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Spring 2005 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives
Schleusener, Jay
MW 1:30-2:50
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
Rothfield, Larry
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.
10701 Introduction to Fiction II: Narrative Theory
Ferguson, Frances
TuTh 12:00-1:20
E
We'll begin by considering some texts that treat the question of perceptible structure in narrative to think about how we can tell that a story is complete. And we'll go on to discuss how an attention to structure in narrative makes it possible to see even inarticulate animals (like Flush, the dog whose biography Virginia Woolf writes) and inanimate objects (like forks, spoons, and cheeses in the Grimm Brothers' tales) as protagonists in narrative. We'll conclude by considering the narrative structure of autobiographical writing and its impact on writing that seems to foreground its content (since it claims that certain things happened and happened to "me").
11602 Travel Writing
McNulty, Tim
W 6:00-9:00
This class aims to capture in writing the experiences of travel: the awakening to a new geography or culture, the romance and humor, even the danger. With readings from classic and contemporary travel writers and through writing about their own journeys, students will explore the role of the senses as well as the landscape in creating vivid accounts. Each session will include discussion of a selected author, from Wilfred Thesiger's travels in the Hindu Kush to Pico Iyer's search for "lonely places." Weekly writing assignments will demonstrate that a trip on Chicago 's "L" is as mundane or exotic as a commuter ride on Hong Kong 's "Star" ferry, and that a walk on the shore along Lake Michigan shares many elements with a stroll on Beirut 's corniche overlooking the Mediterranean . Grades are based on quality of work, improvement and class participation.
11701 Writing Description
Cochran, Kathy Weiner, Tracy
What does it mean to describe something? Why is good description deceptively easy to read but truly difficult to write? How do good writers of description do what they set out to do? A descriptive passage might seem to be objective or to represent subjective experience. It might seem to be covertly or overtly supporting a claim, or it might appear to add detail and richness to a narrative. Throughout this writing-intensive course, we will not take the term "description" for granted, but rather we will interrogate what we mean when we say that a piece of prose "describes" something. Students will write weekly exercises to practice styles and techniques used by superlative writers of description such as Marcel Proust, John McPhee, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Tom Wolfe, H. D. Thoreau, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, Annie Dillard, and some texts of the students' choice. Each week, we will use one class session to identify some techniques that writers use to describe, and to analyze how these techniques affect readers. During the other session, we will workshop students' exercises. The final paper will require students to analyze a description and to describe something themselves, using techniques we identify in class.
12204 Writing Creative Nonfiction
Frey, Darcy
W 1:30-4:20
P.Q. Consent of Instructor: Contact Norah O'Donnell at: neo2@uchicago.edu.
12208 Advanced Screenwriting
Petrakis, John
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. PQ: Beginning Screenwriting.
12300 Poetry and Being
Ruddick, Lisa
TuTh 12:00-1:20
D
The course involves close analysis of poems from a variety of periods and genres, some exposure to various critics' perspectives on literary form, and a number of theoretical readings (largely from the domain of psychoanalysis) on creativity, play, and emotion, which we will place in dialogue with our interpretations of individual poems. PQ: Intro to Poetry (ENGL 10400) or an equiv course at another institution or consent of instructor.
12403 Beginning Fiction: Writing from Margins
Obejas, Achy
Tu 6:00-9:00
Weekly sessions feature in-class writing, discussion, and readings with a focus on writing from perspectives outside the mainstream and alternative view points. One critical annotation is required during the term. Attendance and active class participation are required. Students keep a folder of all work for class. At semester's end, folders are used to evaluate work as a whole and to more closely examine growth. Grades will be based on quality of work, improvement, completion of assignments, and class contributions/participation. The annotation will be 25percent of the grade, quality of work 25 percent, completion and improvement 25 percent, and participation 25 percent. Generally, one half of class will be devoted to presentation and exercises, the other to student work and discussion. PQ: Consent of instructor.
12404 Beginning Fiction Writing: Short Story
Stielstra, Megan
Th 3:00-6:00
This course focuses on the short story--its unique aspects in form and movement and how students can best use it to get their own stories on the page. In a workshop-based setting emphasizing the needs of the individual writer, a wide range of exercises and activities will be used to help students discover their oral and written voices. Point of view, seeing-in-the-mind, gesture, audience, and other aspects of story will be emphasized so that students can attempt to incorporate basic storytelling principles, forms, and techniques into their own writing. The major goals of the short story course are to guide students to discover and use the power of their individual voices, heighten their imaginative seeing and sense of imaginative options, and to develop their overall sense for short story structure and movement. The activities of this course will emphasize the interrelated connections of reading, writing, listening, oral telling, sense of personal voice, imaginative seeing, and structure. Students will select at least one of the assignments undertaken, rewrite it extensively, and attempt a publishable-quality, complete story movement.
