Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2003

Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.

Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses

Note: Only course descriptions are listed below. For a comprehensive summary of course numbers, sections, times and locations, titles, and instructors, see the following web page:

AML 3041

American Literature, 1865–present

Rosa Soto

In this course, we will focus on the major literary periods of American Literature, from 1865 to the present, including Realism (1860–1914), Modernism and 20th c. Experimental Writing (1914–1945), Traditionalism, and Contemporary American Writing. Exploring concepts of individualism, romance, ethnic writings, feminist writings, and cultural writings, we will examine and analyze the changing conditions of literature in the latter part of the 19th century and the entirety of the twentieth century.

We will explore a variety of genres, including plays, novels and poetry written by some of the best-known authors of the American canon, including Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Booker T. Washington, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Carlos Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and Arthur Miller.

Students will write weekly response papers (one page in length) as well as two papers, 5–7 pages in length and will take two exams. There may also be quizzes throughout the semester. The format for the class is discussion (a portion of your grade will also reflect this) so students should come to class prepared to discuss the writings.

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AML 4225

Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century American Narratives

David Leverenz

The readings for this course in late 19th century and early 20th century American fiction will be shaped in part by the students, especially toward the end. We will consider various issues, from “realism” and “naturalism” (what did and does it mean to feel “real” or “natural,” and why did that become a problem?), to the appeal of regional narratives for an emerging nation-state, to representations of tensions between races and classes, and why race and class seemed so real. We will also discuss how and why narratives of upward and downward mobility became so prevalent, and how those narratives featured “passing” in black and white as a prominent way of moving from one class or race to another.

A Tentative Syllabus

Other works may be substituted, e.g., Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, Alger’s Ragged Dick, Charlotte P. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” some stories of Charles Chesnutt, Jack London’s Call of the Wild or The Sea-Wolf, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, if most students haven’t read it. Much will depend on what students have read and want to read. Class format will be informal, emphasizing discussion. My introductory presentations will supply brief historical backgrounds and various interpretive arguments about the texts. I tend to focus on close readings in relation to historical contexts and cultural ideologies. I also try to make class sessions open to conflicting interpretations, so that all of us can try out ideas without feeling silly, weird, or stupid.

Work required: an initial close-reading exercise (5%), a 4–6 pp. comparative close reading (25%), a 15–18 pp. research essay (50%), weekly take-home quizzes and/or responses (20%). The lowest quiz grade will be dropped. No exams. Grading will be based entirely on your writing, though late essays or more than four unexcused class cuts (double period = 2 classes) will lower your grade.

Grading policy: I give A’s to essays using an original and spirited argument to illuminate complexities of language as well as theme. I give B+’s to well organized, well developed, relatively error-free essays with sparks of originality or daring, and B’s to competent essays needing more complex development and/or clearer focus. Lower grades mean greater problems with development, organization, and grammar. Recurrent grammatical errors lower the grade; spelling errors and typos don’t, within reason. The best essays sustain complex and/or audacious arguments; a good “B” essay will capably summarize and compare themes. I encourage “prewrites,” if handed in a week before the assignment is due, and I’d be happy to comment on drafts of the research essay.

If you want to know more about the course, call me at home (371-7461, before 9:30 p.m.) or e-mail me <Ldavid@english.ufl.edu>. Or just come see me at Turlington 4362; I’m there most days.

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AML 4282

From Bad Niggas and Queen Bees to Jay-Z and Lil Kim: Black Folklore’s Transgressions of Sexuality and Gender in the Black Nation

LaMonda Horton Stallings

We will be comparing and interrogating black nationalist and afro-centric theories on black sexuality with the theories of folklore on the construction of black sexuality and gender. This class utilizes folklore as a framework to understand how discourses of nationalism, class, and gender have impacted the representation of sexuality in black popular culture. First, we will be familiarizing ourselves with the various forms and genres found in black folklore. In doing so, we will ask and cover basic questions and themes importance to the community, narrative, audience, position of storyteller, transnational exchanges and context, and ability to shape/influence the social reality of blacks. The second and third objectives for the course are to explore how black folk and oral culture offers alternatives to traditional constructions/ideologies of gender and sexuality, while simultaneously underscoring the importance of economic class divisions amongst blacks. Topics to be covered as a result of this second frame: What is queerness?; What is queer about black literature and culture?; Notable differences between black queer culture and mainstream queer culture; the intersection between discourse of class, race, and sexuality; genres relegated to males and females; figures and genres which allow or disallow fluid sexual identities versus fixed identities; how class impacts the presentation of gender and sexuality in the folk. We will not simply talk about gender roles, but ask how various writers, filmmakers, and critics disrupt the notion of gender itself. Anyone offended by frank discussions or representations of sexuality should not enroll in this course!

Our framing for the discussion of gender and sexuality within a specifically cultural context will be led by an understanding of trickster folk figures in black culture, specifically the Bad Nigga and Queen B figures. However, we will not limit our assessment to the geographical boundaries of the black U.S. We will consider current works and artists influenced, be it negative or positive, by black nationalism and black arts aesthetics. Students should be prepared to utilize literary theory, film theory and criticism, cultural theory and criticism, as well as drama criticism. As indicated by the course title, we shall investigate various popular culture forms, black music from the blues to hip-hop and all its distinct variations (male, female, homo-hiphop, etc.), as well as figures such as Prince, Rupaul, Dennis Rodman, etc. to demonstrate the folk’s untangling of the dubious intertwining of racial and sexual discourse.

Required Texts. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, John Roberts’s From Trickster to Badman, Daryl Dance Cumber’s Shuckin & Jivin, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.

Films viewed (subject to change). Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues, Frilot’s Black Nation/Queer Nation, Riggs’s Black is Black Ain’t, Julien’s Darker Side of Black, Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou, Dunne’s Watermelon Woman/Dancehall Queen, Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite or Petey Wheatstraw.

Course Requirements. 10-minute presentation on readings, quizzes, a midterm oral exam, one final project as it relates to course material, class participation and discussion.

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AML 4311

Faulkner’s Masculinities

Anne Goodwyn Jones

In this course, we’ll be reading the often difficult fictions of William Faulkner and, through those readings, asking questions about masculinities in the 20th century U. S. South. In addition to close and careful readings of the Faulkner texts, we will read selections from the history and theory of masculinity, manhood, sexuality, and gender.

Requirements

This course is designed for senior English majors and other advanced students and is emphatically not recommended for beginners in the university-level study of literature and culture. Caveat emptor.

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AML 4453

American Protest Literature

Patricia Schmidt

Where are we going, Walt Whitman?; The doors close in an hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue Automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what Amer-
ica did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

– From “A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg, Berkeley, 1955

Vietnam protests, Camelot, the Johnson presidency, the rise of a counter-culture and the return of Richard Nixon – all are signatures of two decades that continue to beguile and frustrate thoughtful scholars and students alike. Remembered best, perhaps, is the disorder that erupted after the election of John Kennedy in 1960 and ended before Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. Intertwined in these decades are dual strands of idealism and cynicism, hope and despair. In a discussion of the sixties, though perhaps no more so than in any other age, the observer’s angle of vision is all. Unlike the equally complex but more homogeneously perceived drama of 1776 – when, in John Adams’s idiom, thirteen clocks amazingly struck as one – the complexities and contradictions of the sixties virtually define the period, existing as they do within a grid of values that has shaped not only the observer’s perceptions but has itself been shaped by the period.

Such observations suggest a strong connection between the nature of social change and the role of the past. If the past is prologue – as I believe it is – what hieroglyphs remain and how are they to be explained? To compress such inquiries into one course is daunting. But by utilizing a variety of readings, lectures, and film footage from 1950–1970, I believe that we can learn a great deal about such phenomena as the Vietnam anti-War Protests, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and the counter-culture. In the process, I would like us to come away with a deeper understanding of the ways in which our experiences shape the narrative structures by which we tell ourselves about our world, and the connection of such structures to the creation of meaning, both in fiction and nonfiction.

Several articles, book excerpts, and primary documents will be placed on Reserve. Writing assignments will consist of a 5–7 page essay, a research project prospectus, and a research paper. Viewing history through the lens of literature, and reading literature through the lens of history, creates a dialectic that should enrich our understanding of both, providing insight into the social changes that are still Blowin’ in the Wind.

Texts

Additional readings

Recommended

Films

Assignments

Written assignments include one short essay, a research project prospectus, and a research paper. All papers must be double-spaced with title pages, endnotes or textual notes (MLA or Chicago) and must include complete bibliographies. Late papers earn a drop of one letter grade for each day late.

Short Paper: (5 to 7 pages) 20 points. Due week four of the course. Carefully striving for a balance between liberal and conservative views, select a moment in the decade – the 1962 admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi; the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the July 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit; the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair; Eugene McCarthy’s decision in 1968 to enter the race for president; the anti-war “moratorium” of October 15, 1969; the May 4, 1970 slaying of students on the campus of Kent State. Compare the reporting of this event by Fortune, U.S. News, The National Observer to that of The New Republic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek. Any illusion of mimesis (an accurate copy) of reality will be challenged as you read these articles. Discuss this phenomenon. Attention must be directed to the way that language acts as a vehicle for mediating between external reality and cultural expectations. From what set of assumptions (about order, hierarchy, military might, etc.) did the writers, whose work you consulted, most likely begin? How are they reflected in his/her structure of ideas, examples, metaphors, evidence?

Research Project: (15 to 20 pages) 50 points. Due two weeks before the end of the semester. This project is an extension of the one above. The topic must receive the approval of the instructor and should again draw on primary sources. A one-page prospectus that outlines the topic, explains the approach being used and the questions considered, as well as a discussion of relevant information about sources, will be required by week eight. In this paper, you are being asked to look for what Alfred North Whitehead called “the curves of history.” Utilizing the concepts discussed above, your focus will shift to the larger canvas of which the above events are a part. Topics may range from contemporary reportage of: the consumerism of the fifties, the growth of the counter-culture, the role of the beats, and the push for sexual freedom, to an assessment of literary tastes, reportage of the 1968 presidential (Republican or Democratic) race, campus protest, the environmental or gay or women’s movement, etc. Your assignment is to explore “the idea of the variable ...and rate of change” during a particular time in the twentieth century and articulate the ways in which representations of such changes became “partial truths.” During the last two weeks of the class, you will be asked to discuss your process of discovery and the specific insights gleaned from your research with the class.

Plagiarism, the undocumented use of someone else’s work, will not be tolerated and will result in a flunking grade. If you do not know how or when to cite a source, see me.

Quizzes, homework, etc. 15 points

Class participation: 15 points

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AML 4685

Race and Ethnicity in American Literature and Culture:
Evolution of the Neo-slave Narrative in Black Literature and Culture

LaMonda Horton Stallings

This class will examine the slave narrative, the first (written) narrative genre in African American literature, to explore issues of self-determination. While U.S. citizens discuss the past horror and atrocities enacted by the institution of slavery, many are hesitant to acknowledge or comprehend how the institution has had an impact on black life of the present and future: police brutality, racial profiling, the issue of slavery reparations, the growing prison industry, taxation without representation in D.C., black representation and black self-representation, the subjugation and fear of the black male and female corpus, and the simultaneous conflicting growths of a black middle class and black lower-class masses.

Questions we should be concerned with throughout the semester: How do we define the institution of neo-slavery? What is the neo-slave narrative, and how does it differ from traditional slave narratives in form, aesthetics, theme, and reception. What are the reasons for the proliferation of neo-slave narratives? How do we define freedom? Has slavery of blacks in the African Diaspora been terminated or ended? How do blacks go about self-determination in the past, present, and future?

Required texts. Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, visual art by Kara Walker, Shakur’s Assata, Malcolm X’s By Any Means Necessary, classic slave narratives, a course pack reader, as well as selected music and lyrics.

Films viewed. Halle Gerima’s Sankofa, Oscar Micheaux’s Within our Gates, Hip Hop: The New World Order. Others TBA.

Course requirements. 10-minute presentation on readings, quizzes, a mid-semester 4-page paper, one 8-page final paper, class participation and discussion

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AML 4685

Race and Ethnicity in American Literature and Culture:
“The World Is A Ghetto!”: Race, Space, Migration and the City

Amy Abugo Ongiri

At the turn of the century 90% of all African Americans were living in the South and over 80% were rural. Denied the right to vote and receive equitable salaries and terrorized by anti-Black lynching violence that swept the south, a significant portion of the southern rural Black population decided to “vote with their feet” and migrate to northern cities. By 1970, after the migration had ended, less than 25% of the Black population continued to live in southern rural areas. This migratory act of refusal of southern cultural and political life significantly changed not only the cultural formation of Black life but American culture in general as African American poets, playwrights, musicians, intellectuals, and filmmakers theorized the transition from rural to urban. African America’s journey in the city from hope to despair and the creation of a unique urban “ghetto” culture continues to provide a prototype for understanding the urban experience throughout the world. This course begins with an examination of the images of hope and prosperity that the city often represents to migratory populations through popular blues songs and poetry of the Harlem renaissance. It ends with contemporary images of the city as a polarized, dangerous wasteland that is, nonetheless, central to the ways in which migratory populations configure their identity. We will consider the urban “ghetto” experience from Harlem to Rio de Janeiro, from Miami to Watts, from Berlin to the Bronx. Some of the questions that will inform this course will include: How does urban life shape racial identity? How do American notions of “the ghetto” inform international film? What kind of narrative conventions are produced by the urban experience? Why and how do texts from around the world repeat U.S. ghetto aesthetics and iconography?

The course will include some of the following texts:

Music:

Poetry:

Books:

Films:

Course requirements: a short presentation based on weekly course topics, a short paper due at midterm, participation in discussions, a final research paper.

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CRW 3110

Reading and Writing Short Stories

David Leavitt

What is a short story? No genre has so consistently eluded definition. Stories can range from eighty pages (Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”) to a single sentence (Amy Hempel’s “Housewife”). The purpose of this seminar will be to explore the parameters of this seductive and evasive form, from the standpoint both of the practitioner and the reader.

The seminar will be built around the idea that writers learn by reading. Therefore you may find the reading load heavier than is typical for a fiction workshop. Each week you will be asked to read a selection of stories by an English or American writer, and to arrive in class prepared to discuss them cogently. This conversation will take up roughly a third of our allotted time; the other two-thirds will be devoted to discussion of your own work (presented according to a pre-arranged schedule) and occasional in-class exercises.

For the first several weeks, I’ll be giving you assignments of a vaguely experimental nature – for instance, to tell a story from the viewpoint of an historical figure of your own choosing (Janis Joplin, Jack the Ripper). You’ll then set to work on stories of your own devising, which may have evolved from these exercises. The requirement of the class, in terms of writing, is that you complete two stories, the first by midterm and the second by term’s end. (The second may be an outgrowth of the first.) It goes without saying that attendance is mandatory, and that failure to show up (along with failure to do the reading) will have an adverse effect on your final grade. Grading will be based on your informed participation in the seminar, the critical acuity you show when judging other students’ writing, and your willingness to work hard: to be the best writer you can be, and to emerge at the end of the semester a better writer than you were at the beginning.

The reading many include stories by John Cheever, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Deborah Eisenberg, Allan Gurganus, Amy Hempel and W.G. Sebald.

Final note: although flexibility is essential to any writing workshop, so is structure. The same can be said – and must be said – of the writing process.

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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CRW 3110

Advanced Seminar in Fiction Writing

Jill Ciment

This course is an advanced fiction workshop. Basically, it will be run in the “traditional” workshop fashion with occasional lectures on structure, metaphor, plot, etc. Some writing exercises will be assigned at the beginning, but the primary emphasis is on self generated work. Each student will be expected to write two short stories, as well as complete a final draft of each.

Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished works, but ONLY after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously as they take their own writing.

Reading will be assigned on an individual basis.

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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CRW 3310

Advanced Poetry Workshop

William Logan

“At the same instant innumerable bands of fish are seen, some clothed in the most brilliant colors; the voracious crocodile stretched along at full length, as the great trunk of a tree in size; the devouring garfish, inimical trout, and all the varieties of gilded, painted bream; the barbed catfish, dreaded sting-ray, skate, and flounder, spotted bass, sheeps head and ominous drum; . . . the different bands seem peaceably and complaisantly to move a little aside, as it were to make room for others to pass by.”

– William Bartram, Travels of William Bartram

“Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow’s a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! whoo-oop! I’m a child of sin, don’t let me get a start! Smoked glass, here, for all! Don’t attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I’m cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it. . . . I’m the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, [text missing from description]. . . Whoo-oop!”

– Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

In this workshop we will attend as closely to words as a painter attends to paint. You will read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and write a poem a week. And we will listen closely to what those poets, and your poems, are saying. Every week the workshop will discuss poems from the past and poems from students, attending to voice, form, metaphor, and mystery.

This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who want to press their understandings of poetic language even deeper, into the swamps. Email submissions accepted.

Text: Norton Anthology of Modern Poems

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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CRW 3310

Intermediate Poetry Writings

Debora Greger

We read. We write. We discuss. We revise.

Kirillov: Have you seen a leaf, a leaf from a tree?
Stavrogin: Yes.
Kirillov: I saw a yellow one lately, a little green. It was decayed at the edges. It was blown by the wind. When I was ten years old I used to shut my eyes in the winter on purpose and fancy a green leaf, bright, with veins on it, and the sun shining. I used to open my eyes and not believe them, because it was very nice, and I used to shut them again.
Stavrogin: What’s that? An allegory?
Kirillov: N-no . . . why? I’m not speaking of an allegory, but of a leaf, only a leaf.

– Dostoyevsky

Prerequisites for Admission

  1. a grade of ‘B’ or better in CRW 2300
  2. permission of the instructor

See below for details on how to submit your manuscript by email or hard copy.

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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CRW 4905

Advanced Fiction Workshop

David Leavitt

This is an intensive fiction writing workshop intended for students who have already taken at least one upper level fiction course. The workshop will be organized and run along the lines of a graduate seminar, and is intended to serve as a sort of trial run for those of you who are thinking of getting an MFA degree in fiction. There will be less reading than in the 3110 course, but a lot more writing; you will be expected to turn in a minimum of five stories or novel excerpts over the course of the semester. The workshop will also be geared, although not exclusively, toward the needs of students interested in making the transition from story into novel. Toward that end, the only required text will be E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Other reading will be sporadic and will consist principally of essays on the craft of writing.

This will be a rigorous seminar, and is not intended for the faint of heart, for those who habitually miss class, or for those who don’t like to work. Instead it is meant for students who have already started to think of fiction writing as a vocation.

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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CRW 4906

Senior Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing

William Logan

“When I think of Florida, for instance, I think . . . of the moist, the slightly harsh, Sunday morning under the portico of the Charleston Hotel; I think of the inauspicious drizzle about the yellow omnibus, archaic and “provincial,” that awaited the departing guests – remembering how these antique vehicles, repudiated, rickety “stages” of the age ignorant of trolleys, affected me here and there as the quaintest, most immemorial of American things, the persistent use of which surely represented the very superstition of the past.”

– Henry James, The American Scene

“There are four and twenty changes in a linnet’s song. It’s one of the beautifullest songbirds we’ve got. It sings ‘toys’ as we call them; that is, it makes sounds which we distinguish in the fancy as the tollock eeke eeke quake le wheet; single eke eke quake wheets; or eek eek quake chowls; eege pipe chowl: laugh; eege poy chowls; rattle; pipe; fear; pugh and poy.”

– Mayhew’s London

Poetry must find an equivalent in language for things seen and felt. We will seek the “superstition of the past,” and bird-call, and many other things. This workshop will ask you to write a dozen poems, one per week, and to read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Walt Whitman to poems published this year. Each week the workshop will discuss your work and the work of your predecessors.

This is Florida’s most advanced workshop in poetry, for students who hope to become poets and possibly attend an MFA program – or who have developed an obsessive and perverse interest in writing. Students from this class have gone on to The University of Iowa, University of Virginia, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and other programs. Email submissions accepted.

Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses

To be admitted to upper-division creative writing courses Fall 2003 in advance registration, you must submit an example of your creative writing to the instructor of the course you wish to take. (Instructor mailboxes are in Turlington 4301; individual course descriptions will inform if submission by email is allowed.) For CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, you must submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, you must submit one short story.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than noon, Friday, March 21, 2003.

Your manuscript must be accompanied by a cover sheet including the following:

A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration on or about March 31, 2003. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor. This advance registration will not exhaust the spaces in all the classes. The remaining spaces will be filled in regular registration and during drop/add with the appropriate prerequisites.

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ENC 3250

Professional Communication

Wayne Losano

This upper-division professional communication course will consist of an intense review of grammar, mechanics, and style appropriate to writing in the “real” (as opposed to the academic) world, with an emphasis on concreteness and economy. Topics covered include the publication of professional articles, conference and other oral presentations, proposal writing, short communication formats (nonformal reports, business letters, etc.) and graphics. Four or five papers plus in-class writing/editing exercises.

