Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2005
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 Literatures II: Work, Class, and The American Dream
Jessica Livingston
This survey will examine literature about work and class. In particular, it will focus on historical moments when capitalism is in crisis or change – the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, and the current shift to neoliberal capitalism which is marked by outsourcing, downsizing, and decreasing real wages. The course will begin with Ragged Dick, which popularized the notion of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” and end with the cult hit, Office Space, which bears the slogan “Work Sucks.” The problem of how these narratives address economic inequality in a country that promises opportunity to everyone as well as who gets excluded from prosperity will be central to our discussions. Readings will include historical and critical studies, popular nonfiction, novels and short stories.
Possible texts include:
- Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
- Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner
- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
- Meridel LeSueur, Women on the Breadlines
- Ann Petry, The Street
- Francisco Jimenez, Circuit: Stories from the Life of A Migrant Child
- Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
- Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries
- David Gates, ed., Labor Days: An Anthology of Fiction About Work
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
- Coursepack – excerpted readings such as Karl Marx’s “Working Day,” chapters from Tera Hunter’s ‘To Joy My Freedom, and Studs Terkel’s Working
- Films – Babyface, The Grapes of Wrath, Office Space
AML 3270
African American Literature I: Beginning to 1946
African American Literature: Beginning to 1946 will provide a survey of the most significant writings of Black Americans from 1760 to 1946. It is meant to introduce students to a variety of authors, genres, and periods. This course will emphasize the development, continuities, and discontinuities within the literary tradition. We will pay special attention to issues of fictional representation of the black experience, including issues of heritage, identity, feminism, sexuality, and the idea of the African diaspora. Literature to be supplemented with film, art, and critical readings.
Required texts:
- Norton Anthology of African American Literature
- Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent
- Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Richard Wright’s Native Son
Requirements:
- Two tests (45%)
- one critical paper (20%)
- participation (15%)
- quizzes (20%)
AML 3285
Survey of Asian-American Literature
James McDougall
This course is a survey of Asian American literature and topics from the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies. Beginning with the Exclusion Act of 1882 and ending with “model minority” discourses at the close of the twentieth century, the course will examine major events that have gone into the formation of an archive of Asian American texts, and recurring issues of biopolitics, identity, racial stereotypes, colonial/postcolonial subjectivities, (im)migration, and representation that appear in these texts.
Some of the works we will be reading include:
- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
- Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate
- Frank Chin’s Donald Duk
- David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly
- Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrant Manga
- Him Mark Lai, et al.’s Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island
- Agha Shaheed Ali’s A Country Without a Post Office
- Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Though an important aspect of the course material is the respective cultural backgrounds of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, and Southeast Asian American writers and scholars, the main thrust of the course is evaluating regional, linguistic, religious, historical, political, and legal discourses in the production of different narratives of what it means to be American.
Because the primary texts include poetry, short stories, novels, film, drama, lyrical sequences, and graphic novels, the course will include critical approaches to aesthetics, genre, conventions, intellectual/artistic circles, audience, temporality, and canonization.
This is a discussion-based and writing-intensive class; therefore, the assignments will include papers, written responses, and oral presentations. Successful completion of this course will count towards credit in the Asian American Studies Certificate Program.
AML 4170
American Biography
Biography is a way to participate in the life and times of another person. It relies on the gesture caught “off camera,” traverses the chasm between people and across cultures, and seeks the person behind the persona. In our readings and discussions, we shall scrutinize both the analytical and storytelling skills of the biographers whose works have been chosen for the course. We shall also participate in the kind of research activities that are central to biography.
AML 4213
Strange Attractions in Early American Literature
Julie Kim
Early American literature abounds with instances of strange attraction. A brother and sister in love, male friends who catch mental illnesses from each other, magical forces that draw Amerindians and whites together, a plantation owner unable to ‘master’ his sexual desire for a female slave: all of these elements appear in novelistic, autobiographical, and other accounts of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America and the Caribbean. In this course, we will think about why early American writers consistently depicted forms of interpersonal attraction that violated norms of race, gender, sex, class, and religion. In doing so, we will consider how America was often characterized as an exotic, alluring, yet frightening ‘New World’ with the power to mutate personality and behavior through malevolent natural influences. We will also think about how writers, in portraying transgressive social interactions, were theorizing the meaning and limits of American community in the face of such cultural and economic institutions as patriarchy, class hierarchy, and slavery. Finally, we will examine the key eighteenth-century concept of sympathy and how this feeling was posited as both a solution to the problem of community and a threat to society’s survival.
Readings will include captivity narratives by Isaac Jogues and Mary Rowlandson, as well as the following:
- Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American
- William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy
- Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
- Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer
- John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of an Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
- Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor
- Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly
- Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok
Requirements will include attendance, active participation in class discussions, regular short writing assignments, and three longer papers.
AML 4213
Myth, History, and Colonization
Ed White
This class treats one dimension of the European-Native American conflict in New World colonization: the clash between Native American and European forms of historical knowledge. Our focus will be on Native American myths and legends as a form of knowledge production, juxtaposed against early New England historical writing. We’ll start the semester with a quick survey of critical treatments of Greek mythology and Old Testament history, before turning to Algonquian myths and a series of Anglo-American accounts of the Pequot Massacre of 1636. The final segment of the class will look at historical reportage of the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the writing of the propagandist Thomas Paine and the playwright and historian Mercy Otis Warren. Among the questions we’ll explore: What makes a myth “mythical”? Is a Native American myth mythical in the same sense that a Greek myth is mythical? What is a myth explaining, if anything? Is myth a form of history? Is history a form of myth? What does it mean to treat a history as a literary work (e.g., as “tragic” or “comic”)?
AML 4225
American Technocracy: The Politics of Progress in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
Todd Reynolds
Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year.
– Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, 1861
This course will be an inquiry into the conflicting responses to the increased specialization and rationalization that marked production in late nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Mechanization in particular, ostensibly the harbinger for a “better life,” also came to suggest even more deeply entrenched divisions and antagonisms within the social relation. For example, America’s first three World’s Fairs (in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 1885 at the New Orleans Industrial and Cotton Exposition, and 1893 at the Chicago Columbian Exposition) – events staged to celebrate industrial and mechanical, and by implication cultural and social, progress – were all immediately followed by instances of unparalleled labor unrest. In the cases of both the nation-wide Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Pullman Strike of 1894, workers seemingly directed their wrath at the “labor saving devices” as much as at their own employers and the corporate trusts. Technology seemed to become a major fault-line around which numerous organizations of people gathered a new political subjectivity.
We will look at a wide array of cultural “texts” from the later nineteenth century that handle the question of the social relation in an era in which mechanization and professionalism takes command. A significant portion of the course will not look not only at the more well-recognized novels of this industrializing period, but also the pamphlets and dime novels produced around these particular expositions (including selected detective, frontier, and science-fiction narratives), the personal narratives of numerous factory workers (including those of the women textile workers from Lowell, Massachusetts), the political novels of specific governmental figures, and even certain selections from the first motion-picture shorts. Do these texts invest technology with a new type of epistemological and social authority? Or is that authority itself a source of anxiety and thereby challenged? How is the social situation governed by technological advance represented in these cultural artifacts? More generally, how do these texts work as a materialization of the human consciousness imagining its own situation?
