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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 2008 COURSES
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| 30805/24202 | Romantic Fiction and the Historical Novel | |
| 31000/13800 | History and Theory of Drama 1 | |
| 33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse) | |
| 33007/22905 | Looking for History: Chronicles of Contemporary Latin America | |
| 34100 | Foundations of Interpretive Theory | |
| 34900/14900 | Old English | |
| 35500 | Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading & Research | |
| 41400 | Virginia Woolf | |
| 42404/25306 | Sociology of Literature | |
| 42804/22809 | Comparative Literature of the Americas | |
| 46702/26702 | Poems and Essays | |
| 48100 | The Harlem Renaissance and Hollywood | |
| 48604 | "Owning Up": South Africa, Confession, and Transition | |
| 50400 | Teaching Undergraduate English Pedagogy | |
| 51000 | Ph.D. Colloquium | |
| 52502 | Literary Criticism from Plato to Burke | |
| 55404 | New Directions in the Study of American Culture | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 65304 | Aesthetics and Politics | |
| 65501 | "Yours Sincerely": A History and Theory of Sincerity | |
| 65801 | American Lit 1930-1950 |
Campbell, Timothy
In this course we will examine the emergence of the historical novel in Romantic Britain and situate this genre within a wider expansion of the code of realism that attends to social-historical phenomena and processes in new and enduring ways. We will organize the course around the particularly influential authorship of Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, in part by addressing the competing practices of several oppositional contemporaries. We will also draw upon a mix of foundational and recent criticism to consider a series of sites where Romantic fiction conceptualizes history with special energy: the subject, the imperial Celtic periphery, the romance, commercial modernity, and the everyday.
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 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. 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 33007/22905 (LACS 38306/28306, HIST 36205/26205)
Looking for History: Chronicles of Contemporary Latin America
Guillermoprieto, Alma
This course will focus substantively on 20th-century Latin American history, but will also give attention to the particular style of literary journalism or "chronicles" characteristic of the instructor's own writings. In other words, this course will explore how chroniclers of contemporary Latin American history produce this particular genre. Texts will give an overview of the contemporary history of Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with a full course session devoted to chronicles of Che Guevara. This course would be appropriate for students of Latin American history and students of literature. Teaching and texts will be in English. Alma Guillermoprieto is a Tinker Visiting Professor this quarter.
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 41400 Virginia Woolf
Ruddick, Lisa
Readings will include The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, and selected essays.
ENGL 42404/25306 Sociology of Literature
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course explores the critical potential and limitations of a few key sociological approaches to literature, working with the London literary scene of the 1890s as our case. We will focus on Bourdieu's theorization of the field of cultural production; Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge and discursive formations; Luhman's influential systems theory; and recent efforts by Moretti and others to import geographic and evolutionary models into literary studies.
ENGL 42804/22809 Comparative Literature of the Americas
Coronado, Raúl
The last decade has seen a dramatic shift away from nation-based approaches to literary studies and a desire to move towards more transnational approaches. But how and more importantly why should we do so? What is to be gained? This course will explore these conceptual questions as we read primary texts from late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spanish America and the U.S.
ENGL 46702/26702 Poems and Essays
von Hallberg, Robert
This course will focus on five poets who also wrote essays: Charles Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, Joseph Brodsky, and Zbigniew Herbert. We will first read poems by each of these authors, then we will turn to the essays. Our objective is to study both poems and essays as artful writing; we will not be looking to the essays for explanations of the poems, though some of the essays we will read do directly concern the art of poetry. Certain literary critical questions will no doubt arise: to what extent does the art of the essay depend upon brilliant moments, as poems often do? Is continuity a necessary feature of an artful essay? Is the persuasive objective of an essayist altogether different from the objectives of a poet? How far can rhetorical analysis take one in understanding lyric poetry?
Each student will give one oral report (of about ten minutes) on one of the writers in the course, and also write a final essay (of ca. 15 pp., on a topic to be approved by one of the instructors) due at the end of the quarter.
ENGL 48100 (CMST 41401) The Harlem Renaissance and Hollywood
Binggeli, Elizabeth
This course will consider how African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond shaped and were shaped by the Hollywood film industry. How were the aesthetic and political goals of African American artistic production affected by the economic and narrative practices of the studio system? Our consideration will include writers who were employed by the studios, whose work was considered for studio adaptation, or who directly critiqued studio production, including Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin.
