LIT 2932 Course Descriptions for Spring 2008
Dr. Beverly Butcher
LIT 2932-10375 MW 3:00 – 4:15 2/2063
LIT 2932-10376 MW 4:30 – 5:45 2/2063
Writing and Learning About China through Women’s Autobiographies and Biographies
Through the study of autobiographies and biographies of women in and from China we will gain insight into the history, folklore, and religion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in this country. We will read such works as Julia Chang’s Wild Swans, Ida Pruitt’s A Daughter of Han: An Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman, Anchee Min’s Red Azalea and Peter Conn’s Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. The content of this course provides the focus for advanced reasoned argument, literary analysis and critical thinking both orally and in writing.
Dr. Keith Cartwright
LIT 2932-10384 TR 12:15 – 1:30 15/1202
Dirty South—Race, Rock, Religion
We will continue to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills as we engage literature from the South. The class will look at the “three R’s” of the South: race, religion, and rock. Of course, gender and sexuality are key structural components and obsessions behind these three R’s. We will work towards deepening our understanding of the cross-cultural challenges and creolizations of Southern life and expressive traditions. And we will pay particular attention to the step by step process by which a writer becomes engaged with essaying responses to literary works and songs in their cultural/historical contexts. We will be responding to folk as varied as Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., Loretta Lynn, Lil’ Wayne, and Juvenile.
Laura Caton-David
LIT 2932-10382 TR 10:50 – 12:05 2/2063
Banned Books of the Past and Present
In this class we will explore some of the books that have been challenged over the last century and are still being challenged today. Students will explore common themes found within the books and discuss, within the historical context, why these books made or still make people uncomfortable. The class will examine the issue of censorship and the practice of book banning and how it stands up against first amendment rights. We will also be doing extra activities during National Banned Books Week in late September to promote campus awareness of censorship.
Texts may include:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Color Purple
Heart of Darkness
The Catcher in the Rye
The Handmaid’s Tale
Beloved
Selected Harry Potter
The Awakening
John Chapman
LIT 2932-10374 MW 3:00 – 4:15 2/2062
JAZZ
While developing close reading, critical thinking and writing skills, and analyzing literary criticism in group projects, students in this class explore jazz as a trope that has continued to circulate in American art beyond the music itself and into novels, poetry and film. Texts include THE GREAT GATSBY, the poetry of Langston Hughes, Gershwin's PORGY AND BESS, Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison's novel, JAZZ. Students are required to produce traditional essays that investigate the ways writers and playwrights incorporate a jazz aesthetic and jazz techniques into their work. In addition, students will be required to apply these same jazz techniques to creative work of their own that is designed to get the students "thinking jazz."
Fred Dale
LIT 2932-10361 MWF 8:00 – 8:50 2/2063
LIT 2932-10362 MWF 9:00 – 9:50 2/2063
Mad at (to) the World: Literature of Disenfranchisement
Course Description: John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces begins with this quote from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Throughout life and literature there are characters that are pushed out, or least they feel that they have been marginalized (Robert Frost even wanted his epitaph to read that he “had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”). They often rail against the society that they find themselves in direct opposition to. At the very least, the world lowers their eyes in disgust to these characters for daring to think in sometimes radically different ways, but there are always those that do not avert their eyes; they stare up to these people for the answers. We will read Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. I have not chosen the fourth book, but it will come from this list: Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. We will also watch Francis Ford Coppolla’s film Apocalypse Now (and perhaps a second film). There will be four to five argumentative papers centered on these texts.
Chris Dew
LIT 2932-12636 TR 3:05 – 4:20 2/2063
The Hero’s Journey in Literature and Life
In this course we will use Joseph Campbell’s 12 steps of The Hero’s Journey as a basis for analyzing texts both old and new. We will study Homer’s Odyssey, The Holy Bible, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. We will also study the impact that Campbell’s writings and teachings had on the Star Wars films. The steps of the hero’s journey are constantly encountered in mythology and literature as well as in our daily lives. An understanding of these concepts will make us better able to handle our own experiences with calls to adventure, mentors, tests, enemies, allies, obstacles and the possibilities for reward as we set out on our own personal odyssey. Preparation and attendance are essential for success in this class.
Katherine Espano
LIT 2932-12637 distance learning class
Families from a Multicultural Perspective
What are families like today, and how are they influenced by the dynamics of culture? In this class, we will use literature to analyze the nature of families and friendships from a multicultural perspective. This is a Hybrid Distance Learning class. Most of our work will take place on Blackboard, but we will have two in-person meetings for student presentations. Students must also individually attend one meeting with me face-to-face. Assignments can be posted before or by the deadlines on Blackboard at your convenience.
