Graduate Course Descriptions
Autumn | Winter | Spring | Undergraduate Courses
SPRING QUARTER
(click for course descriptions)
31800 11800 Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis; Volkman, Karen
33000 13000 Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse); McEnerney,Larry; Cochran,Kathryn; Weiner, Tracy
36200 16200 Spenser and Shakespeare; Cormack, Bradin
36301 16301 Renaissance Love Poetry; Scodel, Joshua
37300 17200 The Religious Lyric In England and America; Strier, Richard
38200 18200 The Transit of Venus: Exoticism, Race, Sexuality, and Science in the 18th-Century Pacific; Brewer, John
39900 Intensive Reading Research; Staff
40700 18900 Commerce, Luxury, & Consumption in the Early Modern Era (16th-19th C.); Brewer, John
42300 21900 Victorian Women Writers; Helsinger, Elizabeth
42400 21700 The Politics of Culture; Rothfield, Lawrence
44500 Brechtian Representations: Theatre, Theory, Cinema; Kruger, Loren
45100 19th Century American Gothic; Veeder, William
45800 25800 The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow; Warren, Kenneth
50100 Graduate Teaching Colloquium: The Craft of Teaching; Staff
50400 Teaching Undergraduate English (Pedagogy); Ruddick, Lisa
52700 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages; Miller, Mark
55900 Spirit Worlds; Knight, Janice
59900 Reading Course; Staff,
62200 Renaissance Intellectual Texts: Petrarch to Descartes; Strier, Richard
68500 Historiography of the Cinema; Lastra, James
69700 Totemism, Fetishism, and Idolatry; Mitchell, W.J.T.
31800 11800. Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis
M 3:00-5:50. Volkman, Karen.
This seminar considers poetic responses to urban experience, the city as refracted and reflected in
the poet's eye, and imaginitive transformations of space and place. How does the collision of the
lyric moment with the contingencies of urban encounter destabilize the lyric "I"? What happens to
the poem's time in responding to the multiple levels of city-time, resulting in synchronic
fabulations sometimes exhilirating, sometimes ghostly, sometimes appalling? We will discuss the
flaneur, the Surrealist "encounter," the poetry of dailiness, and other relevent notions, exploring
poetic treatments of Paris, New York, London, Petersburg, Berlin, San Francisco, and of course,
Chicago. Reading will include Baudelaire, Breton, Rilke, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara,
Langston Hughes, Alice Notley, Osip Mandelstam, and Gwendolyn Brooks. For the final project,
students may write a critical paper or develop a series of poems over the course of the quarter
engaging the issues raised in our reading.
33000 13000. Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse)
TuTh 3:00-4:20. 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.
36200 16200. Spenser and Shakespeare
MW 3:00-4:20. Cormack, Bradin. This course explores the place of literature in late sixteenth-
and early seventeenth-century culture by focussing on two exemplary and very different literary
careers. Against Spenser's poetry, including parts of the Shepheardes Calender and the Faerie
Queene, we will read a number of Shakespeare's plays, including Love's Labor's Lost, As You Like
It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra, in order to reflect on the cultural work
done by renaissance lyric, pastoral and romance, both on the stage and off.
36301 16301. Renaissance Love Poetry
MW 1:30-2:50. Scodel, Joshua. This course will explore visions of erotic love in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century English poetry. We will combine formal and historical considerations
to explore the diverse ways in which early modern poems represent erotic longing, seduction,
and sexual consummation; courtship and marriage; same-sex intimacy; sexual betrayal, renunciation,
and repulsion; and conflicts between erotic desire and competing personal and social imperatives.
Poets will include Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser,
Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Katherine Philips, John Milton, Rochester,
Aphra Behn.
37300 17200. The Religious Lyric In England and America
TuTh 10:30-11:50. Strier, Richard. This course will study the development of the religious lyric
in English from its first flowering in seventeenth-century England (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw,
Vaughan, An Collins) and America (Ann Bradstreet, Edward Taylor) to its secularization in the
Romantic lyrics of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the Victorian lyrics of Christina Rossetti and G.
M. Hopkins in England and Emily Dickinson in America to the high modernist meditations of T. S.
Eliot in the Four Quartets. We will then consider the question of what counts as "religious
poetry" after Eliot, and may consider poems by Theodore Roethke, Geoffrey Hill, Allen Ginsburg,
Robert Duncan, and Carl Phillips. There will be one short and one longer paper.
38200 18200. The Transit of Venus:
Exoticism, Race, Sexuality, and Science in the 18th-Century Pacific
TuTh 12:00-1:20. Brewer, John. This course examines the South Sea islands of the Pacific as a social
imaginary in eighteenth-century Europe, especially England and France. Beginning with an examination
of the voyages of Bougainville and Cook, it examines the scientific framing of imperial exploration,
the debate about sexuality, race, and civilization, and South Sea Islands as a site of sexual fantasy
and critique. The course uses visual representations and imaginative prose and verse, as well as
non-fictional texts, and finishes with a consideration of the Mutiny on the Bounty.
39900. Intensive Reading Research
ARR. 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.
40700 18900. Commerce, Luxury, & Consumption in the Early Modern Era (16th-19th C.)
TuTh 3:00-4:20. Brewer, John. This course examines the recent literature on consumerism in early
modern Europe, focusing on Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. The first part of the
course is historiographical and methodological, examining the value of techniques and methods
drawn from economic, social, and art history, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, and
cultural studies. The second considers a series of case studies which include narratives of
modernity, the luxury debate in mid-eighteenth-century France and England, reproductive engraving,
shops and shopping, the female reader, the male fop, fashion and design in the textile industry,
culinary implements, and colonial produce, especially sugar.
42300 21900.
Victorian Women Writers
TuTh 3:00-4:20. 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 Bronte,
Villette; Emily Bronte, 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.).
42400 21700. The Politics of Culture
TuTh 9:00-10:20. Rothfield, Lawrence. Whether focused on beauty and justice or on issues of race,
class, and gender, critical work in the humanities tends to take for granted the assumption that
ideology, ethical resource, source of resistance, means of transcendence or moral
improvement, and so on--culture matters politically. Yet that assumption is itself worth
exploring. This course examines the history of the ways in which, beginning in the Victorian
period but intensifying over the last half century, culture has been defined as an object of
political concern, an objective of political action, or a means to a political end. Topics to
be discussed may include the understanding of the arts and humanities. In addition to reading
key texts by a diverse group of cultural critics, philosophers, economists, and writers we will
evaluate the arguments that have been made in several concrete policy debates from recent years.
44500. Brechtian Representations: Theatre, Theory, Cinema
TuTh 1:30-2:50 C 425; M 7:00-10:00 Scr C 307. Kruger, Loren.
This course will examine the contribution of Brecht, the most influential playwright
of the twentieth century and its principal theatre theorist, to the practice and
theory of theatre and cinema. We will pay particular attention to the relationships
between theory and practice in Brecht's own work from the 1920s to the 1950s, so as
to clarify the use and significance of terms that are both concepts and techniques--epic
theatre, Verfremdung, gest, historicizing, refunctioning the apparatus, and the formation
of the critical audience--and go on to consider the influence (and refunctioning) of
these terms in the more recent work of playwrights (John Arden, Edward Bond, Wole Soyinka,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, ...) film-makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Straub/Huillet, Alexander Kluge, ...)
and cultural theorists (Barthes, Derrida, Adorno, Enzensberger, ....). N. B.: Working
knowledge of German (and/or French) would be very helpful, but is not required.
45100. 19th Century American Gothic
MW 3:00-4:20. Veeder, William. Our course will study the gothic tradition as it developed in America
throughout the 19th century. What accounts for the enduring power of this fiction? We will begin to
explore this question by focusing on the texts themselves. Close analysis will be central to our work.
Such reading cannot occur in the vacuum, however, anymore than writing fiction can. So we will
compliment close analysis with insights and methodologies drawn from diverse disciplines - especially
gender studies, psychoanalysis, and cultural history. Questions of "the canon" will be central, since
we're studying both "classic" gothicists and authors famous in their time but little read or entirely
unknown today. Among the later group will be Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and W.C.
Morrow; among the former, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, James, and Crane. Midterm and final
papers.
45800 25800. The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow
TuTh 1:30-2:50. Warren, Kenneth. Taken as a whole the fiction of Richard Wright, Willam Faulkner, Ann
Petry, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin constitutes a powerful
testament to the common humanuity of black and white Americans in a nation where "seperate but equal"
in matters of race was deemed consistent with the law of the land. How decisive was the humanistic
eloquence of these writers in helping to shift the nations legal climate against de jure segregation?
How Sucessful was the American novel of race in coming to terms with the turbulent social reality of
the civil rights era?
50100. Graduate Teaching Colloquium: The Craft of Teaching
TBA. Staff. This year-long colloquium is open to all PhD students in the department,
regardless of teaching experience. We will meet four times each quarter to practice,
read about, and theorize teaching. 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 literacy generally. A planning
meeting will be held early in the fall quarter to take stock of immediate needs and interests.
The fall quarter will probably focus on inventing and describing courses and constructing syllabi.
Issues of authority, "contracts with students," etc., will undoubtedly arise.
50400. Teaching Undergraduate English (Pedagogy)
TuTh 9:00-10:20. Ruddick, Lisa. This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students,
prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements
of classroom teaching of English. The course, for purposes of focus and with the recognition that
not all our students will teach at the graduate level, is intended primarily as an introduction to
teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction,
the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy, which help the students to reflect on and speak
to their practice. The course will provide significant opportunities in conceptualizing, designing,
and running a college-level course in English: e.g., the opportunity to lead a mock-classroom discussion,
to construct a sample syllabus, to grade a common paper.
52700. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages
MW 1:30-2:50. Miller, Mark. A course on the construction and conduct of gender identity and
erotic life in medieval culture, with particular attention to the question of how the "problem
of sex" becomes central to the self-understanding of late-medieval people in Western Europe.
Readings will be drawn from medical, theological, and philosophical accounts of what constitutes
"male" and "female;" the literature of penance and confession; the writings of Paul, Origen,
Jerome, Augustine, and Bernard; Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich; the Middle English
Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeck and Christina Mirabilis; the Book of Margery Kempe; Alain de
Lille's Complaint of Nature; the Romance of the Rose; and the Canterbury Tales. Secondary
readings include selections from Tom Laqueur's Making Sex, Peter Brown's The Body and Society,
and Caroline Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Fragmentation and Redemption.
55900. Spirit Worlds
W 3:00-5:50. Knight, Janice. In this course we will track changing descriptions
and explanations of the "supernatural" from the colonial period to the middle of
the 19th century. Fortune telling and prophecy, witchcraft, possession, ghosting,
and mesmerism are some of the practices we will consider in our archival explorations.
Our readings will include texts by Increase and Cotton Mather, Sarah and Jonathan
Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, and William James, as well as recent critical work on
trauma, personality formation, and popular religion.
59900. Reading Course
ARR. Staff.
62200. Renaissance Intellectual Texts: Petrarch to Descartes
Tu 1:30-4:20. Strier, Richard.
68500. Historiography of the Cinema
Th 1:30-4:20 C 310; W 7:00-10:00 Scr C 307. Lastra, James.
69700. Totemism, Fetishism, and Idolatry
M 1:30-4:20. Mitchell, W.J.T.
This seminar will explore the phenomena of the "animated object" in an interdisciplinary
framework that will include anthropology, art history and media studies, religion, psychoanalysis,
and literary theory. The idea is to look at those "superstitious images" and objects that are
said to be the obsession of savages, children, and predictably) women. What are the dynamics
of animism? How do images and inanimate objects seem to come to life? Do they ever "really"
come to life? Topics will include Levi-Strauss on totemism, Marx on the commodity, Freud on
fetishism, totemism, and the uncanny, D.W. Winnicott on transitional objects, Carlo Ginzburg,
David Freedberg, and Hans Beltung on idolatry and iconoclasm, Donna Haraway on the cyborg, Bernard
Faure on Buddhist icons, Michael Taussig, Emily Apter, and William Pietz on fetishism. The basic
aims of the course will be to explore the different kinds of animated objects, to distinguish
totemism, fetishism, and idolatry, and to explore their potential as critical concepts rather
than rhetorical bludgeons for those we disapprove of. I'm particularly interested in recovering
the specificity of totemism and decentering the highly fetishized concept of fetishism.
English Department Home | Contact Us | Humanities | UChicago