The National Foundation for the Arts defines creative nonfiction as “factual prose that is also literary – infused with the stylistic devices, tropes and rhetorical flourishes of the best fiction and the most lyrical of narrative poetry.” That is our starting point . This course provides an introduction to the forms and methods of creative nonfiction, everything from immersion journalism to recorded reverie, from Gonzo to Tinker Creek. Emphasis will be on the lyric essay and collage. We will bite nails and open veins and tend to the work at hand. Experimentation is encouraged. Laughter is relished.
This course is an introductory workshop in writing for film. We will explore the fundamentals of dramatic writing- character, structure, dialogue, genres- screenplay style and format and produce a fully realized, 100-120 page, professional level feature length motion picture screenplay. We will also include "real-world" sessions on how to pursue careers in writing, producing and directing for film and television as well as discuss further educational opportunities for the study and practice of cinematic arts.
This course is an introductory workshop in writing for television. We will explore the fundamentals of dramatic writing- character, structure, dialogue, genres- screenplay style and format and produce a fully realized, 100-120 page, professional level feature length motion picture screenplay. We will also include "real-world" sessions on how to pursue careers in writing, producing and directing for film and television as well as discuss further educational opportunities for the study and practice of cinematic arts.
This is an introductory course for people who are fascinated by other people. It’s for people who try to imagine what these other people think and feel, and how they act when they’re alone. It’s for people who imagine people in their craziest, cruelest, sweetest, and most self-destructive moments and know they have to record them. We’ll learn how to describe these moments in ways that are both interesting and comprehensible, so that we can begin to craft our visions of the world.
This workshop will focus on academic-style poetry with the goal of publishing in literary magazines. By the end of the semester, you will learn how to use similes, metaphors, line breaks, stanzas, free verse, and rhyme. To help you become a better writer, we will analyze published poems as well as critique student poems through online forums. The class will take place entirely on Blackboard and offers a flexible schedule. This class will involve a lot of work and will include honest critiques of your writing, so it is not for those with a thin skin or busy schedule. For the serious writer, though, the work will be rewarding. As a community of fellow writers, we will support each other's efforts to explore the art of poetry.
This course will introduce students to scientific, technical, and professional writing with a focus on practical information about communicating in different workplace environments and professional/technical discourse communities.
Students will analyze rhetorical situations and issues (of audience, organization, visual design, style, and the material production of documents) common to different scientific, technical, and professional writing genres, including emails, letters, resumes, memos, reports (progress, lab, etc.), proposals, technical descriptions, technical definitions, and technical manuals.
In this version of ENC 2930, we will concentrate on working with and in the digital environment. Digital Humanities is an emergent field, and given the trajectory of our culture, the digital is the world in which much of our composing and comprehending is and will be done. For the purpose of this course, we will use the “archive” as our digital portal and home.
Our project will be to produce, in web writing and design, a digital archive of the literature and history of Jacksonville, Florida. The project will involve blogging progress reports, gathering and digitizing (if needed) primary and secondary sources, designing a website devoted to the gathering, and finally, producing an analytic and reflective website in tangent with your work in the class.
We will read several texts, including a HTML/CSS guide, short theoretical pieces by Walter Benjamin, Gregory Ulmer, Jorge Luis Borges, etc., but the bulk of our analyses will be self directed. Also, we will examine the new and upcoming issues of digital journals such as Vectors, to find ideas for approaching the digital media.
ENC 2930, The Informed Writer, is a selection in the Writing Sequence courses in the General Education program at UNF. This class will focus on Topics in Genetic Research. Students in this class will engage various types of arguments covering these topics and develop essential skills for textual analysis, critical thinking, creativity, self-awareness and reasoned argument in a variety of written, spoken, and technological formats relative to research and writing in the disciplines of the natural sciences. Students must earn a grade of C or better to receive credit for this class.
Designed as a writing course for prospective physical & occupational therapists as well as for nursing students and others heading into the health field, this class will explore the world of medicine and rehabilitation from the patient’s perspective. The purpose of this orientation is to help future health professionals become better patient advocates. To understand the world from the patient’s point of view, we shall read and write about a number of texts by people who have been patients. To that end, we shall examine a number of texts by and about patients. Some of the composition assignments will be geared toward writing about texts (books, stories, & films) presenting the patients’ viewpoint. A few are:
The Long Road Home by G. B. Trudeau (graphic novel about an American soldier wounded in Iraq); The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (chief editor of Paris’s Elle magazine); Breathing for a Living by Brown University student Laura Rothenburg (young woman with cystic fibrosis); My Left Foot by Christy Brown (Brown encountered physical therapy when it was in its infancy); The Waterdance, 1992 film (directors Neal Jimenez & Michael Steinberg; acting credits: William Forsythe, Helen Hunt, Wesley Snipes, Eric Stoltz); Born on the Fourth of July, 1989 Academy Award-winning film (director: Oliver Stone; acting credits: Tom Cruise, William Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick).
What is education? What are educators’ responsibilities? What should we teach? What is the relationship between “teacher” and “student”? How can education face the challenges of a changing and diverse society? Especially in trying economic times, how should we fund schools and programs? How should we grade or evaluate students, or should we grade at all? Conversely, how do we hold educators, schools and systems “accountable”? What roles do standardized tests and rubrics, like the FCAT or SAT, have in such evaluation and accountability?
Though this course will explore these questions and more, the central emphasis of the course is writing as a means of deepening our knowledge of what we have read and discussed. Through reading in different genres about these topics, writing in different genres about them, and discussing both reading and writing, students will become familiar with the topics and discourse of education, and become more skillful writers, readers, thinkers and speakers.
Please contact me with questions or concerns:
Russ Turney
rturney@unf.edu
620-1261
This course is designed for students interested in examining the controversial topic of immigration. We will investigate the issues and propose solutions. This will require self-examination. After all, America was founded by immigrants or maybe not. Perhaps we will need to clarify this country’s origins and surely we will read some interesting texts in a variety of genres which pose provocative questions about who we are as a country, how we feel about newcomers, and how we treat people who want to be like us.
We will begin with government-generated literature, such as the Citizenship Test. Will you pass it? We will look at the Oath of Allegiance to this great country. Could you swear to uphold the principles this oath requires? Maybe we will see the need to re-write this document. Our reading of immigrant narratives will take us on fascinating journeys after which we will examine immigration theory. “Do the metaphors that have been used to describe the way immigrants have integrated into American society shed any light on the process: Melting pot? Salad bowl? Mosaic?” (from Immigration: A Wadsworth Casebook in Argument by Sharon Walsch and Evelyn D. Asch). Furthermore, a course on immigration cannot ignore Mexico and we will consult experts to help us develop the broadest possible perspective in “The Case of Hispanic Immigration” (Walsch and Asch chapter 6).
This course will culminate with a final research project in which we will construct oral histories of real immigrants. Will our views about immigration change during the course of the semester? Will we take a “Love Train” approach to this national concern or will some of us scream, “Hey! You! Get Off of My Cloud”? Contact Barbara Roberts at broberts@unf.edu for further information.
Who are you? What are you? Why are you? In this research based writing course, we will examine how our voluntary and involuntary membership in groups affects who, what, and why we are. We will use journal articles, contemporary research, essays and film as text (for example, Meirelles’ City of God –“one of the best films you’ll ever see”- Roger Ebert), to examine current controversial topics. The reading, research, and writing skills you learn and practice in this course will prepare you for a variety of undergraduate majors, and particularly for the social sciences:- general research, textual critique, and original field research. ENC 1101 and LIT 2000 are prerequisites for this course.
This course will build on the rhetorical strategies, principles, and practices developed in ENC1101 with a focus on research-based writing in diverse academic and non-academic situations. Assignments will be relevant to the writing needs of those students planning a career in business. We will discuss conventions and expectations in the academic and professional communities associated with various business/office situations; assignments will include production of business documents (reports, letters, resumes, and more); writing practice in a variety of genres, including the argumentative essay; practice in addressing (in writing and in speech) a variety of audiences; and practice in using research strategies relevant to professional communities.
Great Feats!:
Writing about invention in engineering and technology.
This course will examine the role of engineering in context of cultural necessity. We will ask the question: what drives engineering invention and innovation? What is driven by the innovation and invention? We will focus on rhetorical, research, and revision skills that will help as we move into our major fields. Emphasis will be placed on documentation and compositional styles used in the field of engineering, but all majors are welcome.
Possible texts:
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Casey, S.M. Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error
LIT 2932 is the last of the Writing Sequence courses in the General Education program at UNF. The theme for this course is Jazz. Through group assignments, term papers, and creative writing exercises, students in this class will continue to develop essential skills for textual analysis, critical thinking, creativity, self-awareness and reasoned argument in a variety of critical, technological, and performance settings. Students must earn a grade of C or better to receive credit for this class.
This section of LIT 2932 explores the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts. The uncanny describes not so much a literary theme or movement as an aesthetic quality of literature that provokes eerie, strange, creepy, unsettling, haunting, or disturbing feelings. Discussion will focus on a number of elements linked to such sensations, including odd familiarities, haunted architecture, doppelgangers, coincidences, prosthetics, animism, identity disturbances, death, laughter, language, and acts of writing.
The uncanny, by its nature, disrupts intellectual certainty and thus offers extensive possibilities for exploration. 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.
What is Jewish Literature? Do we know it by its subjects and themes, or is it simply literature created by Jews. In 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary “What have I in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.” Maybe Kafka’s question is the question of Jewish literature itself. Maybe the answer is in the spirit of questioning ingrained over millennia. We’ll explore this and other possible answers together. We’ll take slivers of angst, self-doubt, and ties that bind and chafe, layering them between the sour dough of exile and crusty redemption. Then we’ll sprinkle liberally with ethical fervor and top off the whole meshugas with a healthy dollop of apostasy. Our emphasis will be on contemporary voices at this ragged edge of history, though earlier authors will be represented. Some writers whose work we may consider include Shalom Auslander, Etgar Keret, Yoel Hoffman, Amy Bender, Tova Reich, Nathan Englander, Lara Vapynar, Cynthia Ozick, Zvi Kolitz, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and S. Ansky.
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.
We will look at two groups of writers, separated by over a century, but treading on some of the same physical ground. First we will read the work of some of the American Puritans, who settled in Massachusetts, and spread out to form New England. And then we will read the work of a few of the canonical writers of the 19th century “New England Renaissance.” While they differ dramatically in terms of subject matter, style, genre and world view I would like to read them closely enough to see if there are any echo effects that have traveled across the gulf of time which separates them. Are there any important similarities between Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Cotton? Or between Henry David Thoreau and John Winthrop? Are New England’s Puritan roots still feeding the literary fruits that emerge two centuries later? Can such nourishment be detected in writers like Emerson and Thoreau who quite self-consciously distance themselves from the specific theological, moral, and social visions of their region’s first settlers? My hope is that asking the questions, even if they are answered in the negative, will prompt us to get closer to these writers, and allow us to get underneath some of the assumptions and biases that they are often shrouded within.
Be warned, that the Puritan writers are often a bit off-putting for some students—we will be reading through sermons, letters, transcripts and journals, but no fiction, poetry or drama. And we will often be reading through mere fragments of massive works, with all of the difficulties associated with that gesture—references that are obscure or unknown, and pieces of correspondence whose entire context is not available to our eyes. Yet I must encourage us to read closely when we might be tempted to just run our eyes down the page.
Be further warned that the Bible is the principle subject of the Puritan writers, and I will refer you to certain passages from it that might help make sense of what we are reading. We will, however, regard the Bible as simply a text among other equally important texts. The Bible has no more moral or religious authority than the Greek myths would have in a class on Greek epic poetry.
“. . . for has not some wise man of old remarked, that the perfect women are those who leave no histories behind them . . .” (Braddon, Aurora Floyd)
The literature of the Victorian period (1832-1901) reflects a concern with “The Woman Question,” with what should be the role of women within society, the family, and the home, a contentious and recurrent subject of debate during this time. During the latter half of the period, novels steeped in the conventions of the gothic produce some of the most provocative contributions to this debate. In particular, the sensation novels of the 1860s and the sensational fiction of the decadence or fin de siecle period challenge the image of the home and of marriage as something sacred. In addition to examining the way the fiction of this period subverts the middle class myth of domesticity, we’ll examine the difference between the female gothic of the sensation novel and the male gothic of the late nineteenth century. Finally, we’ll read a neo-Victorian novel, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, which re-writes the terms of the debate from a lesbian perspective.
Reading List: Lady Audley’s Secret (Mary Elizabeth Braddon), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (R.L. Stevenson), Dracula (B. Stoker), Fingersmith (Sarah Waters).
Writing Assignments: three (3) short essays (approx. 750 words each).
