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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 |
WINTER 2007 COURSES
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| 30201/21401 | Intro Theories of Sex/Gender | |
| 31100/13900 | History and Theory of Drama 2 | |
| 32800/12800 | Theories of Media | |
| 33000/13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 35204/15204 | Unworthy Bodies: Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript | |
| 36310 | Renaissance Tragedy | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading Research | |
| 41010/24102 | The Idiot as Hero | |
| 42300 | Victorian Women Writers | |
| 43702/29819 | The Modernist Long Poem | |
| 45002/25004 | Jewish American Lit after 1945 | |
| 48700/29300 | History of International Cinema I-Silent Era | |
| 48904/28903 | The Literature of the Fantastic | |
| 49600 | New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel | |
| 57102 | Theories of the Novel | |
| 58700 | Cinema as Vernacular Modernism | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 62200 | Renaissance Intellectual Texts, Petrarch to Descartes | |
| 62701 | Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and Early Poetry | |
| 63701 | The Vitalist Moment | |
| 67101 | Aesthetics and Politics | |
| 68600 | Classical Film Theory |
30201/21401 Intro Theories of Sex/Gender
Berlant, Lauren
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Bodies in Transition. This year this interdisciplinary course will focus on inhabiting conceptualizations of sex/gender formation via law, transnational, transsexual, and transitive embodiments and practices. Beginning with Foucault and Eve Sedgwick, we will then turn to theoretical and practice-based formulations from psychoanalysis; literary, historical, and anthropological disciplinary practices in Queer and feminist theory; rhetoric, critical race studies, Deleuzian rhizomatics, and cinema studies. Cases include: novels from Antigua and post-Apartheid South Africa, trans-films like Boys Don't Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, working-class and queer autobiography, postcolonial conceptions of emotional and economic labor. Theorists include: Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Elspeth Probyn, Patricia Williams, Zachie Achmat, Carolyn Steedman, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, Elizabeth Povinelli, Renata Salecl. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: Consent of instructors required; GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
31100/13900 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The 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.
32800/12800 Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.
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.
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
35204/15204 Unworthy Bodies: Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript
Kim, Susan
The four "other" works in the Beowulf manuscript, the "Wonders of the East," the "Letter from Alexander to Aristotle," Judith, and the "Life of St. Christopher," are rarely examined closely, even for the context they provide for Beowulf. Yet these texts provide much insight not only into the reading of Beowulf, but also into Anglo-Saxon literature and culture, as well as the construction of modern interpretations. In Kenneth Sisam's phrase, these works at the very least indicate "a special interest in monsters" throughout the manuscript. This "special interest in monsters," and its own other, the interest in normative corporeal, linguistic, religious, and cultural identity, will be the focus of the seminar. In addition to the five works of the Beowulf manuscript, we will read, as both primary and secondary texts, a number of critical and theoretical studies. This course meets at the Newberry Library. (For further information, contact Christina von Nolcken at mcv4@uchicago.edu).
36310 Renaissance Tragedy
Mazzio, Carla
This course will examine the development of tragic drama, including works Sackville and Norton, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster and Cary and Ford. While we will examine drama in light of the history and theory of tragedy, and Senecan drama in particular, we will focus heavily on tragic drama in relation to Renaissance skepticism, early modern juridical formations, and nascent forms of nationalism.
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.
41010/24102 The Idiot as Hero
Rothfield, Lawrence
What strains are put on the apparatus of representation and storytelling when the protagonist is cognitively challenged, foolish, stupid, or even idiotic? How do we interpret, evaluate, and make sense of the actions and judgments of such characters? What other codes -- ethical, political, ideological, sexual, etc. -- come into play when we respond aesthetically to a story about an idiot? How, and to what degree, is it possible for us to identify with the experience of being stupid? We take up questions like these through discussion of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Haddon's The Curious Incident, Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy," and two films: The Hudsucker Proxy and Forrest Gump.
42300 Victorian Women Writers
Helsinger, Elizabeth
This course will cover the difficulties and possibilities for women writing in nineteenth-century Britain, as these are variously encountered and exploited in works by Victorian poets and novelists. Likely texts include Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights and selected poems; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; and selected poetry by Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, "Michael Field," Charlotte Mew. We will also evaluate some approaches to Victorian women's writing (Gilbert & Gubar, Armstrong, Homans, Mermin, Leighton) and look at various analyses of sex and gender roles in the Victorian period (Davidoff, Hall, Poovey, etc.).
43702/29819 The Modernist Long Poem
Reddy, Srikanth
Modernist poetry is most often studied in its lyric form. (The highly impacted poetic couplet of Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" provides a typical example). But Modernist verse is a far more sprawling, complex, and unruly affair than it might seem to be from the miniaturist's perspective. In this course we will examine several works of longer Modernist poems by writers such as Eliot, Williams, and Stein in order to consider the problems of literary ambition, scope, and complexity within the period. The careful and attentive reading of major Modernist texts such as Eliot's "Four Quartets" will take priority over any particular theoretical or critical methodology over the course of the quarter. This class is open to advanced undergraduates and master's students.
45002/25004 Jewish American Lit after 1945
Schwarz, Jan
The course will develop a multilingual model for the study of American literature by examining Yiddish and English literature by Jewish writers in America after 1945. Despite the fact that Jewish literature in America exists in several languages, the study of Jewish American literature is overwhelmingly defined by an English-only approach. The main goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. In discussing novels and short stories by bilingual writers such as I.B.Singer and Scholem Asch, we will discuss the permeable borders that existed between American literature in Yiddish and English after 1945. The course will address how the Yiddish literary landscape influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s as represented by the works of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Bernard Malamud. We will compare literature of the Holocaust by John Hersey, Chaim Grade and I.B.Singer with more recent works in the genre. Finally, we will examine how Dara Horn’s In the Image (2002) and Pearl Abraham’s The Seventh Beggar (2005) have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition among a young generation of Jewish American writers.
No prior knowledge of Yiddish is required. All texts will be available in English. Students with reading proficiency in Yiddish are encouraged to read the Yiddish texts in the original.
Primary texts:
I.B.Singer, The Shadows on the Hudson (1957-1958); Chaim Grade, My Quarrel With Hersh Rasayner (1952); Sholem Ash, East River (1946); John Hersey, The Wall (1950); Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1971) and Something to Remember Me By (1990); Cynthia Ozick, “Envy: or, Yiddish in America” (1969) and The Shawl (1983); Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1978); Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2000); Pearl Abraham, The Seventh Beggar (2005); Dara Horn, In the Image (2002).
48700/29300 History of International Cinema I-Silent Era
Tsivian, Yuri
PQ: CMST 10100 must be taken before or concurrently with this course. This is the first part of a two-quarter course. The two parts may be taken individually, but taking them in sequence is helpful. 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 discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
48904/28903 The Literature of the Fantastic
Lachmann, Renate
This course will include texts by Russian and English authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Poe, H.G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde. Theoretical positions will be examined based on texts by Tzevtan Todorov, Jackson, Traill, Lachmann. All text will be in English.
49600 New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel
Nelson, Deborah L.
This course will begin with John Hersey’s Hiroshima and end with Joan Didion’s Salvador. The cross-fertilization of the novel with journalism and journalism with the novel constitutes one of the most important developments in U.S. literary production of the post-World War II era. The course will examine the history of such experiments as well as the contemporary pressures, political and aesthetic, that motivated these innovations in storytelling.
57102 Theories of the Novel
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course introduces graduate students to some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: how are novels formally unified (if they are)? What are the ideological presuppositions inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices do novels encourage? Readings include Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Austen, Emma; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; critics covered include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Watt, Jameson, and others. PQ: Consent of instructor, outside students will be accepted, with the class size limited to 15 students, as long as the majority of students are ComLit Grad students and PhD students in English Language and Literature. Fulfills the core course requirement for CompLit students.
58700 Cinema as Vernacular Modernism
Hansen, Miriam
This course proceeds from the ostensible contradiction that Hollywood cinema at its most "classical," roughly from the late teens through the fifties, was also perceived, all over the world, as an incarnation of "the modern." We will begin with accounts of cinematic classicality in film history and criticism (Brasillach/Bardeche, Bazin), psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory (Metz, Bellour, Heath, Mulvey), as well as neoformalist-cognitivist approaches (Bordwell, Thompson, Carroll). We will look at films that both meet and exceed their categorization as classical and might more productively be described as a form of "vernacular modernism"—as aesthetic expressions of, and responses to, the social, psychic, and cultural experience of modernity and modernization. Drawing on texts by Kracauer, Benjamin, Epstein, Dulac, Colette, Woolf et al., we will consider the formal, stylistic, and thematic ways in which these films articulate a material sense of the everyday, a new image world, a restructuration of sensory perception, subjectivity, and cultural reception.
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.
62200 Renaissance Intellectual Texts, Petrarch to Descartes
Strier, Richard
This course will read and discuss some of the non-literary texts that were fundamental to Renaissance, Reformation, and immediately post-Reformation Europe. It will study works by Petrarch, Bruni, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Luther, Zwingli, Loyola, Calvin, St. Teresa, Montaigne, Galileo, and Descartes. Since none of these works were written in English, all will be read in translation, but students will be encouraged to read any works they can in the original. Each student will be expected to make at least one class presentation, to keep a reading diary, and to do an analytical or historical paper.
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.
63701 The Vitalist Moment
Macpherson, Sandra
The Vitalist Moment: a course on vitalist, Lucretian, Epicurean and materialist philosophy and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will read works by philosophers such as Hervey (On Generation), van Helmond (Oriatrike), Glisson (Treatise on the Energetic Nature of Substance), Gassendi (De vita et moribus Epicuri), Hobbes (On Body), Cavendish (Observations on Experimental Philosophy), Conway (Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy), La Mettrie (L’Homme Machine), Helvetius (On the Mind), and Baron d’Holbach (System of Nature). And we will trace a literary genealogy emerging out of this tradition in the work of such writers as Milton, Marvell, Rochester, Cavendish, Bolingbroke, Pope, Cleland, Thompson, Shelley (Mary and Percy), Godwin, Wordsworth, and Sade.
67101 Aesthetics and Politics
Warren, Kenneth
In this course we will explore both the political work that literary texts and literary criticism allegedly do as well as the way that current critical practice has been shaped by the presumption that the aesthetic is, among other things, another way of doing politics. Although the majority of texts discussed in this course will be drawn from the 19th- and 20th- century American context, the course should be of interest to nonAmericanists as well.
68600 Classical Film Theory
Lastra, James
This course examines major texts in film theory from Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Muensterberg in the 1910s through Andre Bazin's writings in the 1940s and 1950s. We will devote special attention to the emergence of issues that continue to be of major importance, such as the film/language analogy, film semiotics, spectatorship, realism, montage, the modernism/mass culture debate, and the relationship between film history and film style. We will concentrate on the major theoretical writings of Muensterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Bela Balazs, Bazin, as well as writings by Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Jean Mitry, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and others.
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