Watch films about demons, read’ Quick LGBTQ Literatures’ at University of Florida
” Female speculative fiction”,” Black Englishes”, and” Vampire Cinema” are just a few of the personality based English programs students can get this year at the University of Florida.
At least ten of the English agency’s “upper section” programs center on video – including the single category that appears to support Shakespeare.
At least thirteen of the programs use an individuality position, like as” Afrofuturism and” Early LGBTQ Literatures.”
A” Children’s Literature” program says it” may question the ways in which these texts represent culture, group, sex, and regional personality.”
A fall 2023 syllabus for the children’s literature course says it does use” scientific frameworks like as important disability studies, gay theory, monster theory, female theory, and more “in order to” track themes of marginalization, madness, monstrosity, and magic in the wonderland of children’s literature.”
” The literary ( and real ) world has always been a spot of vast physical diversity, gender variance, and same-sex love and sex,” the course description for” Early LGBTQ Literatures” state”. [ Y ] et as space and time shift, what we now refer to as “homosexuality.”
Modern concepts of group identity are the focus of different classes where students study the works of a single person.
For instance, Vital Intersectionality and The World of James Baldwin will demonstrate to students how race theory may show or refute the existence of anti-Black violence in words and deeds. ” In total, five of the upper division courses concentrate on African-Americans.
There are n’t many courses offered at the department that focus on subjects that are n’t typically regarded as classics, such as those that deal with Charles Dickens and John Milton. Only one course, titled” Shakespeare and Film,” will concentrate on William Shakespeare’s works.
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.”
Sid Dobrin, the chair of the English department, did not respond to several requests for comment regarding the use of film in the curriculum.
The English department’s mission and priorities were also questioned by The College Fix.
The courses were criticized by a professor of humanities at Thales College in North Carolina.
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 has been a professor of English for many years.
” 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”. It should come as no surprise that the professors largely avoid making political hash out of literature from other universes because it is actually quite challenging to do so from books written in that particular strange and fascinating land before 1900.
” The loss is tremendous and irreparable.”
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