Undergraduate Courses, Fall 2006
Times and locations of class meetings are subject to change. Consult the UF Schedule of Courses for official class times and locations and an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
Upper Division (3000–4000) Courses
Note: Only course descriptions are listed below. For a comprehensive summary of course numbers, sections, times and locations, titles, and instructors, see the following web page:
AML 3031
Imagining the Multicultural Nation
Throughout the period of early exploration and colonization, the revolutionary war, the early Republic, and the mid-nineteenth century “American Renaissance,” the tenor of American literature wavered between optimism and ambiguity, between determination and doubt, over the promise and possibilities of “America.”
This upper-division course provides both broad thematics and in-depth strategies for reading dominant literary forms prior to the Civil War. In particular, we will explore how writers working in a range of important literary genres (including sermons, poetry, travel writing, gothic fiction, frontier romance, the novel of sentiment, and slave narratives) undertake the challenge of representing American multicultural identity and the place of cultural difference in the new nation.
Questions include: How might we situate individual readings within (or against) what Timothy Powell calls the “unresolvable conflict between America’s multicultural history and its violent will to monoculturalism?” How do the conventions of genre enhance or limit how the text represents cultural “otherness” and the possibilities for cross-cultural contact? Is multiculturalism presented as an ideal or a threat? How might we read Ridge, Douglass, and Whitman, for example, as deliberate responses to their literary precursors?
Major assignments include at least two major essays and a midterm exam. Students will also claim their own path of inquiry through a series of analytical writing assignments that offer increasing flexibility in readings, approaches, and arguments. Attendance and participation required.
Readings likely to include:
- Mary Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1675)
- Unca Eliza Whitman, The Female American (1767)
- Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
- Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
- James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (1826)
- William Apess, A Son of the Forest (1829)
- John Rollin Ridge, Adventures of Joaquin Murietta (1854)
- Short fiction by Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass
- Miscellaneous poetry, including Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
AML 3041
Re/Writing America
Aaron Talbot
Earlier this year, The New York Times announced it had asked 124 authors to answer the question, “What is the best novel of the past 25 years?” The winner was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While most articles discussed who voted and how close the voting was, a more fascinating pattern emerged from the list: the majority of novels dealt with canonized American cultural and historical events. More specifically, many of the works considered “the best” addressed the role of the individual in relation to the nation and personified our historical narratives and myths. Morrison’s depiction of Sethe, an escaped slave living free in Ohio during the 1870s and 1880s, provides an excruciating, unflinching, vast and intimate look at slavery’s scars. In the same vein, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral undermines our ideas of family and suburbia when the quintessential American daughter protests Vietnam and severs her hopes of happiness and success.
What role does the individual have in narrating history and how does the personal effect these narratives? As E.L. Doctorow argues in “False Documents,” fiction
gives the reader something more than information. Complex understandings, indirect, intuitive, and nonverbal arise from the words of a story…[and] instructive emotion is generated in the reader from the illusion of suffering an experience not his own.
William Dean Howells, Gore Vidal, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison provide the works through which this course will explore complex understandings of basic American constructions of suburbia, race, sexuality, and national fantasy. In doing so, we will investigate how individual narrations of these constructions unsettle our cultural definitions of history.
In addition to three papers, four to six pages in length, course assignments include Student Led Discussions and a Course Symposium. For the Student Led Discussion, a group of three to four students will led the class discussion every Tuesday beginning Week Three. On these days, you will be expected to have outlined the readings, how they apply to course discussions both specifically and generally, and present the class with three questions about the readings that will spark our discussion for the day(s). For the Course Symposium, in groups of two, each student will read one (1) text from the Symposium Book List, which is in addition to the required texts for the course. During the final weeks of this course each group will deliver an in-class symposium presentation, which will focus on the symposium book choice and incorporate your semester of work, research, and discussion. Your presentation will last between ten and fifteen (10–15) minutes and will be open to questions, comment, and critique from your fellow classmates. A portion of your grade will likewise come from your questions and comments as an audience member. In other words, you will be reading an outside text, and presenting an argument on that text using the semester’s heretofore parameters. I will provide more detail and a specific call for papers (CFP) for the symposium later in the semester.
AML 3270
African American Literature I: Beginning to 1950
African American Literature: Beginning to 1950 will provide a survey of the most significant writings of Black Americans from 1760 to 1950. It is meant to introduce students to a variety of authors, genres, and periods. This course will emphasize the development, continuities, and discontinuities within the literary tradition. We will pay special attention to issues of fictional representation of the black experience, including issues of heritage, identity, feminism, sexuality, and the idea of the African diaspora. Literature will be supplemented with film, art, and critical readings.
Required texts: Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent
Requirements: Two tests (45%), one critical paper (20%), participation (15%), quizzes (20%).
AML 3285
Race and Gender in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Literature, 1990–2005
In this course, we will be reading U.S. Latina/o and Chicano literature, criticism, and theory of the last 15 years, with an eye to the changing landscape of ethnic and racial “Hispanic” identity as it is negotiated and theorized in the United States. Authors may include: Sandra Cisneros, Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez, Michelle Serros, Erika Lopez, Junot Diaz, and more.
AML 3285
Native American Literature
Although most of the literature currently designated as Native American is recent, a tradition of story-telling and story-tellers is integral to most, if not all, aboriginal peoples who have inhabited and continue to inhabit the land now known as the United States. This course is designed as an introduction to the rich wealth of stories and story telling of these various peoples, a dip merely into a vast ocean of tales as we weave back and forth between present-day cultural productions such as Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart and the oral tradition that preceded written productions, such as the transcribed Zuñi tale “Creation and the Origin of Corn” <http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/zuni/cushing/cush07.htm> (transcribed in 1884).
Texts will include works by Native and non-Native writers from the 19th-century, such as Zitkala-Sa <http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/zitkala.htm> and Lydia Maria, as well as from the 20th-century, such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie.
Requirements: bi-weely response papers, a mid-term essay and a final research paper.
AML 4170
Realism, Naturalism, Local Color
This course will survey some of the narrative fiction – novels and short stories – of the United States in the period 1880 to 1915. The literature of this moment is categorized using a number of different labels, especially “realism,” “naturalism,” and “local color.” We will discuss the process by which literary historians categorize works of literature as we examine the overlapping themes, forms, settings, and contexts that went into the creation of both novels and short stories. In particular, we will be interested in how authors of this exciting period of American history grappled with the experience of being “modern.” Works by the following authors are likely to be included in the syllabus: Willa Cather, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Harold Frederic, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Weldon Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Frank Norris.
Students in the course will read approximately 150 pages per week. Grades will be based upon class participation (including attendance) and three take-home exams (the equivalent of three 6–8 page papers).
AML 4170
American Captivity Narratives
This course explores the captivity narrative as a specialized genre, recurring theme, and lived experience in American literature and culture. Interest in captivity narratives has exploded in recent years as literary scholars and cultural critics more closely examine the roots of American colonial contact, racial formation, and gender construction. Yet, as modern readers, how should we approach some of these unfamiliar texts?
We begin by acknowledging the “standard” definition of captivity narratives – typically, narratives by Euro-American frontier settlers who are captured by “Indians” and relate their trials of captivity, escape or rescue, and eventual “restoration” into society. We’ll continue with an extended look at “Indian captivity narratives,” theorizing the genre’s popularity, its literary predecessors and its dominant literary conventions. How did reader expectations shape the genre, and whose interests and fantasies do the texts serve? In what ways do such narratives reflect – and shape – attitudes towards colonization, Native peoples, early American gender ideologies, and the role of the “frontier” in early American nation-formation? What’s overlooked by restricting our definition of the genre to experiences of whites held by Indians?
The second half of the class explores the lingering influence of the genre: we’ll read a selection of fiction and nonfiction exploring the influence of captivity narratives on other literary genres, including the historical romance, domestic frontier fiction, and slave narratives. In what ways and for what purposes do later writers evoke, adapt, and interrogate the conventions of the genre? What is the relationship between captivity and subjectivity, and between the experience of captivity and the constraints of authorship and publication? How does captivity continue to inform national fantasy – and afford opportunities for cultural critique?
Ultimately, we will endeavor to understand why captivity narratives hold such power in the so-called “land of the free”? The answer is not intuitive, nor at times, easy. Consequently, class discussion and your understanding of the materials will be enhanced by attention to secondary scholarship; student presentations on secondary research will foreground the interpretive possibilities and debates surrounding our chosen texts. Written requirements include a sequence of shorter reading responses and at least 3 essays. Regular participation and attendance required.
Early texts are likely to include narratives by or about Cabeza de Vaca, Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Mary Jemison, Jane MacCrea, John Marrant, Elaudah Equiano, and captive Indians. Later fictional adaptations (and interventions) are likely to include Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), poetry by Louise Erdich, Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (1993), and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996).
AML 4170
Writing Biography
Harun Karim Thomas
This course will be comprised of two units: the methodological and the literary. For the first unit, we will examine some of the methodological questions involved in biography. This unit includes practical questions concerning the assessment of databases and sources, the interpretation and use of interviews and oral histories, but it also explores ethical issues involved in researching life stories and biographies, and various approaches to reading and interpreting texts and sources. Last, we will examine some of the methods used in biography.
For the second unit, we will focus on the writing of biography as a literary form, including questions about the relationship between biography and fiction. We will also consider the roles of memory and testimony in biography. Last, the unit will deal with biography as metaphor, the importance of cultural context in reading and writing biography, and ways of gauging/engaging authorial presence.
The course focuses exclusively on the American biography. For assignments, students can expect to identify successful biographical writing techniques in the class readings and practice these techniques.
AML 4170
Metafiction in Twentieth-Century American Narratives
Doris Bremm
Although the term metafiction is fairly new (and most often associated with postmodern novels), the practice is not new by any means. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as
fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text (Metafiction, 1984, 2).
In this course, we will explore a range of metafictional novels and short stories by American authors from the modernist period to the present. We will discuss how metafiction is related to other forms popular in 20th-century writing, such as fabulism, surfiction, and magic realism and address questions of genre, identity, and reality: How does metafiction cause us to rethink representation? How do we define metafiction? In addition to the primary texts, we will read excerpts from literary theory by: Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh, Mark Currie, J. Hillis Miller, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Roland Barthes.
Tentative reading list:
- Sherwood Anderson, “Death in the Woods”
- William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
- John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel
- Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman”
- Paul Auster, City of Glass
- Nicholson Baker, Mezzanine
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
- Toni Morrison, Jazz
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Films:
- Robert Altman, The Player
- Spike Jonze, Adaptation
- Michael Winterbottom, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Requirements for this class include attendance and active class participation, regular response papers to the readings, and two essays.
AML 4213
“Republican Machines”: American Literature and Culture Before 1800
Todd Reynolds
Man in Prison is the virtual image of the bourgeois type which he still has to become in reality.
– Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
By the time Pennsylvania completed construction on the first penitentiary in the world in 1776 at the Walnut Street Gaol, the political and social project of reconstituting the population into what Benjamin Rush termed “republican machines” had been well underway. Rush – one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence as well as a widely-known author, philosopher and physician – advocated programs that exemplified the application of the principles of the Enlightenment applied to everyday life. To ensure the establishment of a rational, constitutional government that would guarantee and protect the freedoms of the individual, there needed also to be constituted new “citizens” of such a republic. A key part, then, to the establishment of the early nation involved the overarching political project of creating “republican machines” – appropriately subjected to the new enlightened social arrangement.
This course will explore the ramifications of this political project of early American culture and their implicit impact of notions of, among other things, gender and race as they participated in the new constitution of citizenship. The course will be divided into three thematic units, although each unit informs and interferes upon the other two:
- Free People on the Free Market
- The (Gendered) Politics of Private and Public Space
- Democracy, Fear, and Penitence
Texts will include:
- Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt, 1800
- Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or the Transformation
- Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
- Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple
- Tenney, Tabitha Gilman. Female Quixotism
There will also be a course pack which will include readings from John Locke, Adam Smith, Benjamin Rush, Phillis Wheatley, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, and scholars such as Cathy Davidson, Thomas Dumm, Michael Perelman, Ronald Takaki, Michael Warner, and Ellen Meiksins Wood.
Requirements: short response papers, one short formal paper, one longer formal paper, a final exam, regular class participation.
AML 4242
Disobedience, Civil and Otherwise
Tim Gilmore
Rebellion takes many forms. Often our greatest rebels are our greatest leaders. Often they rebel against our conformity with what is wrong, with our failure to interrogate our own behavior. Perhaps no one holds as bright a light into society’s status quo treatment of the oppressed and underprivileged as those who engage in civil disobedience. But while we give the names of Martin Luther King and Gandhi sacred status, their very sainthood means we often fail to give them due attention. Still others who insist on disobeying perceived injustices in society choose less than civil ways. Some call for outright violence, for revolution, for righteous retribution. Where in the writings of our most prominent disobeyers can we locate the roots and trace the ramifications of the actions they undertake and inspire?
Required Texts
Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Words of Cesar Chavez
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Life In Prison, Stanley Williams
Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present, ed. Miriam Schneir
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge? And Why We Must, Kalle Lasn
Assignments
Participation: 20%
Journal: 10%
Presentation: 10%
First paper: 20%
Second paper: 40%
Presentations
Small groups will present on a topic for which students have individually signed up. Topics vary from the iconic figures mainly associated with “disobedience, civil and otherwise” to less overtly political disobeyers. Students will choose from a presentation schedule.
AML 4242
The Beat Generation: Visions of American Literature
James McDougall
Since their first “Howl,” the writers of the Beat Generation have provoked outrageous critical responses, ranging from demonization to deification, in addition to being completely dismissed as literary charlatans (Truman Capote famously laughed off Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, saying “This isn’t writing at all; it’s typing”). In this course we will approach the Beat Generation and its mystique through a body of texts operating within an American literary tradition and as an intervention into post-war culture. To this end we will employ a multidisciplinary inquiry into the role of jazz, avant-garde experimentation, popular culture, mysticism, gender, cross-cultural appropriation, and Cold War politics in Beat literature.
