Spring 2008 Courses

AML 3031 12335
TR 8-9:15am
Cartwright - Early Periods of American Literature

We will examine notions of freedom, community, and nation in early American writing and will focus on ways in which American writers have represented freedom and its lack, the nation and its others. Our focus will fall upon three particular periods of early American writing: a long period of initial cross-cultural contacts and emergent colonial life (from early Florida writings to the Pocahontas story to Thomas Jefferson), a particularly charged decade and a half preceding the horrific violence of the Civil War (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Douglass, Whitman, etc.), and a literature of national reunion in the two decades following the end of Reconstruction (Twain, Cable, Chopin, Harris). We will pay particular attention to the plantation south as a challenging location for writing of freedom and its lack, community and others, nation and its birthing.

Welling - Placing American Literature
For many years, questions relating to the functions of place, region, landscape, and built and unbuilt environments in literature were largely relegated to scholarly discussions of “setting.” In an influential 1942 essay Eudora Welty, for instance, describes place as one of the “lesser angels” that “watch over the racing hand of fiction.” What really mattered in literature, Welty and many other authors and critics argued, were elements like character development, plot, symbolism, and other explicitly anthropocentric but also seemingly placeless and ahistorical concerns; the idea was to transcend issues of mere local, regional, or even national interest in search of what, in one truly international context (the 1950 Nobel Prize ceremony), Welty’s fellow Mississippian William Faulkner called the “old universal truths” of the “human heart in conflict with itself.” To identify oneself and one’s art too closely with a particular place (especially with regions historically considered strange or “backward,” like the U.S. South) was to court misunderstanding and marginalization both in the minds of common readers and critics and on the shelves of bookstores and libraries. The so-called globalization of the world’s economies and, with them, its languages and cultures, greatly contributed to the sense that the particularities of place in literature, as in daily experience, were on their way out, minor victims of our collective march to a global future of boundless convenience and prosperity.
And yet allegiance to specific places, as to the concept of place in general, has stubbornly refused to die, in part because modernity’s utopian dreams of placelessness have been shown to create a host of disastrous and often unforeseen consequences for local human communities and ecosystems.

Literature and literary studies have become more and more concerned with the fate of languages, lifeways, and human populations and nonhuman species that have been dislocated and otherwise endangered by the forces of globalization. At the same time, the explosive growth of literature and literary scholarship by members of formerly silenced minority communities in the U.S. has forced mainstream literary criticism to grapple with such difficult place-related questions as, What does it mean to inhabit stolen property? What responsibility might the current inhabitants of a place have to atone for genocide, forced internment, environmental devastation, and other atrocities committed by their ancestors—or unrelated previous inhabitants? How do present constructions of place (both physical and intellectual) perpetuate, or possibly remediate, past injustices? How do literary devices and values like “metaphor” and “irony,” along with such literary topoi as the “Garden of Eden” and “cyberspace,” shape our perceptions of and behaviors towards our environments? How does a region’s sense of itself change as new waves of immigration upset old demographic—even spiritual—balances? What does it mean in the twenty-first century to be a Floridian? a Southerner? a Midwesterner? an American?

As up-to-the-minute as these issues might seem, and as vociferously as writers like Welty and Faulkner might have denied the centrality to their work both of real places and of something like what Harvard scholar Lawrence Buell has called the “environmental imagination,” the commitment to interrogating “place” that underwrites these questions is actually nothing new. The writers we will encounter in this class—Faulkner and Welty among them—are all positively obsessed with similar problems, from the role nonhuman nature plays in an unsatisfied woman’s struggle to find artistic and sexual autonomy (The Awakening) to a Mississippi family’s tragically comic attempts to take their dead wife/mother to the cemetery where her birth family is buried (As I Lay Dying) to a Native American veteran’s quest to bring healing to his own stricken life and that of his village (Ceremony). In examining these authors’ often tangled approaches to real places and to notions of local, regional, and national ownership and belonging, we will not only gain a richer understanding of the workings of American literature and criticism, but will attempt to come to terms with some of the most vexing problems relating to where, and how, we live today.

