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Undergraduate Courses
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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2003-2004 |
SPRING 2004 COURSES
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 1
Schleusener, Jay
TuTh 9:00-10:20
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 more advanced undergraduate courses. Because English 101 serves as an introduction to the concentration, and because this course is a prerequisite for some English courses, newly declared English concentrators and potential concentrators are urged to take it as early as possible in their undergraduate careers. English 101 is offered every year and is required of all English concentrators.
10100 Critical Perspectives - Sec. 2
Myers, Joanne
TuTh 9:00-10:20
Reading Books, Reading Others, Reading the World. What does it mean to read and write critically? "Criticism" has come to signify a whole host of ideological and methodological approaches to the study not only of literature and other art forms but of society and human nature itself. In this course, our focus will be two-fold: we will examine some of the ways different critical modes engage with texts, and also the ways in which criticism, itself understood as a historically situated phenomenon, seeks to extend its reach to the world beyond the text. Taking a few literary works as our primary objects of study, we will explore some of the key questions that have given rise to the many competing schools of interpretation, reflect on reading practices in and outside the university, and refine our ability to talk usefully with one another about what we read.
10200 Problems
in Gender Studies
Hadley, Elaine
Th 1:30-2:20
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.
10400 Introduction
to Poetry
Strier, Richard
TuTh 10:30-11:50 (2 diss on F)
D
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.
11503/31503 Translation
and Adaptation
Columbus, Curt
M 3:30-6:30
F
11602/31602 Travel Writing
Sartin, Hank
F 9:30-12:20
At its most effective, travel writing combines clear, evocative description, personal narrative, and an offer of useful information to give us the feeling that we both know what a place is like and want to go there. Of course, people have been writing about travel experiences since ancient times, but for this course, we will focus on travel writing produced in the last hundred years, a time when travel writing has changed from describing places that the readers would likely never go to enticing readers with accounts of places that they might actually visit. We will look at a range of materials, from major works by masters of the field like Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin to the short articles that appear in magazines. In this writing-intensive course, we will break travel writing down into a set t of techniques that writers use in travel writing, and practice these techniques through a set of writing exercises. Students will use the city of Chicago as a resource, researching and writing about places in the city. The course will include numerous writing exercises, and a larger final piece of writing demonstrating the skills developed in the course.
11900/31901 The
Literature of Trauma
Berlant, Lauren
TuTh 12:00-1:20
C
This course will introduce undergraduates to advanced trauma theory and
survey classics in the field, like Maus, Dispatches, Ariel, War Journalism,
and the relevant psychoanalytic and social scientific theoretical works
from Freud onwards.
12202/32202 Personal Narrative
Stielstra, Megan
Tu 3:00-5:50
This course focuses on turning "memories” the important people, places, small moments and big events in our lives into effective stories by applying the fundamentals of voice, seeing, structure, movement, point-of-view, dialogue and character development. Students will write their own memoir, either short-form or the beginning of a longer piece, depending on the writer as well as reading models that will be responded to with journal entries and weekly discussions: what is the writer’s process in getting their stories to the page, and how can that effect your own writing? PQ: Consent of Instructor; Submit short writing sample to G-B 309.
12208/33308 Advanced
Screenwriting
Petrakis, John
W 3:00-6:00
F
This course requires students to complete the first draft of a feature-length
screenplay (at least 90 pages), based on an original idea brought to the
first or second class. No adaptations or partially-completed scripts are
allowed. Weekly class sessions include reading of script pages and critique
by classmates and instructor. Grades will be determined by quality of
writing, pages completed and class participation. Prerequisite: Beginning
Screenwriting Note: An 8-page writing sample, in screenplay format, is
required for admission. Class size is limited to eight students.
12504/32504 Writing Perform. Monologues
Obejas, Achy
W 3:00-6:00
12906/32906 Intro. to Poetry Writing
Reddy, Srikanth
Th 3:00-5:50
In this course, we will explore fundamental concepts in the writing of lyric poetry. We will study extraordinary examples of lyric writing from various cultures, historical periods, and aesthetic movements – and we will use these texts as templates and provocations toward our own writing of poetry. A portion of our sessions will be devoted to in-class exercises and discussion of assigned readings. The remainder will be spent responding to each other’s work with constructive care in a workshop setting. By the end of our time together, you will have honed both your reading and writing skills, and you will have compiled a substantial portfolio of creative work.
