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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 2007 Undergraduate Courses
10400 Introduction to Poetry
Scodel, Joshua
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting terminology and providing extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentiality, philosophical and ideological assumptions, and historical considerations.
10700 Intro to Fiction: Short Story
Veeder, William
MW 1:30-2:50
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.
12703 Writing Censorship
Weiner, Tracy
TuTh 10:30-11:50
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
TuTh 12:00-1:20
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.
15500 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
von Nolcken, Christina
TuTh 3:00-4:20
We examine Chaucer's art as revealed in selections from The CanterburyTales. Our primary emphasis is on a close reading of individual tales, although we also pay attention to Chaucer's sources and to other medieval works providing relevant background.
16905 Theater and Five Senses in the Age of Shakespeare
Stanev, Hristomir
TuTh 9:00-10:20
Looking at the five senses as constituents of mimesis, but also as a special archive of knowledge about spectacle and space, this course will investigate series of relationships between stage and senses, sensation and language, city and body, fantasy and reality, and ultimately trace some of the theatrical contours of the early modern world through heightened attention to sensation representation.
20114 British and American Theater Post 1945
Nelson, Deborah L.
TBD
20115 London in the Victorian Imagination
Rothfield, Lawrence
TBD
20116 London and British Drama; Celtic Britain
Bevington, David
TBD
20205 The Folk, Forgers, & Antiquarians: British Ballad Revival
Hsiao, Irene
MW 1:30-2:50
This course examines the history and theory of the ballad, focusing on the ballad revival of 18th century Britain. We will read collected traditional and broadside ballads along with literary imitations. By studying accounts of their origin, we will question what it means to author a text and what values are conferred by a text's status as "literature."
21904 Extravaganza! Victorian Culture in Performance
Meeuwis, Michael
TuTh 4:30-5:50
Theatre in Britain was never more popular, and more culturally influential, than it was during the Victorian era. Structured around this performative superabundance, this course offers a twinned introduction to Victorian culture and performance studies. We will attend to the daily role of performance in the lives of Victorian women and men through close readings of significant Victorian poetry, novels, and plays (Browning, Rossetti, Dickens, Eliot, Wood, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Wilde); and will conceptualize these texts in terms of sociological and philosophical theorists of performance (Schechner, States, Geertz, Turner, Goffman, Butler, Wagner.) How do recent theorists of performance illuminate nineteenth-century conceptions of gender and politics, social process and literary form? How did the Victorian novel reflect and compete with this competing yet complementary medium? How were minority, queer, and politically disenfranchised viewpoints made visible to the larger political order? Prepare to be bewildered, amazed, aroused and excited as we survey the performative nineteenth century.
21905 Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel
Benford, Criscillia
MW 3:00-4:20
In the Victorian novel, class conflict is sometimes translated into that tractable and supremely-narratable topos: romantic conflict. While acknowledging this tendency, this course -- which derives its title from the names Matthew Arnold gives "the three great classes of English society" in Culture and Anarchy (1869) -- starts from the premise that Victorian novels do not always present heterosexual love as an adequate symbolic solution to the "problem" of relations among the classes. In other words, we will assume that Victorian novelists conceived of and represented the relationship between class and gender in a variety of ways. As we read, we will think carefully about the ways in which various social oppositions (e.g., public/private, tasteful/vulgar, production/consumption, sentiment/reason) get mapped onto the masculine/feminine binary. Which narrative strategies collapse which boundaries? Do any of these boundaries remain intact throughout the novel? What impact do novelistic representations of socio-political issues such as "the woman question," industrialization, education, and professionalization have upon novelistic constructions of the social order? How do novelistic attempts to imagine the relationship between gender and class relate to aesthetic questions about mode, coherence, and verisimilitude?
23903 Women, Spirituality, and Religious Expression in America
Knight, Janice
TuTh 12:00-1:20
We will analyze the writings, speeches, public performances, devotional objects and practices, and the recorded testimonies of selected American women religionists and authors, focusing on the relationship between spirituality, gender, literary production, and alternative practices of gaining a public "voice." We will read a variety of genres, including trial transcripts, 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. Among the authors included: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Lee, Emily Dickinson. We will also explore the trials of Anne Hutchinson, the disruptive religious performances of Quakers, and Shaker expressive modes of spirit drawing and dancing.