Primary texts: Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (online); Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Norton Critical Ed.); Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Penguin); Jean Toomer, Cane (Norton Critical Ed.); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage); Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (New Directions); Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Penguin); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Plume); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin).
Requirements: Strong attendance and participation; two essays; one presentation; Blackboard postings; short quizzes; non-written final exam.

This course will open with a flash-survey of major black poets and spoken word traditions from the colonial era (including African sources and spirituals) to the Civil Rights era. We will study blues lyrics and major poets such as Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton. But the key focus of this class will be contemporary, examining a 21st century poetics: current poetry and spoken word of and about the South. We will read books published in this young century by Pulitzer Prize-winning black poets such as Natasha Trethewey and Yusef Komunyakaa. We will read an exciting new anthology titled The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and will investigate spoken word traditions, Dirty South rap, and poetry post-Katrina.

This course for writers of poetry follows a workshop model. We will study the craft of poetry as an expression of the human condition, developing skill with language, knowledge of form, and willingness to revise. The primary methods of instruction will be workshop presentation and criticism of student texts, in-class writing exercises, and analyses (both formal and informal) of model poems. Our primary texts will be students’ drafts and revisions, students’ selections of model poems, and texts on technique. Each student in the class must invest time and energy in dynamic revision of his or her own work as well as in the efforts of all students in the class.

Each of us, however long we’ve been writing, are wherever we are and hoping to get “better,” whatever this means to anyone at a particular time. We are always, every one of us, “beginners.” In the workshop, we examine and explore narrative strategies. We tackle technical concerns and seek methods by which the reliable resources of imagination can be tapped. We read and write fiction. We talk and write about the fiction written by others. We bite nails and open veins and tend to the work at hand. Traditional and nontraditional approaches will be discussed. Experimentation is encouraged. Laughter is relished. Permission of Instructor required. mari@unf.edu.

ENC 3250 10349
TR 3:05-4:20pm

ENC 3250 12044
F 12-2:45pm

ENC 3310 10350
MWF 11-11:50am

ENC 3310 12043
TR 1:40-2:55pm

ENG 3930 12509
MW 3-4:15pm
Beechy - Poems, Poets, Poetry

“How to read poetry.” This course will introduce students to poetry through the anthology as well as the single-author book of poems. The pleasure of the anthology is one of play and discovery. The experience of the single author’s book (as distinct from a Collected Works) is akin to learning a language, in that one learns to know the poet’s idiolect, or unique way of speaking in the world. While we read poetry in these two different formats, students will be introduced to the different aspects of poetics in a cumulative fashion, moving from questions of what makes poetry different from prose to methods of reading that help us perceive the many things happening in the small space of a poem. The basic approach to every text we encounter will be the one suggested by WH Auden: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” By the end of the course students will be able to address Auden’s question in a coherent close reading.

ENG 4013 10351
TR 1:40-2:55pm

ENG 4013 10352
TR 4:30-5:45pm

ENG 4105 12510
MW 3-5:45pm

ENG 4930 12511
TR 9:25-10:40am
Welling - Truth and Reconciliation in American Literature

“After 50 Years, Emmett Till’s Body Is Exhumed.” “Last Yahi Indian’s Brain Is Returned to a Tribe.” “Panel Suggests Brown University Atone for Ties to Slavery.” “Panel Calls for Reparations in Tulsa Race Riot.” “President to Express Regret on Japanese Internments.” The proliferation of headlines like these over the past few years suggests that we may be approaching a turning point in the United States. More and more governmental bodies and educational institutions—and average citizens—seem willing to grapple with the dark side of our nation’s domestic history: Native American genocide, legalized slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow laws and lynching, xenophobic immigration policies, forced Christianization, institutionalized poverty and racism, and more. By the same token, the nation appears to be more open to dialogue on the question of overcoming the toxic legacies of the past. The city of Greensboro, North Carolina, for example, has sponsored a formal truth and reconciliation project in the belief that “confronting and reckoning with the past is necessary for successful transitions from conflict, resentment, and tension to peace and connectedness.” Greensboro’s efforts, patterned after those of the famous South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar entities around the world, show, if nothing else, that people of diverse backgrounds can come together to try to facilitate community healing from a past marked by intercultural violence and intergenerational trauma.