Throughout the course we will explore the impact of the Beat Generation on subsequent cultural movements, such as: environmentalism, Black Power (and other forms of cultural nationalism), the 1960s counterculture, New Age mysticism, and anti-war protest movements. We will close the course by examining the contemporary re-fashioning of the Beats and the globalization of American culture in order to get at what might be at stake with the continual glorification and dismissal of the Beat Generation.
The main goals of the course include the following: students will achieve competence in 1. analyzing literary production through historical and cultural contexts, and 2. writing about American literature with respect to genres, major authors, periods, and critical theory. To achieve these goals students will be expected to write two essays, submit weekly response papers, participate in class discussions, and take part in one panel presentation.
While soul patches, dark glasses, and berets are all optional, required texts for the course include:
- On the Road
- Dharma Bums
- Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
- Howl and Other Poems
- Naked Lunch
- Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka / Leroi Jones
- The Beat Reader
- Women of the Beat Generation
- Trout Fishing In America
AML 4282
Black Queer Literature and Culture
In this class, we will examine the representation of homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender identities in Black literature and culture produced by Black communities. This course will examine the intersections between African American literary production and queer culture from the early 20th century to the present. We will focus on how individuals have or have not used racially scripted cultural forms to extrapolate and then define a black queer aesthetic. The class will focus on six major issues. Those concerns are 1) how forms and aesthetics may signify racial and sexual markers, 2) nation(alism), race, and queerness, 3) gender, race, and queerness, 4) private and public spaces and representations for black queer identity and culture, 5) spirituality and queerness, and 6) consumption/abjection of black queer bodies.
Fiction
- Selections from Harlem Renaissance writers: Grimke, Nugent, and Thurman
- Audre Lorde, Zami
- Dionne Brand, No Language is Neutral
- Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories
- Cheryl Clarke, Living as a Lesbian
- Shay Youngblodd, Black Girl In Paris or Soul Kiss
- Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies
- Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
- James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
- Thomas Glave, Whose Song and Other Stories
Plays
Pomo Afro Homo’ Fierce Love, Shirlene Holmes A Lady and a Woman and Sharon Bridgforth’s blood pudding
In addition to fiction, plays, and poetry, we will also be examining critical prose by Joseph Beam, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, June Jordan, Evelyn Hammonds, Marlon Ross, Keith Boykin, Lindon Barret, Roderick A. Ferguson, Gregory Conerly, Audre Lorde, Dwight McBride, Cathy Cohen, Samuel Delaney, and others. Other cultural texts may include select documentaries, episodes of LOGO’s Noah’s Arc, iconic figures Sylvester and RuPaul, and “homo hip-hop” performers Rainbow Flava, Tori Fixx, Deep Dickollective, Miss Money, and Tim’m T. West.
Updates for course can be found at: <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/stalling/syllabi.html>
AML 4453
Comparative U.S. and Caribbean Literatures
The history of the Caribbean, like that of the United States, is one 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.
size="1">AML 4453
American Realism and Naturalism
Huei-Ju Wang
Critic Amy Kaplan in her contribution to the study of American realism and naturalism, The Social Construction of American Realism, notes that the last two decades of the 19th century saw social turmoil in the U.S, which helped bring into being the literary movement known as realism, as practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James and Mark Twain. Realism as a genre later developed into naturalism, a movement associated with writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. This course will investigate the ways in which those realist and naturalist writers sought to represent the various social changes and upheavals that transformed society, particularly issues such as conditions of work, urban poverty and social inequalities in the context of class, gender and race. What is at stake is the politics of representation: that is, what gets represented and or what gets excluded. We will discuss class, labor, urban poverty, women’s rights, and racial ambiguity, as well as the emergence of the city and consumer culture at the turn of the century. Finally, we will look at Larsen’s Passing (1929) as a way to discuss whether such a periodization is useful and/or limiting in reading works generally not associated with this literary movement. In addition to reading those literary texts, we will also read some critical essays to help us better understand the larger historical and social contexts that helped produce this significant literary movement. Written assignments include: short response papers, a short critical essay and a longer research paper.
Required Texts
- Rebecca Harding Davis, Life In the Iron-Mills (Bedford Cultural Edition)
- William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (Penguin Classics)
- Henry James, The Bostonians (Barnes and Noble Classics)
- Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of Streets (Penguin Classics)
- Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Penguin Classics)
- Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Signet Classic)
- Frank Norris, McTeague (Signet Classic)
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Barnes and Noble Classics)
- James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Penguin Classics)
- Nella Larsen, Passing (Penguin Classics)
- Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (U of Chicago, 1988)
- Donald Pizer, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism (Cambridge UP, 1995)
- Course Packet
AML 4685
Asian American Culture in Historical Perspective
In this course, we will examine works of contemporary Asian American literature and film alongside historical representations of Asians from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. On the one hand, these older works may seem to have little to do with the interest of today’s Asian American writers and filmmakers in issues of identity, race, gender, sexuality, and class. On the other hand, these works, whether written by eighteenth-century European philosophers, nineteenth-century American missionaries, or twentieth-century anthropologists and Asian immigrants, reveal the ways in which Asians as a group have been assigned certain characteristics and features in an often stereotypical and reductive manner. As a result, much recent Asian American cultural production has attempted to grapple with such stereotypes and reverse them. Alternately, some of the works produced by Asian Americans repeat these stereotypes – if only in implicit fashion – to appeal to an audience already receptive to the images and myths of Asian culture they have learned from a long-standing tradition of representing Asia. By studying Asian American works from a historical perspective, we will be able to understand better why and how individual authors and filmmakers produced the works they did. Additionally, in looking at historical accounts of Asia, we will see that not only present-day Asian Americans, but also Asians who immigrated to America before the twentieth century, have taken part in the creation of Asian American culture and identity.
Assignments will include weekly written responses, one or two short papers, a final research project, and an in-class presentation.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
This course will be run in the “traditional” workshop fashion with occasional
lectures on structure, metaphor, plot, etc. Writing exercises will
be assigned at the beginning, but the primary emphasis is on self-generated
work. Each student will be expected to write
two short stories, as well as complete a final draft of each.
Optimally, students will turn in stories that they have taken as far
as they can on their own. The workshop should be a venue to test
the waters, to try new things, to present first drafts as well as polished
works, but only after the writer has struggled with it to the nth degree. The
idea is for students to rigorously challenge themselves. Everyone not
presenting work should take their jobs as critics and editors as seriously
as they take their own writing.
Reading will be assigned.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310 and CRW 4906, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3110
Imaginative Writing: Fiction
Course description not available at this time.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310 and CRW 4906, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3310
Imaginative Writing: Poetry
“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
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 Emily Dickinson 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. This is an advanced workshop in poetry, for students who have already taken the intermediate workshop (CRW 2300) and want to press their understandings of poetic language even further.
Email submission of your manuscript is necessary. I’m out of the country and cannot read hard copy. Please submit four poems to me at <wlogan@english.ufl.edu> in one attachment in .rtf format. Include the workshops you have previously taken.
Required reading:
- an anthology of modern poetry
- a selection of contemporary books of poetry
- James McAuley, Versification
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310 and CRW 4906, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 3310
Imaginative Writing: Poetry
“To be able to bag poems consistently, you have to know more about how a poet thinks than the duck does. To learn to think like a poet and call like a duck, a duck must spend time with poets. The easiest way to learn to call poems is to take a pair of binoculars, go into the swamps, woods, marshes and wetlands where you hunt poems and watch how the poets talk to each other. Listen to the calls they make in your area and then try to imitate those calls.”
Students who have taken CRW 2300 meet the official prerequisite for CRW 3310, and can register for this section on ISIS. Students who have taken either CRW 3310 or CRW 4906, but who have not taken CRW 2300, may also enroll for this section, but because they lack the official prerequisite, they must see an English Department undergraduate advisor in TUR 4012 in order to be registered.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310 and CRW 4906, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4905
Advanced Fiction Workshop
Course description not available at this time.
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310 and CRW 4906, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.).
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
CRW 4906
Senior Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing
“Just as the civilization of the Kelts is revealed to us by their dolmens, and that of the Scandinavians by their mounds and kitchen-middens, so will the antiquaries of future times immediately recognise the spots inhabited in India by the English by the piles of soda-water bottles heaped up before the cantonments, and the dwellings of the Americans by their deposits of empty meat tins.”
Edmond Baron de Mandat-Grancey, Cow-Boys and Colonels, 1887
Poetry must be about hells and heavens, hills and halls, hopscotch and hiphop, and empty meat tins. We will be looking in language for the equivalent of things felt and seen. You will seek this in the words used by other poets, and those you invent for yourself. Be prepared to read until your eyes hurt, to write a dozen poems (one per week), and to find your poems criticized. Each week the workshop will discuss your work and the work of your predecessors.
This is Florida ’s most advanced workshop in poetry, for students who hope to become poets and possibly attend an MFA program – or those who have merely developed an obsessive and perverse interest in writing. Students from this class have gone on to the University of Iowa, University of Virginia, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and other programs.
Email submission of your manuscript is necessary. I’m out of the country and cannot read hard copy. Please submit four poems to me at <wlogan@english.ufl.edu> in one attachment in .rtf format. Include the workshops you have previously taken.
Required reading:
- an anthology of modern poetry
- a selection of contemporary books of poetry
- James McAuley, Versification
Submitting Manuscripts for Upper-Division Creative Writing Courses
To qualify for departmental registration for upper-division creative writing (CRW) courses, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor of the course you wish to take. Each manuscript you submit for each course to which you apply must be accompanied by a Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet, which is available from the link below or in TUR 4012-A. It tells us what you wish to do, and it will help us put you in a course when space is tight. It will allow us to put you in the course you prefer when we can. Please fill it in closely and completely.
For CRW 3310, submit four poems; for CRW 3110 or CRW 4905, submit one short story or excerpt from longer work (up to 20 pp.). For LIT 4930, submit one of the following: a memoir, personal essay, or short story (5–10 pp.)
The Manuscript Submission Cover Sheet indicates whether individual instructors require you to submit hard copies of your manuscripts to their mailboxes in Turlington 4301 or via email.
All submissions must be received by the March 9, 2006 deadline.
A list of those admitted will be posted outside the Creative Writing Suite, Turlington 4211, at the beginning of advance registration. Students who are admitted and who are free of registration holds will be automatically registered for the appropriate course by the Undergraduate Academic Advisor.
ENC 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.
No one who has missed the first three hours of class will be permitted to take this class.
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.
No one who has missed the first three hours of class will be permitted to take this class.
ENC 3414
Hypermedia
This course is an introduction to Humanities computing, authoring in hypermedia, designing Websites for Internet publication. The proposition to be tested in a semester-long project featuring the design of two substantial Websites is that hypermedia explicitly supports creative thinking: there is a fortunate alignment in hypermedia relating the logic of creativity, the forms of popular culture, and the links-and-nodes features of networked media. The non-traditional methodology of the course requires active engagement through practices such as inventive problem-solving and group collaboration in in-class presentations and an email listserv. The point of departure for the semester project is the observation made by cultural historians that a pattern of a few core images is found organizing the work of the most productive people across a wide range of disciplines. The historians note that the ingredients of the core image are in place by the time the individual leaves high school. Our project is designed to locate and represent this pattern or “image of wide scope” in an experimental hypermedia self-portrait. Previous experience with basic Web authoring is helpful but not required. The course is taught in the Networked Writing Environment, using a pedagogy that is a hybrid of criticism, composition, and studio arts. Possible readings include Jean-Marie Floch, Visual Identities; Gregory Ulmer, Internet Invention. Extensive use will be made of online resources.
An exhibit of student projects from earlier versions of the course is available online: <web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/course97/rushmore.html>.
ENG 3010
Theories of Desire
This course will examine how major new theories of desire arose out of post-structuralism. Most theories reflect the impact of Freudian psychoanalysis, though some imply a criticism of aspects of Freudian theory, while others a reinterpretation. We will examine how philosophical treatment of desire compares to psychoanalytic theorization of desire. Among the theorists we will read are Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Stuart Hall, and Judith Butler. We will ask such questions as how theories of desire treat males and females differently, and how queer desire might be seen in relationship to heterosexual desire. We will look at theories of sublimation, and other ways of addressing the relationship of desire to the production and appreciation of art and writing. We will look at how consumer culture and advertising affect our desires, and our theories of desire.
Students will write short reaction assignments to each week’s reading assignment, in preparation for 2 paper projects of seven pages each (a mid-term and a final paper). Active participation in class discussion is vital.
Readings may include:
- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
- Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Libidinal Economy
- and a variety of essays available on eros
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 poststructural, postcolonial and postmodern methodologies. After introducing phenomenology and structuralism as points of departure, the class will consider psychoanalysis, deconstruction, discourse, gender and race en route to postcolonial, postmodern and heterological approaches.
Our principle purpose will be to investigate the conjuncture of theoretical issues with an experience of specific film texts, and the function of these texts in the past and present workings of history, especially as this leads towards questions for future production and study. The working assumption here is that alphabetic writing and film production both constitute modes of inscription, and represent two ways of embodying the same cultural process.
Mastery of so many topics is neither possible nor expected. The goal is to understand the conditions and motives that led to the rethinking of media, and to initiate theoretical strategies in your own work.
Course requirements will include two papers of 8–10 pages each.
ENG 3121
History of the Film 1
Nora Alter
Course description not available at this time.
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, Othello, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Herzog. 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
American Science Fiction Film
Description: A survey of the development of American science fiction film as a reflection of our hopes and fears concerning science and technology.
Books:
- Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film by Vivian Sobchack (Ungar)
- Alien Zone: Contemporary Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema ed. Annette Kuhn (Verso)
- Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader ed. Sean Redmond (Wallflower)
Films:
- Hollywood Aliens and Monsters (history of SF film)
- Frankenstein
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
- The Thing
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Dr. Strangelove
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- A Clockwork Orange
- Star Wars
- Alien
- E.T.