13000/33000 Acad/Prof Writing (LRS)
McEnerney,Larry
Cochran,Kathryn
Weiner, Tracy
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Academic and Professional Writing (Little Red Schoolhouse)This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project.
13202 Poetry:
Writing from Outside
Regan, Matthias
Tu 3:00-5:50
D
In this introduction to the craft of writing, students will respond to
and produce poems that proceed from outside the boundaries of a singular,
psychologized self. Rather than approach poetry as an expression of individual
feelings, we will read and write work in which heightened language creates
and investigates the gap between the writer and the object of poetic attention.
Students will read poems in the Objectivist tradition, participate in
creative writing exercises, and analyze and critique the work of their
peers. PQ: consent of instructor. submit 5-7 page writing samples to ewilhelm@uchicago.edu
by 03/01/04.
14200 Reading Cultures
Kruger, Loren
TuTh 10:30-11:50
from the core
16100 Media Aesthetics
Cormack, Bradin
TuTh 9:00-10:20
from the core
16200 Media Aesthetics
Nelson, Deborah L.
MW 3:00-4:20
Provided from the core. All experience of the arts involves a medium, and this course draws particular attention to that involvement. We construe "aesthetics" rather broadly: as a study in sensory perception, as a study in value, as a study in the stylistic and formal properties of artistic products. We understand "medium," too, along a spectrum of meanings that range (in Aristotle's terms) from the "material cause" of art (stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words for poetry) to the "instrumental cause" (the apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast media, the internet). The vehicle of communication conditions aesthetic experience-mediates between producers and receivers--and thus our larger questions will include some of the following: Can artistic media be distinguished in a rigorous and systematic way from non-artistic media? What, for instance, is the relation between artistic and non-artistic use of photography? What is the relation between the media and human sensations and perceptions? Do we learn new ways of seeing and hearing from inventions like drawing, painting, photography, the phonograph, cinema, and video? What happens to objects when we adapt or "translate" them into other media: written narratives into film narratives or architecture into photography? We will be asking questions aimed at fostering sensitivity to, and analysis of, the sensory, cognitive, and emotional shaping of the aesthetic experience, and how that shape is shaped by the medium in which it occurs. Each quarter of the three-quarter sequence will array a mix of objects and media for examination but will also carry a particular thematic emphasis. The autumn quarter will focus on seeing, especially on the problems that arise when objects and texts seem to offer themselves as "reflections" or "imitations" of the world (e.g., Velàzquez's Las Meninas, Plato's allegory of the cave, Aristotle's Poetics, Hitchock's Vertigo, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, Cindy Sherman's photographs). The winter quarter will focus on hearing, with particular emphasis on how sounds are "composed" for effect in various ways--in this quarter we will attend to issues of musical form, to the prosodic analysis of poetry, to representations of composed sound in fiction and cinema, to philosophical discussions of hearing, and to the analyses of sound composition in such writers as diverse as Poe and Adorno. The spring quarter will focus on reading and the questions routinely associated with the aesthetic object considered as a "text" to be "interpreted" (e.g., Plato's Phaedrus, Genesis, Hamlet, Welles's Citizen Kane, Woolf's To the Lighthouse).
