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 2009 Undergraduate Courses
|
|
|
| 13000/33000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | 15600 | Medieval English Literature |
| 16600 | Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances | |
| 16707 | Elizabethan Low-Life | |
| 17501 | Milton | |
| 18903/36010 | The Lives of Animals | |
| 18904 | The Rise of the Novel | |
| 20206 | Dickinson and Thoreau: Writing as a Way of Life | |
| 20207 | Romantic Origins | |
| 20903 | Science Fiction in the 19th Century | |
| 21907 | Reforming the Nation | |
| 22812/32812 | The Alice Books | |
| 24000 | Ulysses | |
| 24203 | Fashion and Literature | |
| 24304 | India in English | |
| 25103/47901 | Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s | |
| 25918 | Oceanic America: A Literary Geography | |
| 25919 | William Faulkner | |
| 25921/43705 | Poetics of Erasure | |
| 27800/47800 | American Poetry from 1945 to Present | |
| 29403 | American Literature, Hollywood Cinema |
ENGL 13000/33000 Academic and Professional Writing (LRS)
McEnerney, Larry; Cochran, Kathryn;
Weiner, Tracy
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
ENGL 15600
Medieval English Literature
Schleusener, Jay
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.
ENGL 16600 Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances
Strier, Richard
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.
ENGL 16707 Elizabethan Low-Life
Hahn, David
Elizabethan London witnessed an explosion in literature of the low—works about (and sometimes by) criminals and various other social outcasts. This class first offers an introduction to this rich and underappreciated body of literature; insodoing, we also seek to illuminate certain issues often obscured in canonical texts of this period (the issue of vagrancy and homelessness in King Lear, for example). We will engage and hopefully put pressure on certain scholarly approaches to the low-life in literature and history (questions about canon formation, print technology, genre classification, social history, media theory, slang's place in the history of the English language, etc). One of our guiding questions will be to what extent the literature of the "low" constitutes an alternate site of literary authority or, perhaps, represents an extension of the humanist project of mapping human nature in its various guises. Works will include ballads (such as Luke Hutton's Lamentation, 1596), pamphlets (Two Unnatural Murders, 1605), witness testimonies (A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play, 1552), confessions (Martin Markall, Beadle of Bridewell, 1610), prose fictions (The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594), and plays (The Honest Whore, 1604).
ENGL 17501 Milton
Scodel, Joshua
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.
ENGL 18903/36010 The Lives of Animals
Keenleyside, Heather
This course begins from Foucault's claim that "life" did not exist until the end of the eighteenth century. In order to consider what this claim might mean, we will look at a range of eighteenth-century texts that depict the "lives" of all kinds of things, animals, and human beings (both real and imagined). We will ask: what is the relationship between "life" in the sense of biology, a concept that traverses species distinctions and stakes its territory around animation, generation, and death, and "life" in the sense of biography, the narrative identity of an individual person? Readings will include selections from Descartes, Locke, Hume, as well as works by Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Equiano, and others. We'll also read essays or selections from Foucault, Deleuze, Anscombe, Thompson, and Coetzee.
ENGL 18904 The Rise of the Novel
Keenleyside, Heather
This course will introduce the early English novel through its most important critical account: Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. A central touchstone for all subsequent accounts of the English novel, Watt’s study continues to shape the way we think of the form and formation of the genre. In this course, we will read Watt, and we will read what Watt read: key works by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Austen. While we may supplement our readings with other critical materials (selections from McKeon, Armstrong, Lynch, Gallagher, Woloch), this course will mainly give students an opportunity to engage closely with primary materials.
ENGL 20206 Dickinson and Thoreau: Writing as a Way of Life
Kotin, Joshua
Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau are famous for writing in and about two very different forms of seclusion. Dickinson seems to have written for "her own Society": she rejected the public life of an artist in favor of a private life in poems and letters. Thoreau seems to have created his own society at Walden, and then to have transformed that society into public mythology in Walden. Both writers associated writing with seclusion, while at the same time, privileging writing as a way of life, as a way "to discover how to earn and spend our most wakeful hours" (to quote the philosopher Stanley Cavell).
ENGL 20207 Romantic Origins
Zitin, Abigail
Much romantic writing concerns the wellsprings of authenticity, casting a warm glow around childhood, nature, the imagination, and the idea of humanity uncorrupted by culture. Nevertheless, romanticism coincided with an age of social and political revolutions. This survey course, covering the years between 1790 and 1820 in Britain, explores the entanglement of these ideas. What's so compelling about origins in an era of transformation, and what's original to romanticism? What are its formal and thematic innovations, and what does it borrow? In order to answer these questions, we will read closely works by Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Coleridge, Barbauld, Keats, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, among others.
ENGL 20903 Science Fiction in the 19th Century
Blattberg, Ben
In this course, we are going to read science fiction short stories and novels in order to trace the sensibility shared by many nineteenth century canonical authors (Hawthorne, Melville) and some non-canonical authors (Chesney, Lane). We will attend to the ways in which these texts refigure the anxieties about and promises of science at a particular moment in history, paying attention to the ways in which this contributes to an alternative history of science fiction.
ENGL 21907 Reforming the Nation
Bonfiglio, Richard
The period between 1832 and 1867 Reform Bills in England is frequently remembered as the age of reform. While J. S. Mill and other Victorian Liberals worked to reform government, the great novelists of the period transformed the novel into a means of representing and reforming the nation through popular fiction. Novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Benjamin Disraeli used the novel as a vehicle to move their audience both physically, transporting their readers to various parts of the nation through the realistic description of place, as well as emotionally, cultivating a sense of social justice through the graphic depiction of poverty and corruption. In doing so, these authors traced how unjust institutions perpetuated social inequalities and how communities influenced the development of individuals. For the Victorian novelist, one had to see the nation clearly in order to change it. In addition to weekly readings, course requirements include a short and long paper.
ENGL 22812/32812 (PORT 26801/36801) The Alice Books
Tamen, Miguel
We will read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Some topics to be discussed are (alphabetically) animals, children, conversation, intention, justice and fairness, meaning of a word, malapropism, manners, pastoral, pictures, poems. Discussions will sometimes be accompanied by additional texts, which only occasionally count as secondary bibliography. Among these, we may read texts by Austin, Davidson, Empson, Oakeshott, Pitcher, Rawls, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others.
ENGL 24000 Ulysses
Ruddick, Lisa
This course takes students through Joyce's novel and exposes them to various recent critical approaches, with some excursions also into materials contemporary to Ulysses that can be placed in dialogue with the novel.
ENGL 24203 Fashion and Literature
Campbell, Timothy
TBA
ENGL 24304 India in English
Gandhi, Leela
This course examines the emergence of India as a theme in twentieth-century English fiction. We will consider a representative sample of texts, both fictional and non fictional, written about India by Indian and non-Indian writers. The subject will examine the historical contexts for the India-England connection, especially the impact of British imperialism. Elements of postcolonial theory will be brought to bear upon specific textual study.
ENGL 25103/47901 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, Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paule Marshall, 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?
ENGL 25918 Oceanic America: A Literary Geography
Scotch, Hank
This class will look at the representations of globalization in American literature through a variety of representations of the nation's oceans. The ocean, in American literature, has often functioned tropologically to describe a variety of experiences associated with American expansion: the ocean as a "wild" space free from the constraints of civilization, the internal ocean as a pyschic space, even the ocean as a model for an emerging modernist practice of formal arrangement in film and literature. We will think of the ocean geographically and metaphorically, and how they are related throughout the country’s history to the global circulation of an entire world system.
ENGL 25919 William Faulkner
Dahn, Eurie
In this course, we will read some of William Faulkner's best known novels. While emphasizing rigorous close readings of his texts, this course will also work to contextualize Faulkner's oeuvre within conversations and debates about race, modernism, Southern regionalism, and American citizenship of the time.
ENGL 25921/43705 Poetics of Erasure
Reddy, Srikanth
In the humanities, we ordinarily take various forms of writing as our object of study. This course, however, will investigate the poetics of unwriting in post-war English-language literature. In the wake of Anglo-American Modernism, an emerging tradition of authors has ventured to create poems not by "writing" them, but, rather, by erasing language from a pre-existing text. Ronald Johnson's Radi Os, a poem constructed by crossing out text from Milton's Paradise Lost—(hence the title, "Paradise Lost")—is perhaps the seminal work of this genre. From Radi Os to Tom Phillips' A Humument to contemporary works such as Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow, we will examine the poetics of erasure in relation to various theoretical and historical topoi of post-war Anglo-American aesthetics: visuality and disappearance in postmodern pictorial art, the deconstruction of écriture in avant-garde feminist literary practice, and the aesthetics of censorship, for example. As part of the coursework for this class, students will compose their own literary erasures in order to interrogate the normative model of writing as the inscription of one's interiority upon the tabula rasa of the blank page.
ENGL 27800/47800 American Poetry from 1945 to Present
Izenberg, Oren
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?"
This course has two goals. The first is to introduce you to a representative sampling of important work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Frank Bidart and others. Our close attention to the forms, modes and themes of American poetry in the last half-century will enable us to see the poetry of the present, in all its volume and variety, for all its originality and innovation, as deeply continuous with the poetry of the past.
The second goal will be to pose to the poetry of the present two recurrent and related questions. The first: Can there be a poetry of the present? Not just, that is, a poetry being written in the present, but one that responds to or represents the fleeting urgency of the lived moment without either refusing the unfinished present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or skipping over the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that they are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind?
ENGL 29403 American Literature, Hollywood Cinema
Hilsabeck, Burke
Much has been written about film adaptation and the mechanics of transposing novels and theatrical productions to the screen. The cinema's origins, however, admit of a great variety of relationships to a great variety of media. In the spirit of cinema's polyglot origins, this course will attempt to read new correspondences between the American literary tradition and the Hollywood cinema. We will read from Whitman, Emerson, Norris, and Steinbeck, and we will view films from Griffith, Ford, Cukor, and Hawks.
English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago