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WINTER 2005 COURSES
21401 30201 Theories of Sex & Gender
Berlant, Lauren
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Ideology, Culture, and Sexuality: This
year this interdisciplinary course will focus on embodiment and ordinariness, or
bodies in space, traversing the work of geography and related disciplines.
Beginning with the formalist materialism of Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, Donna
Haraway, Jim Clifford, and Gayatri Spivak, we will then turn to more
practice-based non-spaces made by the performance of emotion, attachment
(rhizomatics), rhetorical exchange (from hate speech to blogging), and sex.
Theorists from this section will include: Rosi Bradotti, Judith Butler, Anne
Cheng, Ann Cvetkovich, Lisa Duggan, David Eng, Saidiya Hartman, and Kathleen
Stewart. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: Consent of instructor
required; GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
13900 31100 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David Rudall, Nick
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: Molière, 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.
12205 32205 Beginning Screenwriting
Petrakis, John
The course will introduce students to the basic elements of a literate
screenplay, including format, exposition, characterization, dialogue,
voice-over, adaptation and the vagaries of the three-act structure. Weekly
meetings will include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected
films, extended discussion, and assorted readings of class assignments. Students
will be expected to write a four to five page weekly assignment related to the
script topic of the week. It should be noted that this is primarily a writing
class.
12401 32401 Beginning Fiction Wkshp
Logue, Antonia
A workshop that will meet 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 frequent exercises outside the students' own writing. PQ: Consent of
instructor, submit a writing sample of up to 10 pages to jnklein@uchicago.edu by
12/01/04.
12406 32406 Performance Poetry
Salach, Cin
A good performance poem starts with a great written poem. Most of the time.
First we'll write them, then we'll sing them. Dance them. Draw them. Serve them
up on good china. Bring them home to meet our mothers. There are as many ways to
perform a poem as there are to write one. Come discover/develop/reveal your
style, on the page and on the stage in a safe, inspiring, encouraging
environment. Say your truth out loud. Split the world open. Some of what to
expect: In-class writing assignments, out-of-class field trips, performance of
your own and other poet's work, theater exercises, collaborative exploration,
critiquing of performance poetry videos and recordings, and discussion of
written and performed student work. PQ: Consent of instructor; submit 3-5 poems
to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 12/01/04.
12507 32507 AdvFict:The Longer Manuscript
Obejas, Achy
In order to gain admission to this class, students must be working on some type
of longer manuscripts, whether novels, novellas, or connected short stories. The
workshop meets once weekly to read, discuss and analyze students' original work.
Students re-write, revise and re- evaluate from week to week. In addition
students will be expected to critique peer writing in depth. Outside readings
will be provided. PQ: Consent of Instructor. Submit a writing sample of up to 10
pages to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 12/01/04.
12702 32702 Writing Profiles
Felsenthal, Carol
This course will focus on techniques for writing magazine-length profiles and,
where desired, on expanding profiles into book-length biographies. Class reading
will consist of skillfully executed profiles, both current and classic, and
discussion of why and how these profiles illuminate a subject. Profiles will be
culled from such magazines as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, New
York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Esquire, Elle, and Chicago.
Profiles will cover a variety of subjects-- politicians, university presidents,
educators, actors, directors, business leaders, journalists, people in the art,
literary, music worlds. Students will select a profile subject, looking for
multi-dimensional people who have not been written about widely or who can
accommodate a fresh angle. They will approach that subject or those close to the
subject for cooperation. They will learn how to pursue a subject when
cooperation is denied. The art of conducting interviews will be discussed and
practiced. Students will select sources (in the case of living or recently
deceased subjects, they will compile a list of key interviewees, learn how to
find and gain access to subjects' papers and correspondence, and navigate laws
regarding fair usage of such material. By the end of the quarter, students will
have written a 5,000-10,000-word profile. Actual publication of the article will
have no bearing on evaluation of students' performance; but, for those so
inclined, the instructor will help decide on an appropriate magazine, offer
suggestions on writing a query letter, and will also help students through the
process of expanding a profile into a biography. PQ: Consent of Instructor;
submit a writing sample of up to 10 pages to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 12/01/04.
