AML 3031: Periods of Early American Literature
CRN 11326
MW 12-1:15
Nancy Levine
This course will examine the roots of the American Dream as we know it, starting with a “fire and brimstone” sermon by Jonathon Edwards, and ending with one of Horatio Alger’s last novels. According to Max Weber’s thesis (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), for the early Puritans, the will to serve the Lord was not inconsistent with the will to rise economically in the world. Rising in the world was evidence that one was among the Elect. How would you know you were among the Elect? You prospered in this world as you prepared yourself for the next. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the religious underpinnings that had supported the first two generations of Puritans were beginning to slip. Cotton Mather’s sermon “Rowing for Heaven” urged the wealthy shopkeepers and boat builders in his congregation to “love the world with weaned affections,” which was like saying, “You can smoke, but don’t inhale.” Later in the century, Benjamin Franklin would demonstrate in his own life how an ethical secularist could become wealthy without loss of virtue, by becoming the country’s first “rags to riches” hero. By the end of the century, the American Dream, launched by immigrants from the old world who wanted to recreate the Garden of Eden in the New World, had become a dream of achieving economic success—and material excess. We will read and discuss the texts that help chart this remarkable change, including but not limited to works by: Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Horatio Alger. Grades will be based on online quizzes and an essay, story imitation or research paper.
AML 3041: Periods of Later American Literature
CRN 10236
MW 4:30-5:45
Nancy Levine
The central concern of this course is the development and the gradual erosion of the American Dream. We will be concerned with such questions as the following: What happens to the mental landscape of American authors writing since the turn of the century once the physical "new frontier" is well and truly gone? Has the American Dream turned into a nightmare?
The syllabus is organized around a core text, Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick. Alger's ragtag hero is the grandfather to Forest Gump, Rocky and other present-day mythic representations of the poor boy who, largely by means of his own virtue and talent, raises himself from poverty to achieve "respectability," fame and/or fortune. My goal is to help students pull apart the massively appealing network of clichés and half truths composing the ideology of the American Dream. We will focus on the myth that every poor boy in America with luck and pluck can make good, which Alger's work embodies. We’ll examine Alger’s further secularization of Franklin's version of "the Protestant work ethic" (so-called by Max Weber). The main focus, however, will be on ways twentieth-century modernist and contemporary American writers challenge, subvert and amplify Alger's "rags-to-riches" myth.
Besides Alger’s Ragged Dick, texts will be chosen from the following: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Gish Jen’s Typical American, and selected online texts. Grading is based on a series of online quizzes and a final project consisting of either an interview or an imitation of Ragged Dick.
AML 3041: Periods of Later American Literature
CRN 10987
TR 9:25-10:40
Bart Welling
“Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn” (1848, 1864)
“Stand in the place where you live/ (Now face north!)/ Think about direction/ Wonder why you haven’t before…” REM, “Stand” (1988)
Where are you from? Where are you going? Where are you? These questions may seem trivial in an age of routine jet travel, wireless laptops and satellite phones, ever-accelerating patterns of globalization and immigration, ubiquitous chain stores, automatic heating and air conditioning, and a host of other modern trends and technologies that would appear (to paraphrase the nineteenth-century boosters of the railroad projects that transformed the American landscape in every direction) to have “annihilated space and time.” These days privileged people in the U.S. spend much or all of their time in virtually identical homes, classrooms, stores, and other “non-places” (Marc Augé) that bear hardly any discernible relationship to their specific environments. We’re often doubly distanced from the outside world by being in these 
non-places and “in” cyberspace simultaneously—as am I, in fact, while I type these words on my office computer. And, honestly, this isn’t an entirely bad state of affairs; after all, one of the main alternatives to our postmodern, postindustrial “placelessness” is being trapped by such forces as poverty and substandard education in a place from which you desperately want to escape, but can’t. It may be hard to let go of your attachment to that forest that was cleared to make way for a Super Walmart, but perhaps the forest, along with your rich, complex memories of it, was a necessary sacrifice on the way to greater prosperity for everyone. At least that’s what Walmart would have you believe.
There’s no denying that questions about place have gotten vastly more complicated in the years since the majority of the world’s people quit living on farms or in small traditional communities from which they rarely, or never, strayed. But this doesn’t mean that place has stopped mattering. If anything, it will keep growing in importance as the world’s human population continues to rise and “resources” like arable land, fresh water, ocean fish, and oil are stretched further and further. “Where you live should not decide/ Whether you live or whether you die” goes a U2 song, but the truth is (as Bono knows very well) that the places we inhabit still do have a profound impact on the length and quality of our lives, as well as on which languages and dialects we speak, which foods we prefer and dislike, how we define the good and the beautiful, how we work and spend our free time, how we dress, what or whom we worship, how we engage with nonhuman animals, where we tend to locate ourselves on the political spectrum, and on every other meaningful aspect of life. Of course we should avoid overemphasizing this impact in a deterministic way: assuming, for instance, that inner-city schools will never successfully educate children, or that all Californians are starry-eyed liberals while everyone in Texas is born with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. As Barack Obama insisted in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” What unites us—including people in other countries—is surely more important than what divides us. But we can’t begin to understand both the diversity and the commonality of human cultures without knowing something about the places where they have originated and evolved, and without learning to think more critically about place in general.
The field of ecocriticism, or environmental literary criticism, emerged in the 1990s in response to a pronounced lack of attention on the part of most literary scholars to issues upon which biologists, philosophers, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and members of other disciplines had been focusing for some time—issues ranging from the worldwide extinction crisis to global warming to the deliberate targeting of minority communities by governments and corporations looking for convenient places to locate undesirable production facilities and discard toxic waste. Ecocritics (including me) continue to argue that studying the role of place, environmental crisis, nonhuman animals, (bio)regions, and related topics in literature can have a transformative impact on how we live, since literature is one of the most powerful art forms humans have developed for representing where we are—and for imagining alternatives to how we presently live in place. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which played a decisive role in the banning of DDT and helped give rise to the modern environmental movement, is one example of how literature really can change the world, and ecocritics have done much to illuminate how this kind of change can happen.
This course aims to foster critical environmental thinking on your part by helping you build verbal and written ecocritical arguments about the role of place in the literature and culture of the U.S., and, conversely, about how American literature and culture have helped shape the places around us, from oceans, deserts, and the iconic wilderness areas of the West to city slums, Indian reservations, and long-forgotten New England villages. Instead of trying to convert you to environmentalism, my goal is to help you learn to think ecocritically about American places and American literature by framing and answering questions like the following:
How has literature reflected and influenced changing notions of what it means to be an American (or a Floridian, a Southerner, a Midwesterner, or a citizen of planet Earth)? To what extent is the idea of “America” itself a literary construct?
In which ways—representational but also more-than-linguistic—does literary form (including genre, plot, figures of speech, and so on) engage with places outside the text and with nonhuman beings? How do literary devices and values like “metaphor” and “irony,” along with such literary topoi as the “Garden of Eden” and “cyberspace,” shape our perceptions of and behaviors towards our lived environments?
Do men and women perceive and represent their environments differently? Do women have a special bond with “nature” that men lack? How have American places been gendered in literature and everyday life?
How do race, class, religion, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, age, and other categories impact literary representations of place, nature, and so on? How has the idea of “nature” been used to discriminate against minority groups? What can literature teach us about environmental racism and the quest for environmental justice?
What role does the literary imagination play in revisualizing actual places? Which details of places do authors tend to emphasize or omit, and why? How can we characterize the relationships between fictional literary places, “imaginary homelands” (Salman Rushdie), and actual places (including sacred places and utopian communities)?
What does it mean to inhabit stolen property? What responsibility might the current inhabitants of a place have to atone for genocide, forced internment, environmental devastation, and other atrocities committed by their ancestors—or by unrelated previous inhabitants? How do present constructions of place (both physical and intellectual) perpetuate, or help remediate, past injustices?
How does a region’s sense of itself change as new waves of immigration upset old demographic balances? How do phenomena like exile, cross-country and international travel, and postmodern “rootlessness” affect representations of place in literature?
