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2003-2004 |
Autumn 2008 Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10700 Introduction to Fiction: Short Story
Veeder, William
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.
ENGL 11100 (two sections) Critical Perspectives
Knight, Janice
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.
ENGL 13800/31000 History and Theory of Drama 1
Bevington, David; Coleman, Heidi
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.
ENGL 14900/34900 Old English
von Nolcken, Christina
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.
ENGL 15803 Suffering in Medieval Literature: Saints and Sinners
Gavre, Dana
This course will examine the treatment of human and divine suffering in selected devotional, hagiographical, and penitential literature from the late Middle Ages. By doing so, the aim of this course is to explore the sometimes ambiguous connections between suffering and salvation, bloodshed and redemption, pain and meaning.
ENGL 16307 Art and Literature: Envisioning the Renaissance
Aydelotte, Laura
This course will explore the relationship between poetry and the visual arts in the English Renaissance, and their influence on thinking about love, politics, and religion. Poets read include Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Jonson. Visual representations include portraits, architecture, stage designs, and emblems. Two papers: one short, one long.
ENGL 16705 Amorous Play in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman
Heffernan, Megan
This course investigates the craze for short erotic narrative poetry (which later comes to be known as the epyllion, or "little epic") that swept England during the 1590's. We will read poems by Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and William Shakespeare alongside the other example of narrative poetry in early modern England, epics including Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Beginning from the question of how length affects poetic exposition and narrative, we will move to questions concerning poetic circulation, the modifications that verse undergoes in different modes of narrative, and the sex and gender politics of early modern narrative poetry.
ENGL 17803 The Early English Novel from Defoe to Austen
Haslanger, Andrea
This course will provide an introduction to the English novel before 1800. We will read novels by authors such as Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne alongside selections from critical works. Our focus will be primarily on the novels themselves, with an eye to how the presentation of fictional characters raises the question of what makes a person the same person over time.
ENGL 20503 (SALC 20505) Projects of Freedom: Britain between 1789 and 1867
Satpathy, Siddharth
The idea of Human freedom is central to the European discourses of modernity. This class will explore some of the ways in which people talked about liberty in an imperial Britain roughly between 1789 and 1867. Starting with the French revolution, we will focus on a select set of historical events including the opening of the British India to evangelical mission, abolition of Slavery, Chartist movements and the second Reform Bill. As we make our way through a range of literature generated around these events—tracts, novels, political treatises and autobiographies—we will explore how categories of race, class nationality and gender inflect modern rhetorics of freedom—liberal, radical, conservative and evangelical. The course of study will include Burke, Wilberforce, Macaulay, Bronte, Gaskell, Martineau, Mill, Arnold and Trollope.
ENGL 22300 Henry James: the Fiction of Crisis
Veeder, William
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."
ENGL 22804 Latino/a Intellectual Thought
Coronado, Raśl
Latina/o literature is usually thought of as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, emerging in the late 1980s when mainstream publishers began to publish Latina/o authors. This course will provide a history of the present by turning to Latina/o authors—Chicana/o and Puerto Rican—who wrote in the period leading to the 1980s. We'll pay attention to the interdisciplinary nature of many of these texts, and by placing Chicano and Puerto Rican authors next to one another, we'll also want to think of the convergences and divergences of "Latino literature."
ENGL 22809/42804 Comparative Literature of the Americas
Coronado, Raśl
The last decade has seen a dramatic shift away from nation-based approaches to literary studies and a desire to move towards more transnational approaches. But how and more importantly why should we do so? What is to be gained? This course will explore these conceptual questions as we read primary texts from late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spanish America and the U.S.
ENGL 22905/33007 (LACS 28306/38306, HIST 26205/36205)
Looking for History: Chronicles of Contemporary Latin America
Guillermoprieto, Alma
This course will focus substantively on 20th-century Latin American history, but will also give attention to the particular style of literary journalism or "chronicles" characteristic of the instructor's own writings. In other words, this course will explore how chroniclers of contemporary Latin American history produce this particular genre. Texts will give an overview of the contemporary history of Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with a full course session devoted to chronicles of Che Guevara. This course would be appropriate for students of Latin American history and students of literature. Teaching and texts will be in English. Alma Guillermoprieto is a Tinker Visiting Professor this quarter.
