Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2008
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 3031
American Literature to 1865: Imagining the Multicultural Nation
This course introduces students to American literature prior to 1865, providing in-depth reading strategies and advanced critical contexts for working richly with earlier genres of American writing. In particular, we will explore how writers from a range of literary genres – captivity narratives, travel writing, gothic fiction, the frontier romance, the novel of sentiment, poetry – undertake the challenge of representing American multicultural identity and the place of cultural difference in the new nation.
In Ruthless Democracy, Timothy Powell identifies a core aporia in American history and literature: the “seemingly unresolvable conflict between the multicultural history of the country and the violent will to monoculturalism that prevents the nation from coming to terms with its own ethnic diversity.” The course will focus on the fertile and ambivalent ways that America’s multicultural past has been represented, including whether multiculturalism is presented as an ideal, a dilemma, or a threat. In the process, we will analyze the strategies of adaptation and survival, both real and imagined, necessitated by cross-cultural contact.
The course is broken into three units. We begin with the period of early contact, focusing on texts that represent interactions between explorers, settlers, and indigenous populations. We continue with readings from the post revolutionary & early national periods, exploring the impact of natural rights philosophies, enlightenment racial “science,” and shifting attitudes towards and experiences of “Indians” during a turbulent period of idealization, adaptation, and forced removal. We end with a unit on the “American Renaissance,” particularly the period’s treatment of slavery; here we explore, among other things, the influence of reform movements, the burgeoning cultures of sentiment, and the ways authors adopt or contest the reformist impulses of the times.
Ultimately, you will leave this class with a rich knowledge of how a central issue – the representation of cultural difference – gets interrogated and explored across a range of dominant literary genres. Moreover, you will gain strength in critical reading, critical writing, and literary analysis. I value prewriting as a valuable entry point to discussion and critical analysis. Thus, you will have opportunities for peer workshopping many assignments, including the major essays. No matter what level you are working at, expect to strengthen your writing.
Readings include: early travel accounts including Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación of travels through Florida and Spanish America (1542); Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (1675); satiric essays by Benjamin Franklin; Cooper’s frontier novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826); Pequot Indian William Apess’s autobiography A Son of the Forest (1829); gothic fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville; Stowe’s sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Frederick Douglas’s abolitionist novella The Heroic Slave; poetry by Walt Whitman, plus supplemental critical readings on race and the national imagination.
Requirements include: Up to five short (3-page) analytical response homeworks, two longer (5–7 page) literary analysis essays, regular attendance and participation. No exams.
AML 3041
American Literature II: (Re)Forming the American Identity
Lacy Hodges
In this course we’ll discuss the ways in which a number of cultural categories – gender, sexuality, race, and class – work to form images of coherent and “acceptable” American identities in literature. Utilizing texts from a variety of genres and time periods, we’ll examine the ways that identity is constructed through and by gender, sexuality, race, and class. The class will examine texts from a variety of genres, time periods, and stylistic movements in order to see the many different ways literature works to form identity.
Our discussion goals will be twofold. First, we’ll examine the texts in terms of the conditions under which they were produced. This will enable us to note the ways that literature provides both a reflection of and an escape from the constraints of dominant cultural ideologies. Then, we’ll examine the usefulness of literature in creating what could be considered a distinctly “American” identity. The ultimate goal will be an attempt to understand not only what (if anything) makes something American, but also how these cultural identities are formed. Texts will consist mostly of popular American novels, as well as short stories by authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Joanna Russ.
Possible texts may include:
- Kate Chopin: The Awakening
- Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- Richard Wright: Native Son
- Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
- Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
- Alice Walker: The Color Purple
- Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides
- Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho
AML 3270
African American Literature I: Beginning to 1950
African American Literature: Beginning to 1950 will provide a survey of the most significant writings of Black Americans from 1760 to 1950. It is meant to introduce students to a variety of authors, genres, and periods. This course will emphasize the development, continuities, and discontinuities within the literary tradition. We will pay special attention to issues of fictional representation of the black experience, including issues of heritage, identity, feminism, sexuality, and the idea of the African diaspora. Literature to be supplemented with film, art, and critical readings.
Required texts: Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent.
Requirements: Two tests (45%), one critical paper (20%), participation (15%), and quizzes (20%).
AML 3271
African American Literature II
This course extends the definition of African American literature to include visual narratives by renowned artists as well as those whose works have been overlooked for various reasons. Readings and film screenings will cover such playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, and Adrienne Kennedy, novelists as Paule Marshall, James McBride, Toni Morrison, and John A. Williams, poets as Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and visual artists as Cheryl Dunye, Spike Lee, Darnell Martin, Michelle Parkerson, and Marlon Riggs. Lectures and class discussions will explore how writers and filmmakers use black vernacular, as well as other literary and visual strategies, to explore contemporary social and psychological conflicts that occur when individuals and groups resist societal pressures to conform to hegemonic beliefs about race, sexuality, and gender. (To describe a hegemonic belief formation is not to say that a majority supports this belief system about race, sexuality, and gender, but to say that there appears to be no other alternative to this singular racialized-sexualized-gendered vision of society.)
Required Texts: Orange & Blue Textbooks 309 NW 13th St. Tel. 375–2707
- Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers 6th Edition (New York: MLA, 2003)
- Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun: The Complete Original Version (New York: Signet, 1959) ISBN 0-451-16137-8
- Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre (Cambridge UP, 1994) ISBN 0-521-44522-1
- Jones, LeRoi (Baraka, Amiri). Dutchman (New York: William Morrow, 1964) ISBN 0-688-21084-8
- Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1959) ISBN 0-912670-97-7
- McBride, James. The Color of Water (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996) ISBN 1-57322-578-9
- Wilkerson, Margaret B., ed. 9 Plays by Black Women (Penguin/Mentor) ISBN 0-451-62820-9
- Williams, John A. The Man Who Cried I Am (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985; [1967]) ISBN 0-938410-24-5
- Williams, John A. Clifford’s Blues ((Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1999) ISBN 1-56689-080-2
- Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson (New York: Penguin/Plume), 1990) ISBN 0-452-26534-7
Note: All assigned readings are on reserve in Library West.
Readings On Reserve In Library
- Greenlee, Sam. The Spook Who Sat By the Door (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989) ISBN 0-8143-2246-8
- Kaufman, Bob. Cranial Guitar (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1996) ISBN 0-1-56689-038-1
- Lorde, Audre. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993) ISBN 0-393-03513-1
- Parker, Pat. Movement in Black (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1989) ISBN 0-932379-74-5
- Sanders, Catherine. The Development of Black Theater (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988) ISBN 0-8071-1582-7
Course Requirements
- Pop quizzes on weekly readings, in-class discussions, and film(s) screened in the previous class – 20%
- Each student moderates a ten-minute discussion on a weekly assignment – 20%
- Each student is responsible for a typed, 1-page outline of their ten-minute discussion, due on the day when the student presents her/his 10-minute discussion – 10%
- A typed 15-page group analytical research paper – 20%
- A typed 1-page outline and bibliography of the individual student’s section of the analytical research paper – 10%
- A group oral presentation on the 15-page group analytical research paper – 20%
AML 4213
Women in Early American Literature & Culture
Courtney Grubbs
This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of early American texts written by (and about) women from the 16th-Century until the 19th-Century; some of these texts are frequently included within literary collections, while others are frequently excluded. In addition to discussing possible reasons for the inclusion (and exclusion) of these texts within the literary canon, we will also examine how these texts reflect and challenge – both past and contemporary – cultural and historical myths and beliefs. We will explore a wide range of genres, including poetry, captivity and slavery narratives, legal trials, travelogues, diaries, and sentimental novels. And, throughout the course, we will discuss the intersections of class, race, sex and gender, bodies, and sexuality – particularly in relation to the quest to negotiate and assert an ‘American’ identity and sense of ‘self.’ Pivotal authors will include: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Hutchinson, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Mary Prince, Phillis Wheatley, and Elizabeth Ashbridge. Additional course texts include: The Female Marine (ed. Daniel A. Cohen), Journeys in New Worlds (ed. Andrews et. al.), Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Requirements include active participation in class discussions, presentations, and three 5–7-page essays.
