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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. Graduate course information is also available on this Web site.
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Autumn 2005 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives
Jernigan, Adam
MW 3:00-4:20
10700 Intro to Fiction: Short Story
Veeder, William
TuTh 12:00-1:20
In the first half of this course, we focus on the principal elements that contribute to effect in fiction (setting, characterization, style, imagery, and structure) in order to understand the variety of effects possible with each element. We read several different writers in each of the first five weeks. In the second half of the course, we bring the elements together and study how they work in concert. This detailed study concentrates on one or, at most, two texts a week.
13800 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David; Rudall, Nick
TuTh 1:30-2:50
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.
14900 Old English
von Nolcken, Christina
TuTh 9:00-10:20
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.
16305 Seminar in the Practice of Poetry
Powell, Jim
Tu 3:00-5:50
This seminar enacts the proposition that we acquire the art of poetry in important part by the practice of the art of reading it. Our sessions will be devoted half to a sketchy survey of English Renaissance lyric, Wyatt to Waller, with attention to the evolution of traditional English measure, and half to readings introducing other traditions and issues. This course is taught in conjunction with Workshop in the Practice of Poetry (CRWR 23101/43101, ENGL 16306/33206). Students accepted into the workshop will automatically be accepted and expected to concurrently enroll in this class. There are a limited number of spots reserved for people who wish to enroll in the seminar only (and not the workshop); people expressing the desire to do so will be given priority for these spots. In order to be considered for the seminar only, please submit a paragraph to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 9/1/05 in which you answer the following questions: 1.) Who are two favorite dead poets and two favorite live ones?,
2.) What language(s) do you read besides English? At what level of proficiency? What poets have you read in them?, 3.) What leads you to this course? You will be contacted by 9/15/05 with a decision.
PQ: Instructor Consent Required. In order to be considered, submit materials to jnklein@uchicago.edu by 9/1/05. See course description for submission requirements.
19202 Enlightenment and Revolution 1660-1820
Valenza, Robin
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course introduces students to the writings of the period from the Restoration of Charles II through the years of George III's madness. This span of one hundred sixty years, sometimes called the "long eighteenth century," witnessed revolutions in science, government, and in everyday life. Although they generally happened without bloodshed, these political, intellectual, and social upheavals permanently altered the landscape of British literature. This course focuses on the developments in English letters during these years of enlightenment and revolution, from the bawdy tales of Charles II's court to the quietly smoldering drawing rooms of Jane Austen's novels. Eighteenth-century writers paid particular attention to the Horatian dictum that literature should instruct and delight. The poetry, prose, and drama on this course's syllabus have likewise been chosen with these two ends in mind: the reading is lively and provocative while at the same time exposing students to the broader intellectual and
aesthetic concerns of eighteenth-century belles lettres.
20102 Victorian London in Literature and Art
Helsinger, Elizabeth
London
This course will use London to explore two related aspects of Victorian Literature and Art: The realist norm and the "aesthetic" reaction. We will look first at how more or less realist works depict a tension felt particularly by middle-class urban Victorians between "private" and "public", secrecy and exposure, the idealized home (an important site for reading, accumulating, and looking at "art") and the never completely separate life of streets and public places (including railroads, bridges, shops, courts, prisons, libraries and art exhibitions). Then we will study instances of the reaction against realism, particularly in poetry and the visual arts, including home decoration. In what ways are literature and art understood as private, imaginative or as social, urban experiences? Readings will include Dickens's novel Bleak House (to be read over the summer), with attention to its famous illustrations by Hablot Browne Hood, Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An important part of the course will be visits to various London neighborhoods (from former Dickensian slums to a new suburb built at the height of the Aesthetic movement), as well as to surviving Victorian domestic and public interiors and to museum collections of Victorian paintings and furnishings. Paintings to be studied will include realist panoramas of public events, the domestic genre scenes that were particularly popular, and Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic efforts to shock, subvert, or reform middle-class ideas about both public and private urban life- or to circumvent the tension between them altogether by embracing
20111 Arthurian Romances
Murrin, Michael
London
The major Arthurian romances in the medieval French and English traditions will be studied with a glance at Celtic origins.
21901 The Victorian Novel
Richard Bonfiglio
TuTh 4:30-5:50
Why are the ideas of education and self-cultivation central to so many Victorian novels? This course will focus on the subgenre of the Bildungsroman during the Victorian period as a means of re-examining a number of classic Victorian novels and exploring broader Victorian interests in self-cultivation. All of the texts on this syllabus share a number of general traits that constitute the genre of the "novel of education": a provincial child or young man or woman seeks to educate and acculturate themselves within an unrban cultural center; s/he has a number of romantic encounters that causes him or her to imagine a variety of life or career paths; s/he reaches some form of maturity and enlightenment after overcoming a crisis. The class wil explore the ways in which the particular novels alter or sometimes undermine these basic characteristics, especially in the wide variety of possible endings that constitute adulthood. We will also discuss the relationship of the Bildungsroman to the Victorian novel in
general and its place within British socio-economic history.