In this course, we focus on the work of four Southern writers who will help us define “southerness.” In his fiction, William Faulkner created a fictional replica of the town in northern Mississippi where he grew up: Oxford, located in Lafayette County. He named the replica “Jefferson” and placed it in the center of Yoknapatawpha County, of which, as inventor, he claimed to be sole owner and proprietor. Flannery O’Connor based most of her thirty-one stories on her hometown, Milledgeville, Georgia, and Andalusia, the farm where she lived with her mother, outside Milledgeville. Harry Crews was born in Bacon County, Georgia; he also lived in the Springfield section of Jacksonville, which, as he writes in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, “came up in conversations like the weather.” It was where “all of us from Bacon County went” when their luck gave out and the crops failed. Lee Smith, a Virginian, seems to live on the outer reaches of the South (some experts in regional culture argue that Appalachia is a distinct entity). But her representations of “Southerness” are no less compelling than those conceived by Faulkner, O’Connor and Crews. If we’re going to look for an answer to the question of what the South has meant in twentieth-century American Fiction, these are writers who literally “wrote the book.”
What does “setting” mean to these writers? How do they express their “sense of place”? Eudora Welty, a Mississippi writer of the generation following Faulkner’s, wrote that “the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood.” Among the things we will try to understand in this course is that anomaly, a sense of place, by which we don’t mean “local color” or even “regionalism.” Faulkner, O Connor, Crews, and Smith have re-defined those terms. How they represent the South will be the focus of this course. Texts will include the following: Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place; William Faulkner, Selected Short Stories; Flannery O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works; Lee Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies. Grades will be based on the collected scores of online quizzes and a “compare and contrast” essay.
“Smoke and Mirrors: Georg Büchner’s Theater of Disappearance/Werner Herzog’s Films of Appearance”
The little-known German writer Georg Büchner (1813-1837) wrote his three plays, a single short story, some political tracts, advanced scholarly projects on biology, and many letters to family and a girlfriend, and then—quite suddenly—died at the ripe young age of 23 from typhus. Soon after, Büchner was quickly forgotten, disappearing into his own death, as very little of what he had written had been published in his lifetime. As with most of us, oblivion seemed his fate. And besides, Büchner’s style, his themes, his politics, his philosophy were perhaps so far “ahead of their time” as to make his work, even if published, largely inaccessible to those around him. However, though he may or may not have known it, could it be that Büchner was writing for us, foreseeing a room full of readers in Florida, some of whom would instantly get what it was that he was writing, what it was that he was seeing in the modern world arising around him, and that has arisen around us? In this class, we will examine closely the writings of Georg Büchner. Our investigation will in part be directed by a parallel examination of Büchner’s compatriot, the modern filmmaker Werner Herzog (born 1942), watching a number of his films, such as his adaptation of Büchner’s Woyzeck, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man.
Literary interpretation is an art. And it is a foundation for sophisticated critical thinking and writing within history, philosophy, culture, politics, media, arts, and even sciences. The goal of the class is to teach you how to read literature, and thus any text, with intensity. The course is designed to teach English majors reading, writing, and interpretation skills for the major, but it is appropriate for anyone who likes to read or who wants to learn to read well. We will read short stories, novels, and plays as a means of learning literary techniques, terms, and concepts. Frequent writing exercises and two interpretation papers as well as lots of enthusiasm are required. This course is required for film minors (and a prerequisite for several film classes).
Do you ever wonder why you read the same types of books over and over again? Or watch the same television shows? This course will explore why. Focusing on the Western, hard-boiled detection, romance, and science fiction, this course gives you a broad introduction to the genres that historically have captured the public’s imagination. We will explore the philosophical underpinnings of each genre in addition to examining ways of reading the genre, with particular attention paid to issues of race, class, and gender. Students will be expected to participate heavily, give one presentation, write responses to both critical articles and primary texts, and write a final
This course satisfies a post-1800 (EA18) and American literature (EAML) requirement. Short stories constitute a distinct genre: they vary from novels as much as lyric poems differ from epics or plays from films. Short fiction follows 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. As opposed to novelists, its practitioners can never digress. Every word matters. We are going to read the work of some of today’s foremost short story writers: Tobias Wolff, Amy Tan, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Elizabeth McKenzie, Jim Shepard, zz Packer, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Charles Johnson. Graduate students will produce a research paper.
