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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 |
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2006-2007 |
2005-2006 |
2004-2005 |
2003-2004 |
WINTER 2004 COURSES
31100/13900 History and Theory of Drama-2
Bevington, David & Rudall, Nick
Tu/Th 12:00-1:20 (2 disc)
History and Theory of Drama I is not a prerequisite. A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the late-seventeenth century into the twentieth: Molire, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard. Attention will also be paid to theorists of the drama, including Stanislavsky, Artaud, and Grotowski. The winter-quarter course, like the autumn-quarter 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. Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
31503/11503 Translation and Adaptation
Columbus, Curt
32204/12204 Writing Creative Nonfiction
Staff (Vare Appointment)
32206/12206 The Form of the Essay
Stielstra, Megan
Tu 3:00-5:50
32502/12502 Writing Fiction
Obejas, Achy
A workshop that will meet once weekly to read, discuss and analyze students' original work. Students will be expected to re-write, revise and re- evaluate from week to week. Lectures will be based on issues that arise from student work. There will be occasional exercises outside the students' own writing.
32700/12700 Writing Biography
Weiner, Tracy & McEnerney, Larry & Cochrane, Katherine
M/W 1:30-2:50
Writing Biography is, as its name implies, a course in writing biography. Our goal will be to identify successful biographical writing techniques in the class readings and then practice these techniques in frequent assignments. Texts will include Janet Malcolm on Sylvia Plath, Joseph Ellis on Thomas Jefferson, Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf, , and Malcolm X's autobiography. We'll practice the techniques biographers use to transform into a coherent whole the diverse and often contradictory materials of biography - letters and diaries, media reports and previous biographies, gossip and government records, the fond (but sometimes misleading) memories of friends and the malicious (but occasionally illuminating) accounts of enemies. We will construct narratives that aspire to do two things: represent another person's life, and make that life represent something beyond itself - a historical period, a social group, or a particular kind of achievement (admirable or otherwise).
32800/12800 Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.
M/W 1:30-2:50, Tu 7:00-9:00
WScr C 307 This course will explore the concept of media and mediation
in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass
media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a
set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate
and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient
as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as
television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such
as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and
modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's
Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will
explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the
relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate
sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated"
or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form
of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on
itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system
of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become
"mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent
films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world
of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one
"show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will
also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level
ARTH or COVA course, or consent of instructor. Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
33000/13000 Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse)
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
33200/13200 Beginning Poetry Writing
Sloan, Mary Margaret
Th 3:00-5:50
The Writing of Poetry is designed to give poets at all levels a workshop atmosphere in which to present poems for group discussion and criticism. Assignments will be offered to emphasize various elements of poetry: rhythm and meter, imagery, person, tone and diction, form theme and mood, but students will be free to present work of their own choice if they prefer. Emphasis will be placed on the fact that writing can and should be a matter for hard work and improvement. Though the course will focus on student work, poems by contemporary American poets as well as works from English and foreign literature will be brought in as time allows. Topics for continuing discussion will include clarity, economy, revision, translation, imitation, publication, prevailing styles, fixed forms, and the cultivation of a writer's life and career. P.Q. Consent of instructor, Sample submission of 3-5 poems due to Gates-Blake 309 by December 1, 2003.
34304/14304 Advanced Poetry Workshop: Singing School
Reddy, Srikanth
Th 3:00-5:50
The story of twentieth-century American poetry can be told, in many ways,
as a narrative of the formation and disappearance of various literary
"schools." (Imagism, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the
Language School, etcetera). In this advanced poetry workshop, we will
examine the recurring dream of what Yeats once called "singing school"
in American writing as a way of thinking about our own origins and destinations
as writers of poetry. Are we all, either consciously or unconsciously,
writing as members of a particular school of poetry? How can allegiance
to a literary school limit your development as a writer and, conversely,
how can the study of a particular school open doors for you as a poet?
We will be asking all of these questions as we write and workshop our
own poems throughout the semester. Along with the work of various twentieth-century
American poets, your own creative writing will be a primary text in the
course; the majority of every class period will be devoted to workshopping
one anothers' poems.
34405/14405 Advanced Fiction Writing
Obejas, Achy
The Advanced Creative writing workshop is for students who already have a background in creative writing and are currently working on a manuscript, either a novel or related stories. Students are expected to rewrite, revise and reevaluate their original work on a week to week based on out readings, discussions, and analysis. Lectures are based on issues that arise from student work. There are occasional exercises outside the students' own writing.
35000/15000 Old English Poetry
von Nolcken, Christina
Tu/Th 9:00-10:20
A reading of some of the major poems in Old English. In addition to the texts, the course will examine the nature of the textual and critical problems encountered in studying this literature. There will be a term paper and a final examination.
35101/15101 Seminar
at the Newberry Library-Holy Men and Holy Women
Szarmach, Paul
F 2:00-5:00
The cult of saints produced a remarkable body of literature about holy
men and holy women both in the English vernacular and in Latin. With Special
but not exclusive focus on the saints' lives written by AElfric of Eynsham
this course will consider the various examples of the vita and/or passio
as they developed from late antique models through prose and verse forms
in Old English. The interdisciplinary context will be one theme of the
course, as will comparative analysis and gender criticism. Through readings
in original language and translated materials, presented either in a seminar
or a translation workshop as well as through direct engagement of origional
manuscript evidence, this course will consider many of the issues that
the genre poses. PQ: Eng 149/349 or equivalent; for more information,
consult Christina von Nolcken (702-7977, mcv4@midway.uchicago.edu).
Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate
students.
36180/16180 Travellers
on the Silk Road
Murrin, Michael
M/W 3:00-4:20
We will read some of the major travel narratives of the Silk Road and
Tibet, from Xuanzang, the most famous of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims
who went West, through Marco Polo and others, who went East, including
a diplomat like Clavijo, who went to see Tamerlane, to modern travellers
like the spies the British government sent from India to explore and map
the area, the prototypes for Kipling's Kim, and archaeologists like Aurel
Stein who went both ways on the Silk Road. Choice among all the travelers
will be limited, of course, by time and by the availability of texts.
Through slide lectures students will gain a sense of the physical characteristics
of the region and its art at various periods. At the same time the student
will learn indirectly about the different religions and political regimes
travelers experienced, which changed dramatically over the eleven centuries
and more which we will cover in the course. Crosslisted courses are designed
for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
36701/16701 Skepticism
and Sexuality in Shakespeare
Bevington, David
Tu/Th 1:30-2:50
This course will look at plays that center on problems of sexual conflict
and of crisises of faith : all's Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida,
Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony
and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, The Tempest. The approach will be one of seeing
these as plays in the theatre, for both and Elizabethan and a modern audience.
Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate
students.
38003/18003 Lit.
Sem: The Cinematic Lyric
Reddy, Srikanth
Tu 3:00-5:50
There is a long tradition in literary study of regarding poetry and painting
as "sister arts." The ut pictura poesis tradition in criticism, however,
has tended to obscure the emerging relationship between lyric writing
and the new, twentieth-century aesthetic medium of film. This course will
consider the impact and influence of cinematic art on poetry in this century,
exploring the ways in which the rise of film has inflected representation,
narration, and and formal procedure in the lyric. Montage, "real time,"
and the camera eye have each, in their own way, transformed contemporary
poets ways of seeing the world in lyric writing; studying the work of
filmmakers from Eisenstein to Tarkovsky to Brakhage, and various poets
including Olson, OHara, and Graham, we will explore the affinities and
influences between the filmmakers and poets who have helped to construct
a new, "cinematic" mode of lyric utterance in the twentieth-century. Students
may (optionally) count a creative project toward partial fulfillment of
the course requirements. Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced
undergraduates and graduate students.
46000/26000 Anglo-American
Gothic Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
Veeder, William
M/W 1:30-2:50
In the nineteenth century, gothic fiction in English is an Anglo-American
phenomenon. Americas first internationally recognized literary masterpiece,
Rip Van Winkle, is written in England and appears the same year as Frankenstein.
Our course will study the transatlantic aspect of the gothic tradition,
while we also give full attention to the particular qualities of individual
texts. Close reading will be central to our project. Attention to textual
intricacies will lead to questions about gender and psychology, as well
as culture. Our authors will include Washington Irving, Mary Shelley,
James Hogg, Poe, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Thomas Hardy.
Mid-term and final papers. Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced
undergraduates and graduate students.
48700/29300 History of International Cinema I-Silent Era
Gunning, Tom
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 also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
48901/28901 Narratives of Suspense in European and Russian Literature and Cinema
Bird, Robert
Suspense is a vital (perhaps the vital) element in fictional narrative. This course will explore the source of suspense, its role in narratives, and its implications for narrative theory. Examples will be taken from various genres and national literatures, including narrative poems by Byron, Blok, and Eliot, and prose by E. A. Poe, Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett. Consideration will also be given to suspense in cinematic narratives, especially by Hitchcock, Bresson, and Tarkovsky. Theoretical readings (ranging from Kierkegaard and Benjamin to Burke, Genette, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others) will link suspense to other key concepts such as detachment, distance, distraction, suspension of belief, and engagement. Requirements: Essay 1: A structural analysis of a suspenseful (or suspense-less) narrative, highlighting the role of suspense in the creation of a fictional world. Essay 2: Define suspense and support your definition using two narratives and making reference to critical readings from our course. Some of the readings: R. L. Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance, Memories and Portraits 1887. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted. PR5488.M53 1887a, Beckett, Rockaby, Part, Canto, Henry James, Turn of the Screw.
30100 Introduction to Religion and Literature
Yu, Anthony
33701 Writing as a Public Intellectual
Sartin, Hank
One of the questions raised as part of the Masters Program in the Humanities is "What it might mean to be a public intellectual?" This course is designed to address a very practical issue for public intellectuals - how do we write to communicate with an audience broader than academia, in the popular press. This is primarily a writing course - the class will work on writing about "big ideas" for the popular press, focusing on writing cultural criticism of two types: the review and the longer "feature" essay. In addition to writing, the students will examine examples of journalistic criticism and essay writing drawn from a wide range of publications. They will discuss the goals of cultural criticism in print media and consider and practice some strategies used in criticism. The instructor, Hank Sartin, is a freelance teacher and journalist. He is a film critic for the Chicago Free Press, and his work has appeared in many venues, including the Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and Midwesterner Magazine. He holds a PhD in Film from the University of Chicago (where he served as a MAPH preceptor)
35501 Tough Broads
Nelson, Debbie
M/W 3:00-4:20
This course will read selected works by some of the postwar eras exceptional Women as Adrienne Rich defined the term: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and more. Great Stylists and often brilliant thinkers, these writers, who mostly came of age before feminism and often had a difficult relationship to it, will help us to pose some questions to feminism and so-called post-feminism alike, questions about isolation and community, intellectual authority, personal austerity, pain and suffering, autonomy and self sacrifice. We will very likely juxtapose their work with feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorder.
46700 Culture and African American Thought
Warren, Kenneth
Tu/Th 1:30-2:50
The agenda of this course is two-fold. First, we will chart major currents in the formation of African American social thought by focusing on the patterns of intellectual discourse that developed within and responce to the Jim Crow era- that crucial half century during which the sensibility undergirding contemporary black intellectual life was constituted. Second, we will take this moment as an opportunity to assess the vcultural turn in contemporary critical theory, looking at assessments of culture offered by such figures as Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Adolph Reed.
50100 Graduate Teaching Colloquium: The Craft of Teaching
Hadley, Elaine
Tu/Th 1:30-2:50
This two-quarter-long colloquium is open to all PhD students in the department, regardless of teaching experience. We will meet four times each quarter to discuss issues that may come up in your teaching, to read small pieces about teaching situations and teaching strategies, and to reflect together in a theoretical way about the dynamics of the classroom. Topics will range from the pragmatics of grading, lecturing, and leading discussions to the meaning of "professionalism," the contradictions and overlaps of teaching and scholarship, and the politics of education generally. A planning meeting will be held late in the fall quarter to take stock of immediate needs and interests. Among the specific issues we will doubtless address in the course of the two quarters are: issues of authority; written and implicit "contracts" with students; strategies for creating, evaluating, and commenting on written assignments; diversity in the classroom; types of discussion classes, types of lecture classes, and various hybrids; and the relationship between teaching and other commitments. From time to time we will invite various guest speakers (to be determined by the participants in the Colloquium) to discuss aspects of their teaching and their philosophy of teaching and education.
