Fall 2008 Undergrad English Course Descriptions
AML 3031 Early Periods of American Literature
CRN 82397
Instructor: Nancy Levine
According to Max Weber’s thesis (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), for the early Puritans, the will to serve the Lord was not inconsistent with the will to rise economically in the world. Rising in the world was evidence that one was among the Elect. How would you know you were among the Elect? You prospered in this world as you prepared yourself for the next. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the religious underpinnings that had supported the first two generations of Puritans were beginning to slip. Cotton Mather’s sermon “Rowing for Heaven” urged the wealthy shopkeepers and boat builders in his congregation to “love the world with weaned affections,” which was like saying, “You can smoke, but don’t inhale.” Later in the century, Benjamin Franklin would demonstrate in his own life how an ethical secularist could become wealthy without loss of virtue, by becoming the country’s first “rags to riches” hero. By the end of the century, the American Dream, launched by immigrants from the old world who wanted to recreate the Garden of Eden in the New World, had become a dream of achieving economic success—and material excess. We will read and discuss the texts that help chart this remarkable change, including but not limited to works by: Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and Mark Twaine. Grades will be based on online quizzes and an essay or research paper.
AML 3041 Periods of Later American Lit
CRN 81821
Instructor: Tru Leverette
In this class, we will examine African American novels and their thematic concerns with identity constructions. Focusing on the way certain tropes are repeated with differences between two or more texts, we will interrogate the historical and cultural foundations for the origins of the tropes and differences in the revisions. Paying special attention to aesthetics and style, we will also investigate any connections between constructions of identities and specific narrative forms.
AML 3621 Black American Literature
CRN 80004
Instructor: Tru Leverette
Writing allows individuals to shape themselves, to form identities, to build communities, and to create culture. In this course, we will explore 20th Century African-American literature and culture, focusing specifically on how they have helped construct and transform identities for black men, women, and children. We will investigate the constructions of gendered and sexualized racial identities within families and relationships, exploring the meanings and representations of black motherhood, black fatherhood, black parent/child relationships, black romantic relationships, and black friendships.
AML 3154 American Poetry “‘Without Rhyme or Reason’: Modern to Post-Modern American Poetry & Poetics”
CRN 81016
Instructor: Clark Lunberry
“Poets think they are pitchers but they are really catchers.”
-Jack Spicer, American poet (1925-1965)
William Carlos Williams described the poem as a “machine made out of words” and, relatedly, he insisted that there should be “no ideas but in things.” Taking our cue from such curious counsel, we will focus in this class upon how various examples of modern to post-modern poetry were indeed made, with their ideas arising both from the “things” of the world and the thing of the poem. Our primary emphasis will be upon the twentieth-century tradition of experimental, “avant-garde” poetry (and the poetic theories emerging from, or contributing to, the poetry in question), where familiar forms, like rhyme and meter (or lyrically shaped narrative), have often slipped away, either sadly lost or happily abandoned. This often strange and “difficult” poetry has left us with a new kind of poetry, a new kind of poem, there, flat on the page, “printed matter,” depthless, but resonating still from off of its flat surface. For here is a poetry in which the brute material of language-as-machine is fore-grounded, unforgettably present and always, of course, singing and signifying (no less beautifully, but in a key still seeking its source). New rules written, new reasons for writing and reading emerged—a new kind of poetry, a “difficult beauty” born. But what are the varied workings of such poetry revealing and concealing, sounding upon these irregular and erratic (even erotic) surfaces, touching to the heart and bone?
ENC 3930 The Essay: Past, Present, and Future
CRN 82470
Instructor: James Beasley
Have you ever used writing to experiment with your ideas? The French word for "experiment" is the word essai, which we get our English word, the essay. But in the French it is not a noun, but a verb—to essay. In order to truly experiment, then, we have to write fewer essays and essay more writing, so to speak. In this course, we will experiment with language, with ideas. In order to help us do that, we will look at the beginnings of these movements, read some contemporary essayists, and look forward to those writers whose experimental natures invite us to think in postmodern ways.
ENL 3112 The Gothic Novel (Brit Novel I)
CRN 82473
Instructor: Chris Gabbard
Description: Lurid, gloomy, sensational, melodramatic, Gothic novels or Gothic romances often feature innocent heroines who are accosted and held captive by cruel and lustful villains. The action is frequently melodramatically violent, and mysterious disappearances and supernatural occurrences take place. The best of these explore the irrational, perverse, nightmarish terrors lying beneath orderly surfaces. We will begin with the text that inaugurated the genre, Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) and close with Jane Austen’s satire of the Gothic fad in her novel, Northanger Abbey (1818). In between, we will read most of the following (time permitting): William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1810), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817).
