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Autumn 2006 Courses
10700 Intro to Fiction: Short Story
Veeder, William
MW 1:30-
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.
11100 Critical Perspectives
Valenza, Robin
TuTh 10:30-11:50
Required of students majoring in English. This course develops practical skills in close reading, historical contextualization, and the use of discipline-specific research tools and resources, and encourages conscious reflection on critical presuppositions and practices. The course prepares students to enter into the discussions that occur in the more advanced undergraduate courses.
12300Poetry and Being
Ruddick, Lisa
MW 1:30-2:50
Why do people write poems, and why do we read them? In this course, we will approach this question through a range of readings in literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory devoted to the topics of human creativity, play, and emotion. In each class we will discuss one of these theoretical texts in conjunction with a close reading of one or more individual poems, from a variety of periods. Prerequisite: "Introduction to Poetry" or the equivalent at another institution.
12703Writing Censorship
Weiner, Tracy
TuTh 12:-1:20
This practicum writing course will explore the often dynamic interchanges between writers and censors. While censorship is abhorrent to many people, it imagines texts as powerful quasi-agents with the ability to bring about political change, steal intellectual property, and even transform readers' bodies with visceral reactions like arousal or disgust. The course readings will explore the rhetorical strategies writers use in response to these simultaneously repressive and empowering conditions of censorship. In weekly assignments, students will practice the kinds of writing produced under censorship, including rhetorics of evasion such allusion and parable, and rhetorics of confrontation that frame the censors' own texts as acts of aggression. Case studies will include coverage of the war in Iraq, feminist analyses of pornography, and disputes over digital rights management. Readings will include J. S. Mill, Catherine McKinnon, J. M. Coetzee, and Lawrence Lessig.
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.
15801 Multicultural Literatures in Medieval Britain
Murrin, Michael
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course will cover the vernacular tradition in the British Isles: the Celtic contribution (Irish and Welsh), Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Anglo-Norman French. Texts will include Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon and the Battle of Brúnan Burg from Old English; the Battle of Moytura (a battle originally between gods and giants), the Tain (an epic in the Ulster cycle with Cúchulainn as its hero), and the Voyage of Bran Son of Ferbal from Irish, Egil's Saga from Old Norse: the Lays of Marie de France from Anglo-Norman French; the Four Branches from the Welsh Mabinogion; and Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Middle English. A paper will be required and perhaps an oral examination.
16902 Stuff and Nothing in Renaissance Literature
Murray, Stephanie
MW 3:00-4:20
This course examines the lives of objects in Renaissance literature in order to better understand the material culture of the era. In this course, we will read sonnets by Sidney, Shakespeare, and Wroth; plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton; philosophical writings by Bacon and Burton; and poems by Donne and Herbert. Through these texts we will examine the aesthetic, political, and intimate relationships between individuals, objects, and literature.
20104 LONDON-Monty Python and Holy Grail: King ArthurLONDON-Monty Python and Holy Grail: King Arthur
von Nolcken, Christina
London-In London
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, The Canterbury Tales
von Nolcken, Christina
London-In London
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
20112 London- The Windrush Generation
Goldsby, Jacqueline
London-In London
In June 1948, the S.S. Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, carrying 492 Jamaican émigrés to England. Within the decade, a quarter million more West Indians arrived to Britain's shores. Though peoples of African descent had lived in London since the 18th century, this migration proved to be decisive not only because it marked the beginning of the end of British empire, but also because the "Windrush generation" ushered in an era of literary production that would radically expand the canon of 20th century Anglophone writing.
This course will trace the paths followed by the Windrush writers, considering the pleasures and anxieties of exile they negotiated while living and writing in London during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Remembering that "black" in British racial discourse refers to peoples of African and East Asian descent, we will read exemplary texts from these lineages, and we will consider how this international literary movement anticipates the developments of postcolonial writing out of London since the 1990s. To chart these cross-currents, we may read Sam Seldon's The Lonely Londoners (1956), C.L.R. James' Beyond a Boundary (1963); and V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967), together with Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2001). We will also read social and cultural histories that analyze the Windrush migration. If time and resources permit, we will use London-based archives to research the literary milieu created by émigré women which shaped how their male colleagues' works were read: Una Mason, the Jamaican poet-dramatist who founded the BBC radio show, "Caribbean Voices" (1946-1958); and Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian activist who launched Britain's first black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette (1958-1965), and transplanted the festival known as Carnival to London during the 1950s.
Course requirements: 1 short paper (5-8 pp.) and archive research-presentation.
