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2003-2004 |
Autumn 2004 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives
Devendorf, Robert
MW 3:00-4:20
Marxism, Formalism and The Phenomenal Text: What sort of phenomenon is a novel? Current popular literary critical methods often establish a “scientific” relationship to the texts they analyze, drawing on Formalist and Marxist models in which texts act primarily as objects of study. This course examines how this understanding of the literary text produces certain kinds of knowledge and positions critics as certain kinds of readers, and then further investigates what other kinds of phenomena novels might be, and what other critical engagements they make possible for authors and readers. Texts may include Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.
10100 Critical Perspectives
Piggush, Yvette
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course will use the metaphorical and literal dimensions of the letter in works such as Emily Dickinson's poetry and Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to engage with critical conversations on authorship and producing meaning through writing. We will analyze how critical methodologies stemming primarily from historicist, post-structuralist, and cultural studies approaches engage with the problems of authorial intention and the cultural production of texts. We will seek to understand these critical approaches themselves as historically situated and as texts that desire to extend their interpretive reach to the world beyond the text. The goal of reading and analyzing the literary and theoretical texts in this course will be to develop skills in engaging with the world of "letters" as generous and self-aware critical thinkers, readers, and writers.
10200 Problems in Gender Studies
Michaels, Stuart
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course addresses the production of particularly gendered norms and practices. Using a variety of historical and theoretical materials and practices, it addresses how sexual difference operates in the contexts of nation, race, and class formation, for example, and/or work, the family, migration, imperialism and postcolonial relations.
10800 Introduction to Film
Stewart, Jacqueline
TuTh 9:00-10:20
F
This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed include works by Hitchcock, Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, Sternberg, and Welles.
11401 Writing Law
Cochran, Kathryn McEnerney, Laurence
MW 1:30-2:50
To a considerable extent, law is what gets written down as law. In this course, we'll ask two questions about the characteristic ways that contemporary American law is written: How do you do it? and What difference does it make? We hope that each question will inform the other. We will start by identifying key features of several genres of legal texts: opinions, statutes, contracts, briefs, memos. Students will then study the writing of law by practicing it: completing weekly exercises in which they write parts of these texts. Throughout the course, we'll ask, if legal writing has these features and not others, what difference does in make in how we think of law? What difference does it make in how we create law? What difference does it make in how the law operates? What difference does it make in what the law is?
12205 Beginning Screenwriting
Petrakis, John
W 3:00-6:00
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.
12400 Beginning Fiction Writing
Schaeffer, Susan
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course will be taught as a workshop. The principal texts to be used will be those written by the students during the quarter, and class discussion will center on these works. In addition, several other texts will be examined, primarily in order to enable students to begin criticizing and editing their own works. These texts will be short. Those specializing in the short story will be expected to write at least three to five new stories during the quarter. If anyone embarks on a novel, a schedule will be worked out once the quarter begins. It is imperative that all students participate in discussing the works of everyone else in the class. This is a class in which everyone is free to experiment. Ideally, students will, by the end of the semester, have a clearer idea of what they want to be doing, and how they want to doing it. Each student will submit a portfolio at the end of the quarter. Grades will be determined both by these portfolios and by class discussion.
12506 Advanced Fiction: Research for Writers
Obejas, Achy
Tu 6:00-9:00
Weekly sessions feature in-class writing, discussion, and readings with a focus on writing from perspectives outside the mainstream and alternative view points. One critical annotation is required during the term. Attendance and active class participation are required. Students keep a folder of all work for class. At semester's end, folders are used to evaluate work as a whole and to more closely examine growth. Grades will be based on quality of work, improvement, completion of assignments, and class contributions/participation. The annotation will be 25percent of the grade, quality of work 25 percent, completion and improvement 25 percent, and participation 25 percent. Generally, one half of class will be devoted to presentation and exercises, the other to student work and discussion. PQ: Consent of Instructor.
12905 Beginning Poetry Writing
Reddy, Srikanth
Th 3:00-6:00
This course will introduce students to the writing of poetry. Because the course is designed as a creative writing workshop, the majority of class time will be devoted to the discussion and critique of one another’s poems. We will also read essays on poetic craft, history, and theory while exploring the work of many poets both contemporary and past. PQ: Consent of instructor. Submit samples to: jnklein@uchicago.edu.
12920 Beginning Creative Writing: Creative Reading for Writers
Sloan, Mary Margaret
WF 1:30-2:50
Writing: Creative Reading for Writers: "I am a derivative poet," said Robert Duncan. "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T.S. Eliot. This course will examine the processes of how writers turn their reading of literary and non-literary materials towards their own creative purposes. First we will look at poems and fiction the way writers do, less to arrive at a critical position, more to find out how the works are put together in order to learn from their strategies. If, as Williams says, "The poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words," we'll be looking at the parts laid out on the pavement. Next we'll look at how some writers import the rewards of their reading excursions directly into their own works; for instance, Susan Howe's Pythagorean Silence incorporates a variety of literary, historical, and philosophical materials as well as formal structures learned from Charles Olson. Finally we'll see how poets and fiction writers create works which are imaginative responses to predecessors whose works they admire; we will look at how Robert Duncan addresses Catullus, Jack Spicer writes letter-poems to the dead Gabriel Garcia Lorca in After Lorca, and the contemporary poet Lisa Cooper in turn addresses Spicer and Gertrude Stein in her work, Calling It Home. How do writers involve themselves in influence, inspiration, and tradition? In addition to the writers mentioned above, we will also look at works by Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Michael Palmer, Joseph Donahue and others. Students will be responsible for at least one presentation to the class and one substantive creative reading work involving a writer or reading material of choice.
13600 Playwriting
Allen, Claudia
W 3:00-6:00
This course introduces the basic principles and techniques of playwriting through creative exercises, discussion, and the viewing of contemporary theater. Structural components of plot, character, and setting are covered as students develop their dramatic voices through exercises in observation, memory, emotion, imagination, and improvisation. Prior theater experience not required. PQ: Consent of instructor required.
13800 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David Rudall, Nick
TuTh 1:30-2:50
B,F,H
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.
14305 Advanced Poetry: Writing Practices
Reddy, Srikanth
Tu 3:00-6:00
This poetry workshop is designed to introduce advanced students of creative writing to a wide array of techniques and strategies for generating lyric poetry which fall outside of the Romantic model of "spontaneous utterance." Collage, "cross-outs," and various procedures involving chance operations will be explored along with a variety of other techniques and practices associated with avant-garde movements of the twentieth-century. The goal of the course, however, is not to make "avant garde writers" out you; rather, we will explore ways in which these experimental techniques may be harnessed in the service of quite everyday problems faced by every writer: overcoming "writer's block," generating first lines and first drafts, and revising work which seems mired in an unsatisfactory form. Because this is a workshop, your own writing will be the primary text in this course; we will spend the majority of every class period reviewing and critiquing one another's work. PQ: Consent of instructor.
14400 Advanced Fiction Writing
Schaeffer, Susan
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course will be taught as a workshop. Students entering this workshop will be expected to have some experience in writing fiction. The principal texts for this course will consist of the students' own writings. Several short texts may be examined. Those writing short stories will be expected to write at least three NEW stories during the course of the quarter. Anyone writing a longer work will work out a schedule tailored to the project. It is imperative that all students be willing to participate in discussing the works of others in the class. Experimentation is welcome. If, at the end of the quarter, you feel as if you can work on your own without the help of further workshops or mentors, the course will have achieved its goal. Each student will submit a portfolio at the end of the quarter. Grades will be determined both by these portfolios and by class discussion. PQ: Consent of Instructor.
14900 Old English
Rabin, Andrew
MWF 11:30-12:20
B,H
This course is designed to prepare students for further study in Old English language and literature. As such, our focus will be the acquisition of those linguistic skills needed to encounter such Old English poems as Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and The Wanderer in their original language. In addition to these texts, we may also translate the prose Life of Saint Edmund, King and Martyr and such shorter poetic texts as the Exeter Book riddles. We will also survey Anglo-Saxon history and culture, taking into account the historical record, archeology, manuscript construction and illumination, and the growth of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline. This course serves as a prerequisite both for further Old English study at the University of Chicago and for participation in the Newberry Library’s Winter Quarter Anglo-Saxon seminar.
15600 Medieval English Literature
Miller, Mark
MW 3:00-4:20
A,B,D,H
This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England .
15800 Medieval Epic
Murrin, Michael
TuTh 10:30-11:50
B,D,H
We will study a variety of heroic literature, including Beowulf, The Volsunga Saga, The Song of Roland, The Purgatorio, and the Alliterative Morte D'Arthur. A paper will be required, and there may be an oral examination.
15901 The Post-Human Condition
de Almeida, Eduardo
TuTh 1:30-2:50
Technology revolutions in the past twenty years have given rise to new understandings of the “human condition.” This course will explore the convergence and emergence of new media in shaping experience, culture, aesthetics, and identity. Texts include Gibson’s Neuromancer, Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, and Kittler’s Gramophone Film Typewriter.
16500 Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Bevington, David
TuTh 12:00-1:20
B,F,H
An exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history play and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida.
20104 LONDON-Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur
von Nolcken, Christina
London in London
B,D,H
From the Annals of Wales to Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur in Legend and History: We will consider the historical origins of the Arthurian Legend and some of the ways in which it has subsequently been reshaped and used in great Britain. We will concern ourselves first with how the legend was treated in the Middle Ages, most importantly by Geoffery of Monmouth in the twelfth century and Thomas Malory in the fifteenth. Then we will turn to the extraordinary revival of interest in the legend that started with the Victorians and which has continued almost unabated to the present. In our discussions we will consider such matters as the various political uses that have been made of the legend as well as some of the reasons for its enduring popularity. Early in the course we will visit sites traditionally associated with King Arthur, including Tintagel Castle and St. Michael’s Mount on Cornwall and Glastonbury Abbey and Cadbury Castle in Somerset . Later won we will examine nineteenth-century visual representations of the legend in London collections, most obviously the Tate gallery. We will end with a viewing of the 1975 Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
20105 LONDON-Chaucer
von Nolcken, Christina
London in London
B,D,H
We will examine Chaucer’s art as revealed in The Canterbury Tales. Although our main interest will be in the individual tales, we will also pay close attention to Chaucer’s framing narrative of pilgrimage, and during the course we ourselves will journey to Canterbury . In addition to reading Chaucer’s own text, we will consider some of his sources together with other medieval works providing relevant background and we will use London to help us explore the Tales’ setting in time and space. An important part of the course will accordingly include visits to neighborhoods Chaucer would have known, to the National Gallery to view that supreme example of English Gothic painting the "Wilson Diptych”, and to Westminster Abbey to view the tombs and effigies of Chaucer’s royal patrons as well as the tomb of Chaucer himself. Students need have no previous knowledge of Middle English
20110 London: Urban Romanticism
Chandler, James
London London
We often think of the Romantic movement in Britain as a return to nature and of London as place of coffee houses, commerce, and cold comfort. But many of the most important motifs of British Romanticism, including many of those about "nature," were actually developed in London contexts. London itself became, in the course of the early nineteenth century, a place of mysterious modernity, the foggy " Unreal City " of T.S. Eliot's early twentieth-century meditation in The Waste Land. We will be engaging with both representations of London and with London-generated materials that fall, roughly speaking, within the Romantic tradition. There will be some visual materials, including attention to some of what have been called the early "shows of London ," such as Barker's panoramas, De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, and Girtin's Eidometropolis. And we will be looking at such authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Austen, and Dickens. There will be three short papers totaling about 20 pages in length.
20403 Romantic Regulation
Ford, Thomas
TuTh 12:00-1:20
C,E,H
The period understood as Romanticism is also one which shaped technologies of administration that remain central to the organization of life in modern societies. This course will explore connections between literary texts and the new modes of regulating population, gender, criminality and labor. We will read works by both literary authors, including William Blake, Jane Austen, and Byron, and theorists such as Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and William Godwin.
21902 Feelings and Forms: Affect and the Victorian Novel
Aslami, Zarena
MW 1:30-2:50
C,E,H
Contemporary critical theorists have shown how novels are involved in the project of teaching readers how and what to feel (for example, guilt, shame, anger, sympathy, happiness, boredom, bliss, etc.) in a range of contexts (such as national, domestic, legal, sexual, and aesthetic). These theorists have argued that feelings, which we often think of as the primary, spontaneous expression of our authentic selves, are in fact constructed and shaped by historical forces. This course will examine how Victorian novels in particular trained readers in the art and politics of feelings. We will first read excerpts from current scholars of affect and emotion. We will then ask how to think about these terms historically in relation to the Victorian period by reading not only novels but also nineteenth-century theories of feelings. Possible secondary readings include works by D. A. Miller, Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick, Ann Cvetkovich, and Lauren Berlant. Possible primary readings include novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, as well as psychological, philosophical, and scientific writings by Charles Darwin, George Henry Lewes, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain.
22802 Caribbean Literature: Rewriting Colonial Fiction
Tinsley, Natasha
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds," sings Bob Marley in "Re-demption Song." As this Jamaican lyric underscores, decolonization is both a material and conceptual reconfiguration of world orders--a struggle for interpretive as well as political power. This course examines Caribbean literary texts that thematize this interpretive struggle by self-consciously rewriting "masterpieces" of the English canon. Reading comparatively between the texts and their sources, we will explore how authors transform plots, characters, imagery, and language to transpose colonial fictions to new historic, geographic, and linguistic topoi. Authors considered include Shakespeare and Aimé Césaire, Daniel Defoe and Derek Walcott, Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys, and Emily Bronte and Maryse Condé. All texts in English but those with knowledge of French encouraged to read in the original.
22806 Dostoevsky & James
Steiner, Lina
W 3:00-5:40
Innocence and Insight in the Novel: F.M. Dostoevsky and Henry James: In the novelistic worlds of Dostoevsky and James the most innocent characters are often the ones who are endowed with or come to develop a special insight, which allows them to see through the falsehoods and manipulations of society and to resolve difficult moral dilemmas. In this course we will examine and compare the correlation of the themes of innocence and insight in the works of the two novelists and near contemporaries, both of whom were preoccupied with the problem of the spiritual essence of their respective cultures. The primary texts will include selected novels and short stories by Dostoevsky and James. We will also read some philosophical and critical texts by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Brooks, and some others.
23901 Women, Writing, and Spirituality, in Colonial America
Knight, Janice
MW 1:30-2:50
B,C,G
We will read the works of selected women authors in America, focusing on the relationship between spirituality and literary production. We will read a variety of genres, including heresiographies, advice manuals, conversion and captivity narratives, letters, poems, and diaries. Our selections will be attentive to such issues as class affiliation, the production of public and "domestic" utterance, and the disciplining of female speech. This course will examine the relationship between literature and its cultural context, and will draw on a variety of critical approaches.
25102 Colonial/PostColonial Theory and Literature
Lakshmi, Aishwarya
TuTh 3:00-4:20
C
Both colonial /post-colonial theory and literature engage directly or indirectly with the colonial condition. While theory takes the form of a direct critique of colonialism, literature, even when it is critical of it, tends to have a more indirect approach to the problem. This course will juxtapose readings of colonial theory with literature of the period (and the same for post-colonial theory/literature) in an attempt to bring the two in conversation with one another. Do the questions that literature raises, stories that it plots, complement theories of the times, or does it offer ways of reading colonialism that theory because of its very nature cannot get a grasp at? Or conversely, does literature perhaps simplify some of the historical problems attendant to the colonial and post-colonial scenario, and if so, what are the means by which it does so?
25300 American Literature and Culture to 1865
Slauter, Eric
TuTh 9:00-10:20
A,C,G
This lecture/discussion course provides an introduction to American literary and cultural history between the sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries. We survey major texts (novels, essays, poems, plays, and personal narratives) from colonial North American settlement, the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary era, the American Renaissance, and the Civil War in light of a series of overlapping themes—tensions between liberty and authority, slavery and equality, national and regional identity, individualism and democracy, the impact of social and political change on intellectual work. Adopting a transnational and comparative perspective and focusing specifically on the relationship between writing and culture, we also treat connections between literature and other disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and the visual arts.
25600 The Poet in the Novel
Izenberg, Oren
TuTh 9:00-10:20
C,E
Literary genres reflect different relations to the world; why should the genres reflect upon each other? In this course we will examine a remarkable sequence of 20th century novels (and films) in which poets and poetry appear as central characters and concerns (James's The Aspern Papers, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Powers's Galatea 2.2, Cocteau's Orphée, Hartley's Henry Fool and others). We will consider the questions raised by the appearance of the most private, "difficult" and unpopular of the arts inside the most public and popular: questions about the social function of the imagination, about the limits of knowledge and reason, about the values and demands of high and mass culture.
27901 Re-Defining African American Cinema
Stewart, Jacqueline
TuTh 12:00-1:20
F
What is "African American Cinema"? Must a film be produced by African Americans, feature a Black cast, or address a Black audience in order to be classified as an "African American film"? Is there a discernible Black film aesthetic? Can a Black film be produced within the Hollywood studio system? How important are these distinctions? This course examines a wide variety of films ("race movies" of the early 20th century; fiction films; documentaries; animation; films made for television and the Internet) to explore how notions of African American authorship, content and reception have been defined and redefined in relation to dominant and independent media histories and institutions.
29700 Reading Course
staff
TBA
TBA
These reading courses must include a final paper assignment to meet requirements for the English major and students must receive a letter grade. Students may not petition to receive credit for more than two ENGL 29700 courses. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. The kind and amount of work to be done are determined by an instructor within the English department who has agreed to supervise the course. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
29900 Independent B.A. Paper Prep
Staff
PQ: Consent of instructor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. For more information and an electronic version of the Petition form, go to http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/english/undergrad/forms.shtml. This course may not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the concentration, but may be counted as a departmental elective. Autumn, Winter, Spring
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