Which major paradigms have governed American authors’ approaches to the more-than-human world? How have these paradigms changed over time, and why?
To paraphrase the title of John Felstiner’s recent book, “Can [literature] save the earth?” Which rhetorical strategies in literature have been the most effective in persuading readers to live in more earth-friendly ways? How can environmental writers and ecocritics avoid the twin pitfalls of “preaching to the choir” and alienating the public?
As Glen A. Love asks in his book Practical Ecocriticism, “Can humanism embrace the nonhuman?” How can literary studies account for the decentering of human intelligence and culture that Darwin, Freud, and related figures helped usher in? What can ecocriticism learn from such fields as evolutionary biology, and where are the differences between literary studies and science too great to allow for full interdisciplinarity?
Requirements: Strong attendance and participation; one research project (including argument-based field notes presentation, short annotated bibliography, and research essay); one short close reading paper; short reading quizzes; student-authored final exam.
AML 3154: American Poetry
CRN 12327
MW 12-1:15
Clark Lunberry
Course Title: “Without Rhyme or Reason”: Modern to Post-Modern American Poetry & Poetics
Why do we read a poem? Or why not? Why are some so passionately drawn to poetry, while many (more) are unpassionately resistant to it—and especially resistant to the more modern and contemporary poetry where familiar forms, like rhyme and meter have often slipped away, either sadly lost or happily abandoned.
Our focus will be upon a modern, to post-modern American poetry, a poetry in which such slippage of form, such loss of conventional coordinates, has indeed occurred, leaving us with a new kind of poetry, a new kind of poem, there, flat on the page, “printed matter.”
For here is a poetry in which the brute material of language is often foregrounded, unforgettably present and still always, of course, singing and signifying. New rules written, new reasons for writing and reading emerged—a new kind of poetry, a “difficult beauty” born.
From Imagist poets, to minimalist poets, to visual and concrete poets, New York School poets to language poets, what are these varied workings of language revealing and concealing, sounding upon their irregular surfaces, touching to the heart and bone?
AML 4242: 20th Century American Literature
CRN 11692
MW1:30-2:45
Nancy Levine
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 or months when she was an adult. Eatonville and Polk County were to Hurston what Jefferson County and the township of Oxford were to Faulkner—for both of them, it was the home place of their imagination, the source of their literary power. Hurston, however, was a trained anthropologist, unlike Faulkner who never finished high school or college. It has been said that her fiction pushes boundaries. I’m interested in the hybrid nature of Hurston’s body of work, her anthropological texts, on the one hand, and her novels, short stories and plays, on the other. For lack of better terms, let’s call the two modes she worked in “ethnographical fiction” vs. “fiction-saturated anthropology.” It has been suggested, for example, that when Hurston recorded folklore for her Barnard teacher Franz Boaz and later for the Library of Congress and her patron, Mrs. Osgood Mason, the notes she turned into text sounded, disturbingly to some, like fiction. It has often been noted that her autobiography, Dust Tracks in the Road is full of gaps and evasions. Is it real or is it Memorex?
With your help, I want to find out how her hybrid mode of writing got that way. We will explore the truth of the claim that when she wrote fiction she approached the work the way an ethnographer would. In this course we’ll look at how Hurston used her fieldwork in Florida, New Orleans and the Bahamas as source material for her fiction and how, by using herself as a participant, her fieldwork, she broke the barriers between the scientific objectivity of the ethnographic monograph and the imaginative subjectivity necessary to create literature of a very high order. Grades will be based on quizzes and an oral history project. Texts will include: Hurston: Novels and Stories and Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, both ed. by Cheryl A. Wald, with special emphasis on Their Eyes Were Watching God, and additional online texts.
CRW 3930: Poetry Workshop
CRN 11019
T 6-8:45
Tiffany Beechy
This is a course for writers of poetry that follows a workshop model. We will study the craft of poetry as an expression of the human condition, developing skill with language, knowledge of form, and willingness to revise. The primary methods of instruction will be workshop presentation and criticism of student texts, in-class writing exercises, and analyses (both formal and informal) of model poems. Our primary texts will be students’ drafts and revisions, students’ selections of model poems, and texts on technique. Each student in the class must invest time and energy in dynamic revision of his or her own work as well as in the efforts of all students in the class.
