³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ

85284 CRW 2201 Introduction to Writing Creative Nonfiction 1505-1620 Mark Ari

Creative Nonfiction is the fastest growing genre in creative writing programs across the country. It is as old as writing itself, as fresh as each new idea, and wholly liberating. Tell a story, meditate on a notion or thing, and discover the mind at play or your senses at full-tilt. No subject is off limits in this fact-based but radically subjective pursuit of… you tell me.

What is creative writing in general and creative nonfiction in particular? What is a successful work of creative nonfiction? What are its elements? What leads us to determine some elements are necessary while others are less so? How do you recognize success in work you read or write? How do you compose work that is more successful? This course addresses those issues, and you should keep them in mind as the semester progresses. Even if you are simply exploring creative writing, testing the water to see if this is a place you’d like to swim, then you are exploring yourself. And if you are already a writer, this is a class devoted to helping you become yourself. In either case, it’s an endeavor worth breaking your brains over. This class is suitable for students with interests across the disciplines, from poetry to biology, from art to mathematics—no subject is off limits. Experimentation is encouraged. Laughter is relished.

82786 CRW 3110 Fiction Workshop TR 1340-1455 Mark Ari 

Each of us, however long we’ve been writing, is wherever we are and hoping to get better. We are always, every one of us, beginners. In this workshop, we indulge our impulses toward storytelling and fabrication. Maybe we do so in the service of some greater truth. Maybe we do it because we can build worlds and that’s an exciting thing to do. Maybe we do it because there is something about life that compels us to respond in the remarkable way we call “fiction.” I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me. And while we’re talking about it, we’ll tackle technical concerns and seek methods by which the reliable resources of imagination can be tapped in the service of the art we make with words and sentences. We read and write fiction. We talk and write about the fiction written by others. We bite nails and open veins and tend to the work at hand.  

84330, 85287 CRW3610 Screenwriting Workshop ONLINE Stephen Boka

82337 ENC3310 Writing Prose ONLINE James Beasley

82816 ENG 4013 Approach to Lit Interpretation MW 1500-1615 Alex Menocal

ENG4013 introduces students to an array of critical terms and interpretative approaches that should help students improve their abilities to read texts critically. The class will explore the critical questions and reading strategies that Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle model in their An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (6th edition). Readings will include Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, William Shakespeare's Much Ado ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ Nothing, and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing.

85728 ENL2012 British Literature I TR 1215-1330 Chris Gabbard

Power, wonder, honor, pride, lust, sex, death, despair, faith, frailty, humor, and blood: early texts teem with these themes and elements. We are going to examine some of the best texts that British literature has to offer, reading them very slowly and carefully. Our readings will only consist of the following: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, William Shakespeare’s Much Ado ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ Nothing and Hamlet, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Students will be asked to write several short response papers, submit questions about the readings, participate in class discussions, and take short mid-term and short final exam.

85303 ENL 3333 Shakespeare M 1200-1315 William Pewitt

Will Pewitt: The worlds of William Shakespeare are populated by ghosts and gravediggers, fairies and fools, drunks and duchesses. To read the Bard of Stratford is not to hear a single timeless message, but to encounter a plurality of perspectives—each taken seriously, each played upon in challenging and enchanting ways. Whether in Tragedy, History, or Comedy, Shakespeare’s works are, as scholar Harold Bloom has said, “not larger than life; they are life’s largeness.”

In this Honors Option section of ENL 3333, open to all students, we will read plays across genres, view adaptations, and write analytical essays that explore what is vitally meaningful in these works. At the same time, this course is designed as a professional springboard: students will develop research-driven writing, produce graduate-level arguments, and shape projects suitable for conference presentation or publication. Literary study here becomes not just interpretation, but the production of ideas and intellectual presence.

Rather than trying to pin down what Shakespeare is “trying to say,” our goal is to hear the range of voices in his plays—and to respond to them as emerging scholars. Because of the high impact deliverable outcomes for this course it qualifies for Honors credit through additional opportunities and presents options for mentored research and presentation, allowing your work to extend beyond the classroom and into academic and professional spaces.

85730 ENL4230 Literatures of the Atlantic TR 1505-1620 Prof. Chris Gabbard

This course explores the literary and cultural imaginations of the Atlantic world during 1660-1847, focusing on Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean and west Africa. It considers the period’s literatures in the contexts of the Enlightenment and slave trade as well as those of religion, science, sensibility, empire, emerging capitalism, African diaspora, Atlantic Creole culture, and New World settlement. The course pays particular attention to the ways writers adapted literary forms, theories, and sources to their varied aesthetic and political objectives.

Readings include Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mary Prince’s History, Charlotte Brontë’ Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and several more texts.

84376 ENL4240 Studies in British Romantic Literature TR 925-1040 Holly Coleman

Romanticism is often associated with beauty, nature, and emotion, but it's also a literature of intensity, risk, and transformation.

This course introduces writers such as William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose work redefined what language, imagination, and feeling could do. We'll explore how Romantic texts blur boundaries—between self and world, sensation and thought, art and life—and how they continue to shape the ways we experience creativity and expression.

Along the way, we'll consider how these texts resonate in the present: how their intensity, urgency, and refusal of limits continue to press on contemporary culture and critical practice, asking what it means for feeling to act, and for language to carry a charge.

82301 FIL2000 Film Appreciation ONLINE Tim Donovan

The goal is straightforward: to understand and discuss what makes films powerful. A film's popularity certainly relates to its immediate effect on us, the intuitive way we perceive it, and the wonderfully wordless relationship we can establish. However, as we experience movies as part of popular culture, we can easily overlook the complexity of their cultural impact, emotional landscape, and intricate construction: an infinite combination of images, sounds, lights, composition, movement, acting, choreography, editing, and script.

This course will introduce you to various approaches to studying film, allowing you to begin interpreting films. We will explore movies from multiple perspectives: narrative, cinematography and technique, genre conventions, historical context, cultural context, and theory. These interpretive lenses establish a foundation for analyzing films beyond initial impressions.

To that primary end, Film Appreciation has several goals. By the end of the semester, students will be able to achieve the following:

Articulate specific narrative concepts, such as symbols, themes, characterizations, conflicts, narrative structure, and plot, in various types of films.

Identify and describe specific filmmaking techniques.

Demonstrate these techniques with illustrated examples.

Analyze the meaning of a film, its concepts, and techniques more thoughtfully than impressionistically.

84636 FIL3363 Documentary Production MW 1630-1915 Jillian Smith

The documentary films we make in this class have only one rule: they must use real life as their raw material. Portraits, investigations, poetic montages, compilations, interviews, histories— practicing a range of documentary styles and narratives will open students to the creative possibilities of documentary film while keeping them responsible to the social and natural worlds they capture. This course is a boot camp in independent filmmaking that teaches students (from any major, beginner and advanced alike) a disciplined process of planning, shooting, recording, organizing, scripting, and editing a film. Several small film productions teach students the documentary attitude and technical competence as we move from Fall through Spring. The Fall and Spring Documentary Production courses are designed as a two-course sequence, with the Spring semester ending in a public screening. Take the Fall course to get to the Spring course. We are a welcoming, supportive, and ambitious community.  No experience necessary. No prerequisites. Get on the waitlist because seats often open. Any questions, contact Dr. Jillian Smith: jlsmith@unf.edu.

See the work of AfterImage Documentary here: , , ,  , or  

83039 FIL3801 Film Terms MWF 1000-1050 Jillian Smith

An understanding of film art begins with a working understanding of film terms and techniques. From mise-en-scène to foley, from elliptical editing to the long take—we will define, comprehend, apply, and create examples of film terms in order get a much deeper understanding of their use and their effects. In addition to learning terminology, students receive an introduction to the short film. All students are welcome to join in this fun, low-pressure, and immersive class, where we use many modalities to learn—written descriptions, group explorations, photography, quick edits, cell phone filmmaking.

83530 FIL 3831 Black Cinema ONLINE Stephen Boka

82233 LIT 3213 Critical Reading/Writing I MW 1330-1445 Alex Menocal

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.  Such sophisticated thinking, however, is grounded in basic techniques.  This course is dedicated to teaching students to define, identify, and apply basic literary tools and techniques.  Metaphor, paradox, setting, point of view, symbol -- techniques that we tend to use loosely -- we will learn to use with precision and purpose.  The goal of the class is to teach you how to read literature, and thus any text, with intensity. You will leave with knowledge of literary terms and techniques.

85796 LIT3930 Dystopian Women’s Fiction TR 925-1040 Russ Turney

What’s your nightmare?...

Dystopian fiction has been a significant genre in literary study for decades, particularly dystopian fiction written by women and focused upon the future for women. Works such as Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale or Butler’s Parable of the Sower have become integral parts of the literary canon. (You should read both before taking this course!) However, dystopian fiction by women and focused upon the future for women has exploded in popularity over just the last few years. What scares women writers about the future, which is also to say: what scares them about the present?

Still, as nightmarish as these imagined worlds might be, do they present a vision for change and what does that change look like? Are these visions even dystopian to everyone? Is one person’s dystopia another’s utopia, and vice-versa?

To answer these questions, we will read 4-5 dystopian novels by women, as well as select pieces of scholarly criticism. We might also examine dystopian film and/or television and/or video games as well. While the focus will be on reading, there will be regular creative and analytic writing assignments and a course project as well.