24701 U.S./Third World Feminisms
Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole
TuTh 1:30-2:50
The term US/Third World Feminisms has a problematic history. Although self-defined third world women have been engaged in feminist movements, some critique mainstream Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric (U.S. centric) and does not take into account the existence of feminism(s) plural. Third world feminists often argue that mainstream Western feminists look at women’s experience as homogenous, based on the perspectives of middle-class white Western women. The white western female and male are the subject of universal humanism and thus the subjects of critique and inquiry in feminist thought. Third-World feminists would argue that global capitalism is the basis for any feminist analysis and that self-identified ‘Third World’ subjects experience oppression by other factors in addition to patriarchy. For example, ‘third-world’ women emerge as a monolithic category in discussions of places like Africa. The construction of Africa as nation is hugely problematic and much Feminist scholarship on “Africa” does not take into account regional differences, tribal differences or economic differences, let alone that Africa is a continent and not a country. Instead, many studies focus on the atrocities of practices such as genital mutilation with a Western academic gaze. The methods taught in this class deconstruct and pull apart imperialist knowledge production that allows students to think of Africa as nation and African women solely as victims. This course complicates what constitutes feminist analysis by teaching students a critical idiom that allows for a multiplicity of ideas about the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality as necessary to carrying out feminist analysis. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) and Norma Alarcón (1990) argue that ‘difference’ and the term third world woman are often theorized, unproblematically, as the “native.” Like in the “Africa” example, the native as the other, become the objects of inquiry and not subjects of their own theories or making. A critical U.S./Third World feminist practice interrogates both the category of Africa and the native as object of study to suggest that this is a methodological mode of inquiry and not a field-study of victimized brown women. Examining concepts like intersubjectivity, the basis for comparison across cultures and histories as a way to combat ethnocentrism that is often found in Women’s Studies scholarship, is one particular way to address the ways in which US/Third World feminism is falsely represented as a discourse of victimization and anti-solidarity.
25104 Nature Writing and Spirituality in America
Tharaud, Jerome
TuTh 1:30-2:50
This course aims to help students experience the pleasures of reading American nature writing and to develop a set of conceptual tools to enrich their reading of this material. We will move chronologically from English settlement in the 17th century to the 20th century with a special eye to the contributions this art has made to the inner life in America.
Along the way we will think together about issues such as what counts as nature writing, what its formal features are, how cultural understandings of nature change over this period, and whether access to nature in these texts is restricted based on race, gender and class. A crucial set of questions will revolve around the symbolic uses of nature representation: how do we read social and spiritual significance out of these texts, and what are the limits of such readings? This is not a theology course, but we will give some attention to the religious ideas and backgrounds of the writers and their cultures; more importantly we will consider how the texts work to renew and reform the spiritual lives of readers as private individuals and citizens. Writers include Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin, John Muir, Luther Standing Bear and Rachel Carson. We will read a few exemplary works of contemporary scholarship on this material, and some attention will also be given to visual representations of the natural world.
25914 Facts in Fiction: Late 20th Century Literature and Knowledge
Herbert, Shannon
TuTh 4:30-5:50
A study of late Twentieth-Century literature in the context of changing theories of knowledge and technologies of representation. Particular emphasis on the role of literature in constructing and preserving public knowledge, and the interplay between objective and aesthetic realms. Authors include Borges, Danielewski, Delillo, Pynchon and Sebald.
27000 Fiction of Three Americas
Veeder, William
MW 4:30-5:50
What constitutes "American Fiction"? This question has become prominent in recent years as readers have begun to take seriously a fact we've always "known"--that three "America's", North, Central and South, compose our hemisphere, and that each of these geographic realms has contributed significantly to the literary compositions of post-modernism. Close reading will be central to our course. Attention to textual detail will enable us to study the work done by the intricate formal artifices constructed by our authors. In turn, close reading will be supplemented by attention to issues of gender, psychology, and society, as we explore the private and social sources of the pain so evident in our texts. Authors will include Borges, Rosario Ferre, Carlos Fuetes, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Andre Dubus, Bharati Mukherjee. Midterm and final papers.
27704 Contemporary African American Fiction
Dubey, Madhu
TuTh 1:30-2:50
African-American fiction published since the 1980s is characterized by rich experimentation with narrative form as well as by an effort to reimagine the meanings of race in the “post-Civil Rights period.” This course will explore the ways in which the formal innovations and the thematic concerns of contemporary African-American fiction might be interconnected. To what extent do the distinctive formal elements of this fiction—such as its break with realism, its parody of influential narrative conventions and traditions, or its marked turn to the genres of speculative and science fiction—help to reconfigure notions of black identity and community in the late-twentieth century? Readings will include novels such as Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Percival Everett’s Erasure, and John Edgar Wideman’s Reuben, and short stories by Toni Cade Bambara, Reginald McKnight, and James Alan McPherson.
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