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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 2007 COURSES
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| 31400/11400 | Writing Argument | |
| 31403/11403 | Writing Styles | |
| 33000/13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 37001/17001 | Shakespeare's Sonnets | |
| 38902/18902 | The Architecture of Insight | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 40010 | Victorian Liberalism | |
| 42800/22800 | Chicago | |
| 47010 | Thing Theory | |
| 47802/27802 | Extremist Poetry: Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath | |
| 47901/25103 | Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s | |
| 48900/29600 | History of International Cinema II / Sound Era-1960 | |
| 48906/28906 | The Individual, Form and the Novel | |
| 49900 | Fiction's Fictions | |
| 52002 | Shakespeare and the Law | |
| 53501 | The Theory of Description | |
| 55900 | Spirit Worlds | |
| 56601 | The Harlem Renaissance Re-Considered | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 62701 | Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and Early Poetry | |
| 65303 | Making Up People |
31400/11400 Writing Argument
Cochran, Kathryn
Writing Argument is a pragmatic course in the rhetoric of arguments.
The emphasis on "rhetoric" means that we won't be asking whether an argument is internally valid; instead, we'll look at what's on the page, and ask why it is more or less successful in persuading readers. The emphasis on "pragmatic" means that we'll focus mainly on your own arguments.
Students in the course can expect three kinds of work: writing new arguments, analyzing arguments, and revising. The central goal is for you to use a method of analyzing arguments that will enhance your ability to write arguments, arguments that succeed with your readers, in your field. And you'll revise the argument you make for your field, probably many times.
In most weeks, we'll spend each Monday in small groups, discussing your exercises. We'll spend each Wednesday in a plenary session, one in which we expand upon, refine (and criticize) the rhetorical analysis of argument. In the final week or so of the course, we will look at arguments that class members have chosen for discussion, and we'll look at other approaches to argument.
31403/11403 Writing Styles
McEnerney, Larry
This is a practical course in understanding and writing nonfiction style.
We will look at some of the ways that powerful writers of English have constructed
their sentences and paragraphs; and students will write weekly exercises imitating
and exploring these stylistic patterns. Each week we will devote one class session
to examining styles and one session to discussing students' exercises. In the final
weeks of the course, we will look at the work of writers whom class members have suggested.
Course grades will be based on the weekly exercises and a short analytic paper.
33000/13000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
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
37001/17001 Shakespeare's Sonnets
Cormack, Bradin
This course provides students the opportunity to engage intensively
with Shakespeare's Sonnets (pub. 1609), and especially with the book's
treatment of sex, gender relations, and subjectivity. In addition to
Shakespeare's poems, we will read a number of sonnets from other
Elizabethan sequences, including those written by Samuel Daniel, Philip
Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Richard Barnfield. We will also supplement
each week's readings with essays drawn from the now vast secondary
literature both on the Sonnets and on early modern gender categories.
Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and
graduate students. *This course is restricted to juniors, seniors, and
graduate students only.*
38902/18902 The Architecture of Insight
Slouka, Mark
Most of us originally came to literature, one suspects, not just for the aesthetic pleasures or ideological challenges it offers, nor for the experience of inhabiting a world elsewhere, but at least in part in the hope of gaining some insight into the world of human motivation. Many of us, in other words, came seeking precisely those moments of sudden illumination that remain largely, if not exclusively, the domain and privilege of literature.
In this course we will read from a wide range of authors who dare to offer us the gift of insight, discuss the nature and the success of that offering (quite literally, whether it enlarges our understanding of the complexity of human behavior), and finally, show the ways in which these moments of illumination are the product of particular stylistic decisions made by the author.
Isaac Babel famously remarked that "No steel can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a period at the right moment." In this course we will attempt to expose the period (or the ellipses, or the seemingly inappropriate adjective) that forms the architecture of insight.
Readings will likely include Knut Hamsun's Pan, W.S. Sebald's The Immigrants, Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, as well as short fiction by Vladimir Nabokov, Nadine Gordimer, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, John Edgar Wideman, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, Richard Bausch, Andre Dubus, and Louise Erdrich.
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.
40010 Victorian Liberalism
Hadley, Elaine
This course will attempt to specify the parameters of Victorian
liberalism, especially as a political and cultural practice. Briefly
beginning with liberal forbearers such as Locke and Bentham, this
course will especially concentrate on J.S. Mill, George Eliot, Anthony
Trollope, and what some call second generation Victorian liberals, such
as John Morley and George Meredith. The modern theoretical context for
our discussions will be aided and abetted by, for instance, Habermas,
Bordieu, Poovey, Michael Warner, and Uday Mehta.
42800/22800 Chicago
Knight, Janice
In this course we will sample some of Chicago's wonders, exploring
aspects of its history, literature, architecture, neighborhoods, and
peoples. We begin with study of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
and the early history of Chicago as a mecca for domestic and
international immigrants. In subsequent weeks we will examine the
structure of neighborhood communities, local debates about cultural
diversity and group assimilation, and the ideology and artifacts of art
movements centered in Chicago. This is an interdisciplinary course
focusing not only on literary and historical texts, but also analyzing
Chicago's architecture, visual artifacts and public art forms, local
cultural styles, museum collections and curatorial practices. We will
first explore Chicago sites textually, then virtually via the web, and
finally in "real time:" Students will be required to visit various Chicago neighborhoods and cultural institutions.
47010 Thing Theory
Brown, Bill
This course will engage some basic paradigms (phenomenology,
psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, cultural anthropology) for
apprehending the human engagement with the inanimate object world,
foregrounding such dynamics as fetishism, the uncanny, reification, and
circulation. This engagement will be mediated by literary texts (by
James, Mansfield, Nabokov, and Nella Larsen, &c.) and by visual and material texts (by Claes Oldenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Brian Jungen, &c.). We will also spend some time attending to the recent interest in object cultures (variously understood) and the human/nonhuman divide. Participants will write two very short papers and one long paper.
47802/27802 Extremist Poetry: Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath
von Hallberg, Robert
PQ: Reading knowledge of German. This course examines the relation of
lyric poetry to extreme historical experience, considering the Shoah in
particular. We focus on Celan's poems for seven weeks and then on
Plath's late work for three weeks.
47901/25103 Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her verse
collection Annie Allen. Eight years earlier, For My People brought
Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Poets award. Ann Petry's The Street
became a million-seller novel upon its publication in 1946. A Raisin in
the Sun's twinned successes as a Broadway hit and winner of the New
York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959 established Lorraine Hansberry
as a playwright of note.
This second "woman's era" in African American literature is often neglected as one compared to those of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In this course, we will attend to this group of writers, to account for the unprecedented critical and popular acclaim that they received during the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the writings of Brooks, Walker, Petry and Hansberry, we will consider the following issues:
How might we theorize the thematic and formal appeal of their works--what traditions did these writers continue, what innovations did they establish, and why did their craft and concerns resonate so keenly with mid-20th century American reading publics? What historiographies and sociologies might account for their formation as a cultural cohort--in what friendship and professional networks did these writers circulate? Why was their work so readily accommodated by the mainstream print venues? How did their circuits of contact and influence differ from support systems that black women writers enjoyed (or lacked) in prior or subsequent times? When read in sync with the governing ideals of literary culture and public intellectual life during the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement eras, what models of black female authorship and intellectual authority emerge from this time?
48900/29600 History of International Cinema II / Sound Era-1960
Tsivian, Yuri
PQ: CMST 10100. This is the second part of the international survey
history of film covering the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly
recommended that students take the first section first. This course
focuses on industrial practices and aesthetics during Hollywood's
studio era (1927 to 1960) and alternatives to the Hollywood film,
including French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, and Japanese
cinema. We will also consider the important political, economic, social
and cultural forces, which influenced Hollywood and other cinemas
during this period, particularly the rise of fascism in the 1930s,
WWII, Hollywood's postwar economic struggles, and various national new
wave cinemas. Screenings will include films by Berkeley, Renoir,
Huston, Welles, De Sica, Ozu, Hitchcock and Godard.
48906/28906 The Individual, Form and the Novel
Steiner, Lina
The rise of the novel is typically connected with the emergence of the autonomous personality or individual. However, the shape of the literary character who represents an individual in the novel varies from one historical epoch to the next, and from one national tradition to another. In this course we will explore and compare several different strategies used by European novelists to represent an autonomous individual, all of which give rise to specific novelistic forms, such as the autobiography, the Bildungsroman, the novel of manners, and the psychological novel. The primary bibliography for this course includes works by Rousseau, Goethe, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. We will also read critical works by Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Clement Lugowski, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lidia Ginzburg, and Alex Woloch. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. All texts can be read in English or in the original languages. Discussion and papers in English.
49900 Fiction's Fictions
Veeder, William
Writers since WWII have increasingly found inspiration in recrafting
classic works of English and American literature. Our course will study
this phenomenon. What can we learn about classic texts by reading them
in light of contemporary recraftings? In what ways do these
contemporary novels enable their authors to express viewpoints and
generate affects that could not be produced in less mediated ways? With
each work we will explore social and psychological intricacies through
close-textual analysis. Our texts will include: Jane Eyre, Wide
Sargasso Sea, The Fall River Axe Murders; What Maisie Knew and The Age
of Consent; Robinson Cruso and Foe; King Lear and The Thousand Acres;
Emma and Clueless. Short and long papers.
52002 Shakespeare and the Law
Cormack, Bradin
This course is structured as a series of case studies on different
problems and developments at English law, as these were figured also,
directly and obliquely, in Shakespeare's poetry and drama. This course
is intended to help students of literature navigate the history of
contract and property law and early material culture of the law. In
dialogue with recent critical work at the boundary of early modern law
and literature, we will also explore some of the different theoretical
pressures and methodological approaches within the broader field of law
and literature.
53501 The Theory of Description
Valenza, Robin
Description has long been the less-favored, ugly stepsister of
narrative. One hurries over descriptive passages in pursuit of the
plot, relieved to be past them. Perhaps it is time to rebalance our
techniques of reading.
This course proposes a new kind of "close reading," one that asks not how a particular description is unique (the usual goal of close reading) but rather how different descriptions, drawn from texts across genres, may have the same guiding principles. Thus, the class aims to formulate a theory of description.
We begin with a brief foray into narrative theory for comparison's sake. We will read accounts of descriptio from the classical period, early modern rhetorical treatises, and twentieth-century anthropological, philosophical, and linguistic arguments about the nature and meaning of description. Alongside these texts, we will investigate more familiar works of literature, primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, so that we may work both deductively and inductively towards our theory of description.
55900 Spirit Worlds
Knight, Janice
In this course we will explore how colonial subjects understood
"selves": how they described their spiritual experiences and how they expressed their interior lives. We will also track changing descriptions and explanations of the "supernatural" from the colonial period to the end of the 19th century. Religious ecstasy, trance, prophecy, fortunetelling, witchcraft, and ghosting are some of the practices we will consider in our archival explorations. Our readings will include texts by John Cotton, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, and William James, as well as recent critical work on melancholy, trauma, subject formation, popular religion and the passions.
56601 The Harlem Renaissance Re-Considered
Goldsby, Jacqueline
Most studies of the Harlem Renaissance presume that New York was the
inevitable site of that literary moment and movement. This course will
explore the politics of this canon's formation not by asking "when Harlem was in vogue" but interrogating why Harlem was in vogue during the 1920s. What fictions--literary as well as political and historiographical--have sustained Harlem's centrality to American studies of African American literature and culture? We will explore this question by staging comparative readings of the period's established canon against the works of under-read writers: Langston Hughes with Sterling A. Brown; Helene Johnson with Zora Neale Hurston; Jean Toomer with Angelina Weld Grimké; Nella Larsen with Wallace Thurman; George Schuyler with Alain Locke. Students will be expected to write a seminar-length essay.
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.
62701 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and Early Poetry
Miller, Mark
The course will focus on Chaucer's great courtly philosophical romance
Troilus and Criseyde, together with other early writings in a "courtly" vein (Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, Legend of Good Women). Since all of this poetry is literature of trauma, abjection, and longing, we will also read a range of texts that will help us think imaginatively about those topics, ranging from Chaucer criticism to psychoanalytic theory to texts in the intellectual and poetic traditions in which Chaucer was steeped (Ovid, Boethius, De Planctu Naturae, Roman de la Rose). Both the direction of discussion and our reading list will be shaped by course members' interests, but I expect to pay some attention to the interlacings of the traumas of war and sexual desire, the gendering of sacrifice and loss, the relations among violence, power, and the distribution and delectation of suffering, and the ways ethical imperatives and philosophical reflection emerge from and condition such matters. Seminar paper and presentation required.
65303 Making Up People
Hacking, Ian
Ian Hacking is the 2007 Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor. Shortened seminar will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, April 5-May 1. Graduate students from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
Prerequisite: by March 1, email a Word doc to burke@uchicago.edu with one or two paragraphs stating reasons for wanting to enroll.
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