16200 Media Aesthetics
Rothfield, Larry
TuTh 9:00-10:20
Provided from the core. All experience of the arts involves a medium, and this course draws particular attention to that involvement. We construe "aesthetics" rather broadly: as a study in sensory perception, as a study in value, as a study in the stylistic and formal properties of artistic products. We understand "medium," too, along a spectrum of meanings that range (in Aristotle's terms) from the "material cause" of art (stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words for poetry) to the "instrumental cause" (the apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast media, the internet). The vehicle of communication conditions aesthetic experience-mediates between producers and receivers--and thus our larger questions will include some of the following: Can artistic media be distinguished in a rigorous and systematic way from non-artistic media? What, for instance, is the relation between artistic and non-artistic use of photography? What is the relation between the media and human sensations and perceptions? Do we learn new ways of seeing and hearing from inventions like drawing, painting, photography, the phonograph, cinema, and video? What happens to objects when we adapt or "translate" them into other media: written narratives into film narratives or architecture into photography? We will be asking questions aimed at fostering sensitivity to, and analysis of, the sensory, cognitive, and emotional shaping of the aesthetic experience, and how that shape is shaped by the medium in which it occurs. Each quarter of the three-quarter sequence will array a mix of objects and media for examination but will also carry a particular thematic emphasis. The autumn quarter will focus on seeing, especially on the problems that arise when objects and texts seem to offer themselves as "reflections" or "imitations" of the world (e.g., Velàzquez's Las Meninas, Plato's allegory of the cave, Aristotle's Poetics, Hitchock's Vertigo, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, Cindy Sherman's photographs). The winter quarter will focus on hearing, with particular emphasis on how sounds are "composed" for effect in various ways--in this quarter we will attend to issues of musical form, to the prosodic analysis of poetry, to representations of composed sound in fiction and cinema, to philosophical discussions of hearing, and to the analyses of sound composition in such writers as diverse as Poe and Adorno. The spring quarter will focus on reading and the questions routinely associated with the aesthetic object considered as a "text" to be "interpreted" (e.g., Plato's Phaedrus, Genesis, Hamlet, Welles's Citizen Kane, Woolf's To the Lighthouse).
16200 Media Aesthetics
Valenza, Robin
TuTh 12:00-1:20
Provided from the core. All experience of the arts involves a medium, and this course draws particular attention to that involvement. We construe "aesthetics" rather broadly: as a study in sensory perception, as a study in value, as a study in the stylistic and formal properties of artistic products. We understand "medium," too, along a spectrum of meanings that range (in Aristotle's terms) from the "material cause" of art (stone for sculpture, sounds for music, words for poetry) to the "instrumental cause" (the apparatus of writing or printing, film, the broadcast media, the internet). The vehicle of communication conditions aesthetic experience-mediates between producers and receivers--and thus our larger questions will include some of the following: Can artistic media be distinguished in a rigorous and systematic way from non-artistic media? What, for instance, is the relation between artistic and non-artistic use of photography? What is the relation between the media and human sensations and perceptions? Do we learn new ways of seeing and hearing from inventions like drawing, painting, photography, the phonograph, cinema, and video? What happens to objects when we adapt or "translate" them into other media: written narratives into film narratives or architecture into photography? We will be asking questions aimed at fostering sensitivity to, and analysis of, the sensory, cognitive, and emotional shaping of the aesthetic experience, and how that shape is shaped by the medium in which it occurs. Each quarter of the three-quarter sequence will array a mix of objects and media for examination but will also carry a particular thematic emphasis. The autumn quarter will focus on seeing, especially on the problems that arise when objects and texts seem to offer themselves as "reflections" or "imitations" of the world (e.g., Velàzquez's Las Meninas, Plato's allegory of the cave, Aristotle's Poetics, Hitchock's Vertigo, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, Cindy Sherman's photographs). The winter quarter will focus on hearing, with particular emphasis on how sounds are "composed" for effect in various ways--in this quarter we will attend to issues of musical form, to the prosodic analysis of poetry, to representations of composed sound in fiction and cinema, to philosophical discussions of hearing, and to the analyses of sound composition in such writers as diverse as Poe and Adorno. The spring quarter will focus on reading and the questions routinely associated with the aesthetic object considered as a "text" to be "interpreted" (e.g., Plato's Phaedrus, Genesis, Hamlet, Welles's Citizen Kane, Woolf's To the Lighthouse).
16600 Shakes
II: Tragedy/Romance
Mazzio, Carla
MW 12:30-1:20 (3 disc on F)
B,F,G
This course will study the second half of Shakespeare's career, from 1600
to 1611, when the major genres that he worked in were tragedy and "romance"
or tragicomedy. Plays to be read will include: Hamlet, Measure for Measure,
Othello, King Lear (2 versions), Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles,
The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. There will be one short and one longer
paper. Section attendance is required.
