Language and literacy are often blamed for alienating us from the “more-than-human” world, but the work of our most brilliant poets demonstrates that language can reeducate our senses, reorient our minds, and redefine our humanity in ways that promote more sustainable models of culture, as well as deep and rich forms of engagement with nonhuman species and physical places, from the rugged Pacific coast to your own backyard. In this class we will study major environmental poets of the Americas using conceptual tools supplied by the field of ecocriticism, constantly testing poetry’s capacity to reimagine a world in crisis. In alphabetical order, some of our major topics will include: anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism; bioregionalism; colonial and postcolonial legacies of European expansion in the Americas; Deep Ecology; environmental racism and environmental justice; food; global warming and globalization; hunting; indigenous voices and the “ecological Indian”; the jeremiad; Katrina (the hurricane); landscape and land ethics; metaphors, metonyms, and “econyms”; nonhuman animals; organic agriculture; the pastoral; queer approaches to the environment; Romanticism; the sublime; “toxic discourse”; Umwelt (von Uexküll); vegetarianism; wilderness; xerophilia; Yellowstone; and zoos.
The assignments will comprise both traditional projects and more innovative activities, including fieldwork on the First Coast.
Requirements: 1 argument-based research essay (6-9 pages); 1 argument-based field notes presentation (9-12 minutes); 5 Discussion Board postings; 5 Google Earth labels; strong attendance and participation.
This course will introduce students to the study of poetry through the anthology as well as the stand-alone book of poems. The pleasure of the anthology is one of play and discovery. The experience of the single author’s book (as distinct from a Collected Works) is akin to learning a language, in that one learns to know the poet’s idiolect, or unique way of speaking in the world. While we experience poetry in these two different formats, students will be introduced to the different aspects of poetics in a cumulative fashion, moving from questions of what makes poetry different from prose to methods of reading that help us perceive the many things happening in the small space of a poem. The basic approach to every text we encounter will be the one suggested by WH Auden: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” By the end of the course students will be able to address Auden’s question in a coherent, detailed close reading. In order to do this, students will learn scansion, sentence parsing, and how to treat figurative language.
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 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.
Now 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 “problem novel” for adolescents
3. The portrayal of Native Americans in young peoples¹ literature
4. Racism in picture books
5. The Disneyfication of children¹s texts and culture
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).