AML 4225
America in Print
The United States of America, as a political experiment in “democracy” – a form of government, “of the people, by the people, for the people” – rested on Enlightenment principles. However, it could not have come into existence without the power of print. A lively print culture, and the subsequent dissemination of the “word,” not only made America possible, it almost dissolved the government as well.
Meanwhile, as the political experiment grew, so did America’s ambition to have an indigenous “culture.” In 1846, critic and writer Margaret Fuller published an essay titled, “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” in which she surveyed the field, as it were, of her time and made predictions for the future – our future. Returning to our founding documents, and to that essay as dual launching points, this class is going to re-examine our 19th-century “American” print culture heritage, what it was, what it might mean or have meant, and where our “literary” heritage went after 1846, with a particular focus on print as a medium, the publishing industry and American print culture of the 19th century.
AML 4242
Modern American Poetry
In this course we’ll take an in-depth look at Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Rita Dove. We’ll consider such issues as poetry’s public role in the U.S., traditional vs. innovative forms, and poetry’s relationship to visual culture. Your careful preparation for and participation in discussion are important for the success of this class. Assignments include an explication paper, a term paper, an exam essay, a panel presentation, and a parody.
AML 4242
Twentieth-Century American Literature: Fiction of the 1960s
Description: Reading of selected novels and stories from the American 1960s, with the aim of understanding the works in their historical and cultural context. We will take into account such historical factors as the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the New Left, and such literary movements as metafiction and the New Journalism.
Goals:
- To improve your understanding of the history and literature of the period.
- To improve your writing.
Readings:
- Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
- Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
- The Free-Lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed
- Them by Joyce Carol Oates
- plus a collection of short fiction
AML 4282
Empire and Gender
Taking imperialism as central to the construction of the United States’ national imaginary, this course will raise a number of questions about the intersection of empire and gender. How is the language of empire gendered? How does gender structure metaphors such as the frontier? How are representations of colonized spaces and racial others invested with discourses of gender? How does the captivity narrative persist in the narrative of contemporary imperialism? We will focus on specific sites of U.S. imperialism such as Hawai’i, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq, and examine the literary and cultural texts that emerge from those sites. Although the specific focus of the course is on US imperialism, the discussions should help us in thinking broadly about the ways in which languages of empire and gender intersect. I’m not sure exactly which texts I’ll use but readings might include Edward Said’s Orientalism, Herman Melville’s Typee, Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers, Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Chris Abani’s Graceland as well as a coursepack of theoretical readings. Requirements: attendance, two 7-8 page papers, reading responses and an oral presentation.
AML 4282
Dissenters, Captives, Witches, & Writers
This course offers an introduction to colonial British American culture through the lens of prominent women of the first two centuries of colonization. Our survey will likely include: one of North America’s first and most prominent dissenters, Anne Hutchinson (eventually exiled by the Puritans); one of North America’s first poets, Anne Bradstreet; Anglo-America’s best-known Indian captive, Mary White Rowlandson; North America’s first African-American poet, Phillis Wheatly; and a trio of prominent post-revolutionary intellectual essayists Judith Sargent Murray, historian and playwright Mercy Otis Warren, and correspondent and advisor Abigail Adams. We will also examine, in some detail, the notorious Salem Witch Trials.
AML 4685
Race & Ethnicity in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literature
From the late 1960s through the 1970s, a Chicana/o and U.S. Latino/a “renaissance” of the arts flowered, especially in the West, Southwest and on the East Coast; now, the so-called Latin explosion in the United States has increased the market value of “Latino” authors and artists. A select few Chicano and Latina writers have been drawn into the mainstream of United States publishing: writers like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina García, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez are, if not household names, at least well-known on bestseller lists. In reading bestselling authors as well as less well-known artists, this course will examine the ways assumptions – esthetic, social, political, and market-driven – about ethnicity and race as well as gender have changed (and in some ways remained the same) in the last decade, 1998–2008.
AML 4685
Pedagogy of the Wretched: Literacy, Narrative, & Class in Black & Brown Communities
This class combines the academic disciplines of literary study with cultural studies to examine the importance of literacy and its evolution in specific racialized populations. Textual analysis and interpretive performances of selected works will provide initial query into cultural studies approaches to film, literature, and music. It will also speculate on the role literacy plays in the formation of identity and issues of self-determination stemming from class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. The seminar begins with an exploration of oral narratives and early extended written narratives. By teaching students the rhetorical strategies utilized in these forms, we can then examine how recent cultural phenomenon 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
Course description not 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 – unless otherwise indicated – 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 read it carefully and fill it in completely.
N.B.: The 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 for the Fall 2008 semester must be received by the March 7, 2008 deadline.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This workshop course, the penultimate in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing, seeks to help you write fiction better than you might already. Time is spent also on correct usage. We also seek to have you read better: to read for form, recognizing strength and weakness in your own and in others’ writing, and recognizing various technical maneuvers in the published work we will read.
Students write three pieces of fiction, delivering a copy to each class member one week prior to group criticism. Students participate in that group criticism with wit and cogency and pertinence and deliver a letter of good criticism for each story read. This criticism has one object: to improve the work.
Assigned readings, from a book or two by a major writer, will also be discussed. This reading will be looked at usually in a somewhat technical manner; it is hoped that in the best of all possible worlds the reading will inspire a mimicry of correct form as you make the long trek unto your own vision and your own good writing.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must – unless otherwise indicated – 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 read it carefully and fill it in completely.
N.B.: The 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 for the Fall 2008 semester must be received by the March 7, 2008 deadline.
CRW 3310
Imaginative Writing: Poetry
“Poorly depicted clouds – which most people would not notice as wrong – are so disturbing to Dr. Thornes that they almost spoil visits to museums. For a meteorologist, the distraction is as great as the ordinary viewer being confronted by a figure with three arms… [He added that] too many artists had painted [clouds] as they would a backcloth in a theatre.”
– The Guardian (London), 9 August 2000
Whenever the Mauretania was signaled by a French island, “What ship are you?” she would signal in reply, “What island are you?”
– Terry Coleman, The Liners
In this workshop we will attend to words as closely as a painter attends to paint – or to clouds. You will read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Walt Whitman to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and write a poem a week. Every week the workshop will consider for discussion poems from the past and poems from students. We will attempt to find a place for frivolity and fecklessness within the seriousness of verse, and hope that within our studies cheerfulness will keep breaking in. The workshop will include readings in the poetry of the past century as well as the poetry of the age, and we will spend a few weeks on versification. If you haven’t had an introduction to meter, you will need it to understand what Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Frost, Stevens, and even Eliot thought they were doing. An ear not partly tuned by meter can never write free verse effectively.
This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken the intermediate workshop (CRW 2300) or students who have had CRW 1301 and want to skip a level. Students must want to press their understandings of poetic language even further, and must already have the grammatical skills necessary to write. Please do not take this course if you don’t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb, or the correct usage of it’s and its, lay and lie, and who and whom. Student who don’t know what complete sentences are will be asked to drop the class. Early admission is by manuscript.
Please submit the manuscript, using the guidelines boxed below, to the instructor’s mailbox or by email to <wlogan@english.ufl.edu>.
Required reading
- an anthology of modern poetry
- a book on versification
- four books by modern poets
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must – unless otherwise indicated – 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 read it carefully and fill it in completely.
N.B.: The 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 for the Fall 2008 semester must be received by the March 7, 2008 deadline.
CRW 4906
Advanced Poetry Writing
You may take this course more than once for credit! The prerequisite for CRW 4906 is CRW 3310 or CRW 4906--but those without the prerequisite are urged to apply as well!
We read.
We write.
We talk.
We revise.
We rock.
“Among cavers, it is bad form to discuss the furthest limits too openly. If you bring too much equipment, the cave will be scared, and stop. So the [depth] record was only almost openly discussed. Alexander Klimchouk [an authority on limestone aquifers and Senior Scientist of the Geological Institute at the National Academy of the Ukraine] had told us it could be a record.
“First we create a cave in our imagination. Then by our efforts we create it to correspond… In mountaineering you know your goal – the peak is on the map. Cavers have not so much preliminary information – this comes with exploration. So, when we descend, we have no horizon we are making for – there is only an apparent horizon.”
– Yuri Kasian, Ukrainian caver
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must – unless otherwise indicated – 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 read it carefully and fill it in completely.
N.B.: The 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 for the Fall 2008 semester must be received by the March 7, 2008 deadline.
ENC 3414
Hypermedia
This course is an introduction to Humanities computing, authoring in hypermedia, designing Websites for Internet publication. The proposition to be tested in a semester-long project featuring the design of two substantial Websites is that hypermedia explicitly supports creative thinking: there is a fortunate alignment in hypermedia relating the logic of creativity, the forms of popular culture, and the links-and-nodes features of networked media. The non-traditional methodology of the course requires active engagement through practices such as inventive problem-solving and group collaboration in in-class presentations and an email listserv. The point of departure for the semester project is the observation made by cultural historians that a pattern of a few core images is found organizing the work of the most productive people across a wide range of disciplines. The historians note that the ingredients of the core image are in place by the time the individual leaves high school. Our project is to test the resources of hypermedia by representing this pattern or “image of wide scope” in an experimental hypermedia self-portrait. Previous experience with basic Web authoring is helpful but not required. The course is taught in the Networked Writing Environment, using a pedagogy that is a hybrid of criticism, composition, and studio arts. Possible readings include Family Secrets (Annette Kuhn), Dadaism (Elger and Grosenick), plus works on Japanese Aesthetics, writing the screenplay, and authoring Cascading Style Sheets. Extensive use will be made of online resources.
An exhibit of student projects from earlier versions of the course is available online: <http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/course97/rushmore.html>.
ENG 3011
Theorists: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick & Barbara Johnson
During the 1980’s and 1990’s Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Barbara Johnson emerged as distinct critical voices that altered the field of literary critical thinking. Sedgwick’s initial texts, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, (l985; reissue with new material, 1993) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990; paperback edition, 1992) served as foundational texts for a new field: queer studies. Barbara Johnson incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives – including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory – into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature demonstrated in her texts, The Critical Difference (1980), and A World of Difference (1987). As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Deconstruction is, in Barbara Johnson’s phrase, “a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text.” Certainly both of these critics have their critics, but this course is designed as a retrospective examination of their work, and through them of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist and queer theory. One interesting point of intersection between the two writers is in their differing interpretative strategies of reading Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, which we will also engage.
Readings will include the aforementioned texts, and texts by Derrida, Lacan, and Freud.
ENG 3115
Introduction to Film Criticism and Theory
This course will introduce current theoretical contexts for engaging the contemporary media environment, and will consider the reading and writing of theoretical texts as parallel activities to the viewing and making of films.
We will study world media through close visual analysis of individual films, stressing the historical and international diversity of cinematic approaches and styles. At the same time, we will study contemporary critical writing on film and its basis in the larger domain of cultural theory. Emphasis will be on such basic issues as viewer identification, social formations and cultural context as articulated through a series of post-structural, postcolonial and postmodern methodologies. After introducing phenomenology and and structuralism as points of departure, the class will consider psychoanalysis, ideology, deconstruction, discourse, gender and race en route to postcolonial and postmodern approaches.
The principle purpose of the class will be to investigate theoretical issues through an experience of specific film texts, and the function of these texts in the past and present workings of history, especially as this leads towards questions for future production and study. The working assumption here is that alphabetic writing and film production both constitute modes of inscription, and represent two ways of embodying the same cultural process.
Mastery of so many topics is neither possible nor expected. The goal is to understand the conditions and motives that led to the rethinking of media, and to initiate theoretical strategies in your own work. Two papers of 8–10 pages each plus class discussion are required.
ENG 3121
History of Film 1
Nora Alter
To provide and overview of the history of film from its origins to the advent of sound. This course is designed as Part I of the three part sequence in film history. In addition, the objective of ENG 3121 is to develop analytical and critical skills in reading film texts as aesthetic works and historical artefacts. We will also show how these films have shaped the development of film language and influenced certain modes of filmic discourse (“genre films”). The films will also be considered within a comparative, intertextual context that defines the stylistic specificity of these films vis a vis Russian, French, German and American films of that time. Finally, this course will enable students to discuss current theoretical and methodological issues (film and popular mythology; representation of women; the question of realism; film, politics, and ideology; narration and the social function of film).
ENG 3122
History of Film 2
While this course is nominally the second part to a two-part narrative of the history of cinema, it should actually be understood as the third part in a three-part story (with the silent cinema – 1895 to 1930 or so – as the first part and classical Hollywood – roughly 1930 to 1960 – as the second part). This course then will focus on a number of major historical moments in the evolution of the cinema in what is often termed the “post-classical” moment, from 1960 until the present day. A significant part of the course will focus on the transformation of Hollywood in the wake of the Paramount Decision which effectively put an end to the vertical integration of the studio system, but we will additionally spend a considerable amount of time considering moments that fall outside of this narrowly US-centered industrial history. Other critical moments are likely to include the French New Wave, spaghetti Westerns, the rise of Third Cinema, movements in the avant garde (including structuralist film, the “underground” film, the microcinema movement, and culture jamming), changes in documentary form (cinema verité, Direct Cinema), the rise of (so-called) independent film, etc. As we trace these different histories alongside the history of Hollywood, we will also attempt to articulate a theory of what it is that we are doing when we construct a historical narrative – i.e., what, in fact, “film history” actually is or is meant to be.
ENG 3122
History of Film 2
Paul Anthony Johnson
This course covers film history from 1930 to 1965, and will explore both Classical Hollywood and world cinema. During the middle of the 20th century, something called Classical Hollywood Cinema became the center of people’s social lives. Today, around 10% of the US population goes to the movies on a weekly basis; in the 1930s (in the midst of the Great Depression), that number was 65%. Hollywood shaped the leisure habits of the nation, and built a new kind of democracy out of shadows and illusions. Hollywood’s influence penetrated worldwide, and international filmmakers alternately resisted and assimilated Hollywood methods. In this course, we will explore the movies and the world they invented in the middle of the 20th century.
Our inquiry into film history will lead us to examine the relationship between Hollywood filmmaking in the classical era, and the social-historical contexts that defined it – the Great Depression, WWII, and the Red Scare. Hollywood’s story intertwines with the history of world cinema, and the course will parallel the Hollywood films we watch with some of the major films produced worldwide over the period. We will look at French and German cinema of the 1930s, Italian Neo-Realism in the 1940s, international ‘art house’ cinema of the 1950s, and the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The course will describe the transformations that occurred in film form (including developments in visual style, narrative conventions, and acting) during the era, and investigate the technological, aesthetic, and social reasons for those transformations. Additionally, we will discuss how the movies worked in tandem with other mass media, particularly pop music, to shape the dream life of the 20th century.
Students in the course will be expected to engage in a thoughtful discussion of the films and readings. Students adverse to a large reading load should avoid taking the class.
Course requirements will include seven 2-page papers that respond to the week’s screening and reading material, reading quizzes, one group presentation, a mid-term exam, and a final exam.
ENG 4015
Psychological Approaches to Literature: Lacan’s Poe
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s decision to place the text of his 1955 “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” at the head of his collected essays, Écrits (1966), suggests that Lacan considered his analysis of Poe’s famous short story a signal example of his teaching and of psychoanalytic thought in general. Debate concerning Lacan’s appropriation (misappropriation?) of Poe, initiated by philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1975 response to the Seminar, has generated significant discussions of psychoanalytic concepts of truth and exemplarity, and of the relations of psychoanalysis to literary method.
In this course, we will undertake close readings of Poe’s short story (one of three featuring the fictional detective C. August Dupin), Lacan’s Seminar, and several important critical responses to it. We will read Poe’s text and Lacan’s Seminar twice: as bookends to the critiques of Lacan (and responses to them); or – in another formulation of this relation – as repetitions or versions of a problematic in psychoanalytic literary theory and method. Parentheses within parentheses.
No prior familiarity with psychoanalysis is assumed. Familiarity with contemporary literary and critical theory will be helpful.
Assigned readings for the course will include several short stories, poems and essays by Poe (the Dupin trilogy, “The Bells,” “The Raven,” several of Poe’s essays on poetic method); Lacan’s Seminar; Sigmund Freud’s Outline of Psycho-Analysis; and several critical texts oriented by Lacan’s reading of Poe, including Derrida’s essay “The Purveyor of Truth” (his longest sustained critique of Lacan), and texts by Marie Bonaparte, Irene Harvey, Barbara Johnson, John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Writing requirements include one take-home short answer exam and three take-home essay exams.
ENG 4110
Films of Steven Spielberg
Introduction: Steven Spielberg is one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the world today, both as director and producer. He has won all the major awards in American film and been lavishly praised as a director of enormous skill and visual flair, a natural storyteller able to entertain and to move mass audiences, and harshly criticized as slick, sentimental, or shallow. Over almost 40 years, there have been many Spielbergs: first, the boy wonder who made blockbuster fantasy adventures such as Jaws, Close Encounters, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then the poet of the suburbs who brought warmth to the science fiction film with E.T. Next was serious Spielberg, who adapted prizewinning novels and historical dramas to the screen, such as The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, and Amistad. There was also Spielberg the mogul, producing movies and television programs and developing theme park rides, starting his own production company Amblin and helping to found the studio Dreamworks. In the past ten years, there has been Spielberg the journeyman director, stretching to try various genres, including the combat film (Saving Private Ryan), the crime comedy (Catch Me If You Can), romantic comedy (The Terminal), and the political thriller (Munich).
Goals: We will consider Spielberg as a major American director who has learned from the masters, such as Hitchcock and Kubrick, and as a major player in the Hollywood system. We will study the development of his career and style and look at some of his persistent themes, such as the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, the lost child, and the troubled family. This course should give you a better understanding of American film and American culture.
Films:
- Duel
- The Sugarland Express
- Jaws
- Close Encounters
- E.T.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- The Color Purple
- Empire of the Sun
- Jurassic Park
- Schindler’s List
- Shoah (Holocaust documentary by Claude Lanzmann)
- Saving Private Ryan
- A.I.
- Minority Report
- Munich
Readings:
- The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays ed. Charles L.P. Silet (Scarecrow Press)
- Steven Spielberg: Interviews ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm (U of Mississippi Press)
- Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Indiana U Press)
- Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride (Simon and Shuster)
- The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light by Nigel Morris (Wallflower)
- Citizen Spielberg by Lester D. Friedman (U of Illinois)
- Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg by Andrew M. Gordon (Rowman and Littlefield)
(Note: The only texts we will read in entirety are Citizen Spielberg and the biography. From the rest, we will read excerpts.)
Requirements:
- Two papers. Paper 1 should be four typed pages (about 1000 words) and concern a film covered in Weeks I–V. Keep it tightly focused on one topic. You may revise Paper 1 if your grade is less than a B (79 or below). Paper 1 = 25%.
- Paper 2 should be seven typed pages (about 1750 words) and deal with a film from Weeks VI–XVI or another Spielberg film we did not cover in class. It should show evidence of research from at least four critics.
- In both papers, I encourage you to apply not only what you have learned in this class but also what you have learned in other courses, whether film, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political science, art, or music. We respond to films based on everything we know, and many different approaches to a single work can be worthwhile.
- Paper 2 = 35%.
- One oral report to the class. Report on an assigned film or on another Spielberg film. (These reports may help you prepare for your papers.) Use DVD clips or power point. You may report individually or two_four students may collaborate on a project. Five minutes per person. These reports are required but ungraded. Oral report = 10%.
- Attendance and participation. The film screenings are recommended, or else view the films on your own. Attendance and participation = 10% .
ENG 4130
Introduction to Asian-American Cinema
What happens to Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu when Harold and Kumar go to White Castle? This class will begin with a history of Asian and Asian-American representation in US visual culture in order to examine the way in which media representation, a history of stereotyping, racial mythology and material reality collide to create the image of Asian-Americans in contemporary film and video culture. We will look at work by Asian-American filmmakers including groundbreaking films like the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? and experimental films such as Robot Stories as well as attempts to make images of Asian-Americans commercially viable in mainstream film such as Better Luck Tomorrow and Double Happiness.
ENG 4133
Extended Cinema
We will address the recent shift in film and media studies from the classic question “What is cinema?” to the question “What was cinema?” We will examine the death of cinema and changes in cinephilia arising from the digitalization of film over the past decade, and focus on the afterlives of film in analog video and laserdisc but primarily in DVD and HD-DVD. Our focus will be largely on high-end Criterion DVD editions and their paratextual supplements, with some attention to similar treatments of cult films. We will also look at film websites and trailers. We will watch alternate cuts of a given film, in some cases, as well as directors’ and film critics’ audiocommentaries and other extras, paying particular attention to the interface aesthetics of DVD animated menus. Films will include Caligula, The Battle of Algiers, The Lady Vanishes, The Third Man, Pierrot le Fou, Bladerunner, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Alexander Revisited, among others. Readings will include Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified, D.N. Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film, Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media, Gerard Genette’s Paratexts, Paolo Usai’s The Death of Cinema, and a number of essays on media transitions, the uncanny, and opening title sequences.
ENG 4134
Women and Film
This course will examine how women have been represented in film, how they have participated in film production, and how they consume film images. We will look at several feminist approaches and the range of debates as to how to address these issues.
The course will have several goals:
- To introduce you to the history of women in film
- To increase your skills in viewing and reading film, and in reading critical writing about film
- To increase your understanding of feminist theory.
- To teach you how to appreciate different genres of filmic expression
- To engage you in debates and discussion, and to stimulate you to think
- To give you a deeper understanding of the struggles of women in the twentieth century
- To help you write your best research papers
Emphasis will be on such basic issues as viewer identification, the articulation of social values, and the function of cultural context, as currently formulated through various feminist and post-structuralist methodologies. We will explore how feminism intersects with psychoanalysis, ideology, deconstruction, and related approaches. We will examine the conjuncture of theoretical issues with an experience of specific films. We will look at the function of these films in the past, and in present reworkings of history. We will consider how race and ethnicity, and sexual preference form vital parts of the representation of women in film.
WebCT for the course will post the syllabus, assignments, and additional study material. Your assignments will be uploaded to WebCT and your papers to Turnitin on WebCT
Course Requirements:
- Two research papers of 8 pages each, using theories and methods of analysis of film covered in this course. 70%
- Participation in class discussion and WebCT participation, along with quizzes on readings, lecture material and scenes from films will constitute. 30%
- Attendance is required: Each student is responsible for signing the attendance record at the beginning of class. For every unexcused absence over three hours total, your final grade will be reduced one letter. Only written, verifiable medical or family emergency excuses are acceptable.
- Discussion: Participation in class discussion is essential. Since discussions will critically evaluate readings and films, assigned texts must be read prior to scheduled meetings. Unannounced quizzes may test your degree of preparation.
ENG 4135
European Cinema
Sylvie Blum
Since World War II, European cinemas have struggled to maintain the prestige they had earlier acquired, and are now considered Hollywood’s rivals. Strengthened by the establishment of the European Union, many films are now destined for a larger market and its national communities. The course will emphasize European cinemas’ distinct aesthetic qualities as an ‘art cinema’ in which political and philosophical poetics are present to a degree not found in American cinema. The course will examine the question of what constitutes ‘Europeanness’ and will analyze critical texts surrounding this notion.
As designed, the class does not intend to be a survey of films made in different countries nor to sample films made in Europe. It will seriously study texts (film included) and their European agendas in a critically and historically informed fashion.
ENG 4135
From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration
This course introduces students to the relationship between the cinema of the Weimar Republic and the Hollywood studio system. We will study the films and lives of filmmakers who left Germany to make films in Hollywood. The class emphasizes an analysis of the continuations and breaks from German filmmaking to classic Hollywood cinema. A significant section of the course will focus on film emigration during the “Third Reich” and film noir. Filmmakers will include Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Otto Preminger, Douglas Sirk, Josef von Sternberg, and Billy Wilder.
ENG 4135
From Nuremberg to South Park: Representations of Nazism in Film and Literature
Eric Kligerman
This course examines the representation of the Nazi epoch in pre- and postwar visual culture and literature. In addition to exploring the historical, political and ideological implications of how National Socialism is recollected and represented, we will also track the transformation of the Nazi perpetrator in the cultural imagination of Europe and America. This course shifts attention from the debates regarding the commodification of the victims of the Holocaust, which has led to the provocative terms “Shoah business” and “Holocaust industry,” to what Susan Sontag describes as “fascinating fascism:” our commercial fascination with the perpetrators of genocide. How have those responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich been represented, theorized, turned into metaphors, as well as clichés, through the space of film and literature? By shifting our attention from the tragic images of the victims to the figure of the perpetrators, we will examine the ethical implications as well as moral ambiguities behind various representations of Nazism.
Beginning with Riefensthal’s documentary films, we will examine the circulation of the Nazi aesthetic and its associations with questions of beauty, power, gender and eroticism. How has this aesthetic been re-circulated in postwar cinema? How does the Nazi figure function in documentary films, German cinema (the rubble films, New German Cinema and contemporary German film), Italian neorealism, and American popular culture? Does the representation of Nazism in shifting periods and forms critique, explain or bring about an understanding of those who committed the crimes of the Third Reich? Or, do they perpetuate the spectator’s obsession with the horrors of Nazism while circumventing issues of guilt, responsibility and historical comprehension?
Interrogating the boundaries of representation, where the figure of the Nazi is not outside the frame of the imagination but occupies our day-to-day world, our objective is to explore how film and literature position the spectator in relation to the Nazi past. What moral and aesthetic complexities arise when the Nazi figure inhabits such genres as documentary, comedy, horror and erotica? Accompanying our screening of films by Resnais, Cavani, Visconti, Wertmüller, Fassbinder, Syberberg, von Trier, Hirschbiegel and Spielberg, and reading texts by Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Phillip Roth, Don Delillo, George Steiner, Paul Celan and Heinrich Böll, we will also examine television episodes from The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and South Park.
ENG 4135
Italian Cinema
Mary Watt
Through a combination of lectures, screenings, readings and discussions, this course aims to provide students with an appreciation of the particular artistic genius of Italian Cinema.
The course will focus on identifying recurring themes and topics with a view to providing students with an understanding of the extent to which and the manner in which Italian Cinema reflects the political, cultural and historical landscape of Italy. This course aims to develop the critical and analytical capacities of students as well as broaden their aesthetic appreciation. Tests and examinations will focus on building a practical knowledge base while essays and class discussions will focus on the development of original, well-reasoned critical and creative expression.
ENG 4136
Hypervideo: Rethinking Video Production
This course derives from a double convergence in contemporary media culture. On the one hand, cultural theory and innovative artistic practices regularly overlap and exchange techniques. On the other hand, computers and video have merged so that video imaging and computer interactivity intersect and are reconfiguring the electronic field. Based on these convergences, the class will map the creative and conceptual possibilities of working in new contexts.
The course will not teach traditional documentary, experimental or narrative uses of video as such, but will reinvent these approaches in order to produce visually articulate and engaging video in a contemporary world context.
We will be shooting video on digital video cameras and processing footage with desktop computers, primarily through Final Cut Pro on Mac G5s. The implication of such high-quality but low-cost desktop equipment, for the purposes of this course, is to make current technology available on an individualized basis for innovation and research. Much of the semester will be spent developing stategies for effectively using this equipment, and your participation will form a significant part of the course.
Please Note: Since space in production courses is limited, I am asking prospective students to apply for the class in order to prioritize for those who are most qualified and most in need of the course at this time. Please contact me at <nygren@ufl.edu> before March 19 if you are interested in enrolling for fall 2008. I expect to teach ENG 4136 again in fall 2009.
ENG 4146
Advanced Video Production – Editing/Found Footage
This course will focus on experimental editing practices using found footage. For 15 weeks we will explore the practice, theory and history of editing and more specifically of found footage filmmaking through a combination of screenings, readings, and hands-on production work. The course is designed to return initially to the very basic elements of editing (sequence, duration) in order to develop new approaches to editing from the ground up. As these new approaches come into focus, we will slowly add additional components (duration, motion, sound) with each additional project.
No previous experience in video production or non-linear editing is necessary – in fact, the course might work well as an introduction to non-linear editing, even for students who have never touched a camera. It is important, however, to stress that this is NOT a class focused on technology, but rather is centered around the theoretical and aesthetic issues raised by various alternative editing practices. For all students, the most important prerequisite is a willingness to experiment and to leave behind all preconceptions about what video is or might be.
The assignments for the course will be a series of three short video pieces (less than 3 minutes each) and one short film exercise (less than 100’) that will incrementally explore the basic elements of editing followed by a final project that will be slightly longer (5 min. max). Each assignment will also be coupled with a short paper in which the student will explain the theory behind his or her work.
Admission to the course is by consent of the instructor only. Interested students should contact Roger Beebe at <rogerbb@english.ufl.edu> before March 19 in order to receive an application form.
ENG 4905
Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice
An Independent Study course may be taken for 1- to 3-credit hours and will count as credit toward the English major. This course may be repeated with a change of topic up to a maximum of 9 credits.
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: Thoreau, the Cinema, & Everyday Life
In a recent book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life, Yale Law School’s former Dean, Anthony T. Kronman, argues that English and Humanities Departments have stopped studying the kinds of big questions that once justified their existence. A research-driven, publish-or-perish environment, Kronman suggests, has made such questions seem “unprofessional.” And yet, here is Thoreau, writing in Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.
On the fourth of July 1845, when he took up residence at Walden Pond, in a house he had largely built himself, on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was just two weeks short of 28 years old. After graduating from Harvard College, he had failed as a school teacher, lecturer, and poet; he had succeeded in remodeling his family’s pencil-making business, but he had not enjoyed the work. He was healthy, stubbornly independent, well-educated, and well-connected, but he was at a loss what to do with his life. Walden is the record of the 26-month experiment he designed to enable him to discover the meaning of life, or, at least, his life. This course will look at his answers to that question and ask about those answers’ continued relevance to us.
Because Walden’s experiment involves the question of everyday life, we will read not only Thoreau’s book, but also writers who operate on similar terrain: Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. And because, as MGM producer Irving Thalberg once observed, “In the future, the movies will be the best record of how we once lived,” we will also spend two-three weeks on the cinema, especially the films of Eric Rohmer. (Note that we will use the Thursday screening time only two-three times during the semester.)
The course’s two writing assignments will focus on Walden, using an experimental mode of discrete entries, triggered by particular details and passages in Thoreau’s book.
Readings and Movies:
- Thoreau, Walden (Norton Critical Edition)
- Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
- Wordsworth, selections from The Prelude
- Emerson, selections from his essays
- Wittgenstein, selections from The Philosophical Investigations
- Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”
- Rohmer, My Night at Maud’s, The Aviator’s Wife, A Summer’s Tale
Assignments:
- Weekly, five-minute reading quizzes
- Two 15-minute oral presentations
- Two 10-page papers
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Jane Austen and the Culture of Romanticism
The principle object . . . was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and . . .to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . .
– William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment, is denied to me.
– Sir Walter Scott (journal entry, March 14,1826)
You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of Composition which might recommend me at present, & I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance . . . might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity, than such pictures of domestic Life in the Country Villages as I deal in – but I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem. – I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life; & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter.
– Jane Austen (letter to James Stanier Clarke, April 1,1816)
Do not be angry with me for beginning another Letter to you. I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.
– Jane Austen (letter to Cassandra Austen, March 5, 1814)
Jane Austen lived from 1775 until 1817, but her critics and readers have not always placed her at home during these revolutionary times. Nor have they always recognized the powerful ways that she engages her world as she creates her own version of “ordinary life.” This course will focus on Austen’s writing (including juvenilia, letters, published novels, and uncompleted texts) in the context of the literature, culture, and politics of Romanticism. We will study Austen’s relationship to other women writers of the period, including Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as parallels to such contemporaries as William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, and Lord Byron. We will also discuss several recent film adaptations of Austen’s fiction, considering the ways that such films re-imagine the past (including the vision of the English countryside) that Austen’s novels represent. In addition to selections from critics and theorists on Austen and Romanticism, we will read selected contemporary film criticism of the Austen adaptations.
Readings (subject to some change):
- Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Vintage)
- Catherine and Other Writings (Oxford)
- Northanger Abbey (Broadview)
- Sense and Sensibility (Broadview)
- Pride and Prejudice (Broadview)
- Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon (Penguin)
- Mansfield Park (Norton)
- Emma (Broadview)
- Persuasion (Norton)
- The Longman Anthology of British Literature, the Romantic Period, vol. 2A
Students will write weekly response papers, one report on one of Austen’s contemporaries, and a 15-page seminar paper.
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
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
John Murchek
This course will undertake a detailed reading of the sequence of poems originally published as Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609, and of the bibliographic, formal, rhetorical, social, sexual, and critical histories in which they are embedded or to which they have given rise. The emphasis will fall squarely on acts of reading: our reading and re-reading of the sonnets, Shakespeare’s reading of prior texts and of his own sonnets within the sequence, the readings performed by editors who have had to decide (for example) how to present modernized texts and who have produced annotations and commentaries on the poems, and the readings critics have produced of the poems, especially in the course of the last hundred years. By focusing so intensively on a single sequence of poems, and on the various forms of knowledge, the interpretive gestures, and the multiple contexts that allow us to understand and assign shifting significance to it, students should come away with not only an enriched sense of this almost notoriously enigmatic sequence, but also an enhanced awareness of the range of critical and historical reading practices that are necessary for an informed and nuanced appreciation of any text that has resonated with readers in such varying ways over time.
We will work with one of the recent scholarly editions of the Sonnets (probably that of Katherine Duncan-Jones for the third series of Arden editions of Shakespeare), but also consult others. Certainly, whether I order them or not, Stephen Booth’s prodigiously annotated edition (1977) and Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) are likely to be constant (if rival) reference points. As we explore the history of how the Sonnets have been read, Hyder Rollins’ magisterial 1944 Variorum edition will prove invaluable. We may take up a few of Shakespeare’s plays in order to pose the question of the relation between lyric and dramatic “voices.” We will want to consider the relations between Shakespeare’s sequence and other early modern sonnet sequences, as well as the modes of material and social circulation of lyric poetry in the early modern period. The twentieth-century critics from whom we will attempt to learn about the act of reading the Sonnets will range from New Critics and modernists such as John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, L.C. Knights, and William Empson, through figures such as Thomas Greene, Anne Ferry, Heather Dubrow, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruce R. Smith, Joseph Peguiny, and Joel Fineman. The state of criticism at the beginning of the 21st century will probably be represented by James Schiffer’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (2000).
At the moment, I expect that students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and participation, brief writing assignments (these may include an annotated “edition” of one of the Sonnets, a close reading of one of the poems, and a summary and critique of a critical essay), leading class discussion, and a longer (12–15 page) seminar paper.
ENG 4953
Joyce & Cultural Studies
Course objectives: The course will be an introduction both to James Joyce and to the broad field of cultural studies, using Joyce’s fiction as examples of literary texts with particularly rich cultural resonance – both representationally and as artifacts themselves. We will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses in conjunction with the ideas of various thinkers whose work has impacted cultural studies, including Foucault, Bakhtin, Said, de Certeau, Benjamin, Jameson, and the Frankfurt School. Our emphases will include the areas of
- negotiations of “everyday life” (urban walking, recreation, etc.);
- the growth of commodity culture under modernity;
- high and popular culture interactions (especially with reference to modernism and the birth of “mass media”);
- subject construction and gender relations;
- postcoloniality (especially hybridity, “minor” status and Orientalism); and
- political dimensions (via Bakhtin, Foucault, Jameson, and the Frankfurt School).
Although the course obviously will engage with theory, the stress will be upon specific implications of the literary texts rather than upon the theory in and for itself. As an aid in reading Ulysses, we will use Blamires’s guide to that novel entitled The New Bloomsday Book. I will frequently distribute handouts to help in your reading; you are expected to become familiar with this material as well as with the main texts. I may bring in copies of newspapers and advertisements of the time as well as some examples of the popular reading to which Joyce alludes and play some of the songs that figure in his writing, show slides of Eugen Sandow the bodybuilder and memorial photography of children, and discuss other examples of material culture from turn-of-the-century Ireland. Since I am involved in the production of a hypertext Ulysses, we may discuss aspects of that project throughout the course, as it relates to issues raised by cultural studies.
Texts: The new Norton Critical edition of Dubliners (ed. Norris) and the new revised Bedford Books edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (ed. Kershner); Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses and Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book. Please obtain these particular editions. My own Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature is recommended, and my Twentieth-Century Novel: An Introduction would be useful for the broader literary background. All of these are available at Goering’s Bookstore at the location behind University Plaza. I will also be distributing material as handouts during the course.
Requirements: (1, 2) Two papers, both around 8–10 pages long. The first will concentrate on a Dubliners story or an aspect of Portrait, the second on a chapter or aspect of Ulysses. The second paper must also incorporate references to relevant criticism. (3) A series of quizzes about every two weeks on the reading material. (4) An additional 15% or so to be determined by class participation.
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 richtext format.
Books: All books will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1711 N. W. 1st 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 3122
Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Amy Robinson
This course will consider key developments in the nineteenth-century British novel, preceding and including the Victorian period. If you have not taken ENL 2022, you should plan to familiarize yourself with the period: the Norton Anthology introduction to the period and Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, available at the library, are good places to start.
The Victorian period was the golden age of the English novel, and a testament to the achievement of the period’s writers is that many of today’s classics (think of works by Dickens and the Brontës) were best-sellers then. The novel, which was emerging as a dominant popular form within the literary marketplace, sought to represent a comprehensive social world comprised of a variety of classes and social settings. We will familiarize ourselves with some of these fictional “worlds” by reading representative types of nineteenth-century novels: the novel of manners (Austen), social fiction (Dickens), Gothic romance (Emily Brontë), sensation (Braddon), and novels of country / village life (Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy) – see complete list below.
Students will be expected to keep up with a lot of reading, know how to conduct research in the field, and contribute meaningfully to class discussions. Carefully consider your reading speed and the expectations of the other courses you are taking before committing to this course.
Course requirements include: two papers (6–8 pages each), participation in a class email list, quizzes, and active participation in class discussions.
- Jane Austen, Emma (Broadview)
- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Penguin)
- Emily BrontË, Wuthering Heights (Norton)
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Penguin)
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Norton)
- M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford)
- Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (Oxford)
ENL 3132
Twentieth-Century British Novel
Regina Martin
Although London had long been recognized as the political and economic center of the British Empire, until the late 19th century, British novels tended to source “authentic” British culture and identity in rural England. In many early 20th-century novels, on the other hand, London comes to displace provincial England as the central figure of national identity. This survey of the 20th-century English novel will focus on representations of the metropolitan space of London and in doing so will consider a number of questions: How might “the City” pose a problem for a novelistic mode of representation peculiarly adapted to provincial England? How do novels encode the “the City” itself as a kind of poetics? How might issues such as subjectivity, gender, class, empire, and race complicate and enrich our investigations of these and other questions?
A tentative reading list includes H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and/or The Waves, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners. There will also be a course packet of critical readings.
ENL 3210
Medieval English Literature
In this course, we will read, in their entirety, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure.
We will read selections, some substantial, from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, The Book of Marjorie Kempe and Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.
In preparation for reading these medieval texts, we will spend the beginning of the term reading major Latin authors who are known to have been directly and powerfully influential on medieval English writers, including (but not necessarily limited to) Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, and Boethius.
Students will take one examination in class and write two short essays (5–7 pages), the first due at midterm and the second at the end of term. There will be no final examination.
Extensive use will be made of resources available on the WWW, and students will be introduced early to a number of major sites containing texts and bibliographies.
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 Goerings Textbook location, 1717 N.W. 1 st Avenue.
- Restoration and 18th Century Comedy, 2nd. ed., ed. Scott McMillin (Norton)
- Popular Fiction by Women 1160–1730, eds. John Richetti and Paula Backscheider (Oxford)
- The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1C, 8th edition, eds. M. H. Abrams, et al. (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 3251
Victorian Vampires
Dragan Kujundzic
The course will discuss the figure of the vampire in cinema and literature (Byron, Sheridan le Fanu, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire will be read and analyzed, among others), as well as the rendering of the vampire in cinema (from Dreyer’s Vampyr, Murnau’s Nosferatu, to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Slayers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among others). The course will address issues of vampires and vEmpire (imperial and colonial politics as vampirism in Britain and the US); vampirism and psychoanalysis (mourning and melancholia); vampirism and modernism; vampirism and cinema; vampires and Victorian literature; queer, gay and lesbian vampires; vampirism and nationalism; vampires, blood and AIDS, etc.
ENL 3251
Victorian Literature
This course will help fulfill the requirements for any number of the curriculum “tracks” for a department major, including but not limited to the Cultural Studies, British Literature, and British and American Literature tracks.
This course will attempt to define the world-views, beliefs, doubts, anxieties, and paradoxes of the Victorian Period through a survey of the poetry, fiction, drama, pictures, and critical theory of a few representative artists. We will be reading very few novels; rather, the course is mostly designed to introduce you to many of the other artistic forms – and broad intellectual history – of the Victorian Age, one of the most interesting and influential periods in Western history.
We will try to probe the assumptions which underlie the works of art we will be studying – the “why’s” implicit in the artists’ approaches to their themes as well as the themes themselves – including an investigation of related cultural issues. The material in the course will be grouped under one of four broad thematic categories: the century’s “Crisis of Faith” (Tennyson, Arnold, and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); the clash in shifting assumptions between Romanticism and Victorianism (Browning, High Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painting); the “battle of the sexes,” or issues arising from various drives for “female emancipation” [“The Woman Question”] (women fiction writers and popular drama); and “counter-cultural” fin-de-siècle artistic movements, particularly Aestheticism and the Decadence (Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley).
By the end of this course, you will be expected to be able to demonstrate that you can (1) read accurately what the work says, and how it goes about saying what it says effectively; (2) establish what the premises of the work seem to be, that is, what the implicit concerns of the writer are, what world-view is implied or assumed; and (3) trace how these thematic patterns and philosophical issues or problems differ from writer to writer during the period. Attendance is mandatory; there is a cut rule.
Basis for Final Grade: Your grade will be computed as follows: 50%: your average score on the frequent two-page “Insights”: papers (3–5 “insights,” “ideas,” or “themes”) relating to the previous week’s assignments to the current week’s assignments; 10%: your degree of active class participation and general preparedness during each class session; 5%: a group project and presentation; and 35%: a comprehensive final exam. Optional: You will have the option of substituting either a 1000-2000 word detailed poem analysis or a 1500–3000 word analytical term paper in place of any assignment category or combination of categories, except for the final exam, up to 25% of your final grade.
ENL 4220
16th-Century Poetry and Prose
The course will introduce students to major works of sixteenth-century English literature. The writers to be studied will likely include More, Wyatt, Raleigh, Sidney, Marlowe, and Spenser. The course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
ENL 4221
Seventeenth-Century Renaissance Literature: Donne & Herbert
Randi Marie Smith
In “Meditation XVII,” John Donne writes that “All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language.” In this course, we will examine two authors of the seventeenth century who were concerned with the relationships possible between man, the “one author,” and the world around him, including the erotic and spiritual realms. John Donne produced some of the best erotic and spiritual poetry of his time, while George Herbert created an elaborately structured series within The Temple. As a class we will examine in depth a selection of poetry and prose from both Donne and Herbert in order to develop an understanding of the literature as well as establishing contexts within which and approaches from which to read and write about it. While other authors may be mentioned and looked at briefly, the primary focus will be on Donne and Herbert. Upon finishing this course, a student should be able to apply similar in-depth analysis to writers from a variety of periods. In addition to the required reading, students will be responsible for ten unannounced reading quizzes, one weekly reading question, and two papers.
ENL 4273
Twentieth-Century British LIterature
Aniruddha Mukhpadyay
What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another – emperors, kings, farmers, dockworkers, soldiers, coolies, policemen.
– Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
Starting from the late sixteenth century through to the twentieth, large numbers of English men and women went out to the colonies to serve the empire, but at the same time there occurred a reverse colonial flow and large numbers of people from the colonies flocked to England, the very heart of the imperial machine. So even though the British set out to re-map large parts of the world in their own image, they ended up remaking their own identity in the image of the world.
In this class, we will look at those twentieth-century British novelists who trace their histories to England’s former colonies (with the exception of one), particularly in South-east Asia. We will thus engage with alternative realities of England and its impact in shaping the realities of its former colonies, seen from the perspectives of those whose identities are integrally tied to the colonial history. In the process, we will try to understand what happened, and is still happening, to those millions of people affected and/or displaced by that “incomprehensible power.” Oh, and we will also watch a few films to give us a taste of this multi-cultural atmosphere, and well, for enjoyment.
In my class, students will be required to submit two essays, one in the middle of the semester and the other one at the very end. Students will also have to write a handful of responses to the class readings and answer occasional short quizzes. Following are lists of the possible novels, films and critical readings we will take up in the class.
Novels:
- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
- V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
- Ruth Prawer, Jhabvala Heat and Dust (1975)
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)
- Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
- Monica Ali, Bricklane (2003)
Films:
- Merchant-Ivory Productions/Ruth Prawer, Jhabvala Shakespeare Wallah (1965)
- Damien O’Donnell/Ayub Khan-Din, East is East (1999)
- Metin Huseyin/Meera Syal, Anita and Me (2002)
Critical theory:
- Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back, 2nd edition
- Kershner, R. Brandon. The Twentieth-Century Novel: An Introduction.
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 less commonly read and known dream allegories. We will also look at Latin and Italian source materials included in our two textbooks. 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.
Required texts, which will most likely be ordered through Goerings Bookstore, will include the Norton Critical Edition of The Canterbury Tales (Kolve and Olson, eds.); the Norton Critical Edition of Dream Visions and Other Poems (Lynch, ed.); and The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, 2nd. ed. (Boitani and Mann, eds.).
Major course work includes: class participation and regular, unannounced quizzes (20%); translation exam (in October, 20%); three papers – the first (5–7 pages) on The Knight’s Tale and 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 or the allegories (5–7 pages). All three papers combine to represent 60% of final grade.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare
The course will consist of a close reading of selected plays by Shakespeare. These will include Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 & 2 Henry IV, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. The approach will be psychoanalytic and feminist, but the primary emphasis will be on understanding Shakespeare’s language. The course requirements are a midterm, final, and one five-page paper. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare: Learning by Doing
Since I work both on campus and in the theatre, as an actor and director, I approach plays with my students as something meant to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience. Each student has a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. Students should have no anxiety about doing things this way, for I judge student work by intent, what goes into the performance–not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is considered a bonus.
In my Shakespeare course, we will thus consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Much Ado about Nothing, and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, of course, offers a playwright’s critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There is a major course paper assessing your work as actor and using your own performance as the subject.
LIN 3680
Modern English Structure
In this class we survey English grammar based on principles of descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar. In other words, we will look at how we actually use English rather than how some authority says we should use English. Our focus is on preparing you to help English language learners understand how the English language works. Every week we will look at different points of grammar and how they can be taught in fun ways. This is a core course in the undergraduate minor for Teaching English as a Second Language. If you are not interested in learning how to teach English grammar and how to work with English language learners either in the USA or abroad, you should probably not take the class. Grades are based on class participation, grammar quizzes, a teaching presentation, and participation in the conversation partner program at the English Language Institute, an intensive English program for international students.
LIT 3003
Honors: Time & Narrative
Robert Kawashima
Narrative – the rendering of some set of events in the medium of language – is inextricably linked to the passage of time. The nature of this time that passes, however, far from being imposed upon art by reality, is the object of artistic speculation and experimentation. In fact, the history of narrative bears witness to, among other things, the emergence of various ideas about time – from ancient religious traditions about sacred time to modernist responses to the time of physics. For, as we will see, to compose a narrative is to answer, however unwittingly, a number of questions regarding time. What is the nature of time in itself? What is the relation of the individual to time? What is the relation of the narrative past to the present of the author (or storyteller)? In this course we will explore the various ways in which these and other questions have been answered in a wide range of narrative works representing a diversity of literary periods and genres. The course will be organized around a series of temporal themes: mythic time, epic time, historical time, novelistic time, etc. As befits the topic, our approach to narrative will be formalist and philosophical – which will be reflected in the required secondary readings (drawn from philosophy, literary theory and criticism, etc.). While the primary reading list has not been finalized, it will include both ancient and modern works: from Homer, Hesiod, and the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust.
LIT 3031
Studies in Poetry
Staff
No description available at this time.
LIT 3031
Studies in Poetry
Required texts:
- Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems, 1927–1979
- Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, eds., Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry
- Donald Justice, Collected Poems
- Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead
- J.D. McClatchy, Contemporary World Poetry
- Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch, Dictionary of Poetic Terms
- John E. Warriner, Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition (1986)
Poems in the books will be read, analyzed, and discussed by the entire class. If you don’t want to buy all of the books and to devour every word of them, this isn’t the class for you.
The poems that you will be assigned to write will be graded on quality as well as on quantity and on grammar as well as on content; we’re not in middle school now.
LIT 3041
Studies in Drama: Citizen Comedy & 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
- Thomas Middleton & Thos. Dekker, The Roaring Girl
- 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. Absences will affect final grades.
LIT 3043
Modern Drama: Learning by Doing
Since I work both on campus and in the theatre, as an actor and director, I approach plays with my students as something meant to be performed by an actor and ratified by an audience. Each student has a scene partner with whom he or she stages several scenes each semester. No matter what their background, students should have no anxiety about doing things this way for I judge student work by intent, what goes into the performance–not by finesse. If there is finesse, that is considered a bonus.
In my Modern Drama course we will look at: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and his various works for television, film, and radio; Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Pinter’s Old Times, No Man’s Land, The Lover, and Betrayal; and Shepard’s True West, Curse of the Starving Class, and Buried Child. There is a major course paper assessing your work as actor and using your own performance as the subject.
LIT 3173
Introduction to Modern Jewish Literature
Todd Hasak-Lowy
Introduction to Modern Jewish Literature provides an overview of Jewish literature since the end of the eighteenth century and introduces some of the problems, both methodological and theoretical, that such a study raises. This course will focus on the highly distinct character of Jewish literary production in the modern period, in comparison to both pre-modern Jewish writing and non-Jewish modern literature. Emphasis will be placed on reading this literature within its historical, social, and political context, and as such our readings will also include material on the Jewish Enlightenment, immigration, assimilation, Zionism, and other relevant topics. Though all texts will be available in English, a majority of