This class will use literary texts from the United States and the rest of the Americas (in translation when necessary) to explore some of the central problems associated with the truth and reconciliation movement; in the process, it will assess literature’s capacity both to raise readers’ historical consciousness and to envision a better future. How can literature bring forgotten pasts to life? What does literature have to say about the task of sorting through fragmented, repressed, forbidden, or competing memories and visions of history? Are there cases in which the attempt to address past injustices is more damaging than leaving them alone? How can literature begin to represent the “unrepresentable”—from events that have faded from living memory, to phenomena too vast or chaotic to be described adequately in words, to activities (such as torture) that deliberately warp or destroy language? How does the common human drive to encode experience into narrative shape the testimony of victims, witnesses, and perpetrators? What can U.S. citizens learn, through fiction and poetry, from other Americans’ ongoing struggle for truth and reconciliation? What can books teach us about the nature of forgiveness? Is true reconciliation possible? In working through questions like these, we will repeatedly address aspects of truth and reconciliation that pertain to our lives as citizens of Florida’s First Coast and of an increasingly globalized world.

Requirements: Strong attendance and participation; two essays; one presentation based on fieldwork and research; Blackboard postings; short quizzes; non-written final exam.

The course will cover the span of Shakespeare's plays, tracing his development as a dramatic craftsman and dramatic poet from the earliest comedies to the late romances. Attention will be paid to 16th Century versification, style, and rhetoric, particularly as they are revealed in Shakespeare's plays.

ENL 3501 10356
W 6-8:45pm
Striar - Early Periods of British Literature

The course is a survey of the history of British literature focusing on
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with an eye toward various trends
and movements which occurred in the literature of those time periods
(some consideration of Restoration and 18th Century literature is also
possible). Quizzes, exams, papers, presentations, and recitations.

ENL 3501 11696
MWF 2-2:50pm

ENL 3503 10357
M 6-8:45pm
Menocal - Later Periods of British Literature

This course will examine some of the key spatial metaphors that appear in late 19th- and 20th-century imaginative representations of London. These metaphors—London as urban jungle, London as occult or enchanted space, and London as migrant, hybridized space—offer disparate visions of the capital of England. Each metaphor traces out alternative possibilities for imagining London.

Reading List (tentative): Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four”; Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room; Zadie Smith, White Teeth; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; Sarah Waters, Affinity; Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor.

ENL 3503 11407
TR 10:50am-12:05pm
Wiley - Periods in Later British Literature

In this course, we will read texts from two standard periods of British Literature: Romanticism (extending from the end of the 18th through beginning of the 19th century) and Modernism (extending from the end of the 19th well into the 20th century). Modernism often has been considered a reaction against Romanticism, though the continuities are as great as the discontinuities. We will consider each of the periods separately while also examining the relations between them, always keeping an eye on the aesthetic, linguistic, and cultural changes by which periods are constructed.

ENL 4230 12512
MWF 1-1:50pm
Gabbard - Casanova’s Brothers: The Libertine in Literature
(Restoration & 18th Century British Literature)

Prerequisites: ENC 1101, LIT 2000 (or LIT 2110 or ENC 1102), & LIT 2932.

The 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 John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, took their cue from the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and the promiscuity of Charles II (known as “the merry monarch”). This course shall examine how poets, playwrights, and one novelist in particular—Samuel Richardson—used the image of the libertine to address such Enlightenment-era concerns as (1) the concepts of a “state of nature” and a “social contract”; (2) women’s advancing social status; (3) the new intellectual emphases on rationalism, empiricism and science; (4) the deepening medical understanding of the body; and (5) the increasingly secular nature of society.

We will read Stephen Jeffrey’s modern (1994) play THE LIBERTINE (based on the life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester), a number of poems by Wilmot, four Restoration comedies (William Wycherley’s THE COUNTRY WIFE, George Etherege’s THE MAN OF MODE, Aphra Behn’s THE ROVER, and William Congreve’s WAY OF THE WORLD), and Samuel Richardson’s great novel, CLARISSA. In addition to works of imaginative literature, we are going to look at a number of other items, including an excerpt from Thomas Hobbes’ LEVIATHAN (1651), excerpts from John Locke’s ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING and TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT (1690), a chapter from Giacomo Casanova's memoir, THE STORY OF MY LIFE (1770s), and William Hogarth’s series of engravings, A RAKE’S PROGRESS (1735). And we will screen the following items: clips from da Ponte and Mozart’s opera, DON GIOVANNI, clips from a historical film about the Restoration, THE LAST KING (2004), the entirety of THE LIBERTINE (2004) with Johnny Depp and John Malkovich, the entirety of a BBC version of CLARISSA (1991) with Sean Bean, and the entirety of DANGEROUS LIAISONS (1988).

ENL 4240 11781
TR 3:05-4:20pm
Wiley - Studies in English Romantic Literature

This course will explore British Romantic literature and culture by focusing on two literary genres: the highly popular but subsequently neglected genre of the gothic novel, and the controversial and subsequently canonized genre of experimental poetry. The Romantic period – conventionally dated from about 1789-1832 – saw great conflicts and great changes in British and European aesthetic, social and political values. We will consider how poems and gothic novels of the period participated in those conflicts and changes, both by addressing a public readership and by addressing each other intertextually.

We will read novels by Ann Radcliffe (The Italian) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk) and a range of poetry by William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, and John Keats. In the work of these writers and in the period at large, we will seek to understand (though not necessarily to resolve) various productive and destructive tensions and energies. And we will seek to understand how the positions developed by Romantic writers remain vital today. The course will run as a seminar and its success will depend upon everyone’s active participation.

LIN 3010 10358
M 6-8:45pm
Beechy - Principles of Linguistics

This course will provide an introduction to the field of linguistics and its application in literary studies. If one wants to know how the body works, one studies biology and chemistry. To know how the universe works, one studies physics. To understand how language works, we study linguistics. Language is a subtle and largely unconscious cognitive phenomenon. It operates on both “hardware” (specific parts of the brain) and “software” (programming that runs at set stages of human development) that appear to be genetically endowed. We are born with the innate ability to learn language, in a way that we are not born with in relation to learning differential calculus, for instance. What specific cultures provide is the raw data of experience. This may be an unfamiliar way of thinking about language, but it can provide great insight into how language operates both within us as individuals and socially in our culture. Furthermore, the study of language is a powerful tool for understanding how literature—the artful use of language—makes its many kinds of impacts. It helps us get past the statement, “I just like it,” and achieve the ability to describe just what in a given word, phrase, or poem makes it pleasing.

LIT 3045 12516
MW 1:30-2:45pm
Clark Lunberry - “Tragic Pleasure, Tragic Women”

In tragic theater, what is the attraction created by watching the terrors and tribulations of others? Are we—like voyeurs slowing down at the scene of a car crash—merely titillated on some instinctual level? Or is it somehow instructional to see the suffering of others performed before us, allowing larger lessons to be learned? Do we discern and discover something about ourselves through the witnessing of this distanced ordeal? How is it that, as Aristotle described it, tragedy offers its audience a “true tragic pleasure”? In light of the often bloody horrors witnessed, what kind of “pleasure” could this truly be? In this class, we will address some of these questions by looking at a range of classic tragedies, from the ancient Greeks to the present. Our particular focus will be upon the many rich representations of women found in such literature, from (among others) various depictions of Medea, Phaedra and Antigone, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and the wife and mother in his Coriolanus, Kleist’s Pentheselea, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Beckett’s Winnie, in Happy Days.

LIT 3304 12517
MW 3-4:15pm

LIT 3333 10390
MWF 10-10:50am

LIT 3333 11410
TR 4:30-5:45pm

LIT 3408 12925
MWF 12-12:50pm
Butcher - Mythology and other forms of Folklore

Worldview can be defined as the way in which an individual or a group of individuals perceives, organizes, and responds to the world. Different genres of folklore -- such as that of mythology, folktales, fairytales, legends, folk belief, rituals, foodways, song, dance, and jokes -- express the worldview or part of the worldview of an individual and/or group. In this course we will study the folklore of specific Eastern and Western cultures using various interpretive strategies from the humanities and social sciences in an attempt to understand their worldview. For example, we will study some of the works of Vladimir Propp, Mircea Eliade, Bruno Bettlelheim, Jack Zipes, and Alan Dundes in relation to folktales, fairytales, jokes, and myths.