- Blade Runner
- The Terminator
- Back to the Future
- The Matrix
Requirements:
- Attendance and participation: 10%
- One oral report to the class (as part of a group): 10% (required but ungraded)
- Ten short response papers (one page each) on the movies and readings: 20% (required but ungraded)
- One four-page paper on a film: 25%
- One six-seven page research paper on one or two films: 35%
ENG 4130
“Kill Them With Karate”: Transnationality, Martial Arts Cinema, and Diasporic Cultural Creation
Since its initial appearance in early twentieth-century China to its growth as a global cinema phenomenon throughout the late seventies and into the nineties, martial arts film has become the international standard for the cinematic depiction of violence and action on screen. This class will explore the ways in which martial arts film participates in the transnational circulation of visual culture. It will pay particular attention to the ways in which the films participate in a global discourse on Asian and Asian diasporic identity. Therefore, films will be considered not only in their Asian context, but in terms of the international film industry and distribution system, as well as the specific context of their reception in the West. The class will consider the ways in which the films construct gender, cultural and social norms, as well as participate in a discourse of national belonging in relationship to concepts of heroism and social deviance.
ENG 4133
Shakespeare and Race
This class will examine less the construction of race in Shakespeare’s plays and early modern England, which has largely been confined to blackness, than how race (Asian, Caucasian, and so on) enters the performance history of the plays and sonnets on the stage and in film and television. We will attend as well to the transnational remains of the plays in films such as Stage Beauty and Shakespeare Wallah and more obscure Chinese and Indian (Bollywood and beyond) films as well as episodes of television series such as Have Gun Will Travel and The Lone Ranger. We will also examine full-scale adaptations such as Oliver Parker’s Othello. Some prior knowledge of Shakespeare will be assumed.
ENG 4135
European Identities, European Cinemas
Sylvie Blum
Since World War II, European cinemas have struggled to maintain the prestige they had earlier acquired, and are now considered Hollywood’s rivals. Strengthened by the establishment of the European Union, many films are now destined for a larger market and its national communities. The course will emphasize European cinemas’ distinct aesthetic qualities as an ‘art cinema’ in which politics and philosophy are present to a degree not found in American cinema. The course will examine the question of what constitutes ‘Europeanness’ and will analyze critical texts surrounding this notion.
As designed, the class does not intend to be a survey of films made in different countries nor to sample films made in Europe. It will seriously study texts (film included) and their European agendas in a critically and historically informed fashion. The course will be offered in English only.
Course goal:
Over the 15-16 week semester, the student will explore films written, produced and distributed in several European countries, and will acquire a knowledge of film terminology relevant to film history, technique, analysis and criticism. S/he will come out of the class strengthened by an approach to different cultures, languages and identities that make up contemporary European cinemas.
Topical outline of subjects covered:
The geopolitics of Europe, the European Constitution and the History of the European Union, Religious communities and their practices, Women and the Veil, Traveling through Europe, Cinematic changes in the representation of women in Europe, Immigrant communities in Europe, Children and Education in European countries, Rom communities, Film production and distribution in the new Europe, the making of a European film: a case study.
Geographical areas covered will include Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain and will venture into the candidate countries of Romania and Turkey. Concepts of exile, migration and displacements will be discussed as they reflect a pressing reality in contemporary films. The notion of a new European identity disseminated in films will include a discussion of women, gender notions, politics and industry. It will focus on racial, ethnic and religious minorities that compose the fabric of Europe now.
ENG 4135
Italian Cinema
Deborah Amberson
Italian cinema achieved world-renown in the immediate post-World War II period with the emergence of cinematic Neorealism. Idealized as a moment of cinematic truth, Neorealism’s aesthetic and ideological commitment to an Italian political and social reality has wielded a colossal and sometimes crippling influence over Italian filmmakers active both during this period and afterward, and, whether directors have embraced, manipulated or explicitly rejected the central tenets of Neorealist cinema, this aesthetic of the real together with a politically engaged artistic agenda constitute a fundamental property of Italian cinema. Focusing on a range of theories of political, social or subjective realities, this course will analyze Italian cinema’s changing and inventive relationship with a realist aesthetic, examining the various cinematic techniques and principles that informed the individual cinematic schools and tendencies throughout the second half of the Italian 20th century as well as addressing the political and cultural events which shaped Italian society.
This course will be taught in English. All screened films will be in Italian with English subtitles.
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 G5s. The implication of such high-quality but low-cost desktop equipment, for the purposes of this course, is to make current technology available on an individualized basis for innovation and research. Much of the semester will be spent developing 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 4146
16MM Film Production
This course is designed as an ambitious introduction to experimental film (as opposed to video) production. Work will be exclusively in 16MM. Work will also be exclusively focused on alternative (non-narrative, abstract, etc.) uses of the filmed image. We will explore the process of filmmaking from the most rudimentary ways of putting an image on film (scratching, direct animation, in-camera effects, etc.) to (relatively) advanced approaches to cinematography, processing, and editing. There will be no synchronous sound production in this course, so all films will be dialogue-free, although we will experiment with ways of adding sound (including double-system sound and video transfer). No previous experience with film (or video) production is necessary. What is necessary is a willingness to throw out all of your current ideas about film and to open yourself to experimentation.
Admission is by the consent of the instructor only. Contact him at <rogerbb@english.ufl.edu> for more details about the application process. The application process will begin before the start of advance registration for the spring, so you should contact him at least a week or two before that. Women and students of color should feel especially encouraged to apply. Film, even experimental film, is expensive, so be warned that there will unfortunately be a considerable materials cost for the class (around $300).
ENG 4905
Independent Study
Faculty Member of Choice
An Independent Study course may be taken for 1- to 3-credit hours and will count as credit toward the English major. This course may be repeated with a change of topic up to a maximum of 9 credits.
This course is for advanced students who desire to supplement the regular courses by independent reading or research under the guidance of a member of the faculty. The student must find a faculty member who is willing to supervise the semester-long study, and together, the two create a project. The student must meet with the professor at designated times, agreed upon in advance, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Thoreau/Rohmer
In this seminar, we will study one classic American author, Henry David Thoreau, and one French New Wave filmmaker, Eric Rohmer. (The two may or may not have things in common.) Studying Thoreau will involve a close reading of Walden, named by one poll of college instructors as the single most important 19th-century American literary work. Studying Rohmer will involve watching six of his movies, regarded as contemporary classics. When Thoreau went to Walden Pond at the age of 28, he was concerned with finding a vocation, deciding how to write, and learning how to live. (He saw the three problems as related.) When Rohmer made his first commercially successful feature (My Night at Maud’s), he was 46 (or 49: he has been elusive regarding his exact birth date), but he has been preoccupied with how young men and young women meet and fall in or out of love.
Assignments: Weekly reading quizzes. Two 10-page papers. No exams.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Race(ing) Through the Nineteenth Century
This course will focus on race as a signifier and power apparatus in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. Taking race to be an ever-changing and adaptive social construct, we will focus both on the fluidity and mobility of racial categories, as well as their disciplinary powers. We will also examine the intersections between the discourses of race and sexuality and see how the two are mutually constitutive. Throughout the course, we will deal with some of the questions raised by the concept of race: What are the problems and gains of racial identity politics? How do questions of race and gender intersect/collide? What is the difference between the politics of race and the politics of ethnicity? By drawing on the diverse deployments of race in legal, literary, anthropological, and critical texts, this course will emphasize the importance of race in the reading of cultural texts as well as map some of the racial formations in the nineteenth century cultural imaginary. The course will focus on different aspects of race: constructions of the Other, writing resistance, whiteness, race and sexuality, and race and class. I’m not sure which texts I’ll use but a probable list might include critical essays by Omi and Winant, Patricia Williams, Frantz Fanon, Haney Lopez, Noel Ignatiev, and Patricia Hill Collins. Literary texts might include
- William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
- Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
Requirements: Weekly responses, attendance, and long term paper or short papers.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Postmodern Media Culture
“Postmodernsim is not something we can settle once and for all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there is one, has to come at the end, not at the beginning, of our discussions of it.” – Fredric Jameson
This course takes seriously Jameson’s injunction above and seeks, through the 15 weeks of discussion, to cast some light on the concept of postmodernism. Specifically, the course will explore the interrelations between postmodernism and the mass media – primarily film, but also television, radio, and the internet. We will do this both by looking back at the various facets of modernism against which postmodernism (in its various forms) defines its difference and by looking directly at postmodern films, television shows, music, etc. In so doing, we will (I hope) not just arrive at an understanding of how we got into our current historical predicament, but will also start to see our way out of it.
ENG 4936
Honors Seminar: Henry James and Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton first met Henry James in the late 1880s, but they did not become good friends until after 1900, because he was a famous author nearing the end of his brilliant career and she was at the beginning of what would become an equally long and brilliant career. In 1900, Wharton sent James a copy of her story “The Line of Least Resistance”; he replied with praise for the story, followed by detailed criticism, which she found devastating. In time, however, she learned to accept criticism as one professional to another, and James became a valued literary adviser. Wharton, notoriously shy, overcame her shyness with James, having discovered that she could talk to him with ease “of the things we both cared about; while he, always so helpful and hospitable to younger writers, at once used his magical faculty of drawing out his interlocutor’s inmost self. Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought out our understanding.”
Their relationship was literary, complex and close. This honors seminar will examine the making of a literary career in the late 19th and early 20th century through an examination of these two friends, and literary “partners.”
Text will include as much as we can manage of both oeuvres, as well as criticism and historical materials.
Requirements: response papers, in-class presentations, a mid-term essay and final research project.
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: Acts of Language
John Murchek
In the 1950s, the English philosopher J. L. Austin pioneered the field of speech-act theory in response to analytic philosophy’s insistence that it was the business of philosophy to make statements that could be judged either true or false. Austin argued that philosophy should both draw on and analyze all the resources of “ordinary language,” and that our everyday utterances involve us in doing many more things with language than making statements. We can, for example, promise, command, prohibit, cajole, convince, seduce and make excuses. Meanwhile, in France at the same time, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was demanding that the psychoanalytic community acknowledge the central importance of what he calls in the title of one of his lectures the “field and function of speech and language in psychoanalysis.” Desire, for Lacan, is an effect of the fact we exist in language, and any therapeutic effects produced by analysis are the result of what happens in and through language – by means of the “talking cure,” as it was dubbed by Bertha Pappenheim.
In the intervening years, theorists, critics and scholars have found Austin and Lacan indispensable points of reference for thinking through speech and writing as actions and events, even as their ruminations have problematized “speech,” “writing,” “action,” and “event.” This seminar will dedicate itself to exploring the work of Austin and Lacan, and to examining the work of writers who have responded to them by developing, contesting, or extrapolating from their work. Michel Foucault, for example, engages Austin’s work as he attempts to theorize the “statement event” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and, in a late essay, celebrates Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way of working on the self. Judith Butler draws on both writers in her work on queer performativity. And, legal scholars Catherine MacKinnon and Janet Halley refer to Austin in their work on pornography and on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy respectively.
Before reading Austin and Lacan, we will need to do some preliminary readings in classical rhetoric and in the work of Sigmund Freud. We will take up Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and selections from his Philosophical Papers, and we will read selections from Lacan’s Écrits, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, and his seminars. Our remaining readings may be drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul de Man, Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, Stanley Cavell, Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, Homi Bhabha, Catherine MacKinnon, Janet Halley, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Peter Brooks, and Timothy Gould.
Students will be evaluated on the basis of (a) weekly question sets that they prepare and share with the other members of the seminar, (b) a brief 4–5 page paper due in early October, (c) a longer seminar paper (10–15 pages) due late in the semester, (d) attendance (no more than 3 unexcused 50-minute session absences), and (e) participation.
Students should keep two further facts in mind as they decide whether to register for the course. First, the texts we will be reading are complex and difficult (Lacan’s notoriously so). Second, because the course is a seminar, students will be expected to contribute to class discussion on a regular basis, and in a fashion that is exploratory, collaborative, and perhaps even adventurous.
ENG 4953
Department Seminar: Desperate Domesticity: American Literature and Culture in the 1950s
This course explores fraught constructions of domesticity in U.S. literary and popular culture of the fifties, focusing on the nuclear family, gender roles (especially the housewife and Organization Man), the rise of suburbia, and alternative domesticities. Texts will include
- John Cheever’s Shady Hill stories
- Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha and The Bean Eaters
- Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
- Robert Lowell’s Life Studies
- Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
- Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
- Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
We will study the family sit-com, focusing on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and the film Rebel Without a Cause. You’ll also chart your way through the fifties by exploring Ebony, Ladies’ Home Journal, or The New Yorker. We’ll probably read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and perhaps W.H. Auden’s About the House. We’ll end with recent revisions of the 1950s such as the film Pleasantville and the series Desperate Housewives.
ENG 4970
Honors Thesis Project
Faculty members (2) of Choice
Students must have have completed at least one semester of ENG 4936, Honors Seminar. Open to English Honors students.
The student must select two faculty members: one to direct the reading, research, and writing of a thesis on a topic of the student’s and director’s chosing, and another as the second reader. An abstract (100 to 200 words) and one copy of the thesis (30 to 50 pages) must be delivered to the CLAS Academic Advising Center on Fletcher Road at least 10 days before graduation.
ENL 3112
Eighteenth-Century Novel
We will be reading fictions written in the eighteenth-century, including Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey, Matthew Lewis’s gothic horror novel, The Monk, and Jane Austen’s parody of the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. We will also read two European fictions, Voltaire’s Candide and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther. The course will thus examine not the more traditional fictions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, but the untraditional strain of fictions more interested in ideas than in character and plot. There will be quizzes to ensure reading, as well as written assignments. Students who do not like to read will almost certainly not enjoy this course.
ENL 3132
Twentieth-Century British Novel
This course is a survey of the development of the twentieth-century “British” novel (including Ireland) through the present. The first half of the course will stress the arrival of modernism in the novel and the particular influence of literary impressionism; the second will explore lesser-known novelists, especially women, who are often excluded from surveys. We will also examine the question of postmodernism in the novel.
