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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 2006 COURSES
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| 30100 | Intro: Religion And Literature | |
| 31000/13800 | History and Theory of Drama 1 | |
| 31901 | The Literature of Trauma | |
| 32100/12300 | Poetry and Being | |
| 32602 | Texts of Indian Modernity: Rabindrath Tagore's Writings | |
| 32703/12703 | Writing Censorship | |
| 33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 34100 | Foundations of Interpretive Theory | |
| 36003 | Wit & Wisdom in 18th-Century Literature | |
| 36900 | Elizabeth I in Writing | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 43201/23402 | Obsolescence & Sentimentality | |
| 47210 | Modern European Poetics | |
| 48000 | Methods/Issues: Cinema Studies | |
| 48905/28905 | Classic Yiddish Fiction: Scholem-Aleichem and the Diasporic Imagination | |
| 50400 | Teaching Ugrad Eng Pedagogy | |
| 51000 | Ph.D. Colloquium | |
| 52502 | Literary Criticism from Plato to Burke | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 60301 | Space, Place, and Landscape | |
| 64800 | History and Fiction in 19th-Century Britain | |
| 67501 | Milton’s Epics | |
| 67802 | Ordinariness: An Introduction |
30100 Intro: Religion And Literature
Rosengarten, Richard
PQ: Divinity School Students Have Priority To Register; Students Of Other Units Per Consent Of Instructor
31000/13800 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David
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.
31901 The Literature of Trauma
Berlant, Lauren
This course will introduce students to advanced trauma theory and survey classics in the field, like Maus, Dispatches, Ariel, War Journalism, and relevant psychoanalytic and social scientific theoretical works from Freud onward through critical social theory related to holocausts, genocides, illness and accident, and torture. Special attention will be given to the relation of the "historic" scenes of obliteration to modes of negativity in everyday life. While primary texts will come from the U.S., theoretical and historical works will derive their arguments from a variety of geopolitical scenes.
32100/12300 Poetry and Being
Ruddick, Lisa
Why do people write poems, and why do we read them? In this course, we will approach this question through a range of readings in literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory devoted to the topics of human creativity, play, and emotion. In each class we will discuss one of these theoretical texts in conjunction with a close reading of one or more individual poems, from a variety of periods. Prerequisite: "Introduction to Poetry" or the equivalent at another institution.
32602 Texts of Indian Modernity: Rabindrath Tagore's Writings
Sarkar, Tanika; Nussbaum, Martha
Texts of Indian Modernity: Rabindranath Tagore's Writings about Nation, Universalism, Gender and Faith: The course will look at a selection of Tagore's writings in English translation, focusing on those themes which have gained a new relevance in the light of post colonial debates on universalism and cultural particularism, the politics of nationalism and gender in modern times. It will offer a mix of philosophical writings (Religion of Man), novels (Ghare baire or Home and the World and Jogajog or Relationships), short stories (The Wife's Letter and The Exercise Book) and political essays (”Nationalism”). It will also offer a few poems from The Crescent Moon and a play, The Post Office. The readings would be framed within four or five critical writings on Tagore and his historical-political context.
32703/12703 Writing Censorship
Weiner, Tracy
This practicum writing course will explore the often dynamic interchanges between writers and censors. While censorship is abhorrent to many people, it imagines texts as powerful quasi-agents with the ability to bring about political change, steal intellectual property, and even transform readers' bodies with visceral reactions like arousal or disgust. The course readings will explore the rhetorical strategies writers use in response to these simultaneously repressive and empowering conditions of censorship. In weekly assignments, students will practice the kinds of writing produced under censorship, including rhetorics of evasion such allusion and parable, and rhetorics of confrontation that frame the censors' own texts as acts of aggression. Case studies will include coverage of the war in Iraq, feminist analyses of pornography, and disputes over digital rights management. Readings will include J. S. Mill, Catherine McKinnon, J. M. Coetzee, and Lawrence Lessig.
33000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
Materials fee $25. Do not register for discussion sections. Register for main 01 section only. On the first Tuesday of Week 1, go to the lecture hall. MAPH/MAPSS students: obtain consent from your program. Others should contact writing-program@uchicago.edu
34100 Foundations of Interpretive Theory
Vogler, Candace; Schleusener, Jay
Required for MAPH students. Others by Consent only. Register by Preceptor section. 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 to 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.
