MEMS Courses in Fall 2005

Anglo-Saxon (Old English: See LIN)

ARH 4251: Romanesque and Gothic Art and Architecture

David Stanley

ARH 4304: Italian Renaissance Architecture (1400 to 1530)

David Stanley

ENL 3231: Age of Johnson

Mel New

The course explores British writings in the second half of the eighteenth-century, and will be concentrating on one fiction writer, Laurence Sterne, and four writers in other prose genres, James Boswell (biography/autobiography), Samuel Johnson (all genres imaginable), Edmund Burke (political and aesthetic essays), and David Hume (philosophic, theologic, and personal essays). These authors are models of English prose, and so students will be expected to emulate them in their own writing assignments.

ENL 4311: Chaucer

Dr. James Paxson

This course will familiarize students with the major narrative poetry of Chaucer. We will devote most of our study to several of The Canterbury Tales and to Chaucer’s great romance, Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine at least one of Chaucer’s long allegorical poems, The House of Fame, along with Latin and Italian source materials included in our main textbook. Students will learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English (the form of the English language from about 1100–1500 C. E.), and they will be introduced to the principal methodological issues constitutive of contemporary Chaucer studies. That is, they will investigate how Chaucer studies incorporate modern critical theory – especially involving issues of narrative complexity, figurative discourse, the formalism of Chaucerian genre (especially the frame narrative or novella) and the poetic representation of gender. Particular focus will fall upon the issue of subjectivity, since Chaucer, who is often seen as the forerunner of modern novelistic art, lays claim to being the first major author in English to cultivate the poetics of the subjective, the personal, and the psychologically realistic. Class meetings will include lectures, discussion, and, especially early in the term, recitation and spot translation of Middle English. We shall also view together (most likely only in part) and study I Racconti di Canterbury (P. Paolo Pasolini, dir., 1971), the only film version of Chaucer’s grand novella.

Course Description

ENL 4333: Shakespeare

Ira Clark

Ira Clark’s advanced Shakespeare course will cover 13 plays. It will open with a familiar comedy to help students become accustomed to reading highly rhetorical and poetic texts and to envisioning performances from a dramatic text. We will proceed with a cluster of comedies that illustrate Shakespeare’s dramatic and stylistic development. We will next read a cluster of histories and finally one of tragedies with reprieve through one final romance. All along, we will concentrate on helpful ways to read Shakespeare’s plays: for example, as representations of Shakespeare’s era, as means of raising problems about our own era, as ways of considering other eras and cultures. And we will focus on the questions and debates Shakespeare’s plays have stimulated over theological, political, economic, social, psychological, gender, and other issues.

Course Description

ENL 4333: Shakespeare

Robert Thomson

This course will involve a close study of a dozen or so of the plays and a number of readings from the poems and elsewhere. Emphasis will be laid upon the problem stating – solving – mediating nature of the dramas. This will necessitate a close reading of the texts; a recognition of the dramatic and verbal ironies that abound; close attention to the paradoxes and ambiguities which motivate the actions and observation of the stark oppositions which are continually reiterated.

We will be led into a contextual study of both the world within and the world without the Elizabethan theatre, with its concern for an orderliness and its doubts and confusions as the new seventeenth-century learning questioned and undermined the values and social/political/religious assumptions of its society. We may then come to appreciate how these great plays and poems still speak to us with immediacy after a span of nearly four hundred years.

Course Description

ENL 4333: University Honors: Shakespeare: Learning by Doing

Sidney Homan

This section of ENL 4333 is offered through the University Honors Program, and enrollment is limited to students in that Program.

The focus of this course is on performance, on plays as not just texts but as something happening in space and time, and ratified by an audience. Therefore, we learn about a Shakespeare play by doing it, and so each student works with a scene partner, with whom they rehearse a scene, stage it for the class, and then work with the director to polish and evaluate their work. No experience in the theatre is required, and, historically, Mechanical Engineering majors have done as well as Theatre majors, who have done no better than English majors. Scene work will be graded on the intent of the actors, what they put into it--not finesse. The course’s major paper will be an assessment of your experience doing the scenes.

HIS 3931: Holy war in the middle ages

Nina Caputo

ITT 3431: Italy and Pilgrimages

Mary Watt

LIN 4127: Old English

Marie Nelson

LIT 4320: An Introduction to Folklore

Robert Thomson

This is in every sense an introductory course; I assume no knowledge on your part of either the materials or the study of folklore though of course many of you will have at least an inkling of what is intended here. By the term “folklore” I mean, firstly, the materials that are subsumed within the many diverse activities of folklore performance including narratives in the form of epics, ballads, folksongs, folktales, legends, myths and folk dramas as well as usages of idiosyncratic verbal play such as riddles, rhymes, proverbs, charms and other verbal utterances associated with superstitious practices and beliefs. All of these forms, by their usage within a folk group, impose a distinctive character upon that group. They may function as both a reflection and constant reinforcement of the manners and mores of a group. However, because it is essentially an unwritten culture, folklore is constantly adaptable to change even though it may, paradoxically, resist alteration.
The term “folklore” also has a second usage; it encompasses the discipline of the study of folklore materials. And so our course will attempt to cover both an introduction to the materials of folklore and also a wide ranging though necessarily brief examination of the many and various methodologies and theoretical approaches which have arisen to explain the origins, nature, forms and meanings of folklore genres.

SPW 4400: Medieval Spanish Literature

Shifra Armon

Anything but 'dark', Spain's Middle Ages were illuminated by Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultural expressions. This year, we will be placing special emphasis on the lyrical and liturgical traditions nurtured by the pilgrim's route known as the Camino de Santiago.

Prereq.: Successful completion of one SPW 3000 course or permission of professor. All coursework to be conducted in Spanish.

SPW 4310 Golden Age Drama

Shifra Armon

While Shakespeare brought down the Globe theater in England, Lope de Vega and his followers charmed and outraged audiences in Spain. Students will study three types of dramatic texts: comedia, entremes and auto sacramental by Cervantes, Lope, Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina and others.

Prereq.: Successful completion of one SPW 3000 course or permission of professor. All coursework to be conducted in Spanish.

WOH 3285: JEWISH HIST 711-1492

Nina Caputo

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Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Will Hasty, 263 Dauer Hall, 273-3780
Email: hasty@ufl.edu

Mary Watt, 301 Pugh Hall, 392-2422
Email: marywatt@ufl.edu