Graduate English Courses: Fall 2006

AML 6455-82977 | Nineteenth-Century American Fiction | T 6:00-8:45

Sam Kimball

This course will focus on a number of canonical works of fiction by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Crane, (perhaps James, perhaps Norris), Howells, Chopin, and Dreiser in order to explore how these authors dramatize the relation of the individual and society in nineteenth-century America, and how they do so in terms of competing analyses of the state of the nation and of the prospects for the nation's founding spirit.

ENG 6019-80058 | Contemporary Critical Theory | W 6:00-8:45

Jillian Smith

In this course we will read a range of primary theoretical texts that tackle the complexities of meaning and culture: The theorists we read will write from the perspectives of Marxism, structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, postcolonialism, new historicism, post-structural theory, and more. Students will be expected to sustain a consistently high level of engagement with the readings and with their own writing throughout the course.

ENL 6455-82975 | British Romanticism | R 6:00-8:45

Mike Wiley

In this course, we will read a selection of British Romantic literature and writings about Romantic literature and culture. We will consider some of the most vital concerns of the Romantics and of thinkers in the early 21st century, including the origins of Terror(ism); the relationship between localism, nationalism, internationalism, and globalism; aesthetic, sexual, political, and intellectual experimentation; the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of individuals versus social communities; the aesthetics of transcendence, displacement, and avoidance; and the politics and aesthetics of racial and sexual identity. In general, we will consider Romantic values, both those that we continue to live by and those that we reject.

Romantic-period authors will include William Blake, Olaudah Equiano, Ottabah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron.

Essays (one at midterm, one at semester's end), group presentations, and class participation will determine course grades.

LIT 5934-82282 | The Playwrights' Project | MW 3:50-5:30

Pam Monteleone

Mark Twain once said, "The fellow holding the cat by the tail is learning twice as much as the fellow who is just watching." The Playwrights' Project involves two kinds of activities that will challenge you to grab the cat's tail: playwriting and playmaking. The first two thirds of the course will consist of an intensive writing workshop designed to introduce you to and immerse you in the art and craft of playwriting: constructing blueprints for human interaction. We will focus on developing and practicing techniques (scene shaping, characterization, and dialogue) that make for stageworthy scripts. We will write with directors, actors, and audiences in mind. During the final third of the course, we will produce (audition, cast, direct, rehearse, and present) five to six of your original one-act plays for the larger university community.

LIT 5934-82945 | The Rhetoric of Global Warming | MW 12:00-1:15

Allen Tilley

Ideological concerns shape much of what politicians, journalists, and artists say about our most urgent issue, global warming. We will attempt to make those concerns explicit, and see what lies beyond ideology on the issue. Texts include Elizabeth Kolbert's 2006 summary of the state of our knowledge about global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, as well as Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004), which imagines that much of the concern about global warming is fraudulent. We will watch The Day After Tomorrow, a global warming disaster flick, and analyze current political rhetoric and propaganda. Announced quizzes and short papers. The course will proceed by discussion and involve frequent small group work.

LIT 5934-82949 | Casanova's Brothers | TR 10:50-12:05

Chris Gabbard

Casanova's Brothers: The Libertine in Literature (British restoration and eighteenth-century literature)

Description: King Charles II, the Earl of Rochester, Don Juan / Don Giovanni, Giacomo Casanova, Catherine the Great, the Marquis de Sade, Aleister Crowley (dubbed "The Wickedest Man in the World"), Wilt Chamberlin, President Bill Clinton, these are just a few famous sexual libertines. A libertine is a freethinker in philosophy, someone who rejects society's established mores and who may or may not engage in wanton behavior. The term rake is more limited in meaning; he (most often it is a he) is a libertine who pursues sexual conquests. The sexual libertine or rake figured prominently in the cultural imaginary of the Restoration (1660-1700) and the eighteenth century, both in England and on the continent. English libertines such as Rochester took their cue from the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, from the promiscuity of Charles II (popularly known as "the merry monarch"), and from France, where the libertine novel especially caught on, with its anti-clerical, anti-establishment, and erotic themes. This course shall examine how poets, playwrights, and novelists used the libertine figure to address Enlightenment concerns such as (1) the role of religion in society, (2) women's advancing social status; (3) the new intellectual emphases on rationalism, empiricism and science; (4) the emergence of economic classes; (5) the deepening medical understanding of the body; and (6) the increasingly secular nature of society. We shall view portions of two very recent films, The Libertine and Casanova, as well as segments of two Mozart operas, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro. We also will read poetry by Rochester, plays by Aphra Behn (The Rover) and William Wycherley (The Country Wife), novels by Daniel Defoe (Roxana) and Samuel Richardson (Clarissa—abridged), and an English translation of Choderlos de Laclos' great French novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, not to mention screening director Stephen Frears' Academy Award winning 1988 Dangerous Liaisons starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Keanu Reeves, and Uma Thurman. Requirements: (1) 10-12 page term paper, (2) moderating undergraduates' BLACKBOARD discussion, (3) in-class participation, (4) checking & grading undergraduates' precis, and (5) leading two class discussions