ENGL 48604 "Owning Up": South Africa, Confession, and Transition
Bunn, David; Taylor, Jane
This course will introduce students to major debates within post-election South Africa. We will examine several major texts by several writers and artists who situate their work in relation to the confessional voice. The primary works are those of J M Coetzee, William Kentridge, and Penny Siopis, and they will be examined for what they can reveal about rupture and identity through examining the case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At the same time, they will be considered as aesthetic experiments. The course will explore the extent to which these experiments posit provisional subjectivities which are "authoring" themselves through confessional utterances. We will also discuss the emblematic threat which confronts these subjectivities in the figure of the ghost, the zombie, the witch, and the double.
We will examine several documents from the Truth and Reconciliation commission. In addition we will study the following texts:
- Brett Bailey, Ipi Zombi
- J M Coetzee: "the Truth in Autobiography" (lecture); Waiting for the Barbarians; Foe; Disgrace; (novels) Giving Offense (selected essays).
- William Kentridge: Eight Soho Films; Black Box; Ubu tells the Truth; Zeno Writing. (depending upon availablitity).
- Njabulo Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela
- Penny Siopis: Pinky-Pinky and Shame series.
Theoretical Texts will be drawn from Derrida; Žižek; Melanie Klein; Walter Benn Michaels; Peter Brook
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 52502 (CMLT 30102) Literary Criticism from Plato to Burke
Scodel, Joshua
PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of the students are CompLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students. 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 some of 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.
ENGL 55404 New Directions in the Study of American Culture
Slauter, Eric
This is a Scherer Center Seminar. This lecture/discussion course provides an introduction to American literary and cultural history between the sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries. We survey major texts (novels, essays, poems, plays, and personal narratives) from colonial North American settlement, the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary era, the American Renaissance, and the Civil War in light of a series of overlapping themes—tensions between liberty and authority, slavery and equality, national and regional identity, individualism and democracy, the impact of social and political change on intellectual work. Adopting a transnational and comparative perspective and focusing specifically on the relationship between writing and culture, we also treat connections between literature and other disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and the visual arts.
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 65304 Aesthetics and Politics
Rancière, Jacques
Students must apply to enroll (send a paragraph saying why you want to take the course to jww4@uchicago.edu). Course meets 2x/week between 10/6/08 and 10/29/08. Jacques Rancière is the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor. Grad students from all depts. are encouraged to apply, but participants will be selected. The course will count as a regular PhD seminar and will include the traditional writing requirements.
This seminar will try to provide some principles of interpretation of the metamorphoses of aesthetic forms and of the interplay of aesthetic strategies in relation to political transformation. It will do it through a rereading of some classical texts and the examination of some historical employments of "form." It will try to find new ways to address such issues as: what kind of democracy happens in literature, painting, or photography? What kind of communism in theater, dance, or cinema? What kind of public life in the form of the exhibition? What kind of criticism in installation art? How far do new media determine new political potentials of art forms? What is exactly meant by the "aestheticization of life"?
ENGL 65501 "Yours Sincerely": A History and Theory of Sincerity
Bunn, David; Taylor, Jane
This course will seek to account for the emergence of "sincerity" as a 'natural good' within Western culture in the early modern era. This will entail both an historical examination of the key concepts associated with this idea as well as a theoretical scrutiny of the ideology of transparency. Beginning with an exploration of the conceptual terrain, we begin the historical enquiry by discussing Elizabethan texts in relation to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Hamlet will be a primary text, and we will consider the trope of conversion in relation to a discussion of the poetry of John Donne. Eiseman Maus's work on theatricality and interiority will structure the discussion of emerging discourses of the staging of the subject. The model of mind imagined in the seventeenth century between Descartes and Locke informs the evolving idea of a multiple or complex self. Restoration theatre and the eighteenth century models of performance challenge notions of transparency. Texts will include Steele's The Conscious Lovers, and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling; Sterne's Sentimental Journey. As we consider the shift to the Romantic display of affect, there will be an opportunity to read selections from Wordsworth and Rousseau. We will examine notions of Truth and Hypocrisy in the ninenteenth century, in relation to Science and Empire. We will read selections from Sherlock Holmes, William James; Freud's The Wolfman and Darwin's Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, as well as Foucault's work on the "repressive hypothesis", and Carlo Ginsburg on "clues". Finally we will consider authenticity and transitional justice, with the South African TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) as a case study. The course will conclude with a reading of JM Coetzee's Disgrace.
ENGL 65801 American Lit 1930-1950
Warren, Kenneth
In this course we will look at how literary art and the problem of social inequality were articulated during these decades. Texts on which we will focus include: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, George Schuyler's Black No More, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. This course will meet in conjunction with Walter Benn Michaels's seminar at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Students who enroll should be prepared to travel to the UIC campus on alternate weeks.
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