Courses

The UF courses listed below, taught by SFWG members, include substantial science fiction, fantasy, or utopian literary content.

Fall 2020 | Spring 2020 | Fall 2019 | Summer 2019 | Spring 2019 | Fall 2018 | Summer 2018
Spring 2018 | Fall 2017 | Spring 2017 | Fall 2016 | Spring 2016 | Fall 2015

Fall 2020

Undergraduate Courses

ENG 1131. Thomas Johnson (Dept. of English), “American Fantasy and Cultural Prestige”

This class will examine the rise of American fantasy television from a niche, cult genre to unprecedented cultural prominence and influence over the last decade. The early 21st-century saw a new brand of premium cable TV that branded itself as “quality” and realist by default. This categorization went largely unchallenged until the premiere of Game of Thrones in 2011. Based on a book series that appealed to readers of mass-market fantasy, the show represents an attempt by premium cable to appeal to a previously untapped market of genre fiction fans without alienating a core audience that engaged with its programming on the premise that it was more aesthetically refined and psychologically complex than “ordinary” television. As Game of Thrones rose to unprecedented cultural prominence over the next decade, the show brought issues to the fore of the cultural conversation that the fantasy genre has long negotiated – the nuances of fan engagement, the ethics of postcolonialism, questions of feminist representation, and debates over politics and religion.

In this course, students will come to a better understanding of how fantasy television has increasingly influenced American culture as it has risen in cultural prominence. Students will explore how the reception of fantasy television influences its narrative trajectory and ideological messages in a manner unique to the medium. Students will learn how to rigorously engage with popular texts through four critical viewing responses, an annotated bibliography, and a critical research paper on show of their choice within the genres of fantasy and/or science fiction. Finally, students will become cognizant of the realities of television development and network branding by writing a pitch for a prospective fantasy show to a premium cable network or streaming platform.

ENG 1145. Danielle Jordan (Dept. of English), “Writing About Worlds to Come”

Stranded polar bears, apocalyptic fire-storms, and tree-hugging hippies. These are just a few of the cliché images often used to tell stories of climate change. But why do we rely on these over-simplifications? Representing our environment is no simple task. Climate change is not only abstract, it is taking place over a large amount of space and time, making it impossible to convey its magnitude, causes, and effects in a single work of art. Still, a rich body of literature and film has arisen and continues to emerge around this pressing global issue.

During this course we will look at a number of novels and films that seek to represent the potential futures of a world impacted by climate change. Each unit will pose a specific focus, allowing us to think through the various strengths and limits of different representational strategies. To think through dystopia and climate catastrophe, we will read The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler. We’ll follow with a unit on Utopia including Kim Stanley Robinson’s “ecotopia” novel, Pacific Edge (1990), and Duncan Jones’s post-oil film Moon (2009). Finally, we will turn to Annihilation (2014), the first book from Jeff VanderMeer’s widely read Southern Reach Trilogy, and Shane Carruth’s marvelous film Upstream Color (2013) to analyze texts that rely on extreme abstraction and strategies of the “weird” to convey changing ecologies.

Throughout this course we place a heavy emphasis on the importance of representing the future. Our aim will be to better understand how our notions of the future impact how we engage in the present. Assignments will include discussion posts/responses, analytical essays, one short creative writing project, and a final research paper.

ENG 4133. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Films of Environmental Crisis”

This course is a survey of the semiotics and imaginative ecologies of films of environmental crisis. (Here “crisis” applies to stories of natural and human-made disasters as well as changes in weather and climate that catalyze the plot, images, and sounds of a film.) We will view and discuss primarily narrative fiction films, in which human characters are thrust into conditions of environmental transformation – alienation, upheaval, collapse, extinction, and re-creation – and confront new relations to other humans and other beings of the natural and built worlds. A key emphasis of the course is on learning how to see environmental elements of a film as more than scenery or allegorical doubles of characters’ emotions and actions: as real, determinant situations of subjectivity and agency in the medium of film.

Films we will view and discuss include: Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, Holland, 1929), Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (UK, 1961), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (US, 1972), Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (Australia, 1977), Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime, Japan, 1997), Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand (Casa de areia, Brazil, 2005), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (Sānxiá hǎorén, China, 2006), Sylvère Petit’s The Fanning Bees (Les Ventileuses, France, 2010), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (S. Korea/Czech Republic, 2013), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia 2015), Jennifer Baichwal’s Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (Canada, 2018), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lija’s Aniara (Sweden/Denmark, 2018).

ENG 4936. Pietro Bianchi (Dept. of English), “The Weird, the Eerie and the Uncanny”: Contemporary Narratives of Horror and Extinction”

What happens when the world ceases to be perceived as a substance but starts to appear as a shadow? What if another dimension of existence suddenly arises in the texture of reality but is unable to fully disclose? In 1919 Freud referred to this dimension as the uncanny: something that, while being overly familiar, appears as weirdly out of place. Something – Mark Fisher would say almost a century later – that is at the same time frightening and promising another world.

This course will be an overview of the emergence of figures of weird, eerie and uncanny in contemporary imaginary: from David Lynch to True Detective; from the Lovecraftian literature of Thomas Ligotti, to contemporary pessimist neo-rationalists philosophers such as Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier; from Jordan Peele’s horror films to narratives about anthropocene and climate catastrophes. Our guiding question will be: why today it is easier to imagine horrors, supernatural creatures and human extinction instead of revolutionary social transformations?

LIT 4930. Richard Burt (Dept. of English), “Poe Scrypts”

We will read Edgar Allan Poe’s major shorts stories and his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in relation to their posthumous reception (Baudelaire, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida), cryptography, crypts, and race theory. For comparative purposes, relevant short stories by M.R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.P. Lovecraft as well as the novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself will also be included. Requirements: Three short papers, co-leading class discussion twice, and written responses twice a week.

LIT 4930. Dragan Kujundzic (Center for Jewish Studies), “Vampire Cinema”

No course description available.

Spring 2020

Undergraduate Courses

AML 4170. Tace Hedrick (Dept. of English), “Race and Sexuality in Twenty-First Century Paranormal Romance”

The study of women’s popular writing has been a minor but constant theme in feminist theory. Indeed, critics have shown that even under the pressures of a changing scene of racialized and class power, the genre of women’s romance still struggles to say what makes white women desirable. Here, we will discuss one aspect of women’s popular writing In early twenty-first century United States, the paranormal romance, as it is imagined not just by white women writers but women writers of color as well as of differing classes and sexualities. Our understandings of the constraints of genre – through our readings in theory and criticism – in particular will help inform us where questions about feminism, race, class, and sexualities might be brought to bear in this particular popular genre. Thus, we will be reading how women writers of color and of differing sexualities attempt to operate within, while also having to change, an affective and deeply rooted investment in the remains of white middle-class conventions of the romance.

ENC 1145. Bri Anderson (Dept. of English). “Writing About Body Horror”

Reveling in the disgusting and the taboo, body horror evokes fear and revulsion in equal measures through graphic depictions of deformed, diseased, and mutated human bodies. Here, death and destruction come not at the hands of a knife-wielding killer or a vengeful spirit, but from within as one’s own treacherous body transforms uncontrollably into a gruesome new form. While body horror is traditionally associated with films such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), the genre has infiltrated a variety of media, appearing in comics, music videos, science fiction novels, and even Skittles advertisements. Why do we continue to read and watch these nauseating narratives, even as their grotesque displays of ruined bodies dare us to turn away? How does body horror serve as a dark mirror that reflects cultural preoccupations with embodiment?

This course will explore how body horror texts from a range of historical periods and mediums expose shifting societal anxieties surrounding corporeal and historical traumas. First, we will investigate how depictions of monstrous bodies in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) shape contemporary iterations of the genre. Next, we will analyze representations of gender and sexuality in texts dealing with pregnancy, puberty, and sex, such as Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984), Charles Burn’s comic Black Hole (2005), and the animated television series Big Mouth (2017–present). Finally, we will examine how portrayals of “freakish” or mutilated bodies in works like Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love (1989) and the television series American Horror Story: Asylum (2012) perpetuate or complicate ableist narratives of disability and illness. Throughout the course, our analyses will devote particular attention to the ways that body horror depicts marginalized bodies. Whose bodies are subjected to transformation, and what are the ethics of consuming these revolting narratives?

ENC 1145. Samantha Baugus (Dept. of English), “Writing About Animals”

Humans are fascinated by animals and the role(s) they have played in our communities: food, entertainment test subject, friend, worker, predator. We, as humans, have written endless narratives about animals imagining their lives and projecting our own thoughts about animals lives on to their experiences. This course will explore what we write about animals and why. We’ll be investigating three kinds of writing about animals: writing with animals (human narrator accounts of experiences with animals), writing for animals (fictional or fictionalized accounts of animal lives), and writing by animals (animal “autobiographies”). Through the investigation of these three subgenres we will try to answer questions about the place of animals in the modern world, our moral and ethical responsibilities to animals, and how to write about those who cannot write for themselves.

Writing assignments will include analysis papers of assigned readings or viewings and writing about your own experiences with animals, as well as reflective responses and other homework and in-class assignments.

Possible readings and viewings could include “The Writer of the Acacia Seeds” by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Only Harmless Great Things by Brooke Bolander, selections from Speaking Up For Animals by Lisa Kemmerer, We3 by Grant Morrison, Call of the Cats by Andrew Bloomfield, Homeward Bound, Watership Down, A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam, Dewey by Vicki Myron.

Content Warning: This course will involve reading and seeing depictions of animal abuse, death, and violence. Please do not register for this class if you’ll find this material too disturbing.