22800
Chicago
Knight, Janice
TuTh 10:30-11:50
In this course we will sample some of Chicago's wonders, exploring aspects of its history, literature, architecture, neighborhoods, and peoples. We begin with study of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the early history of Chicago as a mecca for domestic and international immigrants. In subsequent weeks we will examine the structure of neighborhood communities, local debates about cultural diversity and group assimilation, and the ideology and artifacts of art movements centered in Chicago. This is an interdisciplinary course focusing not only on literary and historical texts, but also analyzing Chicago's architecture, visual artifacts and public art forms, local cultural styles, museum collections and curatorial practices. We will first explore Chicago sites textually, then virtually via the web, and finally in "real time:" Students will be required to visit various Chicago neighborhoods and cultural institutions.
22300 Henry James: the Fiction of Crisis
Veeder, William
MW 4:30-5:50
In 1895 Henry James suffered his first nervous breakdown. Over the next five years he produced several of the greatest novellas and novels of the nineteenth century. How fiction writing became a mode of self therapy for James is one of the issues this course will explore. In addition we will examine how self-analysis interacted with a mordant social analysis to produce fiction that simultaneously looks outward and inward. By a close reading of James's texts and of various theorists, we will engage the forces that produced James's masterpieces. Texts will include The Aspern Papers, The Pupil, The Spoils of Poynton, In the Cage, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and "The Great Good Place."
22808 Latina Narratives
Lewis, Salinda
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This course will study Latina narratives from the late nineteenth century through the present. Particular attention will be paid to tracking and exploring experimental uses of narrative forms from the historical romance, folkloric novella, and feminist treatise of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the "autohistoria" and radical poetry-prose of the 1970's and 1980's, to the epistolary novel, the post-modern novel, and the historical fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Texts may include Maria Amparo de Ruiz Burton's, The Squattor and the Don, Jovita Gonzalez's,Dew on the Thorn, Luisa Capetillo's, A Nation of Women, Gloria Anzaldua's, Borderlands/La Frontera, Cherrie Moraga's, Loving in the War Years, Ana Castillo's, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Rosario Ferre's, The House on the Lagoon, Julia Alvarez's, In the Time of Butterflies or In the Name of Salome, and Christina Garcia's, Dreaming in Cuba. Requirements include four one page response papers to be posted on an open forum for course on chalk site, active participation in class discussion, and one 8-10 page final paper.
23400 Virginia Woolf
Ruddick, Lisa
MW 3:00-4:20
Readings include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas. Some attention is given to different critical and theoretical approaches to Woolf's fiction.
23402 Obsolescence & Sentimentality
Scappettone, Jennifer
TuTh 3:00-4:20
n this seminar, we will explore 20th-century allegories of junk and the junked. The course posits, along with the literature at hand, that the production of obsolescence under modernity simultaneously generates a vengeful residue of what expires, emerging in the form of sentiment--a category much despised by canonical modernists. According to these works, there is history in the body as well as of the body; and the feeling in which that history is lodged evokes a past far more extensive than that of the cloistered person. Together we will tap the residual histories embedded in "obsolescent" objects, subjects, and environments within such texts as Henry James' The Golden Bowl, T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, and Lisa Robertson's Xeclogue. Our questions will include the following: If modernist theories of emotion rely on the concept of the "objective correlative," what kinds of bad 20th-century sentiment are produced when the object begins to vanish, or is rendered spectral by commodification? How does what is passing away assume form in writing? How can we conceive of historical affect and historical empathy, in ways more expansive than concepts of melancholia and nostalgia allow? Essays by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Rem Koolhaas, Anne Cheng, Rei Terada, and Sianne Ngai will provide theoretical buttresses for our work. Midterm and final papers.
25909 The Sublime City: Industrial Revolution to the Present
Glidewell, Lee
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course will examine a wide range of materials-literary, filmic and theoretical-relating to the experience of living in the large and, sometimes, overwhelming cities of industrial modernity. We will discuss the ways in which different authors and thinkers have attempted to express their love for and disgust with cities, and how these attitudes frequently seem to intermingle. We will examine the technological revolutions of the past 250 or so years, and how these revolutions have changed cities, the way people live in them, and the attitudes those residents have toward them. First and foremost, however, we will attend to the aesthetics of the city, and how these aesthetics have played a role in shaping-or perhaps have been shaped by-some of the most significant literature of the industrial era.
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.
28805 Poetry Now!
Kotin, Joshua
TuTh 12:00-1:20
Pairing readings of contemporary poets with their influential precursors, this course will contextualize and illuminate the state of the art. As we explore its venues (books, magazines, blogs, MFA programs) and engage its critics, we will pay special attention to poets reading at the University and in the Chicago area.
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