36003 Wit & Wisdom in 18th-Century Literature
Valenza, Robin
A strong anti-intellectual current ran through eighteenth-century British literature. Texts tarred with the brush of pedantry were ruthlessly mocked, satirized, dismissed, or worse--ignored entirely. David Hume complained his scholarly philosophical treatise "fell dead-born from the press" because it was too recondite for general comprehension. Yielding to this (real or imagined) pressure to be intelligible to a general reader, eighteenth-century writings in the many branches of philosophy (natural, moral, metaphysical, among others) took a page from belles lettres and aimed for a mix of linguistic accessibility and intellectual virtuosity. Perhaps Alexander Pope expressed the century's ethos best when he wrote, "True Wit is nature to advantage dressed/What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Thus the question falls to us: do the writers of eighteenth-century Britain sacrifice methodological rigor at the altar of common intelligibility? Or have they achieved that unique marriage of style and substance that proves deep thinking does not need to be incomprehensible to the average reader? In pursuing these questions, we begin by reading the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldmith's popular essays and his novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, which, taken together, offer a concise, belletristic formulation of our questions. We'll then read a range of poetry, prose, and philosophical texts in search of an answer. Authors will include some of the following: Susannah Centlivre, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, David Hume, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, John Locke, Thomas Shadwell, Frances Burney, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, George Berkeley, Maria Edgeworth, Laurence Sterne, and Thomas Amory. Secondary texts will be drawn from modern responses to the problems of scholarly specialization.
36900 Elizabeth I in Writing
Mueller, Janel
This course has a historically specific, twofold purpose: to examine the range of writings produced by Elizabeth I as one of the first English women authors, and to investigate the workings of the 16th-century literary system, where the search for patronage and for opportunistic timing in presenting work were the routes to any possible professional status for a male author. Texts to be studied will include:
--writings by Elizabeth (letters, speeches, poetry, prayers);
--writings about Elizabeth (Edward Hall, Roger Ascham, John Foxe, Richard Mulcaster, and Book 3 of Spenser's "Fairie Queene");
--writings or staged productions for Elizabeth (dramas--Thomas Heywood's _If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody_, Sackville and Norton's _Ferrex and Porrex_, Shakespeare's _Love's Labor's Lost_, _Richard II_, and _Henry VIII_; entertainments--George Gascoigne's Kenilworth Castle entertainment, Sidney's _Lady of May_, and _The Four Foster Children of Desire_).
The course will be divided into five units: girlhood, accession to the throne, earlier decades (1560s-1570s), later decades (1580s-1590s), and epilogue (nostalgia for Elizabeth, 1603-13).
Two papers: one of five pages (in 4th week); one of fifteen pages (in 11th week).
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.
43201/23402 Obsolescence & Sentimentality
Scappettone, Jennifer
In this seminar, we will explore 20th-century allegories of junk and the junked. The course posits, along with the literature at hand, that the production of obsolescence under modernity simultaneously generates a vengeful residue of what expires, emerging in the form of sentiment--a category much despised by canonical modernists. According to these works, there is history in the body as well as of the body; and the feeling in which that history is lodged evokes a past far more extensive than that of the cloistered person. Together we will tap the residual histories embedded in "obsolescent" objects, subjects, and environments within such texts as Henry James' The Golden Bowl, T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, and Lisa Robertson's Xeclogue. Our questions will include the following: If modernist theories of emotion rely on the concept of the "objective correlative," what kinds of bad 20th-century sentiment are produced when the object begins to vanish, or is rendered spectral by commodification? How does what is passing away assume form in writing? How can we conceive of historical affect and historical empathy, in ways more expansive than concepts of melancholia and nostalgia allow? Essays by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Rem Koolhaas, Anne Cheng, Rei Terada, and Sianne Ngai will provide theoretical buttresses for our work. Midterm and final papers.
47210 Modern European Poetics
von Hallberg, Robert
PQ: Reading knowledge of one modern European language is required. This course, intended for M.A. and Ph.D. students, focuses on theories of poetry proposed by European writers of the 20th century. We will read essays by Mallarme, Valery, Benn, Eliot, Pound, Breton, Ponge, Heidegger, Celan, Bonnefoy, Oulipo writers, Kristeva, and others. Students will give one or two oral reports and write one essay on a poet of their choosing.
48000 Methods/Issues: Cinema Studies
Lastra, James
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, Godard.
48905/28905 Classic Yiddish Fiction: Scholem-Aleichem and the Diasporic Imagination
Schwarz, Jan
The seminar will examine the Yiddish writer Scholem-Aleichem's work as a prime example of the diasporic imagination in modern Jewish culture. The writer's greatest achievement was his monologues, oral narrative performances such as Tevye the Dairyman, the Railroad Stories and Menakhem Mendel. These key texts will be discussed in the context of Russian Jewry's crisis and transformation at the turn of the twentieth century. Scholem-Aleichem's political development will be traced in his relationship to the two dominant ideologies in Jewish Eastern Europe prior to World War I: Socialism and Zionism. Finally, Scholem-Aleichem's encounter with America during his visit in 1905-1906 and his immigration in 1914 will be discussed in connection with his play writing for the Yiddish stage and cinema. The course will delineate Scholem-Aleichem's unique literary universe and style, the pivotal expression of classic Yiddish fiction that remains one of the most original expressions of the diasporic imagination in modern Jewish culture.
No prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. All readings will be in English. Students wanting to study the primary material in the original languages (Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian) are encouraged to do so.
50400 Teaching Ugrad Eng Pedagogy
Hadley, Elaine
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 Ph.D. Colloquium
Brown, Bill
For first-year English Ph.D. students. This course provides an introduction to the advanced study of cultural texts by engaging some fundamental questions about literary works and, more broadly, works of art. One question will be ontological: what kind of thing is a work of art? what is a literary text? Another will be epistemological: when and how does a literary text come to count as a kind of knowledge--about "subjects," systems, beliefs, &c. The readings will include work from Heidegger, Lukács, Benjamin, and Arendt, and from Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault. We will also read some contemporary literary criticism and cultural theory to determine how such questions persist or how they have been suppressed. Participants will be required to write three very short papers.
52502 Literary Criticism from Plato to Burke
Scodel, Joshua
This course will explore major trends in Western literary criticism from Plato to the late eighteenth century. The course will take as its particular focus the critical treatment of epic in the following: Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Montaigne, Sidney, Le Bossu, St. Evremond, Dryden, Addison, Voltaire, and Burke. The course will also examine some twentieth-century approaches to epic (e.g., Auerbach, Curtius, Frye) in order to assess continuities and discontinuities in critical method and goals. Students will be encouraged to write final papers on subjects and authors of their choice while addressing issues treated in the course.
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.
60301 Space, Place, and Landscape
Mitchell, W.J.T.
This seminar will analyze the concepts of space, place, and landscape across the media (painting, photography, cinema, sculpture, architecture, and garden design, as well as poetic and literary renderings of setting, and "virtual" media-scapes). Key theoretical readings from a variety of disciplines, including geography, art history, literature, and philosophy will be included: Foucault's "Of Other Spaces," Michel de Certeau's concept of heterotopia; Heidegger's "Art and Space"; Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space; Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space; David Harvey's Geography of Difference; Raymond Williams's The Country and the City; Mitchell, Landscape and Power. Topics for discussion will include the concept of the picturesque and the rise of landscape painting in Europe; the landscape garden; place, memory, and identity; sacred sites and holy lands; regional, global, and national landscapes; embodiment and the gendering of space; the genius of place; literary and textual space.
Course requirements: 2 oral presentations: one on a place (or representation of a place); the other on a critical or theoretical text. Final paper. Consent of Instructor Required: Submit a statement of your proposed seminar project to wjtm@uchicago.edu by 9/22/06 indicating what specific aspect of space, place, and landscape 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 ENGL / ARTH / CMST / CMLT PhDs and then other outstanding applicants.
64800 History and Fiction in 19th-Century Britain
Helsinger, Elizabeth
This course will explore the relations of history and fiction in nineteenth-century Britain. Topics will include nineteenth-century conceptions of history, especially with respect to the construction of a national history and representations of the French Revolution; the nature of historical fiction; and general questions about the historicity of fiction, the fictionality of history, and problems of narrative, texture, and textuality. Readings: selections from nineteenth-century historians (Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin), contemporary theory and criticism (Lukacs, Foucault, Barthes, de Certeau, White, etc.), a generous selection of novels (Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot), and Browning's long historical poem "The Ring and the Book."
67501 Milton’s Epics
Murrin, Michael
The focus of the seminar will be close readings of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in light of major topics in Milton criticism in the last century. Examples might include issues like style, which came under attack by T. S. Eliot and the academic group which was then called the New Criticism; theology and/or philosophy, a lively topic in the days of Patrides and recently revived; the debate among feminists over Paradise Lost; politics, the current academic concern; and finally the interventions of creative writers like Ronald Johnson and Philip Pullman.
There will be student presentations, and a seminar paper will be required at the end of the course.
67802 Ordinariness: An Introduction
Berlant, Lauren
To encounter the ordinary is to encounter the saturation of predictable life by details vibrating with history while calmed by processes of ongoingness, even when conditions are extreme. Sometimes those processes are normatively ideological: for example, Zizek writes that what is to be defined as ahistorical is a primary anxiety of political struggle. But the literature suggests that all sorts of explanations are necessary to locate people at the juncture of being historical and feeling simple, ahistorical, transhistorical, beside the point, private, detached, and/or contingent, not held well by any temporality in particular. The analytic and aesthetic mediation of the ordinary has increasingly become reflected on in anthropology, everyday life theory, histories and theories of sexuality, urban/global geography, architecture, psychoanalysis and affect theory, and literary study. We will amass and read in a bibliography, beginning with: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, Michel DeCerteau, Tom Dumm, David Harvey, Henri Lefevbre, Michel Foucault, John Ricco, Kristin Ross, Nadia Serematakis, Georg Simmel, Katie Stewart, Carolyn Steedman, Melodrama, (Hansen/Dyer/Gledhill), Realism (Fisher/Lutz/Howard/Warren). The main aim of this course is to encounter how a stream of thinkers conceives the mediations, affects, built environments, and ideologies of the ordinary, the everyday, the banal, and the taken for granted; we will also inhabit these scenes in aesthetic material derived from recent and contemporary US minimalist fiction (Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Charles Johnson, Ben Marcus), but after a few weeks this material will be reshaped by student scholarly interests. Seminar paper and presentation required.
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