Bridget Ferris
LIT 2932-10383 TR 10:50 – 12:05 2/2064
Dr. Kathleen Hassall
LIT 2932-11408 TR 1:40 – 2:55 2/2064
LIT 2932-11451 TR 3:05 – 4:20 2/2064
Pam Hnyla
LIT 2932-11452 TR 4:30 – 5:45 12/2116
Family Values
In his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that Americans’ worldviews can be described through the metaphor of the family. As the inside flap of his book’s cover explains, “Lakoff analyzes the unconscious worldviews of liberals and conservatives, explaining why they are at odds over so many seemingly unrelated issues—like taxes, abortion, regulation, and social programs. The differences, Lakoff argues, are not mere matters of partisanship, but arise from radically different conceptions of morality and ideal family life—meaning that family and morality are at the heart of American politics, in ways that are far from obvious.”
Our urgent task this semester is to work on making those “unconscious worldviews” conscious. We each need to understand and clarify our own worldview, as well as to understand the worldview of those people who do not hold the same “values” as we do. Until we understand ourselves and each other, until we recognize our common ground, our country will continue to be malignantly divided. And it seems there is no better place to start the work of uniting than among the intelligent and (relatively) privileged Americans who are college educated—in other words, us.
To this end, we will become familiar with Lakoff’s theories and then consider his metaphors of the “strict father” and “nurturant parent” alongside literary works (primarily short fiction, films, and poetry) that portray family life.
As the final course in UNF’s general education writing sequence, LIT 2932 continues to highlight argument—not only arguments created by the writers of the texts we study but also those produced by students. The class emphasizes the close and careful reading of texts. For our purposes, “texts” include not only those things we expect to encounter in a literature class, but also things perhaps not currently perceived by students as texts. Additionally, this class demands that we make connections, not only between the texts that we read and discuss but also between texts and what you possibly call “real life.”
Among our reading: many short stories, a poem or two, a little Shakespeare, Jane Smiley’s novella Good Will, and either the story “Brokeback Mountain” or its film version.
Todd Kincaid
LIT 2932-10370 MWF 1:00 – 1:50 2/2063
Michele Leavitt
LIT 2932-12638 distance learning course
Literature of Addiction
This is a Distance Learning section that uses the Online Hybrid model. Most of our work will be conducted online, but we will have two face-to-face meetings for student presentations. Students must also attend two face-to-face meetings with me. Do not take a distance-learning section if you do not have access to the internet or to your UNF email account. You must check in to our course website on Blackboard during the first week of class. Students who do not check in during the first week of classes may be dropped from the course if a waitlist exists.
The image of the artist/writer as a tortured alcoholic or drug addict haunts much of Western cultural history, and Western literature is replete with characters whose motives are fueled by addictions, who suffer from the effects of addictions, and whose fates are determined by addictions. In this course, we will explore the tension between cultural and literary representations of addicts and their addictions by studying a variety of literary texts and their historic and social environs. Texts will include memoirs by Caroline Knapp and Jim Carroll, fiction by Dorothy Parker and Keri Hulme, poetry by Mary Jo Bang and Lynda Hull, and the film Half Nelson. Central to our discussions will be the classical Greek concepts of pharmakon and pharmakos: the poison cure and the scapegoat.
Dr. Tru Leverette
LIT 2932-10363 MWF 9:00 – 9:50 2/2062
Contemporary African American Literature
This course fulfills the final requirement for the General Education Writing Program sequence. As such, it is a literature-based writing course that uses literary works as the medium through which we sharpen writing skills. Our literary focus will be on contemporary African-American texts, and our writing focus will be on the honing of skills necessary for clarity and effectiveness, including technical control, reasoned argument, unity and coherence.
Dr. Nancy Levine
LIT 2932-10386 TR 12:15 – 1:30 15/1204
Eileen Maguire
LIT 2932-10379 TR 8:00 – 9:15 2/2064
LIT 2932-10380 TR 9:25 – 10:40 2/2064
Irish Fiction
In this course, we will examine over one hundred years of Irish fiction, and in particular the short story. We will read works from James Joyce (1882-1941) to Anne Enright (1962--). We will learn how the culture, music and history of Ireland are inexorably linked to her literature. We will view some films that have been written and directed by Irish writers, and are set in Ireland: Michael Collins, Agnes Browne, The Snapper, and others which depict a more modern Ireland.
The texts we will read are the following:
Modern Irish Short Stories. Ed. Ben Forkner (ISBN: 0-14-024699-1).
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7.. Ed. David Marcus (ISBN: 978-0-571-23045-7).
A Bit on the Side: Selected short Stories by William Trevor (ISBN: 0-14-303591-6).
There will be two papers and a Final Thoughts paper.