LIT 4930. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Verne, Wells & Co.: European Science Fiction of the Late Nineteenth Century”

Defining the canon of nineteenth-century European science fiction (SF) seems to lead, inevitably, to also embracing doubtful analogies and inventive anachronisms. American editor Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 endorsement of “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story” as the model for what Gernsback christened “scientifiction” – later “science fiction” – is telling in this regard. Verne, Wells, and Poe are among the precursors of modern SF, but in most respects they are dissimilar from each other. Many other, equally dissimilar, figures also contributed to the incunable period of SF, the complexity of which confounds such comparisons.

Labels such as “proto-SF,” “early SF,” or “Victorian SF” – the last of which is too closely associated with one national tradition to be really useful – may help to mark the field’s development. But they also beg the question of what SF was, really, during this early phase when it had no widely-accepted name and the distinctive traits of its national traditions in the twentieth century were equally undefined. During the late nineteenth century “SF” is at best a placeholder for a radically diverse, inconsistent field of literary production that emerged, haltingly, out of traditions of utopian fiction, satirical contes, and imaginary voyages, and in relation to other literary movements, such as romanticism, realism, naturalism, and early modernism.

In this course we will read long and short works of fantastic fiction by mostly British and French authors of the period whose names are known to you (such as Verne and Wells), some (such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Florence Dixie, Enrique Gaspar, Richard Jefferies, Albert Robida, J.–H. Rosny aîné) who may be unfamiliar, and others, major literary figures of the period whom you probably didn’t know wrote fantastic fiction (Guy de Maupassant, George Sand).

Our aim will be not to solve the taxonomic problems noted above. I’m not sure that we will settle on one definition of “science fiction,” so much as we will survey the landscape of an adventurous, nuanced, messy proto-canon that was then – and still is – in search of its meaning and place in the modern literary, technological, and ecological imaginations.

All assigned readings will be in English or English translation. Writing requirements include a take-home midterm and a final research paper.

REL 2930 & REL 3938. Erin Prophet (Dept. of Religion), “Religion and the Paranormal”

As many as three-quarters of Americans believe in ghosts. The majority hold other paranormal beliefs as well. What does this tell us about the future of religion? We will examine the paranormal as an “other” category for both religion and science. Organized religion uses it to distinguish the miraculous from unsanctioned activities like witchcraft and the occult. Science frames itself as the opposite of superstition. And yet in a “disenchanted” world, it’s important to ask why we continue to be fascinated with the paranormal, as seen in the explosion of the topic in film (horror, superheroes), television, gaming and manga. This course takes a multi-methodological approach that includes critical theory, folklore studies, laboratory research, and cognitive science. It also examines the role of the paranormal in human experience of healing and psychological transformation. Topics include telepathy, precognition, UFOs, government-sponsored research (US and Soviet), cryptozoology (Bigfoot, etc.), hauntings, curses and taboos, near-death experiences, possession (including erotic encounters), mediums, and channeling. Students will learn to look critically at both the phenomena and attempts to explain them.

The 3938 section will complete two papers and additional reading assignments to engage more deeply with philosophical concepts.

Graduate Courses

AML 6017. Stephanie Smith (Dept. of English), “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic(s)”

In our era of “terrorism,” it should come as no surprise that the Gothic underpinnings of the American literary tradition are being re-examined, as in Paul Hurh’s recent book American Terror:The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (2016). In this century, peaceful civilian populations increasingly face various forms of violent destabilization, from armed ideological conflicts to brutal domestic policing tactics. Since fear and terror are the heart of the Gothic tradition, a re-examination of the labor done in that genre seems fitting. In Europe, the castle, the dungeon, hauntings and secret chambers were central features of Gothics, in other words, the architecture that supposedly denotes civilization where dread and horror reign instead. In the United States, Gothicism is rooted in a different history: a Puritan religious and capitalist heritage in which xenophobia, racism, sexism, slavery, servitude, and genocide all had (have?) a place. The secret chambers of the castle became the cave in the wilderness or the depths of the forests, the hold of the boat, the slave-auction, the prison and the closet, places where exploitation, discrimination and torture belied the rational Enlightenment theories upon which the nation was founded.

Fall 2019

Undergraduate Courses

AML 4311. Stephanie A. Smith (Dept. of English), “Ursula K. Le Guin”

Once hailed as a ‘living legend’ during her life-time, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin passed away at the age of 88 in January 2018. Now recognized as one of the greatest authors of our time, Le Guin created new and alien worlds that yet always speak to deeply important issues in our own lives, and to what it means to be human. By turns witty and wild, mischievous and yet dangerous, Le Guin’s consummate ability to both entertain and make the reader think is a rare and radiant combination that this class will explore by examining her multi-faceted career as a novelist, poet, essayist and children’s book author. Texts will range from Le Guin’s young adult Earthsea novels, to her Hainish Universe novels, from her essays to selected poetry.

ENC 1145. Mitch Murray (Dept. of English), “Why Read Now?”

No doubt we all agree reading is important. But why? What does it mean to actually read something? Seriously, what even is reading? And why should we do it? Answers to these questions are far less obvious than one probably at first thinks.

Nonetheless, this course seeks answers to these fundamental questions about reading, and they begin to take shape, this course presumes, when we reflect on how we read. We will reflect on our own reading habits by turning to texts in which encounters with artworks – or in which the acts of reading, writing, and the creation of readerly experience – are central, from the estrangements of European modernism (Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka) and Jorge Luis Borges’s fantastic stories to contemporary poetry and science fiction (William Gibson, Cathy Park Hong, Ted Chiang).

Often understood as a solitary act, we will see that reading is quite the opposite: it is a social act. Reading helps us to narrate – and thus to make thinkable – the relationships that structure our everyday lives. Given this grounding presupposition, how does one not only read but read well? More particularly, how does one read well in the 21st century? And, more importantly, to what ends? How does one read generously, ethically, politically? How can reading, and the shared experience of a text, enable us to stitch artistic and cultural texts into the fabric of our individual and collective lives, to reflect on and shape the makeup of our reality?

This course will be of interest to students wanting to learn about how literature, and culture more generally, underwrite daily life; how to become conscious readers of all sorts of cultural “texts”; and how to better understand how art and culture play fundamental roles in how we relate to each other at all levels of social life, in ways seen and unseen. Fair warning: the assigned readings will likely be challenging to many students. But these challenges themselves will be a significant part of our discussions, and the texts will be rewarding to those seeking to rethink their own assumptions about, and approaches to, reading literature.

ENG 4954. Tace Hedrick (Dept. of English), “Octavia Butler”

We are reading the work of Octavia Butler (1947–2006), black feminist speculative fiction writer. Although few readers were aware of her until well into the 1990s, her work has garnered more and more attention for its examination of connections between “alien” otherness, theories of genetic interdependence, and race and sexuality. We will be reading her major works, including her best-known Xenogenesis trilogy. We will be looking at some of her varied influences – sociobiology and evolutionary biology, the possibility of telepathy, positive thinking and laws of attraction – as well as what she had to say in interviews about race, gender, and politics in her writing and in the United States.

LIT 3400. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “The Literature of Sustainability & Resilience”

This course takes as its founding premises two unassailable principles. First, we live in an time of increasing environmental instability, mass extinction, food insecurity, and social and economic unrest fostered by climate change. Second, the literary imagination is among our most powerful and adaptive responses to the planetary realities of the twenty-first century and a path forward to a more just, sustainable, and resilient future.

We will read widely from an established and emerging canon of literary nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and criticism that address the perils and vitality of the late Anthropocene. Authors we will read include conservationists, naturalists, and ecologists such as Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Arne Næss, H.T. Odum, and Henry David Thoreau; fiction authors such as Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Emmi Itäranta, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Alexis Wright; poets and artists such as Madhur Anand, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Ronald Johnson, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Natasha Myers, and Walt Whitman; and a small but diverse corpus of contemporary scholars working in critical animal, plant, and sustainability studies.

Graded assignments include several short essays on assigned readings, a creative exercise in flash climate fiction, and a take-home final.

See http://users.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/ for a course syllabus.

LIT 4930. Stephanie A. Smith (Dept. of English), “Breaking Boundaries, an SF Creative Writing Workshop”

From that inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body and/or soul, in order to more fully understand what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we call robots, androids or cyborgs, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, or psychological ones, in which human perception plays a significant role, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this writing workshop we shall revisit some older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, while we perform some fictional thought-experiments of our own. We will workshop those experiments, read and critique our own works, and strive to create fictions about our future(s).

Students who want to apply to take this class must send a writing sample of no more than 5 pages to Professor Smith at ssmith@ufl.edu by March 20, 2019. Your name and UFID number must appear on the writing sample.

Graduate Courses

LIT 6934. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English) “Climate Fiction”

As we enter an era of increasing climate instability, physical reality and the cultural imaginary of climate will shape how we envisage the collective futures of humans and other living creatures of the Earth. In this course we will investigate the contribution of the arts and humanities to our understanding of climate change. We will read a wide range of climate-related texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some nonfiction (climate studies, animal studies, plant studies, environmental humanities), but mostly from the emerging textual and graphic genres of climate fiction, stories that are grounded in realities of planetary climate crisis, mass extinction, climate-induced migration, and economic collapse: a world in which former habits of mind and body are incompatible with situations on the ground, in the air, and in the water. The diverse authors whose works we will study (Atwood, Ballard, Bacigalupi, Chanter, El Akkad, Ghosh, Itäranta, Lunde, Powers, Robinson, Stewart, Turner, Watkins, Wright and others) show that creating new habits is difficult; it is easier to find fear, cynicism, and despair – none of which responses, it is clear, is up to the challenges of the real futures that approach us.

Much of what we will read is, implicitly and explicitly, an indictment of the blind hubris, cruel appetite, and reckless improvidence that have pushed us all toward terrible ends. This course proposes that the literary imagination of climate, haunted by the allures and negations of crisis, may also point in the direction of an ethic of climate that embraces critical reflection, shared responsibility, and hopeful resolve.

See http://users.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/ for a course syllabus.

Summer 2019

Undergraduate Courses

LIT 3003. Chesya Burke (Dept. of English), “# Hashtag Black Girl Magic: The Narrative of Celebration, Community, and Resistance as Empowerment” (Summer A)

Severely premature babies are more likely to survive if they are Black and female. Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, smuggled hundreds of slaves to freedom while spying for the Union Army. Furthermore, Tubman never learned to read or write and suffered debilitating seizures and narcoleptic episodes due to being bashed in the head with a two-pound weight by an overseer. Henrietta Lacks’s body continues to produce arguably the most important cell lines in medical history (HeLa). Time and time again, Black women defy odds, spawning seemingly unexplained phenomena with no medical or rational explanation. Throughout history Black women’s accomplishments are overlooked and even derided. The hashtag Black Girl Magic seeks to correct this omission. This course will examine the way Black women use their narratives to voice change and how these narratives themselves have evolved and changed over time. We will attempt to answer the question: Are the narratives for and by black women useful tools for their freedom? Our key figures and texts will include Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and portions of comics written by black women. Titles include Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi and The Living Blood by Tananarive Due.

Writing assignments for this course will include short critical analysis essays, a historical analysis paper, a presentation, mid-term and final.

Spring 2019

Undergraduate Courses

AML 2410. Corinne Matthews (Dept. of English), “From Damsels in Distress to Dragon Slayers: Strong Female Characters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature”

What do Anne of Green Gables, Susan Pevensie, and Katniss Everdeen have in common? Each represents a stage in the development of the strong female character in children’s and young adult literature. But what makes bow-wielding Susan Pevensie—ultimately barred from the magical land of Narnia for liking lipstick, nylons, and parties a little too much – so different from her more contemporary counterpart Katniss, the archer of Hunger Games fame? What, exactly, makes a female character strong? And what do those judgments tell us about the cultures in which they first appear? In this class, we will investigate a number of depictions of female characters in children’s and young adult literature as we try to answer these questions.

As we follow the progression of the strong female character, we will read a number of texts from children’s and young adult literature in a variety of genres, including realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Potential texts include: Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L.M. Montgomery, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1978) by Elizabeth George Speare, Alanna: The First Adventure (1983) by Tamora Pierce, The Hero and the Crown (1987) by Robin McKinley, Ella Enchanted (1998) by Gail Carson Levine, Coraline (2006) by Neil Gaiman, The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins, Ash by Malinda Lo (2009), Nimona (2015) by Noelle Steverson, The Hate U Give (2017) by Angie Thomas, and Jane, Unlimited (2017) by Kristin Cashore.

Assignments may include an in-class presentation, short reading responses, a creative assignment, and three analysis papers. With each assignment, students will use close reading and analytical skills to develop critical arguments and engage with the class theme.

CLA 3930. Jennifer A. Rea (Dept. of Classics), “Heroes, Gods, and Monsters”

What kinds of monsters did the ancient Greeks and Romans imagine and why? What can monsters tell us about what is taboo? Who gets to define what is monstrous in a society?

This course will examine the origins of monsters in Greco-Roman literature and how our popular media either challenges or reinforces the stereotypes of the ancient world. Does Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer resemble an ancient Roman hero when he battles monsters? How does Black Panther take an ancient Roman myth about founding a city and transform it into a modern social commentary on heroes and immigration? Through an investigation of the ancients’ hopes and fears for the future, we will explore what makes re-imagining the monsters, heroes and gods of ancient Greece and Rome so appealing in fantasy and science fiction literature and popular media.

Readings will include works from classical antiquity. There will also be some viewing of excerpts from modern science fiction and fantasy films. Students are expected to be engaged in class discussions and to have read the required texts before coming to class. Course evaluation will include in-class writing and exams.

ENC 1145. Ayanni C.H. Cooper (Dept. of English), “Giant Monsters and Mega Mechs: The Monstrous in Media”

From the ancient epic Beowulf to 2018’s Pacific Rim Uprising, writers have used giant creatures to shock, terrify, and awe their audiences. But what is it about the gigantic that we find so alluring and terrifying? Why do we keep returning to these larger-than-life figures? This course will survey historical and contemporary narratives about giant monsters across media forms, including prose, poetry, film, animation, and comics. Pairing primary texts with historical sources and theoretical perspectives on the monstrous, horror, and science fiction, we’ll discuss the social commentary inherent in giant monster/robot narrative–and some of the global impact these stories have.

Over the course of the semester, we’ll cover a variety of pieces, including, but not limited to: Beowulf (c. 975); Jabberwocky (1871) by Lewis Carroll; The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells; King Kong (1933); Godzilla (1954); The Iron Man: A Children’s Story in Five Nights (1968) by Ted Hughes; Mobile Suit Gundam (1981); X-Men: Days of Future Past (1989) written by Chris Claremont, illustrated by John Byrne; The Iron Giant (1999); Neon Genesis Evangelion: You Are (Not) Alone (2007); Attack on Titan (2009/2013) by Hajime Isayama; Kaijumax (2015) by Zander Cannon; Monstress (2015) written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda; Shin Godzilla (2016); and Borne (2017) by Jeff VanderMeer.

Writing assignments will include multiple discussion posts throughout the semester, an in-class presentation, project prospectus, and a critical analysis paper. Students will use their close reading and analytical skills in the development of their discussions and assignments. Previous experience with film, comics, or Japanese media & culture are not required

ENC 1145. Samantha Baugus (Dept. of English), “Secondary Worlds and (Imaginary) Travel Narratives”

Traveling holds a complicated and tense position in society – people travel for pleasure and work, to escape persecution, to conquer new lands, to obey oppressive regimes and captors. But traveling is not limited to the reaches of the world as we know it. In this course we will be exploring travel to secondary worlds –  the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Why do people write about travel to places that don’t exist? Is there a difference between a fantastic travel narrative and a realistic travel narrative – and does that difference matter? Does secondary world travel exist outside of fiction, and should we go to these places? And, most importantly, what is a primary world and what is a secondary world?

Our texts will focus on traveling from the primary world to secondary worlds, to different versions of the primary world, and to imaginary places that are part of the primary world. By thinking about these three different kinds of travel, we will think about colonialism and imperialism (what happens when we go to a new world), identity politics (how we interact with the inhabitants of these new world), and the political stakes of inventing new world (why do we need to create the final frontier). Of equal importance will be logistics and modes of travel: what are the modes of traveling, how we make them, and how we get to secondary worlds?.

Writing assignments will include two literary/film analyses of one of the secondary world travel texts, an argumentative position paper on the function of secondary worlds, an argumentative paper on the existence of secondary worlds, and a travelogue creative assignment.

ENG 4936 (Honors Seminar). Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Reading Science Fiction: The Pulps”

The “pulps” were illustrated fiction magazines published between the late 1890s and the late 1950s. Named for the inexpensive wood pulp paper on which they were printed, they varied widely as to genre, including aviation fiction, fantasy, horror and weird fiction, detective and crime fiction, railroad fiction, romance, science fiction, sports stories, war fiction, and western fiction. In the pulps’ heyday a bookshop or newsstand might offer dozens of different magazines on these subjects, often from the same publishers and featuring work by the same writers, with lurid, striking cover and interior art by the same artists. The magazines are, moreover, chock-full of period advertising targeted at an emerging readership, mostly – but not exclusively – male and subject to predictable worries and aspirations during the Depression and Pre-WWII eras. (“Be a Radio Expert! Many Make $30 $50 $75 a Week!” “Get into Aviation by Training at Home!” “Listerine Ends Husband’s Dandruff in 3 Weeks!” “I’ll Prove that YOU, too, can be a NEW MAN! – Charles Atlas.”) The business end of the pulps was notoriously inconstant and sometimes shady; magazines came into and went out of publication with little fanfare; they often changed genres or titles without advance notice. In all, the pulp canon represents one of the most innovative, dynamic, and visually rich periods of modern fiction publishing.

We will focus on mostly American science fiction (sf) published between 1926 and 1945, during the heyday of the pulps up through the early “Golden Age” of sf and the beginning of the atomic era. We will examine magazines with titles such as Air Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Astonishing Stories, Astounding Stories, Marvel Science Stories, Planet Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Tales of Wonder, Unknown Fantasy Fiction, and Wonder Stories. We will read short fiction by authors such as Arthur Conan-Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Edmund Hamilton, Clare Winger Harris, Fritz Leiber, Murray Leinster, Catherine Lucille Moore, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, E.E. Smith, Leslie F. Stone, and Donald Wandrei. We will examine the work of pathbreaking sf illustrators such as Earl Bergey, Howard V. Brown, Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, Frank Kelley Freas, Frank R. Paul, and Norman Saunders.

Assigned course readings will include contemporary writing by sf historians and theorists such as Mike Ashley and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. Most of our reading will be from issues of the pulps themselves. We will, whenever possible, review the fiction we read in its original, holistic verbal-visual contexts, i.e., in the formats of its first publication, alongside the illustrations, advertising, other fiction, and editorial apparatus, forming a complete and culturally-rich and nuanced media ecology of the fantastic.

The course will include significant digital humanities work. We will spend a good deal of the semester, in and out of the classroom, foraging in digital archives and in databases devoted to the publishing history of the pulps, their authors, and illustrators. We will develop effective workflows for building critical archives of these materials, cataloging and sharing bibliographic data, and creating academically rigorous and entertaining exhibits.
Graded assignments include a take-home midterm and collaborative curated critical exhibits on a selected corpus of pulp sf on subjects selected by students.

