Winter Course Descriptions

WINTER 2003 COURSES
(click for course descriptions)

10100. Critical Perspectives; A. Yaphe. Autumn, Winter, Spring
10200; S. Michaels Autumn, Staff. Winter.
10200-10300. Problems in Gender Studies
10300; Staff, Autumn, Winter.
10500/30500. Argument and Education; TBA G. Hillocks. Winter.
11300. Criticism and Ideology; L.Kruger. Winter 2003.
12200. The Art of Nonfiction Literature, David Hadju.
12800/32800. Theories of Media; W. Mitchell. Winter 2003.
12900/42900. Poetry Workshop: Radical Strategies; K.Volkman. Winter 2003.
13400/33400. Graduate Poetry Workshop; K. Volkman. Winter 2003.
13000/33000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing); L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring 2003.
13200/33200. Beginning Poetry Writing; Sloan, Mary Margaret.
13700/33700. Advanced Playwriting; E. Sobel. Winter 2003.
13900/31100. History and Theory of Drama II; D. Bevington, D. N. Rudall. Winter.
13900/31100. History and Theory of Drama II; D. Bevington, D. N. Rudall. Winter.
14701/34701. Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction; A. Obejas. Winter 2003.
15100/35100. Seminar at the Newberry Library: Sin and Forgiveness in Anglo-Saxon England; Staff. Winter.
15200/35200. Beowulf; C. Von Nolcken. Winter 2003.
15600. Medieval English Literature; M. Miller. Winter 2003.
16500. Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies; D. Bevington. Winter.
17000. Writing and the Early Modern Court; B. Cormack, Winter 2003.
17400. Shakespeare and Hybridity; C. Mazzio. Winter 2003.
17502. Liberty and Toleration in Seventeenth Century Art and Literature; C. Carlson, Winter 2003.
17800. Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature; S. Macpherson. Winter 2003.
20900. Fantasy and Science Fiction; M. Murrin Winter 2003.
21100. Victorian Wives, Mothers, and Daughters; E. Hadley. Winter 2003.
23000. War; S. Makdisi. Winter 2003.
23900. From My Soul to God's Ear: Gender and Spirituality in Early American Lit; S. Rivett. Winter 2003.
24000. Ulysses; L. Ruddick. Winter 2003.
24300. Form and Experience in Contemporary Asian American Poetry; D. Nelson. Winter 2003.
24700. Contemporary Historical Fiction; W. Veeder. Winter 2002.
28100. The Films of Max Ophuls; M. Hansen. Winter 2003.
29600/48900. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960; Y.Tsivian. Winter 2003.
29700. Reading Course; Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
29802. Senior Seminar: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy; R. Strier. Winter.
29805. Senior Seminar: Fin de Siecle Gothic In Britain and America; W. Veeder. Winter.
29900. Independent B.A. Paper Preparation

For a description of the numbering guidelines for the following courses, consult the section on reading the catalog on page 15.

Boldface letters in parentheses refer to courses that fulfill the following program requirements: (A) Period; (B) Pre-1700; (C) 1700 to 1900; (D) Poetry; (E) Fiction; (F) Drama/Film; (G) American; (H) British.

10100. Critical Perspectives.
Required of English concentrators; ENGL 10100 is ideally taken by English concentrators in their third year and not later than autumn quarter of their fourth year. This course develops practical skills in close reading, historical contextualization, and the use of discipline-specific research tools and resources, and encourages conscious reflection on critical presuppositions and practices. The course prepares students to enter into the discussions that occur in more advanced undergraduate courses. A. Yaphe. Autumn, Winter, Spring

10200.
This course addresses the production of particularly gendered norms and practices. Using a variety of historical and theoretical materials, it addresses how sexual difference operates in the contexts of nation, race, and class formation, for example, and/or work, the family, migration, imperialism, and postcolonial relations. E. Hadley. Autumn, Staff. Winter.

10200-10300. Problems in Gender Studies
(=ENGL 10200-10300, GNDR 10100-10200, HUMA 22800-22900, SOSC 28200-28300). PQ: Second-year standing or higher.
Completion of the general education requirement in social sciences or humanities, or the equivalent. May be taken in sequence or individually. This two-quarter interdisciplinary sequence is designed as an introduction to theories and critical practices in the study of feminism, gender, and sexuality. Both classic texts and recent conceptualizations of these contested fields are examined. Problems and cases from a variety of cultures and historical periods are considered, and the course pursues their differing implications in local, national, and global contexts. Both quarters also engage questions of aesthetics and representation, asking how stereotypes, generic conventions, and other modes of circulated fantasy have contributed to constraining and emancipating people through their gender or sexuality.