P.S. - If you do not want to take this course, consider taking ENL4240: Studies in British Romantic Lit that also meets on these same days/times!

83828 LIT3930 Bible in/as Literature TR 1505 - 1620 Russ Turney

Even punk rocker and writer Patti Smith, one of the most counter-cultural figures of the last American century, acknowledges the centrality of the Bible to literature: “The Bible…has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realize”. No news flash then, perhaps: The Bible is all over Western literature.

Some biblical connections are more explicit, like in Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Paradise Lost. But what about the biblical resonance in Shelley’s Frankenstein or Shakespeare’s Hamlet? What about the biblical framework for poetry by William Blake, or Emily Dickinson, or T.S. Eliot? How about the prose of Toni Morrison, or Margaret Atwood, or James Baldwin? What about television, film, and anime? Video games?

For centuries, the Bible was a/the familiar text to Western writers and readers alike. Writers could count on reader’s intimate familiarity with biblical allusions, narratives, and concepts. However, for many students of literature today, this is no longer the case. This should not be a source of shame but, as scholars of literature, it can leave us lost when we encounter a text that presumes our literary knowledge of the Bible.

Thus, this course will have two, interrelated goals:

The first focus will be on reading the Bible as literature, not as a faith-based text. To this end, students will be introduced to a literary reading of a variety of biblical texts, taken from both the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) and the Christian Bible (“New Testament”). We will not study anything close to the entire Bible, but rather particular biblical texts that commonly reappear in world literature over time.

The second focus augments the first, which is to read the Bible in literature. We will study how these biblical texts appear and reappear in different world literary genres and contexts over time.

In addition to a steady reading commitment, students will write in response to biblical and non-biblical texts, both in scholarly and creative assignments. Students will also complete a project researching and analyzing a unique connection between The Bible and an outside literary/cultural text.

83855 LIT 4650 Seminar- Being Bored: The Art of Ennui TR 1215 -1330 Clark Lunberry

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. 
Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all but very interesting.”
—John Cage, Silence

Boredom was discovered, or first diagnosed, in the 19th century (or so), and this ailment continues to afflict and entertain us to this day. We have, of course, a love-hate relationship with boredom…or it (like a virus) has a relationship with us. We just can't seem to shake it, to find a cure for this curiously modern condition of being bored. Ever since its infectious spread, many have found boredom irresistibly interesting, as it grows uncontrollably hither and yon. One might wonder if boredom—or the more expansive (and fancy) French term ennui—is a fundamental fact of being alive today, of being modern, a diagnosable symptom of our tiresome and tedious age: boredom, being bored, being bored with being…boring ourselves to death.

In this class, our focus will be upon a variety of materials, from modern & contemporary fiction, theater, poetry, music, painting and performance, where boredom is often at the chilled heart of the matter, setting in motion events that threaten at any moment to collapse beneath their own exhausted weight. How has such boredom, such dis/ease, been represented in literature and the arts? Why did it arise and how has it endured as a representable theme and affliction? And finally, perhaps paradoxically, how can boredom—and what Siegfried Kracauer calls “radical boredom”—be such a rich, revealing and, yes, fascinating focus for writers, artists, musicians, and readers alike?

 85288 CRW5935: Poetry in Dark Times MW 1330-1445 Jessica Stark 

 In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ the dark times.
 —Bertolt Brecht

Inspired by Brecht’s infamous quote about the “dark times” above, theorist Hannah Arendt in her collection of essays Men in Dark Times (1968) defines “dark times” as periods marked by overlapping crises (namely: totalitarianism, war, and the loss of shared truth), during which people feel unable to lead meaningful public or social lives. In this poetry workshop, we will explore a range of poetry books that grapple with contemporary “dark times,” examining themes such as political disenchantment, social disconnection, doom-scrolling, information overload, public detachment, and the ever-present sense of impending collapse. Reading works by acclaimed, living poets like Franny Choi, Carmen Giménez, Jorie Graham, Megan Fernandes, and Danez Smith, we will test Arendt’s theory that the arts—that poets, specifically—can serve as illumination in moments of seemingly all-encompassing darkness. And we’ll creatively write towards that light as well.

We will discuss a number of techniques and skills involved in the process of poetry writing—from generating inspiration to fine-tuning the craft of self-editing and publication. Throughout our journey we will also acknowledge the tenuous dialogue between standard “rules” for artistry and how or when to break them. There will be a number of in-class writing exercises and short, creative writing assignments in the first half of the semester and ongoing, robust peer workshops in the latter portion of the term. These exercises and workshops will lead up to and compose the majority of a culminating final poetry portfolio and an end-of-term public exhibition and reading

84471 CRW 6925 Graduate Creative Writing Workshop / Story and Anti-Story T 1800-2045 Ari

What is a story, and where does it come from? What, if any, are its essential components? Together, we will consider various answers to these questions. Students will create and discuss works that explore and challenge assumptions, learn new ways to tap the reliable resources of imagination, and explore unforeseeable possibilities of personal expression. Experimentation is encouraged. Laughter is relished.

85800 ENC5226 Technical Writing HYBRID R 1430-1745 & Online Kailan Sindelar

Technical Writing is a course designed to provide students with experience in applying the fundamentals of technical writing to a special topic throughout the course. Students will pursue a long term project in the following stages: learn about the field, learn about specific subject matter, answer a research question related to the subject matter, recommend a product or change to a product (from an approved list of options) based on their research results, create the product or change they recommend, and then create or update their own portfolio. Throughout the course there will be small discussion posts and class time dedicated to discussing concepts students learn about them.

85830 ENC 6702, Problems in Contemporary Composition M 1800-2045 Dr. James Beasley

ENC 6702, Problems in Contemporary Composition, is one of the courses in the Composition and Rhetoric concentration within the M.A. in English. This course introduces students to scenarios they will likely face as beginning teachers of composition, including designing effective writing courses and assignments. This course will also introduce students to current debates within the field of composition, including anti-racist writing assessment and labor issues regarding contingent faculty. Students completing this course will be better prepared to solve both practical and theoretical problems involved in the study and teaching of writing.

82232 ENG 6019 Contemporary Literary Criticism & Theory R 1800-2045 Dr. Nicholas de Villiers

This course will serve as a graduate-level introduction to literary theory and criticism and a survey of major literary theories and critical debates including formalism, phenomenology,

reception theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism. We will read primary and seminal texts by Freud, Austin, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Jameson, Williams, Althusser, Said, Gates, Morrison, Ahmed, Miller, Sedgwick, Butler, Berlant, Buurma & Heffernan, Ngai, Flatley, and others. We will pay special attention to recent trends in affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and histories of literary study. Students will be asked to give one short in-class presentation and will learn how to write a short book review, critical response, 300-word conference paper abstract, and 15-page research paper.

84603 FIL5934 ST: Adv. Doc. Podcast Audio MW 1500-1615 Dr. Jillian Smith

The art of documentary is twofold: (1) finding and capturing the stories and significant topics that circulate around us every day and (2) shaping them into meaningful and creative form. In this course we capture our world through audio—interviews, soundscapes, sound effects, environmental immersion, scripted voice-over, archive, diaries, and music—in order to craft complex podcasts that we will record and post. We will learn audio and recording technique; research skills; narrative and scripted organization; documentary experimentation; interview styles and techniques; and audio editing

85732 FIL 5934 ST: Asian Cinema: East Asian Cinema TR 1050-1330 Dr. Nicholas de Villiers

This course examines films from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and South Korea, in terms of their reception in both national and transnational contexts. We will consider aesthetic questions of form, genre, the director as “auteur,” and various New Wave cinematic movements. We will also look critically at matters of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, post-colonialism, and “Orientalism” in each film as a cultural text. Graduate students will read foundational texts in postcolonial theory and East Asian film theory and will be required to give a short in-class presentation (connected with one of the films screened but sharing the results of additional research), write a short critical response paper on one of the readings, and develop and write a 10-page research paper on a film of your choosing.

85733 FIL 5934 ST: Film and Trauma MW 1200-1445 Dr. Tim Donovan

This class explores why film is particularly well-suited to the topic of trauma. Cinema frequently confronts extraordinary experiences at the boundaries of meaning and identity for individuals, communities, and the planet. By embodying, intervening in, and bearing witness to the compulsive remembering and incomplete forgetting of trauma, film allows us to examine the intersections of the cinematic, psychological, and philosophical. We will consider the following questions: What is trauma? What impact does it have on identity and meaning? What role does film play in approaching and often healing these extraordinary experiences? The scope of selected films will vary from semester to semester, encompassing genres such as documentary, drama, parody, superheroes, and, of course, the zombie apocalypse.

85746 LIT 5934 ST: Literatures of the Atlantic TR 1505-1620 Dr. Chris Gabbard

This course explores the literary and cultural imaginations of the Atlantic world during 1660-1847, focusing on Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean, and west Africa. It considers the period’s literatures in the contexts of the Enlightenment and slave trade as well as those of religion, science, sensibility, empire, emerging capitalism, African diaspora, Atlantic Creole culture, and New World settlement. The course pays particular attention to the ways writers adapted literary forms, theories, and sources to their varied aesthetic and political objectives. Students will be expected to read secondary material and to incorporate and synthesize it into written and oral argumentation. Course work entails (1) reading responses, (2) participation, (3) research paper of significant length citing an appropriate number of secondary sources, and (4) a presentation of the research paper to the class with follow-up Q&A.

Readings include Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mary Prince’s History, Charlotte Brontë’ Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and several texts from the period TBD.

85805 LIT 6246 Major Authors: George Eliot (Middlemarch) W 1800-2045 Dr. Laura Heffernan

George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is widely regarded as the best novel of the nineteenth century. Featuring several plots that focus on the inhabitants of the fictional midlands town of Middlemarch, Eliot’s novel afford us an opportunity to talk about nearly everything: the inevitability of change, what makes a marriage, how social status works, the function of gossip, the links between morality and politics, the history of gender and family, the purpose of art, and the meaning of life. When the novel was first published in 1871-72, readers encountered it in serial format over the course of eight months. Our reading schedule will approximate this experience: we’ll read the novel intermittently over the course of an entire semester while we also work on developing primary and secondary research skills. All students will keep a writer’s notebook, as Eliot did when she was preparing her novel, make a class presentation, and write several shorter close reading papers and a longer final essay.

14629 AML 4242 20th Century American Lit: Paranormal Souths MW 1330-1445 Keith Cartwright

12267 CRW 2300 Introduction to Poetry M W 1200-1315 Dorsey Olbrich

In Introduction to Poetry, we will learn to bring forth what is inside ourselves and transform it into irreducible art by reading examples of both contemporary and canonical poetry that will serve as models for the various and unique poems we hold in our own memories and experiences. We will learn about the working parts that build our poetry, such as concrete imagery, figurative language, poetic diction, repetition and rhyme, voice, and style. We will spend time writing both in and out of class, beginning to define our own poetic voices and visions. Finally, we will begin a practice of giving and receiving feedback with the introduction of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, a workshop format designed to center the artist and their unique vision.

Required Text: Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology by Amorak Huey and Todd Kaneko.

11446 CRW 2600 Intro to Screenwriting ONLINE Stephen Boka

This course covers the fundamentals of screenwriting, including formatting, structure, theme, character development, and more. Students will pitch movie ideas, write a treatment, develop an outline, and learn scene construction for a feature film. Workshops will help students refine their work and apply lessons to the development of their peers’ projects.

12901 CRW 3310 Poetry Workshop MW 1330-1445 Frederick Dale

Course Description: This is a class steeped in the craft of poetry. We will workshop original poems and produce critiques of both our own texts, as well as the poems of the poets in our workshop groups. You will turn in “final poems” five times during the semester (two poems at a time, for an aggregate of ten or so “final poems” for the semester). We will concentrate our readings on three poets: Mia S. Willis (the space between men), Susan McCabe (I Woke a Lake), and Clayre Benzadon (Moon as Salted Lemon)—each at the top of their perspective poetic games. In addition to the poems and critiques, each student will write a formal, academic essay (minimum of five pages) that focuses on two poems from one of the three assigned poets.

13297, 13696 CRW 3610 Screenwriting Workshop ONLINE Stephen Boka

This workshop breaks down the scriptwriting process into a detailed, scene-by-scene, page-by-page, and line-by-line analysis. Students are expected to write, read, and critique scripts weekly in order to produce a feature-length screenplay by the semester’s end.

12904 CRW 3930 Short Form Creative Writing T R 1505-1620 Mark Ari 

This course focuses on brief works (1000 words and less) to explore student interests and open new possibilities. Using constraint-based prompts, students experiment with a variety of approaches to fiction, creative nonfiction, prose poetry, and/or hybrid works. Risk-taking is encouraged. Laughter is relished.

13298 CRW 4320 Advanced Poetry Workshop MW 1030-1145 Jessica Stark 

The word hybrid comes from the Latin term hybrida, meaning mongrel or the “offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar.” Relatedly, some of the most exciting artistic creations in the 21st century involve experimental work that crosses definitional boundaries and explores multiple literary genres in poetry. In this course, we will explore the ways you might tell stories (your own or those that compel you) in wild and imaginative ways, using multiple artistic genres in poetry. In order to become familiar with contemporary poets that effectively employ hybrid forms, we will explore cross-disciplinary hybrid poetry by writers like Claudia Rankine, Tyehimba Jess, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joe Brainard, Eve L. Ewing, and others. Introducing different forms of media in our poetry—sound, photographs, illustrations, collage, footnotes—will allow us to blast open the conceptual containers for what we think makes a poem, a poem. In the process, we will read about and discuss how hybrid forms both emulate and resist our contemporary, everyday reading practices that are so often inundated with information, images, and multimedia. We will discuss a number of techniques and skills involved in the process of creative writing—from generating inspiration to fine-tuning the craft of self-editing and publication. Throughout our journey we will also acknowledge the tenuous dialogue between standard “rules” for artistry and how or when to break them. Most importantly, we will develop insight together for understanding a wild, untamable definition of the literary in order to cultivate a deeper capacity for human expression and its radical possibilities.  

There will be a number of in-class writing exercises and short, creative writing assignments that will lead up to and compose the majority of a final portfolio and an end-of-term class reading.  

14623 ENC 1143 Evidence and Style M W 1330-1445 Dorsey Olbrich

What does it mean to be a nurse? What responsibilities, challenges, and contradictions does this role entail? What transformative power does caretaking hold? What does it mean to write about nursing, or to write as a nurse? In this process-based writing course, students will discuss, research, and write about important issues in nursing such as compassion fatigue, public health, hospice and end-of-life care, narrative medicine, and more. Students will also learn the basics of APA-style writing and documentation as they compose a self-directed, stepped research paper on a contemporary issue in the field.

Required text: Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World by Sarah DiGregorio.

14624 ENC 1143 Evidence and Style M W 1030-1145 Dorsey Olbrich

What does it mean to be a nurse? What responsibilities, challenges, and contradictions does this role entail? What transformative power does caretaking hold? What does it mean to write about nursing, or to write as a nurse? In this process-based writing course, students will discuss, research, and write about important issues in nursing such as compassion fatigue, public health, hospice and end-of-life care, narrative medicine, and more. Students will also learn the basics of APA-style writing and documentation as they compose a self-directed, stepped research paper on a contemporary issue in the field.

Required text: Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World by Sarah DiGregorio.

14863 ENC 1143 Writing with Evidence and Style: Place-Based Writing for Immersive Technologies T R 1215-1330 Kailan Sindelar

This hybrid course asks students to spend time working with immersive technology and time outdoors. ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ is home to nature trails and a reserve that connects to surrounding wetlands. Throughout the course, students are expected to spend time on the nature trails and practice place-based writing for a virtual reality (VR) project (no coding required!) Writing with Evidence and Style is a course designed to give students the opportunity to learn and practice writing for specific audiences with relevant, credible information. The audience for this VR project is next year’s freshmen, and the topic will be transitioning to college (and specifically ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ). Students will practice researching information, reflecting, place-based writing, composing with multimedia, and revising. Specifically, students learn about the ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ trails and visit the same part of campus throughout the semester, taking pictures and writing about their experience there as well as the history of the place. Students do NOT need to have any experience with creating immersive technology. Student-generated content will be put into a program that the professor has already created. However, students will get to learn about different technologies through the course in addition to writing for and with them.

14559 ENC 3375 Emo Fans and Other Dangerous Ideas T R 1215-1330 David Mac Kinnon

Are you obsessed with emo lyrics, zines, Tumblr threads, or the cultural ripple effects of My Chemical Romance? Do you find yourself mulling the emotional weight of a phrase like “I’m not okay” or wondering how fandoms shape—and are shaped by—society? In Emo, Fandoms & Other Dangerous Ideas, we will dive into emo—a genre, a movement, a mood, and a fandom—and explore methods of analyzing and interrogating language and culture. This course invites you to consider how fans create meaning, challenge norms, and build communities around music and media. Using fandom studies as our framework, we’ll not only examine emo’s shifting definitions and its fans’ roles in shaping cultural narratives but how such a model underwrites everyday discourse. Drawing on the example case study of “emo,” you will work toward being able to: decode the social and economic status of fandoms in today’s media landscape; engage with foundational fan studies scholarship; produce research genres like critical reviews, research proposals, and poster presentations; and conduct your own critical analysis of a term or phrase from a fandom of your choice—whether it’s “scene kid,” “sadboi,” or something entirely your own.

14914 ENC 4436 Writing as Social Action ONLINE, R 1505-1620 Kailan Sindelar

Writing as Social Action is a course designed to give students the opportunity to learn about professional communication, explore rhetoric, research, and compose their own public writing to help local communities. This hybrid section is designed around a service-learning opportunity, creating webpages for the Jacksonville Zoo. These webpages will be about their seven interpretive themes, and they may be found by zoo visitors through QR codes on signs as well as vis search engines. Throughout the course, students will work in groups to learn technical communication methods, writing process and software. In the first section, students will learn the zoo’s goals and guide, and then they will create and administer a public survey. After gathering survey results, they will learn Figma, will collect information on a guided visit to the zoo, and begin drafting the web pages. After creating their first draft, they will create and administer a usability test of the web pages and report their results. In the last section of the class, students will revise their draft based on usability test results and stakeholder feedback. The final for this course includes creating a portfolio website that features their revised reports and a professional bio.