CRW 3930: Fiction Workshop
CRN
11163
R 6-8:45
Marcus Pactor
CRW 3930: Creative Non-Fiction Workshop
CRN 12329
W 6-8:45
Mark Ari
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 imagine and, perhaps, create new forms. We bite nails and open veins and tend to the work at hand. Traditional and nontraditional approaches will be discussed. Fantastic ideas and firmly held opinions will be tossed about willy-nilly. Experimentation is encouraged. Laughter is relished. Prereq: CRW2930 or permission of Instructor.
ENC 3250: Professional Communications
F 12-245
Brenda Maxey-Billings
“The primary emphasis of technical writing is on the basics of professional communication-research, organization, grammar/mechanics/style. We will also pay attention to the forms of professional communication-letters, memos, and formal and informal reports.” (UNF Catalog)
Course Objectives: This course aims to help students gain writing skills important for professional environments: to formulate strong documents, to develop “Plain English” style, and to practice the conventions of professional writing.
Course Focus: ENC 3250 emphasizes topic development, conventional writing formats, graphic/text forms, and collaborative writing. Each student produces several professionally-formatted documents.
In general, course assignments mimic the kinds of writing students might expect in business environments. In addition to in-class practice work, peer review, and quizzes, assignments may include letters, memos, employment documents, technical definitions and instructions, presentations, webpages and/or wikis, instructional manuals, business reports, etc.
ENC 3310: Writing Prose
CRN 10244
MW 1:30-2:45
James Beasley
ENC 4930: Dramatism
CRN 12340
MW 3-4:15
James Beasley
This course will take literary and rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke as an exemplary figure in the genesis of rhetoric, composition, communication, cultural studies, and literary theory in the twentieth century. The focus will be on Burke’s continuing relevance for our understanding of key rhetorical principles (identification, terministic screens, dramatism) of emergent subjects in the field and of the relationships between rhetoric, composition, drama, and literary theory. Course readings will include primary texts and secondary work by contemporary rhetoricians and theorists. Coursework will include regular responses to the readings and a major print or multimedia project.
ENG 4013: Approaches to Literary Interpretation
CRN 10245
TR 12:15-1:30
Timothy Donovan
ENG 4013: Approaches to Literary Interpretation
CRN 10246
TR 4:30-5:45
Timothy Donovan
Ever had the class with an annoying teacher who seemed driven to find some hidden meaning or secret urge behind words so obvious and motivations so clear? Why can’t these types just enjoy a story, a poem, or a film for what it is: simple entertainment. What drives these irritating fools? What were the childhood problems they suffered that compels their obsessive need to endlessly analyze and interpret? Prolonged bedwetting? Habitual thumb sucking?
We may not be able to answer these questions so early in the class. But I trust that in time we will become as unbearably annoying in our own ability to read carefully the sophistications and complications of a literary work. This is our undertaking—to become annoyingly careful and sophisticated readers—without the lingering suffering. Why not? It is fun to be smart, even if it seems irritating to others.
On the way to irritation, we will explore how notions of reading and perception are framed within unnoticed interpretive strategies that this course will make very clear. Even simple claim of entertainment presupposes many unstated values of interpretation and expectation. Next, this course will focus on an array of strategies by which we assemble what we call the “meaning” of a literary work. Literary texts typically invite interpretation. Therefore, how can readers investigate carefully to know if and when they have understood a work in a way that is more rather than less accurate, more rather than less comprehensive, more rather than less sophisticated? To this end, we will study different theoretical, cultural, and literary approaches distinguishing the differences and evaluating the respective advantages and costs of these approaches.
