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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 |
SPRING 2006 COURSES
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| 10702 30702 | Short Fiction: Strategies and Techniques | |
| 32300 | Marxism & Modern Culture | |
| 25906 32630 | Time and Narrative | |
| 13000 33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 35411 | Perfection & Utopia in Late Medieval England | |
| 36702 | Three Authors: Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson | |
| 38604 | Literature and the Division of Intellectual Labor | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 25001 45001 | Jewish Latin American Literature | |
| 45102 | Henry James: The Fiction of Crisis | |
| 25100 45200 | Colonial Encounters | |
| 51702 | Shakes: Rhetoric & the Senses | |
| 52401 | The Policing of Culture | |
| 53701 | The Rise of the Person | |
| 54301 | Before and After Victorian Studies | |
| 56003 | ||
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 60350 | Gesture, Inscription, Techne | |
| 65301 | Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction |
10702/30702 Short Fiction: Strategies and Techniques
Slouka, Mark
In this course we will focus on a wide variety of short stories (by authors ranging from Chekhov and Babel to contemporaries like Lorrie Moore and Daniel Alarcon), in order to illuminate the rhetorical strategies that have evolved in response to the requirement of compaction, or brevity. Among the issues we will explore will be the eloquence of omission and of physical objects, the uses of indirection, the plasticity of chronology. Our readings will include works by, among others, Frank and Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Cheever, Nabokov, Carver, Gordimer, Andre Dubus, Nathan Englander and John Edgar Wideman.
32300 Marxism & Modern Culture
Kruger, Loren
This course covers the classics in the field of marxist social theory (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Reich, Lukacs, Fanon) as well as key figures in the development of Marxist aesthetics (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Marcuse, Williams) and recent developments in Marxist critiques of new media, post-colonial theory and other contemporary topics. It is suitable for graduate students in literature depts., art history and possibly history. It is not suitable for students in the social sciences. TuTh 9-10.20 for all students; Friday morning tutorial required also for MAs
25906 32630 Time and Narrative
Hansen, Mark
This course will focus on the complex and multiple relations between time and narrative following a cross-media approach. Finding orientation in Ricoeur's magisterial study of our topic, we will read philosophical texts (Augustine, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Prigogine) and literary texts (Proust, Borges, David Foster Wallace), view and study films (Godard, Inarritu), artworks (Smithson) and various forms of digital media (Marker's Immemorial, digital films of Peter Greenaway). Our aim will be to explore the place of narrative (and of the "non-narrative," whatever that is) in the human experience of time as well as its potential role in our understanding of the time of the cosmos.
13000 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. Materials fee $25
35411 Perfection & Utopia in Late Medieval England
Miller, Mark
The culture of late medieval England was both haunted and goaded by the joint ambitions of individual ethical perfection and utopian sociality. This course will examine the ways these ambitions structure agency and identity, the forms of desire, disavowal, misrecognition, and shame that emerge around them, and the conceptual and political conditions of possibility, and impossibility, that inform them. Readings will explore the relations among subject-formation, agency, and social forms in chivalric romance, allegory, hagiography, mysticism, and monastic literature. While much of our work will be based in the close reading of primary texts, we will also do some reading in the social history of late-medieval England, in medieval and modern ethics, and in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory.
36702 Three Authors: Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson
Cormack, Bradin
This course explores the poetry and drama of Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson in terms of the early modern conception of authority and authorship. As well as texts like Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and the Faerie Queene, Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Dr. Faustus and Jonson's Forest and Volpone, we will read selections from Virgil, Horace and Ovid as a way to approach the three writers' very different senses of the literary career.
38604 Literature and the Division of Intellectual Labor
Valenza, Robin
Where did the Renaissance man go? At what moment could a man (or woman) of letters no longer be an expert across all intellectual fields? This course looks at how the division of intellectual labor has been recognized, theorized, praised, and lamented since the early modern period. We will read perspectives on and examples of the division of intellectual labor from the 1590s through the present, paying particular attention to the ways in which the literature of the academic disciplines has responded to the partitioning of intellectual fields. Readings include Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," selections from Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Wordsworth's Excursion, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, excerpts from eighteenth-century encyclopedias, Kant's Conflict of the Faculties, essays and letters of Schiller and Schopenhauer, Weber's "Science as Vocation," selections from Musil's The Man without Qualities, recent writings on academic disciplines, and more! Students are also encouraged to attend the events of the Mellon workshop, New Perspectives on the Disciplines: Comparative Studies in Higher Education.
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.