Allan Marcil
LIT 2932-10360 MWF 8:00 – 8:50 2/2064
To Live and Die in LA
Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. – Frank Lloyd Wright
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciuncula. LA, city of angels, city of dreams, city of nightmares. Lit 2932, “To Live and Die in LA,” will be a literary and cinematic excursion into the mystique and mythology of a city where star-struck pilgrims watch their dreams combust quicker than dry chaparral in a canyon firestorm. This course will feature some seminal literary works, spawned by Los Angeles authors, that explore the narrative fabric and mythic proportions of a city that seems more fabulous than factual, whose sun-drenched and palm lined boulevards belie and camouflage an insidious uncanniness. Works will include John Fante’s Ask the Dust, Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and possibly Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People. Films can include Chinatown, Two Days in the Valley, The Player, To Live and Die in LA, Crash and/or others.
Allan Marcil
LIT 2932-10365 MWF 10:00 – 10:50 2/2063
LIT 2932-10366 MWF 11:00 – 11:50 2/2063
SUMMER OF LOVE, THE 60S: Revolution, Revelation, Apostasy?
Q: How do you think students of the sixties compare to us right now…?
Abbie Hoffman: You’re about the same size, shape. What can I say? I think you are faced with the same decisions. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the same decision. The only difference today is that we in the sixties left you a legacy that says that you can do it. (excerpt from “Reflections on Student Activism,” by Abbie Hoffman, 1988)
Q: What’s so revolutionary about something like MTV?
Abbie Hoffman: Actually, the initials stand for moron television…
LIT 2932, SUMMER OF LOVE…, will explore the Zeitgeist of an era that was, arguably, the most politically and culturally dynamic decade of the 20th century. Through the study and analysis of literature and film we will try to answer Marvin Gaye’s question: “What’s Goin’ On?” Were the 60s truly revolutionary? What still resonates today? What was accomplished, if anything? This course will concentrate on the late sixties in an attempt to provide a snap shot of the “tipping point” in American (and World) culture. We will look at the “new journalism” and the “non-fiction novel,” as manifested in the works of Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test)and Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night). Readings will also include works by Joan Didion (Play It as It Lays), Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice), Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America), R.Crumb (The Book of Mr. Natural). Possible film works may include Medium Cool, Easy Rider, Monterey Pop, Putney Swope, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Platoon and/or Apocalypse Now. The course will also be augmented by various ancillary readings. We will try to define the late 1960s (if possible) through the lenses of the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and rock and roll. What a long, strange trip it’s been…
Brenda Maxey-Billings
LIT 2932-10367 MWF 11:00 – 11:50 2/2064
LIT 2932-10368 MWF 12:00 – 12:50 2/2064
The Uncanny: Writing and Weirdness
This course explores the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts. Although the uncanny resists definition, it provokes exquisitely familiar yet eerily unfamiliar sensations, and it carries persistent import. The uncanny, by its nature, disrupts intellectual certainty and thus offers extensive possibilities for exploration of issues of identity, boundaries, the status-quo, the strange, the ordinary, and the extra-ordinary. As a general-education writing course, this course asks students to engage the uncanny through reading and critical analysis skills, intensive reflection on uncanny literature and experiences, and development of organized and reasoned arguments.
Dr. Alex Menocal
This course will focus on the representation of serial killers in 6-7 popular novels, not on true crimes or actual serial killers. We’ll explore Mark Seltzer’s contention that serial violence is a symptom of America’s “wound culture,” that is, “a mediatronic culture centered on the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed person, as public spectacle”; the function of technology (photography, home movies, writing, prosthetics in general) in the depiction of serial killings; serial violence as addictive behavior; serial killers as an abnormal instance of the “self-made man”; and serial violence as apocalyptic violence.
Reading List (tentative): Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon; Pat Barker, Blow Your House Down; Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie; Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory; Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter (and perhaps Dexter in the Dark.).
Marcus Pactor
LIT 2932-11575 M 6:00 – 8:45 12/2117
Big Mistakes
We all want stuff – love, acceptance, money, etc. – and we spend a lot of our lives pursuing those desires. Unfortunately, we often make hard mistakes in the course of those pursuits. Those are mistakes we’d prefer never to mention again. However, OTHER people’s hard mistakes can be very interesting to read about and discuss. This is why people often like to second-guess their football coaches and read celebrity tabloids. In this course, we’ll read about characters who are not as famous as Urban Meyer, Bobby Bowden, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Aniston. They are people who are just a little older than we are and they make mistakes much worse than running the ball on 4th and 7 or begging for Brad Pitt to love them again. They plot against their own friends, sabotage their relationships, fall in love with their teachers, and eat mushrooms as big as your fist. Oops. The books this semester will likely include Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.
