Spring 2008 Graduate English Course Descriptions
Beechy - ENL 6455/11742
Medieval Genius
People long ago were moved by beauty and excited by the surprising just as we are today. However, an ancient culture’s standards for defining things like beauty and virtue—and their opposites of ugliness and abomination—can often seem as strange to us as the culture of a far-off land. This course will explore ways of appreciating the genius of the vastly different. We will at once attempt to understand the culture and history of a text (accounting for the “eval”—the historically specific—in medieval) and to locate its particular “genius”: its energy centers, its modes of creativity and surprise. We will focus on texts from the Anglo-Saxon period to Chaucer’s time, from Old English to Middle English (the Old English will, alas, be in translation). Much changed, but much in the way of literary style persisted and found expression in new genres. We will read these texts with an eye for both change and continuity, and for both difference and familiarity. This will give us access to an amazingly diverse and interesting body of literature.
Gabbard - LIT 5934/11403
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 7-9 page essay and required revisions; (2) class participation (including Blackboard discussion); and (3) reading quizzes.
(Restoration & 18th Century British Literature)
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).
Requirements: participation, reading quizzes, 10-page semester paper
Leverette - LIT 5934 12521
Black Male 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.
Levine - LIT 5934 11737
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
Levine - LIT 6017 12529
The Grotesque in American Literature
Writers in the grotesque mode (and almost all twentieth-century American fiction contains elements of the grotesque) indirectly reveal to us our hidden selves. By using the techniques of distortion, exaggeration, and juxtaposition of disparate things, authors of this century and the last bring to the surface our subconscious fears, hatreds, and psychic wounds. This course attempts to equip you to sort through and explain those justifiably mixed reactions that grotesque fiction evokes. Grades will be based on quizzes, and a paper or a presentation. Texts will be chosen from among the following: Faulkner's Portable Faulkner, Mellville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, Eudora Welty’s Thirteen Stories, West’s The Day of the Locust, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Harpham's On the Grotesque, plus selected essays and short stories.
Lunberry - LIT 5934 12531
TITLE: “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.
Mauro - AML 6455 11740
Frost and American Poetics
This course will be devoted to examining and appreciating Robert Frost’s poetry for its formal qualities which too often go unnoticed by virtue of the poetry’s seeming simplicity. We will use Robert Pinky’s The Sounds of Poetry as a field guide to the terrain of Frost’s work, and then move on to read other modern and contemporary poets in light of what we discover from Frost.
Monteleone - LIT 5934 11816
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.
Wiley - LIT 6037/12530 – British Romanticism
In this course, we will read a selection of British Romantic literature and critical commentaries on 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; 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.
This course (concentrating on the literature of the years 1789-1832) may fulfill either an early-periods or a later-periods program requirement.