LIT 4650-51152: Caribbean/American LiteratureNow that studies of cross-culturality, hybridity, and global migrations have moved from the margins to the center of literary and cultural studies, the Caribbean has been recognized as a dynamic space of sea changes wherein new structures of knowledge and performance emerge from longstanding and intense engagement with plantation ties to transnational economies and identities. The Caribbean is an intensely multicultural region. We will be reading works by some of the most powerful Caribbean writers and performers (working in both the Caribbean and the U.S.), including Bob Marley, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, Patrick Chamoiseau, Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, and Paule Marshall. We will be immersing ourselves in Caribbean culture and its migrations as we engage topics such as Afro-creole languages and religions, carnival and music, postcolonial politics, tourism, hurricanes, and especially Florida's own Caribbean history and presence.
Students will choose an issue to explore in literature ranging form picture books through Young Adult novels. Possible topics include: 1. Cannibalism in fairy tales 2. The ³problem novel² for adolescents 3. The portrayal of Native Americans in young peoples¹ literature 4. Racism in picture books 5. The Disneyfication of children¹s texts and culture6. Who is in charge? 6. The role of the narrator 7. Put your issue here____________
Mark Twain once said, “The fellow holding the cat by the tail is getting twice as much information as the fellow just watching.” This is a hands-on course. Students will participate in the planning and execution of all aspects of play production. We will audition, cast, and produce Beth Henley’s Pulitzer-prize winning tragi-comedy, Crimes of the Heart. Students will have the opportunity to earn credit in areas that address their diverse interests and competencies: academic research, acting, technical and other behind-the-scenes work, business/production management. There are roles for 6 actors, 4 women and 2 men between 20 and 30 years of age. Auditions will be held during the first week of class and are open to class members and other members of the university community. Those planning on auditioning should be prepared for a rigorous five-week rehearsal period. We will rehearse both inside and outside of class. For more information, contact Dr. Pam Monteleone at pmontele@unf.edu or 704-3207. This course may be repeated for up to twelve (12) credits. The final product will be a fully realized production, an evening of two one-act plays presented for the university and Jacksonville communities. The production itself will celebrate not only the African American experience, but the collective experience of those students who, in recreating the voices of the past, perhaps learn to listen differently. An African American student majoring in Communications and minoring in Drama has chosen and will direct the two plays. This course offers opportunities for students who wish to focus on differing kinds of work for course credit: or the director, Jessica Rich (Jrich604@aol.com; 954-464-6175).
The National Foundation for the Arts defines creative nonfiction as “factual prose that is also literary – infused with the stylistic devices, tropes and rhetorical flourishes of the best fiction and the most lyrical of narrative poetry.” That is our starting point in the creative nonfiction workshop. 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 this workshop, we explore possibilities that range from Gonzo to Tinker Creek and everything between and beyond. We tackle technical concerns and seek methods by which the reliable resources of imagination can be tapped in the service of the factual. We read and write creative nonfiction. We talk and write about the creative nonfiction 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.
Hollywood is quick to absorb historical events into filmic representations, but it stuttered over the Vietnam War, not quite sure how to appropriate the images from the first televised war, not sure what cultural questions needed to be addressed, and not quite able to find the narratives and characters that made sense within the complexity of Vietnam. Consequently, the Vietnam Film not only provides a rich cinematic text in itself, but it also prompts us to look back to the war film genre and forward to current representations of war to understand how it has formed as a genre and as a tool for cultural inquiry. Students will be expected to perform formal, thematic, and cultural analysis, so prior film class experience is recommended.
This course will provide an introduction to the field of linguistics. 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, and this experience leads to the differences between any two languages—differences that are much more superficial than they might seem. 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.
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Identify what is scientific about linguistics
- Describe the major design features of human language (Universal Grammar)
- Describe the sounds of English, and how those sounds are arranged in a system (phonology)
- Describe the structure of words in English (morphology)
- Describe the structure of sentences in English (syntax)
- Describe the significance of different dialects and historical change in English (comparative analysis)
We will look at two groups of writers, separated by over a century, but treading on some of the same physical ground. First we will read the work of some of the American Puritans, who settled in Massachusetts, and spread out to form New England. And then we will read the work of a few of the canonical writers of the 19th century “New England Renaissance.” While they differ dramatically in terms of subject matter, style, genre and world view I would like to read them closely enough to see if there are any echo effects that have traveled across the gulf of time which separates them. Are there any important similarities between Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Cotton? Or between Henry David Thoreau and John Winthrop? Are New England’s Puritan roots still feeding the literary fruits that emerge two centuries later? Can such nourishment be detected in writers like Emerson and Thoreau who quite self-consciously distance themselves from the specific theological, moral, and social visions of their region’s first settlers? My hope is that asking the questions, even if they are answered in the negative, will prompt us to get closer to these writers, and allow us to get underneath some of the assumptions and biases that they are often shrouded them within.
In addition to reading the primary texts mentioned above, we will be reading through works by some of the theologians that have structured the Puritan sensibility. We will also be delving into the secondary critical literature surrounding them. Each student will be responsible for producing a book review of a substantial work of criticism relevant to our work. And each student will be responsible for producing an extended essay of publishable quality that takes into account the primary and secondary literature of these periods.
Be warned, that the Puritan writers are often a bit off-putting for some students—we will be reading through sermons, letters, transcripts and journals, but no fiction, poetry or drama. And we will often be reading through mere fragments of massive works, with all of the difficulties associated with that gesture—references that are obscure or unknown, and pieces of correspondence whose entire context is not available to our eyes.
Be further warned that while the Bible is the principle subject of the Puritan writers, and while I will refer you to certain passages from it that might help make sense of what we are reading, we will regard the Bible as simply a text among other equally important texts. For the purposes of this class, the Bible has no more moral or religious authority than the Greek myths would have in a class on Greek epic poetry. Please consider carefully whether this course will be of interest and benefit to you.
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 the last century 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 Selected Short Stories and As I Lay Dyng; Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Wise Blood, Eudora Welty’s Thirteen Stories, West’s The Day of the Locust, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, selected critical essays by Bakhtin, Harpham, Kayser and more on Blackboard, and at least one of the following graphic novel (Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Mick Mignola’s Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher: Gone to Texas, and Frank Miller’s Sin City).
The Style, Grammar, and Rhetoric of the Sentence and Paragraph provides students with the theoretical and technical background to recognize the sources of stylistic, grammatical and rhetorical problems that so often trouble inexperienced writers. This course primarily will introduce students to the historical and scholarly research on style error analysis. In addition, students will study theories regarding rhetorical style and structure of the sentence, paragraph, and essay. In the course of our study students will complete a number of exercises that will prepare them to be better writers, technicians, and scholars.
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.
This course will focus on Lord Byron the poet; the social, political, and sexual adventurer; the expatriate traveller; the sometimes incestuous, pedophilic, and vampiristic adulterer; and the cultural hero. We will study Byron’s deeply incisive and spectacularly funny poetry and personality as well as the literary and cultural possibilities that he opened for artists, writers, and readers. Along with Byron’s poetry and recent critical studies of it, we will read select writings by the contemporaries who comprised his social and literary circle: for example, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Thomas More, and others.
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. The best playwrights write for actors, the persons who will body forth their words and bring their scripts to emotional life for an audience. The best playwrights also write with a director’s eye for stage space. The practice exercises will prepare you for writing your one-act play. Each student will submit a one-act playscript to be read at a Marathon Readoff on a Saturday in November. During the final third of the course, we will produce (audition, cast, direct, rehearse, and present) four or five of your original one-act plays for the larger university community.
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.
Graduate students will read seven great Victorian novels as well as Victorian essayists and contemporary scholars as we seek to understand the ways in which economics, religion, family politics, and education shaped gender, identity and society among the working poor as well as the middle classes in England. Students will provide undergraduates enrolled in the 4,000 level course a broader perspective on the “the Woman Question” as you integrate the voices of Gaskell, Collins, and Trollope into our exploration of how Bronte, Eliot, Dickens, and Hardy structure conversations on gender. Students will write an annotated bibliography, one paper, one report and collaborate on a creative final project. Assignments will be geared toward providing you opportunities to: offer nuanced interpretation of literary texts; articulate the arguments of relevant scholarly debates; understand how varying theoretical perspectives influence our interpretations of texts; and advance your own ideas in the context of an on-going scholarly conversation. This is an intense reading schedule. I encourage you to meet with me before the semester begins; contact me at mjones@unf.edu Required texts: Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre (Please purchase the Bedford/ St. Martin’s edition, Beth Newman [ed]); Gaskell, North and South; George Eliot Adam Bede; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Please purchase the Bedford/ St. Martin’s edition, Janice Carlisle [ed]) Collins, The Moonstone; Trollope, Small House at Allington; Hardy Jude the Obscure; Haight (ed), The Portable Victorian Reader
“World Cinema and the Cross-Cultural Encounter”: Based on a set of films that focus on the situation of the cross-cultural encounter —including tourism, immigration, and transnational romance—paired with critical readings in world cinema studies, this course will provide students with the analytical tools to address three central questions: What does it mean to be “abroad”? What are the pleasures, privileges, and perils of being “lost in translation”? And how does the cinema both reflect and participate in globalization? Our exploration of these questions will also entail that students be self-critical about how their encounter with world cinema is a cross-cultural experience. The principle analytical tools will be drawn from the diverse interdisciplinary fields of cinema and media studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural anthropology.
