English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago
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 2008 COURSES
ENGL 32207 Literature and Psychoanalysis
Ruddick, Lisa
This course introduces students to an array of psychoanalytic theories that have special salience for the interpretation of literary texts. The readings will feature two psychoanalytic schools, descending from Freud on the one hand and from D. W. Winnicott and object relations theory on the other. For each class meeting, we will pair a work of psychoanalytic theory with a literary text for which the theory will give us interpretive leverage. We will also read some recent literary criticism in a polemical vein that sets object relations theory against the theories of the "decentered subject" favored in recent post-Freudian criticism.
ENGL 32300 Marxism and 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 1:30-2:50 for all students; If ten or more MAPH students enroll, they will also attend a tutorial session on Friday 9:30-10:20
ENGL 35305 Enlightenment & Revolution in America
Slauter, Eric
Do books cause revolutions, and if so, how? This seminar explores the impact of ideas on social realities in the revolutionary era. Primary and secondary readings in law, literature, history, politics, religion, science, and the fine arts help us raise and respond to some of the most important questions of recent criticism and historiography: What did "Enlightenment" mean in a colonial context, and how successfully were universal norms institutionalized in particular settings? Was mass mobilization the result of mass consumption, and if not, what combination of material and ideological forces shaped American independence, the formation of the United States, and the creation of a national identity and culture? Was the "founding period" an "age of reason" or an age of feeling, a moment of secularization or of increasing religiousity, a time of individual or of collective liberties? How did the transition from monarchy to republic inform new notions of gender and "race," and what difference did it make to the lives of ordinary women and men, to the rich and the poor, and to American Indians, to European Americans, and to Africans and African-Americans? Contemporaries sometimes imagined that everything had been transformed, but what, and who, was ultimately left behind? One in-class presentation and a final research paper. Open to PhD and Law School students only. Permission of instructor required for Law School students.
ENGL 36182 (CMLT 39002, EALC 37451) Silk Road Narratives
Chin, Tamara
This graduate seminar introduces students to problems in cross-cultural comparative reading through the example of the Silk Road. We will explore ways of reading classic literary texts associated with the Silk Road (e.g. the Greek Alexander Romance, the epic Chinese novel The Journey to the West), particularly in their relation to multiple literary or aesthetic traditions. We will also address the modern conception of the ancient Silk Road, both as a cosmopolitan ideal spanning East and West and in its relation to the nineteenth century politics of Central Asia, through historical and theoretical debates on world systems, world literature, philology, and translation. Other primary readings will draw from Sima Qian, Herodotus, Marco Polo, Jamyang Norbu. Knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek is recommended but not required.
ENGL 36704 Marlowe and the 1590s
Cormack, Bradin
This course addresses the impact of Christopher Marlowe's writing on the drama and poetry produced in the last decade of Elizabeth I's reign. We will consider in particular how Marlowe's engagement with humanist pedagogical culture and with the vexed question of England's relation to the classical past helped shape the literary engagement with questions of sexual desire, political affect, and the reproduction of knowledge. In addition to texts such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Edward II, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and poems by Lodge and Chapman, we will read selected texts in early modern literary criticism and historiography.
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 42403 The Politics of Taste
Rothfield, Lawrence
Taste has long been a concern of public policy. This course examines the history of efforts to define, monitor, control, and shape public tastes. Among the questions to be considered are: what constitutes a taste? What do tastes consist of? How can tastes be measured? What is hip, and how does fashion or faddishness affect tastes? What is the difference between good taste, distastefulness, and bad taste? How do these distinctions manifest themselves, and what ideological work do they do? What norms, principles, and interests underlie the distinction between good and bad taste, high-brow/middle-brow/lowbrow, the excellent and the merely popular? What tools are available for shaping tastes? We will discuss a few classic discussions of taste (Hume, Veblen, Adorno); more recent work on the subject by cultural critics, sociologists, and economists (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Paul DiMaggio, Richard Peterson, Gary Becker); and recent policy research and governmental initiatives designed to affect public tastes. We will also be looking at some cases where works of literature, art, dance, film, and antiquities-collecting generated conflicts about taste.