LIT 5934-82962 Modern Irish Poetry | MW 3:00-4:15

Richard Bizot

William Butler Yeats's early-20th-century success as a poet inaugurated a great age of poetry for Ireland. We will consider Yeats's major successors, from Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh, through John Hewitt and Louis MacNeice, then Richard Murphy and John Montague, to Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and some of their younger contemporaries.

LIT 5934-82964 | Jane Austen: In Her Day and Ours | TR 9:25-10:40

Marnie Jones

What does the contemporary fascination with Austen films reveal about her power and our culture? Do the novels wittily subvert the reigning cultural orthodoxy of her day or does irony mask an intensely conservative agenda? We explore Austen's comic novels in the context of Regency England, examining marriage as an economic and social institution. David Denby suggests the courtship dance is "the central trial of an individual's worth: the test of his or her ability to perceive and to know." We will read Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion. Students will make a class presentation on one film adaptation: choices range from direct adaptations (i.e. the BBC Pride and Prejudice or Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility) to films that do homage to Austen (i.e. Bride and Prejudice: The Bollywood Musical, Bridget Jones's Diary or Clueless). Blackboard represents an important component of the course. Evaluation will be based upon a paper examining Austen through the lens of contemporary literary theory, two presentations (one on film, one on theory), reading cards; participation; a final exam. Students must use the editions ordered (Penguin or Longmans) as the contextual information is central to our work.

LIT 5934-82966 | The Life of Documentary Film | MW 12:00-2:45

Jillian Smith

From the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in 1991 to Michael Moore's controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) to the popular March of the Penguins (2005), documentary films, through the entire 20th century, have not only represented life but altered it. This course will examine the historical, political, and aesthetic force of documentary film through its history. Students will come to see the documentary form as more than a simple record by critically examining varied documentaries and by designing their own documentary project.

LIT 5934-82968 | Faulkner and Film | MW 4:30-5:45

Nancy Levine

Viewed as potential screen plays, William Faulkner's early short stories dispel the myth that his most notable quality as a writer is an addiction to impossibly long sentences. We will discuss Faulkner's career in Hollywood, but will focus on short stories and novels on film; readings will include "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning" and the novels Sanctuary and Intruders in the Dust. Grades will be based on weekly quizzes comparing text and film, and a final short paper. Graduate students will do extra reading and a presentation in addition.

LIT 5934-82976 | Florida Writing and Culture | TR 4:30-5:45

Keith Cartwright

It makes sense that our understanding of the world should begin from the location upon which we stand-our grounding, our natural and social landscape, the historical currents (and Atlantic currents) that have placed us here. We will be looking closely at local grounding of global issues in our reading of texts representing Florida. As North America's "first coast," Florida has served as an unusually charged cross-cultural contact zone and is our most longstanding frontier. Among our readings will be translations of early Spanish texts, Seminole word-rites and poems, Afro-Florida writing and performance, "Cracker" songs, contemporary Caribbean immigrant writing, and texts by writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Lillian Smith, Marjorie Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Russell Banks, Adrian Castro, and Edwidge Danticat. We will address a range of cultural production and performance, moving between standard literary genres and other dynamic modes (from film to advertising, prayer, and more).

