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.