LIT 4930. Stephanie Smith (Dept. of English), “Blending Boundaries, Breaking Barriers: An SF Workshop”

From the inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body, in order to more fully understand what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we call robots, androids or cyborgs, like the novel I, Robot, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, as in the novel Dawn, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this workshop we shall revisit older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, read critical theory about such works, and in the end perform some fictional thought-experiments about the body of our own. Readings will include probably include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, C.L. Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederick Pohl, Donna J. Haraway, Octavia Butler, and more

In order to be considered for admission to this workshop, you must submit a manuscript to the instructor. The manuscript should be a short story or excerpt from a longer work (no more than 20 pages). You must include your name, UFID number and UF email address on the title page. Submit a hard copy of your manuscript to Professor Smith’s mailbox in TUR 4301. The deadline for manuscript submission is October 15, 2018. You will be notified about your admissions status by October 29. If seats remain open in the workshop after the manuscript submission and review process, the course will be opened to general registration.

Fall 2018

Undergraduate Courses

AML 2410. Jill Coste (Dept. of English), “American Fairy Tales”

The contemporary fairy tale offers a rich landscape for thinking about agency, community, and the social structures that shape our reality. In this course, we will read a variety of fairy tales, both old and new, in order to examine what makes the contemporary fairy tale so powerful. We will address the literary fairy tale of the 18th and 19th centuries as a starting point from which contemporary revisions depart, and we will progress through revisions for children and adults alike to consider the cultural concerns and socializing methods at work in these tales. We will ask what qualities make up a fairy tale and determine how we arrived at those qualities. We will consider how contemporary fairy tales reflect societal anxieties about race, class, and gender, analyzing how subversion brings those anxieties to the forefront of cultural conversation. Our driving question will be: In what ways can we map contemporary concerns onto a fairy tale narrative, and vice versa?

Readings will include a selection of literary fairy tales and contemporary adaptations aimed at audiences of children, teens, and adults, respectively. We will also read criticism on the meaning of fairy tales and their significance as a distinct mode of composition.

As this is a composition course, students will work toward a final project that synthesizes their understanding of the power and flexibility of the contemporary fairy tale. Students will select a tale or trope to follow throughout the semester, writing a series of short papers that contextualize the topic and analyze that topic in adaptation. Students will also complete an image analysis project, considering the visual representation of their topic in various mediums. Finally, an annotated bibliography will prepare students for the final research paper.

ENG 4936. Stephanie Smith (Dept. of English), “Honors Seminar: Blending Boundaries, Breaking Barriers in SF”

From the inaugural work of body-modification, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, fictions that engage deeply with science have often sought to extend, explore, confuse or break the confines of the human body, in order to more fully understand what it means to be human. Whether contemplating technological interventions, such as the inventions we call robots, androids or cyborgs, like the novel I, Robot, or genetic ones, in which human genomes are scrambled, infected or recoded, as in the novel Dawn, SF has repeatedly sought to challenge the limits of both known science and accepted norms regarding human embodiment. In this honors seminar we shall revisit older fictions that take on the task of re-imagining the human body, read critical theory about such works, and in the end perform some fictional thought-experiments about the body of our own. Readings will include probably include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, C.L. Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederick Pohl, Donna J. Haraway, Octavia Butler, and more.

IDH 2930. Gregory Stewart (Dept. of Physics), “Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.”

Course description TBA.

IDH 2930. Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig (UF Health Science Center Library Archives), “What Makes a Monster?”

Course description TBA.

IDH 3931. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “The World to Come: Images of Climate Change”

We live in an age of growing ecological instability. Climate change, accelerating environmental degradation, and mass extinction are reshaping the collective futures of humans and other living things of the Earth on a scale that is without precedent in the memories of our civilization and our species. As we enter this new phase of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by human influence, our former habits of mind and body are increasingly incompatible with new situations on the ground, in the air, and under the water. But humans are by nature conservative and timorous; creating new habits is difficult for us, who find willful neglect, cynicism, and despair the easier solutions. In this course we will start with the fundamentally humanist conviction that how we prepare for and respond to the world to come, in practical terms, depends on how we may re-envision that world and our roles in it. Hopeful resolve to think and act differently, and the ability to do so, come to us first by way of the creative imagination.

Our model for this work of bearing witness and renewed insight will be a landmark art exhibition at UF’s Harn Museum of Art, “The World to Come” (September 18, 2018 – March 3, 2019). The exhibition, which features works by more than 45 contemporary international visual artists, will challenge us to discard assumptions about human privilege and mastery of nature, to rethink the bond of humans to non-human life, and to locate an openness, wonder, and curiosity that may lead to critical reflection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of a *planetary* humanism.

The course will meet once weekly in a classroom in the Harn and we will spend much of our time in the gallery discussing individual works in the exhibition. We will also meet with the exhibit’s curator and attend a two-day international symposium in mid-October featuring scholars, artists, and scientists whose research and teaching are focused on environmental crisis and the environmental imagination.

LIT 3400. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Imaging Climate, Seeing the Anthropocene”

We live in an age of growing ecological instability. Climate change, accelerating environmental degradation, and mass extinction are reshaping the collective futures of humans and other living things of the Earth on a scale that is without precedent in the memories of our civilization and our species. As we enter this new phase of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by human influence, our former habits of mind and body are incompatible with new situations on the ground, in the air, and under the water. But humans are by nature conservative and timorous; creating new habits is difficult for us, who find willful neglect, cynicism, and despair the easier solutions. In this course we will start with the fundamentally humanist conviction that how we prepare for and respond to the world to come depends on how we may (re)envision that world and our roles in it. Hopeful resolve to think and act differently, and the ability to do so, come to us first by way of the creative imagination.

This course will focus principally on visual imaginaries of the late Anthropocene. We will read widely in contemporary graphic fiction and nonfiction on the subject of global climate change and ecological crisis, and view a small number of fiction films on these themes. Our principal model for the work of bearing witness and renewed insight will be a landmark art exhibition at UF’s Harn Museum of Art, “The World to Come” (September 18, 2018 – March 3, 2019). The exhibition, which features works by more than 45 contemporary international visual artists, will challenge us to discard assumptions about human privilege and mastery of nature, to rethink the bond of humans to non-human life, and to locate an openness and sense of wonder that may lead to critical reflection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of a *planetary* humanism.

Course writing assignments include participation in threaded discussions of weekly readings, a short research paper on selected works and artists exhibited in “The World to Come” and a take-home final exam.

LIT 4930. Dragan Kujundzic (Center for Jewish Studies), “Vampire Cinema”

Course description TBA.

Summer 2018

Undergraduate Courses

LIT 3003. Derrick King (Dept. of English), “Forms of Narrative” (Summer B)

This course will juxtapose historical fiction with science fiction in order to investigate how literary narratives can represent “history” in the widest possible sense. Students will consider how texts about the past – such as the historical novel or autobiographical writing – share narrative techniques with speculative genres like the alternate history or dystopian fiction. Indeed, all these genres attempt to grapple with the historical specificity of the author’s present by contrasting it with another time period, either in the past or an imagined future. In particular, we will examine how these genres can challenge simple narratives of historical progress or decline by charting the complex relationships between the past, present, and future.

Students will consider questions like: how is historical fiction related to speculative genres like alternate histories and dystopian fiction? How can historical fiction avoid lapsing into an uncritical nostalgia for the past? Can narratives of the past and future help us to imagine a more just world?

Our reading list will likely include the following:

• Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Talents (1998)
• Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
• Phillip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
• Anne Garréta, Not One Day (2002)
• Toni Morrison, Home (2008)
• Joana Russ, The Female Man (1975)
• W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (1995)

The course will also examine the links between literary narratives and other forms of narrative, including film and media. Assignments will include a presentation, a short response paper, and a longer critical essay.

LIT 4930. Karina Vado (Dept. of English), “Race and Science in African American and Latinx Science Fiction” (Summer A)

This course takes as its focus the literary and popular culture productions of African American, Chican@/x, and Latino@/x science fiction (SF) artists and writers and their confrontations with the genre’s fraught colonial, gendered, and racialized medico-scientific origins. More specifically, this course critically responds to literary scholar Roger Luckhurst’s contention that the “the strangest silence in SF scholarship has surely been the marginal interface between SF critics and those in Science and Technology Studies and History of Science.” By engaging the (pseudo) scientific narratives of nineteenth and early twentieth white masculinist figures (such as Samuel G. Morton and Josiah C. Nott), we will consider how Black and Latinx SF artists and writers—past and present—appropriate the idioms of science and technology to radically contest and disrupt biological determinist understandings of disability, gender, race and sexuality. At the same time, we will weigh in on the degree to which Black and Latinx SF texts fashion alternative, non-normative, and/or emancipatory representations of differently “gendered,” “raced,” and “sexed” bodies.

Throughout the course of the semester, we will attempt to answer the following questions: What do science and SF, to borrow from black feminist SF writer Octavia E. Butler, have to offer people of color and other historically marginalized communities? How (and with what intention) do SF artists and writers of color complicate our understanding of the “science” in science fiction? How do they challenge (or buy into) its positivist and progressivist standpoint? Lastly, what stake(s) do SF artists and writers of color have in writing themselves into increasingly biotechnological futures?

Possible course texts include: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1905); George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931); Samuel Delany’s Nova (1968); Octavia E. Butler’s Patternmaster (1976); Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues (1991); Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech (1992); Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008); Sabrina Vourvoulias’ Ink (2012); and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Assignments will include a short close reading paper, a panel presentation, and an encyclopedia entry for SF @ UF, a collaborative and interdisciplinary digital project seeking to improve the visibility and usability of UF’s diverse holdings in science fiction (SF), fantasy, and utopian studies.

Spring 2018

Undergraduate Courses

LIT 4930. Spencer Chalifour (Dept. of English), “Back to the Futures of American Culture”

American ideology often emphasizes hopefulness with the country’s potential, yet the complexities of American life can also create fear and uncertainty about our future. We imagine utopian and dystopian futures. The question of what America’s future will be occupies many minds today, as we see in the renewed popularity of books like 1984 and It Can’t Happen Here.

Yet these questions have existed for most of the country’s history. This course will interrogate literary and graphic texts that present several imagined futures for America. Through examining these texts, as well as critical material, students will investigate what these various futures reveal about the time in which they were written—as well as the present moment. We will also consider what these futures expose about American culture and its changing values.

Potential texts include Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Bellamy), Herland (Gilman), It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis), The Iron Heel (London), The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), and Parable of the Sower (Butler), as well as graphic novels like American Flagg! (Chaykin) and Bitch Planet (DeConnick).

Students will compose three major critical papers, as well as discussion posts responding to the readings and in-class writing and analysis assignments. We will spend considerable class time discussing how to formulate and organize analysis papers, and how to incorporate research. By the final assignment, students will be able to apply the various critical models discussed in class to their own research to produce a 6–7 page scholarly analysis of a text of their choosing.

ENC 1145. Brooke Fortune (Dept. of English), “Writing About Magic”

From ancient religion to modern day cultural phenomena, the idea of magic has captivated humankind for thousands of years. This course will trace the evolution of magical thinking, as well as the ways in which gender, race and other cultural contexts can complicate diverse representations of magic. We will begin with the inherently magical religions of ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Phoenicia, Rome, and Ireland before moving into the Medieval period and the shifting attitudes towards magic that accompanied widespread Christianization. Next, we will consider witch hunts (both New and Old World), and new conglomerate magical traditions such as Vodou and Santeria in the age of empire and triangle trade. We will touch on the revival of spiritualism and occultism at the turn of the twentieth century before finally discussing how we consider magic in our contemporary cultural consciousness, especially in the fantasy and young adult genres.

Possible texts (both written and visual) include the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Fenian and Ulster cycles of Irish mythology, Arthurian legends and the show Camelot, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (both film and play), selected works by W.B. Yeats and other early 20th century occultists, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Robert Jordan’s “The Eye of the World,” J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, Penny Dreadful and American Horror Story: Coven. Potential assignments include two short argumentative papers, a short presentation, an annotated bibliography, and a final research paper.

ENC 1145. Karina Vado (Dept. of English), “Writing About Science/Fiction”

This course surveys what literary scholars such as Isiah Lavender III call the “signature language of modernity”: science fiction (SF). In particular, we will explore how the genre often represents genetics, genomics, and biotechnologies as “cure” for biological and social ills. Through a Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) approach, we will consider the bioethical challenges that the intersections of race, science and medicine proffer. Moreover, because this is, first and foremost, an SF literature and popular culture course, we will map the historical development of SF in the Americas—considering how the genre has invariably animated, complicated, and/or (mis)understood medico-scientific thought and practices.

We will then critically consider how SF artists and writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Alejandro Morales, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, approach the promises—and perils—of appropriating the idioms of science, genetics/genomics, and technology in science fiction. We will also engage shows such as the BBC America series, Orphan Black, and films such Blade Runner.

Writing assignments for this course include four critical response papers, a midterm close reading assignment, and a final research paper that asks students to incorporate an outside SF text.

ENG 1131. Najwa Al-Tabaa (Dept. of English), “Writing Through Media: Supernatural”

Horror as a genre offers a multitude of avenues for exploration, often engaging the common fears and anxieties of society through metaphor to address emotional, physical, and psychological concerns. In the contemporary moment, the horror genre is prolific in film, television, and literature. The course will use television’s Supernatural to explore the serialized horror genre, as well as the development of fandom culture around the show. We will examine horror influences on Supernatural such as The Haunting of Hill House, Sandman, Hellblazer, and Lucifer as well as multimodal media to engage the show critically.

Why Supernatural?

The Muse Calliope has an answer: “Supernatural has everything. Life. Death. Resurrection. Redemption. But above all, family. All set to music you can really tap your toe to. It isn’t some meandering piece of genre dreck. It’s…epic!”

Supernatural’s relationship to genre plays into the idea of low-brow art by being a pulpy, monster-of-the-week horror show, on a network that is considered low-brow, the CW Network, which rarely has received any recognition in award ceremonies like the Emmy’s or Golden Globes. Instead of taking itself seriously all the time, it decided to have fun with the possibilities the genre offers and then some. From monsters of the week, to time travel, to dramatic family saga, to parallel universes and multiverses, Supernatural is unafraid to bend the possibilities of genre. We will examine not only how Supernatural plays with genre but also explore the myths, legends, and popular culture influences on the show.

ENL 3122. Madeline Gangnes (Dept. of English), “The English Novel: 19th Century” 

This course will cover key developments in nineteenth-century British novels, considering their historical, literary-historical, and critical contexts. Such novels serve as documents of their writers’ attempts to explore and comment on the major cultural conditions of their day, many of which persist in our own culture. These include gender roles and relationships, poverty and welfare, economic and political systems, international relations, scientific and technological advances, and the nature and purpose of art.

Although the novel emerged as a comparatively “realistic” form, many nineteenth-century novels incorporate supernatural and speculative elements, which provide powerful metaphors for cultural and historical conditions. The selection of texts we will read (including Gothic and proto-science fiction) will allow us to identify and explore how the “unreal” expresses the “real” in nineteenth-century fiction.

This reading-intensive course will require students to engage in research and to apply critical frameworks. Where possible, we will read novels through digital archives of first or early editions to reveal a greater view of their cultural and material contexts. Assignments include a short paper, a long paper, several short response posts, a short presentation, and a creative project.

Possible texts:

• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1872)
• R. L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 and 1891)
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
• Appropriate critical texts

LIT 4930. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Verne, Wells & Co.: European SF of the Late Nineteenth Century”

Defining the canon of nineteenth-century European science fiction (SF) seems to lead, inevitably, to also embracing doubtful analogies and inventive anachronisms. American editor Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 endorsement of “the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story” as the model for what Gernsback christened “scientifiction” – later “science fiction” – is telling in this regard. Verne, Wells, and Poe are among the precursors of modern SF, but in most respects they are dissimilar from each other. Many other, equally dissimilar, figures also contributed to the incunable period of SF, the complexity of which confounds such comparisons.

Labels such as “proto-SF,” “early SF,” or “Victorian SF” – the last of which is too closely associated with one national tradition to be generally useful – may help to mark the field’s development. But they also beg the question of what SF was, really, during this early phase when it had no widely-accepted name, a concern at least since Félix Bodin’s description of the problem in Le Roman de l’avenir (The Novel of the Future, 1834). (Bodin offers the label roman futuriste [futurist novel].) The label “scientific romance,” used from mid-century onward for mostly British authors, was rejected by many to whom it was applied, such as Wells, who found “romance” too backward-looking.

The French roman scientifique (“scientific novel” and “scientific romance”) dodges retrospection a little – the etymologies of roman and romance are tangled – but “scientific” is the problem term here; the label also was applied to naturalist authors such as Émile Zola because their depictions of the influences of heredity and environment were considered scientifically accurate. The French merveilleux scientifique (“scientific marvel fiction”), associated with authors J.–H. Rosny, aîné, and Maurice Renard, is too self-consciously anti-Vernian to be of much use outside of that context. Disagreements about the pertinent traits of the emerging European literature left an opening for twentieth-century Americans like Gernsback and Golden Age editor John W. Campbell to name and circumscribe the field’s content and method.

During the late nineteenth century, in short, “SF” is at best a placeholder for a radically diverse, inconsistent field of literary production that emerged, haltingly, out of traditions of utopian fiction, satirical contes, and imaginary voyages, and in relation to other literary movements, such as romanticism, realism, naturalism, and early modernism. In this course we will read long and short works of fantastic fiction by European authors of the period whose names are familiar to you (such as Verne and Wells), and some (such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Chesney, Florence Dixie, Enrique Gaspar, Richard Jefferies, Kurd Lasswitz, J.–H. Rosny aîné, M.P. Shiel, Émile Souvestre) who are likely unfamiliar. Our aim will be not to solve the taxonomic problems noted above. I’m not sure that we will settle on one definition of “science fiction,” so much as we will survey the landscape of an adventurous, nuanced, messy proto-canon that was then – and still is – in search of its meaning and place in the modern literary imagination.

All assigned readings will be in English or English translation. Writing requirements include a take-home midterm and two short critical essays.

Fall 2017

Undergraduate Courses

CLA 3939. Jennifer Rea (Dept. of Classics), “Classics and Fantasy”

Why did the Greek philosopher Plato believe that fantasy could teach us nothing useful about ourselves? Why does Aristotle have problems with literature which describes the impossible? What can we learn about fantasy from the Roman author Vergil?

This course will examine the origins of science fiction and fantasy in Greco-Roman literature and how our popular media either challenges or reinforces our modern perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome. How does the sci-fi novel Hunted allude to an ancient Greek story about war and transform it into a contemporary social commentary about the effects of war on society? What can the ancients’ views on the soul teach us about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Through an investigation of the ancients’ hopes and fears for the future, we will explore what makes re-imagining the values and politics of ancient Greece and Rome so appealing in our modern fantasy and science fiction literature and popular media.

Readings will include works from classical antiquity as well as modern science fiction and fantasy texts inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity. There will also be some viewing of excerpts from modern science fiction and fantasy films. Students are expected to be engaged in class discussions and to have read the required texts before coming to class. Course evaluation will include in-class writing and exams.

ENG 4133. Dragan Kujundzic (Center for Jewish Studies), “Vampire Cinema” (cross-listed with JST 4936 and JST 4905)

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and apparitions from Bram Stoker, to Francis Ford Coppola and Anne Rice. The course will address issues of vampire and vEmpire (the imperial politics behind vampirism), vampirism and psychoanalysis, vampirism and modernism, vampirism and cinema, queer, gay and lesbian vampires, vampires of East and Central Europe, vampirism and anti-Semitism, vampirism and religion, vampirism and nationalism, etc.

The course will discuss the figure of the vampire in cinema and literature (Bram Stoker’s Dracula will be read or screened and analyzed, among others; particular attention will be given to the novel as a proto-cinematic medium), as well as the rendering of the vampire in cinema (from Murnau’s  Nosferatu, to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Slayers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and  Twilight among others). The course will introduce students to the classics of vampire cinema as well as to the contemporary production in the genre of vampire films, television series, etc.

There will be a collective work (30% of the grade), one final paper (50%) (the final paper may be multiple choice test in the classroom or take home, TBA), and participation and attendance will count for 20% of the grade.

LIT 2120. Jaquelin Elliott (Dept. of English), “Survey of World Literature, 17th Century to Modern: The Marvelous and Fantastic”

For as long as people have told tales of magic, mystery, and the supernatural, they have blurred the line between fantasy and reality. The marvelous, fantastic, and uncanny each toy with that line, while genres like magical realism and urban fantasy have become, and remain, pre-eminently popular. But how do we account for the centuries-old popularity of the fantastic? The marvelous? The uncanny? The Gothic? Why have we always been drawn to the Gods and monsters of Shakespeare, of myth, of fairy tales? Why do we remain in thrall to Faustian bargains and ghost stories?

This course will interrogate these questions by examining the philosophical, theological, social, and political undercurrents that has drawn magic and “unreality” into and out of the lives and stories of people from all around the world. From the witchcraft of Shakespeare to Victorian horrors, from mid-century magical realism to present-day urban fantasy, our journey into the fantastic will take us to every corner of the map: Revolutionary-era France and Soviet Russia, where the devil comes out to dance; kaidan-haunted Japan, the Gothic American South, and war-torn Spain where the ghosts of the wronged seek revenge; Jamaica, where magic hangs in the humid air like hibiscus perfume and Latin America where it is baked into the very bricks of the streets; Nigeria, where the spirits of children torment the living and Ghana where Anansi the spider-god weaves his web; and, of course, the United Kingdom, where an evening stroll might put you face-to-face with witches, ghosts, and fae folk.

This course will examine the prevalence and cultural work of the marvelous and fantastic in world literature and how/why so many writers and film makers have chosen the strange, “unreal,” and supernatural as an outlet for expressions of political anxiety, wonder, pleasure, existentialism, horror, cathartic revenge, and much more. By the end of this course, students will arrive at a better understanding and appreciation of the social functions of fantasy and magic in fiction by engaging with texts from around the world.

LIT 3400. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Climate Fiction”

As we move into an era of greater climate instability, climate science will shape how we imagine the collective futures of humans and other living creatures of the Earth. In this course we will investigate a vital contribution of the humanities to our understanding of the significance of climate change. We will read a wide range of climate-related texts, mostly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and mostly in the emerging genre of climate fiction: stories that are grounded in realities of global climate crisis, mass extinction, climate-induced migration, and economic collapse: a world in which former habits of mind and body are incompatible with situations on the ground, in the air, and under the water. The diverse authors whose works we will study show that creating new habits is difficult and perilous; it is easier to find fear, cynicism, and despair – none of which responses, it is clear, is up to the challenges of the real futures that approach us.

Much of what we will read is, implicitly and explicitly, an indictment of the blind hubris, cruel appetite, and reckless improvidence that have pushed us all toward terrible ends. This course proposes that the literary imagination of climate, haunted by the losses and negations of crisis, may also point in the direction of a new ethic of climate that embraces critical reflection, shared responsibility, and hopeful resolve.

Graded writing requirements for this course include a flash fiction exercise, a take-home midterm exam, and a take-home final exam.

POW 4930/6930. M. Elizabeth Ginway (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Studies), “Brazilian Science Fiction”

Science fiction, because of its speculative potential and connections to science and technology, constitutes a unique vehicle for understanding the cultural impact of modernization in Brazil. Since industrialization is intimately tied to the military dictatorship (1964–85), its policies and authoritarian development, the course will focus principally on the science fiction written before, during and after the regime. We will examine issues of race, gender, politics and climate change in traditional alien and robot stories and in various subgenres, including cyberpunk, alternate histories and steampunk. Graduate students in the class will also be required to read critical and theoretical texts about genre of science fiction. Among the issues to be addressed are: How can we define science fiction? Is science fiction different in Brazil and Latin America? Why are anthologies of short fiction so popular in Brazil? What are the predominant issues and characteristics of BSF? Can we read traditional or canonical stories through the lens of science fiction? How are Brazilian SF films different from those in the U.S.? How does Brazilian science fiction fit into the global genre of SF?. This course will be taught in Portuguese.

Graduate Courses

LIT 6934. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Climate Fiction”

As we move into an era of greater climate instability, climate science will shape how we imagine the collective futures of humans and other living creatures of the Earth. In this course we will investigate a vital contribution of the humanities to our understanding of the significance of climate change. We will read a wide range of climate-related texts, mostly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and mostly in the emerging genre of climate fiction: stories that are grounded in realities of global climate crisis, mass extinction, climate-induced migration, and economic collapse: a world in which former habits of mind and body are incompatible with situations on the ground, in the air, and under the water. The diverse authors whose works we will study show that creating new habits is difficult and perilous; it is easier to find fear, cynicism, and despair – none of which responses, it is clear, is up to the challenges of the real futures that approach us.

Much of what we will read is, implicitly and explicitly, an indictment of the blind hubris, cruel appetite, and reckless improvidence that have pushed us all toward terrible ends. This course proposes that the literary imagination of climate, haunted by the losses and negations of crisis, may also point in the direction of a new ethic of climate that embraces critical reflection, shared responsibility, and hopeful resolve.

Graded writing requirements for this course include periodic participation in seeded class discussions and a final research paper.

Spring 2017

Undergraduate Courses

AML 2410. Chesya Burke (Dept. of English), “Mine of Our Mind: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction”

This course will interrogate the speculative fiction genre though the lens of black women writers. It offers a foray into key debates that surround contemporary genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) written by black women. We will also examine the concept of speculative fiction itself, attempting to define it within the black feminist literary aesthetic. We will seek to answer these questions: Do Black Women Spec Fic Writers stay true to the basic concepts and ideas of speculative fiction? How do they push the boundaries? Texts will include Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and the lyrics and artistic short film (music video) of Archandroid by Janelle Monae.

AML 2410. Rebecca McNulty (Dept. of English), “Cyberpunk, Post-Cyberpunk, and Technical Revolution”

This course will examine the genre of cyberpunk: alternate futures where corporations and technology contribute to breakdowns in social order. In addition, the course will account for the ways cyberpunk (and post-cyberpunk) futures speak not only about (im)possible futures, but also about the contemporary American moment(s) that engendered these visions. We will also take up the issue that James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel raise in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology: what if “emerging technologies will change what it means to be human”? This course will explore how technology and corporations influence literature, politics, and the calculus of what it means to be a contemporary American. Readings will include William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers, and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. We will also examine critical articles, current events, social media, video games, and recent technological innovations to consider what the genres of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk say about multiple facets of the contemporary American identity.

ENC 1145. Heather Hannaford (Dept. of English), “The Paranormal and the Academy”

The prevalence of movies and television shows such as Paranormal Activity and Ghost Hunters points to our cultural moment’s increased attention to the paranormal. This course will explore how multiple academic disciplines interpret and analyze what we term the “paranormal.” We will also focus on writing in different disciplines, drawing on the Bedford/St. Martin’s Guide to Genres. How do we engage with the paranormal in multiple academic genres? First investigating ghosts in literature, we will uncover and analyze the meanings that writers and scholars attribute to the supernatural in fiction. Next, we assess how the social science fields view the paranormal by looking at studies from psychology and sociology. Finally, we will address how key scientific fields explain the supernatural. Students will build a comprehensive understanding of how the paranormal signifies in modern and contemporary culture.

ENG 1131. Jaquelin Elliott (Dept. of English), “Metamorphosis”

From Ovidian nightmares and animal husband tales to Victorian Gothic and MTV’s Teen Wolf, cultures across the globe have demonstrated a millennia-old preoccupation with metamorphosis, hybridity, and shapeshifting. A being that can move between worlds, identities, values, and physical bodies, the shapeshifter presents a perfect metaphor for our times – transgressing and blurring the boundaries between good and evil, human and animal, male and female, concrete and abstract, and high and low culture. In this course, students will engage with cultural studies, fandom studies, queer theory, and adaptation/remix theory through close readings of metamorphosis texts from different genres, mediums, and historical periods. These texts not only place metamorphosis at the center of their narratives, but also incarnate transformation in some way: whether they changed literary forms (Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), offer radical retellings (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber), inspire transformative fan practice (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), or experiment with medium (Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale).

Writing assignments in this course will be experimental and creative and will require students to engage with a number of digital platforms and methods of production, including a reflective tumblr blog and a film review. The final project invites students to produce a short transformative adaptation/retelling in a creative medium of their choice, accompanied by an explanatory essay.

Fall 2016

Undergraduate Courses

AML 2070. Jaquelin Elliott (Dept. of English), “Gothic America”

In his essay “Invention of the American Gothic,” scholar Leslie Fiedler described American Gothic as “a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement.” It is a fair comment, as Gothicism is not only threaded throughout multiple genres and modes of American media, but is, in fact, deeply embedded within the American Canon, having played an integral role in the rise of American literature. But if American Gothic is a symptom, then what is the illness that it belies?

This course will examine the prevalence and cultural work of American Gothic fiction and how/why so many American authors have chosen the genre as an outlet for expressions of anxiety, outrage, and suffering in a country ostensibly built upon the ideals of optimism and equality. This course will unveil and interrogate the ghosts that haunt the American consciousness from the awe and terror of the wilderness to the specter of slavery to the darker aspects of the American Dream.

CLA 3930. Jennifer A. Rea (Dept. of Classics), “Heroes, Gods, and Monsters”

What kinds of monsters did the ancient Greeks and Romans imagine and why? What can monsters tell us about what is taboo in our own modern society and within the ancient Greek or Roman world? Who gets to define what is monstrous in a society and does the monster always escape at the end of the story?

This course will examine the origins of monsters in Greco-Roman literature and how our popular media either challenges or reinforces the stereotypes of the ancient world. Does Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer resemble an ancient Roman hero when he battles monsters? How does Snowpiercer take an ancient Roman myth about the gods and transform it into a contemporary social commentary on heroes, war and the environment? Through an investigation of the ancients’ hopes and fears for the future, we will explore what makes re-imagining the monsters, heroes and gods of ancient Greece and Rome so appealing in our modern fantasy and science fiction literature and popular media.

Readings will include works from classical antiquity. There will also be some viewing of excerpts from modern science fiction and fantasy films. Students are expected to be engaged in class discussions and to have read the required texts before coming to class. Course evaluation will include in-class writing and exams.

ENC 1145. Spencer Chalifour (Dept. of English), “Writing About Weird Fiction”

In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Fiction,” H.P. Lovecraft defines the weird tale as having to incorporate “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

This course will focus on “weird fiction,” a genre originating in the late 19th century and containing elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the macabre. In our examination of weird authors spanning its history, we will attempt to discover what differentiates weird fiction from similar genres and will use several theoretical and historical lenses to examine questions regarding what constitutes “The Weird.” What was the cultural and historical context for the inception of weird fiction? Why did British weird authors receive greater literary recognition than their American counterparts? Why since the 1980s are we experiencing a resurgence of weird fiction through the New Weird movement, and how do these authors continue the themes of their predecessors into the 21st century?

Readings for this class will span from early authors who had a strong influence over later weird writers (like E.T.A. Hoffman and Robert Chambers) to the weird writers of the early 20th century (like Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood) to New Weird authors (including China Miéville, Thomas Ligotti, and Laird Barron). We will also examine theorists and historians who have analyzed the genre, such as S.T. Joshi and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (whose anthology The Weird will be a primary text for the class) and how the weird has manifested in other pop cultural texts, such as the HBO TV series True Detective.

ENC 1145. Jill Coste (Dept. of English), “Writing About Adolescence and the Apocalypse”

Adolescence is a potent time of transformation, both physically and mentally. From identity formation to shifting allegiances, the remarkable changes that an adolescent goes through are ripe for exploration in literature, particularly when the adolescent experience is paired with an apocalyptic landscape. Dystopian young adult fiction has exploded in popularity in the last decade, but the post-apocalyptic adolescent protagonist is far from a new phenomenon. Long before The Hunger Games came The Chrysalids (1955), Logan’s Run (1967), and Battle Royale (1999), among others. This course will look at the history and the present of the adolescent and the apocalypse, tracing the context of cultural anxieties and the changing conception of the teenager.

Through the readings, students will interrogate the partnership of adolescence and the apocalypse and reflect on what it means to come of age at the end of the world. Why is the teenager such a common protagonist for the dystopian or post-apocalyptic narrative? What does the adolescent perspective add to the social critique that appears in these novels? How does a post-apocalyptic backdrop inform and complicate the space of adolescence? By discussing these questions and their possible answers, we will engage in a critical conversation about the role of adolescence and the apocalypse in our culture and others. Through our reading, we will encounter different inciting disasters, from nuclear holocaust to sweeping viruses to climate change, and we will examine how the experience of the adolescent protagonist varies through the different narrative milieus.

ENC 1145. Madeline Gangnes (Dept. of English), “Writing About Late-Victorian Serialized Fiction and Periodicals”

The popular conception of a novel today is a book bound in one self-contained volume. However, many of the major canonical British texts from the early nineteenth century were published in three volumes, and by the middle and latter part of the 1800s, novels by authors such as Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells were not published as collected volumes until after they had been serialized over the course of several months or longer. Serialization is responsible for many Western storytelling conventions: cliffhangers at the end of chapters or sections in a book, for example, or shorter narratives that are part of a series, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Today, we no longer read these texts in a format that resembles their original publication. In this course, we will read a selection of Victorian novels, series, short stories, and other texts that were first published in British periodicals in the late 1800s. We will also examine illustrations, cartoons, advertisements, and other materials that were printed alongside these texts in an effort to re-contextualize them. When possible, we will read the texts in facsimile editions or scans of the periodicals so that we may experience their original format as a Victorian reader would have done.

ENC 1145. Karina A. Vado (Dept. of English), “Writing About Visionary Feminist Fiction”

“Visionary fiction,” adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha write in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, “is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice” (4). Visionary fiction can thus be understood as an umbrella term that incorporates science fiction, utopias/dystopias, horror, magical realism, and fantasy works that not only address theories of power/power relations along the fault lines of class, (dis)ability, gender, race, and sexuality, but also engage the fantastical to imagine alternatives to our current dystopian conditions.

In this course, we will look at the visionary fictions produced by U.S. feminist women writers such as James Tiptree Jr., Jewelle Gomez, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and examine how these writers’ feminist politics, and social justice orientations inform their alternative vistas of the future. We will then attempt to answer the following questions: What makes these texts feminist? How is the fantastical or the spectacular (re)appropriated by these writers to critique—and look beyond— “real world” systems of oppression? Lastly, what (if any) is the political import of visionary feminist fiction?

To help us answer these questions, we will critically analyze the assigned texts (and their respective authors) in relation to the various sociopolitical and historical moments that these were being animated by, written in, and/or responding to (for instance, the U.S. eugenics movement, the suffragette movement, the 1960s feminist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, etc.). As such, we’ll be reading these novels/short stories chronologically. We will thus start with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian text, Herland (1910), and we’ll end the course with Sabrina Vourvoulias’ immigration-based critical dystopian novel, Ink (2010). In reading these texts chronologically, we will trace the development, evolution, and transformation of visionary feminist fiction.

Graduate Courses

LIT 6934. Sid Dobrin (Dept. of English), “Writing/Memory; Augmentation/Prosthetic”

Early rhetoricians placed substantial value upon the idea and practice of memory. Memoria, after all, was one of the five canons of rhetoric. As writing technologies evolved, rhetoric was repeatedly adapted to account for literacy in the same ways as orality. As written and print culture became the dominant form of communication, memoria began to fall by the wayside as an emphasized element of rhetoric, some criticizing writing as technology determined to eliminate the need for memory, others praising its contributions to sustained memory. In the digital age, we find ourselves needing to engage memory more directly, albeit in a drastically different form, one that might reductively be understood as bound to augmentation.

This seminar will examine histories of memory and the relationship between writing technologies/digital technologies and memory. This seminar will consider the very idea of augmentation ranging from the prosthetic augmented body to information augmenting technologies like augmented reality applications. Encumbered in these discussions, we will address issues of identity, posthumanism, the body, digital media, circulation, delivery, telepresence, and extension.

Spring 2016

Undergraduate Courses

ENG 4936. Tace Hedrick (Dept. of English), “Honors Seminar: Science, Race, and Sexuality in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction”

In this course we will examine the work of Octavia Butler, black feminist speculative fiction writer. Although few readers were aware of her until well into the 1990s, her work has garnered more and more attention for its examination of connections between “alien” otherness, theories of genetic interdependence, and race and sexuality. We will be reading her major works including the Xenogenesis trilogy. We will also be looking at her influences as well as what she herself had to say about racial and sexual politics in the United States.

ENL 2930. Terry Harpold (Dept. of English), “Climate Fiction”

“Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions.” – Isaac Asimov

As we move into an era of increased climate instability, scientific analysis of climate change is central to our understanding of physical systems of our planet and the impact of these systems on human life. Science fiction (sf), the distinctive literary form of our time, bridges elite and popular cultures and broadly engages enthusiasts and scholars alike in the work of imagining our possible futures. These areas of scientific, intellectual, and artistic inquiry – climate studies and sf – are converging in the new field of “climate fiction”: print and graphic fiction and film grounded in scientific realities of environmental change, and projecting the resulting transformations of our societies, politics, and cultures. In this course we will read major works in this emerging literary genre from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries.

ENL 2930 coincides with an international colloquium at UF on “Imagining Climate Change: Science and Fiction in Dialogue” (February 17–18, 2016). The instructor (Harpold) is one of the organizers of the colloquium, which is co-sponsored by The France-Florida Research Institute, The Center for African Studies, The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Department of English, the Florida Climate Institute at the University of Florida, the Science Fiction Working Group, the UF Smathers Libraries, and the UF Water Institute. Colloquium events are made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. See http://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu for a complete schedule of events.

This course is a humanities (H) subject area course in UF’s General Education Program and carries “Cluster A” credit toward UF’s Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies.

IDH 3931. Andrew Gordon (Emeritus, Dept. of English), “American Science Fiction Literature and Film”

This course will survey the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American science fiction (sf) literature and film. We will consider sf as the literature of science, technology, and change, and as perhaps the most characteristic American literature since 1945, a genre affecting all areas of our popular culture. By the end of the course, you should understand the theory and methodologies which have been applied to the study of science fiction and be able to apply them yourself.

SPN 3930. Mary E. Ginway (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Studies), “Latin American Science Fiction and Film”

Latin American science fiction and film offers a distinct perspective on a genre associated with Hollywood blockbusters, high production value, heroic space operas and dazzling special effects. By viewing films and reading texts in Latin American science fiction, students will understand how filmmakers and writers transform SF narratives and use innovative film techniques in keeping with the region’s lower production values and different social reality and political concerns. The course will include films and short stories on similar science fiction themes. Students will learn to classify diverse types of science fiction and fantasy based on genre paradigms in order to analyze texts effectively, while also examining the key differences between the Anglo-American and Latin American perspectives. This course is taught in English.

Graduate Courses

LIT 6857. Phillip Wegner (Dept. of English), “Reading (and Watching) 1984: A Return to the Scene of the Postmodern”

The title for our seminar is taken from Michael North’s landmark study, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999). North’s book offers an experiment in reading the extraordinary range of works released in the year 1922—including T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—as “a limited test case in investigating the relationship between literary modernism and the public world of which it was a part.” In this seminar, we shall perform a similar experiment for the literary and cultural situation of postmodernism, taking as our focus works released in the banner year of 1984. That year saw not only the publication of such key theoretical statements as Fredric Jameson’s essay, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” the special Social Text double issue, “The 60s Without Apology,” the English translation of Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, and the posthumous publication of the second and third volumes of Michel Foucault’s landmark Histoire de la sexualité, but also an extraordinary range of novels and films by established figures and the debut works of others who would become vitally important in the years to follow. The year 1984 also resonated in the larger cultural context in another way, as it was the setting of George Orwell’s great Cold War fantasy, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Many of the works released in that year also directly reference and respond to Orwell’s masterpiece, marking the distance of current realities from Orwell’s own. In the course of our seminar, we will explore as many of the key works of 1984 as time permits, including Jameson’s and Lyotard’s studies, The 60s without Apology, the three volumes of The History of Sexuality, and a number of the following: Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Martin Amis’s Money, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, James Cameron’s TheTerminator, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ridley Scott’s Apple Macintosh commercial.

LIT 6934. Stephanie Smith (Dept. of English), “American Gothic(s): Ghosts, Monsters, and the Abhuman”

The trappings of Gothicism originated in Europe: the castle, the dungeon, hauntings and secret chambers being central features—in other words, the architecture that supposedly denotes civilization where dread and horror reign instead. In the United States, Gothicism is rooted in a different history: a Puritan religious and capitalist heritage in which xenophobia, racism, sexism, slavery, servitude, and genocide all had (have?) a place. The secret chambers of the castle became the cave in the wilderness, the hold of the boat, the slave-auction, places where exploitation and torture belied the rational Enlightenment theory upon which the nation was founded. This course will start with three intertwined, non-U.S. texts that present a kind of ur-text of the Gothic tradition: Jane Eyre, Rebecca and The Wide Sargasso Sea and then we will use various theories of the abject and the Gothic to examine several key texts in which the United States tradition began and continues into the 21st century; each text will feature a ghost, a monster, or some version of the abhuman. Texts may include: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” short stories by Hawthorne, Melville and Poe; Moby-Dick, The Turn of the Screw, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, As I Lay Dying, Beloved.

Fall 2015

Undergraduate Courses

CLA 3930. Jennifer A. Rea (Dept. of Classics), “Classics and Fantasy”

Why did the Greek philosopher Plato believe that fantasy could teach us nothing useful about ourselves? Why does Aristotle have problems with literature which describes the impossible? What can we learn about the monstrous fantastic from the Roman poets Horace and Vergil?

This course will examine the origins of science fiction and fantasy in Greco-Roman literature and how our popular media either challenges or reinforces our modern perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome. Does Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer kill like an ancient Roman? How does The Hunger Games take an ancient Greek myth and transform it into a contemporary social commentary on children and war? Through an investigation of the ancients’ hopes and fears for the future, we will explore what makes re-imagining the values and politics of ancient Greece and Rome so appealing in our modern fantasy and science fiction literature and popular media.

Readings will include works from classical antiquity as well as modern science fiction and fantasy texts inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity. There will also be some viewing of excerpts from modern science fiction and fantasy films. Students are expected to be engaged in class discussions and to have read the required texts before coming to class. Course evaluation will include in-class writing and exams.

ENC 1145. Jaquelin Elliott (Dept. of English), “Writing About Children’s Horror”

Many children and young adults are powerfully attracted to the strange, dark, and terrifying. The question—or questions, really—is why? Is it because the things that frighten us as children are taboo, and we seek out what is forbidden to us? Are these things forbidden because they excite young curiosities? Why might younger readers and viewers want to be afraid?

In this course, we will survey “scary” texts (fairy tales and short fiction, long fiction, films, etc.) created for children and young adults or often consumed by these audiences. Themes of the works we will examine may include trauma, abuse, death, abandonment, sexual endangerment, monstrosity, and loss of identity. We will engage with these texts and themes by way of multiple historical and critical lenses, so as to better understand the social functions of children’s literature and horror, as well as grapple with important literary problems such as audience reception, censorship, and the flexibility of genres.

Writing assignments will be experimental and creative and will require students to engage with a variety of digital platforms and methods of production. Assignments will include a reflective blog, a class wiki, a film review, short response papers, and a final research paper.

ENC 1145. Rebecca McNulty (Dept. of English), “Writing About Strangeness”

In the introduction to Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, editors describe “slipstream, the genre that isn’t,” as “a canon [of] mist and wishful thinking” (vii). Slip-stream fantasy has long relied on the concept of “strangeness” to show the ways fantastic elements penetrate aspects of daily life. These strange slip-stream elements appear in all lengths of fiction, and each medium complicates the fantastic elements of what “strangeness” really means. In this course, we will engage with a variety of stories to create our own definitions of “strange” and “slip-stream” and attempt to understand why these categories have become so popular in contemporary fiction.

The course readings will examine the concept of “strangeness” through multiple contemporary short stories by writers from diverse backgrounds, including: selections from the anthology Feeling Very Strange, the collection Stranger Things Happen, and the magazine Strange Horizons.

To explore how authors use the longer novel format to expand upon and complicate the definition of “strange,” we will consider Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Strange Pilgrims and Leslye Walton’s The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender. The course will also examine the history of “strangeness” in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Assignments will include (but will not be limited to) reading response papers, an in-class presentation on the story of a student’s choice, and a series of academic essays, culminating in a final research paper. Students will also be expected to participate in daily discussions and in-class workshops.

LIT 3113. Shaun Duke (Dept. of English), “American Space Opera: The Roots and Political Blowback”

Coined by Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a pejorative, the science fiction subgenre of “space opera” has become a staple of science fiction narrative, most popularly envisioned in film by the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. But far from mere visual spectacle or adventure, space opera’s history suggests a complicated relationship between the subgenre and the contemporary culture in which it is written. From its roots in the often paranoid and sometimes blatantly racist narratives (e.g., “Yellow Peril” stories) of what I.F. Clarke calls “future war fiction,” to its development as a legitimate subgenre in the pulps and the Golden Age via writers such as E.E. “Doc” Smith and Alfred Bester, space opera has always been in conversation with its time. It reinforces contemporary values or, as science fiction is apt to do, it critiques or deconstructs those values.

This course will explore the development of American space opera from its literary origins in late 19th-century “future war fiction” and the “Edisonades” to its codification as a subgenre in the pulps via writers such as Edmond Hamilton and E.E. “Doc” Smith. From there, the course will trace the legitimization of space opera as a subgenre in the Golden Age and the political blowbacks to its imperialistic and/or “conservative” themes or narrative tropes in the New Wave (Samuel R. Delany, et. al.) and New Space Opera periods (Tobias Buckell, C.J. Cherryh, et al.).

Readings will consist of serialized fiction, novels, and critical readings on science fiction, history, or relevant literary or cultural theory. Students will be expected to keep up with the readings and to regularly participate in class discussion. Written course requirements will include two short essays, a group discussion panel, weekly discussion questions, and one final essay.

LIT 4188. Philip Wegner (Dept. of English), “Literary and/as Science Fiction”

In this course, we will explore the increasingly prominent place of science fiction within the global English language literary output of the early twenty first century. For many years, there was an implicit divide between what was understood by many critics and readers to be “serious” literature and genre fiction, including science fiction. However, a growing number of the most prominent younger authors of the last two decades or so have drawn more and more upon the figures, tropes, and devices of science fiction, and some have even produced works that would be identified as science fiction. At the same time, established writers previously enjoyed only by fans of science fiction have garnered wider and more diverse audiences as their work begins to move into new territories. The result has been a tremendous revitalization of contemporary world English language literature as it has been able to respond in ever more productive ways to the rapidly changing realities of our increasingly planetary lives. Our readings will be drawn from a diverse range of national traditions, including the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Caribbean, and will include many of the following: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Krake; Kevin Barry, City of Bohane; Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; William Gibson, Zero History; Joe Haldeman, Camouflage; Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind; Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds; Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas; Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312; China Miéville, The City and the City; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; and Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.