17001/37001 Shakespeare's
Sonnets
Cormack, Bradin
TuTh 3:00-4:20
B,D,H
This course provides students the opportunity to engage intensively with
Shakespeare's Sonnets (pub. 1609), and especially with the book's treatment
of sex, gender relations, and subjectivity. In addition to Shakespeare's
poems, we will read a number of sonnets from other Elizabethan sequences,
including those written by Samuel Daniel, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser
and Richard Barnfield. We will also supplement each week's readings with
essays drawn from the now vast secondary literature both on the Sonnets
and on early modern gender categories. Crosslisted courses are designed
for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. *This course is restricted
to juniors, seniors, and graduate students only.*
18102 Literature
and Finance
Youssef, Sharif
TuTh 3:00-4:20
C,E,H
This course concerns itself with the scandalous conjunction of literature
and finance. We will explore the ways in which the imaginative enterprise
of the novel drew from the eighteenth century spirit of enterprise and
speculation. It behooves us to begin the course with several distinctions
such as the differences between such terms as diligence, business, labor,
work, property, finance, speculation, risk, management, piracy, jobbing,
hoax and projection. Of the several kinds of novel we shall read some
will model the way they work on an understanding of the way propagandists
of finance argue that speculation works; other texts will ask whether
or not the notion of the common good embedded in early modern texts about
finance can remain a viable one when conjoined to the instability of risk;
others discuss a realm of scandal which used to be called "white
collar crime," and we will seek to ask why this category may now
appear defunct; finally some of the readings more explicitly foreground
the psychosexual associations of finance. Neither a business nor an economics
background is required for this course as it takes a broad survey of economic
history, and many of the terms discussed will be introduced in the lectures
and discussions. The syllabus is subject to change but for the time being
"Names" include Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe,
William Petty, Henry Fielding, Benjamin Franklin, Frank Norris, Henry
Fielding, Maxine Hong Kingston and Brett Easton Ellis.
18103 Sci. &
Lit. in 18th Century
Valenza, Robin
TuTh 9:00-10:20
C,E,H
Late seventeenth-century advances in optics brought the human eye to places
it had never been before. This course asks students to consider how British
novelists, scientists, philosophers, and poets in the long eighteenth
century engaged with mathematical and technological developments that
made the visible and invisible world more intimately available to them.
Together we will inquire into how the descriptive and aesthetic strategies
of the new sciences related to those of literature -- how they were mutually
appropriated, modified, and mocked. In turn, we will ask how scientists
engaged with the literary sphere, discovering how men and women of science
made their technical work appealing to a broad audience. Readings will
include selections from Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Isaac Newton,
John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Humphry Davy,
Mary Shelley, and others.
20200 The Romantic
Period
Sachs, Jonathan
MW 1:30-2:50
A,C,H
The period from 1789-1832 was one of great social and political turbulence.
There was a major revolution in France, a prolonged period of European
warfare, and the spread of unprecedented new techniques of industrial
production. It was a period inwhich radical thinking was popularized and
one that saw an emergent discourse of "women's rights" and new
ways of thinking about gender. In this course, we will focus on a selection
of poetry and prose written during the so-called Romantic period, from
the fall of the Bastille (1789) to the passage of the first voting Reform
Bill (1832). We will focus on the development and elaboration of some
of the concepts most prominently associated with romanticism-such ideas
as imagination, nature, and the self-but we will also be asking just what
constitutes specifically "Romantic" poetry and to what degree
works produced in this period conform to these criteria. We will think
about the relationship between the concept of romanticism and the period
designation 'Romantic' and, in addition, by looking at the history of
the period as well as by asking ourselves how history and literature are
related, we will think about how political and socioeconomic issues might
inform our conception of what constitutes "great literature."
20302 Allegorical
Journeys
Yost, Jason
TuTh 12:00-1:20
B,H
This course will explore in detail, the complexities of allegorical literature
by focusing on narriatives patterned after the questing journey. Typically
in such allegories, a hero or heroine leaves home and travels through
various symbolic terrains in order to reach an ideal destination. By unfolding
the literal narrative of these jopurneys, the reader unexpectedly reveals
underlying psychological, political, moral or spiritual meanings. Starting
with Virgil's Aeneid, we will examine a wide historical range of allegorical
quests. Major readings will include Apulieus' The Golden Ass, The Quest
of the Holy Grail, Dante's Purgutorio, the Relacion of Cabeza de Vaca,
and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Minor works by Porphyry, Bernardus Silvestris,
Chaucer, Milton, and Hawthorne will also be studied. Topics for investigation
include: the basic forms, or narrative structures, enabling allegorical
representation; the relationship of allegory with other modes of inerect
speech such as irony, sarcasm, and personification; the influence of allegorical
romance upon colonial writings in the New World; and seemingly natural
connection between allegory and didacticism. All non-English texts will
be read in translation. Course requirements incluse two papers, short
responce assignments and classroom participation.
20902 Contemp
Science Fiction
Baylus, Cara
TuTh 3:00-4:20
C,E,G
This course will explore the ways in which 20th century Science Fiction
is uniquely engaged with philosophical questions about the nature of freedom,
justice, individualism and the state. Through novels, short stories and
films, we will consider not only Science Fiction’s concerns about
utilitarianism, totalitarianism, social engineering, and panopticism,
but also how these works advocate a particular view of the individual,
the state, and the language of natural rights. Materials will include
1984, Brave New World, Gattica, The Forever War, The Minority Report (Spielberg),
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, A Clockwork Orange, Dune, The Handmaid’s
Tale, and Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.”
21000/41000 The
19-Century Realist Novel
Rothfield, Larry
TuTh 1:30-2:50
A,C,E,H
This course seeks to identify and evaluate the distinguishing features
of nineteenth-century realist fiction. What techniques did realist novelists
invent to produce the effects of the real? How and why did realism invoke
particular themes or subject matter, conceptions of character or plot,
styles of narration? On what basis, and with what success, did realist
authors claim the authority to represent reality? How are the answers
to these questions affected by the national context in which novelists
wrote? For the purposes of this class we will limit ourselves to British
and French writers, comparing and contrasting two pairs of novelists --
Balzac and Dickens, Flaubert and George Eliot. Cross listed courses are
designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
22400/42401 The
Pre-Raphaelites
Helsinger, Elizabeth
MW 3:00-4:20
C,H
This course offers an introduction to Pre-Raphaelitism across three generations,
from the early 1850s through the early 1870s, looking equally at the work
associated with the term from both literature and the visual arts (not
only painting but illustration and the design of books, objects, and houses).
The focus, however, will be on the multiple conjunctions between verbal
and visual arts: "literary" painting, illustration, poetry and
prose about painting, the literal or symbolic uses of color and design
in literary composition, books as designed and crafted objects. We will
be studying the ways that artists and poets in Pre-Raphaelite circles
re-think art in one medium through their simultaneous experiences in another.
Among the artists and poets to be considered: Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Holman Hunt, J.E. Millais, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Philip
Webb, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. Crosslisted courses
are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
23902/43902 Rhet/Relig
Nat'lism/Colon Amer
Knight, Janice
TuTh 3:00-4:20
B,G
Redeemer Nation: Rhetorics of Religious Nationalism in Colonial America:
Beginning with the English plantations of l585 and concluding with Jefferson's
Notes on Virginia, this course will examine the origins of religious nationalism
in the Colonial period. We will analyze Anglo-American constructions of
the "new world" as a prophetic text and of colonization as a
religious mission. Representations of America as a "New Jerusalem"
and of citizens as "civil saints" will be probed in texts of
exploration, in utopian charters and civil ordinances, and in millennialist
prophecies and narratives of conquest. The rhetoric of sacred nationhood
will be probed as it informs the work of plantation, the subsequent wars
of conquest, and the logic of revolution. Our archive will include promotional
tracts, sermons, traveller's portfolios, maps and charters, diaries, portraits
and material objects. Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates
and graduate students.
26600/36600 Mourners
Bench: Af-Am Lit
Goldsby, Jacqueline
TuTh 1:30-2:50
C,E,G
The Mourners Bench: Writing, Grief, and African American Literature. They’ve
been called the “sorrow songs.” They’ve been called the
“blues.” In other traditions, they’re called “elegies.”
In this course we’ll study how African American writers give voice
to personal, social, cultural, and political grief of various kinds. What
aesthetic forms have black writers turned to in times of crisis, loss,
harm, or assault? Indeed, what counts as a “crisis,” what rates
as a “loss,” what acts or events inflict injuries such that
narration and representation become imperative? Situating our major texts
within current critical theories about trauma, melancholia, mourning,
and race (e.g., Caruth, Felman, Hartman, Butler, and Brown; Holland, Holloway,
and Cheng) we will ask: what is this writing of disaster (to recall Maurice
Blanchot) intended to accomplish? Major authors and texts may include:
James Baldwin, The Fire the Next Time and Going to Meet the Man; Gwendolyn
Brooks, In the Mecca; Reginald Shepherd Angel Interrupted; Toni Morrison,
The Bluest Eye; Sonia Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions?; Anna Deveare
Smith, Twilight; August Wilson, The Piano Lesson; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small
Place; Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Toni Cade Bambara, Those
Bones Are Not My Child. We may screen such films as: Four Little Girls
(dir., Spike Lee) and Eve’s Bayou (dir., Kasi Lemons). And, of course,
listen to a range of actual sorrow songs: blues, traditional spirituals,
and soul epics (e.g., Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?). Cross
listed courses are designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
26900 Postwar
U. S. Literature
Nelson, Deborah L.
MW 1:30-2:50
A,C,E,G
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 Ware. 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.
27000 Fiction
of Three Americas
Veeder, William
MW 3:00-4:20
C,E,G
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.
27900 Spike Lee
Stewart, Jacqueline
TuTh 9:00-10:20
SU 1:00-4:00 C307
W 7:00-10:00 C425
F
This course surveys what Wahneemah Lubiano calls, “the Spike Lee
Discourse” -- the films and other media work Lee has produced, alongside
the public persona he has constructed through his appearances in print
media, television, advertising and the Internet. How has Lee negotiated
(and influenced) the realms of independent and Hollywood filmmaking traditions
and institutions? How does he (as director, writer, producer, actor, author,
entrepreneur, advertising executive) push the boundaries of auteur approaches
to reading his films, as well as traditional definitions of African American
cinema? How can we talk about Lee’s career as a reflection of post-classical
cinematic sensibilities and marketing strategies? We will watch Lee’s
films (possibly in conjunction with a Doc Films series) from his student
thesis film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982) to Bamboozled
(2000).
28803 New Poetry:
View from Chicago
Steinhoff, Eirik
MW 3:00-4:20
C,D,G
This course takes the 2003/4 Poem Present reading series as a starting
point for an investigation of the poetry being written today in English.
We have an arbitrarily set itinerary, which tracks the poets who have
read on campus in this year's Poem Present reading series (Mark Strand,
William Fuller, Alice Notley, Lisa Jarnot, Robert Creeley, and Mark Doty).
But deviations from this itinerary are to be expected, as we will be using
these poets as optics into the field of contemporary poetry and poetics.
"What do we need to know to read these poems?" and "how
do these poems ask us to read them?" are two questions we'll try
to answer; other angles of critical inquiry will include: the relation
of our starting list of poets to their contemporaries and to poets who
have preceded them ("Where does this poetry come from? Where is it
going?"); the role of the putative distinction between mainstream
and experimental poetries (a distinction maintained by both parties to
the dispute); and the relevance of poetry to our contemporary moment ("Can
poetry matter?" is a question the current director of the NEA, Dana
Gioia posed back in the early 1990s, when he was an executive managing
the Jell-O account for General Foods-no joke!). Our attention will be
focused on poems and essays in poetics, as well as on other salient artifacts
and events, such as anthologies, magazines (you will be expected to subscribe
to one or two; and we shall spend some time in the archives of Poetry
and Chicago Review at the Reg), poetry readings (two scheduled at the
U of C, and many audio and video recordings), and (the latest flora in
the landscape) the poet's blog. All students are welcome; our labor shall
be collaborative, intensive, and, most importantly, exploratory.
29600/48900 History
of International Cinema II-Sound Era to 1960
Gregg, Ron
TuTh 9:00-10:20
M 3:30-6:30 Scr C 307
W 7:00-10:00 Scr C 307
F
This is the second part of the international survey history for film covering
the sound era up to 1960. It is strongly recommended that students take
the first section first. This survey will deal with issues of film form,
industry organization, and film culture during three decades, the 30',
40's, and 50's. The crystallization of the Classical Hollywood Film in
terms of style and genre, as well as industry organization, will be a
key issue. But international alternatives to Hollywood will also be discussed,
from the unique forms of Japanese cinema to movements like Italian Neo-realism
and the beginnings of the New Wave in France. The writings of Andre Bazin
and issues of film in relation to realism and narrative form will provide
a thread throughout the course. Film style, from the classical scene break
down to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and
technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting) will form
the center of the course, while the development of a film culture will
also be discussed. Text will include Thompson Bordwell, Film History an
Introduction, and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, Godard, and others.
Screenings will include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson,
Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.
29900 Independent B.A. Paper Prep
Staff
ARR
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.
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