13300 ENG 3613 Disability Culture: Classic Texts MW 1330-1445 Chris Gabbard

This course will theorize representations of disability in literature. Disability has been depicted in ways ranging from bodily abjection to unique resource to road to spiritual transcendence. Applying crip theory, this course will explore how disability has evolved into an aesthetic value in itself, providing insights into the artistic imagination that could not be achieved by other means. Students will come to appreciate the crucial roles that the disabled mind / body have played in the evolution of modern literary aesthetics and our comprehension of the human condition. Readings include Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, Molly McCully Brown’s The Virginia Colony, and William Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as excerpts from Tobin Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics and Disability Theory. Students are not required to participate in the ELR (or CBL)—see below.

Optional: Experiential Learning Requirement (ELR). This course can satisfy ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ’s new Experiential Learning Requirement (ELR) (alternatively, Community Based Learning [CBL]). Students have the option of volunteering at one of Jacksonville’s two exceptional student centers, Mt. Herman or Alden Road, or at the Developmental Learning Center in Murray Hill. Typically, students undertake 16 hours of volunteering over the course of the semester, usually for two hours per week for eight weeks. In addition to, or aside from, satisfying the ELR, those completing the work can count on Prof. Gabbard to write glowing letters of recommendation for graduate school, internships, scholarships, character-reference requests, grants, and/or employment. In the fourteen years he has taught some form of this course, he has written dozens upon dozens of letters of recommendation. He will write as many letters as a student needs, for as long as the student needs them. That’s a guarantee! This volunteer work also looks great on a resume!

14328 ENL 3333 Shakespeare ONLINE McCluskey

11813 FIL 2000 Film Appreciation ONLINE Stephen Boka

This course introduces students to the formal elements of cinema and the ways filmmakers tell stories visually. Students will analyze how image, movement, sound, framing, lighting, and editing work together to construct meaning. Through readings, screenings, quizzes, and discussions, students will learn to recognize and interpret the visual language of film.

11656 FIL 3006 Analyzing Films T R 1050-1330 Nicholas de Villiers

This course introduces students to key terms for interpreting film, including important concepts and trends in the field of cinema studies. Students will learn how to watch films with a critical eye, how to discuss cinematic form and meaning, and how to write coherent and persuasive essays analyzing film. This course provides an important foundation for more specialized courses in the film studies minor and IDS major, but will benefit anyone who wants to better understand how movies affect us, and how to put that experience into words.

13006 FIL 3832 Horror Films TR 1505-1745 Jeffrey Smith

14290, 14291 FIL 3930 Topics in Film: Screenwriting Workshop ONLINE Stephen Boka

In this special topics for Film course, the scriptwriting process is broken down into a detailed, scene-by-scene, page-by-page, and line-by-line analysis. Students are expected to write, read, and critique scripts weekly in order to produce a feature-length screenplay by the semester’s end. This section may include additional emphasis on selected topics or approaches in screenwriting.

14632 FIL 4882 Gender, Sexuality, and Cinema T R 1505-1745 Nicholas de Villiers

Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey argued that there was a sexual division of labor in Classical Hollywood cinema with “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” Women were objectified by the “male gaze” in cinema, which catered to the visual pleasure of male audience members. The documentary The Celluloid Closet makes an equally broad claim that “Hollywood taught straight people what to think of gay people, and gay people what to think of themselves.” Feminist critics since Mulvey have gone on to consider the problem of female spectatorship and questioned the social construction of gender (masculinity as well as femininity), and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) film historians have since asked what possibilities there are for queer and transgender identification and desire in cinema. This course provides an opportunity for discussion of these and related issues regarding “the politics of representation” in an atmosphere of free and open inquiry. The principle analytical tools will be drawn from the diverse interdisciplinary fields of cinema and media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory. Undergraduate students will complete two short critical response papers on your choice of the assigned critical essays and one 5-page research paper on a film of your choosing, focusing on gender and/or sexuality, that will go through a research proposal and peer review process.

12575 LIT 3331 Children’s Literature T R 1050-1205 Jennie Ziegler

This course examines the concept of the child alongside the history (and future) of children’s literature, beginning with the foundational texts and worldviews of fairy tales, folklore, and myths, which are some of humanity’s first (and most retold) stories. As we explore the history of “childhood” in the West from the Middle Ages forward, we’ll investigate the concept of storytelling to and about children. What do we mean when we describe literature that belongs to “children”? While certainly not an exhaustive course, we will begin with essential questions as we read about (and alongside) children’s stories. How do issues of culture, history, and social context open avenues for interpreting a tale? What strategies can we use to read children’s literature? Why is children’s literature so important? Part investigation, part reading advocacy, this course will begin the conversation of narratives belonging to the world of imagination, of truth, and of how we begin to interrupt the world in critical—and ultimately crucial—ways. The class will include a pedagogical reader, a fairy tale anthology reader, handouts, and picture books.  

14631 LIT 4083 Studies in Modern Literature: Opacity and Knowledge in Modernist Fiction TR 1215-1330 Laura Heffernan

This upper-level seminar examines how literature at the turn of the twentieth century grappled with questions of knowledge, interpretation, and the limits of understanding. We will read a range of narrative and theoretical texts that explore the instability of identity and the difficulty of knowing others or even oneself. Primary readings include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Throughout the semester, we will consider why writers during these decades turned to “case study” structures and investigative modes to reflect on evidence, truth, and interpretive authority. We will also engage critical scholarship on changing scientific ideals of objectivity, emerging theories of sexuality, and the growing presence of opacity and abstraction in modernist art and literature. Students will continue to develop their close reading skills, analyze the relationship between literary form and knowledge production, and write interpretive essays that situate primary texts within their historical and theoretical contexts.

14718 LIT 4650 Comparative Lit: Carnival MW 1200-1315 Keith Cartwright

14558 LIT 4934 Wanderlust! | The Flâneur’s Modern Imagination T R 1505-1620 Clark Lunberry

“Everything   /  suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of  /  a Thursday”

—Frank O’Hara, from “A Step Away from Them”

Getting lost can be both exhilarating and terrifying. Getting lost can lead to finding things unimagined, stumbling onto places unknown—getting hurt, getting happy—seeing sides of others (and ourselves) unsuspected, perhaps undesired. In this course, we will hear from many different writers and artists for whom getting lost—on a walk, on a drive—led them to discoveries, to the opening of eyes and minds otherwise squinting, otherwise sealed shut. 

In the 19^th century, the figure of the modern walker, the urban wanderer, the one deliberately seeing in motion, being in time within a city’s labyrinth of crowded streets and sidewalks, was the flâneur. It was these “passionate observers” of the urban spectacle who dropped themselves into a setting, seeing the kaleidoscopic sights, absorbing the myriad sensations, the shocks and abrasions, and later recollecting the vivid impressions, inscribing the beauty found, the bruises received. 

Among those to be read are such poets as Charles Baudelaire walking the sidewalks of 19^th century Paris, William Carlos Williams driving the streets of early 20^th century New Jersey; Frank O’Hara on his lunch break in a 1950’s midtown Manhattan; and then, with fiction, there’s Edgar Allan Poe and his “The Man of the Crowd”; Virginia Woolf walking in London; the contemporary novelist/photographer Teju Cole in his Open City of New York; Lauren Groff’s Florida, its characters stalking the streets of nearby Gainesville; and finally, we’ll look at two photographers: Eugène Atget (France) and Vivian Maier (U.S.), both of them picturing the gritty and everchanging urban streets and sidewalks before them. 

All of these writers and photographers have deliberately lost themselves to find that which, if lucky, stuns and surprises, seeing what might be seen, what discoveries might be detonated. The Diversity of a flaneur’s encounters, the Equity of their engagements in the world, and the Inclusion needed for their varied insights, will direct our own movements, as we seek to see around our own blinding corners, our own inevitably limited and limiting points of view.  

In addition to all that will be seen and read, each of you will undertake excursions of your own devising, for your own “flaneur” projects,” entering the Jacksonvillian sprawl of speed and sensation (or any other appropriate location), wandering into the local wilderness that constitutes our own post-urban world.

13299 CRW 5935 Advanced Poetry Workshop MW 1030-1145 Jessica Stark 

The word hybrid comes from the Latin term hybrida, meaning mongrel or the “offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar.” Relatedly, some of the most exciting artistic creations in the 21st century involve experimental work that crosses definitional boundaries and explores multiple literary genres in poetry. In this course, we will explore the ways you might tell stories (your own or those that compel you) in wild and imaginative ways, using multiple artistic genres in poetry. In order to become familiar with contemporary poets that effectively employ hybrid forms, we will explore cross-disciplinary hybrid poetry by writers like Claudia Rankine, Tyehimba Jess, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Joe Brainard, Eve L. Ewing, and others. Introducing different forms of media in our poetry—sound, photographs, illustrations, collage, footnotes—will allow us to blast open the conceptual containers for what we think makes a poem, a poem. In the process, we will read about and discuss how hybrid forms both emulate and resist our contemporary, everyday reading practices that are so often inundated with information, images, and multimedia. We will discuss a number of techniques and skills involved in the process of creative writing—from generating inspiration to fine-tuning the craft of self-editing and publication. Throughout our journey we will also acknowledge the tenuous dialogue between standard “rules” for artistry and how or when to break them. Most importantly, we will develop insight together for understanding a wild, untamable definition of the literary in order to cultivate a deeper capacity for human expression and its radical possibilities.  

There will be a number of in-class writing exercises and short, creative writing assignments that will lead up to and compose the majority of a final portfolio and an end-of-term class reading.  

13441 CRW 6925 Creative Writing Workshop R 1800-2045 Mark Ari

What is a story, and where does it come from? What are its essential components and how are they determined? In this course, students will consider various answers to these questions. They will create and discuss works that explore and challenge assumptions, opening up unforeseeable possibilities for imaginative expression. Part of the time, rather than trying to determine where our efforts go wrong as we attempt to do things right, we’ll uncover what’s right in going wrong.

14633 FIL 5934 Gender, Sexuality, and Cinema T R 1505-1745 Nicholas de Villiers

Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey argued that there was a sexual division of labor in Classical Hollywood cinema with “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” Women were objectified by the “male gaze” in cinema, which catered to the visual pleasure of male audience members. The documentary The Celluloid Closet makes an equally broad claim that “Hollywood taught straight people what to think of gay people, and gay people what to think of themselves.” Feminist critics since Mulvey have gone on to consider the problem of female spectatorship and questioned the social construction of gender (masculinity as well as femininity), and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) film historians have since asked what possibilities there are for queer and transgender identification and desire in cinema. This course provides an opportunity for discussion of these and related issues regarding “the politics of representation” in an atmosphere of free and open inquiry. The principle analytical tools will be drawn from the diverse interdisciplinary fields of cinema and media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory. Graduate students will give one in-class presentation, write a short critical response paper, and complete a 10-page research paper that will go through a research proposal and peer review process. 

14556 LIT 6246 Major Authors: Jane Austen: Romance and Rebellion T 1800-2045 Chris Gabbard

Most readers associate Jane Austen with romance novels, every one of which incorporated the marriage plot. Her deployment of it accounts in considerable part for why she has been so popular with filmmakers and movie audiences. It could be argued that she pioneered this plot device, but, at the same time, her narratives are spiced with sardonic utterances, mordant wit, and acts of defiance and rebellion that betray profound skepticism regarding the institution of marriage. This skepticism was rooted in the harsh realities of the Georgian marriage market (Georgian being the era in which she was wring): the prospect of a woman winding up single and destitute provided one of her chief incentives for entering into matrimony. It should be noted that Austen herself never married but managed to avoid penury. This course will read five of her six novels in the order in which she wrote them: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Emma, and Persuasion. We will also read Paula Byrne’s 2014 biography, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, as well as scholarship articles on her work. Students will lead discussions, produce a summary of a work of scholarship, and write a research paper of substantial length.

14630 LIT 6855 Topics in Cultural Studies - Econarratives in Latin American Culture: Mythology, Magical Realism and Dystopian Futures M 1800-2045 Andrea Gaytan Cuesta

This seminar explores econarratives—those stories that link environmental imagination with social critique—in order to trace the evolution of myths, magical realism and dystopian aesthetics as strategies for rethinking the human relationship with land, nature and disasters in Latin America. Drawing from novels, short stories and films, we will examine how mythic and magical frameworks reconfigure ecological frameworks and how dystopian imaginaries articulate the environmental anxieties of the Anthropocene in Latin America. By the end of this course students will be able to identify key features of Latin American environmental thinking, as extractivism, Sumak Kawsay, and engage critically with major theorists in environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. 

Readings:

La Vorágine/The Vortex (José Eustasio Rivera- Colombia) 

Marea Rosa/Pink Slime (Fernanda Trías-Uruguay)

Distancia de Rescate/Fever Dreams (Fernanda Schweblin-Argentina) You Glow in the Dark (Liliana Colanzi-Bolivia)

Films:

También la lluvia /Even the Rain (2010) Dir. Icíar Bollaín 

The Embrace of the Serpent (2015) Ciro Guerra

 Fitzcarraldo (1982). Dir. Werner Herzog

81770 CRW 2600 Intro to Screenwriting ONLINE Stephen Boka

This course covers the basics of the craft of screenwriting such as formatting, structure, theme, character, and more. Students will pitch movie ideas, write a treatment, outline, and learn scene construction for a feature film. Students will participate in workshops to further develop their work and apply lessons to the development of the work of their peers.

80492 CRW 3110 Fiction Workshop W 1800-2045 Marcus Pactor

Ready to take your fiction to a place it—and you—have never been? In this course, we will learn to devise and employ new approaches to our writing to radically change and upgrade our fiction. We will also be learning new writing techniques and approaches from three contemporary writers: Premee Mohamed, Diane Williams, and Victoria Lancelotta. 

82166 CRW 3110 Fiction Workshop TR 1243-1455 Michael Wiley

In this class, we will work on writing suspenseful plots, complex characters, and evocative settings, while developing writerly styles/voices. Since great writers are also great readers, we will consider various approaches that other writers than ourselves—such as Yuri Herrera and James Cain—have taken to composing powerful fiction. Evaluated writing will include two short stories or a chapter from an extended work of fiction, workshop responses, and short responses to published fiction.

83268 CRW 3610 Screenwriting Workshop ONLINE Stephen Boka

Screenwriting Workshop will break the script-writing process into a scene-by-scene, page-by-page, line-by-line analysis. Students are expected to write, read, and critique scripts on a weekly basis to produce a feature-length screenplay by the semester’s end.

83429 ENC 2210 Technical Writing TR 1215-1330 Chris Gabbard

Students will assemble an APA-informed research project paper on a medical- or health-related topic of their own choosing. Former students often mention these papers later in their application letters when applying for a nursing program or for medical school or graduate schools in health-related fields. Students will also read parts of Frances Lee’s and Stephen Macedo’s In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us and Dr. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Students will learn how to (1) navigate the Carpenter Library’s health and medical databases such as CINAHL Plus and PubMed, (2) incorporate data from research studies into a paper, (3) summarize a research study, (4) synthesize the results of several research studies, (5) analyze the quality of the studies they synthesized based on their type, methodology, and limitations, (6) produce a References page according to APA Style specifications, and (7), overall, write a scientific paper in accordance with the protocols of written standard English.

81774 ENG 4013: Approaches to Literary Interpretation TR 1050-1205 Michael Wiley

In this course, we will explore literary concepts, terms, and interpretive approaches that contribute to an understanding of the richness, pleasures, and challenges of fiction, poetry, drama, film, and other work. We will draw heavily from An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory (6th edition), by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, and will consider the points they discuss in relation to Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden.

82178 ENL 2012 British Literature I MW 1030-1145 Chris Gabbard

Power, wonder, honor, pride, lust, sex, death, despair, faith, and frailty: early texts teem with these themes. In this chronological and thematic examination, we are going to read literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the neo-classical period. We’ll explore the rich early history of English literature through works by medieval, Early modern, and eighteenth-century authors and come to understand how these literary texts were shaped by – and attempted to shape – the historical moments in which they were written. We’ll read and discuss a wide variety of texts: poetry, prose and drama.
P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” This class will immerse you in this foreign country and challenge you to consider the importance of historical context in any literary analysis. Part of that challenge will involve considering how aesthetic criteria evolved over this thousand-year period. Readings include: Anon., Beowulf; Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selections); William Shakespeare, King Lear; Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, as well as prose by Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift and poetry by John Donne; Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea; and Robert Burns.
Course work will consist of reading quizzes and questions, a midterm, and a final exam.

81775 ENL 4230 Literatures of the Early Atlantic MW 1330-1445 Chris Gabbard

This course explores the literary and cultural imaginations of the Atlantic world during 1660-1838, focusing on Britain and its colonies in Ireland, the Caribbean, and west Africa. It considers the period’s literatures in the contexts of the Enlightenment and slave trade as well as those of religion, science, sensibility, empire, emerging capitalism, African diaspora, Atlantic Creole culture, and New World settlement. The course pays particular attention to the ways writers, poets, and playwrights adapted literary forms, theories, and sources to their varied aesthetic and political objectives.
Readings include Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.
Course work will consist of reading quizzes and questions, a midterm essay and end-of-term essay.

83324 ENL 4240 British Romantic Literature TR 0925-1040 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. Graded work will include a midterm essay, a final essay, and a group presentation.

81776 FIL 3831 Black Cinema ONLINE Stephen Boka

Black Cinema poses the question, What is a Black movie. In an effort to answer this question, students will screen movies for a through-line, research the topic to write an essay, and participate in discussions both on-line and in-class with the goal of developing their own understanding and idea of what may define Black Cinema. 

83326 FIL 3833 Science-Fiction Film TR 1050-1330 Nicholas de Villiers

In this course we will explore the broad genre of science fiction films (from the U.S. and East Asia in particular), considering science fiction as allegory, utopia or dystopia, visions of the future or alternative worlds, encounters with aliens or artificial life, disasters and apocalypses, and as symptomatic of cultural anxieties. By the end of the course, students will be able to: identify genre conventions and subgenres of science fiction; describe interactions among science fiction genres and history; analyze primary and secondary sources through the methodological and theoretical lenses of film theory and cultural studies; analyze science fiction subgenres and specific films in particular social and historical contexts; and develop critical reading, research, and writing skills. The final product will be a short research paper on a science fiction film of your choosing.

83327 FIL 4078 American Film in Context: 1980s TR 1340-1455 Nicholas de Villiers

In this course we will examine a diverse selection of American films from the decade of the 1980s in their historical, economic, and political context, and consider their lasting influence (Stranger Things) and uncanny relevance today. 1980s American cinema 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. Students should come to this class willing to question 1980s nostalgia and “retro” phenomena. 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 three short critical response papers on the films and readings and to give a short in-class presentation. 