Barbara Roberts
LIT 2932-10385 TR 12:15 – 1:40 10/1339
LIT 2932-11450 TR 3:05 – 4:20 39/4029
Coming to America: Immigration, Assimilation, and Identity in an Inconstant World
This course will use a variety of texts in which students will discover, explore, and hear the voices of immigrants. Naturally, we will connect our fiction and non-fiction literature to the current political climate concerning immigration today. Texts include poetry and songs featuring patriotic themes, American Chica (Marie Arana), Digging to America (Anne Tyler), and The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri).
Russ Turney
LIT 2932-10378 TR 8:00 – 9:15 2/2061
LIT 2932-10381 TR 9:25 – 10:40 2/2061
Graphic Literature
Want to take a literature course where the texts are all comics?...Here you go!
“Comic book” or “graphic” novels frustrate categorization. Are they “literature”? Kids’ books? Or just trash? Some of these books even challenge the lines between biography, history and fiction. So are they in fact “novels” at all? Perhaps because such boundaries are blurred however, studying these books could help tune our critical eye: to question what literature is; to question the line between story and fact; to better confront all the visual and verbal texts that confront us every day. To do so, this course will address some of these graphic novels and examine their form, content, and how they interact with some of our culture’s most sensitive issues: terrorism, genocide, religion, sex, racism.
Please be aware of a couple of important things, however. First, graphic novels are not cheap. I have tried to select less expensive versions; still, the total cost of books for this course will run over $100. Second, these books are “graphic” in every sense. They address controversial subjects; sometimes they use explicit, even shocking, words and images to do so. While we will treat these texts, and each other, with respect and tolerance, you should be prepared to confront images and ideas that may make you uncomfortable. Perhaps getting out of your comfort zone will help us all expand our horizons---and think!
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me:
Russ Turney
Office: Building 8/2313
Fall 2007 Office Hours: Tuesdays/Thursdays 10:45 – 12:15 pm
Office Phone: 620-1261
Email: rturney@unf.edu
Amy Wainwright
LIT 2932-10371 MWF 1:00 – 1:50 2/2061
LIT 2932-10372 MWF 2:00 – 2:50 2/2061
Loss, Recovery, and Redemption: Journeys of the Spirit
It seems that most of us—whether we are 18 or 89—have somehow dealt with losing people, objects, or situations that are every dear to us. More than 2/3 of my former students have lost families to divorce and/or death; homes, parts of homes, beloved pets, even loved ones in hurricanes and other disasters; friends and acquaintances to unexpected tragedies such as cancer, automobile accidents, or drug use.
Few of us arrive at the age of 18 or so and have not suffered some kind of profound loss. Some-one or some-thing we have depended upon is, for often inexplicable reasons, lost to us forever.
Some losses are tremendous (such as we might find in the novel “Life of Pi” or “The Lovely Bones”); others, such as we find in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” may be more temporary—although they might not seem so at the moment.
But, whatever the loss, we feel real sadness and grief—we feel vulnerable, directionless. And we need to tread a hobbled path through life for awhile so that we may regain our sense of self. That path is, most often, not easy—at all. But it is worth the trip. And perhaps, if we look long and hard enough, we will even become something beyond what we were before that loss. Ultimately, our lives will become more loving, more accepting and much richer because of that which we have suffered.
This is our focus for the semester. I will ask you to keep track, in journals, of how you are progressing on your own “journeys.” And I will ask you to help others on their journeys—there will be a community service component to this course in which you will be asked to devote some of your free time to those who have “lost” perhaps even more immediately than you have And, I hope, your own life will be enhanced by such contact.
We will read five novels and view sequences from several films in support of our study.
Dr. Bart Welling
LIT 2932-11409 TR 1:40 – 2:55 39/2031
Wild Encounters: Uncaging the Beast in Modern Literature and Film
Why do “trained” wild animals turn on their human masters? Why do good pets go bad? What happens when humans give expression to “the beast within”? Our airwaves and theaters in the U.S. have long been full of sensationalistic or trivial answers to problems like these. Meanwhile, generations of writers and theorists have been dealing with animal behavior, human/animal interactions, and questions of human/animal identity in ways that challenge our most fundamental assumptions about who we are, what—or who—“they” are, and how “we” ought to be treating “them.” In this class we will not just encounter some of the most famous beasts in modern literature, from Melville’s white whale to Rawlings’s fawn to James Dickey’s nightmarish backwoodsmen in Deliverance, but will frame our encounters with them by means of critical engagement with leading animal rights philosophers, biologists, ecocritics and ecofeminists, and other participants in the growing field of animal studies. Rather than advocating a particular political agenda, my goal will be to create an open and informed dialogue about the functions nonhuman animals and “beastliness” serve in American culture, and, more broadly, about the roles literature plays in helping humankind make sense of its place in a world full of other life forms.
Primary Texts:
Requirements: