Watch movies about vampires, read ‘Early LGBTQ Literatures’ at University of Florida
“Feminist speculative fiction,” “Black Englishes,” and “Vampire Cinema” are just a few of the identity based English courses students can take this year at the University of Florida.
At least ten of the English department’s “upper division” courses center on film – including the only class that appears to cover Shakespeare.
At least thirteen of the courses use an identity angle, such as “Afrofuturism and “Early LGBTQ Literatures.”
A “Children’s Literature” course says it “will question the ways in which these texts represent race, class, gender, and national identity.”
A fall 2023 syllabus for the children’s literature course says it will apply “analytical frameworks such as critical disability studies, queer theory, monster theory, feminist theory, and more” in order to “trace themes of marginalization, madness, monstrosity, and magic in the wonderland of children’s literature.”
“The literary (and real) world has always been a place of abundant sexual diversity, gender variance, and same-sex love and sex,” the course description for “Early LGBTQ Literatures” states. “[Y]et the cultural meanings of what we now call ‘homosexuality’ shifts across space and time.”
Other classes that have students study the works of a single individual are contemporary and revolve around conceptions of group identity.
For example, “The World of James Baldwin and Critical Intersectionality” will show students “how critical race theory might reveal or deny the persistence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds.” In total, five of the upper division courses concentrate on African-Americans.
Courses that explore what are traditionally considered classics are few and far between the department’s offerings, including classes on John Milton and Charles Dickens. The works of William Shakespeare are the focus of only one course — titled “Shakespeare and Film.”
There appears to be no courses on works before the 17th century except “The Bible as Literature.”
However, “Vampire Cinema” will study topics such as “queer, gay and lesbian vampires” and “vampirism and psychoanalysis.” A course called “Community Engagement” will use “Chicana feminism, Black womanist epistemologies, and decolonial theory” and includes an assignment on writing a “positionality statement.”
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Film courses also include “Israeli Cinema,” “The European Road Movie,” and “Women and Fashion in French Cinema.”
The English department chair Sid Dobrin did not respond to multiple requests for comment in the past weeks about the curriculum and its use of film.
The College Fix also asked what the mission and priorities are for the English department.
A humanities professor at Thales College in North Carolina criticized the courses.
Professor Anthony Esolen told The Fix the absence of classic works “betrays a narrowness of mind that the professors seem not at all to recognize.”
Thales College, named after Thales of Miletus, a pre-Socratic philosopher in ancient Greece, bases its education on the liberal arts. Esolen is an English scholar and longtime professor.
“Course after course is not about literature as literature, but rather about politics, sociology, or anthropology in literary garb, taught by people who are almost certainly mere dilettantes in those fields,” Esolen said via email. “But since it is actually quite difficult to make political hash out of literature from another universe — I mean, that strange and fascinating land that people lived in before 1900 — it is no surprise that the professors largely avoid it.”
“The loss is tremendous and irreparable.”
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