52001 Literature, the Disciplines and the Renaissance Book
Cormack, Bradin
Th 3:00-5:50
This course examines the early modern book in the context both of literary production and of textual self-representation in professional disciplines such as law and medicine. The course has two principal goals: we will explore literary analyses of London's professional cultures in authors such as Shakespeare and Jonson, and we will ask after the impact of early professional specialization on the meaning and material form of the book.
52400 The Politics of Taste
Rothfield, Larry
Tu 9:00-11:50
Despite Horace's dictum that there is no arguing about taste, such arguments erupt frequently, albeit sometimes framed as political conflicts about race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. This course seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions that underlie these cultural clashes: What constitutes taste? What do tastes consist of? How are tastes formed, informed, and transformed? What is hip, and how does fashion or faddishness affect tastes? What norms, principles, and interests underlie efforts to shape tastes? How are tastes related to ethical, moral, and political concerns, practices, preferences? What is the difference between good taste, distastefulness, and bad taste? How do these distinctions manifest themselves, and what ideological work do they do? We will read some of the classic discussions of taste (Hume, Arnold, Pater, Wilde, Veblen, Adorno), as well as more recent work on the subject by cultural critics, sociologists, and economists (Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Paul Dimaggio, Pierre Bourdieu, Gary Becker). We will also be looking at some cases where works of literature, art, dance, or film generated conflicts about taste.
53401 Narrative Point of View: Theory/Practice, Fiction/Cinema
Chandler, James
Tu 3:00-5:50
This seminar will provide an opportunity for its participants to revisit some of the crucial issues in the history of fiction and film criticism in a new perspective, one in which these two critical traditions can be seen as part of a single theoretical and historical field. One can think of the course as an exercise in "historical epistemology." We will read literary and philosophical texts from the period when "point of view" emerged as a key concept in the philosophical literature--a period dating to the early eighteenth-century. We will consider the development of the novel in relation to this philosophical literature--e.g., Hume, Smith, the theorists of the picturesque--and to the culture in which it circulated. (Of special interest here will be the crucial notion of the "general point of view" in this literature and its relation to, for example, the "sentimental" as Schiller defined it.) We will review the twentieth-century formalist theorization of the novel in terms of point-of-view analysis (James, Lubbock, Booth). And we will look at the development of point of view practice and theory in cinema in relation to all three of these prior considerations. The course will begin with a contemporary exercise in self-consciously modernist point-of-view fiction--Ian McKewen's Atonement (not a great novel but very useful for the purpose)--and exfoliate its questions from that text. In the first half of the syllabus, we will read selected novels, screen selected films, and assess various critical approaches to both. There will be an opportunity for the participants in the seminar to shape the second half of the syllabus. Requirements will probably include an oral presentation, a short paper (4pp), and a full length seminar paper (25 pp.).
55600 Reading ER: Ethics
and Aesthetics of TV Series
Dietze, Gabriele
Th 9:00-11:50
Subject of the course are American TV-representations of liminal areas
- mortality, bodily integrity, violence and crime whether 'factional'
in TV constructions of "race"-conflict and spectacular trials
or 'fictional' in drama series on death and violence. The first part will
investigate the power of the televised representations of the Rodney-King
incident and the O.J. Simpson trial. The second part of the seminar will
be devoted to Chicago based hospital drama such as ER an Chicago Hope
and concentrates on negotiations of death, medical ethics, poverty and
diversity. And a third part will look into the HBO series 'The Sopranos'.
Beyond the analysis of visual and narrative strategies in live-TV and
drama series, the seminar will be concerned with media and television
theory and medical and juridical ethics.
63800 On Beauty and Being Just in the Long Eighteenth Century
Macpherson, Sandra
Th 9:00-11:50
This course is conceived as a sequel, of sorts, to last years' Ph.D. seminar "Thinking and Acting in the Long Eighteenth Century." We will focus on aesthetic theory and moral philosophy from 1660 to Kant's Third Critique, and on literary texts that raise the question of what it means to be beautiful and/or good. Texts include: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Project, Shaftesbury's Characteristiks, Books II and III of Hume's Treatise, Burke's Enquiry, Kant's Critique of Judgement, Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Fielding's Amelia, Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall.
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