Requirements include two short essays (roughly eight typed pages in length). The subject of the first paper will be point of view in one of the authors we read before the midterm; the subject of the second will be open, but it must concern the work of one of the novelists we are reading after the midterm. There will be a midterm and a final exam, both including objective and essay parts, but the objective part of the final will not be cumulative. Papers and exams count equally toward your grade. Depending upon the class’s demonstrated preparedness, there may be occasional quizzes, each counting 1/4 of a paper grade. An additional grade, between C and A, will reflect your class participation.
Books may include
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Bedford Books)
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
- Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Bedford Books)
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- E. M. Forster, Howards End
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
- Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
- A. S. Byatt, Matisse Stories
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
ENL 3132
Twentieth-Century British Novel
Lisa Schroeder York
This course will focus on nine twentieth-century British novels, some literary criticism associated with these texts, and some literary theory. In an effort to come to some understanding about what a twentieth-century British novel might be, we will examine these works from various angles. What is a novel? How does the novel as genre change over the course of the century? We will also question the notion of displacement: cultural and colonial, intellectual, political, religious, physical, etc. For instance, how does displacement affect and what constitutes “British-ness”?
Texts include:
- Monica Ali, Brick Lane
- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
- E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin
- Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth
- Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Course requirements include participation in on-line and in-class discussions, a group presentation of a piece of literary criticism concerning one of the texts, two eight-page papers, a mid-term exam, and a final exam.
ENL 3210
Medieval English Literature
In this course, we will read, in their entirety, Beowulf, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid.
We will read selections, some substantial, from the Ancrene Wisse, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, The Book of Marjorie Kempe and Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.
In preparation for reading these medieval texts, we will spend the beginning of the term reading major Latin authors who are known to have been directly and powerfully influential on medieval English writers, including (but not necessarily limited to) Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, and Boethius.
Students will take one examination in class and write two short essays (5–7 pages), the first due at midterm and the second at the end of term. There will be no final examination.
Extensive use will be made of resources available on the WWW, and students will be introduced early to a number of major sites containing texts and bibliographies.
ENL 3230
Age of Dryden and Pope
We will read plays, poems, and prose fiction by British authors of the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. While we will study the individual works in considerable detail, we also will establish backgrounds (aesthetic, political, religious) from which those works emerge. In particular, we will attend to the growing social and literary power of what we today call the middle class and to a corresponding diminution of aristocratic/patriarchal authority.
Students will write two papers (6–8 pages each). They also will write briefly at the opening or closing of most class sessions, responding to questions about the reading or about the class itself. The course concludes with a two-part final examination. Part 1 (Identification and Short Answer) will be based upon my lectures. Part 2 (Essay) will ask for a comprehensive response to one of three questions about the Age. Participation in class discussions is expected. Students who have difficulty speaking in class should see me about other options.
Books:
All these will be available at Goering’s Books and Bagels, 1717 N.W. 1 st Avenue.
- Restoration and 18th Century Comedy, 2nd. ed., ed. Scott McMillin (Norton)
- Popular Fiction by Women 1160–1730, eds. John Richetti and Paula Backscheider (Oxford)
- The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1C, 8th edition, eds. M. H. Abrams, et al. (Norton)
ENL 3241
The 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 3241
Romantic Materialisms: Transcendence and Immanence
Roger Whitson
This class will attempt to chart a certain non-empirical materialist strain in Romantic poetry. Traditionally, Romanticism is understood as a rejection of British materialist thought in favor of German Idealism. This characterization ignores the immense impact philosophers like Spinoza and Leibniz had on Romanticism. Focusing on William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Clare, and George Gordon Byron, we will look at how arguments over materialism impacted their work, and the poetic history of what could be termed a visionary materialist tradition that rejected the influence of British empiricism. We will spend a good amount of time considering the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, move through the empiricism of John Locke and Issac Newton and into more radical interventions by Spinoza and Leibniz. Then we shall see how Coleridge’s transmission of German Idealism and Spinozism impacted the development of the “Romantic Period” and its supposed disdain for the material world. Class requirements include two five page papers and a final exam.
ENL 3251
Victorian Literature
Lisa Hager
This course will seek to define the contours of Victorian literature – its obsessions, tensions, particulars, and world views. Since literature reveals the workings of culture, we shall endeavor to create an ongoing conversation on the nature of those workings as we piece together the conversation in which the work itself participates through both in-class discussions and weekly written responses. We will focus on a number of issues that were vitally important to the Victorians and continue to be debated in our own time such as the Woman Question, class conflicts, Crisis of Faith, and degeneracy/decadence.
The class takes as its organizing text Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Though this text is from the twentieth century rather the nineteenth, it provides a useful framework to examine the Victorian issues mentioned above. In the course of the term, we will read all of the major text from which Moore has taken his main characters and explore in depth how each represents particular Victorian obsessions.
The final project will be a group project in which you will construct a fictional narrative featuring a character from Victorian literature. You will then proved an 8-10 page interpretation and discussion of the Victorian characters, styles, and discourses that you have utilized in your narrative. Each group member will also provide an anonymous review of how the group functioned so that I will know if any groups members have not done their share of the work.
The goal of this course is to encourage an understanding of each individual work within the larger context of English literature and, by doing so, learn how to read poetry, drama, and fiction critically. In order to communicate these interpretations, we will also focus on how to write about literature. Thus the goal in this endeavor is to construct essays that discuss these genres in a thoughtful, convincing, and effective manner.
Reading List
In addition to selections from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Volume 5: The Victorian Era), we will also be reading the following:
- Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula
- H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon's Mines
- Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
ENL 4221
Donne to Milton
This course will introduce students to selected major works of seventeenth-century English literature. We will concentrate on poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Milton, and Bunyan, though other writers such as Bacon, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, and Rochester may also be included. The course requirements are a midterm, final, and two five-page papers. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions are also expected.
ENL 4273
Twentieth-Century British Literature
Paromita Mukherjee
In her essay “The Bend Back,” Elizabeth Bowen writes that looking back to one’s past is like reading fiction, which can be dangerous because “one invests one’s identity in one’s memory” (Cornhill CLXV 224). In the texts that we will be reading for this course, memory and history do not remain stable points of reference, but are continuously reconstructed through remembrances, lies, fear, uncertainty, fantasy, desire and so on. Memory and history become subjective experiences in these texts, and are also represented in ways that produce uncanny moments and instances of undecidability. Thinking along the lines of Freud, Hillis Miller, and other theorists listed below, we will explore the questions of memory and history, as well as issues of identity and gender, in twentieth-century British literature.
Apart from the primary texts, critical readings may include excerpts from Sigmund Freud, Umberto Eco, Henry Bergson, Mieke Bal, Alessia Ricciardi, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, and Nicholas Royle.
Possible Reading List:
- Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories or The Heat of the Day
- Muriel Spark, Memento Mori or Aiding and Abetting
- Harold Pinter, Old Times
- Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton or First Light
- Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills or The Remains of the Day
- Helen Dunmore, Zennor in Darkness or A Spell of Winter
- Sarah Waters, Affinity
- David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
- Trezza Azzopardi, Remember Me
The requirements for this course include short response papers and one essay, along with active participation in class discussions. If you have any questions, please contact me by email at <paromita@english.ufl.edu>.