10500/30500. Argument and Education.
TBA G. Hillocks. Winter.

11300. Criticism and Ideology
(=CMLT 20200) This course will examine the contributions of Marxism to the theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism. Starting with different Marxist approaches to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina we will use the concept of ideology as formulated by Marx, Lenin, Williams, Eagleton, Macherey and others as the point of departure for an investigation of the relationships among literary texts, social life, and power. Readings will include drama and prose fiction as well as Marxist theorists reading novels (Lukacs, Jameson) as well as drama (Brecht, Benjamin). The course is intended primarily for those students planning to go on to graduate study in them humanities. Participants should be prepared for a long and demanding reading list and should read Anna Karenina over the break before class starts. L.Kruger. Winter 2003.

12200. The Art of Nonfiction Literature
Can nonfiction be literature? This course explores how past and working masters have used reportage, memory, and history to make art -- and how students can aim for the same goal in their writing. It is a study of how nonfiction can evoke poetic truths as well as recount facts. The class is a workshop: Each student will write a sizable work of serious nonfiction, to be completed by the end of the term. Readings include Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves, Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov, and Herman Melville, by Elizabeth Hardwick. D. Hadju. Winter 2003.

12800/32800. Theories of Media
(=CMST 27800/37800, ARTH 26000/36000, COVA 25400, ENGL 12800/32800, MAPH 32800).. This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level ArtH or COVA course, or consent of instructor. W. Mitchell. Winter 2003. 12900/42900. Poetry Workshop: Radical Strategies
(=ENGL 42900, MAPH 32900) For this workshop, we will read poems and documents from some of the major avant-garde movements of the last century (including French Surrealism, Russian Futurism, and Oulipo), discussing and borrowing strategies from each. Students will write poems each week and keep a reading journal. Workshop discussion will necessarily focus on how to critique and evaluate innovative work, and will engage current debate over the problematic nature of terms such as experimental and avant-garde. K.Volkman. Winter 2003. (D)

13000/33000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing).
PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. P/N grading optional for non-English concentrators. This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $20. L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring 2003.

13200/33200. Beginning Poetry Writing
Through interaction between their own writing and readings of poetry, poetics, and manifestoes, students will gain a broader and deeper understanding of their own writing and of poetry. Students will write at least one poem per week. These will be discussed in class, along with readings by poets including Pound, Stevens, Stein, Creeley, Rukeyser, Oppen, Niedecker, Spicer, Ashbery, Plath, Howe, Palmer, Bernstein, and Notley as well as with poetic ideas associated with Russian Formalism, The Black Mountain School, The San Francisco Renaissance, Oulipo, Language Poetry and others. M. Sloan, Winter 2003 (D)

13400/33400. Graduate Poetry Workshop.
(=MAPH 33400, ENGL 33400) This graduate-level workshop features intensive reading, discussion, and critique, as well as occasional exercises. Along with students' weekly writing, we will discuss a number of recent books, considering a range of lyric gestures, deformations of convention, music and movement, and the poetic possibilities (and perplexities) they imply. (Although first priority is given to graduate students, graduating seniors may apply for admission based on a manuscript submission and statement of interest.) K. Volkman. Winter 2003. (D)

13700/33700. Advanced Playwriting
E. Sobel. Winter 2003.

13900/31100. History and Theory of Drama II
(=CMLT 20600/30600, ENGL 13900/31100, GSHU 24300/34300). May be taken in sequence with GSHU 24200/34200 or individually. This course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth: Molière, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, and Stoppard. Attention is also paid to theorists of the drama, including Stanislavsky, Artaud, and Grotowski. The goal is not to develop acting skill but, rather, to discover what is at work in the scene, and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report. Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with some other members of the class. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended. D. Bevington, D. N. Rudall. Winter. (C, F)

14701/34701. Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction.
PQ: Consent of instructor; submit a short story to G-B 309 by December 1, 2001. Students are expected to rewrite, revise, and reevaluate their original work from week to week based on our readings, discussions, and analysis. Lectures are based on issues that arise from student work. There are occasional exercises outside the students' own writing. The workshop meets weekly. A. Obejas. Winter 2003. (E)

15100/35100. Seminar at the Newberry Library: Sin and Forgiveness in Anglo-Saxon England.
PQ: Eng 149/349 or equivalent. This course meets at the Newberry Library; for more information, consult Christina von Nolcken (702-7977, mcv4@midway.uchicago.edu ) Staff. Winter. (B,D,H)

15200/35200. Beowulf.
PQ: ENGL 14900/34900 or equivalent. This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); we will also draw on the Newberry Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions when discussing textual and paleographical matters. Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. C. Von Nolcken. Winter 2003. (B, H)

15600. Medieval English Literature.
This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England. M. Miller. Winter 2003. (A, B, D, H)

16500. Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies.
This course is an exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history plays and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard III, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure. We also give serious attention to issues of political conflict, formation of national identity, self-fashioning, gender role-playing, courtship, maturation, innovations in genre, and staging (including, when we have time, film). D. Bevington. Winter. (B, F, H)

17000. Writing and the Early Modern Court
This course examines a range of poetry and drama written at or around the courts Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. In our readings of authors like Skelton, Wyatt, Sidney, Spencer, Shakespeare and Johnson, we will ask how literature responded to the course as the most visible center in early modern England for cultural, social and political engagement. B. Cormack, Winter 2003. (A, B, D, F, H)

17400. Shakespeare and Hybridity
This course will explore issues of generic, cultural, and linguistic forms of "hybridity" in Shakespearean drama. We will examine texts closely with attention to the thematic and structural significance of mixture, and work towards an understanding of cultural concerns about the mixing and blending of forms of racial, generic, and national forms of hybridization. We will consider the potential and limits of categorical thinking in social, familial and poetic terms, and explore the conceptual potential of mixture in the specific context of drama on the Shakespearean stage. C. Mazzio. Winter 2003. (B, F, H)

17502. Liberty and Toleration in Seventeenth Century Art and Literature.
C. Carlson, Winter 2003. (B,D)

17800. Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature.
A course in eighteenth-century British literature takes for granted two things eighteenth-century writers did not: the existence of a body of works one could point to and call British literature, and a clear sense of what it meant for a person and for a culture to be British. This course examines attempts between 1660 and 1740 to produce a literature for and about Britain and Britons. Texts include poetic, dramatic, imaginative, and nonfiction prose works by such writers as John Locke, George Etherege, Lord Rochester, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson. S. Macpherson. Winter 2003. (A, C, H)

20900. Fantasy and Science Fiction
(=CMLT 21800). This course will count on the "classic" period (1930's-1960's). It will however ,begin with representative authors from the nineteenth century like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, as well as some of the early twentieth century like David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus and H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness. Worth special attention will be authors like C.S Lewis and Ursula LeGuin who worked in both genres at a time when they were often contrasted. The two main texts which will be discussed will be one from each genre, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Herbert's Dune. Theory will be historical, that held by the authors or applied to their stories within the period. Most of the texts we will read come form the Anglo-American tradition with some significant exceptions like short works by Kafka and Borges. Requirements include a course paper and perhaps an oral examination. M.Murrin Winter 2003. (G)

21100. Victorian Wives, Mothers, and Daughters
(=ENGL 21100, GNDR 21300). This introduction to modern theoretical debates concerns the role of gender in Victorian society with a focus on the female gender in history, as well as instructive and medical texts. We begin with readings by Armstrong, Poovey, and Langland. We then concentrate on several contested and much-studied modes of identity: marriage, motherhood, the role of daughters, and related categories such as leisure and labor. E. Hadley. Winter 2003. (C, E, H)

23000. War.
(=CMLT 21900). Through a consideration of the texts and contexts of the First World War, this course will examine the nature and experience of modern warfare as a cultural--not merely a political and military--phenomenon, and will explore the extent to which war allows us to understand modernity itself. Readings will combine texts that will give us a familiarity with some of the basic political, historical, military and technological aspects of modern warfare; and, on the other hand, novels, poems, memoirs, films, and other texts produced by soldiers and civilians with a direct experience of war, either on the battlefront or at "home." We will explore the ways in which modern warfare either disrupts or allows us to more adequately understand the fundamental cultural processes of modern society--for example, questions of personal and national identity, social and economic process, geopolitics, biopolitics, gender and sexual identity, and modes of temporal organization. Readings will be selected from the work of Erich Remarque, Richard Aldington, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Paul Fussell, Henri Barbusse, Bernard Bergonzi, John Keegan, and others. S. Makdisi. Winter 2003. ()

23900. From My Soul to God's Ear: Gender and Spirituality in Early American Lit
(=GNDR 23900). This course explores the intersections between gender, spirituality, and literary form. Throughout our readings, we discuss spirituality as an alternative approach for thinking through themes such as identity, community, authority, and resistance. How does gender affect one's formal and emotional relationship to the sacred? How do practices of piety shape gender identity? Can these practices create possibilities for new forms of spiritual authority? What is the relationship between the self and the Christian community? Genres of early American literature from the seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography to the nineteenth-century slave narrative reflect the diverse ways American authors have engaged these questions. Narrative voices working within these genres often push against religious form to rework American spiritual traditions. Throughout the course, we trace how notions of the sacred and the self operate within literature to register and reorganize human relations. S. Rivett. Winter 2003. (E, G)

24300. Form and Experience in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
(=GNDR 24400) This course will survey a selection of Asian American Poets, some who are well-established in the canon of Asian American writing and some who are rarely found in anthologies organized by ethnicity. We will group these poets along three main lines: voice and experience, experimentation and surrealism, and hybridity of language and form. We will also occasionally pair these writers with important influences from Basho to the Beat poets. Some of the poets we are likely to read are Li Young-Lee, Janice Mirikatani, John Yau, Mei Mei Berssenbruge, Theresa Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Garret Hongo, Kimiko Hahn, Walter Lew, Marylin Chin, and David Mura. D. Nelson. Winter 2003. (D, G)

24700. Contemporary Historical Fiction.
One of the most prominent modes of contemporary fiction is the "historical novel." Our course will explore what it means for "fiction" to be "historical." In the process we will study various ways in which "identity" is produced through the interaction of familial and social forces. Psychological and cultural questions will be posed through close attention to textual intricacies. Primary texts will include Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Capote's In Cold Blood, Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Fuentes's The Old Gringo, Morrison's Beloved, Thomas's The White Hotel, Warren's All The King's Men, and Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From" and "The Demonstrators." Two of our ten weeks will explore various theoretical viewpoints on the conjunction of fiction and history. Theorists will include Barthes, de Certeau, Hutcheon, Lukacs, and White. There will be a midterm and final paper. W. Veeder. Winter 2002. (G)

28100. The Films of Max Ophuls
(=CMST 26500) Max Ophuls has variously been discussed as master of the long take and mise-en-scene, of theatrical adaptation and self-conscious narration; as director of the "woman's film," of melodramatic pathos and irony; and as artist and analyst of erotic and cinematic--obsession. Following the trajectory of his life and work from Germany through France, Italy, Hollywood, and back to Europe, we will consider Ophuls' films in terms of style and genre; the question of his gynocentric aesthetic and the feminist debate surrounding it; filmmaking and reception under the conditions of exile and industrial production. Films include Liebelei, La Signora, Madame De...., Le Plasir, and Lola Montes. (M.A. Students require permission of instructor) M. Hansen. Winter 2003. (F)

29600/48900. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960
(=ARTH 28600/38600, CMST 28600/48600, COVA 26600, ENGL 29600/48900, MAPH 33700, CMLT 22200/32200). PQ: ENGL 29300/48700 or consent of instructor. This is the second part of the international survey history for film covering the sound era up to 1960. The crystallization of the classical Hollywood film in terms of style and genre, as well as industry organization, is a key issue. But international alternatives to Hollywood are also discussed, from the unique forms of Japanese cinema to movements such as Italian Neo-Realism and the beginnings of the New Wave in France. Texts include Thompson Bordwell, Film History, An Introduction, and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, Godard, and others. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir. Y.Tsivian. Winter 2003. (F)

29700. Reading Course.
PQ: Consent of instructor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. May not be taken for a letter grade. The kind and amount of work to be done are determined by an instructor within the Department of English Language and Literature who has agreed to supervise the course. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

29802. Senior Seminar: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy.
This course will follow the history of Shakespeare's engagement with a genre (and also a mode). Starting with some ancient comedies, Old (Aristophanes) and New (Menander, Plautus), we will read most of Shakespeare's formal comedies (from Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night), at least one History (Henry IV, Part I), at least one "Problem Play" (Measure for Measure or All's Well that Ends Well) and the four "Romances": Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. We will also discuss selected critical approaches to these plays. R. Strier. Winter. (B, F, H)

29805. Senior Seminar: Fin de Siecle Gothic In Britain and America.
Our seminar has three objectives. To study major texts of gothic fiction produced in America at the end of the 19th-Century: Frank Norris' McTeague and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. To do archival work on gothic texts famous in this period but lost to history thereafter (stories by Emma Frances Dawson, W. C. Morrow, and others). To produce a major research paper on these gothic works or on others chosen by individual students in consultation with the professor. Our seminar will thus be both tightly focused and wide-ranging. We will focus on The School of Bierce, the writers associated with San Francisco in the 1890s; but we will range out to include any text in the Anglo-American gothic tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries that students want to devote their essays to. Our methodologies will be appropriately diverse: close reading, cultural and gender studies, psychoanalysis. W. Veeder. Winter. (E, G, H)

29900. Independent B.A. Paper Preparation.
PQ: Consent of instructor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. May not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a departmental elective.

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