22804 Chicano/a Intellectual Thought
Coronado, Jr., Raul
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course will trace the history of Chicana/o intellectual work that helped shape contemporary Chicana/o cultural studies. Our focus is on how Mexican Americans have theorized the history, society, and culture of Mexicans in the U.S. The course is organized chronologically with thematic concentrations as well. We will begin with how nineteenth-century Mexicans reflected on their relationship with and as part of the U.S. We will then move into the early twentieth century and examine Mexican Americans' intellectual interests in folklore, history, and literature. With this background, we will launch into contemporary scholarship. Themes we will study include feminism, sexuality, literary history and theory, ethnographic studies, historiographic debates, Marxism, postcolonialism, and the emergence of a pan-Latino culture. Throughout, we will be attuned to the need to reconfigure Chicana/o cultural studies by looking at the interaction between Chicanas/os and other Latinas/os. Reading will include political
essays, histories, memoirs, novels, folklore studies, and cultural criticism.
22807 Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean
King, Rosamond
TuTh 9:00-10:20
/Hybridity. Metissage. Creole. Mestizaje. /These words refer to the complex contact of, conflict between, and mixture of peoples and cultures in the Caribbean. This course explores issues of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean through a variety of historical, theoretical, and creative texts. Students will examine how the concepts of race and ethnicity function in Caribbean societies, in both intra- and inter-ethnic situations, as well as how these concepts relate to gender, sexuality, color, class, and other topics. We will analyze each text's form, content, and perspective, as well as its historical, political, and social context. Presentations encourage students to describe their own ideas and help lead class discussions. Readings include C.L.R. James's /The Black Jacobins/, Edgar Mittelholzer's /Corentyne Thunder, /Jean Rhys's /Wide Sargasso Sea/, Piri Thomas's /Down These Mean Streets/, poems by Michelle Cliff, and other articles and essays. We will also see Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's film
/The Couple in the Cage/ and listen to various music selections. Class presentation, mid-term, final project.
25103 Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
TuTh 3:00-4:20
When and Where They Entered: Black Women Writers of the 1940s and 1950s: This second "woman's era" in African American literature is often neglected as one compared to those of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In this course, we will attend to this group of writers, to account for the unprecedented critical and popular acclaim that they received during the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the writings of Brooks, Walker, Petry and Hansberry, we will consider the following issues: How might we theorize the thematic and formal appeal of their works-what traditions did these writers continue, what innovations did they establish, and why did their craft and concerns resonate so keenly with mid-20th century American reading publics? What historiographies and sociologies might account for their formation as a cultural cohort-in what friendship and professional networks did these writers circulate? Why was their work so readily accommodated by the mainstream print venues? How did their circuits of contact and
influence differ from support systems that black women writers enjoyed (or lacked) in prior or subsequent times? When read in sync with the governing ideals of literary culture and public intellectual life during the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement eras, what models of black female authorship and intellectual authority emerge from this time?
25500 Tough Broads
Nelson, Deborah L.
This course will read selected works by some of the postwar era's "exceptional Women" as Adrienne Rich defined the term: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and more. Great Stylists and often brilliant thinkers, these writers, who mostly came of age before feminism and often had a difficult relationship to it, will help us to pose some questions to feminism and so-called post-feminism alike, questions about isolation and community, intellectual authority, personal austerity, pain and suffering, autonomy and self sacrifice. We will very likely juxtapose their work with feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorder. Prerequisite: Introduction to Gender Studies
25907 Phonographic Fictions: Literature and Sound
Biers, Katherine
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course introduces students to the nascent field of "sound studies" and asks how it can help us to understand late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. We will read fictions that thematize mechanically reproduced sound alongside essays about the effects of mechanical reproducibility on culture and on the practice of fiction writing. We will also examine phonography - the writing of sound - in a larger sense, listening to the ways in which historical "soundscapes," or sonic environments, register differently in different literary genres and movements. Do "record grooves dig the grave of the author," as one theorist of modern media systems has recently suggested? Is the notion of a "subject" who "experiences" acoustic technologies itself a fiction? Or can approaching modernity in terms of the aural, rather than the visual, allow us to hear the historical experiences of non-normative subjects - for example, those marked by race, gender and/or sexuality? Genres may include the
late-Victorian Gothic, the Harlem Renaissance, "high" modernism, and postmodernism. Authors may include Bram Stoker, James Weldon Johnson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Don Delillo.
26401 Literary Environments
Atkinson, Jennifer
TuTh 9:00-10:20
Literary Environments`: From Wilderness to Cityscape: Using place as a critical category, this course will explore literary environments and landscapes from Turner's frontier to the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of Philip K. Dick and the utopian communities of Ursula le Guin. Throughout our readings we will examine the ideological, aesthetic, and generic dimensions of spatial categories like "wild", "domestic", "urban-industrial", "pastoral", "sacred", "toxic", "utopic", "mythological", "public", and "private". Course requirements will include a 6-page midterm paper and a 10-page final paper.
27801 Love Lyric in the 20th Century
Glidewell, Lee
MW 3:00-4:20
This course will explore how twentieth century English-language writers have written about love in a genre traditionally associated with love: the lyric poem. Specific topics to include the influence of the "Free Love", feminist and other social reformist movements, and the changing definitions of the aims and purposes of poetry.
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