29815 32815 Lit Sem: Stein & Wittgenstein
Reddy, Srikanth
This course will examine the work of Gertrude Stein in light of Wittgenstein's
writings on language and reality. Our exploration will take place primarily in
the field of poetics; we will consider Wittgenstein's Tractatus, for instance,
as offering something of a philosophical "gloss" on texts such as Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation." Topics will include the role of language games in Stein's oeuvre; aphorism and Modernist poetics; the place of digression in the philosophical lyric; the meditative epic; the interpenetration of philosophical and poetic discourse in early twentieth- century intellectual life. Open to undergraduates and graduate students.
13000 33000 Acad/Prof 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
13501 33501 TV Writing: Situation Comedy
Ferrara, Ed
In this intensive workshop-oriented seminar, students will learn the basics of
the TV sitcom writing process by participation, culminating in the creation of
their own 1st draft, half-hour spec script. Students will also examine many of
the basic principles of comedy writing, focusing on comic characters, comedic
premises, and story structure. Class meetings will involve lectures/discussions
about various concepts pertinent to the sitcom form, exercises designed to
reinforce comedic analysis techniques presented, as well as in-class viewing and
deconstruction of exemplary sitcom scenes and episodes. Students will be
responsible for completing a variety of sequential assignments that will, in
effect, chart their progress as they build their first-draft script. Students
will be required weekly to watch sitcoms out-of-class. Classroom participation
is mandatory. Strict attendance policy. Writing sample & application required for admission. PQ: Consent of instructor. Email hnthomps@uchicago.edu for submission info by 12/1/04.
15102 35102 Newberry Lib Sem:Old English
Niles, John
The Discovery and Invention of Old English Literature. The title of this seminar
plays on the Latin word inventio, a term whose meaning ranges from 'discovery" to 'invention'. During the first two thirds of each seminar meeting we will be translating (and to some extent 'discovering') Old English texts with precise attention to their grammar, style, lexicon, and thematic context. During the rest of each meeting we will look at rare books in which those texts were first presented to a post-medieval reading public, thereby promoting their discovery by an unattended audience while also inventing them as modern artifacts. Early editions drawn from the Special Collections of the Newberry Library will be compared with current scholarly editions so as to reveal the underlying assumptions on both sides.
Each meeting will be devoted to different type of text. We will start with prose excerpts from the Old English Gospels, the writings of Aelfric, the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Old English law codes, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Later we will turn our attention to poetic texts, including selections from the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and Beowulf, still comparing current editions of those texts with early ones. As time permits, we will take a look at early dictionaries and grammars of Old English. The point of the seminar will be to develop students' reading knowledge of Old English while at the same time sharpening their awareness of the degree to which Old English literature, as it has presented to the modern reading public, is the creation of successive generations of scholars building on one another's work.
The prerequisite for enrollment is at least one full term of Old English. Students who take the course for credit will be expected to write a term paper of a length appropriate to their individual level of training. Everyone enrolled in the seminar will 'present' at least one rare book to the group.
PQ: Eng 149/349 or equivalent. This course meets at the Newberry Library; for more information, consult Christina von Nolcken (702-7977, mcv4@midway.uchicago.edu).
15200 35200 Beowulf
von Nolcken, Christina
This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them
with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We
will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson,
Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); we will also draw on the Newberry
Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions when
discussing textual and paleographical matters. Once students have defined their
particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to
discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and
in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. Prerequisite: Eng
149/349 or equivalent.
16300 36300 Renaissance Epic
Murrin, Michael
A study of classical epic in the Renaissance or Early Modern period. Emphasis
will be both on texts and on classical epic theory. We will read Tasso's
Jerusalem Delivered, Camões' Lusiads, and Milton's Paradise Lost. A paper will be required and perhaps an examination.
37250 Shakesp. in the Mediterranean
Bevington, David
Shakespeare in the Mediterranean. This course will investigate plays that
Shakespeare set in the Mediterranean, with a view to studying how he makes use
of his sources, and what the Mediterranean world, ancient and Renaissance, meant
to him: what sorts of opportunities, challenges, imaginative escapes, different
landscapes. The list is too long to cover all of them, since it includes at
least The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The
Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado
about Nothing, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Antony and
Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The
Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (I leave out Twelfth Night, since it's hard
to be sure were Illyria is located), but we'll explore as much as we have time
for. What did Shakespeare understand about a part of the world that he almost
certainly never saw? Are there common values associated with this collective
setting? What role does geography play in his creeation of imaginative
landscapes?
38603 Early English Novel 1688-1796
Macpherson, Sandra
This course is a survey of English novels written before 1800, and of the
critical literature on the rise of the novel form in England. Texts will include
Watt, The Rise of the Novel; McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel;
Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary;
Lynch, The Economy of Character; Behn, Oronooko; Heywood, Love in Excess; Defoe,
Roxana and Robinson Crusoe; Richardson, Pamela; Fielding, Joseph Andrews;
Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph; Burney, Camilla.
29809 39809 Thesis Sem: Poetry
Reddy, Srikanth
This course is an advanced creative writing seminar intended primarily for
seniors writing honors theses in creative writing as well as graduate students
who are writing poetry at an advanced level. (There is, however, usually enough
room in the class to accommodate additional students, so all qualified
undergraduates are encouraged to apply). Because it is a thesis seminar, the
course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic "projects." We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, the long poem, the poetry collection, and the book-length poem as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic "projects," considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students' work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.
P.Q. Consent of instructor; email submission of 3-5 poems to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 12/1/04.
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.
24101 42301 Middlemarch
Rothfield, Larry
This course will spend the entire quarter focusing on Eliot's masterwork, with
some attention to the novel's literary and intellectual context.
44100 T.S. Eliot
Yu, Anthony
Intense reading and discussion of Eliot's major poems, one or two plays, and
selected works of criticism. Term paper required. Undergraduates per consent of
instructor. PQ: At least one course in modern English/American poetry.
44901 Contemporary Historical Fiction
Veeder, William
One of the most prominent modes of contemporary fiction is the “historical novel.” Our course will explore what it means for “fiction” to be “historical.” In the process we will study various ways in which “identity” is produced through the interaction of familial and social forces. Psychological and cultural questions will be posed through close attention to textual intricacies. Primary texts will include Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Capote's In Cold Blood, Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Fuentes's The Old Gringo, Morrison's Beloved, Thomas's The White Hotel, Warren's All The King's Men, and Welty's “Where is the Voice Coming From” and “The Demonstrators.” Two of our ten weeks will explore various theoretical viewpoints on the conjunction of fiction and history. Theorists will include Barthes, de Certeau, Hutcheon, Lukacs, and White. There will be a midterm and final paper.
25401 45401 US Nat'l Beg. Bynd Blck/Whte
Rifkin, Mark
U.S. National Beginnings Beyond the Black/White Binary. The U.S. was built on
the labor of African slaves. It also required the annexation of Native American
and Mexican territory, and it largely gained international power through the
growth of political and economic influence in the Pacific. While slavery and
African-American history have become part of public conversation about the U.S.
past, these other areas still receive scant attention in collective forms of
national memory. In this course, we will focus on the antebellum period,
exploring U.S.-Indian relations, the lead-up to and impact of the
Mexican-American War, and commercial expansion in the Pacific. Examining how a
range of different authors and texts represent those events, we will consider
how such writings seek to (re)shape the meaning and popular understanding of the
above dynamics. Authors may include Thomas Jefferson, Nancy Ward, Charles
Brockden Brown, William Apess, Lydia Maria Child, Black Hawk, Elias Boudinot,
William H. Prescott, George Lippard, Richard Henry Dana, Henry David Thoreau,
Juan Seguin, Antonio Maria Osio, Henry Obookiah, Charles Wilkes, M.C. Perry, and
Herman Melville.
26701 46701 Whitman & Successors
von Hallberg, Robert Strand, Mark
This course will treat Whitman's poetry, and then its influence on two later
poets: the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
28101 48101 The Films of Max Ophuls
Hansen, Miriam
Max Ophuls has variously been discussed as master of the long take and
mise-en-scene, of theatrical adaptation and self-conscious narration; as
director of the "woman's film," of melodramatic pathos and irony; and as artist and analyst of erotic - and cinematic -- obsession. Following the trajectory of his life and work from Germany through France, Italy, Hollywood, and back to Europe, we will consider Ophuls' films in terms of style and genre; the question of his gynocentric aesthetic and the feminist debate surrounding it; authorship and industrial production; and the challenge diasporic film practice poses to paradigms of national cinema and national film history. Films include Liebelei, La Signora di tutti, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment, La Ronde, Madame de..., Le Plaisir, and Lola Montès.
29300 48700 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.
50100 Graduate
Teaching Colloquium - CANCELLED
Nelson, Deborah L.
55002 AfAm Lit
on the Frontier - CANCELLED
Stewart, Jacqueline
Although much critical attention has been paid to the development of African
American literature within the framework of the Great Migration (Southern
roots, flowerings in Northeastern and Midwestern urban locales like Harlem
and Chicago's South Side), the American West has functioned as a vast
but underexplored territory of Black history and creative writing. This
course looks at literary works by and about African Americans in the West
(e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota, Colorado, California), as
well as archival materials, in order to explore how "frontier" myths and
experiences (Black "Exodusters," cowboys, "buffalo soldiers," homesteaders,
entrepreneurs) complicate our understanding of U. S. racial history as
well as the construction of a Black literary canon. We will trace how
the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the American West (such as the
racial politics of its opening and closing; fantasies of a land yet untouched
by Jim Crow segregation but secured by violence against Mexicans; the
flourishing of Black businesses but frequency of race riots, such as the
infamous 1921 destruction of Tulsa's "Negro Wall Street") are depicted
in novels, short stories, autobiographies, poetry, folklore, and the Black
press. We will examine texts from the late 19th century to the present,
including Sutton E. Griggs (Imperium in Imperio), Oscar Micheaux (The
Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer; Symbol of the Unconquered), J.
Mason Brewer (Ghost Dog and Other Texas Negro Folktales), Langston Hughes
(Not Without Laughter), Ralph Ellison ("A Couple of Scalped Indians"),
Ishmael Reed (Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down), Carroll Parrott Blue (The
Dawn at My Back) and Toni Morrison (Paradise).
55402 Enlight. & Rev. 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.
57101 Cultural Markets
Rothfield, Larry
How can culture be understood as a market activity? This course looks at recent
historical, critical-theoretical, economic, and sociological efforts to
understand how cultural forms emerge and are shaped by the conditions of the
market.
57500 Philosophical Literature
Schleusener, Jay; Miller, Mark; Vogler, Candace
Some literary texts are, in an important sense, philosophical—not because they
provide examples or otherwise illustrate philosophical themes, but because they
engage in a particular kind of philosophical work. We will read, write and think about texts of this kind by Geoffrey Chaucer, Edgar Allen Poe and Flannery O'Connor. We are specifically concerned with the way these writers engage the ethical, since for each of them it is at least a question what might characterize the ethical in the first place. Weekly writing and daily conversation will be essential to the success of the seminar. Permission of the instructors required—contact jsch@uchicago.edu or vogue@uchicago.edu.
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.
61601 Gendr & Rep in Early Mod Lit
Rose, Mary Beth
In this course we will explore the ways in which ideologies of gender in the
Renaissance (or early modern era) inform literary representation and the
construction of texts. Focusing on the interrelationship of gender and
transforming conceptions of politics, race, sexuality, marriage, and heroism,
our approaches will be both formal and historical. We will consider the
connections among diverse texts, change over time, and the role representation
plays in a culture's evaluation of itself. We will also examine the ways in
which literary forms register and enable cultural change. Readings will include
Castiglione (The Courtier); Machiavelli (The Prince); Christine de Pisan (City
of Ladies); Marguerite de Navarre (The Heptameron); Elizabeth Tudor (selected
speeches); Shakespeare (Othello); John Webster (Duchess of Malfi); Elizabeth
Cary (Tragedie of Mariam); tracts and sermons defining gender; selected
autobiographies; Milton (Samson Agonistes); Aphra Behn (Oroonoko); and Mary
Astell (Some Reflections Upon Marriage).
66100 Irish Modernity
Chandler, James
Studies in Irish literary and cultural history from the late eighteenth to the
late twentieth centuries. We will track the relation between folkloric movements
(what Katie calls "bardic nationalism") and more cosmopolitan movements (Wolfe Tone's French-Revolution-inspired Irish republicanism, the United Irishmen movement, early socialism) over the longue durée of the evolution of Modern Ireland. Both movements are born in the 1790s and both march together, arm-in-arm, through the decades of early modernism (1910-30) and beyond. Authors to be read might include Burke, Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Thomas Moore, Maturin, Wilde, Stoker, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and Edna O'Brien. All are concerned, one way or another, with the case of Ireland, and all have or make important connections--literary, cultural, and political--with that other island, across the Irish Sea. Indeed, part of the point of the seminar will be to see how understanding Irish literary history transforms one's sense of "British" literary history: e.g., how altered a writer Burke appears in the Irish contexts, what difference it makes to understand Scott's and Austen's fiction as derived from Edgeworth's, whether the single "day" as represented in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway belong to the same understanding of narrative temporality. There may also be opportunity for comparisons between the Irish and Scottish contexts. A short paper, an oral presentation, and a seminar paper.
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