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Graduate Courses
Click on the course title to view its course description. Please note that all courses are subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date and current day and time information, please refer to the University Time Schedules. Undergraduate course information is also available on this Web site.
2008-2009 |
2007-2008 |
2006-2007 |
2005-2006 |
2004-2005 |
2003-2004 |
AUTUMN 2005 COURSES
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| 31000/13800 | History and Theory of Drama 1 | |
| 32700/12700 | Writing Biography | |
| 32852/22807 | Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean | |
| 33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 33205/16305 | Seminar in the Practice of Poetry | |
| 34100 | Foundations of Interpretive Theory | |
| 34900/14900 | Old English | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 46000 | 19th Century Anglo-American Gothic Fiction | |
| 46020/25907 | Phonographic Fictions: Literature and Sound | |
| 46301 | 19th Century U.S. Latino Public Sphere | |
| 47200 | Elements of Poetry & Poetics | |
| 48000 | Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies | |
| 48602/28602 | Black Queer Media(makers) | |
| 48700/29300 | History of International Cinema I-Silent Era | |
| 50300 | Principles of Teaching Writing | |
| 50400 | Teaching Ugrad Eng Pedagogy | |
| 51000 | PhD Colloquium | |
| 51801 | Politics of Literacy in Late Medieval England | |
| 56002 | World Poetry | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 60302 | The Arts of Memory | |
| 63900 | The Sentimental | |
| 67801 | The Intimate Public Sphere |
31000/13800 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David; Rudall, Nick
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The course features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report.
32700/12700 Writing Biography
Weiner, Tracy
Writing Biography is, as its name implies, a course in writing biography. Our goal will be to identify successful biographical writing techniques in the class readings and then practice these techniques in frequent assignments. Texts will include Janet Malcolm on Sylvia Plath, Joseph Ellis on Thomas Jefferson, Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf, , and Malcolm X's autobiography. We'll practice the techniques biographers use to transform into a coherent whole the diverse and often contradictory materials of biography - letters and diaries, media reports and previous biographies, gossip and government records, the fond (but sometimes misleading) memories of friends and the malicious (but occasionally illuminating) accounts of enemies. We will construct narratives that aspire to do two things: represent another person's life, and make that life represent something beyond itself - a historical period, a social group, or a particular kind of achievement (admirable or otherwise).
22807 32852 Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean
King, Rosamond
/Hybridity. Metissage. Creole. Mestizaje. /These words refer to the complex contact of, conflict between, and mixture of peoples and cultures in the Caribbean. This course explores issues of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean through a variety of historical, theoretical, and creative texts. Students will examine how the concepts of race and ethnicity function in Caribbean societies, in both intra- and inter-ethnic situations, as well as how these concepts relate to gender, sexuality, color, class, and other topics. We will analyze each text's form, content, and perspective, as well as its historical, political, and social context. Presentations encourage students to describe their own ideas and help lead class discussions. Readings include C.L.R. James's /The Black Jacobins/, Edgar Mittelholzer's /Corentyne Thunder, /Jean Rhys's /Wide Sargasso Sea/, Piri Thomas's /Down These Mean Streets/, poems by Michelle Cliff, and other articles and essays. We will also see Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's film /The Couple in the Cage/ and listen to various music selections. Class presentation, mid-term, final project.
33000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse)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. PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. P/F grading optional for English Language and Literature nonconcentrators. Materials fee $25.
33205/16305 Seminar in the Practice of Poetry
Powell, Jim
This seminar enacts the proposition that we acquire the art of poetry in important part by the practice of the art of reading it. Our sessions will be devoted half to a sketchy survey of English Renaissance lyric, Wyatt to Waller, with attention to the evolution of traditional English measure, and half to readings introducing other traditions and issues. This course is taught in conjunction with Workshop in the Practice of Poetry (CRWR 23101/43101, ENGL 16306/33206). Students accepted into the workshop will automatically be accepted and expected to concurrently enroll in this class. There are a limited number of spots reserved for people who wish to enroll in the seminar only (and not the workshop); people expressing the desire to do so will be given priority for these spots. In order to be considered for the seminar only, please submit a paragraph to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 9/1/05 in which you answer the following questions: 1.) Who are two favorite dead poets and two favorite live ones?, 2.) What language(s) do you read besides English? At what level of proficiency? What poets have you read in them?, 3.) What leads you to this course? You will be contacted by 9/15/05 with a decision.
PQ: Instructor Consent Required. In order to be considered, submit materials to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 9/1/05. See course description for submission requirements.
34100 Foundations of Interpretive Theory
Vogler, Candace; Schleusener, Jay
An introduction to seminal works in the European philosophical tradition which have shaped important approaches to humanistic study. The course focuses on traditional accounts of the intending subject, and the criticism of it central t some modes of psychoanalytic and Marxist work, and to some work on culture, sex race, and gender. Among the authors read are Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, Lacan, and Althusser. Ian Mueller and Candace Vogler with guest lecturers
34900/14900 Old English
von Nolcken, Christina
This course is designed to prepare students for further study in Old English language and literature. As such, our focus will be the acquisition of those linguistic skills needed to encounter such Old English poems as Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and The Wanderer in their original language. In addition to these texts, we may also translate the prose Life of Saint Edmund, King and Martyr and such shorter poetic texts as the Exeter Book riddles. We will also survey Anglo-Saxon history and culture, taking into account the historical record, archeology, manuscript construction and illumination, and the growth of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline. This course serves as a prerequisite both for further Old English study at the University of Chicago and for participation in the Newberry Library's Winter Quarter Anglo-Saxon seminar.
39900 Intensive Reading Research
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of Instructor required.
46000 19th Century Anglo-American Gothic Fiction
Veeder, William
In the nineteenth century, gothic fiction in English is an Anglo-American phenomenon. America's first internationally recognized literary masterpiece, Rip Van Winkle, is written in England and appears the same year as Frankenstein. Our course will study the transatlantic aspect of the gothic tradition, while we also give full attention to the particular qualitie of individual texts. Close reading will be central to our project. Attention to textual intricacies will lead to questions about gender and psychology, as well as culture. Our authors will include Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Poe, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Thomas Hardy. Mid-term and final papers.
46020/25907 Phonographic Fictions: Literature and Sound
Biers, Katherine
This course introduces students to the nascent field of "sound studies" and asks how it can help us to understand late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. We will read fictions that thematize mechanically reproduced sound alongside essays about the effects of mechanical reproducibility on culture and on the practice of fiction writing. We will also examine phonography - the writing of sound - in a larger sense, listening to the ways in which historical "soundscapes," or sonic environments, register differently in different literary genres and movements. Do "record grooves dig the grave of the author," as one theorist of modern media systems has recently suggested? Is the notion of a "subject" who "experiences" acoustic technologies itself a fiction? Or can approaching modernity in terms of the aural, rather than the visual, allow us to hear the historical experiences of non-normative subjects - for example, those marked by race, gender and/or sexuality? Genres may include the late-Victorian Gothic, the Harlem Renaissance, "high" modernism, and postmodernism. Authors may include Bram Stoker, James Weldon Johnson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Don Delillo.
46301 19th Century U.S. Latino Public Sphere
Coronado, Jr., Raul
Latina/o literature has usually been described as a twentieth-century phenomenon, emerging for the most part during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. This course will critically interrogate this assumption by focusing on nineteenth-century Latinas/o public writings. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Latin Americans--including Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, and Colombians--sought refuge in the U.S. and used the printing press, especially in Philadelphia, Charlottesville, and New Orleans, to foment support for the independence of their Latin American countries. Likewise, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the printing press arrived across what is today the U.S. Southwest and gave birth to a vibrant and often belligerent printing culture. It was through these published texts that ideas associated with modernity were, for the first time, debated and developed in print among Latinas/os, ideas such as representative government, the rights of citizen-subjects, and the power of the press to reconfigure society. Though our focus will be on that body of work produced in what is today the U.S., we will need to situate this literary and cultural history in a transnational framework, between the U.S. and Latin America. In doing so, we will be better equipped to begin to imagine alternative historical geographies for a literature of the Americas, one where the seemingly impermeable barrier between U.S. and Latin American literary and cultural history begins to disintegrate in U.S. Latina/o studies. Readings will include primary texts (travel writing, newspapers, memoirs, essays, fiction) and secondary readings by such critics as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Julio Ramos, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Juan Poblete, Michael Warner, Debra Castillo, Jorge Klor de Alva, Walter Mignolo, Angel Rama, and Wernor Sollors. A reading knowledge of Spanish, though not required, will be useful.
47200 Elements of Poetry & Poetics
von Hallberg, Robert
This course is designed as a high-level introduction to poetry and the criticism of poetry as well. We will begin class discussions always with individual poems, but the course will proceed through a series of four categories of reading and analysis: 1) Meter and Prosody; 2) Tone, Structure, Syntax, and Diction; 3) Simile, Description, and Metaphor; 4) What Is Poetry? Within each of these segments of the course, we will read particular poems but students will also read and report on assigned critical writings on these topics. Three short papers.
48000 Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies
Hansen, Miriam
This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique, and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus, and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, and Godard.
48602/28602 Black Queer Media(makers)
Welbon, Yvonne
This course surveys current films, videos and television programs by and about black gays and lesbians, focusing primarily on the recent emergence of black queer feature filmmakers (Cheryl Dunye, Rodney Evans, Angela Robinson, Patrick Ian Polk) and proliferation of black queer characters on television (The L Word, The Wire, Metrosexuality and Six Feet Under). Framing our discussion with the race, gender, and cultural movements of the late 20th century, as well as the technological innovations that led to "democratization" in media production, this course will survey media produced by and about black gays and lesbians in the United States and abroad; explore alternative independent systems developed to counter media industry hegemony; and evaluate diverse approaches to contemporary media and cultural criticism.
48700/29300 History of International Cinema I-Silent Era
Tsivian, Yuri
The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological; we will also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
50300 Principles of Teaching Writing
McEnerney , Larry
We will survey some of the major points in teaching composition, including the research that speaks to matters on intention, invention, organization, style, and usage as they impinge on teaching composition. We will attempt to evaluate different theories of evaluation and the reasons for the markedly different approaches to evaluating student writing. Open to "Little Red Schoolhouse" lectors only, others by application.
50400 Teaching Ugrad Eng Pedagogy
Goldsby, Jacqueline
This course is restricted to third-year Ph.D. English department students only. This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching of English. The course, for purposes of focus and with the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy, which help the students to reflect on and speak to their practice. The course will provide significant opportunities in conceptualizing, designing, and running a college-level course in English: e.g., the opportunity to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to construct a sample syllabus, to grade a common paper.
51000 PhD Colloquium
Brown, Bill
This course will include an introduction to what New Criticism was (with Wimsatt and Brooks being the examples), an explanation of structuralism (featuring Saussure and Levi-Strauss), a discussion of how Foucauldian and deconstructive work emerged in relation to and in reaction against both formalism and structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze). The course will end up discussing work by Leo Bersani, D.A. Miller, Eve Sedgwick, and Mary Poovey, to situate their arguments and locate them in relation to ongoing critical debates.
51801 Politics of Literacy in Late Medieval England
von Nolcken, Christina
With the reestablishment of English as a vehicle for written as well as spoken texts in the fourteenth century came the radical democratization of learning. Working especially with writings by Richard Rolle, John Wyclif and his followers, some early dramatists, Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe, we will follow this democratization as it affected the literary production of the period.