Process writing: This class will place a strong emphasis on student academic writing. Students have fifteen weeks to produce a well-written four-to-six page interpretive analysis of one of the assigned stories. No one should underestimate the toughness of this assignment! Through multi-draft revision, students will strive to render their arguments clear, coherent, concise, and convincing, to free the prose from grammatical and mechanical errors, and to make the use of evidence persuasive. I am eager to work with students privately to help them produce essays of literary criticism of which they will be proud.
Prerequisites: ENC 1101, LIT 2000 (or ENC 1102 or LIT 2110), and LIT 2932
ENL 3112 requirements: (1) in-class and Blackboard participation, (2) reading quizzes (3) three drafts of a 4-to-6 page paper, (4) “designated discussant” participation.
ENL 4251 Victorian Literature
CRN 82474
Instructor: Alex Menocal
“I know you by heart. Ah! I know you well.”--
Surveillance, Detection, and Dangerous Women in the Victorian Novel
This course will concentrate on five novels published during the mid-Victorian period (1848-1870) and the late-Victorian period (1870-1901). We will be reading both canonical and “popular” novels in an effort to develop a familiarity with and an understanding of numerous subgenres of Victorian fiction: realism, the sensation novel, gothic fiction, and imperial romance. In addition to discussing the formal features that distinguish one subgenre from another, we will discuss one of the most vexing social issues of the entire period: the Woman Question and, in its late-Victorian incarnation, the rise of the New Woman. Accordingly, we will examine how these five novels represent women whose actions promote a re-consideration of traditional feminine stereotypes and dangerous women whose violent actions and emotions threaten to disrupt social stability. Victorian society responds to such perceived threats by intensifying its systems of surveillance and detection which aim to produce more disciplined feminine subjects.
C. Bronte, Villette (1853)
M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
G. Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
H. R. Haggard, She (1887)
B. Stoker, Dracula (1897)
FIL 4931 "East Asian Cinemas"
CRN 82476
Instructor: Nicholas de Villiers
This course examines films from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand, in terms of their reception in both national and transnational contexts. We will look critically at matters of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, postcoloniality, and “Orientalism” in each film as a cultural text. We will also consider aesthetic questions of form, genre, the director as “auteur,” and various “New Wave” cinematic movements.
LIT 2930 Introduction to Film
CRN 82478
Instructor: Nicholas de Villiers
This course is designed to be an introduction to some of the key concepts and trends in cinema studies. We will be using Bordwell and Thompson’s FILM ART throughout the course as a textbook to gain familiarity with key terms in the production and interpretation of film, but this will be supplemented with weekly film screenings and several theoretical essays. The flow of the course and selected films is not historical, but is rather structured in part by the textbook, and by different approaches to genre or spectatorship.
Special emphasis will be placed on the genre(s) of horror/suspense, and theories of gender, sexuality, and globalization.
LIT 4930 "Monsters, Robots, Cyborgs"
CRN 82482
Instructor: Nicholas de Villiers
This course examines the philosophical, ethical, and political questions surrounding the production, representation, and theorization of monsters, robots, and cyborgs. The powerful myths and realities of these hybrid entities call into question a series of deeply fraught humanist cultural
binaries: human/machine, natural/unnatural, organic/artificial, agent/automaton. We will address these complex problems by looking at a series of literary, cinematic, and critical texts that centrally figure the monster, the robot, the cyborg, and their makers.
LIT 4934 Senior Seminar "Network Culture"
CRN 82486
Instructor: James Beasley
Description: This course is an examination of the concept of network culture as a distinct movement. If network culture is not change as such but the acceleration of the rate of change, the aim of the course is to understand exactly what traits define this acceleration, and to identify the various sorts of motives that have historically brought about this movement in particular. The course is primarily concerned with the philosophical and rhetorical issues involved in these questions, but it carries out this goal by investigating how popular culture, corporations, and other institutions have appropriated this culture for their own purposes.
The course is divided into three sections. The first section will address how current notions of network culture are rhetorically constructed from philosophical contexts. The second addresses the literary treatment of network culture, and how the questions inherent in these treatments shape current conceptions. The third part of the course will be a practical application of these contexts to examine the appropriation of globalization rhetoric for corporate purposes.
LIT 4934 (Senior Seminar) Appalachian Literature
CRN 82487
Instructor: Nancy Levine
Since “the war on poverty” of the sixties, Appalachia has been seen as poverty’s poster child. In spite of the renaissance in Appalachian writing that has occurred in recent years, most Americans outside the area still have the fixed assumption that Appalachia is the home of the inbred mountaineer, annealed in ignorance and poverty. Since Lyndon B. Johnson launched “the war on poverty” in 1964, Appalachia has been seen as the poster child for poverty in America. We will examine the “culture of pity” that was established as far back as Agee and Evan’s photo project, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936). Complicating the sort of assumptions that allowed the construction of the Appalachian as “other,” we will start with the Hatfield/McCoy feud, which has been a cornerstone of the stereotype of the feudin’, fightin’, moonshine drinkin’ mountaineer. A core text for the course isLee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies, which spans the era of transition from subsistence mountain farms to the proliferation of coal towns in the twenties and thirties to the closing of the mines in the latter half of the twentieth century. Other possible texts include: James Dickey's Deliverance, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven, Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek, Patricia Johnson’s Stain My Day’s Blue, and James Still’s River of Earth. Possible films include: Matewan, Stranger with a Camera, Songcatcher, and American Hollow. Grades will be based on weekly quizzes, presentations, and a final project.
LIT 4934 Classics of Children¹s Literature (Senior seminar)
CRN 82488
Instructor: Marnie Jones
What is a classic? What did it have to say in its own time? What does it have to tell us today? These questions will guide our collaborative exploration of four children¹s classic novels in their original cultural context and in more recent film adaptations: Mark Twain¹s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Lewis Carroll¹s Alice¹s Adventures in Wonderland, Frank L.
Baum¹s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and J. M. Barry¹s Peter Pan.
While the entire seminar will read all of the novels, each student will focus in two of them in substantive detail: helping to facilitate the seminar discussion, situating the text its cultural context, and analyzing one film version. Expect to participate daily in discussion, work collaboratively on BB, and do a formal presentation. The Senior Seminar, designed as the capstone experience of the major, should be taken close to the term you plan to graduate as it is designed to be the culminating experience of your undergraduate career.
LIT 4934 Senior Seminar “Writing into Wilderness: Waiting for Samuel Beckett”
CRN 82489
Instructor: Clark Lunberry
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
-Samuel Beckett
The Irish-born, French-bound author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was without doubt one of the great writers of the twentieth century and he is certainly an author deserving of the kind of sustained attention that this “single-author” course will allow. Beckett’s work—which includes plays, novels, short stories, poetry and critical prose—has movingly articulated something of the mood both of his time and of our own. For, in ways that remain relevant to this day, Beckett’s writings focus upon the individual’s often disrupted coordinates of meaning and purpose in contemporary life, the privacies of consciousness in conflict with public personae and responsibility. Few have written with such force, beauty and humor of the individual’s existential plight, the anxieties and alienations that often arise from within the struggling self, and the lengths (and limits) of language to describe and diagnose this often confounding condition (of self-less-ness).
Two extraordinary (and required for this class) events have been arranged to coincide with this class. The first of these will entail the visit of the celebrated Beckett performer and protégé Rick Cluchey in a performance of Krapp’s Last Tape at UNF’s Fine Arts Center on Nov. 6. Cluchey was an inmate at San Quentin State Prison in the 1950’s when the experimental theater director Herbert Blau directed him, and others, in a very early (and now historical) production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Cluchey, later paroled, went on to become one of Beckett’s principal actors and, in 1977, when Beckett himself directed Krapp’s Last Tape in Paris, he cast Cluchey in the title role. This unique event will offer us a rare opportunity to see this important Beckett play performed by Rick Cluchey, witnessing firsthand this culturally and historically significant production.
The second Beckett-related event involves the visit of the (above mentioned) theater director and theoretician, Herbert Blau. Blau is without question one of the leading theater and performance theorists of our time and he is currently the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle. As co-founder of The Actor's Workshop in San Francisco (1952-1965) and co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York (1965-68), Blau worked directly with Samuel Beckett on numerous occasions, producing several of his plays, and—as indicated—he directed Rick Cluchey in the now-legendary San Quentin Waiting for Godot production. In conjunction with Cluchey’s UNF visit (but scheduled separately during the semester), Blau will give a public lecture on the San Quentin Beckett production, as well as his years of close engagement with Beckett and his work.
It is likely that both Cluchey and Blau will, in addition to their evening events, come and speak directly to our class.
LIT 4935 The English Lyric
CRN 82490
Instructor: Mary Baron
This course will have as a base the history of the lyric poem in English from the time of Caedmon to 2009. We will look first and mostly at the poems themselves, then at issues of prosody, politics, culture, ethnicity, style, language, publication, experimentation, movements, and other issues students raise.
Graduate students will choose a topic from the issues listed above, or develop one on their own. They will be responsible for writing a major paper and then for teaching that topic to the class as a whole.
Norton
39332429X
978-0393324297
Dell (October 3, 1992)
0440213835
978-0440213833
McGraw-Hill
0-07-241472-3
9-780072-414721