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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.
2009–10 |
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2007–8 |
2006–7 |
2005–6 |
2004–5 |
AUTUMN 2009 COURSES
Rosengarten, Richard
PQ: Divinity School Students Have Priority to Register; Students of Other Units Per Consent of Instructor
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 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.
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.
Enrollment by consent only.
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 33210/28809 Post-War American Poetry
Regan, Matthias
The post-war years enjoyed a remarkable flourishing of poetic principles and practices, many of which were caught up in aesthetic and political countercultures. We will read the "beats" and "confessional" poets alongside work associated with the New York, Black Mountain and Black Arts writers. Our focus will be on how poetry participates in the "distribution of the sensible": what forms of citizenship do these works bring into view? What do the writers of these different schools perceive to be the urgent problems of their times? What solutions do they imagine poetry might provide?
ENGL 34100 (MAPH 30100) Foundations of Interpretive Theory
Levin, David; Miller, Mark
Required for MAPH students. Others by consent only. Register by Preceptor section.
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 34560 (SCTH 34350)
Embracing the Past, Struggling with the Present;
Poetry's Quest for Meaning
Zagajewski, Adam
In this class we'll be reading poets (and a few essayists as well) and, in doing so, paying attention to their romance with the historical time. We'll ask several questions and among them this one: Is the dialogue with history one of the main sources of meaning in poetry? And: Which layers of the past and the present are involved? Why does the imagination need the past? But we'll also concentrate on individual voices and situations. We'll read C.P. Cavafy, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel, Joseph Brodsky, W.G. Sebald, Z. Herbert and other authors.
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 36709/16709 Shakespeare, Marlowe, Benjamin, and Brecht
Kahn, Victoria
In this course, we will read several plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe in relationship to the theoretical writings of two twentieth-century critics, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Why did Benjamin and Brecht think Shakespeare and Marlowe were radical, avant-garde playwrights? What conclusions did they draw from Shakespeare and Marlowe for their own political moment? How were Brecht's own plays and dramatic theory influenced by these earlier writers? Texts will include Shakespeare, Hamlet; Marlowe, Edward II and Tamburlaine; Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Understanding Brecht; Brecht, Selected Plays and his Short Organon for the Theater. For students with an interest in both Renaissance literature and European modernism, as well as a strong interest in literary theory.
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 41112 Culture of Victorian War
Hadley, Elaine
It was once a commonplace in Victorian Studies to describe the middle decades of the British nineteenth century as an "age of equipose," to quote W. L. Burn's influential monograph. Students of the period were often taught that mid-century Victorians, suffused by the principles of liberalism, were a peaceful and peace-loving people in contrast to American and European nations tangled in civil and geopolitical conflict. The emergence of postcolonial scholarship in the last few decades has made this portrait of the age not only outdated but an instance of cultural denial on a spectacular scale. This seminar seeks to develop an account of this "condition of England question." Why did the continual warfare of Imperial Britain not register as a component of the British character? Why did the Crimean War—a large-scale European conflict, with multiple theaters and widespread geopolitical repercussions—not seem to unsettle this "equipoise"? Reading contemporary conceptual work on war and military conflict, periodical and newspaper coverage of the Crimea, and the few fictions of the period that address war and imperial conflict, we will try to develop some understanding of the relation between war and peace, between liberalism and imperial aggression, between national character and national practice during this era. Reading will include Tennyson, Thackeray, Hardy, Gaskell, possibly Browning, some Gladstone, Palmerston, and Disraeli speeches. We'll also look at Crimean war photography in an attempt to think about temporality and visibility in times of war.
ENGL 47214/28911 (CMLT 32901/22901) Film Noir, French and American
von Hallberg, Robert
This course will focus on film noir in a broad sense, including neo-noir. We will attend to some of the conventions of the genre in terms of plot, characterization, and cinematography. However, the course will have a thematic focus as well: how is trust constructed in these films? What are the features of trust that most directly affect political systems? Is trust among men much different from that among men and women in heterosexual relationships? We will interpret a set of films as utopian efforts to imagine trusting lives. The films we watch will include: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly, Out of the Past, Touch of Evil, Notorious, Narrow Margin, Blast of Silence, Night and the City, Criss Cross, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gilda, Double Indemnity, Rififi, Chinatown, LA Confidential, Band of Outsiders, Bob le Flambeur, Le Samourai.
ENGL 47215/27805 (CMLT 35901/25901) Reading Modern Poets
von Hallberg, Robert; Zagajewski, Adam
The idea of the class is to read a group of important 20th century poets and some of the crucial theoretical texts. This course will focus on a heterogeneous group of poets, some who write in English, some who will be read in translation. The course is not organized around a particular theme or problem. We will let each poet raise particular themes and problems for class discussion. The poets: Anne Carson, Philippe Jaccottet, Derek Mahon, Czeslaw Milosz, Eugenio Montale, Paul Valery, C. K. Williams.
ENGL 48000 (CMST 40000) Methods & Issues in Cinema Studies
Wild, Jennifer
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 48121 Writing White: Black Authors and White Protagonists
Binggeli, Elizabeth
In 1942, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, "I have hopes of breaking that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people." What does it mean for mid-twentieth century black author to write a novel with a white protagonist? Is it merely a capitulation to white narrative consumption -- an deal brokered to court Hollywood, or book clubs, or simply to be published at all? Or might we read the decision to "write white" in a more complicated way? In this class we will examine several black-authored works of fiction about white characters, including Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Wallace Thurman's The Interne (1932), William Attaway's Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow (1946), Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door (1947), Ann Petry's Country Place (1947), Richard Wright's Savage Holiday (1954), and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956). In addition, we will screen films that Hollywood adapted from some of these works, including Tomorrow's Children (1934), Way Down South (1939), The Foxes of Harrow (1946), and Knock on Any Door (1949).
ENGL 48605/28605 Owning and Disowning: J. M. Coetzee
Bunn, David; Taylor, Jane
This course is not simply about contemporary South Africa, and the novels of Coetzee, but also about the manner in which the public confession of past sins was and continues to be a critical point of reference for the ways in which political transition and justice are imagined. We will be reading Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, The Life and times of Michael K, Disgrace and the volume of essays, Giving Offence. We will also be reading Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Yvette Christiaanse's novel, Unconfessed, and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, Yael Farber's playtext, Malora, and will study two films: Alain Resnais' groundbreaking Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Christopher Nolan's recent psychological thriller, Memento. Theoretical readings will include works from Freud, Derrida, Foucault.
ENGL 48606 Circulation, Sensibility, and the Discourses of Modern Value
Bunn, David; Taylor, Jane
We will look at the figure of circulation arising from Harvey's anatomical investigations, philosophical enquiries from Descartes, Smith and Hume, and literary texts including Behn, Wycherley, Fielding, Austen, Smollet, Burney, Goldsmith and Pope and Worsworth as well as Kubrick's film of Thackeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and will look at circulation, feeling and value from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will discuss the particular emergence of two sites for the performance of mobility: on one hand, the English landscape, with the impact of practitioners such as Vanbrugh, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton, as well as Vauxhall Gardens and Stowe; on the other is the auction house: both as key tropes. Theoretical readings will include Marx, Veblen, Simmel, Benjamin, Habermas, Nancy Fraser. Literary and performance history of the early modern era suggests that there was considerable instability around matters of gender identity. In this course we will look at such historically particular cultural phenomena as 'the breeches part' and the 'castrato' in an enquiry into how passing (across class positions as well as gendered identities) gets deployed as a strategy for representing increasingly mobile conceptions of selfhood in an era of upheaval within the economic sphere.
ENGL 48700/29300 (CMST 48500/28500) History of International Cinema 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, Kathryn;
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
Ruddick, Lisa
This course is restricted to third- and fourth-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
Gandhi, Leela
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 51300 (CDIN 51300) Race, Media, and Visual Culture
English, Darby; Mitchell, W.J.T.
This seminar will explore the question of race, racism, and racial identity across a variety of media and social practices, including photography and cinema, visual art and literature, and the iconology of everyday life. The seminar will provide a twin introduction to the fundamentals of visual cultural theory and media studies, on the one hand, and racial theory on the "other." The study of racial theory will converge with issues of visuality, mediation, and iconology, particularly the question of stereotype and caricature, the role of fantasy and the imaginary in racist perception, and its reproduction and critique in various form of visual art and media. Sponsored by the Center for Disciplinary Innovation (CDI), the seminar will combine methodologies from art history, literary criticism, visual and media studies, as well as anthropology.
ENGL 55405 Scherer Center Seminar: The Multidisciplinary Study of American Culture
Slauter, Eric
This seminar surveys the rich and varied multidisciplinary study of American culture as it is currently practiced at the University of Chicago. Seminar members read and discuss together recent books by scholars who teach in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Divinity School, the Law School, and the Booth School of Business. Though interested in the way in which members of different departments and disciplines frame questions and problems, we will also be attuned to convergences in themes, approaches, and methods. During the last half of our seminar meetings the authors of our readings will join us for a discussion of their work and their fields.
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 67502 Milton
Kahn, Victoria
This course offers an introduction to the poetry and prose of John Milton, with a focus on the major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. We will also read some of Milton's controversial prose, including Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. The seminar will take up the following questions, among others: What was the influence of Milton's heretical theological and political views on his poetry? How do Milton's major poems reflect on Reformation problems of agency and autonomy? What is Milton's place in the history of poetic making, including theories of the sublime? Can Milton be considered a poet of the post-theological age? Is Milton a defender of religiously motivated violence or a critic of it? Why read Milton today?
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