LIT 5934-82972 | Special Topics in Cultural Studies | TR 3:05-4:20

Clark Lunberry

Makings of Memory: Remembrance and its Multidisciplinary Representations (or, Representing Oblivion)

In this course, we will be examining how memory has been represented in various modernist forms, from literature, music, to the visual arts—all of them united in their focus upon the remembrance of things past, the shaping of a life as it is seen through the "rearview mirror." How are memories made, and to what end? How are memories written, filmed and photographed (and, in the process, fabricated), and for what purpose? What is the role of memory (and oblivion) in the constitution, and sustaining, of identity? And what happens to that identity when memories falter or fail, as we recognize that which "memory cannot contain...," and are left only, as Shakespeare counseled, to "Commit to these waste blanks"? In conjunction with this course, the pianist Louis Goldstein of Wake Forest University will address the class on memory and music. Goldstein will also be offering an evening performance of Morton Feldman's masterpiece for solo piano, Triadic Memories.

ENG 5934-82979 | Film as Literature | TR 6:00-8:45

Jason Mauro

Film is ceasing to be the social and public medium that it has been over most of its brief history. We have retreated to our private homes, or to our video Ipods, to encounter what is perhaps the most powerful storytelling medium at work in the present world. Film criticism and reviews have devolved into consumer advisories that speak to the private customer, rather than careful analyses that speak to a film going public. This course will work to retrieve the public and social power of film and film analysis. We will explore, through our attention to the specific grammar, syntax and structures specific to film, and to current theoretical arguments about it, what we are at risk of losing as we watch our films in isolation and in silence.

LIT 5934-82981 | Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature | MWF 10:00-10:50

Betsy Nies

This course will focus on contemporary ethnic traditions, examining how such movements such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism have intersected with evolving ethnic traditions including, but not limited to, Native American, African American, and Chicano/a literature.

LIT 6934-82976 | The Old Ways | M 6:00-8:45

William Slaughter

We all have in us what I have taken to calling "a textual repertoire" made up of texts that we have saved and texts that have saved us. I'm thinking, here, of Kenneth Burke's definition of literature as "equipment for living." The Old Ways will surely add several new texts to your repertoire, texts that will actually tell you what to do... and not do. Oh, and this course will satisfy the pre-1800 requirement in the M.A. in English program too.

from "Ground Notes" in Scott Russell Sanders' Staying Put:

"Some years ago a utility company wanted to build a nuclear power plant on the sandy shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago. Their permit required them to set their foundations on bedrock, so down they drilled through the sand, down and down; but after excavating a very expensive hole, they still had not come to solid rock. Having made what they considered an honest effort, they petitioned the regulatory agency to allow them to anchor the foundations in a considerable depth of sand, and treat that as the equivalent of bedrock. The agency, to their credit (and to my surprise), said no. So the utility rolled up their blueprints and trudged back to the board room. But most of us, after failing in our own efforts to drill all the way to bedrock, give up and build our lives on shifty sand. Ground, foundation and fundamental all derive from roots meaning bottom, as in, 'I'll get to the bottom of this.' But is there a bottom, and even if there is can we ever get down to it? 'There is a solid bottom everywhere,' Thoreau assures us in Walden. That cantankerous book is a prolonged invitation to dig:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin.

"I share his aspiration, but not his confidence. The aspiration is an old one. Twenty-five centuries before Thoreau, Lao-tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching:

By many words is wit exhausted.
Rather, therefore, hold to the core.

"Gladly: but how to find it, this core?"

How indeed? That is the question we will be asking, if not answering, in The Old Ways. We will read some, not all, of the following books, which will be available in these particular editions at the UNF Bookstore. Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Beacon Press: Boston, 1994). Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Penguin: New York, 1988). Matsuo Basho, trans. Hiroaki Sato, Narrow Road to the Interior (Stone Bridge Press: Berkeley, CA, 1996). Han Shan, trans. Red Pine, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Cooper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA, 2000). Lao Tzu, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching (Shambala: Boston, 1998). Dalai Lama, My Land an My People (Warner Books: New York, 1997). Rumi (Jelaluddin Balkhi), trans. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi (HarperCollins: New York, 1995). Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader (Counterpoint: Washington, D.C., 1999). Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (Bloomsbury: New York, 2004).