Baron - Mickey's American Dream

This course investigates the themes of the classic fairy tales, both those collected by the brothers Grimm and the literary fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. It then turns to the fairy tale films of Walt Disney and explores the ways in which they, like the tales, offer an understanding of how boys and girls must think and act in order to be good citizens or to achieve “The American Dream”.

Texts in literature, sociology, psychology and popular culture. This is an inter-active discussion course; attendance is required. Tasks include a paper, a group presentation, one student composed examination and Blackboard postings.

In this course we will talk about fairly tales, folk tales, texts and movies intended to shape the behaviors, values, and attitudes of children.

We will read the classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, which were intended to teach children how they ought to believe and behave in 19th century Europe and Scandinavia.

We will analyze Walt Disney’s instructions, embedded in his fairy tale films, on how girls and boys can achieve the “American Dream”.

We will also read literary criticism, psychology, and sociology as we investigate what “American Dream” has meant in this country over time.

LIT 3930 12518
TR 12:15-1:30pm
Jillian Smith - The Art of Reading.
Dr. Jillian Smith

In this course you will learn to read. You will learn that your own art of interpretation matters as much as the words on the pages of literature.

Our methods of interpretation in this course will quickly show us that meaning is located in many places other than these black marks on the page. We will come to see that literature isn’t simply sitting passively waiting to be read, but rather it is actively intertwining in culture, history, knowing, and being. What are the roles of the reader and of the author in producing meaning? Are there ways in which readers are produced by what they read? Can a text mean the same thing over and over again? What can books do? Can fiction be philosophy? Can it be history? Can it limit my identity? Can it have political force? Can it change the world? What can I do with it? By learning how to use traditional literary techniques—character, voice, metaphor—alongside philosophical concepts—signification, subjectivity, ideology—we will tackle such questions in our art of interpretation. We will learn the intensity of reading.

By the end of the course you will have facility with many literary techniques as well as several conceptual tools. You will be able to craft well-composed, engaging interpretations that put these techniques and tools to work. Your ability to interpret literature will further train you to interpret film, culture, politics, and the media.

All majors are welcome. English majors should run to this class because no matter when you take it you will have wished you took it sooner.

LIT 4041 11815
TR 10:50-12:05pm
Monteleone - Studies in Drama: Race, Class, Gender in the Dramatic Literature of the United States

Plays are not only works of art but powerful social commentaries. Moreover, because they are also scripts that are only fully realized in performance, they have particular relevance to questions of identity. This course will examine social constructs of race/ethnicity, class, and gender through the reading of plays that reflect diverse cultural perspectives on U.S. history and lifestyles. We will examine the strategies playwrights use to describe their perspectives on American life, through their treatment of such common themes as the American Dream, the meaning of home, growing up, and the importance family. In addition to reading, writing, and discussion, we will act out scenes. No previous theatrical training or experience is required. I will simply ask you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Playing roles and witnessing them, like telling family stories, is an act of self-definition. As we bring these plays to life, we shall ask ourselves such questions as:

In short, this course has two simple aims: (1) To give you the opportunity to study culturally diverse plays for the stage and (2) To give you the opportunity to explore your own individual emotional and cognitive potential by working with others to bring a play to life.
Readings will include plays by Eve Ensler, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, Douglas Turner Ward, Luis Valdez, Federico Fraguada, Wakoko Yamouchi and others.

LIT 4093 10391
MWF 10-10:50am
Gabbard - American Short Stories Today—Study of a Genre (Contemporary Literature)

This course will not instruct students in how to write a short story; rather, it will study the short story genre as writers have practiced it in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Short story writer Elea Carey finds similarities between an affair and short fiction. “[A]n affair is a distinct genre, not like a quotidian romance, not like a marriage; the imperative is to be brief; it is subject to its own convictions and has its own history.” Carey might have added that short fiction has its own logic, one involving the economical use of language. A short story must be spare, describing scenes and situations, depicting characters, and unfolding and resolving conflicts using few words. Along these lines, M. H. Abrams writes that the “short story differs from the novel in the dimension that Aristotle called ‘magnitude,’ and this limitation of length imposes differences both in the effects that the story can achieve and in the choice, elaboration, and management of the elements to achieve those effects.” Carey’s analogy and Abrams’s description imply that its practitioners can never digress.

To ground ourselves in what a short story is, we are going to read excerpts from the work of Edgar Allen Poe and Frank O’Connor as well as essays from SHORT STORY THEORY AT A CROSSROADS. And then we are going to jump into the present time by reading stories fresh from the NEW YORKER, one of the few mass circulation magazines still publishing examples of the genre, and from two or three of the following literary journals: STORYQUARTERLY, ZYZZYVA, GEORGIA REVIEW, and PLOUGHSHARES.

We also are going to read portions of collections published in the last twenty years:

Process writing: This course will emphasize process writing, which entails composing an essay during the first third of the semester and then revising it several times for grammatical and mechanical correctness, structural coherence, and thoroughness of literary analysis and interpretation.

Course requirements: (1) one 5-7 page essay and required revisions; (2) class participation (including Blackboard discussion); and (3) reading quizzes.

LIT 4243 11736
TR 3:05-4:20pm
Nancy Levine - Zora Neale Hurston in Florida

Zora Neale Hurston grew up in the first all-black town in America, Eatonville, Florida. In a real sense, she never left Eatonville, though she never lived there for more than a few weeks as an adult. We will track Hurston’s hybrid body of work (fiction/ethnography) using her fieldwork in Florida as our timeline. Off campus trips: Eatonville for the Zora Neale Hurston Festival; UF special collections library. Books: Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories; Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writing; and Lucy Hurston, Speak, So that You Can Speak Again

LIT 4650 12519
MW 4:30-5:45pm
Clark Lunberry - “The French Connection: Modern and Contemporary Poetry from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Bernstein”

This course will offer a study of modern and contemporary American poetry as it has emerged out of influences and alliances with late 19th century French poetry, from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Apollinaire, to Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Rosmarie Waldrop and Charles Bernstein (with a particular orientation towards what the literary critic Marjorie Perloff has called “a poetics of indeterminacy”). Emphasis will be upon the experimental quality of all of the poetry involved, its formal and conceptual complexity and playfulness.

LIT 4931 12520
MWF 1-1:50pm
Leverette - Contemporary Black Men Writers

This course is conceived as a companion course to one on Contemporary Black Women Writers that was taught during the fall semester; students need not have taken the earlier course in order to take this one. In this course, we will study contemporary literature written by black men. We will examine historical and contemporary ideologies of black masculinity and explore the connections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics. Additionally, we will investigate mass cultural representations of black men as fathers, lovers, citizens, etc. in contrast to the representations black men offer of themselves.

LIT 4934 12522
MW 7:30-8:45pm
MW      7:30-8:45           LIT 4934—(Senior Seminar)
Title: “Words on the Wall, Hovering in the Air, Fallen to the Floor: Poetry as Found Object, Sound Substance”
Description: This course will have as its primary focus sound poetry, concrete poetry, found poetry, poetry in the visual arts, poetry created/generated through chance operations and cryptic system, poetry in which the brute material of language (as ink on paper or digital emanation) is foregrounded, unforgettably present and still always, of course, singing and signifying. Important Point: the emphasis in this writing course will not be upon the manner in which we possess language, but instead the varied ways in which we are possessed by language; in other words, the writing will not be our own per se, but the writing of something other, something elsewhere (to be determined). Classes will be devoted to both the reading/listening/looking at the many historical precedents for this type of work, as well as to the students’ own making of poems (as they might emerge and respond to the material that we cover). In addition to the making of poems, students will also be asked to think (and write) conceptually about the work that they are doing, to theorize a poetics of their own activity and to see its position in a broader historical context.

LIT 4934 12523
R 6-8:45pm

LIT 4934 12524
MWF 11-11:50am
Leverette - Race & Identity Politics in African-American Literature & Culture

People wear race like a badge or a burden, like a chip on their shoulder or an albatross around their neck. For others, it’s a mark of shame, a scarlet letter of sorts, or a source of confusion and blame. Some carry it like a rite of passage, like warrior marks, like a tattoo. For others, race has been conceived through questions: what is this really, and how does it shape who I am? This question of Who am I? is far from unique and in the realm of race studies has provided the basis for countless explorations in literature, culture, and life. Since the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, most African-American racial discourse has relied on identity politics to articulate struggles against oppression. Identity politics, however, takes the metaphor as paramount, forgetting the actual signified (people who need freedom from oppression) in favor of the signifier (black man, black woman, Chicano/a, lesbian, etc.). Additionally, identity politics relies on synecdoche; that is, it views the part as an adequate stand-in for the whole, allowing us to imagine that we are our skin color or ancestry or our sex/gender. This course will seek to define and explore the history of racial identity politics in African-American civil rights struggles, even questioning its efficacy as the best platform from which to advance struggles for racial equity.

LIT 4934 12525
TR 10:50-12:05pm
Jillian Smith - Documentary Studies

Prereqs: 4 upper division English courses or permission of instructor.

When people hear “documentary,” they immediately think of film, but documentary can include painting, photography, radio, music, and text. All of these documentaries have in common an effort to capture and give form to the narratives that circulate around us. In this course, we will challenge ourselves with questions at the heart of documentary art. How do we gain access to others’ stories? How do we then give others access to those stories? What happens to the story in the process? What ethical issues must be examined: exploitation, accuracy, propaganda, manipulation?

Texts may include Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Hell’s Angels, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, Eduardo Galeano’s aphoristic history Memory of Fire: III. Century of the Wind, Michel Foucault’s archive compilation, I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, Wendy Ewald’s collaborations with children who photograph their dreams, Alain Renais’ poetic documentary film of Auschwitz Night and Fog, Leni Riefenstahl’s Third Reich propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, the Maysles Brothers’ Direct Cinema film The Rolling Stones—Gimme Shelter, and more.

Students will write one longer paper over the semester, post reading responses on BlackBoard Discussion, and create a few small documentary projects.

This course will focus on 4 contemporary British authors: Pat Barker, Sarah Waters, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson. Barker and Waters represent a realist or neo-realist pulse in contemporary British fiction; Carter and Winterson represent a post-modernist one. Generic differences aside, we’ll explore how these writers contextualize the representation of history from deviant or ex-centric positions; furthermore, we’ll examine how these writers regard gender and sexual identity as a performance.

Reading List (tentative): Pat Barker, Regeneration and The Ghost Road; Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet and Affinity; Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children; Jeanette Winterson, two of the following novels: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Written on the Body, and Lighthousekeeping.

LIT 4935 12527
TR 6-7:15pm

THE 4923 10393
TR 4:30-5:45pm
Monteleone - Play Production: Dead Man Walking

Students will participate in the planning and execution of all aspects of play production. The Department of English will produce Tim Robbins’s play Dead Man Walking for the university and Jacksonville communities. The play is based on Sister Helen Prejean’s book Dead Man Walking and is an adaptation of Tim Robbins’s screenplay of the same name made into a major motion picture In its fourth year, the Dead Man Walking Theatre Project was designed to engage colleges, universities, and their communities in a national discourse on a major issue of our time: the death penalty. Students will have the opportunity to earn credit in areas that address their diverse interests and competencies: acting; academic research; technical, including sound and video production; and business/promotion, management. This course may be repeated for up to twelve (12) credits.

This course is an introduction to acting. We will focus on techniques and challenges associated with the acting process, with the ultimate aim of creating a character and interacting with others in a dramatic scene. The course will include acting exercises, monologue and scene work. This course is highly recommended for students who plan to participate in English department productions and may be repeated for up to six (6) credits. The spring 2008 English Department production will be Dead Man Walking.