Texts may include:
- Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
- Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Portion of Labor
- John Hay, The Breadwinners
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
- Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A course pack with shorter writings from Anna Julia Cooper, Stephen Crane, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, and the corporate authors of various dime novel libraries. The Course Pack may also include selections from various critics such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Burton Bledstein, Bill Brown, Hazel Carby, Amy Kaplan, David Montgomery, Ronald Takaki, Alan Trachtenberg, and Richard Wright.
Course Requirements:
Students will write two formal argument papers (one will be 4-6 pages, the other will be 7-10 pages), and twelve short response papers to the selected texts (each more than one page). Students will also be required to participate in regular class discussions throughout the semester. There will be a number of unannounced quizzes on the readings as well.
AML 4225
The Antebellum City: The Significance of Place in the Cultural Work of Popular Narrative
Robin Gray Nicks
F.O. Matthiessen called the pre-Civil War period the “American Renaissance,” identifying a handful of white, male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorn and Walt Whitman as the major contributors to a truly “American” literature. In this course, we will be delving deeper into this “renaissance,” looking not at the canonical authors, but at those who have fallen from our literary memory.
Our unifying theme is The City. We will examine the antebellum city as depicted in various types of popular narratives, including the urban Gothic, pamphlet fiction, and women’s rights fiction. In some narratives, the city seems to act as a character, while in others it is simply a setting. We will examine the different depictions of the city, including the race, sex, gender, and class of its inhabitants, in different types of narratives and question whether the genre affects the characterization of the city. Equally important, we will use theory as a tool that will help us investigate each text’s “cultural work,” a phrase employed by Jane Tompkins. To this end, we will ask many questions, including the following: What does a particular text tell us about the culture in which it was written? What might have been its intended effect? Does the text subvert cultural norms, or does it essentially reinforce those norms? What is the function of the many stereotypes that occur in these texts? What insight can we gain by applying different theories?
No previous knowledge of literary theory is required or assumed. You may reach me at rgray@english.ufl.edu if you have questions about the course.
Requirements: short, 3–5 page theoretical interpretation of a novel; semi-daily quizzes; midterm exam; longer 10- to 12-page final paper.
Texts will include:
- The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans by Ned Buntline
- Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern
- The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall by George Lippard
- Venus in Boston and/or City Crimes by George Thompson
- The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth
- The Lives of Helen Jewett and Richard P. Robinson by George Wilkes
- Selected short stories from magazines of the period
- Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson
AML 4242
Queer “Retro-sexuality”: Periodizing the Fifties in US Literature and Culture
Nishant Shahani
This class proposes to explore the retrospective structuring that informs contemporary gay and lesbian culture. We will begin our conversations with the question as to why several recent queer productions such as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Michael Cunnighamn’s The Hours, Sarah Schulman’s Shimmer, and Mark Merlis’s American Studies return to the historical context of the 1950’s as a reference point or political backdrop. If the 1960’s Stonewall rebellion is historically constructed (and at times overdetermined) as the epistemic moment of queer liberation in the U.S, the fifties have been historically framed as a period where queer love dare not speak its name and must remain behind closed doors. We will examine whether the fifties as a ‘primal scene’ for the queer imagination offers a historical narrative that departs from the traditional historical view of silent closetedness and repression. Through an examination of contemporary queer literature as well as the history and politics of American literature in the 1950’s, this class will attempt to grapple with the following questions – What are the political and literary motivations that inform the return to the fifties? What does this return do to the ways in which mainstream U.S. history is written and understood? In what ways does this retrospective return, in Cathy Caruth’s words, “permit history to arise where immediate understanding may not”?
Through inter-disciplinary readings that will include LGBT history, queer theory as well as literature and political documents from the 50’s, we will examine the ideological legacy that continues to link sexual dissidence with communist and un-American activities. Apart from the titles mentioned in the above course description, readings/films may include:
- “The Love that Dares not Speak its Name: McCarthyism and its Legacy,” Lillian Faderman
- “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin
- “Hard Candy,” short story by Tennessee Williams
- Excerpts from Student and Faculty Academic Freedom Bill of Rights
- Excerpts from the “Communist Control Act,” 1954
- “Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges,” 1949, Raymond Allen
- Introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick
- “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg
- Hearts and Minds, Dir: Peter Davis
- Forrest Gump, Dir: Robert Zemeckis
Students will be expected to write response papers to selected texts, make an individual class presentation and write a research length paper at the end of the semester.
AML 4242
Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture: The Literature and Film of September 11
This course will explore some of the attempts in recent literature and film to come to grips with the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. Our discussion will begin with an examination of a number of works released in the years leading up to what many now view as this major turning point in both American and world history. These works both attempt to make sense of the post-Cold War landscape of the 1990s, and seem to foreshadow in an uncanny fashion the events of 9/11. We will then turn our attention to readings and viewings that try to map the new social, political, and cultural landscape that has quickly set into place. Although the final course list has not yet been finalized, likely texts will include novels by Salman Rushdie (Fury), Don DeLillo (Underworld and Cosmopolis), and William Gibson (Pattern Recognition); the recent graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, In The Shadow of No Towers; and the films, Fight Club, the Terminator trilogy, 25th Hour, and Phone Booth.
Students will be expected to engage in a serious and sustained fashion with all of the readings and films, to attend scheduled film screenings, to produce on on-going reading and viewing log, and to develop a number of more formal papers.
AML 4242
Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture: Writing the Black (Wo)man’s Body in 20th Century American Literature
Maisha Wester
This class seeks to interrogate textual constructions of race, particularly blackness, as it intersects gender and sexuality in twentieth century American literature. This class will especially examine the ways that Black authors have imagined and constructed blackness, particularly as they oppose and/ or caricature popular (historical) constructions of the black body. Furthermore, we shall interrogate the role of sex(uality) in re-imagining the racialized body. How, for instance, did racist myths of the hyper-sexualized black woman’s body impact her position and role during the civil rights era when images of blackness, though not necessarily womanhood, were being challenged and rewritten? How has Black homosexuality been imagined and by whom?
In studying how race, gender, and sexuality impact each other, we must also inevitably discover the ways each reproduces upon the other(s) the very oppression it challenges. Thus we might observe that Black struggle for a recognized voice in American culture did not impede them from imposing a similar silence upon homosexuality within Black culture. Equally significant is the extent to which contemporary authors note such replicated oppressions and attempt to disrupt its occurrence. Most notably, this class does not seek to answer the question, “what is blackness?” Rather it seeks to investigate the ways it has been and continues to be constructed and imagined, and to what consequence.
The tentative reading list includes:
- Richard Wright’s Eight Men Out
- Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
- Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits
- Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
– as well as several selections from Eldgridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, various other short stories by Alice Walker and Amiri Baraka, and a number of theoretical essays.
AML 4453
American Protest Literature
Many astute critics of the state of modern fiction argue that the contemporary American novel grew out of the practical failure of various social utopian ideas of the 20’s and 30’s. In addition, the New Deal, HUAC, the nuclear bomb, Russian totalitarianism, and the existential implications of the holocaust have all contributed to an impulse quite different from that which informed novels of social conscience, such as The Grapes of Wrath. Many works of the 50’s and 60’s turn in the direction of the metaphysical. Moreover, the burden of living in a less than sane world becomes and remains a popular theme in a variety of films portraying individuals trapped in a world devoid of spirituality, innocence and goodness. These themes will inform our readings and assignments this semester.
AML 4453
The Family, Capitalism, and American Literature, 1850-1985
Andrew Reynolds
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Overview and Objectives
Tolstoy’s famous opening line can serve as a jumping-off point for this course, in which we will examine a wide range of American family patterns in order to consider what makes a “happy” family as well as what makes people “unhappy” about families (and not just their own). Are there any traits universally shared by successful, healthy families? Conversely, what makes a family dysfunctional, broken, or “disorganized,” to use the language of the infamous “Moynihan Report” (1965)? These questions get at the fundamental issue of this course: the role and function of the family as a social institution within a modern, capitalist society. Throughout the semester, we will continue to ask: What is a family? Why do people form families? What are the rewards of family life, and who gets them? How does a family organize gender and sexuality, work and leisure, and even knowledge?
While written history, theory, and our own family experiences will serve as important subtexts for our conversations and writings, our primary object of study will be literary representations of the family. Through a variety of novels, plays, and short stories, we will gain a better understanding of the historical transformations of the family. Beyond using fiction simply as an alternative means to study American history, we will consider the role of literature in the ideological production of the family. How have aesthetic movements such as romanticism, domestic fiction, modernism, and postmodernism responded to the existing family and shaped American (mis)perceptions of it? Or, to paraphrase the critic Raymond Williams, what is the “knowable family” of each text?
Texts (tentative)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Stowe
- Ragged Dick by Alger
- The Awakening by Chopin
- My Ántonia by Cather
- All My Sons by Miller
- A Raisin in the Sun by Hansberry
- Snow White by Barthelme
- Sula by Morrison
- White Noise by DeLillo
Assignments
You will be required to write two essays during the semester. Each essay must be between 2200-2500 words in length. I will distribute a writing prompt for each. The remainder of your grade will be based on classroom participation and short (300 word max.) reading responses that will be emailed to the class prior to each meeting.
Final Grade Distribution
- Essay 1 & 2: 30% each
- Responses: 20%
- Participation: 20%
AML 4453
Comparative U.S. and Caribbean Literatures
The history of the Caribbean, like that of the United States, is a story of conquest, slavery, and revolution. Like many writers in the United States from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison, Caribbean writers have been haunted by a history that is as elusive as it is omnipresent. Like some of their U.S. counterparts, Caribbean writers sought to write not only the story of European conquerors and slave owners, but also the stories of the people who were conquered and enslaved. In so doing, Caribbean and U.S. writers alike have confronted the challenge of writing about people who left few written records and whose lives have often been neglected by historians or portrayed from the perspective of their antagonists, slave owners and colonists. Thus, for example, in the 1770s, Edward Long a prominent British historian and planter argued that Afro-Caribbeans were not human. A century later James Anthony Froude famously claimed of the Caribbean that there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own. We examine the strategies Caribbean and U.S writers have used to create art from these absences and denials through an analysis of literary and historical writing. Authors will likely include: Bryan Edwards, Edward Long, James Anthony Froude, Hannah Craft, Frances Harper, Earl Lovelace, Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Erdrich, and Michel Trouillot.
AML 4685
Race and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century American Literature: Jewish-American Fiction
This course is cross-listed with JST 3930/section 1864.
This course traces the development of Jewish-American fiction within the context of twentieth-century American literatures and cultures and deals with the role of ethnic literatures within our multiethnic nation. Though diverse in form and style, most of the works we will read deal with problems of assimilation of Jews into American society and the quest of the protagonists for identity as both Americans and Jews.
We begin with the influence of Eastern-European Yiddish literature (stories in translation) and then read a selection of Jewish-American stories and novels from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present. We will also view a documentary on the history of the Jews in America and a few fiction films (Hester Street and Daniel).
We will study how Jewish-American authors contributed to traditions of naturalism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism in twentieth-century American fictions. We will also study such topics as anti-Semitism, literary responses to the Holocaust and to the state of Israel, and the rise of Jewish feminism.
Although we will consider how Jewish religion and culture contributed to the literature, this is not a course in religion and you need not be Jewish to take it. An interest in American literature, history, and culture, or in the issues of ethnic identity and assimilation is sufficient.
I hope this course will make you a more sensitive interpreter of American culture and a better writer.
Texts:
At Goering’s Books, 1717 NW 1 st Ave, next to Bageland:
- America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers, ed. Joyce Antler (Beacon)
- The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan (Harper)
- Breadgivers by Anzia Yezierska (Persea)
- Call It Sleep by Henry Roth ( Avon)
- The Assistant by Bernard Malamud ( Avon)
- Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (Penguin)
- The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (Signet)
- Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon)
- A Weave of Women by E.M. Broner ( Indiana)
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Vintage)
- Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher
At Orange and Blue Texts, 309 NW 13 St, across from Krispy Kreme:
- Xeroxed readings from Handbook of American-Jewish Literature, ed. Lewis Fried
- Xeroxed readings from Jewish-American Stories, ed. Irving Howe
Requirements:
- Attendance and participation = 10%.
- Quizzes= 20%.
- Two papers. Paper 1= 25%; Paper 2= 35%.
- Oral report = 10%.
The first papers may be analytic or take the form of a brief fiction parodying the style or extending the narrative of one of the works we read. Paper 1 may be revised if the grade is less than B. Paper 2 is a research paper.
No midterm or final exam.
AML 4685
Race and Gender in Afro-Latina/o Literature and Culture
In this course we will be examining the various ways that Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, Afro-Mexican, and Afro-Puerto Rican literature and culture in the United States express a racial discourse that runs both parallel with and counter to ideas about African-American “race.” We will be looking at many different times and texts, from the work of Arturo Schomburg, Nuyorican hip-hop, blackness in Cuba and Cuban-Americans, to the afromestizos of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.
AML 4685
The World is a Ghetto!: Race, Space, Migration and the City
Recent demographic shifts in major cities have challenged the terms of identity and representation in local and global political and aesthetic culture. This course begins with an examination of the images of hope and prosperity that the city often represents to migratory populations. It ends with contemporary images of the city as a polarized, dangerous wasteland that is, nonetheless, central to the ways in which these populations configure their identity. 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?
Films will include
- Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters
- Taylor Hackford’s Blood In Blood Out
- F. Gary Gray’s Friday
- Miguel Arteta’s Star Maps
- John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood
- and Merzack Allouche’s Salut Cousin!
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This course will be run in the “traditional” workshop fashion with occasional lectures on structure, metaphor, plot, etc. Writing exercises will be assigned at the beginning, but the primary emphasis is on self-generated work. Each student will be expected to write two short stories, as well as complete a final draft of each.
Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished works, but only after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously as they take their own writing.
Reading will be assigned.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For Prof. Logan’s CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pages).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by March 15, 2005.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This workshop course, the penultimate in our series of undergraduate workshops in fiction writing, seeks to help you write fiction better than you might already. Time is spent also on correct usage. We also seek to have you read better: to read for form, recognizing strength and weakness in your own and in others’ writing, and recognizing various technical maneuvers in the published work we will read.
Students write three pieces of fiction, delivering a copy to each class member one week prior to group criticism. Students participate in that group criticism with wit and cogency and pertinence and deliver a letter of good criticism for each story read. This criticism has one object: to improve the work.
Assigned readings, from a book or two by a major writer, will also be discussed. This reading will be looked at usually in a somewhat technical manner; it is hoped that in the best of all possible worlds the reading will inspire a mimicry of correct form as you make the long trek unto your own vision and your own good writing.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For Prof. Logan’s CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pages).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by March 15, 2005.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3310
Intermediate Poetry Writing
When Winston Churchill began Latin, at the age of seven, he opened his grammar and found himself staring, bug-eyed at the first declension, which his textbook exemplified but did not explain:
Mensa a table
Mensa O table
Mensam a table
Mensae of a table
Mensae to or for a table
Mensa by, with, or from a table“What on earth did it mean?” he asked readers many years later. “Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me.” He had managed to memorize “the acrostic-looking task,” but enquired about the paradox that mensa could mean both “a table” and “O table.” “The master explained that one would use the vocative mensa when ‘addressing a table, in invoking a table.’ And then seeing he was not carrying me with him: ‘You would use it in speaking to a table.’” “But I never do,” Churchill protested, even more baffled –
– Anthony Grafton
Course Description: We write, we read, we discuss, we revise!
Prerequisite: CRW 2300 or permission of the instructor. Those who have taken CRW 1301 are encouraged to inquire.
Note:
- CRW 3310 may be taken for credit more than once.
- Those who have the prerequisite may register by computer.
- No manuscript-submission is required.
CRW 3310
Imaginative Writing: Poetry
“Poorly depicted clouds which most people would not notice as wrong are so disturbing to Dr. Thornes that they almost spoil visits to museums. For a meteorologist, the distraction is as great as the ordinary viewer being confronted by a figure with three arms. . . . [He added that] too many artists had painted [clouds] as they would a backcloth in a theatre.”
– The Guardian (London), 9 August 2000
Whenever the Mauretania was signaled by a French island, “What ship are you?” she would signal in reply, “What island are you?”
– Terry Coleman, The Liners
In this workshop we will attend to words as closely as a painter attends to paint – or to clouds. You will read a broad selection of modern poetry, from Walt Whitman to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and write a poem a week. Every week the workshop will consider for discussion poems from the past and poems from students. We will attempt to find a place for frivolity and fecklessness within the seriousness of verse, and hope that within our studies cheerfulness will keep breaking in. The workshop will include readings in the poetry of the past century as well as the poetry of the ages, and we will spend a few weeks on versification. If you haven’t had an introduction to meter, you will need it to understand what Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Frost, Stevens, and even Eliot thought they were doing. An ear not partly tuned by meter can never write free verse effectively.
This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken the intermediate workshop (CRW 2300) and want to press further their understanding of poetic language. Early admission is by manuscript. Please submit the manuscript, using the guidelines boxed below, to the instructor’s mailbox or by email to <wlogan@english.ufl.edu>.
Required reading:
- an anthology of poetry
- a book on versification and various books by modern poets
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For Prof. Logan’s CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pages).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by March 15, 2005.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4905
Advanced Fiction Workshop
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 CRW 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 qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For Prof. Logan’s CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pages).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by March 15, 2005.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4906
Advanced Poetry Writing
Write soon. Now that the big event of your life is decided, I can fancy you say – what is there to write about? Write upon prawns, rheumatism, Armstrong guns, Birds of Paradise or raspberry jam –
– Edward Lear, to a friend who had just announced his engagement, October 3, 1862
Course Description: We write, we read, we discuss, we revise! Poems worthy of publication are produced.
Prerequisite: CRW 3310 or permission of the instructor.
Note:
- CRW 4906 may be taken for credit more than once.
- Those who have the prerequisite may register by computer.
- No manuscript-submission is required.
ENC 3250
Professional Communication
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.
ENC 3310
Advanced Exposition
This is a standard, traditional (old-fashioned) composition course focusing on familiar rhetorical modes of development (narrative, description, analysis, etc.) with a heavy emphasis on style and rhetorical effectiveness and perhaps a nod towards “creative nonfiction.” Four or five papers plus analysis of selected essays and assorted in-class writing activities.
ENC 3414
Hypermedia
ENC 3414 treats the World Wide Web in particular, and the internet in general, as an object of study worthy of the same critical and theoretical attention as that given to cinema and television. We will be concerned not only with the new forms of art and entertainment emerging online, but also with the internet as a new “public sphere,” a new site in which citizens participate in the making of collective as well as of personal meaning and identity. We will gain some perspective by placing the invention of the web in the context of the cultural transformations associated with film and print (the screen and the page). The projects for the semester focus on the similarity among the features of digital media, creative thinking, and entertainment narratives. ENC 3414 is taught in a computerized classroom, and all assignments involve making websites. No previous experience with computing (other than word processing) is required.
ENG 3010
Theory and Practice of Modern Criticism
Emily Garcia
This course familiarizes students with the fundamental questions of 20th-century literary theory and criticism and encourages them to develop their own critical and theoretical practices. Readings, assignments and discussions will compare how different critical works engage with the notions of literature, textuality, subjectivity, materiality, culture, history, language and the other.
We will work from the model of inquiry rather than of survey while noting the common definitions of the field and the history of criticism. Course readings will engage with the fields of semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, ethnic studies, and queer theory.
Readings for the better part of the semester will be selected from the anthology Modern Literary Theory, edited by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, and from Julian Wolfreys’s Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory. We will also read several books that either intersect or challenge various critical approaches, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, which illustrates the work of cultural studies while challenging the field through questions of race, colonialism and philosophy.
Readings
Readings (taken from Modern Literary Theory and Critical Keywords) will include work by critics such as Roland Barthes, Donna Haraway, Raymond Williams, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Cleanth Brooks, Gérard Genette, M.M. Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Étienne Balibar, as well as commentary provided by the authors.
Books will include the following:
- Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter
- Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic
- Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place
- Roland Barthes’s S/Z
Requirements
Students will be expected to engage thoughtfully in class discussions throughout the semester. Students will write six 2-page response papers (one written in response to a panel attended at the 2005 EGO conference, October 27–29) and one 10-page term paper. Unannounced quizzes will be given periodically.
ENG 3011
The Major Critics
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.
ENG 3115
Introduction To Film Criticism And Theory
This course will introduce current theoretical contexts for engaging the contemporary media environment, and will consider the 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 principal 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.
ENG 3121
History of Film 1
Early cinema is a wonderful exploration of comedy, melodrama, spectacle and social commentary. Images were never more important to the cinema. This course will examine the international history of film from its origins through the transformations that accompanied the development of sound film. The goal is to awaken an understanding of the historical use of film form. Each week we will view a film, discuss its place in film history, as well as social history, and its form of expression (looking closely at montage, set design, acting styles, dialogue and narration). We will look at issues of industry and audience and representations of gender, race and political change. Students will learn how to see films with a greater depth of visual understanding. Films to be screened include great works of Chaplin, Keaton, Griffith, Eisenstein, Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, and other directors whose talent shaped the development of cinema; we will also examine the role of actors and actresses, screenwriters, designers and producers in shaping the history of film.