Major Authors: Alice Walker Many are familiar with Alice Walker through her novel and film The Color Purple. Many are less familiar with her poetry, nonfiction, other novels, and her coining of the term Womanism, which she has defined, in part, as a black feminist or feminist of color. In this course, we will explore Walker’s writing life and work—including her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—in relation to issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other major themes, including Womanism, and investigate Walker’s evolution as a writer over the decades she has produced her work.
Rural black people living in the South after Reconstruction needed a means for expressing and understanding the suffering caused by chronic economic hardship and the everyday misery of Jim Crow oppression: the blues, which emerged as an indigenous art form in the 1890s, was an antidote to pain. Not much has changed in a hundred years for millions of African Americans, when more than 24.4 percent live below the poverty line. The survivors of Hurricane Katrina who waited in the Superdome in New Orleans for help to come four years ago were unknowingly performing a scenario that Charlie Patton had described in 1927 in his song about the Great Delta Flood: "Lord, the whole round country, lord,/ River is overflowed/ Lord, the whole round country/Man it's overflowed/I would go to the hilly country/But they got me barred" ("High Water Everywhere"). Blues has been helping twentieth century writers "finger [the] jagged grain" of American life since the Harlem Renaissance. But anonymous blues singers (and some whose music survived) who sang about homelessness, illness, violence, and the dangers inherent in living at the bottom of the economic ladder prepared their way by creating a language, an aesthetic, and survival tactics they could draw on.
We will interrogate the old truism “you gotta suffer if you wanna play the blues” by reading and discussing texts drawn from the following authors: Sherman Alexie (Reservation Blues ); Adam Gussow (Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence, Murder and the Blues Tradition); Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God); Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye ); August Wilson (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); and various examples of lyrics, short stories and poetry on Blackboard. Grades will be based on the following: online quizzes and a final written project.
Students will study the styles of documentary film in order to produce their own short documentary film. The class will be engaging in a group documentary project producing a folk life documentary for a traveling exhibit and permanent archive on the St. Johns Riverkeeper Project. In the process issues of research, interview technique, camera style, editing style, and exhibition will be covered through readings, discussions, and exercises. By the end of the course students will have learned the skills necessary for producing amateur documentary on their own and will have at least one completed short documentary. Prior film study experience is recommended.
“The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Alexander Pope
“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.” David Abram
Animals have always occupied both a central and a marginal place in every human culture, capable of standing at exactly the same moment as examples both of what we are, or should be, and of what we are not—but could, and yet must not, become. Animals are simultaneously everywhere—on our plates, in our homes, in our dreams and books and films—and (from a modern consumerist perspective) nowhere, consigned by the billions to lead lives of invisible and anonymous suffering in factory farms, industrial-scale slaughterhouses, and research labs. They fascinate us with their boundless diversity, frustrate us with their insistence on communicating in their own ways, terrify us with their special capacities and appetites, delight us with their exuberant expressions of joy, and, increasingly, haunt us as we continue to drive them into extinction at a rate not experienced on Earth for millions of years.
In this class we will not just encounter some of the most famous beasts in modern literature and film, but will frame our encounters with them by means of critical engagement with leading animal rights philosophers, ethnologists and animal psychologists, ecocritics and ecofeminists, and other participants in the growing field of what might be called animal/animality studies. Rather than advocating a particular political agenda, our 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 and film can play in helping humankind make sense of its place in a world full of other life forms.
Possible primary texts: Erica Fudge, Animal (Reaktion); Charles Bergman, Wild Echoes: Encounters with the Most Endangered Animals in North America (Illinois); Sue Coe, Dead Meat (Four Walls Eight Windows); Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (Scribner); Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (Scribner); J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton); Susan McHugh, Dog (Reaktion); James Dickey, Deliverance (Delta); Linda Hogan, Power (Norton).
Requirements: Strong attendance and participation; one short verbal response and one research paper; one field experience and related presentation; regular Blackboard postings; short quizzes; student-produced final exam.