80494 LIT 3213 The Art of Critical Reading and Writing I ONLINE Betsy Nies

This course offers a review of sixteen literary terms as part of a broader effort to read and analyze literature. This asynchronous course requires that students be self-motivated. The class will read four short stories, two picture books (!), one theoretical article, engage in online discussions, and focus heavily on strengthening writing through exercises and editorial feedback. 

81053 LIT 3333 Young Adult Literature TR 1215-1330 ONLINE Betsy Nies

Why read young adult literature (YAL)? Why does the field matter?  Does it influence how we think about teens or how they think about themselves? We will explore these questions as we study the field from the mid-nineteenth century to today. The intention is to think critically about how this body of literature has transformed and how it addresses issues of young adult development and identity. For example, one might ask, why does dystopian fiction or paranormal romance matter now? How do these genres speak to particular adolescent anxieties and desires? How does their rise in popularity reflect our political, social, and economic climate and the position of teens in our culture?

To promote critical thinking, this course requires academic research (for one presentation and final essay), and provides readings on issues of gender, genre, and literary history.

82240 LIT3930 The Bible As Literature TR 1340-1455 Russ Turney

Even the great punk rocker and writer Patti Smith, arguably one of the most counter-cultural figures of the last American century, acknowledges the centrality of the Bible to literary and cultural history: “The Bible…has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it, and more than people realize”.  

No news flash then, perhaps: The Bible is all over Western literature. For centuries, the Bible was a (some would argue the) familiar text to Western writers and readers alike. Writers could count on reader’s intimate familiarity with biblical allusions, narratives, and concepts. However, for many students of literature today, this is no longer the case. This should not be a source of shame but, as scholars of literature, it can leave us lost when we encounter a text that assumes such knowledge of the Bible. 

Thus, this course will have two, interrelated goals: 

The first focus will be on reading the Bible as literature, not as a faith-based text. To this end, students will be introduced to a literary reading of a variety of biblical texts. We will not study anything close to the entire Bible, but rather particular biblical texts that commonly reappear in world literature over time.  

The second focus builds upon the first, which is to read the Bible in literature. We will study how these biblical texts appear and reappear in different, canonical world literature genres and texts over time, including genres like tv, films, anime, and video gaming. 

In addition to a steady reading commitment, students will write in response to biblical and non-biblical texts, both in scholarly and creative assignments. Students will also complete a project researching and analyzing a unique connection between The Bible and an outside literary/cultural text.  

83329 LIT 4243 – Major Authors: Toni Morrison ONLINE Michaela Tashjian

82292 LIT 4650 Be Drunk: Spirits of Intoxication TR 1505-1620 Clark Lunberry

“One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.”

—Charles Baudelaire, “Be Drunk”

Intoxication offers hope. Intoxication offers escape. Intoxication offers “the illusion of being alive,” a temporary respite from the weight of the world. All such sentiments were voiced by the 19^th century French poet Charles Baudelaire in his still stunning and shocking prose-poem “Be Drunk.”

In this class, we will have as our focus art and literature of intoxication that has, in part, helped to shape (and derange) our modern and contemporary sensibility. Beginning, as we must, with Baudelaire (his Artificial Paradises: On Hashish and Wine), we will move through the rich and hallucinatory terrain by which so many modern writers and artists have written and created so vividly of various forms of intoxication. Imagined there are alternative worlds, an expanded consciousness (of consciousness), and a desired and euphoric opening onto experiences otherwise unseen, unseeable; or where, if nothing else, one may seek an escape from the banality, the boredom of everyday life.…the tedium (and terror) of “Time’s horrible burden.”

Oh, and, just in case, I’ll be the designated driver.

In addition to Baudelaire, we will also be looking at the work of Edgar Allan Poe (“A Tale of the Ragged Mountain”), Thomas de Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Arthur Rimbaud (“Drunken Boat” and “A Season in Hell”), Sigmund Freud (“On Cocaine”), Henri Michaux (Miserable Miracle), Antonin Artaud (The Peyote Dance), Walter Benjamin (On Hashish), Mina Loy (“Lunar Baedeker”), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception), María Sabina (“The Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico”), Billie Holliday (from Lady Sings the Blues), James Baldwin (“Sonny’s Blues”), The Diaries of Anais Nin, and more.

822923 LIT 4934 Making of Memory TR 1215-1330 Clark Lunberry

What is it that memory tells us, reveals to us, about the world, about ourselves? In this class, we will read, view, and discuss a variety of modern and contemporary writers and artists, all of them converging upon memory and its incited imagination, the shaping of lives seen through the “rearview mirror,” or as James Joyce wrote, in “retrospective arrangement.” Our multi-genre approach to memory and its rich manifestations will be the starting-off points for your careful reflections, our wide-ranging discussions, and then your own engaged creative projects and written essays, always moving us toward a more fruitful examination of our own minds and memories, our own (provisionally) re-collected selves.

From poetry to short stories, essays to novels, film to photography, we will apply a comparative lens onto the intangible workings of memory, exploring the varied ways that the residue of remembrance might be represented, its retrieved fragments made into imaginable form and substance, as a bulkhead of resistance against the inevitable forces of oblivion.

81313 ENC 5720 Problems in Contemporary Composition R 1800-2045 James Beasley

ENC 5720, Problems in Contemporary Composition, is one of the courses in the Composition and Rhetoric concentration within the M.A. In English. This course introduces students to scenarios they will likely face as beginning teachers of composition, including designing effective writing courses and assignments. This course will also introduce students to current debates within the field of composition, including anti-racist writing assessment and labor issues regarding contingent faculty. Students completing this course will be better prepared to solve both practical and theoretical problems involved in the study and teaching of writing. 

83602 LIT 5934 Literatures of the Atlantic MW 1330-1445 Chris Gabbard

Satisfies British and early requirements

This course explores the literary and cultural imaginations of the Atlantic world during 1660-1838, focusing on Britain and its colonies in the Caribbean, and west Africa. It considers the period’s literatures in the contexts of the Enlightenment and slave trade as well as those of religion, science, sensibility, empire, emerging capitalism, African diaspora, Atlantic Creole culture, and New World settlement. The course pays particular attention to the ways writers, poets, and playwrights adapted literary forms, theories, and sources to their varied aesthetic and political objectives.

Readings include Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Students will be expected to read secondary material and to incorporate and synthesize it into written and oral argumentation. Course work entails (1) reading responses, (2) participation, (3) presentation to full class of a scholarly article with follow-up Q&A, (4) research paper of significant length citing an appropriate number of secondary sources, and (5) a presentation of the research paper to the class with follow-up Q&A.

51485 CRW 2201 Intro Creative Nonfiction ONLINE Jennie Ziegler

What is nonfiction? It is described, by its title alone, by what it is not. It is not fiction. And that is the only clue we have of this sprawling genre filled with voices from the culinary world, the travel world, the world of loss and laughter and…car manuals? In this six-week nonfiction class we will read not only read luminary essayists but also draft weekly flash essays and responses. Prepare to flex your writing muscles in this class. We will be writing constantly and questioning closely this genre that defies definition. Abandon all expectations, all ye who enter here.  

50390 CRW 2600 Intro to Screenwriting ONLINE Stephan Boka

This course covers the basics of the craft of screenwriting such as formatting, structure, theme, character, and more. Students will pitch movie ideas, write a treatment, outline, and learn scene construction for a feature film. Students will participate in workshops to further develop their work and apply lessons to the development of the work of their peers.

51423 ENC 2210 Technical Writing BCOH: Writing for Healthcare MTWR 1050-1230 Chris Gabbard

Students will assemble an APA-informed research project paper on a medical- or health-related topic of their own choosing. Former students often mention these papers later in their application letters when applying for a nursing program or for medical school or graduate schools in health-related fields. Students will also read parts of Dr. Marty Makary’s Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health, and Dr. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, two of the best books about medicine and related health fields published in the last 15 years.

Students will learn how to (1) navigate the Carpenter Library’s health and medical databases such as CINAHL Plus and PubMed, (2) incorporate data from research studies into a paper, (3) summarize a research study, (4) synthesize the results of several research studies, (5) analyze the quality of the studies they synthesized based on their type, methodology, and limitations, (6) produce a References page according to APA Style specifications, and (7), overall, write a scientific paper in accordance with the protocols of written standard English.

50147 ENC 3310 Writing Prose ONLINE James Beasley

In ENC 3310, we will examine three of the most widely-held writing rules in American institutions in the 21^st century: that every paper must have a thesis statement, every paper must be free from grammar error, and every paper may only examine one topic. In short, ENC 3310 is truly an intermediate writing course. By intermediate, I mean that it serves as a pause, a time to examine the writing you have already done, but also a time to anticipate and identify the writing you would like yet to do. We will examine the difference between the effect your writing has had, and the affect you would like it to have.

50439 FIL 4828 Movements in International Film MW 0900-1230 Jillian Smith

In this class, you are exposing yourself to the beautifully strange and profound experience of international cinema, where you are transported not only to different worlds, but also to different experiences of time, space, and being.  We will watch some of the most watched films in the history of international cinema by focusing on national movements that have influenced the development of cinema worldwide—American Romantic Realism, German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, French New Wave, and more.  In the process we will learn film vocabulary, film style, film technique, and some film theory. We will also study historical context to understand the politics of film.  Students will be expected to write reflections on all of the films and engage in short creative projects designed to promote comprehension. 