56002 World Poetry
von Hallberg, Robert
Poets are usually understood to address a national readership, though sometimes they address a transnational readership that shares one language, as the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. share English. A small number of poets, however, reach a larger or different audience through translation, and a few small number of these poets become a poetic influence through translation. Czeslaw Milosz certainly belongs in this last group as a poet in the English language. How does this process occur? Is there a pattern to the reception histories of the poets who successfully attain a significant audience through translation? How important is the political dimension of this process? What are the consequences of such translation for the source and the target cultures? What role do aesthetic judgments play in this process?
The seminar will begin with a study of the current theoretical debate about world literature; we will read David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Franco Morretti in this first phase of the seminar. In the second phase, each student will give one oral presentation on a single poet. In the final phase, each student will write a paper on the reception history of one poet, either in the U.S. or abroad. Ability to read well in one foreign language is required. Students wishing to register for the seminar should contact the instructor and select in advance one poet to write on; the instructor will set the reading list of poets in translation in consultation with the seminar members. PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 12 students, as long as the majority of students are ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature.
59900 Reading & Research: English
Staff
A student who wishes to study an author or a topic not covered by the course offerings may arrange for independent study with a professor willing to supervise that study. The student should indicate on the Registration Program Card the name of the professor from whom a grade is to be expected. Consent of instructor and advisor required.
60302 The Arts of Memory
Mitchell, W.J.T.
The aim of this seminar is to survey some of the classic theories of memory (as archive, as natural capacity and cultivated technique; as subjective experience and collective transmission; as a semiotics of inscription and erasure), and to explore the staging of memory in verbal and visual media-the "arts of memory." Topics discussed will include amnesia and cinema; writing, recording, and memory; artificial and machine memory; memory spaces and architecture; the double coding of word and image; memoirs and slave narrative; matter, technology, and memory. The syllabus will be in part determined by the interests of the group, but we will certainly want to take up some of the classic theories of memory from Plato to Freud and Bergson as well as some of the important modern scholarship on this topic, including Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Mary Carrothers, The Book of Memory, David Krell, Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, and others. Consent of Instructor Required: Submit a statement of your proposed seminar project to wjtm@uchicago.edu by 9/12/05 indicating what specific aspect of the arts of memory you would like to explore, and what particular theoretical resources and archives you intend to develop. Statements should be one page single-spaced, and be accompanied by a short list of the texts you regard as most crucial to your research. Indicate what department and what level you are in. Preference to Eng / ArtH / CMST PhDs & then other outstanding applicants.
63900 The Sentimental
Chandler, James
This seminar will give advanced students a chance to pursue research and criticism over a range of periods and objects of study. The broad topic will be the theory and practice of the sentimental over the course of nearly three centuries, on stage, page, and screen. In addition to looking at the philosophical treatments of the sentiments in Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith, and critical discussions of the "sentimental" as a literary mode (in Schiller), we will look at sentimental comedy, sentimental fiction, and sentimental cinema. Since the sentimental is inevitably a mode of mediated affective exchange, the place of the media and of translation between media, will have special importance in the course. Primary works by such figures Steele, Sterne, MacKenzie, Charlotte Smith, William Hall Brown, the poets of sensibility and Romanticism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dickens, D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Douglas Sirk, and others. Secondary works from the burgeoning field of "sensibility studies." Seminar presentation and paper.
67801 The Intimate Public Sphere
Berlant, Lauren
Public sphere and feminist/queer theory have opened up critical strategies for thinking about the cultural politics of adaptation and transgression in the development of collective identifications. The first half of the course will track these two trajectories using US "women's culture" as its main historical scene: here, the course provides an arena for studying the aesthetic production and imagination of subjects in everyday life, the "ordinary," the capitalist and political spheres. The second half will focus on the articulation of sex and politics in everyday and mass institutions of intimacy. We will begin by reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and will move through suffrage and into modern and contemporary elaborations of this structure, focusing on melodrama and comedy. Seminar paper and presentation required.
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