If you've ever taken a course in which you studied the meaning of culture, then you know that culture is not something natural, like rocks or trees, but something not only made (constructed) but made up (a fiction). From this perspective, literature is a kind of language by which a culture constructs or stages its reality--not life as it "really is"-- (for what can that be apart from interpretation?), but the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and myths of the people who live it. We all know that human beings love to tell stories, to sing songs, and to play roles. These essential forms of human cultural activity seem to be the basis for three literary genres (kinds): stories, poems, and plays. As we read a sampling of stories, poems, and plays, we'll ask ourselves such questions as:
(1) If literary works are imaginative constructs, how are they related to the culture that produced them?
(2) Why do human beings delight in the fictions they produce?
(3) What particular skills--interpretive strategies--do we need to develop in order to become competent readers?
(4) Is literary competence in any way related to the skills we need for competent living? In other words, will becoming better readers of fiction make us better readers of our own lives?
In short, this course is a course about interpretation or meaning or significance in the largest sense of the word. It's about the big picture. For more information contact Dr. Pam Monteleone at pmontele@unf.edu.
The short story and its writers. In this class we will slowly, carefully, and closely read short friction about explosive situations, examining the texts as an attorney would read a trial transcript and asking the famous questions: who, what, when, where, and especially why?
Cultural texts inform identities of women by exposing how women are portrayed, restrained, and violated as sexualized objects or conversely how women take charge of their portrayals both as strong and independent characters. These texts can subvert a social order that stigmatizes women as inferior by exposing misogyny, displaying counter examples of women who appear self-sufficient, and actively changing the ways in which texts are consumed by women. However, text after text presents similar ways of subverting this social order that elicit no real social change: texts both subvert a culture of misogyny and at the same time reinstate it.
This course will examine this repetition of subversion and question the shifting attitudes towards women’s cultural images and identities and the ways in which women are (mis)represented in texts.
Texts will include:
• Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes by Gerd Brantenberg
The authority of the corpse, its power, is its materiality. How do we deal with the material facts of death? What do we do with the bodies? And what do we do when there are no bodies? How is death different if the body is somehow missing? In this course, we will examine how the dead body is represented in literature and how the representation of death informs who we are. Through a range of texts, including Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, we will witness the violent and generative interaction of death and self.
While this course focuses on literature, it is also a writing course. You will receive instruction in writing an effective thesis, in paper organization, and in writing at the sentence level throughout the course and in workshops scheduled before papers are due.
Robert Frost wrote that “The more I say “I” the more I mean somebody else.” I would like to take his cue and ask how indeed we have come to mean what we mean when we say “I.” We enter into our next moment fairly certain that we are in possession of the same self that entered into the previous moment. Is that certainty subject to reconsideration? We will read a cluster of essays, poems and fiction, from Frost, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Robinson and others that focus upon this seemingly simple question: Who the hell do you think you are?
Most of you may not have heard of Donna Summer, who was the Queen of Disco in the 80s. One of her biggest hits was “Bad Girls,” a very interesting song which we will use to begin this course. A critical analysis of this song’s lyrics will initiate our discussion of the concept of “bad girls.” What is a bad girl? What does a woman do that causes people to say that she is a bad girl? Do men love bad girls or do they love to hate bad girls? We will examine this theme in several provocative books and movies. For further information about this course, please contact me at broberts@unf.edu or feel free to drop by my office to meet me prior to registration. 8/2321.
Texts under consideration (I will determine and submit my book order by April 1. You may contact me then for the completed list or check out the course on the Bookstore’s webpage):
Ann Petry: The Street
Bernhard Schlink: The Reader
Richard Russo: Empire Falls
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
In this course we explore the spiritual lives and folk traditions of Quaker and Buddhist individuals primarily through an examination of their autobiographies and biographies. We will begin with The Journal of George Fox, the founder of the former tradition in England in 1640 and with Freedom in Exile, the Autobiography of the Dalai Lama, the present day spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists. We will also read other texts by and about Quaker-Buddhists, and discern the similarities between the two traditions in the process. For example, we will read Jim Pym’s Listening to the Light and excerpts from Sallie B. King’s Being Benevolence: the Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism in this regard. We will especially be concerned with the concepts of meditation, compassion, and nonviolence in these two religions as revealed in these texts.