Course Requirements: One paper of 8–10 pages, using historical analysis of film, and short answer exams on readings, lecture material and scenes from films. Participation in class discussion and an oral presentation will also be required.
Books may include:
- Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, Steven J. Ross
- Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931, Donald Crafton
- A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra.
ENG 3122
History of Film 2
Course Description: This course is the second half of Film History Part II and covers the historical period from the 1960s to the present. Film screenings survey various types of narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and experimental films produced in the U.S. and elsewhere. The course introduces students to recent international films and the major artistic movements that make up this particular history. Lectures and class discussions apply various critical methods to analyze film form, visual style, and narrative content as they relate to particular socio-historical moments and artistic movements. Students will learn to correctly employ film and theoretical terminology in their oral presentations, written and creative work.
Course Goals: Students analyze how various types of films from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia imitate, appropriate, and or resist dominant representational regimes and popular film genres. Students must employ film terminology, a combination of one or two critical approaches when analyzing and comparing various films and filmmakers. Students should leave this course with a sharpened critical understanding of the many ways to discuss film and the filmmakers who have shaped this history.
Course Requirements And Grading:
- Pop quizzes on weekly readings as well as film(s) screened in the previous class 20%
- Each student moderates a ten-minute discussion on a weekly assignment 20%
- Each student is responsible for a typed, 1-page outline of the 10-minute discussion that is due on the day the student presents her/his discussion 10%
- A Group submission of a typed, twelve-fifteen page analytical research paper 20%
- A Group submission of a 2-page annotated bibliography of the research paper 10%
- Select one of the two options 20%
- a) A Group oral presentation of their research paper, or
- b) A Group or Individual ten-minute video project
ENG 3122
History of Film 2
This course asks you to use the movies Casablanca and Breathless as memory theaters for storing and recalling (1) the events of the 1930s, especially the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of German fascism; and (2) the course of post-War cinematic history, especially American film noir, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave.
The course covers film history from 1930–1965. After beginning with two movies of German origin, Fritz Lang’s M and MGM’s Grand Hotel, the course’s first half will trace the parallel developments in Hollywood and Europe, using the biography and writing of Walter Benjamin as an allegory of popular culture’s appeal and Nazism’s danger. Part I ends with the Fall of Paris, both the historical event (which drove Benjamin further into a fatal exile) and its Hollywood representation (in Casablanca). Part II traces the two roads that diverge from that moment: the film noir of movies like The Big Sleep and the neorealist rejection of Hollywood Cinema. These two filmmaking practices, apparently so contradictory, converge in the French New Wave, whose most famous movie, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, explicitly invokes the image of Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca.
Some students, especially non-majors, have complained about the course’s significant reading requirements. That reading provides the larger historical context for the cinema’s development. But if you don’t like to do reading and have daily quizzes on it, you might think about taking a different class.
Readings:
- Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
- Schatz, The Genius of the System
- Stern, The Fuhrer and the People
- Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca
- Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s
- Photocopy packet
Assignments and Grading:
I. 60% of the final grade will result from two written projects:
- a two-hour mid-term essay exam
- a two-hour final essay exam
II. 40% of the final grade will result from the following:
- class participation (quality as well as quantity)
- brief, short-answer daily reading quizzes
- one oral presentation, which counts as five quiz grades
You are allowed one unexcused absence. Each additional absence will deduct four points from your final course grade.
ENG 4015
Psychological Approaches to Literature
This course will provide students with an introduction to major currents in psychoanalytic theory through readings in Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Bowlby, and others. The literary texts to be read from various psychoanalytic perspectives are Oedipus the King, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Othello, Frankenstein, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man. The course requirements are a midterm, final, and an eight- to ten-page term paper, as well as a nongraded weekly journal entry. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
ENG 4110
African Diaspora Film: Tracing PostNegritude Visual Culture in the U.S. and Western Europe
Course Description: This course employs the work of Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu, Alex Hargreaves, Paul Gilroy, and various American social critics who have discussed the postmodern impulse in literature and films made by western-educated Blacks who reside in North America and Western Europe. This course uses a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to compare and contrast the cinematic depiction of multi-cultural life in highly populated urban regions in the United States and Europe.
The purpose of this course is to analyze how such African Diasporic filmmakers as Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Mweze Ngangura, Isaac Julien, Haile Gerima and others, use the medium of film to articulate a post-1960s sensibility that challenges traditional ways of visually constructing race and gender identity. Class discussions, written assignments, and creative projects will examine how recent American, European, and African films dramatize and (de)construct this postNegritude impulse.
Course Goals: Students analyze how various types of films from the Americas, Europe, and Africa imitate, appropriate, and or resist dominant representational regimes and popular film genres. Students must employ film terminology, a combination of one or two critical approaches when analyzing and comparing various films and filmmakers. Students should leave this course with a sharpened critical understanding of the various ways one can discuss the global film industry, filmmakers, and their films.
Course Requirements And Grading:
- Pop quizzes on weekly readings as well as film(s) screened in the previous class 20%
- Each student moderates a ten-minute discussion on a weekly assignment 20%
- Each student is responsible for a typed, 1-page outline of the 10-minute discussion that is due on the day the student presents her/his discussion 10%
- A Group submission of a typed, twelve-fifteen page analytical research paper 20%
- A Group submission of a 2-page annotated bibliography of the research paper 10%
- Select one of the two options 20%
- a) A Group oral presentation of their research paper, or
- b) A Group or Individual ten-minute video project
ENG 4110
Nonfiction Cinema
Nora Alter
This course is cross-listed with GET 4293/section 5318.
This course will trace the development of nonfiction cinema from early cinema to the present day. Beginning with actualities, documentaries and avant-garde experiments we will explore how nonfictional production emerged along side its fictional counterparts. The types of films to be discussed will include avant-garde films, documentaries, science, anthropological and cultural films, American direct cinema and cinema verité, essay films, mockumentaries, art film, video art and recent “reality TV shows.”
ENG 4130
Race and Ethnicity in Film: Introduction to Asian-American Film
What happens to Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu when Harold and Kumar go to White Castle? This class will begin with a history of Asian and Asian-American representation in US visual culture in order to examine the way in which media representation, a history of stereotyping, racial mythology and material reality collide to create the image of Asian-Americans in contemporary film and video culture. We will look at work by Asian-American filmmakers including groundbreaking films like the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? and experimental films such as Robot Stories as well as attempts to make images of Asian-Americans commercially viable in mainstream film such as Better Luck Tomorrow and Double Happiness.
ENG 4133
Polish Science Fiction and Fantasy – Films, Fiction, Artwork
Chris Caes
This course introduces and examines one of the most imaginative and currently vibrant artistic currents of modern Polish culture – fantastyka, or “the fantastic,” in two of its most popular guises: science fiction and fantasy. Our focus in the course will be twofold. Firstly, developing a conceptual “tool kit” from the writing of Polish science fiction grandmaster Stanislaw Lem, we will inquire into (and experience) the pleasure-giving dimensions of these genres, attempting some structural definitions and highlighting the peculiar blend of cognitive or metaphysical ambition and horror that defines the Polish fantastic. Secondly, considering representations of other worlds as unique reflections of this world, we will attempt to identify and reflect on specific historical and social factors – from wartime catastrophe and communist censorship to the commercialization of publishing and availability of new computer technologies – that have led Poles to practice the genres of the fantastic.
Selected works will be drawn from three different media: fiction, film, and artwork. We will begin with tales by two classic practitioners of the fantastic – the supernatural fiction of Stefan Grabinski and the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. Later, we will turn to works of science fiction and fantasy by current authors – the metaphysical horror fiction of Marek Huberath, the Tolkienesque world of Andrzej Sapkowski, and the science fiction of Jacek Dukaj. We will also be viewing film adaptations of Lem’s fiction by Maetzig, Tarkovsky, and Soderbergh, as well as screening works from the dark existential sf cinema of Andrzej Zulawski, the oneiric cinema of Wojciech Has and the sociological science fiction films of Piotr Szulkin. Finally, we will look at the nightmare painting of Zdzislaw Beksinski, the “fantastic hyperrealism” of artist/illustrator Wojtek Siudmak, the Escheresque fantasy painting of Jacek Yerka, the neobaroque fantasy painting of Tomasz Setowski, as well as at digital sci-fi art by a number of contemporary Polish artists – Czarny, Drozd, Jasiczak, and Wojtowicz.
ENG 4133
Introduction to Screenwriting
This is a writing class for a small and carefully chosen group. Students meet with the professor for three hours each week to learn and discuss the specifics of screenwriting. Class gathers again, one night later in the week, to view selected films. All members are instructed to prepare and present samples from original screenplays – treatments, storyboards, first and second drafts. Instructor permission is required for registration; students interested in enrolling in this course should contact Professor Robison at <MaryRobison@aol.com>.
ENG 4134
Women and Cinema
Nora Alter
This course is cross-listed with GET 4291/section 5317.
Theory and criticism have long been preoccupied with the problem of the “subject,” be it in fiction, as the live body acting on stage, or in cinema. Much recent criticism, especially that generated by psychoanalytic and feminist approaches, has shown that the subject can no longer be regarded as an autonomous self-defined entity, and that the mechanisms for the construction of the subject-position must be thoroughly explored and criticized. Yet, at the same time and with increasing frequency, an exclusively psychoanalytic approach has come under critique for its comparative neglect of history: specifically, the ways both the human subject and theories about it are conditioned by social and historical pressures – of the kind discussed, for example, in much recent Cultural Studies. From this perspective, the category “women” turns out to be no more stable and heterogeneous than is the category “German” or “Cinema,” let alone “nation,” “race,” “gender,” “class,” “sexuality,” and so forth. Our treatment of the topic “Women and Cinema” thus will introduce social and ideological questions, such as what values are mobilised on behalf of subject-positions (especially in assumptions not only about gender but about sexuality, race, and class) which in turn determine the identity of the subjects historically produced in the medium of cinema, in both film production and film consumption. In this course we shall look at women in their roles as filmmakers, spectators, and as subjects of male filmmakers.
ENG 4135
Israeli Cinema
Arieh Saposnik
The course is cross-listed with JST 3930/sec. 1628 and HEB 4931/sec. 1614.
Films and nations are both relative newcomers on the stage of history, and both nevertheless omnipresent. Both, moreover, have come to play central roles in the ways in which we understand, view, and represent reality. From its very inception, film has had a global dimension, an ability to cut across national and cultural boundaries. At the same time, film often seems very much a product and a reflection of a given national culture.
Israeli society, very much the product of an articulated national ideology, has a young but vibrant film industry. Over the past half-century, Israeli films have reflected (and perhaps, in some cases, helped to catalyze) ideological changes, changing gender roles, military successes and traumas, political upheavals, ethnic relations and national conflict – in short, the dynamics of a rapidly changing society. In this course, we will look to (and at) Israeli films as a means for understanding Israeli society, its changing culture, and its shifting image of itself.
ENG 4135
Caribbean Cinema
This course introduces students to Caribbean film and subsequently to issues of Caribbean history and culture. We will watch films from Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and the Dominican Republic. By learning about the diverse history of the region, we will discuss the effects of colonialization on culture and the creation of national cinemas. We will also discuss examples of films about exile and emigration to France, England, and the United States. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course, but no prior knowledge of the region or film studies is required.
ENG 4135
Italian Cinema
The course is cross-listed with ITT 3521/section 5766.
A critical and historical study of Italian film and directors.
ENG 4136
Hypervideo: Reinventing Video Production
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 has become one of many possible inputting devices into an electronic space. 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.
Four short assignments on videotape, an oral presentation, and a final project on videotape will be required. All final projects will be presented in a public screening at the end of the semester, organized and run by students in the class.
ENG 4139
Television and Electronic Culture: The End – Informational Millenarianism & the Y2K Crisis
Rome was burning.
The fire suppression system in the Sistine Chapel thought it had been turned off for maintenance. The note the firebomber taped to the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica said he was the Son of Kaczynski. None of this, his brief manifesto said – citing the shootings of looters in police-crippled Mexico City, the train collision in Berne, the Israeli-Palestinian bloodbath in Jerusalem – none of this would have happened if the Church had not set up a web page on the Internet. But the Church, he said, had aligned itself with the anti-Christ, the Internet. It must all be swept away.
– Andrew Burt, Noontide Night (1999)
The innovation of the ship already entailed the innovation of the shipwreck. The invention of the steam engine, the locomotive, also entailed the invention of derailment, the rail disaster… Each period of technical evolution, with its set of instruments and machines, involves the appearance of specific accidents, revealing in negative the growth of scientific thought.
– Paul Virilio, “The Accident Museum” (1986)
Nearly six years after the Big (non)Event, Andrew Burt’s novel of the Y2K crisis appears overwrought and badly dated, destined, with other Jeremiads of the year zero – militia and urbanite survivalist manuals, New Age celebrations of off-the-grid living, corporate preparedness checksheets – for the remainder table and the library discards bin. The nearly complete disappearance of Y2K stories from the popular press in the West suggests that public consciousness has moved on. One is tempted to ascribe the panic to a momentary distraction in the ongoing triumph of computing culture.
This course begins with a contrary proposition: crisis and failure are constitutive elements of technological systems and as such are irreducibly present as the horizon of every technological imaginary – and its corollary: even the most optimistic futurities of informational culture are bounded by fantasies of “endism,” predicated on the possibility of massive, systemic chaos and collapse. Interpreted in this context, Y2K’s entanglings of (religious) millenarian fantasies, a second-time-only moment of the Gregorian calendar, and the effects of a short-sighted technique of data storage and recovery, seem more exemplary of, than exceptions from, the occult structure of the emerging informational society.
Our readings in this course will range widely, and will include nonfiction texts in the history of millenarian thought, philosophy and critical theory, systems risk theory, and media studies. We will also read several novels of Y2K panic and view films and excerpts from films on the theme of the panic and technological crisis and endism in general.
Course requirements include a take-home midterm, an annotated research bibliography, and a final research paper.
