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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 2009 COURSES
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| 31100/13900 | History and Theory of Drama 2 | |
| 32300 | Marxism and Modern Culture | |
| 33000/13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 35200/15200 | Beowulf | |
| 36300/16300 | Renaissance Epic | |
| 39900 | Intensive Reading & Research | |
| 42303 | The "Writing" of Modern Life | |
| 44505/24400 | Brecht and Beyond | |
| 45302 | History of the Book in America | |
| 47808/25602 | 20th Century Fictions: The Novel and Its Others | |
| 47903 | African American Literary Criticism & Theory | |
| 52004 | Lyric Narration | |
| 59900 | Reading & Research: English | |
| 66701 | Postcolonial Theory and Beyond | |
| 67100 | Shock Treatments and Nervous Systems |
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
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.
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 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
ENGL 35200/15200 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 poem as edited in Klaeber's Beowulf (4th ed., Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008). 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.
ENGL 36300/16300 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.
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 42303 The "Writing" of Modern Life
Helsinger, Elizabeth
This course, offered in conjunction with a Mellon exhibition running concurrently at the Smart Museum, “The Etching Revival (1850-1940) in Britain, France, and the United States,” begins from the parallels between writing and etching (as varieties of both hand-writing and authorship) noted by contemporaries as disparate as Charles Baudelaire and Samuel Palmer (a visionary disciple of William Blake). The course will explore different approaches to “writing” modernity in the two media, comparing visual and verbal representations in several genres (poetry, fiction, and journalism as well as artists’ etchings and etched illustration) in a number of areas (“dark” pastoral, the city, travel and the picturesque, figures of labor, grotesques). Attention will be paid to the uneven development of non-narrative and increasingly abstract languages and modes of notation. We will also study the rhetorics of value (economic and aesthetic) surrounding the etching and the book. In addition to readings (literary and critical) and close study of the exhibition objects and others in the Smart Museum’s or the Art Institute’s collections, the course may include visits to a print gallery and a print-maker’s workshop. Response papers, final paper. Not designed as a seminar, but Ph.D. students may petition to write a seminar-length paper if desired.
ENGL 44505/24400 Brecht and Beyond
Kruger, Loren
Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the twentieth century. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920's to the political learning plays to the classical parable plays, as well as the works of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Caryl Churchill), and sub-Saharan Africa (Ngugi, and various South African practitioners). We will consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht's own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard to African film makers.
PQ Juniors, seniors and/or graduate students with at least one of the following: Intro to Cinema, History and Theory of drama, or their equivalents. Working knowledge of German and/or French would be helpful but is not required
ENGL 45302 History of the Book in America
Slauter, Eric
This course provides a focused introduction to the fields of inquiry collectively known as the history of the book, paying special attention to the histories of authorship, reading, and publishing in America. Our case studies treat primary texts and moments in American literary history from the colonial period to the present; secondary readings encompass a wide range of approaches (from material to quantitative analysis, and from "close" to "distant" reading). Students will develop original projects based on the unique holdings of Chicago libraries and archives (Regenstein, Newberry, and Harold Washington, among others). The course meets in the Special Collections Research Center.
ENGL 47808/25602 20th Century Fictions: The Novel and Its Others
Izenberg, Oren
The novel, that most public and popular of our literary genres will, at crucial moments in its history, visits modes of art that offer alternatives to its own increasingly dominant nature—such arts may be "difficult" like poetry, or nonlinguistic, like music. Such novels raise questions about the social function of the imagination, the relation between kinds of literature and kinds of knowledge, the tension between high and mass culture. This course studies 20th century novels (and films) in which poets and poetry or musicians and music appear as central characters and concerns: James' The Aspern Papers, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Mann's Doctor Faustus, Richard Powers' In the Time of Our Singing, Cocteau's Orphée, Hal Hartley's Henry Fool and others.
ENGL 47903 African American Literary Criticism & Theory
Goldsby, Jacqueline
In this course we will survey works that have shaped current research and critical debates in African American literary studies. What categories and methods of analysis presently structure the field's critical imaginary? What texts—or, more precisely, what kinds of texts—comprise the canon of African American literary studies, and what theoretical cases are made for those works of art? Finally, how might these projects lead you to shape your own critical pursuits?
Studies we read may include: Joanna Brooks on the transformative role of evangelicalism in 18th century African American and Native American letters; Elizabeth McHenry on the literary societies and reading habits amongst free Blacks during slavery; Daphne Brooks on trans-Atlantic "performances of freedom" during the late-19th and early 20th centuries; Brent Edwards on the Harlem Renaissance's translation to (and reconfiguration in) the scene of 1920s Paris, France; Bill Mullen on the Communist-Black coalitions that defined the 1930s "Chicago Renaissance"; Arnold Rampersad on the (arguably stalled) literary career of Ralph Ellison; James Smethurst on the regional writing cultures of the Black Arts Movement; Fred Moten on the tropes of sound in Black avant-guarde writing; Anne Cheng on the melancholic structures of racial grief; E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson on the historiographic and conceptual potential of Black Queer Studies; and Kevin Quashie on the narratology of contemporary Black women's fiction. Also, since the "Birmingham School's" cultural studies approach has proven decisive to the field's development in the past two decades, we will discuss its migration from England to the U.S. academy, by way of studying select works by Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy.
As this outline suggests, we will read mostly monographs. In addition, students will be required to read one of the literary works discussed by a book's author each week. Article-length works certainly count, though that canon will be defined through independent reading shaped by students' research interests. In terms of written work, students will write three short book reviews, lead class discussions, and submit a final review essay.
ENGL 52004 Lyric Narration
Cormack, Bradin
This course will explore the relation of lyric to narrative in a series of case studies ranging from Dante and Petrarch through Spenser and Shakespeare to John Berryman and Adrienne Rich. In dialogue with historical-critical readings and theoretical material on questions of desire, love, and knowledge, we will focus especially on the relation of lyric utterance to implied narrative as one kind of unity a poem or sequence might both gesture toward and withhold.
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 66701 (HIST 61801, SALC 50401) Postcolonial Theory and Beyond
Chakrabarty, Dipesh; Gandhi, Leela
This course intercepts postcolonial theory at an important moment in its disciplinary mutation. In recent years critics and commentators both within the field and hostile to it appear increasingly at one in their dramatisation of a certain theoretical ‘exhaustion’ with questions hitherto raised under the banner of postcolonialism. What are the reasons for this new critical ennui? What relation does it bear to earlier critiques of the field? What, if any, are the (epistemological and political) costs of giving full credence to this recent version of anti-postcolonialism? To what extent may we map a future for postcolonial theory? In our readings and discussions we will review crucial and canonical moments in the gestation of the field (Bhabha, Spivak), canvass some recent critiques (Hardt and Negri, Badiou), and review some new directions (cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, ethics).
ENGL 67100 Shock Treatments and Nervous Systems
Nelson, Deborah L.
While this course examines the metaphor of electroshock therapy that finds its way into a good deal of post World War II US literature—Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for instance—it will principally investigate the dueling assumptions in post war America that human beings were both too sensitive to pain and too anesthetized to it. If art of this period offered, as Susan Sontag said of Diane Arbus's photography, a "self willed test of hardness," it did so with extreme ambivalence about the stability of its subjects. "Nervous systems" refers both to the individual's psychic wiring and the organizing institutions (state, corporation, bureaucracy) and categories (race, gender, sexuality) of postwar society. We will necessarily have to attend to shock value, but I'm more interested in how various writers and artists figured the value of shock.
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