ENL 3132: British Novel II
CRN 12342
MWF 11-11:50
Alex Menocal
The Gothic Novel
The course focuses on the Victorian gothic novel. The course will adopt a two-fold approach to the subject. We’ll examine some common conventions of the genre, focusing on recurring tropes: doubleness, confinement, madness, secret identities, the uncanny, the return of the repressed, and the supernatural/the occult, to name a few. Furthermore, we’ll discuss how these novels engage with contemporary social, political, and scientific issues and debates such as the legal rights of women, upward mobility, imperialism, degeneration fears.
Readings will be selected from the following list:
C. Bronte, Villette
E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
W. Collins, The Woman in White
Richard Marsch, The Beetle
R.L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
B. Stoker, Dracula
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine or The Island of Dr. Moreau.
O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
ENL 3333: Shakespeare
CRN 10247
T 6-8:45
Brian Striar
The course will cover the span of Shakespeare's plays, tracing his development as a dramatic craftsman and dramatic poet from the earliest comedies to the late romances. Attention will be paid to 16th century versification, style, and rhetoric, particularly as they are revealed in Shakespeare's plays.
ENL 3501: Early Periods of British Literature
CRN 10248
W 6-8:45
Brian Striar
This course is a survey of the history of British literature focusing on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with an eye toward various trends and movements which occurred in the literature of those time periods (some consideration of Restoration and 18th Century literature is also possible). Quizzes, exams, papers, presentations, and recitations.
ENL 3501: Early Periods of British Literature
CRN 12343
TR 3:05-4:20
Tiffany Beechy
This course will introduce students to major literary works and cultural movements from the early Anglo-Saxon period through Chaucer (roughly 600AD-1400AD). The medieval island of Britain was a nesting-ground for unique and often cross-fertilized forms of art and literature. Anglo-Saxon England was a crossroads of several cultures: Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Roman Christian, Viking Scandinavian, and at the end of the period, Norman French. The main body of surviving Old English texts combines elements of all these traditions, most obviously the Anglo-Saxon and Latin (Roman Christian). After the French invasion of England in 1066, new influences from the Continent poured into England, and the Middle English we see emerge in the thirteenth century is a hybrid of a new sort. We will consider the vast changes that occur across the period often lumped together as “medieval,” examining both important genres (epic verse and allegory, for instance) and key themes that helped give medieval literature its shape—themes such as heroism, community belonging, religious devotion and erotic love, and the dynamics of power between class and gender categories.
ENL 3503: Later Periods of British Literature
CRN 10249
TR 9:25-10:40
Michael Wiley
In this course, we will read texts from two standard periods of British Literature: Romanticism (extending from the end of the 18th through beginning of the 19th century) and Modernism (extending from the end of the 19th well into the 20th century). Modernism often has been considered a reaction against Romanticism, though the continuities are as great as the discontinuities. We will consider each of the periods separately while also examining the relations between them, always keeping an eye on what the university course catalogue describes as the “aesthetic, linguistic, and cultural changes by which periods are constructed.”
Readings will include poetry and prose fiction, with the emphasis on poetry. While Periods of Later British Literature has a prerequisite of one course in literature, I will not assume that all class members have an extensive background interpreting poetry, and we will spend time (as necessary or desired) working on interpretive strategies.
ENL 3503: Later Periods of British Literature
CRN 10989
TR 1:40-2:55
Michael Wiley
In this course, we will read texts from two standard periods of British Literature: Romanticism (extending from the end of the 18th through beginning of the 19th century) and Modernism (extending from the end of the 19th well into the 20th century). Modernism often has been considered a reaction against Romanticism, though the continuities are as great as the discontinuities. We will consider each of the periods separately while also examining the relations between them, always keeping an eye on what the university course catalogue describes as the “aesthetic, linguistic, and cultural changes by which periods are constructed.”
Readings will include poetry and prose fiction, with the emphasis on poetry. While Periods of Later British Literature has a prerequisite of one course in literature, I will not assume that all class members have an extensive background interpreting poetry, and we will spend time (as necessary or desired) working on interpretive strategies.
ENL 4240: English Romantic Literature
CRN 11131
TR 10:50-12:05
Michael Wiley
This course will explore British Romantic literature and culture by focusing on two literary genres: the highly popular but subsequently neglected genre of the gothic novel, and the controversial and subsequently canonized genre of experimental poetry. The Romantic period – conventionally dated from about 1789-1832 – saw great conflicts and great changes in British and European aesthetic, social and political values. We will consider how poems and gothic novels of the period participated in those conflicts and changes, both by addressing a public readership and by addressing each other intertextually.
We will read novels by Ann Radcliffe (The Italian) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk) and a range of poetry by William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, and John Keats. In the work of these writers and in the period at large, we will seek to understand (though not necessarily to resolve) various productive and destructive tensions and energies. And we will seek to understand how the positions developed by Romantic writers remain vital today. The course will run as a seminar and its success will depend upon your active participation.
FIL 3826: American Film
CRN 12348
MW 1:30-2:45
Nicholas deVilliers
American Cinema in Context: The 1980s
This course is not going to be like VH1’s “I Love the ’80s.” The films we will watch may be entertaining, but students should come to this class willing to question 1980s nostalgia and “retro” phenomena. While we may consider why certain films from the 1980s have become “classics” sold as nostalgic impulse buys at Target, we will also look critically at each film in its historical, economic, and political context. 1980s Hollywood was quite conservative: movies were made only if they could guarantee financial success, hence big name stars and sequels were predominant. Trends included: the “teen film,” horror and action film sequels, slapstick comedies, and fantasy films. Special effects-driven and PG-13 rated films also made their debut. Films from the 1980s also reflected changes in gender roles, family structures, and the workplace. We will be using the anthology American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations as our textbook, supplemented with other essays on film theory and history. Students will be required to write several short critical response papers on the films and readings.
FIL 4828: International Film
CRN 12349
TR 3:05-5:45
Jillian Smith
“Movements and Films of International Cinema”
In this course we will watch some of the most watched films in the history of international cinema. Our aim is to understand their role in the history of cinema, place them in their historical and cultural contexts, identify the cinematic techniques they brought to cinema, and understand their common interpretations while building upon those interpretations. Students will leave the course having watched some of the “great films” of cinema—Bicycle Thieves, Jules and Jim, The Battleship Potemkin, 8 ½ , and so on—which will give them a sense of the contour of international cinema history. Students will also refine their viewing skills by understanding the history and lineage of particular cinematic techniques. Finally, emerging international cinemas—Iranian, Mexican—will help preview the future cinematic landscape. Exams and will lead to a couple of short papers.
LIN 3010: Principles of Linguistics
CRN 10250
M 6-8:45
Ronald Kephart
LIT 3043: Modern and Contemporary Drama
CRN 12353
TR 12:15-1:30
Clark Lunberry
Course Title: Being Bored: Representations of Tedium, Ennui and Boredom in Modern Literature
“I often think that I have only one real talent in life … Boring myself to death.”
-Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
In this course, we will be looking at several instances of major European writers whose work would seem to have diagnosed a particularly modern ailment: boredom, being bored, being bored with being…or even, as Ibsen wrote of Hedda Gabler, being bored to death.
Our primary focus will be upon drama, but we will also be examining instances of poetry and short stories in which boredom is often at the chilled heart of the matter, setting in motion events that threaten at any moment to collapse beneath their own exhausting weight.
How has such boredom, such dis/ease, been represented in modern literature? Why did it arise and how has it endured as a representable theme? And finally, perhaps paradoxically, how can boredom be such a rich, revealing and, yes, fascinating focus for writers and readers alike?
Among the writers we will be reading are the not boring and very interesting Georg Büchner, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustav Flaubert, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.
LIT 3213: Art of Critical Reading
CRN 11708
TR 12:15-1:30
Jillian Smith
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.
LIT 3213: Art of Critical Reading
CRN 11709
TR 1:40-2:55
Jillian Smith
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.
LIT 3331: Children's Literature
CRN 11873
TR 9:25-10:40
Mary Baron
LIT 3333: Adolescent Literature
CRN 10275
TR 1:40-2:55
Mary Baron
LIT 4041: Studies in Drama
CRN 12354
MW 1:30-2:45
Pam Monteleone
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 address 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:
- What role do the categories of race, class, and gender play in shaping our American experience?
- Are we all the same, universally human, or does difference make a difference?
- .What about groups in the United States who consider themselves denigrated or just plain invisible?
- Is ideology an important factor in shaping one’s identity? And what is ideology anyway?
- What effect do stereotypes have on a person’s sense of self? Are all stereotypes negative? Are there historical explanations for stereotypes?
- What is the relationship between drama and cultural identity?
- Who am I in my world? And what do I mean by my world?
Readings will include plays by Eve Ensler, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, Douglas Turner Ward, Luis Valdez, Federico Fraguada, Wakoko Yamouchi and others. A commitment to substantial scene rehearsal outside of class time is required.
LIT4093 10276 "Cultural Disability Studies: A TLO Course"
CRN 10276
TR 10:50-12:05
Chris Gabbard
Are you looking to add 'something extra' to your academic profile stand out when you apply for graduate school or a job?
Are you seeking to synthesize academic study with hands-on experience?
Are you wanting to make a difference?
Then this Transformational Learning Opportunity (TLO) is for you.
Note: students wishing to take the course but skip the TLO are welcome.
TLO: In addition to the academic requirements, students will complete 20 hours of volunteer activity working with disabled children at either Hope Haven or the Mt. Herman Exceptional Student Center (both in Jacksonville). UNF will reimburse $150 (maximum) of your expenses, which can include travel costs. To take part in this TLO, interested students MUST declare themselves to the professor no later than the first week of December (cgabbard@unf.edu). (Students can change their minds and withdraw after declaring themselves.) The number of TLO spots is limited; TLO placement will be awarded on a first come, first serve basis.
Academic component: Is John Milton referring to his blindness at the opening of Sonnet 16 when he writes, "When I consider how my light is spent"? In Sophocles' play, what is implied by the name Oedipus, which translates as "swollen foot"? What did commentator Chris Matthews mean when, reporting at President Obama's inaugural, he said that Dick Cheney's wheelchair was "a metaphor"? Speaking generally, how much does the ancient prejudice--that the disabled are bearers of stigma--linger? On what occasions has the disability motif been used to challenge conventional notions of beauty, the body, and normality? Students will interrogate representations of disability in poems, novels, short stories, memoirs, films, paintings, and sculptures, advertising, popular music, Saturday Night Live skits, and cable news contemporary. They will write two short papers, engage in class and Blackboard discussions, and take a final.
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 4243: Major Authors - Proust
CRN 12356
M 6-8:45
Mark Workman
We will read in its entirety Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time with the goal of understanding and appreciating its status as one of the handful of iconic works of modern literature. Please note that reading this novel in one semester is an ambitious undertaking; it will require intensive but rewarding effort.
LIT 4650: Comparative Literature
CRN 11389
MW 4:30-5:45
Clark Lunberry
Course Title: “Absolutely Modern”: Trails and Traces of French Modernism
The title of this course is taken from a letter by the 17-year old French poet Arthur Rimbaud and his bold injunction (to himself and others) that the poets of his time must be “absolutely modern.” Intended in part as a rallying cry, Rimbaud’s insistence was that the new and the modern must be fully and unreservedly embraced by the artists and poets of his time, leaving behind the (dead) weight of history and tradition in order to encounter “the unknown,” to “make it new.”
With Rimbaud’s assertion very much in mind, this course will seek to understand more fully these early and seminal stirrings of French modernism and the literary and cultural context from which “the modern” was so abruptly and turbulently arising in France and elsewhere.
Among the writers that we will be reading are, in fiction, the writings of Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, and, in poetry, the work of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire.
IMPORTANT NOTE: As an optional supplement to this course, I will be conducting a two-week (non-credit) literary and cultural tour to various sites in France that are directly linked to material that we will have just studied during the semester.
Paris will be the central location for this tour, the hub of our travels, with three specific two-day excursions also arranged to related sites outside of the city.
This tour will be conducted immediately following the spring 2010 semester, coinciding approximately with the first two weeks of Summer A. Details about this tour will be announced later.
LIT 4934: Literature and Cognitive Psychology
CRN 12358
TR 4:30-5:45
Sam Kimball
The purpose of this course is to explore the following hypothesis: When humans experience other people’s beliefs (and thus other people’s consciousnesses) as a problem, they typically experience their own beliefs (and thus their own consciousnesses) as the solution. In this course we shall seek to explain why this is so.
To this end we shall address the following questions: What is involved in the experience of being certain that we know what we (think we) know? Why do we hold certain beliefs without proof that the beliefs are true or in the face of contrary evidence? When and why do others believe they are right when we know they are not? Why are others blind to what we can see about the falsity of their beliefs? When and why are we similarly blind? What makes other people’s beliefs, other people’s consciousness, appear problematic to us but not our own? When and why does our own consciousness seem truer and more trustworthy than the consciousness others have? When, how, and why do we not see the contradiction in treating other people’s beliefs (and thus their consciousnesses) as problematic but not our own?
We shall work through these questions with respect to four films (Paul Haggis’ Crash, David Mamet’s House of Games, Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, and Guy Ritchie’s Revolver) and a number of literary works (Garcia Marquez’s beautifully, perfectly crafted short novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated by a teenager who suffers from a form of autism, the “Personal Narrative” of the great, eighteenth-century American religious thinker, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles,” and Walt Whitman’s tradition-altering signature poem, “Song of Myself.” We shall also three works of “theory” that are pertinent to understanding the nature of cognitive psychology (Robert A. Buton’s On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, Carol S. Dweck’s Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation Personality, and Development, and Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do with Our Brain?).
In sum, in this course we will investigate how cognitive psychology can help clarify what literature knows humans do not know (that they do not know about themselves at the very moment they think they do), on the one hand, and how literary studies can elucidate the puzzling, counterintuitive, and sometimes shocking limits of first-person, self-reflective consciousness, and thus help clarify what cognitive psychology knows, on the other hand.
LIT 4934: Wild Encounters
CRN 12359
F 12-2:45
Bart Welling
“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 4934: Gender, Sexuality, and Culture
CRN 12360
MW 12-1:15
Nicholas de Villiers
Why are the gendered body, sexual desire, and eroticism so heavily invested with significance—so meaning-laden—in our culture? Why are many women hesitant to call themselves “feminists”? What is the history of the symbiotic and mutually exclusive concepts of “homosexual” and “heterosexual”? Has “queer” culture become mainstream? This course creates a space where these much-contested issues can be approached in an atmosphere of free and open inquiry. We will examine the history of feminism’s “waves,” and the history of gay and lesbian studies, as well as what has been called the New Gender Politics concerned with transgender, transsexuality, and intersex. We will also consider the intersections between gender, sexuality, and other vectors of oppression such as class and race. We will read important works in feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory, and consider how they can help us read works of literature, film, visual art, and popular culture. Students will be required to write several short critical response papers on the readings and lectures.
LIT 4935: Mickey's American Dream
CRN 12361
TR 10:50-12:05
Mary Baron
THE 4923: Play Production
CRN 10277
MW 4:30-5:45
Pam Monteleone
The Department of English is producing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the university and Jacksonville communities. Students will participate in the planning and execution of all aspects of play production. Students will have the opportunity to earn credit in areas that address their diverse interests and competencies: acting; academic research; technical, including sound and video production; and business/promotion, management. This course may be repeated for up to twelve (12) credits.
THE 4935: Advanced Acting - Scene Study
CRN 12362
F 12-2:45
Pam Monteleone
This is an advanced course in acting that builds on skills learned in Acting I. Students gain a working knowledge of the analysis, rehearsal, and performance techniques associated with particular acting methods or styles. Different semesters focus on different styles depending on the semester's production schedule. This semester the department of English is producing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Acting II will focus on techniques associated with the analysis and performance of Shakespearean verse drama. Students will read dramatic texts and theory. A commitment to substantial scene rehearsal is required. May be repeated for up to 6 credits. Prerequisite: TPP 2100 or permission of instructor.