12907 Beginning Poetry Workshop
Rollings, Alane
MW 1:30-2:50
This course is designed to give poets at beginning levels a workshop atmosphere in which to present poems for group discussion and criticism. Assignments will be offered to emphasize various elements of poetry: rhythm and meter, imagery, person, tone and diction, form theme and mood, but students will be free to present work of their own choice if they prefer. Emphasis will be placed on the fact that writing can and should be a matter of hard work and improvement. Though the course will focus on student work, poems by contemporary American poets as well as works from English and foreign literature will be brought in as time allows. Topics for continuing discussion will include clarity, economy, revision, translation, imitation, publication, prevailing styles, fixed forms, and the cultivation of a writer's life and career. PQ: Consent of instructor.
12921 Creative Writing: Intro to Genres
Morris, Rob
M 3:00-6:00
This course offers an introduction to the study and practice of three major genres of imaginative literature: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. We will experiment with the formal qualities of each and look at what links and separates them. Writers need not be experienced, but must be eager to try their hands at different literary forms and to share their weekly assignments. The course is workshop-based, with an emphasis on steady production and revision. Through exercises and/or open and directed writing assignments, students will produce a portfolio of original work
13000 Academic and Professional 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. Materials fee $25
13405 Performance Art
Allen, Claudia
This course offers students a chance to explore some of the aesthetic strategies used by artists/performers working in the genre of performance art. As scholars, we work toward an understanding of how changing notions of what constitutes the "avant-garde" influences the conceptualization, creation, and dissemination of art and performance. As performance artists, we employ various "avant-garde" techniques as we create original performances based on a theme, such as "memory."
13503 Advanced TV Writing: Creating the Situation Comedy
Ferrara, Ed
Students will build upon their knowledge of the sitcom form by conceiving and creating their own original situation comedy series. Using study and analysis of various extant series and pilots as a foundation, students will develop their own series premises, populating them with a dynamic mix of rich, well-crafted comic characters. Students will develop a complete proposal, known as a "Series Bible," which will contain an exhaustive amount of information about every aspect of the proposed series - overview, character analysis/biographies and production/presentation considerations. Students will also be responsible for writing a full treatment for the pilot episode of their series, as well as detailed "story springboards" for twelve additional episodes. Limited class size. Classroom participation is mandatory. Strict attendance policy. PQ: ISHU 27313 or Instructor Consent.
13700 Advanced Playwriting
Allen, Claudia
This course presumes the basic principles and techniques of playwriting (structural components of plot, character, and setting, as well as a developed dramatic voice) and explores the steps toward developing a production-worthy script for contemporary theater. In addition to main instructor Claudia Allen, students have the benefit of a professional Dramaturg and Literary Manager, who discusses dramatic structure and what she looks for in a play; and Sandy Shinner, Artistic Associate at Victory Gardens Theater, who shares a director's viewpoint for bringing the text to production. PQ: ISHU 26600 and consent of instructor.
14303 Advanced Poetry: Service Learning
Reddy, Srikanth
This course is designed for students who wish to pursue the writing of poetry at an advanced level. The great majority of class time each week will be devoted to the discussion and critique of one another’s creative work. However, this class will be unlike the conventional poetry workshop, as we will also explore “service learning” as a way of developing our abilities as writers. With the belief that teaching is the best way to consolidate and investigate one’s understanding of poetic form, image, etcetera, the students in this workshop will be required to design and lead three “mini-units” introducing children to poetry at after school programs in area elementary schools throughout the quarter. Students will work in teams during their school visits, and the instructor will supervise lesson planning and provide guidance throughout the quarter. Open to graduate students and undergraduates. PQ: Consent of instructor. Submit samples to jnklein@uchicago.edu.
14601 Aesthetics and Politics
Earle, Bo
TuTh 3:00-4:20
This course aims to explore some of the various ways in which aesthetics is implicated in society and politics. Our focus will be the romantic period because it was then that such implication became a pressing, focused and broad literary concern. But readings in the fiction, poetry and theory of Burke, Kant, Schiller, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hegel, Owenson, Keats, Shelley, Scott and Hogg, will be supplemented with a good deal of subsequent commentary, and a secondary course objective will be to evaluate the degree to which these romantic conceptions and concerns remain our own.
