ENC 2930: Writing Topics in Business
CRN 12091
MWF 9-9:50
Instructor: Bernadette Gambino
ENC 2930: Writing Topics in Psychology
CRN 12094
MWF12-12:50
Instructor: Joe Flowers
In Writing Topics: Psychology, we will be reading an assortment of texts dealing with concepts and issues from a variety of psychology's subfields (e.g., social, cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, etc.).
This class will read and write about the principles, case studies, experimentation and findings of psychology; additionally, we will engage with the ideas presented as we observe ourselves, our culture and human nature in the attempt to apply this knowledge to our own lives. We will read texts from a vast assortment of psychologists and authors including E. Becker, E. Berne, C. Dweck, S. Freud, A. Ellis, E. Fromm, S. Pinker, P. Watzlawick, and others.
Required texts include, "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, "The Moral Animal"
by Robert Wright, "The Resiliency Advantage" by A. Siebert, and
"Psychology: A Very Short Introduction" by G. Butler.
ENC 2930: Writing Topics in Natural Sciences
CRN 12095
MWF 1-1:50
Instructor: John Chapman
ENC 2930: Writing Topics in Literature
CRNs 12096, 12097, and 12352
TR 8-9:15, TR 9:25-10:40, and TR 10:50-12:05
Instructor: Brenda Maxey-Billings
This course 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, for example) that provokes eerie, strange, creepy, unsettling, haunting, or disturbing feelings. As a general-education writing course, this course asks students to engage the topic through close readings and critical analysis, intensive reflection on uncanny literature and experiences, and development of organized, researched, and reasoned oral and written arguments.
In a country that is rather free and technologically advanced, is imagination needed to build a post-apocalyptic world? We will read four novels from this genre and write a substantive paper on each. The texts for the class are still being considered, but here are four books that presently head the list: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. We will also watch one, perhaps two movies: Children of Men, Logan’s Run. We will thoroughly canvass the landscapes that these artists present. Ultimately, we will come to some consensus of the cumulative vision that awaits us and whether or not the post-apocalyptic scene is evolving beyond the need for imagination.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10253, 10257, and 10260
Instructor: Bernadette Gambino
MWF 8-8:50, 10-10:50, and 12-12:50
LIT 2932
CRNs
10255, 12331, and 12332
Instructor: Tru Leverette
MWF 9-9:50, 10-10:50, and 11-11:50
What does it mean to have a social conscience? What is social justice, and how do we create it? This class asks that students begin to think critically about society and to approach it with a questioning mind; it encourages critical thinking and writing skills as it moves students to explore their own social conscience and make personal efforts toward social justice. We will read non-fiction texts that delve into contemporary issues such as animal conservation, conscious eating, environmentalism, racism, poverty and living wages. Student writing will respond to these texts and to their own community service projects, which will be based on the social justice movement/issue that is most meaningful to them as individuals. Ultimately, student writing will form a class-wide anthology on social justice and its many manifestations.
LIT 2932
CRNs
12335
Instructor: Sarah Stuart
Lost and Found: Finding Religion in Science-Fiction Television
“Who wouldn't welcome a savior right now?” (Father Jack, abc television’s V)
This course will examine the trend of religious and philosophical themes in science-fiction television. In recent series such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Flash Forward and V, spirituality and religion play central roles, and biblical and mythological allusions create more meaningful viewing experiences. What does the popularity of these shows tell us about American viewers and contemporary society? Why do these shows’ writers rely on such explicit use of religious and mythological narratives? How does it help enrich their stories and touch viewers on a deeper level? How do we “read” a television show? Required reading assignments for this course include religious texts, science-fiction literature, and the following works of non-fiction: Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion by Diane Winston, and Reading Lost by Roberta Pearson.
Prerequisites for this class are ENC 1101 (College Writing) and LIT 2000 (Introduction to Literature), as well as some prior knowledge of at least one of the television series mentioned above.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10256 and 10258
Instructor: John Chapman
LIT 2932 is the third course of the General Education sequence of Gordon Rule Writing Courses at UNF. This LIT 2932 will take the epic poem BEOWULF, itself the foundation for fantasy roleplaying, board, and video games, as a point of departure for studying the pervasiveness of "games" and "gamespaces" not only in literary works, but our everyday lives as well. This course will address the following questions: How much does the narrative of Beowulf resemble a series of games? How are our lives structured like gamespaces we entertain ourselves with in stories like BEOWULF and games like HALO, or THE SIMS? What kinds of games do we play in our personal/academic/professional lives? What kinds of games does our culture value? What does understanding the rules and pervasiveness of games tell us about ourselves? Can immersion into the logic of game environments be a tool for critical thinking and self-awareness? Can writing be thought of as a game? Students will work individually and in groups in a variety of traditional and technological formats to combine interactivity, entertainment, and exposition for the purpose of thinking criticallly about literature, writing, technology, and society.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10259 and 10261
Instructor: Aaron Talbot
MWF 11-11:50 and 12-12:50
This course will investigate how individual narrations of suburbia, race, sexuality, and national fantasy unsettle our cultural definitions of history. We will divide the course into three sections—Hollywood and the West, Suburban Dwellings, and American Nightmares—and read three main texts—Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locusts (1939), Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931)—to explore these constructions and our understanding of American Literature.
Students will learn the technique of close reading, which will combine the analytical and rhetorical skills built in previous writing courses. Assignments for the course will include several short responses and text summaries, as well as one research paper.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10262 and 10264
Instructor: Duncan Barlow
MWF 1-1:50 and 2-2:50
Theories and Applications: Creation and (Re)Creation
All memory is compromised. In fact, studies show that every time we remember an event, that memory is further corrupted, edited, added onto, until very little remains of the original memory. In this course ,we will examine several texts that attempt to recreate historical events, memories, or language itself. With the aid of theoretical texts, we will discuss our readings and each author’s approach to (re)creating.
LIT2932
CRNs
10263 and 10266
Instructor: Amy Wainwright
MWF 1-1:50 and 2-2:50
Feeding the Gators
Stephen King, famous for writing novels that invoke horror (The Shining, Misery, Pet Cemetery, just to name a few) is equally capable of writing stories that speak to human connection; to hope and brotherhood (“The Body”—which became the film Stand by Me; and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”—known best as the film that took the latter part of King’s original story title).
In an essay called “Why We Crave Horror Films,” King elaborates on what he sees as the duality of human nature. His argument, condensed, is that, if we allow our more primitive sides, the under-belly of our nature, to have “safe” ways in which to vent and express itself, then we will avoid turning to more primitive or violent means by which to indulge these more subconscious elements.
As King concludes, “It was Lennon and McCartney who said, ‘All you need is love,’ and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.”
So I would like to explore the varying elements of the “human nature” as they are exposed to different circumstances of external provocation: desire, deprivation, anxiety, hope, overabundance, neglect, etc.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10268 and 10270
Instructor: Su Kraegel
TR 8-915 and 925-1040
How callous and self-serving is a boy who refuses to grow up? Why do boys turn into murderous stick-sharpening savages after a few days without adults? How does a young Indian boy cope when he is a castaway on a small lifeboat with a wild, man-eating tiger for company? How do people survive in a city where six year olds have automatic weapons? How does a young, black, professional woman in London deal with the discovery that her birth mother is white, foolish and very lower class? How do two children, one privileged and the other a low caste servant, cope with reversals and corruption in Afghanistan? Is a young African American girl only valued for her athletic ability? Why is a wealthy and privileged Parisian girl counting the days until she commits suicide? Choosing from the book list below and using four films as text, in our discussion of these questions, we will examine the origin of evil, truth and deception, the effect of social hierarchy on accomplishment, oppression, and freedom and responsibility.
Choosing FOUR from the following texts:
Peter Pan: J.M.Barrie (a dark and troubling text, not the Disney version)
Lord of the Flies: William Golding
The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini
Life of Pi: Yann Martel
Run: Ann Patchett
The Elegance of the Hedgehog: Muriel Barbery
and also four films from:
Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese anime Spirited Away, Guillermo del Toro's strange reality/fantasy Pan's Labyrinth, Fernando Meirelles’ beautiful and horrifying expose of Brazilian street children in City of God, Mike Leigh’s controversial examination of class and racial differences in Secrets and Lies, Michael Apted's 42 year pursuit and study of English children, the friendship of two boys under a barbed wire fence in Mark Herman's The Boy in Striped Pajamas and Siddiq Barmak’s post Taliban Afghanistan Osama.
LIT 2932
CRNs 10269 and 10271
Instructor: Russell Turney
TR 8-915 and 925-1040
Long dismissed as “simple” and “childish”, graphic novels have exploded in popularity: both in terms of sales and praise from critics. They have also become very popular films: from Watchmen to Iron Man to 300 to 30 Days of Night to V for Vendetta to Men in Black. And filmmakers like Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), the (The Matrix), Sam Raimi (Spider Man), and Kevin Smith (Zach and Miri) acknowledge how graphic novels have shaped their work. Increasingly, these texts are seen as a valid, complex art form… and thus, possibly, as literature.
However graphic novels, by their very nature, frustrate categorization. Are they literature? Are they “novels” at all? Kids’ books? Or just trash?
Perhaps because such boundaries are blurred,
studying these texts can help us tune our critical mind to better comprehend all sorts of verbal and non-verbal texts.
However, this course is not a history of the graphic novel or comic books; nor does the course attempt to represent all the varieties of graphic novel out there. This is a writing course, in which we will use these texts and how they interact with some of our culture’s most perplexing issues---
terrorism, genocide, religion, divisive politics, violence, sexism, racism--- to become stronger writers and thinkers.
Two important things to be aware of, however.
First, graphic novels are not cheap. While I have tried to choose less expensive texts, be aware that the total cost of texts for this course could run over $100.
Second, these novels are “graphic” in every sense. They address sensitive subjects,
and sometimes use explicit, even shocking, words and images.
While we will treat these texts, and each other, with respect and tolerance,
you should be prepared for the mature nature of the material.
LIT 2932
CRN 10267
Instructor: Teri Grimm
Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About You. What do You Think About Me?
The “I” in Contemporary Poetry
In her book, The Mirror: A History, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet states, “The self is only tolerable when mediated by artifice.” In this course, contemporary poetry will be the artifice through which we sift through various layers of the “I”. From poems of observation, to blatantly personal narratives, to personas that are often an extension of the poet, we will examine the impetus behind this need to reveal oneself. Discussions will include the literal truth versus realized truth, artifice versus authenticity and accountability. Essays by Allen Grossman, Jorge Luis Borges, Lionel Trilling, David Wojahn, Tess Gallagher and Tony Hoagland, will be among our readings, as well as numerous poems. Music will be integrated to think about the singularness of voice and we will look at some self-portraits. And at some point there will be mirrors.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10273, 10990, and 10991
Instructor: Eileen Maguire
In this course, we will examine over one hundred years of Irish fiction, and in particular the short story. We will read works from James Joyce (1882-1941) to Anne Enright (1962--). We will learn how the culture, music and history of Ireland are inexorably linked to her literature. We will view some films that have been written and directed by Irish writers, and are set in Ireland: Michael Collins, Agnes Browne, The Snapper, and others which depict a more modern Ireland.
The texts we will read are the following:
Modern Irish Short Stories. Ed. Ben Forkner (ISBN: 0-14-024699-1).
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7.. Ed. David Marcus (ISBN: 978-0-571-23045-7).
A Bit on the Side: Selected short Stories by William Trevor (ISBN: 0-14-303591-6).
There will be two papers and a Final Thoughts paper.
LIT 2932
CRNs
10274 and 11010
Instructor: Barbara Roberts
TR 1215-130 and 140-255
LIT 2932
CRNs
11707 and 12107
Instructor: Pamela Hnyla
In his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff argues that Americans’ worldviews can be described through the metaphor of the family. As the inside flap of his book’s cover explains, “Lakoff analyzes the unconscious worldviews of liberals and conservatives, explaining why they are at odds over so many seemingly unrelated issues—like taxes, abortion, regulation, and social programs. The differences, Lakoff argues, are not mere matters of partisanship, but arise from radically different conceptions of morality and ideal family life—meaning that family and morality are at the heart of American politics, in ways that are far from obvious.”
Our urgent task this semester is to work on making those “unconscious worldviews” conscious. We each need to understand and clarify our own worldview, as well as to understand the worldview of those people who do not hold the same “values” as we do. Until we understand ourselves and each other, until we recognize our common ground, our country will continue to be malignantly divided. And it seems there is no better place to start the work of uniting than among the intelligent and (relatively) privileged Americans who are college educated—in other words, us.
To this end, we will become familiar with Lakoff’s theories and then consider his metaphors of the “strict father” and “nurturing parent” alongside literary works (primarily short fiction, films, and poetry) that portray family life.
This class highlights argument—not only those arguments created by the writers of the texts we study but also those produced by students – and the close and careful reading of texts. For our purposes, “texts” include not only those things we expect to encounter in a literature class, but also things perhaps not currently perceived by students as texts. Additionally, this class demands that we make connections, not only between the texts that we read and discuss but also between texts and what some refer to as “real” life.
LIT 2932
CRN
12336
Instructor: Bart Welling
MWF 11-1150
“Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?” John to Elizabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999)
“[W]e are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1996)
Let us begin with a paradox, as pretty much every discussion about the place of animals in modern culture tends to do. Animals are everywhere and nowhere. We are surrounded by them and even inhabited by them, from wild wood storks and semi-domesticated Canada geese and Chihuahuas to the microscopic mites and parasites on our skin and the more helpful critters that live in our digestive tracts. Animals fill zoos and circuses and pet stores, but also taxidermy shops, department stores (in the form of fur, leather, and wool products), and the meat section of your local Winn-Dixie. Animals end up in bizarre places in our culture—in the plastic seat of your car, in that Jello salad your aunt brought to the family reunion, and, perhaps, in your dreams. And our lives are positively spilling over with representations of animals in the form of teddy bears, animated films, Happy Meal toys, animal costumes, sports mascots, IMAX documentaries, calendars, screen savers, T-shirts…every conceivable medium and representational space has been devoted in a significant way to representing animals. And yet, despite this ubiquity on the part of living and represented animals, we can be profoundly ignorant in mainstream U. S. culture—often willfully so—about some of the most basic issues regarding our relationships with them. Where did the chicken in my sandwich come from? Why can I eat a cow any day of the week, but be sent to jail for eating a dog? Why are there fewer and fewer birds in my neighborhood? Is it crazy of me to think that my puppy gets “depressed” when I don’t take her on a walk? Am I an animal? Questions like these have driven some of the most important intellectual developments and debates of the last few centuries, but we rarely bring them to bear on our daily experiences with the animals around us.
This class introduces students to a number of powerful literary and cinematic explorations of these and related questions (under the general heading of “the question of the animal”) in order to illuminate animal/human relationships that have shaped human history and radically transformed the “more-than-human world.” Our examinations of representations of animals in literature and culture will be guided by readings in the emerging field of animal studies, an interdisciplinary approach to animals which combines literary and cultural analysis with philosophical and ethical inquiry, historical research, and scientific study. Although I avoid using the class as an opportunity to persuade students to adopt any one position vis-à-vis animals, I will argue that the state of blindness regarding animals in which many aspects of our culture try to keep us is unethical, untenable from an educational standpoint, and ecologically unsustainable. At the same time, I welcome the perspectives of all students (including hunters, horse riders, animal liberationists, Future Farmers of America, whale watchers, and avid fishermen and fisherwomen) who have had significant personal histories of interactions with animals and who are willing to take “the question of the animal” seriously. Ultimately, I hope to provide you with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of animals wherever we encounter them—including the animals many of us find looking back at ourselves in the mirror every day.
Primary texts: Erica Fudge, Animal (Reaktion); Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling (Scribner); Sue Coe, Dead Meat (Four Walls Eight Windows); Jonathan Balcombe, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (Macmillan); Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone (Picador); J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton); Sid Marty, The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (Emblem); Charles Bergman, Wild Echoes: Encounters with the Most Endangered Animals in North America (Illinois); and other readings to be posted on Blackboard.
Requirements: Strong attendance and participation; one research project (including field experience, argument-based field notes presentation, short annotated bibliography, and research essay); one short close reading paper; short reading quizzes; final exam.
LIT 2932
CRN
12338
Instructor: Chris Gabbard
TR 1215-130
"The Exceptional Body in the Cultural Eye"
Engaging with the personal and fictional stories on our reading list, we will ask such questions as . . .
In answering these and other questions, students will develop their reading, writing, and analytic skills.
LIT 2932 12106
Instructor: Jacob White
TR 305-420
“Whipped: Fractious Fictions of the South”
“The literature of the South is full of people running around admitting or denying their whippedness,” observes Padgett Powell. Of course, chief among these admitters and deniers are the Southern authors themselves, many of whom deny, defy, secede from or vanquish the very Southern Narrative Tradition that gives their work meaning. That is, “Southern,” “narrative,” and “tradition” are all unstable words for the Southern writer, who occupies a literary landscape at once grand and ravaged, a landscape where, as in some never-ending Reconstruction, liberation and defeat are inextricably braided.
We will try to pursue the scrambling retreat and charge of Southern literature from the Civil War on through the Southern Renaissance and into the Twenty-first Century, focusing on fictional texts that work aggressively to complicate Southernness, while at the same time deepening our understanding of it. Primary authors will include Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Padgett Powell, and Selah Saterstrom, to be supplemented with shorter texts by William Gilmore Simms, James Agee, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah, Ann Pancake, and others, as well as essays and films. Students will write two major essays.
Required Texts:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain [ISBN-10: 0451530942]
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston [ISBN-10: 0061120065]
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner [ISBN-10: 0393931382]
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy [ISBN-10: 0375701966]
Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men by Padgett Powell [ISBN-10: 0807128422]
The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom [ISBN-10: 1566891558]
LIT 2932 12110
Instructor: Jacob White
TR 430-545
“The African American Narrative: Does It Exist?”
Still today can be found chain books stores that have a “Literature” section, then an “African American Literature” section. Likewise, our universities regularly offer courses in American Literature and African American Literature. But this categorization raises a difficult question: Where does American literature end and African American literature begin? Can there be an American story, finally, without the African American story, and vise versa? Is there an African American story? Certainly we have countless narratives of African American experience, but can we derive from these a single narrative?
This course will explore this question, with an emphasis on texts that both amplify and complicate the idea of a single African American narrative. The course will build itself around books and shorter texts by Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ernest J. Gaines, Major Jackson, Charles Johnson, Edward P. Jones, and others, as well as essays and films. Students will write two major essays for the course.
Required Texts:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
by Frederick Douglass [ISBN-10: 0393969665]
Cane by Jean Toomer [ISBN-10: 0871401517]
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston [IS9BN-10: 0061120065]
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison [ISBN-10: 0679732764]
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison [ISBN-10: 0307278441]
Erasure by Percival Everett [ISBN-10: 0786888156]