ENGL 42804 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 47211 (CMLT 42300) The Romanticization of Greece: Friedrich Hölderlin & Ezra Pound
von Hallberg, Robert
This course is a study in poetic idealization. Ancient Greece is unlike most other literary cultures: it stands for the actual historical realization of the highest artistic and broadly cultural values. No poet is so audacious as to suggest that Greece was somehow not quite good enough. Hölderlin and Pound, a century apart, imitated and translated Greek poetry. What did they see in that ancient poetry that fulfilled their own desires for the poems of their own times? Was Hölderlin’s Sophocles the poet Pound translated into the 20th century? Why did Hölderlin admire and Pound despise the praise poems of Pindar? These are some of the questions we will engage in our reading of these poets. The course will be organized as a seminar. Each student will give one oral report and write one long essay. Prerequisite: Reading knowledge of German.
ENGL 47300 Literary History and the African American Text
Warren, Kenneth
This course involves first and foremost a sustained look at literary history—an aspect of our field that we often take for granted, deem to be narrow and outmoded as a way of thinking about literature, or displace in favor of theorizing about or historicizing texts. But what is literary history a history of? Master works? The development of national literatures? The coming to voice of subordinated groups? The evolution, emergence, and obsolescence of genres? Or perhaps an account of the effect of broader socioeconomic forces on literary production? Does literary history have a theory? And what is the relation of literary history to practical criticism? As we consider these questions we will pay particular attention to 20th-century African American literature. Students will be expected to give two in-class presentations and to write a final essay focusing on any aspect of literary history.
ENGL 47802 Defending Poetry
Izenberg, Oren
Throughout its history, poetry has been asked to apologize for its existence. We will read Classical, Early Modern and Romantic defenses alongside strong lyric poems of the same periods, with an eye toward understanding the terms in which poetry has sought to defend and justify itself in the twentieth century and in the present.
ENGL 48103 (CMST 68002) Contemporary Political Documentary
Mitchell, W. J. T.; Hoffman, Judy
It seems clear that we are living in the golden age of documentary film (or perhaps a contemporary revival of a genre that gains importance during times of crises), with feature-length nonfiction films assuming an unprecedented popularity and commercial viability, not to mention political impact. Directors such as Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Jason Spurlack, Avi Moghrabi, Ziba mir-Hosseini, and films like Borat, Control Room, Fog of War, Jesus Camp, Nine Bad Apples, the BBC’s Power of Nightmares, Divorce Iranian Style, Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, The Corporation, Fahrenheit 911, Outfoxed, Super Size Me, etc.—everyone has their list. The aim of this seminar will be to investigate this phenomenon, map its tendencies, modes of production and distribution, and formal innovations. Why, in the age of simulation and illusory images, has investigative realism, and polemical, adversarial documentary emerged as such an important genre of cinema? We would like to think of this seminar as a learning collective that will begin by sketching out a tentative filmography of contemporary documentary, and discuss the theory of documentary and its relation to documents, monuments, and media. Among topics to consider: the transformation of documentary from a minor, marginal genre into a major element of the contemporary culture industry, employed on both the Right and Left; the nature of “the political” in political documentary; the relation of cinema and other media (television and video), and professions such as investigative journalism. We will try to establish some of the fundamentals of genre, form, and structure, narrative and discourse in documentary film at the outset by reference to important early films by Vertov and Eisenstein, with some sampling of American agitprop films from the sixties as well. We will discuss the question of realism, of course, and its relation to new media like video and digital imaging, and try to parse the issue of truth claims in cinema, photography, and video. We are especially interested in the way documentaries mimic the genres of fictional film, so that Errol Morris is really a kind of noir story-teller, a private eye looking obsessively into the darkness, while The Power of Nightmares, the BBC documentary on the parallel rise of the Islamic Brotherhood and American Neoconservatism, might best be described as an exercise in horror and paranoia. In addition to the obvious “blockbuster” American documentaries in recent years, we may investigate some less well known productions, particularly those focused on Israel and Palestine. An important aspect of the phenomenon we are investigating is the way in which the genre remains open to “work from below,” based in relatively modest resources and passionate commitment. Finally, we must consider the “margins” of documentary—the comic mockumentary, the philosomentary; photographic and filmic documentations of artworks and performances.
We will ask students to prepare reports on various films, propose screenings for a mini-“DocFest” in the final 2 weeks, and write a seminar paper or the equivalent.
ENGL 48907/28907 (RUSS 39800/29800) The Idea of Europe in Realist Prose
Steiner, Lina
The idea of “Europe” as a shared cultural space, in which different national cultures and literatures can engage in a dialogue, emerges in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of the Western-European authors and several “outsiders,” including Gogol, Turgenev, and Henry James. This course will examine the connections between the development of realist fiction and the formation of the transnational cultural conception of “Europe” as a realist-age successor of Goethe’s conception of “Weltliteratur.” The texts in this course will include fictional works, essays, and criticism by Goethe, Mme de Staël, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Henry James. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Readings are available in English and in the original languages. Discussion and papers are in English.
ENGL 52403 Law, Literature, and Sexual Revolution
Nelson, Deborah L.
While the Court has in recent decades been preoccupied with visual images, the late 20th century witnessed a remarkable transformation of obscenity law with respect to the written word. This course revisit works that occasioned significant rulings (“Howl,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch) and examines the role of Grove Press in exploring obscenity and what Samuel Beckett called “certain obscenities of form” in both book publishing and the periodical Evergreen. We will look at other so-called obscene works, like Nabokov’s Lolita and Updike’s Couples, and those that tread the boundary, like Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus and Mary McCarthy’s The Group, both of which courted controversy with the use of the word “pessary.” To understand the dramatic changes during the period, we will also look back to the Kinsey reports, the advent of the birth control pill, the influence of New Left politics, and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote that he could not define obscenity but “/he/ knew it when /he/ saw it”; our question is slightly different: having seen it, what do we know?
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 63602 (CMST 67805, ARTH 48808)
Spectacle, Investigation & Demonstration: Optical Devices
Gunning, Thomas
TBA
ENGL 65001 Late James
Brown, Bill
This seminar will provide extensive attention to Henry James’s last completed novels: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Widely regarded as the masterpieces of James's final period, these novels have also become important to discussions of modernism and modernity, the form of narrative prose fiction and the forms of human perception and cognition. We will also read the collection of prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition of his works, and we will read The American Scene. We’ll engage a considerable body of critical work on James, arguments that assume different perspectives: narratological, phenomenological, historicist, deconstructive, ethical, &c. Participants will be asked to provide oral and written accounts of both critical texts and textual moments in the novels, and they will be asked to share their proposals for the final paper.
ENGL 66500 Donne and Herbert
Strier, Richard
This course will study the moment when the devotional lyric comes to fruition in England. There is no doubt that George Herbert is the master devotional poet of the early modern period in England, and that he remains the most influential religious poet in the language. The course will treat Donne as the forerunner who helped make Herbert's achievement possible -- just as, in a parallel but earlier movement in love poetry (knowledge of which the course will assume), Sidney's love poetry helped make Donne's possible. We will study Donne's religious poetry, and then move on to a detailed study of The Temple. In the process, we will attempt to come to terms with the criticism and scholarship on this body of poetry. We will also perhaps think about what it is that made, and continues to make, Herbert's lyrics such a productive model for other poets. Every participant in the seminar will be expected to make at least one oral presentation and to produce a full-length scholarly paper.
English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago