) understand course precepts derived from readings and lecture materials, as tested by three exams during the semester (the course has no final exam), and (3) produce a final research paper about style as defined in this course (research paper options will be explained during a lecture relatively early in the semester and will require additional library reading). Final grades are determined one-half by the average of your three exam scores and one-half by the quality of your final notebook with polished drafts of speeches and the research paper – all typed, double-spaced, and turned in during exam week at the time and date listed in the University Timetable as the course final exam period. The textbook for the course is Ronald H. Carpenter, Choosing Powerful Words: Eloquence that Works; it can be purchased at Goerings Book Store at Bageland.
Although this is a writing course, I also am impressed – for grading purposes – by how much you know about style as defined in this class. Please appreciate the fact that this composition course is unlike virtually all other persuasive writing courses at the University of Florida, for the expertise and confidence in the precepts being taught are derived from your instructor’s own published research in four scholarly press books, several book chapters, and numerous research journal articles (all of which informed my writing of your textbook). Furthermore, from my experience as a communications consultant for organizations outside the university (such as corporate executives, lawyers, civic leaders, hospital administrators, public relations professionals, and officers attending the U.S. Naval War College), I know that skills taught in this course are useful in the “real” world.
In conclusion, teaching you to be eloquent stylists gives me great personal satisfaction. For I can make positive changes in your behaviors as communicators. If you join me in this endeavor, which admittedly entails some substantial effort on your part, I promise you will acquire valuable skills that will be admired by others as well as be useful for the rest of your life, no matter what your later profession might be. The only prerequisite for the course is that you can write grammatical sentences that are punctuated correctly.
SPC 4680
Rhetorical Criticism: Masterpieces of Rhetoric
Rhetorical Criticism has as its focus several “masterpieces of rhetoric.” Although several of these are in the realm of political and presidential discourse, another focus this semester will be upon rhetorical efforts to persuade Americans to engage in armed conflict with other nations. Thus, students will examine how some speakers, writers, and filmmakers appealed successfully to specific attitudes and actions with profound influence upon the course of events. The primary goal of the course is to provide students with a refined sense of some rhetorical principles and techniques by which their own future discourse is more effective persuasively. Please note: “rhetoric” is not a pejorative word. In its current and inaccurate usage, the word often is prefaced with the adjective “empty” to disparage what “other” people say or write ostensibly as groundless emotional appeal in contradistinction to discourse that presumably only “tells it like it is.” But accurately, “rhetoric” refers to those means by which discourse “adjusts ideas to people and people to ideas.” So rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and rhetorical criticism identifies and assesses what was done with words (and other factors) to achieve persuasion.
Students will write five short papers (2–3 typed pages), four of which will summarize and expand briefly upon assigned readings, films, or group projects (the fifth paper is the enthymemic persuasion of me, an assignment that will be described in week six). I will accept these papers co-signed by all group members that participated. A longer final paper (8–10 typed pages) will report research about some topic suggested by the course (the focus of that paper must be developed in consultation with me). The course will have four very short quizzes during the semester as well as a “take home” final exam. Please understand that your group projects will require meetings with your student peers outside regular class periods. Students also are required to view some films outside of class. The textbook is Halford Ryan, Contemporary American Public Discourse: A Collection of Speeches and Critical Essays. It is available at Goerings Book Store, next to Bageland.