25001 45001 Jewish Latin American Literature
Obejas, Achy
A survey of Latin American literature by Jewish writers, including Ariel Dorfman, Clarice Lispector, Mario Szichman, Rosa Nissan, Jose Kozer, Victor Perera and Ilan Stavans, among others. Issues include crypto-Judaism, displacement, and the particularities of construction of identity in the New World. Readings by Jorge Luis Borges address "the mythical Jew" in Latin America. The course looks at Jewish literature in countries such as Argentina, which have historically vibrant Jewish communities, as well as places such as Cuba, where Jews have been more of a hidden influence. Students will be expected to read and discuss materials, as well as research literary and historical issues. Readings will be in English.
45102 Henry James: The Fiction of Crisis
Veeder, William
In 1895 Henry James suffered his first nervous breakdown. Over the next five years he produced several of the greatest novellas and novels of the nineteenth century. How fiction writing became a mode of self therapy for James is one of the issues this course will explore. In addition we will examine how self-analysis interacted with a mordant social analysis to produce fiction that simultaneously looks outward and inward. By a close reading of James's texts and of various theorists, we will engage the forces that produced James's masterpieces. Texts will include The Aspern Papers, The Pupil, The Spoils of Poynton, In the Cage, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and "The Great Good Place."
25100 45200 Colonial Encounters
Knight, Janice
We will explore the project of colonialism in l7th century America, focusing on English colonies in Virginia and New England. We will begin the course with an examination of Spanish conquest and settlement of the southwest. Drawing on the work of recent critics, these regions will be studied as zones of contact between Amerindian, English, and Spanish cultures. Our approach will be varied. We will focus on primary texts, including historical accounts, maps, and traveller's portfolios, but we will also consider demographic analyses, town plans and other aspects of material culture. We will also survey the wide range of recent studies of colonialism in the period.
51702 Shakes: Rhetoric & the Senses
Mazzio, Carla
This course will explore Shakespearean drama in light of literary, cultural, religious and philosophical histories of the senses. We will focus in depth on visual, auditory, and tactile modes of transmission, communication and miscommunication in a number of comedies, tragedies, and romances, where plots often hinge on moments of sensory unreliability. We will begin by exploring literary tropes of sense in relationship to historical documents and contemporary theories of sense perception. We will also consider the place of the senses in the domain of performance more generally, where "audiences" "spectators" and "assemblies" gather in a communal setting requiring a complex interplay of bodily and cognitive "sense." Weekly readings will focus on topics such as acoustics and memory; physiologies of persuasion; touch, curiosity and contagion; temperature and temperament; introspection, self-spectation and the history of mirrors; sensory alienation and the tragic mode; and science, sensation and romance. Seminar members will explore early documents on sensory perception, construct an "archive" of materials on the topic of your choice, and produce a short presentation and substantial paper for the course.
52401 The Policing of Culture
Rothfield, Lawrence
We will discuss a) the historical rationales for governmental intervention in culture; b) the objects of policing action (producers, distributors, consumers, products, practices. etc.); c) the objectives of policing; d) the tools of governmental policing (negative tools such as regulation, prohibition/censorship, etc., but also positive tools such as incentives, allocation of property rights; information); and d) the political economy of cultural policy (how does one measure the impact of a governmental action on institutions, artists, audiences, or art works?). We will focus on three very different efforts at policing: the National Endowment for the Humanities' programs; attempts to develop cultural districts; and initiatives to stem the looting of archaeological sites.
53701 The Rise of the Person
Macpherson, Sandra
This is primarily a seminar in the history of the novel, one that takes up the question of the ontology of literary characters. Histories of the novel tend to assume that literary characters are persons and that persons are human beings. We will address this critical consensus by coming to terms with the persistence of typology in the novel and in novel criticism. Our primary focus will be the early English novel: Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, History of an Atom, Adventures of a Hackney Coach, Sentimental Journey, and Pride and Prejudice. Novel criticism will includes works by Lukacs, Bakhtin, Eikenbaum, Shklovski, Barthes, Greimas, Watt, Jameson, Gallagher, Lynch, Miller and Woloch.
54301 Before and After Victorian Studies
Hadley, Elaine
Both before and after the emergence of New Historicism, Victorian Studies has been, at its heart, an historicist venture, aided and abetted by the wealth of extant materials from this period. Now that the "newness" of the "New Historicist" approach has moved into a smug middle age, it is time to assess and reassess the historicism at the heart of Victorian literary studies: did New Historicism really change the questions we asked of the period? And, in turn, did it alter our understanding? Was this historical approach that much different from its predecessors? The related emergence of post-colonial studies and a global literature movement in recent years also puts special pressure on any future commitment to the study of the Victorian period: is it even worthwhile to configure these years as a period and these texts as a national literature? And given these shifts and reconfigurations, how might an academic define a field of expertise that bridges the new demands of empire, colonialism and globalization and the old demands of canonical teaching and student expectation? We will read several important works in the devising of "Victorian Studies," including work by Walter Houghton, Basil Willey, J. Hillis Miller, Raymond Williams, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Edward Said, as well as influential works of history by Asa Briggs, Harold Perkins, Catherine Hall. Although this course seeks to provide an advanced introduction to the methods and questions of moment to this period of literary study, it will also read several literary texts that emerge as central to these debates, possibly including Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Middlemarch, "Dover Beach," Modern Love, Kim.
56003 Seminar: Music and Poetry
von Hallberg, Robert and Travis Jackson
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.
60350 Gesture, Inscription, Techne
Hansen, Mark
This course will explore the space of indifferentiation between gesture and articulation, mark and form, grammé and word, in both theoretical and historical registers and across a host of media, including painting, poetry, dance, film, video and digital media. The proximate aim of the course will be to expand (and perhaps revise) our understanding of "writing" in light of the history of technics that culminates in our contemporary digital revolution. While the course will consist of focused case studies oriented by theoretical protocols, we will consistently ask whether and how the boundary between mere mark and articulation varies historically, and even more significantly, how the concrete technologies of inscription mediate the differentiation of this boundary as well as the specific space of indifferentiation that is its irreducible correlate in any given technical-historical configuration. Material studied will likely include: Muybridge and Marey's experiments with motion (chrono-) photography, gesture in painting from Giotto to Enzo Cucci, experimental typography in avant-garde and modernist poetry and artist's books, contemporary poetry and hypertext, time-lapse experimentation in video art, motion capture technology and the inscription of bodily movement, digitization as the writing of life, the book historically and reframed through new media (Ann Hamilton), and Cy Twombly's scriptural aesthetic. Theorists studied will likely include: Derrida, Stiegler, Didi-Huberman, Kittler, and Bergson. The underlying theoretical agenda here concerns the continuum linking embodied life to gestural expression and articulate speech and we may, depending on class interest, explore paleontological and biological accounts of the dynamic co-evolution of embodied human beings and human culture (Leroi-Gourhan, Dawkins).
65301 Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction
Zizek, Slavoj
Slavoj Zizek is the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor. Shortened course to take place April 4-25. Please send a couple paragraphs on why you want to enroll as a Word document to anat@uchicago.edu by March 1st.
In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was accompanied by a new wave of triumphalist acclamations of how psychoanalysis is dead: with the new advances in brain sciences, it is finally put where it belonged all the time, to the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist search for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers.
There is something to these accusations. The story of three successive humiliations of man, the three narcissistic illnesses, (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) was given a new turn in the last decades: the latest scientific breakthroughs seem to add to it a whole series of further humiliations which radicalize the first three, so that, with regard to today's brain sciences, psychoanalysis rather seems to belong to the traditional humanist field threatened by the latest humiliations. Is, then, psychoanalysis today outdated? It seems that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurolobiologist model of human mind appears to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against chemotherapy and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of society, of social norms, which repress individuals' sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today's predominant hedonistic permissiveness.
In contrast to these evident truths, the aim of the course is to demonstrate the exact opposite: not only is psychoanalysis not veraltet it is only today that its time has arrived, that Freud's key insights gain their full value on condition that one reads Freud through Lacan, through his return to Freud which is not the return to Freud as he was, but to what was in Freud more than himself, the traumatic core of the Freudian discovery of which he himself was not fully aware.
The course will follow the fundamental rule of excluding all clinical stuff. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and clinic permeates everything he wrote and did: even when Lacan reads Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, it is always in order to deal with a precise clinical problem (Plato for transference, Aquinas for symptom, Hegel for the dialectic of the progress of treatment, Kierkegaard for repetition). Our wager is that this very all-pervasiveness of clinic allows us to exclude it: precisely because clinic is everywhere, one can erase it and limit oneself to its effects, to the way it colors everything that appears non-clinical -- this is the true test of its central place.
The four week course will thus provide a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: first week, philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); second week, science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker); third week, theories of ideology (from Marx to analyzing today's fundamentalism); last week, theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch, Lars von Trier). The overall aim is to demonstrate the strength of the Lacanian approach, through polemical confrontations with other predominant trends, from cognitivism to deconstructionism.
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