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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.
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AUTUMN 2007 COURSES
ENGL 31000/13800 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
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.
ENGL 32603 India in English
Gandhi, Leela
This course will consider some primary nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian engagements with, and variations upon, the English literary tradition. Focussing upon the complex literary transactions that marked the Indo-British colonial encounter, our discussion will be loosely structured by two fields of enquiry. First, we will canvass the debate on the vexed relation between literariness, canonicity and imperialism that has haunted postcolonial theory through its various mutations, in a bid to read ‘poetry’, ‘imagination’, ‘literature’ as revolutionary signs for the anticolonial project. Second, and following on from here, we shall endeavour to glean in the anticolonial valorisation of literariness a new manifesto, presenting the domain of poetry as one of the principle sources for a postcolonial askesis; a unique way of reforming those selves that have known various historically disorting experiences of subordination. The texts being surveyed will include paradigmatic generic experiments with the epic, the novel, autobiography, philology and comparative literary theory (Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi), and select contemporary variations upon these literary predecedents (Ghosh, Rushdie). Participants will be required to offer one oral research / seminar presentation and write one long paper of approximately 3000 words. (Click here to view a working course outline.)
ENGL 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.
ENGL 32801 Literature, Information, Media
Hansen, Mark
Course will explore experimental "poetics of granularity"—poetic practices that operate on language at the granular level of the word and syllable—from mid-20th-century until today, with an eye towards contextualizing contemporary multimedia and digital textuality. Some attention will be devoted to information theory as a potential source for the theorization of such poetics and, in particular, for an expansion of "poetics" beyond "language" narrowly writ into the domains of the visual and the tactile. Poets, artists, and critics to be studied will likely include: Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley, John Cage, Jackson MacLow, Carolyn Bergvall, Steve McCaffery, Jim Rosenberg, John Cayley, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes.
ENGL 33000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn;
Weiner, Tracy
Academic and Professional Writing, a.k.a. "The Little Red Schoolhouse" or "LRS," is an advanced writing course for graduate students in all of the divisions and many university professional programs. The Little Red Schoolhouse helps writers learn to communicate complex and difficult material clearly to a wide variety of expert and non-expert readers, including the readers in the academic community you are currently working to join. It is designed to prepare you for the demands of academic writing at the level of the dissertation, the academic or professional article, and the academic or professional book.
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.
ENGL 34100 (MAPH 30100) Foundations of Interpretive Theory
Levin, David; Miller, Mark
Required for MAPH students. Others by consent only.
The MAPH Colloquium and Core (Foundations of Interpretive Theory) will offer a rigorous introduction to theoretical work that fosters a dialogue with a range of cultural objects. In lieu of an Introduction to Theory course (and the Greatest Hits approach that often characterizes it), we will seek thematic and analytic coherence around a set of unfolding questions concerning identification and desire and their relations to social form, politics, ideology, and aesthetics. Readings will include works in psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and post-colonial studies by such writers as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Zizek. While the majority of lectures will be presented by the program’s co-directors, the Core course will also feature a series of distinguished guest lecturers drawn from the University of Chicago faculty.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 35500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Schleusener, Jay
During most of the twentieth century Chaucer was understood by British and American critics as a proto liberal-humanist poet. That understanding made for comfortable though selective reading of The Canterbury Tales. During the last thirty years a more vexing but less easily characterized Chaucer has emerged from the work of critics interested in social history and theory, in gender theory and in psychoanalysis. It is now harder and more interesting to try thinking clearly about the kind of poetic project Chaucer undertook in The Canterbury Tales. The course will focus on that issue. We will discuss some of the most ambitious and compelling recent scholarship and criticism; we will engage some of the literary and philosophical texts that Chaucer drew on most often; and we will read and reread a number of the tales (including some traditionally neglected).
ENGL 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.
ENGL 43202 Postmodernism
Dubey, Madhu
This course will explore the various and hotly contested meanings of the term “postmodernism” in U.S. literary and cultural studies. We will begin by examining influential ‘meta’ theories of postmodernism by the likes of Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward Soja, followed by critiques, revisions, and extensions of these theories from the perspectives of feminism, race, and postcolonial studies (by critics including Doreen Massey, bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiano, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Donna Haraway, Linda Nicholson, Anthony Appiah, Rey Chow). We will test the various definitions, claims, and counter-claims that emerge from theoretical debates on postmodernism against selected literary texts, popular fiction, graphic novels, and films.
ENGL 43903/23903 Women, Spirituality, and Religious Expression in America
Knight, Janice
We will analyze the writings, speeches, public performances, devotional objects and practices, and the recorded testimonies of selected American women religionists and authors, focusing on the relationship between spirituality, gender, literary production, and alternative practices of gaining a public "voice." We will read a variety of genres, including trial transcripts, heresiographies, advice manuals, conversion and captivity narratives, letters, poems, and diaries. Our selections will be attentive to such issues as class affiliation, the production of public and "domestic" utterance, and the disciplining of female speech. Among the authors included: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Lee, Emily Dickinson. We will also explore the trials of Anne Hutchinson, the disruptive religious performances of Quakers, and Shaker expressive modes of spirit drawing and dancing.
ENGL 44701/24701 U.S./Third World Feminisms
Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole M.
The term US/Third World Feminisms has a problematic history. Although self-defined third world women have been engaged in feminist movements, some critique mainstream Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric (U.S. centric) and does not take into account the existence of feminism(s) plural. Third world feminists often argue that mainstream Western feminists look at women’s experience as homogenous, based on the perspectives of middle-class white Western women. The white western female and male are the subject of universal humanism and thus the subjects of critique and inquiry in feminist thought. Third-World feminists would argue that global capitalism is the basis for any feminist analysis and that self-identified ‘Third World’ subjects experience oppression by other factors in addition to patriarchy. For example, ‘third-world’ women emerge as a monolithic category in discussions of places like Africa. The construction of Africa as nation is hugely problematic and much Feminist scholarship on “Africa” does not take into account regional differences, tribal differences or economic differences, let alone that Africa is a continent and not a country. Instead, many studies focus on the atrocities of practices such as genital mutilation with a Western academic gaze. The methods taught in this class deconstruct and pull apart imperialist knowledge production that allows students to think of Africa as nation and African women solely as victims. This course complicates what constitutes feminist analysis by teaching students a critical idiom that allows for a multiplicity of ideas about the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality as necessary to carrying out feminist analysis. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) and Norma Alarcón (1990) argue that ‘difference’ and the term third world woman are often theorized, unproblematically, as the “native.” Like in the “Africa” example, the native as the other, become the objects of inquiry and not subjects of their own theories or making. A critical U.S./Third World feminist practice interrogates both the category of Africa and the native as object of study to suggest that this is a methodological mode of inquiry and not a field-study of victimized brown women. Examining concepts like intersubjectivity, the basis for comparison across cultures and histories as a way to combat ethnocentrism that is often found in Women’s Studies scholarship, is one particular way to address the ways in which US/Third World feminism is falsely represented as a discourse of victimization and anti-solidarity.
ENGL 45201 U.S. Historical Novel: 19th Century
Berlant, Lauren
This course has two aims: one, to familiarize students with the current touchstones of U.S. historical fiction during the pre and post bellum US century—such as Hobomok, Typee, Ramona, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Scarlet Letter, Of One Blood, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Country of the Pointed Firs. Students will be expected to do original historicizing work on the texts they report and write on. Second, students will read in a wide range of secondary materials (not just on U.S. novels) that produce models for reading the narrative and political conventions and effects of historical fiction. We will focus on the history/sentiment/romance axis, as well as on the question of minority literatures: addressing the critical work of Doris Sommers, Joseph Roach, David Lloyd, Ann DuCille, Claudia Johnson, June Howard, W. B. Michaels, and Jonathan Arac, as well as the theoretical work of Peggy Phelan, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Jurgen Habermas, and Nikolas Luhmann.
ENGL 47210 Modern European Poetics
von Hallberg, Robert
PQ: Reading knowledge of one modern European language is required; Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of students are ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. 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.
ENGL 47803/27803 (SCTH 34310) What a Lyric Poem Can Carry
Zagajewski, Adam
This class will consist in the close reading of great poems by several poets (George Seferis, Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, etc.). Each week one or two poems will be studied and the purpose will be to see the structure and the meaning of the poem against the backdrop of private and public history behind it.
ENGL 47804/27804 (SCTH 34300) Poetry vs Zeitgeist—Czeslaw Milosz among His Masters and Peers
Zagajewski, Adam
The idea of this class is to read Milosz's work, poetry and essays, in the context of writers and thinkers who inspired him or whom he saw as his competitors. His main rival was the zeitgeist itself; Milosz's poetry entered the realm of ideas and this will be one of the main themes of the course.
ENGL 47902 African American & Caribbean Poetry
von Hallberg, Robert
This course will follow a seminar format: students will give reports to orient and initiate discussion of individual poets. In our discussion of poems—and the classes will focus on single poems—the role of musicality, oratory, and vernacular speech will figure prominently. We will be concerned to identify the distinctive features of these poets one by one: Edouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Jay Wright, Nathaniel Mackey, Carl Phillips, Thylias Moss, and Elizabeth Alexander. Students will give a formal report on a poet of their choosing, and will write an essay at the end of the quarter.
ENGL 48000 (CMST 40000) Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies
Gunning, Thomas
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.
ENGL 48700/29300 (CMST 48500/28500) History of International Cinema, Part I, Silent Era
Lastra, James
PQ: CMST 10100 must be taken before or concurrently with this course. This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. 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 discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
ENGL 50300 Principles of Teaching Writing
Cochran, Kathy; Weiner, Tracy
Principles of Teaching Writing (offered in Autumn only) is for graduate students who have been hired to teach Academic and Professional Writing (The Little Red Schoolhouse).
ENGL 50400 Teaching Undergraduate English 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 57301 Early Enlightenment Epistemology in England
Valenza, Robin
The reading list may speak for itself: Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, Hooke, Cavendish, Newton, Locke, Hutcheson, Berkeley, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Chambers, and Hume. We will attend to how each of these writers addresses how we come to know what we know. This class traces a trajectory that leads (arguably) to the high philosophical Enlightenment in Europe, but—never fear—we will read with critical eyes. The pace will be intense; the rewards immense.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 60304 Realism & the Abracadabrant Word: Lit Productions of Lower Manhattan
Scappettone, Jennifer
This course will sound the limits, permissions, and implosion of realist strains in American experimentalism through a genealogy of writing surrounding Lower Manhattan; reading through the objectives of both tourists and inhabitants, we will consider texts not only as representations of urban space but as inventors of it. We will begin and end in the zone's—and the global future's—epicenter of power, on Wall Street, in order to grasp the stakes of its inversion by the underground and to detect the reciprocal interference of work and leisure, fortune and emiseration within the city. In reading the Bowery, we will ponder Henry James's sense of the illegibility of the American amalgamation witnessed downtown: its syllables too numerous to constitute a legible word, it hangs in the air there "as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language." We will then ask what new languages and forms were enabled by the tenement environment's compression of ethnic and linguistic traditions—taking Louis Zukofsky's polylingual lyrics and homophonic translations as an early example. We will move from modernist strains of depiction of the Lower East Side through an explosion of post-war artistic activity around this neighborhood: the intermedia collaborations and little magazines/mimeos of the New York School and the St. Mark's Poetry Project; "happenings" and installations at The Store; the resurgence of a collective dream once represented by Harlem in the jazz of Archie Shepp, the La MaMa theatre, and publications such as The East Village Other; and the polylingual, sound, and spoken word poetry produced around the Nuyorican Poets Café. We will close with questions surrounding the amplification and ramification of this region's significance following the devastation of September 11, looking at projected plans for the World Trade Center's reconstruction and the friction between official and grassroots acts of memorialization. Literature treated may include: Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; Walt Whitman, selected poems; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Henry James, The American Scene; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; Louis Zukofsky, selected poems & prose; Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, & Joe Brainard, writings and collaborations; Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns and "simultaneities"; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Edwin Torres, All-Union Day of the Shock Worker; Richard Serra, Tilted Arc; Various artists, anonymous, Here is New York; projects for the World Trade Center memorial. One presentation to the seminar leading to a final research project will be required.
ENGL 67502 Milton
Scodel, Joshua
This course will follow Milton’s career as a poet and, to some extent, as a writer of polemical prose. It will concentrate on his sense of his own vocation as a poet and as an active and committed Protestant citizen in times of revolution and reaction. Works to be read include the Nativity Ode, selected sonnets, A Mask, Lycidas, The Reason of Church Government, selections from the divorce tracts, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. There will be a mid-term exercise and a final paper.
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