51426 LIT 2000 Intro to Literature ONLINE Will Pewitt

Dystopias, aliens, time travelers, and other implausible premises make it unsurprising that Science Fiction is often derided as a genre for people who cannot handle reality; to its critics, Sci-Fi is for people who lack “common sense” because their heads are in the clouds—or, in the stars. Yet such derision has also been leveled against physicists of string theory (whose equations rely on dimensions beyond our perceptions) or philosophers of ontology (whose work challenges conventional conceptions of “reality”). However, in this course we will investigate how Science Fiction interrogates our customary beliefs in order to give us “uncommon sense.”

Sci-Fi invites us into the mysteries of the most mind-blowing disciplines—from aesthetics to metaphysics. Over the semester students will read, watch, and discuss myriad texts that cover issues that perplex society’s most ardent intellectuals. For this course, students will need to bring a curiosity about the universe and your place within it in order to better understand, analyze, and write about such extraordinary issues. Nonetheless, those issues will come packaged as stories about alien invasions and artificial intelligence. By reading, discussing, and writing about life’s outstanding questions students may come to see that reality is for people who cannot handle Science Fiction.

50960 LIT 4934 Seminar in Literature MW 1240-1610 Clark Lunberry

Plays begin as words on a page, as writing to be read. Directors must study what the playwright has written, and actors must memorize their lines before going on the stage. However, once the play begins, the written words give way, or are replaced by, the performance and enactment of that writing. Together, we are all then supposed to forget the written text from which a play begins, as the words are performed before us, embodied on the stage. But what about when we read a play to ourselves, silently or aloud, as a form of dramatic literature? How is such language, as language, to be handled and engaged, seen and imagined prior to its performed appearance (and disappearance)—the words, as words, given the illusion of life? 

In this class, we will look at four plays by Shakespeare with each play thought about and discussed as both written and filmed texts. Approaching theater in this “corrupted,” un-staged manner, various questions will be asked: in reading a scene from a play (instead of viewing it in a theater), how are the dramatic actions imagined and seen? As envisioned in the “mind’s eye,” might the very act of reading drama be understood to empower the reader, by empowering the imagination, turning those reading the play into the play’s director, stage manager, costume designer (as well as the single spectator sitting alone in the audience.

Also, what happens to "live" theater when it's filmed and turned into a film? What's lost in the process when the “real time/real life” dimension of theater is eliminated? But also, what's gained by the camera's framing of events, the film's freezing of fleeting action? In this class, we will explore the unique qualities of theater, alongside the unique qualities of film, alongside the unique qualities of language. What happens when these three forms come together (or collide)?

50295 THE 2000 Theater Appreciation ONLINE Maureen McCluskey

This course is for students interested in understanding and appreciating one of the oldest art forms in the world. In order to learn more about theatrical production, plays, musicals, acting, and design, students will study theater terminology, history, research, and complete creative projects. 

14464 CRW 3211 Creative Nonfiction Workshop TR 0925-1040 Jennie Ziegler

Fans of adventure, intrigue, and the great outdoors will love this Creative Nonfiction workshop coming Spring 2025 to a classroom near you. We will be reading and workshopping our way through the perils of personal essays, the language of lyric essays, and hypnotizing hybrid forms. Let’s write about science, space, and spectacle! Let’s write about Disney, dreams, and…dinner? Leave expectations at the door: we’ll be crafting new ones.   

14465 CRW 3310 Poetry Workshop MW 1330-1445 Frederick Dale

We will workshop original poems and produce critiques of both our own texts, as well as the poems of the poets in our workshop groups. You will turn in “final poems” five times during the semester (two poems at a time, for an aggregate of ten or so “final poems” for the semester). We will concentrate our readings on three poets: Hala Alyan (The Moon that Turns you Back), Nicky Beer (Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes), and Rachel Mann (Eleanor Among the Saints). In addition to the poems and critiques, each student will write a formal, academic essay (minimum of five pages) that focuses on two poems from one of the three assigned poets.

15229 CRW 3610 Screenwriting Workshop Online Stephan Boka

Screenwriting Workshop will breakdown the script writing process into a scene-by-scene, page-by-page, line-by-line analysis. Students are expected to write, read, and critique scripts on a weekly basis in an effort to produce a feature-length screenplay by the semester’s end.

14472 CRW 3930 Short Form Creative Writing TR 1800-1915 Mark Ari

We are all beginners. Each of us, however long we’ve been writing, is striving to get better at it. That’s part of what it is to be a writer. Maybe we do so in the service of some greater truth.  Maybe we do it because we can build worlds and that’s an exciting thing to do.  Maybe we do it because there is something in our lives that compels is to respond in the remarkable way language affords.  This course focuses on brief works to explore student interests and open new possibilities.  Students will learn to tap the reliable resources of their imaginations to experiment with a variety of approaches to fiction, creative nonfiction, prose poetry, and/or hybrid forms.  Risk-taking is encouraged.  Laughter is relished. 

13139 ENC 3202 Professional Communications Business TR1630-1745 Michael (Dean) Rice

This course interlocks with your surrounding business curriculum. It’s designed to help you practice fluency in the language of business—by immersion, reading workplace documents. In discussing these documents, evaluating them, and responding in kind, you become more businesslike in your writing. But beyond that, you practice the virtues of all professional communication—accountability, truthfulness, and attentiveness. All responsible members of professional communities—chemists, economists, nurses, architects, students, teachers—use certain kinds of language to help illuminate and solve problems. So, by the end of the term, if we’re doing this wholeheartedly, we should be more insightful participants in professional and public life—in short, better citizens.
The course has four modules. Within each one, we read several professional texts related to your fields; these pieces form the basis for each module’s project. In general, we are learning to “reverse engineer” the practices common to professional documents. For an outline of each module, its project, and its points—see Modules in Canvas.
Each writing assignment will be assessed with ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ rubrics available to you.

13140 ENC 3202 Professional Communications Business TR1505-1620 Michael (Dean) Rice

This course interlocks with your surrounding business curriculum. It’s designed to help you practice fluency in the language of business—by immersion, reading workplace documents. In discussing these documents, evaluating them, and responding in kind, you become more businesslike in your writing. But beyond that, you practice the virtues of all professional communication—accountability, truthfulness, and attentiveness. All responsible members of professional communities—chemists, economists, nurses, architects, students, teachers—use certain kinds of language to help illuminate and solve problems. So, by the end of the term, if we’re doing this wholeheartedly, we should be more insightful participants in professional and public life—in short, better citizens.
The course has four modules. Within each one, we read several professional texts related to your fields; these pieces form the basis for each module’s project. In general, we are learning to “reverse engineer” the practices common to professional documents. For an outline of each module, its project, and its points—see Modules in Canvas.
Each writing assignment will be assessed with ³ÉÈËAVÊÓƵ rubrics available to you. 

15233 ENG 3613 Disability and Care, w/optional CBL* TR 0925-1040 Chris Gabbard

Care is not just a good feeling but also a difficult, stressful action. As care ethicist Eva Feder Kittay writes: “care is a costly morality.” Across multiple literary genres, caregiver and disabled characters work through issues of engrossment, embodiment, dependence, ableism, abandonment, and ethical choice. Examining a diverse range of texts including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, we observe that certain themes recure: the relation of love to care and the way care, labor, and power interact. Along with literary texts, we will examine the writing of care ethicists such as Kittay and attend to forms of expression generated by extraordinary bodies and minds. Course assignments: daily reading quizzes and questions, a midterm and final, and an end-of-semester PowerPoint presentation.

*ENG3613 contains an optional Community Based Learning (CBL) component involving students volunteering at one of Jacksonville’s two exceptional student centers, Mt. Herman or Alden Road, or at the Developmental Learning Center in Murray Hill. Students undertake 16 hours of CBL volunteering over the course of the semester, usually for two hours per week for eight weeks. Those who complete the volunteering can count on Prof. Gabbard to write glowing letters of recommendations for graduate school, internships, scholarships, grants, and/or employment. He will write as many letters of recommendation as the student needs, for as long as the student needs them. That’s a guarantee! The volunteer work also looks great on a resume! However, ENG3613 students are not required to take part.

14481 ENG 4013 Approaches to Literary Interpretation TR 1505-1620 Michael Wiley

In this course, we will explore literary concepts, terms, and interpretive approaches that contribute to an understanding of the richness, pleasures, and challenges of fiction, poetry, drama, film, and other work. We will draw heavily from An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory (6th edition), by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, and will consider the points they discuss in relation to Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden.

12706 ENL 2022 British Literature II TR 1215-1330 Michael Wiley

In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about British literary texts from 1800 until the present, considering the benefits and drawbacks of categorizing literature according to the times and places in which writers produce it. We will consider literary periods separately while also examining the relations between them, and we will look at and question ideas of Britishness. Readings will include poetry, prose fiction, and prose nonfiction, with an emphasis on poetry. 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. We will read selections from William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and other writers who have changed the ways we think, talk, and write.

15266, 15267 IDS 1932 Mythmaking MW 0900-1015 Will Pewitt

How do the stories we hear as children influence us individually, culturally, politically? How are our concepts of terms like Love, Time, Nature, Heroism, or Power defined by the tales we are told—and the ways we retell them? How do the myths of our societies recur, and in what senses do our lives reflect (or repel) their values? In this Interdisciplinary Studies course for Honors students, we will examine how certain mythological commonalities evolve from antiquity to modernity and how we shape (and are shaped by) old myths to suit new situations, whether in children’s fables or pop culture films.

We will survey not only a number of fantastical stories from several global cultures but also an interdisciplinary array of perspectives through which to read, discuss, and interpret how these narratives have meaning for their times, places, and peoples. In many ways oral stories like myths, legends, and folk tales—though they tend to be denigrated as narratives we “outgrow” often reveal a great deal to us and about us since their authors are not one single individual but are rather an entire culture. In the course we will investigate such narratives across various cultures and investigate them using a variety of disciplinary methods. In doing so, students will engage in hands-on activities, games, and discussions that allow us to see how disparate fields and different stories help us understand the human experience.

13510 LIT 2000: Introduction of Literature, “Writing the Body” TR 1050-1205 Clark Lunberry

“That is why as a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write.” —Dr. William Carlos Williams

 “Never generalize. Never theorize. Pay attention to the particulars. Focus on the concrete.” —Dr. Anton Chekhov 

What is it that a good doctor and a good writer have in common? The most obvious answer is that both must pay close attention to the world around them … “to focus on the concrete.” They must see lucidly and intelligently, with care and compassion, in order to describe (and to diagnose) the unique facts and features of the place, the person (the patient) before them. Two of modernism’s greatest writers were — not coincidentally — also doctors: the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and the New Jersey-based American William Carlos Williams (1883-1963).

In this class, we will read a selection of short stories (Chekhov & Williams) and poetry (Williams) by these two remarkable doctors/writers, seeking to understand more fully the ways in which their being doctors impacted their being writers, and how the one vocation may have fed and fueled the other. All of our materials will be the starting-off point for class discussions, your own creative projects and presentations, and your own extended essays. 

15218 LIT 4042 Dramatic Lit: Tragic Pleasure/ Tragic Women "Trigger Warnings & Unsafe Spaces" TR 1340-1455 Clark Lunberry

“The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad… Hence, they are in error who censure Euripides just because he follows this principle in his plays, many of which end unhappily. It is, we have to say, the right ending.” —Aristotle’s Poetics

There is a long and glorious tradition of playwrights creating brutal and distressing work that is deliberately intended to shock, provoke and “hurt” those witnessing it. Audiences seem to eat it up, seek it out. But one might reasonably wonder why? What is the enduring appeal of such troubling and tragic material, of its terrors and tribulations? Are we—like voyeurs at the scene of a car crash—merely titillated on some base level to tease at the taboos, poke at the horror? Or is it somehow instructional to stare at the sadness of others, their sufferings acted out before us, thus allowing larger lessons to be learned, burned “in the memory,” as Nietzsche noted? For, as Aristotle insisted, such tragedies might still, through “pity and fear,” offer an audience, cathartically, a “true tragic pleasure.” But what kind of “pleasure” could this truly be? In this course, with the burning issue of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” in mind, our focus will be upon the many triggering stories and unsafe spaces created in Euripides and Seneca’s ancient theatrical depictions of Medea (seen in the photo) and Phaedra (the two women forming our classical background), and then on to more modern productions, among them Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Jean Genet’s The Maids, Samuel Beckett Happy Days, Sarah Kane Phaedra’s Love, Will Eno The Flu Season, and Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone.

13884 LIT 4243 Major Authors: Frost MW 1030-1145 ONLINE Jason Mauro

This course will be an introduction to Robert Frost’s work, and to poetry more generally through his work. For such simple sounding work, Robert Frost’s poetry has been championed and appropriated by a truly startling array of interpretive communities.  Ezra Pound sought to align him with American Expatriates in Europe; regionalists wished to see him as the darling bard of New England, and an extension of the Georgian poetic tradition.  Lionel Trilling characterized him as the darkest of modern poets; economic conservatives of the 30’s and 40’s saw him as a champion of “laissez-faire” individualism.  Pragmatists see him as a disciple of William James; post-structuralists as enabling the dismantling of the subject.  This class will examine both the work that has generated such various, often contradictory critical responses, and some of responses themselves.  My wish is to regard this class as a workshop in considering this most widely known, but perhaps least comprehended poet.

12936 LIT 4650 CL: Madness and Modernism, “Out of My Mind” TR 1505-1620 Clark Lunberry

 “The capacity for self-reflection is given to man alone –  that is why he has, so to speak, the privilege of madness.” —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher (1770–1831)

  It may seem crazy but for some time now a rich and powerful body of literature and art has been building around the topic of madness, insanity, the loss of mind. In fact, crazy or not, stories and images of and about madness have, again and again, proven to be a source of fascination in much modern and contemporary writing and art. Something about the derangements of mind would appear to have promised many writers and artists access to worlds otherwise unseen, unfelt, unimagined—an opportunity to escape the sanely familiar and to investigate forbidden zones of thought and emotion outside the bounds of conventional imagination, rational formulation.

But what is really found in these often-terrifying spaces of alienation and despair, darkness and danger, and what is gained through their fictional representation and examination? Why would one want to go there at all? What’s to be learned? What’s to be feared?

Our readings will move from, among others, Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, selected poems by Emily Dickinson and Charles Baudelaire, Anton Chekhov’s Ward No. 6, Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, Antonin Artaud’s letters, and W. J. T. Mitchell recent book Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia. Looking also at images of madness in the visual arts (painting, photography, and film), and using Sander L. Gilman’s remarkable book Seeing the Insane, we will always keep our eyes fixed onto the present, the mad world around us, and the shifting boundaries determining our own sense of self, our own always vulnerable self-confinements.

13886 LIT 4934 Writing Creatively and Critically in the Archives TR 1630-1745 Laura Heffernan

This seminar will focus on creative and critical approaches to writing about, with, against, and around archival documents and objects. Part of the seminar will cover the basics of archival research and discovery: What are archives and special collections? How do archivists process collections so that researchers can access them? How do archivists think and write critically about their own methods? We will also consider how creative writers have used archival materials to create new forms, fill gaps in the historical record, or write against official documents. Readings may include A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Students will have a choice of various forms of archival writing for a final project, including grant application-style proposals to revalue or transform existing collections; critical essays on archival theory and practice; or creative engagements with specific local or national archival collections. 

15501 AML 6507 Unscarred Texts / Florida Lit W 18:10-20:45 Keith Cartwright

This seminar will take up the notion of American Exceptionalism, considered in relation to recent Florida legislation affecting the classroom, and read primarily through texts that represent Florida. Florida literature offers a great window into discussion of the idea of American exceptionalism, and we draw deeply upon the state's folklore (fables, fairy tales, legends) to frame discussion through a popular (and highly international) lens of vision. We will also inevitably end up engaging notions of Florida exceptionalism, "Florida Man," for example. Readings will be framed by fables that ask us to consider the longer assignments in relation to another, perhaps wilder dimension. Several featured texts are historical novels opening up a sweep of time.

The course draws its title from a West African (Wolof) tale about a woman who refuses to marry a man with a scar. In her search for flawlessness, she ends up with a perfect demon. We will look to how Edgar Alan Poe used this tale as a base for presenting ideas of American perfection during the Seminole wars—via a perfect cyborg-hero assembled flawless part by part. Having launched this 20th and 21st-century literature seminar in the 19th century, we'll move to read more recent Florida writers and representations of Florida, including work on Florida from international writers, as well as material from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Louisiana (for having been "West Florida" not too long ago). From modern and contemporary writers who have lived in Jacksonville (James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessica Q Stark) to writers and/or material from Choctaw Nation, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco, Vietnam, Spain, England, and maybe-Saturn, this seminar will discuss a rich mix of story and lyric, space and time, as we engage ideas of exceptionalism, flawlessness, perfect grammar, political correctness, and technologies of progress and perfection.

The seminar aims to combine conceptual rigor with respect for students' time and energy. We will move with care, bit by bit, text by text, reading/writing for the reassuring scars in texts and doing our best to keep the demonic at bay.

15500 CRW 6925: Advanced Genre Fiction T 1800-2045 Michael Wiley

This creative writing workshop in genre fiction will focus on the full process of writing genre fiction from “reading as writers” to writing, revising, and editing stories to guiding our stories toward publication. Each class member will write, workshop, and prepare for submission at least one substantial story in any of the major genres. As part of the course, we will discuss distinctions between genre and literary fiction as well as crossover (upmarket or general) fiction. We will also consider the differences between conventionality and the manipulation of conventions and the effects of each. We will consider genre-specific stylistics. And we will identify potential markets for our stories and address questions about how these markets might or might not shape our writing. Periodically, New York Times bestselling, Amazon bestselling, Emmy Award-winning, and top genre writers will join us (in person or by Zoom) to discuss craft and publishing.

14480 LIT6246 The Absurdity of Laurence Sterne M 1810-2045 Chris Gabbard

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was the first anti-novel, parodying the realist novel that at the time (1760s) was establishing itself as the premiere literary genre. Many of Sterne’s contemporaries considered his book obscene, preposterous and infuriating, the opposite of what a novel should be. Samuel Johnson expressed the critical consensus when, in 1776, he said: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” But Johnson was wrong. Today, this novel is considered a classic of world literature along with Don Quixote, Candide, Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Students will produce reader response questions, research and present the content of scholarly articles, moderate class discussions, and write a modest research paper. This course satisfies early, British, and author requirements.