Required texts
- Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Rev. ed. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995
- Burt, Andrew L. Noontide Night: A Y2K Novel. Neverworlds Press, 1999
- Gould, Stephen Jay. Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. 2d ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1999
- Jeffrey, Grant R., and Angela Hunt. Flee the Darkness. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998
- Strozier, Charles B., and Michael Flynn, eds. The Year 2000: Essays on the End. New York: New York University Press, 1997
- Tiggre, Don L. Y2K: The Millennium Bug. Xlibris Corporation, 1998
– and several short fiction and non-fiction texts held on electronic reserve.
Required film screenings
- Bigelow, Kathryn, dir. Strange Days. 20th Century Fox, 1995
- Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. Alphaville. Chaumiane/Filmstudio, 1965
- Lowry, Dick, dir. Y2K: The Movie (aka Y2K: Countdown to Chaos). NBC (Made for television), 1999
- Marcarelli, Robert, dir. The Omega Code. Providence Entertainment, 1999
- Sargent, Joseph, dir. Colossus: The Forbin Project. Universal, 1969
- Wachowski, Andy, and Larry Wachowski, dirs. The Matrix. Warner Brothers, 1999
ENG 4905
Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice
An Independent Study course may be taken for 1- to 3-credit hours and will count as credit toward the English major. This course may be repeated with a change of topic up to a maximum of 9 credits.
This course is for advanced students who desire to supplement the regular courses by independent reading or research under the guidance of a member of the faculty. The student must find a faculty member who is willing to supervise the semester-long study, and together, the two create a project. The student must meet with the professor at designated times, agreed upon in advance, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Postcolonial Theory and American Studies
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few European powers had colonized 80% of Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements during the latter half of the century led to territorial, but not necessarily cultural and intellectual decolonization. The continuing cultural effects of colonialism, as well as neocolonialism and imperialism, constitute the field of postcolonial studies. A major component of the course will be to introduce you to this field and study the ways in which postcolonial theory has intersected with and impacted diverse areas of inquiry such as feminism, historiography, legal studies, and literature. The second objective of the course will be to grapple with the following questions: What would it mean to reconceptualize American literature and culture through the optic of postcolonial studies? What kinds of issues are raised by settler colonialism (such as that of North America) that put pressure on some of the terms of postcolonial inquiry? How do we read subalternity in the U.S.? Has globalization changed issues important to postcolonial studies? What is the nature of the American empire today?
I’m not exactly sure which texts I’ll use, but a likely list would include the following:
- Edward Said, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism
- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
- Ashcroft, Postcolonial Transformations
- Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory
- Michael Hardt and Antonio, Negri Empire
- Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism or Wretched of The Earth
- Richard King, Postcolonial America
- as well as selections from Gayatri Spivak, David Harvey, Walter Mignolo, Arjun Appadurai, and Partha Chatterjee.
We will also read essays on culture and imperialism in the U.S. after 9/11.
Requirements: Attendance; Class discussion; response papers, quizzes or mid terms; two 8–9 page papers.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Three 19th-Century European Geniuses: Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy
We will be reading Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther and Elective Affinities, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karinina and Collected Short Stories. The link by which we will bind the authors will be an exploration of male-female relationships as they developed during the course of the 19 th century in the hands of three of the most important and influential writers of Europe. If any other reading is assigned it will be Proust’s Swann’s Way, since one of the threads we will be tracing is how these writers shaped the idea of romantic love inherited by the 20th century, and embodied in Proust’s epic, Remembrance of Things Past. Students will be asked to write an extensive essay as befits an Honors course.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: American Modernism
This course will address modernism, the experimental literature from around the turn of the last century, in the context of the history and culture of the United States. Of particular interest to us will be the problem of literary historical periodization: how do we describe the literary period known as modernism, and how does that term apply to the particular literary production of the U.S.? A typical starting place for thinking about modernism is to acknowledge that it has something to do with the experience of being “modern.” But here we begin to see a host of difficulties. For example, the U.S. was widely thought to be one of the most “modern” countries in the world in this period. American industry was famous for its productivity, and more Americans per capita owned radios than anywhere else in the world. But a significant percentage of the population of the U.S. also lived without electricity. What does this picture of America have to do with modern literature? Or, to take another example, literary modernism is often associated with the terrible experience of World War I, but America entered that conflict, fought overseas, when the war was nearly concluded, and far more Americans died in the 1918 flu epidemic than died in the war. How does a specifically American literary history force us to rethink the narratives of modernism that often take the British or French experience as the norm? How important was it that Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris, when William Faulkner, another great modernist writer, lived in Mississippi? What might literary modernism have to do with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, or with the emergence of Hollywood? In other words, our focus on American modernism will attempt to connect aesthetic practices to history, to try to account for why certain kinds of experiments in the arts happened when and where they did.
As for the required readings: Modernist literature is notorious for being “difficult,” and some of the assigned works for this class will doubtless seem so. Our readings will include canonical poets and novelists and less well-known figures. We will read historical sources and literary criticism, and perhaps see a film or two as well.
The course requirements will include class participation and three papers.
ENG 4940
Internship
Undergraduate Coordinator
The English Department at the University of Florida offers three* credit hours of internship to its majors who provide the following to the Undergraduate Coordinator for approval:
- An offer to hire (from the employer) which states that the student will be working at least 12 hours per week for the entire semester (Fall, Spring, or Summer C), or 24 hours per week for a Summer A or B term. Said document should be produced on the company letterhead and should outline the job duties for the internship position.
- A personal statement (submitted along with the offer of hire) about why the student wants to take the internship and how it relates to the student’s future plans.
Once the Undergraduate Coordinator has approved the internship requested by the student, the department will register the student for the internship credits.
Upon completion of the internship:
- The supervisor of the student must submit a job performance evaluation to the Undergraduate Coordinator by Wednesday of finals week so that a grade of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory may be submitted to the Registrar. The evaluation may be faxed, mailed, or hand delivered.
- The student must submit a personal evaluation of the work experience provided by the internship by the same day as above.
*For two credit hours, the student would need to work 8 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 16 hours per week for Summer A or B.
*For one credit hour, the student would need to work 4 hours per week in a Fall, Spring, or Summer C semester; and 8 hours per week for Summer A or B.
Please note the following limitations on the English Internship:
- A student may register for the English Department Internship for three credits ONLY ONCE; no more than three hours worth of internship credit may be counted toward coursework in the major.
- Because no English Department course carrying fewer than 3 credit hours counts towards the major, your internship will not count as part of your major coursework if you register for fewer than 3 credits.
ENG 4953
Department Seminar: Poetry, Government and the Origins of “Sexuality” in the Sixteenth Century
John Murchek
In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sixteenth-century men and women in the West started to focus ever-increasing attention on their bodies, pleasures, sensations and impressions, and that they did so with the goal of governing their own behavior and the behavior of others. According to Foucault, this heightened attention to sensations, impressions, and pleasures would, approximately 200 years later, result in the emergence of a new object of knowledge and a new experience called “sexuality” – a term that no sixteenth-century Englishman or Englishwoman would have understood.
This course takes Foucault’s historical sketch as its point of departure, and explores the hypothesis that sixteenth-century poetry and poetic theory also participate in this intensified focus that people brought to bear on their desires, sensations and pleasures, and thus helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual emergence of “sexuality.” In order to elaborate and test this hypothesis, we will ask such questions as: How do texts that defend and attack poetry in the period conceptualize poetry’s effect on its readers? In what ways are readers’ pleasures and desires supposed to be stimulated by poetry, and how are poetic pleasure and the desires it excites related to the government of the self and others? What are the implications of the fact that rhetorical, educational and poetic theories privileged the imitation and translation of authoritative models? How do poets and poetic theorists conceptualize imagination? What do disputes over poetic diction reveal about what one might call the “government of the tongue?” How does “love poetry” – primarily imitative of Petrarch – define relations between lover and beloved, beauty and desire, desire and reason, desire and virtue? What kinds of bodies and psyches are assumed or produced by such “love poetry,” by religious verse (translations of the Psalms, for example), and by allegorical epic?
Readings will include the first two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as selected lectures by Foucault; materials drawn from early modern English social and political history; and, of course, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century poetry and poetic theory by such writers as Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Richard Sackville, William Baldwin, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke), George Puttenham, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon.
Given the topic of this course, it should be of interest to students pursuing any of the following English Department Undergraduate Models of Study: British Literature, Cultural Studies, Studies in Theory, or Feminisms, Genders and Sexualities.
Students will be evaluated on the basis of a brief close reading paper (4–5 pp.), a longer (8–10 pp.) essay, a test on concepts from Foucault’s work, an in-class presentation, and a final examination.
This course will be substantially the same as the ENL 4220 I taught in the Fall 2004 semester. Students who registered for that course should not register for this one.
ENG 4953
Department Seminar: James to Cather
This course will focus on three late 19th- and early 20th-century American prose writers, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, counterpointed with W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and perhaps Nella Larsen’s Passing. Most class discussions will focus on close readings. We’ll also discuss whether and how Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” applies to narratives written by white authors, how their narratives present tensions between provincial and cosmopolitan orientations, and how race complicates those tensions. Likely texts: James’s Daisy Miller, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, perhaps The Ambassadors; Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, perhaps a novel or other essays if the class wishes; Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Summer, and “Roman Fever,” perhaps Ethan Frome; Cather’s O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, and The Professor’s House, perhaps My Antonia. We may also read some critical writings on cosmopolitanism.
Work required: an initial close-reading exercise (5%), two 4–5 pp. comparative close reading (20% and 25%, better grade wins), and a 12–15 pp. research essay (50%). No exams and no quizzes, unless discussions flag. Typically I’ll go around the class asking what issues and themes you’d like to talk about that day, in part so that everyone has a voice in the discussion, and in part so that you’ll keep up with the reading. Grading will be based entirely on your writing, though late essays or more than four unexcused class cuts (double period=2 classes) will lower your grade. The more absences over the maximum, the lower the grade becomes. Excused absences can be made up with extra writing about the text(s) discussed that day.
I 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. 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.
I try to make class sessions relaxed, a place where all of us can try out ideas without feeling silly, weird, or stupid. It’s often the case that what seems obvious or off the wall to you is exactly what needs to be said, and I hope you say it. To invoke Emerson’s spirit, or Paul de Man’s: insights often begin in confusions and bafflements that haven’t quite been suppressed by anxious conformity to reigning critical fashions.
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. Copies of the completed thesis (30 to 50 pages), accompanied by a Thesis Submission Cover Sheet (available at <www.honors.ufl.edu>) must be submitted to both Room 105 in the CLAS Academic Advising Center on Fletcher Drive and the English Department Undergraduate Coordinator in Turlington 4012 no later than the last day of classes for the semester (December 7, 2005).
ENL 3112
18th Century British Novel
The theme for this semester will be good sex/good families. In the past twenty-five years, influential historians and literary scholars have described the eighteenth century as a period which witnesses the rise of “companionate marriage” and new versions of masculinity. We will look at a wide range of eighteenth-century British novels and analyze how they portray male and female roles in courtship and marriage.
We will read seven novels, one of them being Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Because of the length of Clarissa, we will take it in sections, reading roughly one hundred pages per week. We will study how these novels reflect and speak to changes in British society described by Aphra Behn in her late seventeenth-century prose narratives Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt. Most particularly, we will analyze the changing role of social status (which these writers typically use the word “quality” to reference) in courtship and marriage, as economic and social changes create new kinds of wealth. But we also will observe how these novels repeat plots and characters of earlier literature, notably the birth-mystery plot. By the end of the semester, students should have a full sense of these novels as, at once, products of a specific culture and of a long-enduring literary tradition.
Students will write two papers (between eight to ten pages each) on topics that I offer. They also will keep a response journal in which they record their reactions to their daily readings. If the class is small enough (under twenty students), that journal will provide the basis for a one-half hour final oral examination. Should the class enroll more than twenty students, a written final examination will be offered. Students will be expected to participate in a Clarissa study group and to contribute to class discussions.
All papers must be word-processed. I am happy to read and comment upon early drafts of papers and encourage e-mail submission of them via attachments in rich text format.
Books:
All books will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1711 N. W. 1 st Avenue.
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (California )
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works (Penguin)
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Penguin)
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Penguin)
- Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Norton)
- Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Norton)
- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Penguin)
- Francis Burney, Evelina (Oxford )
- Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
ENL 3132
Twentieth-Century English Novel: Inventions and Witnesses
This course will examine a number of English novels published in the last quarter century, in order to consider how history comes to be invented through what Jacques Derrida has called ‘the testimony of fiction’. We will be exploring the ways in which fiction offers testimony and assumes an ethical responsibility, which fiction may be read as seeking to communicate to the reader, for maintaining the past through inventions of anamnesis and the poetics of identity that exceed any merely historical or allegedly factual record, account, documentary or narrative. Through a number of historiographical and metafictional novels, we will explore the novel as mnemotechnic, with attention directed towards the production and mediation of cultural identities that can be observed recurring across the novels.
The novels to be studied will be taken from the following list:
- Nicholas Mosley, Inventing God
- Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters
- Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- Edward Carey, Alva and Irva
- Sarah Waters, Affinity
- Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
- David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
- Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in its Third Year
- D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel
- Peter Ackroyd, First Light
- Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
- Ian McEwan, Attonement
- Andrew Crumey, Pfitz
In addition, there will be a selection of critical readings taken from (amongst others): Jacques Derrida, Mieke Bal, J. Hillis Miller, Walter Benjamin, Nicholas Royle, and Maud Ellmann.
Course requirements: two essays, one group presentation, in-class participation.
If you have any questions concerning the course or materials email me at <wolfreys@ufl.edu>.
ENL 3231
Age of Johnson
The course explores British writings in the second half of the eighteenth-century, and will be concentrating on one fiction writer, Laurence Sterne, and four writers in other prose genres, James Boswell (biography/autobiography), Samuel Johnson (all genres imaginable), Edmund Burke (political and aesthetic essays), and David Hume (philosophic, theologic, and personal essays). These authors are models of English prose, and so students will be expected to emulate them in their own writing assignments.
ENL 3241
The British Romantics
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.
ENL 3251
Victorian Literature
[This course would be appropriate for any number of the undergraduate models of study offered by the English Department, including but not limited to the Cultural Studies, British Literature, and American Literature models.]
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 as follows: 20%: your average score on the weekly one-page “Questions” (3–5 questions) regardin