15201 Writing the Graphic Novel
Brunetti, Ivan
Th 6:00-9:00
PQ: Consent of Instructor.
16205 Memory and Imagination in Spenser and Shakespeare
Rzepka, Adam
TuTh 1:30-2:50
B,H
Spenser and Shakespeare: Memory and Imagination in Renaissance England . This course approaches Shakespeare and Spenser through two of their most integral and reflexive themes: memory and imagination. Reading the poet and the playwright together with early modern treatises on poetics, the arts of memory and meditation, purgatory, and the power of fantasy, we will survey the literary and cultural logics of memory and imagination in late sixteenth-century England .
16304 Study of Renaissance Poetry
Plotinsky, Benjamin
MW 3:00-4:20
B,D,H
Students in this course learn to identify and explore formal elements of poetry (e.g., meter, rhyme, tone) as well as particular poetic forms (e.g., sonnets, couplets, stanzas). The poetry is some of the best that the English Renaissance has to offer, from Wyatt to Milton .
16600 Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances
Strier, Richard
TuTh 12:00-1:20
B,F,H
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.
17501 Milton
Scodel, Joshua
TuTh 9:00-10:20
B,D,H
This course will follow Milton 's career as a poet and, to some extent, as a writer of polemical prose. It will concentrate on his sense of his own vocation as a poet and as an active and committed Protestant citizen in times of revolution and reaction. Works to be read include the Nativity Ode, selected sonnets, A Mask, Lycidas, The Reason of Church Government, selections from the divorce tracts, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. There will be a mid-term exercise and a final paper.
19202 Enlightenment and Revolution 1660-1820
Valenza, Robin
TuTh 3:00-4:20
A,C,H
Enlightenment and Revolution 1660-1820. 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.
19601 The Country House in English Literature
Devendorf, Robert
MW 1:30-2:50
C,H
This course explores the development of the country house as a significant literary trope, examining the relationship between the aesthetic experiences of time and space that the country estate embodies and the forms of writing through which those experiences were developed and communicated from the seventeenth century through Brideshead Revisited.
21900 Victorian Women Writers
Helsinger, Elizabeth
MW 3:00-4:20
C,E,H
This course will cover the difficulties and possibilities for women writing in nineteenth-century Britain, as these are variously encountered and exploited in works by Victorian poets and novelists. Likely texts include Charlotte Brontë, Villette; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights and selected poems; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; and selected poetry by Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, "Michael Field," Charlotte Mew. We will also evaluate some approaches to Victorian women's writing (Gilbert & Gubar, Armstrong, Homans, Mermin, Leighton) and look at various analyses of sex and gender roles in the Victorian period (Davidoff, Hall, Poovey, etc.).
22300 Henry James: the Fiction of Crisis
Veeder, William
MW 4:30-5:50
C,E,G
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.”
22803 19th Century U.S. Latino/a Literature and the Path to Modernity
Coronado, Jr., Raul
MW 4:30-5:50
Nineteenth-Century U.S. Latina/o Literature and the Path to Modernity: Latina/o literature has usually been described as a twentieth-century phenomenon, emerging for the most part during the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. This course will critically interrogate this assumption by focusing on nineteenth-century Latinas/o public writings. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Latin Americans--including Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, and Colombians--sought refuge in the U.S. and used the printing press, especially in Philadelphia , Charlottesville , and New Orleans , to foment support for the independence of their Latin American countries. Likewise, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the printing press arrived across what is today the U.S. Southwest and gave birth to a vibrant and often belligerent printing culture. It was through these published texts that ideas associated with modernity were, for the first time, debated and developed in print among Latinas/os, ideas such as representative government, the rights of citizen-subjects, and the power of the press to reconfigure society. Though our focus will be on that body of work produced in what is today the U.S. , we will need to situate this literary and cultural history in a transnational framework, between the U.S. and Latin America . In doing so, we will be better equipped to begin to imagine alternative historical geographies for a literature of the Americas, one where the seemingly impermeable barrier between U.S. and Latin American literary and cultural history begins to disintegrate in U.S. Latina/o studies. Readings will include primary texts (travel writing, newspapers, memoirs, essays, fiction) and secondary readings by such critics as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Julio Ramos, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Juan Poblete, Michael Warner, Debra Castillo, Jorge Klor de Alva, Walter Mignolo, Angel Rama, and Wernor Sollors. A reading knowledge of Spanish, though not required, will be useful.
22805 Nabokov's Early Novels
Bird, Robert
We will read most of the work Nabokov wrote in Russian, including such novels as: Mary; The Defense; Glory; Despair; Invitation to a Beheading; The Gift. We will also consult Nabokov's poetry, critical writings, and memoirs. We discuss these works in the context of the author's thematic concerns, modern narrative theory, and recent critical positions on Nabokov. No knowledge of Russian required; all texts read in English (with option of reading in the original Russian). Class discussion encouraged.
25001 Jewish Latin American Literature
Obejas, Achy M 6:00-9:00
C,E,G
A survey of Latin American literature by Jewish writers, including Ariel Dorfman, Clarice Lispector, Mario Szichman, Rosa Nissan, Jose Kozer, Victor Perera and Ilan Stavans, among others. Issues include crypto-Judaism, displacement, and the particularities of construction of identity in the New World . Readings by Jorge Luis Borges address "the mythical Jew" in Latin America . The course looks at Jewish literature in countries such as Argentina , which have historically vibrant Jewish communities, as well as places such as Cuba , where Jews have been more of a hidden influence. Students will be expected to read and discuss materials, as well as research literary and historical issues. Readings will be in English.
25101 Frontier and Early American Literature
Piggush, Yvette
TuTh 9:00-10:20
G
From the national celebration of the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving to the popularity of Western films, the concept of the American frontier plays an important role in constructing American culture. How and why did the American frontier become a location where oppositions such as alien and native, savage and civilized, inside and outside could be created, preserved, and transgressed? This course seeks to trace the concept of the Eastern United States frontier in fiction and non-fiction texts from the earliest English colonial contacts up to the 1850s. The focus the Eastern frontier will allow this course to explore a complex and frequently overlooked conversation about the early American frontier that includes female and Native American perspectives and informs the later understanding of the frontier in the far West. The course will examine the conceptualization of the frontier in American literature as a space of uncertain boundaries: where conversion occurs, where "civilization's" borders are troubled by the "savagery" they purport to exclude, and where human economic organization struggles to obtain, while maintaining, the resources of a supposedly empty wilderness.
25302 Utopias
Berlant, Lauren Zorach, Rebecca
We live in a post-utopian world -- so some people would argue, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But what does it mean to say that the end of one experiment in reorganizing human relations toward the good life equals the end of all such experimentation? This course surveys significant moments in utopian practice (which includes theory), choosing case studies from among Plato's Republic, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, national experiments (the United States, Liberia, Israel), utopian communities (Fourier, Owen, the Bauhaus, the Pre-Raphaelites), socialism, technophily (modernist architecture, science fiction, networked culture), new social movements (from first wave feminism and civil rights to contemporary antiwar and antiglobalization activity), radical conservatism, and fundamentalisms. We will focus on literature and art, including music, painting, architecture and urbanism, and film and digital media. Final projects for the course may be creative as well as analytical.
26800 Age of Realism & Naturalism
Goldsby, Jacqueline
TuTh 1:30-2:50
A,C,E,G
Literary histories tell us that realism and naturalism were aesthetic movements that redefined American fiction at the turn of the 19th century. Cultural histories of the era tell us that Americans fiercely debated what constituted the "real" and the "natural" as they coped with the revolutionary changes that turned their worlds upside down between the Civil and First World Wars-the consolidation of state power in the federal government; the transformation of the economy into a fully industrialized, corporate-commodity driven order; the emancipation of African Americans from slavery; the liberation of "New Women" (and men) from Victorian gender roles; the metamorphosis of cities into metropoles with the arrival of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe; the "closing" of the frontier and the imperialist extension of American power abroad; the sanctification of science, technology, and "professionalized" knowledge as the bulwarks of the nation's tender faith in "progress." This course moves between these two accounts to appreciate the varied styles and issues that characterized the literature of this moment. Authors will include: Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, and Henry James.
27600 Cinema in Africa
Kruger, Loren
F
This course examines cinema in Africa as well as films produced in Africa . It places cinema in SubSaharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa , documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), ground-breaking film by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, The Magic Garden (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine cinematic representations of tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the different implications of these tensions for men and women, Western and Southern Africa , in fiction, documentary and ethnographic film.
29600 History of International Cinema II-Sound Era to 1960
Gregg, Ron
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.
29700 Reading Course
staff
TBA
TBA
These reading courses must include a final paper assignment to meet requirements for the English major and students must receive a letter grade. Students may not petition to receive credit for more than two ENGL 29700 courses. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. The kind and amount of work to be done are determined by an instructor within the English department who has agreed to supervise the course. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
29900 Independent B.A. Paper Prep
Staff
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. Autumn, Winter, Spring
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