ENL 4311
Chaucer
This course will familiarize students with the major narrative poetry of Chaucer. We will devote most of our study to several of The Canterbury Tales and to Chaucer’s great romance, Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine at least one of Chaucer’s long allegorical poems, The House of Fame, along with Latin and Italian source materials included in our main textbook. Students will learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English (the form of the English language from about 1100–1500 CE), and they will be introduced to the principal methodological issues constitutive of contemporary Chaucer studies. That is, they will investigate how Chaucer studies incorporate modern critical theory – especially involving issues of narrative complexity, figurative discourse, the formalism of Chaucerian genre (especially the frame narrative or novella) and the poetic representation of gender. Particular focus will fall upon the issue of subjectivity, since Chaucer, who is often seen as the forerunner of modern novelistic art, lays claim to being the first major author in English to cultivate the poetics of the subjective, the personal, and the psychologically realistic. Class meetings will include lectures, discussion, and, especially early in the term, recitation and spot translation of Middle English. We shall also view together (most likely only in part) and study I Racconti di Canterbury (P. Paolo Pasolini, dir., 1971), the only film version of Chaucer’s grand novella.
Required texts, which will be available at Goerings’ Bookstore, will include the Norton Critical Edition of The Canterbury Tales (Kolve and Olson, eds.); the Penguin edition (“original spelling”) of Troilus and Criseyde (Windeatt, ed.); The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, 2nd. ed. (Boitani and Mann, eds.); and The House of Fame in a course packet.
Major course work includes: class participation and regular, unannounced quizzes (20%); translation exam (in late September or early October 2006, 20%); three papers–the first (5–7 pages) on The House of Fame; the second (5–7 pages) on classical myths, biblical stories, or folktales that served as sources for Chaucer (20%; note that this second project might take the form of an in-class midterm exam); the third (5–7 pages) on any critical or thematic problem concerning The Canterbury Tales (5–7 pages) or on Pasolini’s film (20%). All three papers combine to represent 60% of final grade.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare
Ira Clark’s advanced Shakespeare course will cover 13 plays. It will open with a familiar comedy to help students become accustomed to reading highly rhetorical and poetic texts and to envisioning performances from a dramatic text. We will proceed with a cluster of comedies that illustrate Shakespeare’s dramatic and stylistic development. We will next read a cluster of histories and finally one of the tragedies, with reprieve through one final romance. All along, we will concentrate on helpful ways to read Shakespeare’s plays: for example, as representations of Shakespeare’s era, as means of raising problems about our own era, as ways of considering other eras and cultures. And we will focus on the questions and debates Shakespeare’s plays have stimulated over theological, political, economic, social, psychological, gender, and other issues.
Grades will be based on a combination of 12 pop tests, dropping the lowest grade (50% of the grade), a 3000-word paper on one of the comedies or histories (20% of the grade) and a 4000-word paper on a tragedy (30% of the grade). Each paper must be preceded by a 500-word paper proposal (receiving a check, plus, or minus) and the final topic must be agreed upon in advance by the student and teacher.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare
We will be reading some 17 or 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances. The emphasis of the course will be on reading each play as closely as time allows, while still moving at a fast pace (two or three days per play) through a substantial number of plays so that by the end of the course one is familiar with at least a sizeable portion of Shakespeare’s output. There will be quizzes to ensure reading, as well as written assignments. We will not act out the plays, we will not watch films of the plays, we will not discuss race, gender, or Shakespeare’s failure to institute Marxism in Renaissance England, and we most certainly will not make scrapbooks or models of the Globe theater. Students who do not like to read will almost certainly not enjoy this course.
ENL 4333
Shakespeare (Learning by Doing)
The focus of this course is on performance, on plays as not just texts but as something happening in space and time, and ratified by an audience. Therefore, we learn about a Shakespeare play by doing it, and so all students work with scene partners, with whom they rehearse scenes, stage them for the class, and then work with the director to polish and evaluate their work. No experience in the theatre is required, and, historically, Mechanical Engineering majors have done as well as Theatre majors who have done no better than English majors. Scene work will be graded on the intent of the actors, what they put into it – not finesse. The course’s major paper will be an assessment of your experience doing the scenes.
Students will also assist Professor Homan as he prepares for an all-woman production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre, preparing the text, helping the director as he develops a “concept” for the production, advising on all aspects of staging, working with a playwright who will be rewriting Shakespeare’s “outer” play that will set the scenes involving Christopher Sly and the courtiers in modern times, as well as including material from the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew of 1594, which may have been Shakespeare source or, alternately, a spin-off from his own play.
Again, the assumption is that a play is not just the words on the page but also the sub-text (the history of the character as devised by the actor), movement, gesture, blocking, as well as the physical dimensions of the stage itself – set, lighting, props, costumes.
We will be examining, from the actor’s and director’s standpoint – as well as the critic’s and scholar’s as they influence production – Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
LIN 3680
Modern English Structure
We will focus on the English language from the standpoint of descriptive rather than prescriptive linguistics. In other words, rather than learn “correct” grammar, we will explore how English speakers use grammar as they interact with each other in a variety of settings. You’ll find that this descriptive approach unmasks a hidden power that advertisers, authors, politicians, lawyers, and even you tap into. The course has three parts. In Part 1, we look at problems English learners have in figuring out how English works, including problems in hearing the grammar, developing appropriate vocabulary and deciding which version of English is correct. In Part 2, we look at how the social aspect of English causes problems for learners in such seemingly easy things as deciding which tense to use, how to answer questions, how to get people to do things, and how to say no. In Part 3, we turn to problems in learning academic English looking at nouns, adjectives, adverbs, complex grammatical structures, and various focus structures.
Materials are all available online.
Grades:
- 300 points: Three Exams*
- 80 points: Class Participation (40 class periods, 2 points per day)*
- 120 points: Twelve 10 point grammar detective assignments*
- 30 Bonus: Points Be a conversation partner at the English Language Institute (Due Friday Nov 18)*
- Exams are given on Wednesday and have three sections. Section 1 asks for definitions or examples of terminology introduced in the class discussion. Section 2 asks for explanations of “broken” grammatical rules e.g. *Never I have had such a great time. What rule was broken? Section 3 asks for short essays based on topics discussed in class.
- Class Participation: If you are not here, you cannot take part in the teaching activities that are designed to show you a new way of looking at grammar. There are no excused absences. If you know you will be absent, be sure to use the bonus point option.
- Grammar Detective Exercises: You will look at how a grammar is being used around you in the spoken and the written language. If, when I check your work, it looks like you followed instructions, you get 10 points. Partial assignments receive appropriate partial credit. There is a 2 point penalty per week for late assignments – so don’t wait until the end of the semester to hand in late work. Remember the bonus point option.
- Bonus Points – Conversation Partner: Be a conversation partner with someone who is learning English as a second language. The easiest way to do this