English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago
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.
2008-2009 |
2007-2008 |
2006-2007 |
2005-2006 |
2004-2005 |
2003-2004 |
Spring 2007 Courses
11100 Critical Perspectives
Chudgar, Neil
TuTh 12:00-1:20
Godfrey, Mollie
MW 1:30-2:50
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.
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
15205 The Graphic Novel
Orchard, William
TuTh 4:30-5:50
This course will explore the recent rise a graphic novel, a form that presents an opportunity to refresh our critical vocabularies for examining narrative and visuality. We will also consider how the graphic novel critically engages the history of the comic. Reading list will likely include Ho Che Anderson (King), David B. (Epileptic), Will Eisner (A Contract With God Trilogy), Gilbert Hernandez (Poison River), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Joe Sacco (Palestine), Art Spiegelman (Maus), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan).
15600
Medieval English Literature
Miller, Mark
TuTh 10:30-11:50
This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England.
16600
Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances
Strier, Richard
TuTh 3:00-4:20
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, Othello, King Lear (quarto and folio versions), Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. There will be one short and one longer paper. Section attendance is required.
16903
Staging the Metropolis: Renaissance Drama and Rhetoric of Urban
Stanev, Hristomir
TuTh 9:00-10:20
This course will explore some of the intriguing ways in which the Renaissance playhouses began to depict their urban environment. We will investigate the material and cultural conditions of playacting and playgoing, and consider further how the metropolis conditioned the stage and how, in turn, the stage fashioned the metropolis.
17001
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Cormack, Bradin
TuTh 10:30-11:50
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.*
17501
Milton
Scodel, Joshua
MW 3:00-4:20
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.
17801
Whipping World's Posteriors:Irony in 18th C British Literature
Gallagher, Noelle
TuTh
This course will introduce students to a range of popular eighteenth-century British texts, including cartoons, satires, parodies, novels, and autobiographies, linked by their use of ironic humour. Using Wayne Booth's A Rhetoric of Irony as our starting point, we will explore some of the ways in which eighteenth-century writers used irony-to inspire emotion, to provoke thought, and to initiate social change.
20203
Poetry of Place: Poetry, Landscape, Space in Anglo Amer Tradition
Ludwig, Jennifer
TuTh 4:30-5:50
This is a course in how places-both internal and external-are read and written in and through poetry, and the theorization of poetry itself as a "space." Poets include Wordsworth, Blake, Frost, Williams, Milton, Rich. Critics include Harvey, Lefebvre, Buell, Bachelard.
20502
On London's Ruins: Imagining the Future in 19th C Britain
Strang, Hilary
TuTh 1:30-2:50
What kind of project is it to write about the future? Do stories of the future critique present social arrangements or simply attempt to escape from them? This class examines nineteenth century British texts that wrestle with questions of crisis, political optimism, and faith in progress by imagining the world remade, both beautifully and horrifyingly. We will read a range of nineteenth century texts -both prose and poetry-from canonical (Shelley, Arnold) and thoroughly un-canonical (Shiel, Chesney) authors.
21903
The Victorian Novel
Hadley, Elaine
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This is a course that considers the Victorian novel within the broader history and theory of the novel form, its function within Victorian society, and its dialogue with other forms of cultural representation during the period. We will read novels or novellas by Dickens, Gaskell, Bronte, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy, and, at the end of the quarter, consider the continuing impact of the Victorian multiplot novel on contemporary writing. Along with the novels, we will be reading secondary scholarship on the novel, and contemporary primary materials that join the discussions expressed in the novels themselves.
22800
Chicago
Knight, Janice
TuTh 10:30-11:50
In this course we will sample some of Chicago's wonders, exploring aspects of its history, literature, architecture, neighborhoods, and peoples. We begin with study of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the early history of Chicago as a mecca for domestic and international immigrants. In subsequent weeks we will examine the structure of neighborhood communities, local debates about cultural diversity and group assimilation, and the ideology and artifacts of art movements centered in Chicago. This is an interdisciplinary course focusing not only on literary and historical texts, but also analyzing Chicago's architecture, visual artifacts and public art forms, local cultural styles, museum collections and curatorial practices. We will first explore Chicago sites textually, then virtually via the web, and finally in "real time:" Students will be required to visit various Chicago neighborhoods and cultural institutions.
25003
Image of the Jew in Amer Novel: Populism, Nativism, and Beyond
Wolff, Nathan
MW 4:30-5:50
This course examines representations of the Jew in American literature, focusing on the period 1880-1925. Authors include James, Cahan, Norris, and Cather. Critics and historians include Richard Hofstadter, John Higham, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Walter Benn Michaels, and Daniel Boyarin.
25103
Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her verse collection Annie Allen. Eight years earlier, For My People brought Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Poets award. Ann Petry's The Street became a million-seller novel upon its publication in 1946. A Raisin in the Sun's twinned successes as a Broadway hit and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959 established Lorraine Hansberry as a playwright of note.
This second "woman's era" in African American literature is often neglected as one compared to those of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In this course, we will attend to this group of writers, to account for the unprecedented critical and popular acclaim that they received during the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the writings of Brooks, Walker, Petry and Hansberry, we will consider the following issues:
How might we theorize the thematic and formal appeal of their works-what traditions did these writers continue, what innovations did they establish, and why did their craft and concerns resonate so keenly with mid-20th century American reading publics? What historiographies and sociologies might account for their formation as a cultural cohort-in what friendship and professional networks did these writers circulate? Why was their work so readily accommodated by the mainstream print venues? How did their circuits of contact and influence differ from support systems that black women writers enjoyed (or lacked) in prior or subsequent times? When read in sync with the governing ideals of literary culture and public intellectual life during the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement eras, what models of black female authorship and intellectual authority emerge from this time?
25601
Nineteenth Century American Gothic
Veeder, William
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will trace the "Gothic" tradition in America from its initial manifestations in Brown and Irving through its first great flowering in the "American Renaissance" era of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. We will emphasize questions of methodology as well as practicing close analysis and defining a literary tradition.
26900
Postwar U. S. Literature
Nelson, Deborah L.
TuTh 1:30-2:50
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.
27300
The Harlem Renaissance
Warren, Kenneth
MW 3:00-4:20
In this course we will first examine the major descriptions and evaluations of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary period ( Nathan Huggins, David Levering Lewis, Houston Baker, George Huchinson), and then we will take up some of the chief creative and intellectual architects of the movement: Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W.E.B Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and others.
27901
Re-Defining Af Am Cinema
Stewart, Jacqueline
What is "African American Cinema"? Must a film be produced by African Americans, feature a Black cast, or address a Black audience in order to be classified as an "African American film"? Is there a discernible Black film aesthetic? Can a Black film be produced within the Hollywood studio system? How important are these distinctions? This course examines a wide variety of films ("race movies" of the early 20th century; fiction films; documentaries; animation; films made for television and the Internet) to explore how notions of African American authorship, content and reception have been defined and redefined in relation to dominant and independent media histories and institutions.
English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago