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:

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/>.

toptop

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:

Possible films:

toptop

AML 3041

American Fiction Since 1865

David Leverenz

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).

toptop

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:

toptop

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.

toptop

AML 3271

Survey of African American Literature II

Amy Abugo Ongiri

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.

toptop

AML 4225

American Literature to 1865

David Leverenz

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).

toptop

AML 4242

Modern American Poetry

Marsha Bryant

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.

toptop

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):

Shorter critical essays by:

Assignments:

toptop

AML 4453

Title TBA

Patricia Schmidt

No course description is available at this time.

toptop

AML 4685

Pedagogy of the Wretched: Literacy, Narrative, and Class in Black and Brown Communities

LaMonda Horton Stallings

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>.

toptop

CRW 3110

Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Mary Robison

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.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines & Cover Sheet

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.

toptop

CRW 3110

Imaginative Writing: Fiction

Jill Ciment

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.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines & Cover Sheet

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.

toptop

CRW 3310

Imaginative Writing: Poetry

Brandon Kershner

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.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines & Cover Sheet

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.

toptop

CRW 4905

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Jill Ciment

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.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines & Cover Sheet

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.

toptop

CRW 4905

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Mary Robison

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.

Manuscript Submission Guidelines & Cover Sheet

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.

toptop

ENC 3310

Advanced Exposition

Wayne Losano

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.

toptop

ENC 3312

Title TBA

Patricia Schmidt

No course description is available at this time.

toptop

ENC 3312

Advanced Argumentative Writing

Raúl Sánchez

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.

toptop

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.

toptop

ENG 3010

Modern Criticism

James Paxson

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.

toptop

ENG 3011

Critics: Roland Barthes

Ed White

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.

toptop

ENG 3063

Advanced Grammar: Theory & Application

Wayne Losano

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.

toptop

ENG 3115

Introduction to Film Theory

Roger Beebe

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.

toptop

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).

toptop

ENG 3122

History of Film 2

Robert Ray

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:

Assignments and Grading:

I. 60% of the final grade will result from two written projects:

II. 40% of the final grade will result from the following:

You are allowed one unexcused absence. Each additional absence will deduct four points from your final course grade.

toptop

ENG 4015

Psychological Approaches to Literature

Peter L. Rudnytsky

This course will focus on major works by Philip Roth. Texts to be read will include:

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.

toptop

ENG 4110

Animation and Comics

Donald Ault

Required Texts:

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.

toptop

ENG 4110

The Film Epic and U.S. Imperialism

Richard Burt

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

Readings include

For more information, go to <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~rburt/filmepic/>.

toptop

ENG 4130

Race and Ethnicity In Film: Hollywood Whiteness

Andrew Gordon

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:

  1. To learn how to analyze film narratives from a sociological perspective.
  2. To develop skills required for intellectual collaboration.
  3. To gain an understanding of the complex nature of the white American self.
  4. To gain an understanding of the process of cinematic representation of whiteness.
  5. 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):

Films:

Required viewing outside of class (any two):

Requirements:

  1. 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.
  2. 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%.
  3. Final research paper, seven pages long, comparing and contrasting two or three films. Counts 30%.
  4. 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.

toptop

ENG 4130

African Cinema

Mark A. Reid

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

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]

toptop

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.

toptop

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:

Texts:

Recommended: 

toptop

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:

Film screenings take place during scheduled lab. All film and video screenings are mandatory.

toptop

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

Agnieszka Holland

Andrzej Zulawski

toptop

ENG 4136

Film and Video Production

Roger Beebe

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.

toptop

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.

toptop

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Servitude and Power

Julie Kim

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

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.).

toptop

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Richard Brantley

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.

toptop

ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Thomas Hardy: Mnemotechnics, Materiality, and the Textual Archive

Julian Wolfreys

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):

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:

There is no final exam.

toptop

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:

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:

*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:

toptop

ENG 4953

Department Seminar: The Wyoming Massacre

Ed White

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.

toptop

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.

toptop

ENL 3112

Eighteenth Century British Novel

Brian McCrea

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.

toptop

ENL 3154

British Poetry: Twentieth Century: Voices of Dissonance and Difference

Julian Wolfreys

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:

Course Requirements:

There is no final exam.

toptop

ENL 3230

Age of Dryden and Pope

Brian McCrea

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.

toptop

ENL 3241

The Romantic Period

James Twitchell

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

toptop

ENL 3241

Romantic Poetry

Melvin New

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.

toptop

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:

toptop

ENL 4221

Seventeenth-Century Poetry

Ira Clark

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.

toptop

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:

Requirements for this class include attendance and active class participation, regular response papers to the readings, and two essays.

toptop

ENL 4311

Chaucer

James Paxson

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.

toptop

ENL 4333

Shakespeare

Peter L. Rudnytsky

The course will offer a close reading of Shakespeare’s “greatest hits.” The plays to be studied are

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.

toptop

LIT 3003

Narratology of New Media

Terry Harpold

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.

toptop

LIT 3041

Studies in Drama: Citizen Comedy and Domestic Tragedy in the Age of Shakespeare

Robert Thomson

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

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.

toptop

LIT 3043

Modern Drama: Learning by Doing

Sidney Homan

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.

toptop

LIT 3374

The Bible as Literature

Richard Brantley

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.

toptop

LIT 3400

Internet Literature

Greg Ulmer

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.