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ENC 3254

Professional Writing in the Discipline

Instructor Varies (call 392–5421)

Except for 7 sections that are reserved for Education majors, this course is offered out of the Dial Center for Written and Oral Communication. N.B.: English majors should be aware that because the UF Undergraduate Catalog defines the requirement for the English major as ten courses “offered by the department,” the sections of ENC 3254 offered by the Dial Center for Written and Oral Communication cannot be counted toward the major.

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ENC 3310

Advanced Expository Writing

Wayne Losano

This is a standard, traditional (old-fashioned) composition course focusing on familiar rhetorical modes of development (narrative, description, analysis, etc.) with a heavy emphasis on style and rhetorical effectiveness and perhaps a nod towards “creative nonfiction.” Four or five papers plus analysis of selected essays and assorted in-class writing activities.

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ENC 3312

Advanced Argumentative Writing

Patricia Schmidt

One purpose of this course is to develop skills which will enable you to frame arguments which carry real weight and to develop confidence in deciding the strength of arguments made by others. To do so requires us to be able to demonstrate clearly the reasons for our beliefs and cogency of logical inference.

What we are “about” is more than that, however. In the words of Wayne C. Booth and Marshall W. Gregory, the authors of the text we shall use for the course, “we are moral agents attempting to do something in or to the world.” Thus, it is hoped that in addition to skills, this course will nourish the quality of thought which underlies good writing through readings selected for the course and through class discussions.

Robert Maynard Hutchins tells a story which nicely addresses the need for this second loftier goal:

My father came home from India about thirty years ago with the story of a British woman who was plagued to death by the questions of her Indian servant. Finally she said to him, ‘Why don’t you use your common sense?’ He replied, ‘Lady, common sense is the gift of God; I have only a technical education.’

Argumentation is a good deal more than a skill. The rhetorical assumptions which undergird it comprise a habit of mind. The course will be informed by an exploration of those rhetorical assumptions.

Texts

Requirements

Papers must be typed and double spaced with title pages. A bibliography and footnotes (or endnotes) should be used where appropriate. If the paper is late, its grade drops one letter grade for every day late. Staple or clip the pages. No binder or covers, please.

This is a demanding course so be prepared to work.

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ENC 4212

Professional Editing

Patricia Craddock

“Professional” Editing is the skill and art of preparing a document for presentation or publication as a part of someone’s profession. Editing is not about research and conceptualization, but it may be about organization or about gaps in research or arguments. Professional editors must learn to improve other people’s writing as well as their own. It is the editor’s job to make sure that there is nothing about the use of English in the work that will strike its anticipated audience as incorrect, confusing, or inappropriate; ideally, an editor also helps an author, whether or not the editor is the author, to interest and persuade the target audience. In this course we will study and practice these skills. We will focus on mastering features of editing that matter in real life to the members of the class; for instance, whenever possible we will address issues specific to the kinds of documents the class members expect to be writing. We will, however, spend much of our time on issues common to all kinds of editing, such as getting a firm grasp on correct and effective English sentence structure. We will discuss matters of style in the broad sense (adapting language and tone to the occasion) and deal with concrete examples in a workshop structure. Guest speakers will present information and exercises for student editing practice. Students should expect a lot of writing, or rather rewriting on the order of at least one written assignment per week.

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ENG 3010

The Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism

John Murchek

“However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. . . . Only since Freud have we begun to suspect what listening, and hence what speaking (and keeping silent), means. . . I dare maintain that only since Marx have we had to begin to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means. . .”

– Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (1965)

Students who take “theory” courses in English departments often ask what the wide array of texts by linguists, semioticians, sociologists, psychoanalytic theorists, Marxist theorists, anthropologists, speech-act philosophers, poststructuralists, feminists, postcolonialists, queer theorists and so on (or, in other words, the body of materials that comprise theory) has to do with the study of literature.

French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser suggests one way of answering that question. Literary criticism and theory have participated in the broader “dramatic and difficult trial” Althusser identifies as a defining feature of “our age,” “the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading.” Literary critics and theorists have argued over the definition of their objects of study and appropriate protocols of reading. They have isolated problems of form, genre, figure, intention, affect, mimesis, and historical context (to name a few), and produced rival resolutions to those problems. While literary critics and theorists have been immersed in this “trial,” others, working in the fields and disciplines I catalogue above, have been attempting to understand signifying processes from other perspectives, and working out ways of “reading” the psyche, the economy, the operations of ideology, the constraining and productive forces of institutions, cultural logics, the kinds of acts words can perform, the ways in which structures of meaning can tend toward their own subversion, and the problematic codings that produce and reproduce differences of sex, gender, and race. Even as literary criticism and theory have learned from the work of writers in these various fields and disciplines, bringing different forms of knowledge to bear on the analysis and theorization of literature, the collective enterprise of trying to understand the “‘simplest’ acts of existence” has led to the emergence of new fields of study and objects of knowledge. “Theory” has come to embrace this broader domain.

In this course, we will read texts drawn both from twentieth-century literary criticism and theory, and from “theory” understood in the larger sense. I have not yet finalized a syllabus for this course. However, readings from literary criticism and theory will probably begin with I.A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929), which notoriously displays the difficulties that inhere in the “simple” act of reading by quoting and discussing student responses to 13 poems, and may include books by or selections from the work of Cleanth Brooks, representatives of the Chicago school, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, Wayne Booth, Northrop Frye, E.D. Hirsch, Stanley Fish, Paul De Man, Fredric Jameson, Barbara Johnson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Joel Fineman, and Stephen Greenblatt. Readings from “theory” understood more expansively, will likely include selections drawn from the works of some of the following: Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said.

I anticipate that students will be evaluated on the basis of two tests, an essay of 8–10 pages, attendance and participation (which may include a group presentation), and a final examination.

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ENG 3011

The Major Critics

Richard Brantley

The emphasis is on the history of criticism from Plato to at least the end of the nineteenth century. About twenty essayists will receive close attention; they represent the classical, medieval, Renaissance, neoclassical, Romantic, and Victorian moments. A final unit on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud will lay the groundwork for Modern and Postmodern theory (which forms the focus in ENG 3010). Directions for both the midterm and the non-cumulative final are as follows: Identify the following fifteen passages, author and title (60 points). Comment on two of them (30 points each). In commenting take class discussion into account and go beyond it.” Twenty typed, double-spaced pages of critical response are required, though not all at the same time. The text is Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato: Revised Edition.

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ENG 3115

Introduction to Film Criticism and Theory

Scott Nygren

This course will introduce current theoretical contexts for engaging the contemporary media environment, and will consider the writing of theoretical texts and the making of new films as parallel activities.

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 audience identification, social formations and cultural context as articulated through a series of post-structural, postcolonial and postmodern methodologies. After introducing phenomenology and structuralism as points of departure, the class will consider psychoanalysis, ideology, deconstruction, discourse, gender and race en route to postcolonial and postmodern approaches.

Our principle purpose will be to investigate the conjuncture of theoretical issues with 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.

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ENG 4133

Psycho-Cinem-Analysis

Richard Burt

“The age of media,” Friedrich Kittler writes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, “renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is mad and who is faking it.” This course will take up this proposition by examining theoretical accounts of psychosis drawn from psychoanalysis and media theory in relation to the representation of psychosis in art and popular films, ranging from the lonely streets and dead ends of film noir to the dark spaces of science fiction. The techno-delusional systems and discourse networks of psychosis mark in theory and in film the ambiguous intersection of the human and post human (cyborg), madness and media, urban space and architecture, peace and war, and gender and sexuality.

Readings to include Dr. Daniel Schreber, Memoirs of My Mental Illness; Sigmund Freud, writings on Schreber, psychosis, and the uncanny; Jacques Lacan, writings on psychosis and the Lapin sisters; Friedrich Kittler, selections from Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Laurence Rickels, The Vampire Lectures; Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely; Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.

Films to include Edgar G. Ulmer, Detour; Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho and Vertigo; David Cronenberg, Videodrome and Crash; Terry Gilliam 12 Monkeys (remake of Chris Marker, La Jettée); David Fincher, Fight Club and The Game; David Lynch, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive; Craig Bierko, Thirteenth Floor; Ridley Scott, Bladerunner; Shinya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo: The Iron Man; Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, and the Steven Soderbergh remake; Mark Pellington, Mothman Prophecies; Alex Proyas, Dark City (with Keifer Sutherland as Dr. Daniel Schreber); and several films related to the Papin sisters: The Maids, Sister, My Sister, La Ceremonie, and Les Blessures Assassines.

Note: This will be a very demanding course in terms of intellectual challenge and workload. All films will have to be viewed outside of class. A working knowledge of film and some knowledge of media and psychoanalytic theory are highly recommended.

For more information, see the course WWW site, at <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/~rburt/psychocinema/>

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ENG 3122

History of Film II

Robert Ray

This course asks you to use the movies Casablanca and Breathless as memory theaters for storing and recalling (1) the events of the 1930s, especially the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of German fascism; and (2) the course of post-War cinematic history, especially American film noir, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave.

The course covers film history from 1930–1965. After beginning with two movies of German origin, Fritz Lang’s M and MGM’s Grand Hotel, the course’s first half will trace the parallel developments in Hollywood and Europe, using the biography and writing of Walter Benjamin as an allegory of popular culture’s appeal and Nazism’s danger. Part I ends with the Fall of Paris, both the historical event (which drove Benjamin further into a fatal exile) and its Hollywood representation (in Casablanca). Part II traces the two roads that diverge from that moment: the film noir of movies like The Big Sleep and the neorealist rejection of Hollywood Cinema. These two filmmaking practices, apparently so contradictory, converge in the French New Wave, whose most famous movie, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, explicitly invokes the image of Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca.

Readings

Assignments and Grading

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

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

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

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ENG 4135

National Cinemas

Mary Watt

Course description not available at this time.

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ENG 4136

Hypervideo: Rethinking Video Production

Scott Nygren

This course derives from a double convergence in contemporary media culture. On the one hand, cultural theory and innovative artistic practices now regularly overlap and exchange techniques. On the other hand, computers and video have now 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 G4s. 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 strategies for effectively using this equipment and your participation will form a significant part of the course.

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ENG 4136

Film and Video Production

Roger Beebe

This course is designed as an introduction to a broad range of practices sometimes labeled “experimental video.” The focus of the course will be exclusively on non-narrative approaches to the theory and practice of videomaking. Students will work on a number of short projects throughout the semester (about one every two weeks) that engage simultaneously with different theoretical problems, technological challenges, and aesthetic strategies. The projects will span all of the stages of video production from conception to sound editing as well as a wide variety of aesthetic forms. The course will conclude with a short final project of your own devising that grows out of one or a number of the theories and formal approaches that we have explored during the semester.

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ENG 4139

Television & Electronic Culture: Para-histories of the Network

Terry Harpold

A course in neglected and alternate histories of emergent network culture. In addition to texts by the usual suspects (Bush, Engelbart, Kay, Licklider, McLuhan, Nelson, Sutherland, etc.), and contemporary theorists of the network (Deleuze and Guattari, Taylor), we will read texts from literary authors (e.g., Borges, Burroughs, works by members of the Oulipo) and critical-theoretical authors (e.g., Freud on memory and perception, Yates on medieval and early modern mnemotechnic) whose writings suggest new approaches to the formal and procedural methods of network culture.

Course requirements include a short exercise in methods of procedural fiction, an in-class group presentation and a research paper. Writing requirements will not be especially heavy, but the reading load will be significant, and students should be prepared for this. This class will make extensive use of MOOville, the text-based virtual reality environment of UF’s Networked Writing Environment (NWE). No prior experience with MOOville is required, though a basic familiarity with the WWW and Internet chat/messaging tools will be to the student’s advantage.

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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.

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ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: The Internet

Greg Ulmer

The Internet is not only a new technology but a new institution of language use. Considered within the disciplinary framework of English (the heir of the Greek invention of alphabetic literacy and its institutionalization in School), the Internet still lacks a writing practice specific to its own possibilities as a medium. This problem is focused by the critical theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio who warns that the Internet makes possible a “general accident” occurring simultaneously worldwide, and at the same time destroys the civic (public) sphere of critical thinking capable of addressing this danger. The seminar uses contemporary forms of media, theory, and popular culture to generate and test a new use of the Internet to meet these challenges and opportunities. Taught in the Networked Writing Environment (NWE), the course uses the web site as the medium of learning. No previous experience with web site composition is necessary. Recommended reading: Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet.

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ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: Films of Jean-Luc Godard

Maureen Turim

Director of over seventy films over 55 years Jean-Luc Godard’s films have a unique art and depth. They comment philosophically on modern life, often with sharply political analysis. They innovate with film form, reflexively. They innovate with image construction and montage. They have some of the most complex and engaging soundtracks found in film. They are marked by humor and irreverence. Godard loves to quote literature and philosophy, and engages with popular culture and advertising. This seminar will explore Godard’s films and video works as texts of modernity and postmodernity. Students will work on projects throughout the semester and produce two eight page papers. This is an honors seminar open to any students who have an interest in film even if they have never taken a film course. The class will be limited to fifteen students who should come prepared to discuss, debate, and actively learn.

Books May Include

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ENG 4936

Honors Seminar: A Lost Lady: Willa Cather and Literary Politics

Stephanie Smith

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1923. She served as the fiction editor for McClure’s Magazine, where she had a great deal of influence on other writers of her time. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald was so worried that she would think he’d stolen from her novel The Lost Lady to produce The Great Gatsby that he wrote her an apology.

Yet for many years of American letters she was considered a “minor” American writer. This honors seminar will not only re-examine Cather’s work, but will follow the fortunes of “literary politics” in reviewing how this American writer was both made and, for a period of time, “lost.”

Requirements A bi-weekly reading journal, mid-term project and final paper.

Tentative Reading List

Including selected criticism, TBA

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ENG 4940

Internship

Undergraduate Coordinator

The English Department at the University of Florida offers three* credit hours of internship to its majors who provide the following to the Undergraduate Coordinator for approval:

Once the Undergraduate Coordinator has approved the internship requested by the student, the department will register the student for the internship credits.

Upon completion of the internship:

*For two credit hours, the student would need to work 8 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 16 hours per week for Summer A or B.

*For one credit hour, the student would need to work 4 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 8 hours per week for Summer A or B.

Please note the following limitations on the English Internship:

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ENG 4953

Confessional Poetry/Confessional Culture

Marsha Bryant

What do we mean when we label a text “confessional”? The word has a history of ambiguous and even contradictory meanings that blur boundaries between private and public, shame and exhibitionism. For example, “Confess” can mean. . .

This course will grapple with these meanings as we explore American confessional poets in three contexts:

  1. as a postmodern literary movement;
  2. as an emergence from postwar culture;
  3. as a model for contemporary confessional culture.

Our texts will include poetry by Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Ted Hughes; Kaysen’s recent memoir Girl, Interrupted; talk shows; and a course packet. Assignments will include 3 papers, an oral report, and an essay exam.

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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.

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ENL 3112

English Novel: Eighteenth Century

Brian McCrea

We will read eight eighteenth-century British novels. 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 how social status (which these writers typically use the word “quality” to reference) becomes problematic in these fictions, as economic and social changes create new kinds of wealth and new freedom for women. Whether that “freedom” is substantial or illusory will be a topic we pursue throughout the semester. 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 the novel as, at once, a product of a specific culture and a long-enduring literary phenomenon.

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.

All papers must be typewritten (or done on a word processor). I am happy to read and comment upon drafts of papers, and encourage students to use e-mail to submit early versions.

Books

All books will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1717 N. W. 1st Avenue.

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ENL 3122

English Novel: Nineteenth Century – Marriage, Gender & the Law

Kristen Chancey

This course will examine the profound changes in the institution of marriage, both in ideology and practice, which took place in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, and how those shifts were reflected in the popular literature of the period. Variously considered a vital instrument of social stability and progress, a much-threatened, cherished ideal, and an outdated, degraded weapon of bourgeois tyranny, marriage was an increasingly fraught area of debate throughout the period. New ideas about gender roles and political equality seriously influenced these heated arguments, and as the debates continued both in the social and legal arenas, they took more and more of a central place in the fictional. For this reason, few nineteenth-century novels are without a marriage plot of some sort, but this course will focus on seven in which marriage, and its ancillary concerns of gender and social class, takes center stage as the primary crisis of the narrative. How did changes in gender roles change the way that marriage was delineated in the popular imagination? How did the advancement of the middle class and its values transform the definition of a “good” marriage, both in fiction and reality? Why does the traditional happy marriage ending become increasingly complicated and in some ways frustrated as the period progresses? These are just a few of the many questions this course hopes to answer by examining these works, in an effort to achieve a fuller understanding of one of the most important ideological controversies of the nineteenth century.

Texts

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ENL 3122

English Novel: The Nineteenth-Century Novel as Great Exhibition

Megan Norcia

In 1851 the Great Exhibition, nicknamed the “Crystal Palace” by Punch, opened in celebration of arts and manufactures in England. Drawing international visitors and participants, the Crystal Palace was a defining event of the Victorian period; it showcased products from all over the Empire and attempted to represent and contain the entire world in neatly labeled galleries. Using the Crystal Palace as our model, we will be reading representative types of the nineteenth-century novels of manners (Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), sensation (Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone), country/village life (Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford), and empire (H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim). We will mine these texts for artifacts reflective of nineteenth-century culture and customs, assembling and arranging these “finds” in our own “Great Exhibition” for the final paper.

Course requirements include three papers of four pages each (or two long papers), an annotated bibliography, participation in the class email list, and an informal presentation of the final paper.

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ENL 3210

Studies in Middle English Literature

R. Allen Shoaf

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with English literature of the period 1300–1475 (attending also to principal sources and influences from earlier periods) and to introduce them to the main issues of current scholarly debate about the literature of the period. Readings include selections from Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, Boethius, the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, Malory, and various anonymous writers of the period.

The design of the course reflects a movement from the simple and preparatory to the increasingly complex and advanced. The amount of reading early in the course, if we look to number of pages only, is not particularly large; as the course progresses, however, the amount and the difficulty of the reading increase steadily, culminating in reading at least one text in the original Middle English (all other texts in the course are in translation). In keeping with this design, the final paper in the course is the item that counts most in determining a student’s final mark (roughly 40%): the work of the course aims toward preparing the student to write a significant final paper on a text or texts and topics addressed in the course.

The requirements of the course are straightforward: one in-class examination; one take-home examination; one essay; unannounced quizzes on the reading.

Class attendance is mandatory and is strictly monitored: the first two absences (150 minutes = 1 week) will be excused, but each absence thereafter, unless excused for extraordinary reasons and in writing, reduces the final mark by 10%.

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ENL 3230

Age of Dryden and Pope

Mel New

The course will cover the period of English literature from 1660–1744, along with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and will concentrate on the poems and satires of Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and the philosophy of John Locke, among others. The main subject we will be examining is how these authors all managed to anticipate (indeed predict) the madness of much in modern intellectual life, beginning with unintelligible writing by critics of literature (whom Pope labeled “Dunces” in his famous Dunciad); to the incoherencies of religious and political fanaticism (which Swift labeled the “perpetual possession of being well-deceived; of being a fool among knaves); and concluding with the vices and follies of a society that was losing its sense of art amidst a flood of bad writing, and something called “popular culture (what Dryden would label “the realms of Nonsense, absolute.” (He also wrote that “Loads of Sh** almost chok’d the way” but we will try not to be vulgar in this course). There will be written work and students will be expected to read the assignments.

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ENL 3241

The Romantic Period

James Twitchell

This is an undergraduate survey of English romantic writers. It is roughly divided into nine parts: an introduction to romanticism, and then eight sections on individual writers. There is, relative to other English courses, little outside reading, as the main concern of the course is a careful reading of selected representative works. This is deceptive, for students might assume that the course will therefore be easy. There will be weekly quizzes (embarrassingly objective for an English course) and two short papers (not necessarily research papers). The quizzes give me a chance to get answers to questions I think are important; the papers give you a chance to form answers to questions you think are important. The class is informal and relaxed, but the quizzes and papers are not. The quizzes stress material covered in class and so it might be suggested that you take good and careful notes.

Texts

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ENL 3241

The British Romantics

Richard Brantley

The emphasis is on such major poets as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The approach is historical, interdisciplinary, biographical, and formalistic. Directions for both the midterm and the non-cumulative final are as follows: “Identify the following fifteen passages, author and title (60 points). Comment on two of them (30 points each). In commenting take class discussion into account and go beyond it.” Twenty typed, double-spaced pages of critical response are required, though not all at the same time. The text is David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers.

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ENL 3251

Victorian Literature

Chris Snodgrass

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 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 on (1) one 1000-2500 word detailed poem analysis (approximately 4-8 typewritten/printed pages); (2) your average score on the weekly one-page “Questions” (3-5 questions or more, at least one on each work), submitted at the first session of each new week (or each new writer, as appropriate); (3) your average score on the weekly 1-2 page “Themes & Ideas” papers (3-5 “ideas”) submitted on either the last session of each new week (or each new writer, as appropriate) or the first session of the very next week; (4) your degree of active class participation and general preparedness during each class session; (5) a group project and presentation; and (6) a comprehensive final exam. The poem analysis, weekly short papers, class-preparation grade, the group presentation, and any extra-credit work will constitute approximately 70% of your final grade; the final exam will constitute approximately 30% of your final grade.

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ENL 4220

Elizabethan Prose Fictions

John Perlette

Course Description: In the realm of Elizabeth I, in the era of Shakespeare and Spenser, in the Golden Age of English lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry, prose fictions formed a large, popular, and important component of the literary production of the time. Highly varied in form and style, these stories and tales also served a variety of ideological functions. The course will concentrate on prose fictions written and/or published during the reign of Elizabeth I (1559-1603). Specifically, we will focus on the interplay between text and society in terms of developments such as the impact of print, the persecution of witches, the decline of the aristocracy, the emergence of individualism and the transvaluation of labor. Our fundamental concern will be with the textual production and/or subversion of ideologies of gender and of status and class. My goal is to provide a course useful not only to students interested in the Renaissance, but also for those interested more generally in narrative fiction (or the novel) and ideological critique, in feminist/gender approaches, and in the relationship of literature to society.

Texts: The required primary texts are

Reading List: Tentative reading list, in the order of reading

Other titles may be substituted for or added to the above. This primary list will be supplemented by a secondary list of brief critical analyses or theoretical discussions (in xerox copy).

Prerequisites: Technically, none, though you should bear in mind that this is an upper division course in which you may be competing with people who have had some experience in thinking about and analyzing literary texts. I do not expect you to know anything about Elizabethan England or its literature, but I will expect you to know how to write a focused, organized, well-developed essay with a minimum of mechanical (i.e., spelling, grammar, punctuation) errors. Requirements will include two in-class essay exams and a course paper.

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ENL 4273

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

Phillip Wegner

In one of her best-known interventions in the literary debates of the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf claims “that in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” As a consequence of this change, Woolf goes on to suggest, “All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” It would be the project of the variety of artistic and cultural movements that we now describe as modernism to give voice to the experience of these and many other of the explosive social and cultural changes of the new century. In this course, we shall investigate some of the issues surrounding the modernist revolution, while also considering modernism itself as a kind of revolution, as they are raised in the work of three of the most important “British” authors of the first half of the twentieth-century: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In addition to exploring the rich aesthetic and formal issues raised by these writers’ work – what, for example, did T. S. Eliot mean when he wrote that Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses is “not a novel?” – we shall look at the way that these writers’ works respond to and help us understand the cultural and social histories in which they unfold. Indeed, one of the first questions these writers force us to confront is what is “British” about British literature in this moment – after all, Conrad is the child of exiled Polish patriots and only learns English as an adult; Joyce is Irish, writing in a language that is always for him, as his character Stephen Dedalus puts it, “an acquired speech;” and Woolf tirelessly interrogates the status of the woman artist in relationship the traditional centers of English cultural power. Similarly, these works will lead us into an investigation of the relationship between literature and the fundamental realties of the new century: the massive institution of British imperialism; the creation of a global culture and the shrinking of space; industrial technology; the rise of mass culture; the experience of the city; the proximity of social revolution; new media such as film; and the changing place of women in culture and society. Finally, all of these works will ask us important questions about the roles of the artist and the work of art in this newly emerging world.

We will read the following works: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Nostromo; James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; (we will also use Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

Students will be expected to keep up with all of the readings throughout the semester (and they are extensive and sometimes quite challenging); keep a reading journal; regularly attend and participate in class discussions; and produce three formal course papers evaluating the work of each author in relationship to the issues discussed in class.

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ENL 4311

Chaucer

James Paxson

This course will familiarize students with the major narrative poetry of Chaucer. We will devote most of our study to several of The Canterbury Tales and to Chaucer’s great romance, Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine at least one of Chaucer’s long allegorical poems, The House of Fame, along with Latin and Italian source materials included in our main textbook. Students will learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English (the form of the English language from about 1100-1500 C. E.), 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, and the poetic representation of gender. Particular focus will fall upon the issue of subjectivity, since Chaucer – 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 be available at Goerings’ Bookstore, will include the Norton Critical Edition of The Canterbury Tales (Kolve and Olson, ed.); the Colleagues Press edition of Troilus and Criseyde (Shoaf, ed.); The Cambridge Chaucer Companion (Boitani and Mann, ed.); and The House of Fame in a course packet.

Major course work includes: class participation and regular, unannounced quizzes (20%); translation exam (in late September 2003, 20%); three papers–the first (5–7 pages) on classical myths that served as sources for Chaucer (20%); the second (5–7 pages) on The House of Fame (5–7 pages); the third (5–7 pages) on any critical or thematic problem concerning The Canterbury Tales (5–7 pages). All three papers combine to represent 60% of final grade.

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ENL 4333

Shakespeare

Robert Thomson

This course will involve a close study of a dozen or so of the plays and a number of readings from the poems and elsewhere. Emphasis will be laid upon the problem stating-solving-mediating nature of the dramas. This will necessitate a close reading of the texts; a recognition of the dramatic and verbal ironies that abound; close attention to the paradoxes and ambiguities which motivate the actions and observation of the stark oppositions which are continually reiterated.

We will be lead into a contextual study of both the world within and the world without the Elizabethan theatre, with its concern for an orderliness and its doubts and confusions as the new seventeenth century learning questioned and undermined the values and social /political / religious assumptions of its society. We may then come to appreciate how these great plays and poems still speak to us with immediacy after a span of nearly four hundred years.

I intend to spend time with the following plays and in addition may spare more than a passing glance at one or two others – particularly making use at the beginning of the course of the early plays, Titus Andronicus and Richard III and also The Sonnets.

The Text for the course is The Norton Shakespeare edited by Stephen Greenblatt and others. It is in stock at Goering’s Bookstore. Any recent and annotated text would suffice but since I will be giving references to the texts in the above edition and occasionally referring to its introductory essays and bibliographies, it would be perhaps more prudent to use the recommended text. Throughout the course of the semester I will draw your attention to particularly noteworthy essays and critical studies from the lists given by Greenblatt in his text. My intention is not simply to display my own preferences and prejudices but also to let you know where much of the substance of my discussions of the plays comes from. In addition I will frequently offer you recommended readings of recent criticism that has been published since our text went to press, particularly those arising from new historicist, feminist, psychological and anthropological approaches to the texts. I will also take it upon myself to advise you of the more useful Web-Sites I have encountered, particularly those that offer bibliographical, critical and explicatory information.

Assignments

Two essays will be required of you (each ca. 2500 words) and in addition there will be a number of in-class tests. There will be no final exam. Oral participation will be expected and rewarded. Absences – I intend to make periodic register checks – will be penalised, as will late papers. Plagiarism which is detected will result in a failing grade for the course.

If at any time you need to see me or discuss a problem I can be reached on the phone, 392-1060 ext 267. My office (Turlington 4342) hours will be 8–9 AM each morning of classes or by appointment. I can also be reached by email: <rthomson@english.ufl.edu>.

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ENL 4333

Shakespeare

Sid Homan

This is a course where we learn about the theatre by “doing it.” Each student works with a scene partner, and so the “text” for each class is the couple’s performance of a scene. After that performance, Mr. Homan solicits comments from the fellow students who form the audience; then he works the scene with the actors, trying out options, exploring what they have done, rehashing the scene. Scene work is judged not by finesse, though that is a welcomed by-product, but by intention, what the students put into their work. As a result, English majors over the years have done as well as, say, Theatre majors who, in turn, have done no better than Mechanical Engineering majors. The principle here is that a play is not just a literary text, but something that exists in performance, something that has rhythm, space, dimensions, movement, something physical and something happening – all this is inseparable from the actual text on the page, the script.

We will study the following plays by Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Much Ado about Nothing, and Macbeth, as well as Stoppard’s reworking of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Since the course is ultimately about the theatre, as experienced through its greatest playwright, students will attend several “Evenings with the Playwrights” at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre, each evening devoted to the work of a single playwright. They will also assist Mr. Homan in a production of the Weill/Brecht musical, The Threepenny Opera, which he will be directing in the fall.

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ENL 4333

Shakespeare

Peter L. Rudnytsky

This course, the last in a four-semester sequence, will examine the last phase of Shakespeare’s career, from 1606 to 1613. The Plays to be studied are

Several plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries will likely also be considered. The requirements are a midterm, a final, and one five-page paper. My approach will be largely psychoanalytic and feminist, with considerable attention given to developing skills of close reading. Although this course is part of a sequence, each semester is independent of the others, and no previous familiarity with Shakespeare’s works is assumed.

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LIN 3680

Modern English Structure

Roger M. Thompson

We will focus on the structure of the English language from the standpoint of descriptive rather than prescriptive linguistics. In other words, rather than teach you “correct” grammar, I will help you explore how English speakers use grammar as they interact with each other in a variety of settings. This should be useful for future English teachers who will work with students from a variety of backgrounds, whether native or non-native speakers of English. It should also be useful for anyone interested in sociolinguistics.

Grades

Exams Have Three Sections

Class participation points are based on class attendance and participation in classroom activities.

At the end of the semester the points are totaled (including the bonus points) and divided by 500. The resulting percentage is converted to a grade according to the following scale: 90–100 is an A, 87–89 B+, 80–86 B, 77–79 C+, 70–76 C, 67–69 D+, 60–66 D. The bonus points do make a difference so I suggest you look into the interaction program at the beginning of the semester since it is not a possibility in December.

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LIT 3003

Forms of Narrative: World Travel Narratives

Afshin Hafizi

One of the central aims of this course is to reflect upon the cultural phenomenon of travel and to investigate the relationship between the discourse of travel and the process of identity formation. I would propose that economy as metaphor can be used to understand this relationship. In discussing economical categories to shed light on the phenomenon of travel, I will utilize the writings of George Bataille and his distinction between a restricted economy (the conventional economy of maximization of profit, exchange, etc) and a general economy.

This course on travel narratives would be a historical as well as theoretical survey of major and minor works, fictional or non-fictional, representing the authors’s personal or cultural experience of the foreign. Starting from the Odyssey and covering some of the Medieval narratives of peregrination (Marco Polo in Italy and Ibn Battuta in Morocco), the course would concentrate more on the 19th and 20th centuries. The travel narratives of these periods are analysed within the context of colonialism (19th and the first part of the 20th century) as well as within the context of the phenomenon of tourism (roughly the second part of the 20th century). The course will cover some or all of the following works:

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LIT 3031

Studies in Poetry

Chris Snodgrass

[This course will help fulfill the requirements for a number of the curriculum “tracks” for a department major, including but not limited to the British Literature, British and American Literature, American Literature, and Poetry tracks. It is also strongly recommended for anyone who might consider going to graduate school in English, as well as anyone who just wants to understand about “the poetic,” in many ways the foundation of all artistic feeling.]

If human history and modern psychology have taught us anything, it is that the poetic impulse – our need to visualize, to fictionalize, to play with different paradigms of reality – has always existed at the root of the human experience. This course will study in detail primarily lyric poetry, in order to understand the technical interrelationships between poetic structure and meaning and the varied and complex ways by which human “themes” and reactions emerge – in short, what poems mean and how they come to mean what they mean. On occasion we will try to probe the assumptions which underlie the works of art – the “why’s” implicit in the artists’ approaches to their themes as well as the themes themselves.

Prior training in studying and analyzing poetry is not required. If you don’t know much about poetry now, this course will change that. By the end of the term you will learn: (1) a solid general knowledge of poetic devices, metrical forms, and other elements of poetics; (2) the ability to do a meticulously detailed and discerning analysis of a poem, showing a clear understanding of how the specifics of language, form, and structure create meaning; and (3) the ability to draw out and deal intelligently with whatever larger thematic patterns or philosophical issues you find in the poems of different cultures and historical periods.

Basis for final grade: (1) 50%: two papers (25% each): the first will be a detailed poem analysis; the second will be either another poem analysis, or a paper comparing the different assumptions of several authors who have written on a particular specific theme, or a poem written by you, along with an attached detailed commentary on the logic of your poem and what techniques you attempted to utilize in it. (2) 30%: your average score on quizzes/exams, both intermittent “pop quizzes” and scheduled larger quizzes/exams. (3) 20%: class participation and general daily preparedness.

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LIT 3031

Studies in Poetry: The Three Johns

Mel New

The course will read the poetry of John Donne, John Milton, and John Dryden. The primary focus will be on the tools one must acquire in order to read poetry well, and there will be some emphasis given to understanding the formal structures of poetry – all those things you should have been taught in high school or in Freshman English but somehow never got to. Paradise Lost is one of the poems that will be read. There will be written work and students will be expected to read the assignments.

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LIT 3041

Studies in Drama: Medieval English Theater

James Paxson

Medieval English Theater will be an introduction to the dramatic texts of the later Middle English period, specifically the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Primarily, this designation covers the out-of-doors, guild-sponsored pageants of the four major and complete urban mystery cycles: Chester, Wakefield (also called the Towneley Plays), York, and N-Town (once labeled the Ludus Coventriae). It also concerns the morality plays found predominantly in the unique Macro Manuscript. We will study one complete mystery cycle, Wakefield, along with excerpts from other complete cycles as well as a number of major morality plays, such as the dramatic allegories Everyman, Mankind, Wisdom, and selections from The Castle of Perseverance. In addition, we’ll consider fragmentary Middle English cycle pageants such as the Digby plays, the two Coventry plays of the Shearmen and Tailors, the Brome Abraham and Isaac,