ENGL 23400 Virginia Woolf
Ruddick, Lisa
Readings will include The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, and selected essays.
ENGL 24202/30805 Romantic Fiction and the Historical Novel
Campbell, Timothy
In this course we will examine the emergence of the historical novel in Romantic Britain and situate this genre within a wider expansion of the code of realism that attends to social-historical phenomena and processes in new and enduring ways. We will organize the course around the particularly influential authorship of Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, in part by addressing the competing practices of several oppositional contemporaries. We will also draw upon a mix of foundational and recent criticism to consider a series of sites where Romantic fiction conceptualizes history with special energy: the subject, the imperial Celtic periphery, the romance, commercial modernity, and the everyday.
ENGL 24803 (CMST 21400) The Rhetorics of Studio Era Censorship
Binggeli, Elizabeth
This course will examine film censorship in Hollywood's studio era as industrial practice and narrative technology. We will consider how the many players in film censorship—advocacy groups, exhibition boards, governmental bodies, and the studios themselves—created a discourse of the visible and invisible in Hollywood narrative film. In addition to critically reading histories and theories of censorship, we will analyze the narrative effects of censorship on produced films and trace the effects of censorship on Hollywood's "rejects" through an examination of studio archival records related to unproduced projects.
ENGL 25306/42404 Sociology of Literature
Rothfield, Lawrence
This course explores the critical potential and limitations of a few key sociological approaches to literature, working with the London literary scene of the 1890s as our case. We will focus on Bourdieu's theorization of the field of cultural production; Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge and discursive formations; Luhman's influential systems theory; and recent efforts by Moretti and others to import geographic and evolutionary models into literary studies.
ENGL 26702/46702 Poems and Essays
von Hallberg, Robert
This course will focus on five poets who also wrote essays: Charles Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, Joseph Brodsky, and Zbigniew Herbert. We will first read poems by each of these authors, then we will turn to the essays. Our objective is to study both poems and essays as artful writing; we will not be looking to the essays for explanations of the poems, though some of the essays we will read do directly concern the art of poetry. Certain literary critical questions will no doubt arise: to what extent does the art of the essay depend upon brilliant moments, as poems often do? Is continuity a necessary feature of an artful essay? Is the persuasive objective of an essayist altogether different from the objectives of a poet? How far can rhetorical analysis take one in understanding lyric poetry?
Each student will give one oral report (of about ten minutes) on one of the writers in the course, and also write a final essay (of ca. 15 pp., on a topic to be approved by one of the instructors) due at the end of the quarter.
ENGL 26900 Postwar U.S. Literature
Nelson, Deborah L.
This survey of postwar U.S. literature begins with Arthur Miller's The Crucible and concludes with Tony Kushner's Angels in America. These works, haunted by the Rosenberg and McCarthy trials, frame a course that considers a variety of genres and formal experiments in poetic language in terms of the political and cultural upheavals of the Cold War. In addition to the two plays, we are likely to read prose works by Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison, and poetry by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Monette.
ENGL 27402 Realism and Social Reality in American Fiction 1861-1941
Gentry, Amy
This course seeks to identify formal features of American literary realism as they developed between 1961 and 1941. Taking our cue from the realism debates that bookend this lengthy period, we will be focusing on the social, political, and aesthetic motives behind the development of realism as a form, as well as the anxieties to which it gave rise.
ENGL 27903 Staging Race: African Americans and Theater in the 20th Century
Barton, Melissa
Theater written, produced, or performed by African Americans throughout the twentieth century has made the substance of race one of its central questions. This course tracks these theater practitioners' continued engagement with the process of "staging race" as they experiment with a wide variety of theatrical forms. Readings will include plays and essays by Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Suzan-Lori Parks, and August Wilson.
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