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 |
Winter 2005 Courses
10100 Critical Perspectives
Ford, Thomas
TuTh 12:00-1:20
Translation and Imitation. The concepts of translation and imitation bridge postcolonial theory and certain types of Marxist literary criticism. Robert Lowell's Imitations, a work that comprises a Western canon in miniature, will introduce themes of cultural poetics that can then be investigated and countered through these two influential modes of theory. Critics read will range from Benjamin and Foucault to Edward Said; other writers considered will include Derek Walcott and Jean Rhys.
10400 Introduction to Poetry
Izenberg, Oren
TuTh 3:00-4:20
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.
10700 Introduction to Fiction: Short Story
Veeder, William
MW 3:00-4:20
E
In the first half of this course, we focus on the principal elements that contribute to effect in fiction (setting, characterization, style, imagery, and structure) in order to understand the variety of effects possible with each element. We read several different writers in each of the first five weeks. In the second half of the course, we bring the elements together and study how they work in concert. This detailed study concentrates on one or, at most, two texts a week.
11502 Literary Criticism from Aristotle to Eliot
Scodel, Joshua
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will hit the high points of literary criticism in the West up to the 1920's. Critics to be read (aside from those in the title) include (at least): Longinus, Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, Arnold, and Wilde. There will be one shorter and one longer paper.
12401 Beginning Fiction Workshop
Logue, Antonia
Tu 3:00-6:00
A workshop that will meet weekly to read, discuss and analyze students' original work. Students will be expected to re-write, revise and re- evaluate from week to week. Lectures will be based on issues that arise from student work. There will be frequent exercises outside the students' own writing. PQ: Consent of instructor.
12406 Performance Poetry
Salach, Cin
TuTh 10:30-11:50
A good performance poem starts with a great written poem. Most of the time. First we'll write them, then we'll sing them. Dance them. Draw them. Serve them up on good china. Bring them home to meet our mothers. There are as many ways to perform a poem as there are to write one. Come discover/develop/reveal your style, on the page and on the stage in a safe, inspiring, encouraging environment. Say your truth out loud. Split the world open. Some of what to expect: In-class writing assignments, out-of-class field trips, performance of your own and other poet's work, theater exercises, collaborative exploration, critiquing of performance poetry videos and recordings, and discussion of written and performed student work. PQ: Consent of instructor.
12507 Advanced Fiction: The Longer Manuscript
Obejas, Achy
Tu
6:00-9:00
In order to gain admission to this class, students must be working on longer narratives, whether novels, novellas, or connected short stories. The workshop meets once weekly to read, discuss and analyze students' original work. Students re-write, revise and re- evaluate from week to week. In addition students will be expected to critique peer writing in depth. Outside readings will be provided. PQ: Consent of Instructor.
12702 Writing Profiles
Felsenthal, Carol
W 3:00-6:00
This course will focus on techniques for writing magazine-length profiles and, where desired, on expanding profiles into book-length biographies. Class reading will consist of skillfully executed profiles, both current and classic, and discussion of why and how these profiles illuminate a subject. Profiles will be culled from such magazines as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, New York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Esquire, Elle, and Chicago. Profiles will cover a variety of subjects-- politicians, university presidents, educators, actors, directors, business leaders, journalists, people in the art, literary, music worlds. Students will select a profile subject, looking for multi-dimensional people who have not been written about widely or who can accommodate a fresh angle. They will approach that subject or those close to the subject for cooperation. They will learn how to pursue a subject when cooperation is denied. The art of conducting interviews will be discussed and practiced. Students will select sources (in the case of living or recently deceased subjects, they will compile a list of key interviewees, learn how to find and gain access to subjects' papers and correspondence, and navigate laws regarding fair usage of such material. By the end of the quarter, students will have written a 5,000-10,000-word profile. Actual publication of the article will have no bearing on evaluation of students' performance; but, for those so inclined, the instructor will help decide on an appropriate magazine, offer suggestions on writing a query letter, and will also help students through the process of expanding a profile into a biography.
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
13501 TV Writing: Situation Comedy
Ferrara, Ed
In this intensive workshop-oriented seminar, students will learn the basics of the TV sitcom writing process by participation, culminating in the creation of their own 1st draft, half-hour spec script. Students will also examine many of the basic principles of comedy writing, focusing on comic characters, comedic premises, and story structure. Class meetings will involve lectures/discussions about various concepts pertinent to the sitcom form, exercises designed to reinforce comedic analysis techniques presented, as well as in-class viewing and deconstruction of exemplary sitcom scenes and episodes. Students will be responsible for completing a variety of sequential assignments that will, in effect, chart their progress as they build their first-draft script. Students will be required weekly to watch sitcoms out-of-class. Classroom participation is mandatory. Strict attendance policy. Writing sample and application required for admission.
13900 History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David Rudall, Nick
TuTh 12:00-1:20
C,F,H
History and Theory of Drama I is not a prerequisite. A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the late-seventeenth century into the twentieth: Molière, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard. Attention will also be paid to theorists of the drama, including Stanislavsky, Artaud, and Grotowski. The winter-quarter course, like the autumn-quarter course, features voluntary but highly recommended end-of-week workshops in which individual scenes will be read aloud dramatically and discussed. Assignments at mid-quarter and at the end of the quarter will give the option of two substantial essays, or (in place of either or both) the putting on of a short scene in cooperation with some other members of the class. Acting skill is not required; the point is to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report. Cross listed courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
15102 Newberry Library Seminar: Old English
Niles, John
B,H
The Discovery and Invention of Old English Literature. The title of this seminar plays on the Latin word inventio, a term whose meaning ranges from 'discovery" to 'invention'. During the first two thirds of each seminar meeting we will be translating (and to some extent 'discovering') Old English texts with precise attention to their grammar, style, lexicon, and thematic context. During the rest of each meeting we will look at rare books in which those texts were first presented to a post-medieval reading public, thereby promoting their discovery by an unattended audience while also inventing them as modern artifacts. Early editions drawn from the Special Collections of the Newberry Library will be compared with current scholarly editions so as to reveal the underlying assumptions on both sides.
Each meeting will be devoted to different type of text. We will start with prose excerpts from the Old English Gospels, the writings of Aelfric, the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Old English law codes, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Later we will turn our attention to poetic texts, including selections from the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and Beowulf, still comparing current editions of those texts with early ones. As time permits, we will take a look at early dictionaries and grammars of Old English. The point of the seminar will be to develop students' reading knowledge of Old English while at the same time sharpening their awareness of the degree to which Old English literature, as it has presented to the modern reading public, is the creation of successive generations of scholars building on one another's work.
The prerequisite for enrollment is at least one full term of Old English. Students who take the course for credit will be expected to write a term paper of a length appropriate to their individual level of training. Everyone enrolled in the seminar will 'present' at least one rare book to the group.
PQ: Eng 149/349 or equivalent. This course meets at the Newberry Library; for more information, consult Christina von Nolcken (702-7977, mcv4@midway.uchicago.edu).
15200 Beowulf
von Nolcken, Christina
MW 3:00-4:20
B,D,H
This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); we will also draw on the Newberry Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions when discussing textual and paleographical matters. Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. Prerequisite: Eng 149/349 or equivalent.
16300 Renaissance Epic
Murrin, Michael
TuTh 3:00-4:20
B,D,H
A study of classical epic in the Renaissance or Early Modern period. Emphasis will be both on texts and on classical epic theory. We will read Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Camões' Lusiads, and Milton's Paradise Lost. A paper will be required and perhaps an examination.
16700 Shakespeare in Performance
Witt, Gavin
TBA
TBA
This course explores the dramatic texts of Shakespeare through scene-study and the mechanics of performance. Students will begin by working to develop awareness of and freedom with the verse in the sonnets. Moving toward more extensive dialogue and scene-work from the plays, students will explore the building blocks of performing Shakespeare - from the text itself to the actor’s voice and body. The class will teach specific approaches to both verse and prose, developing a methodology of analysis, preparation, and performance. Each participant will direct and perform scenes for class. Previous theater experience helpful but not required.
16703 Shakespeare's Imagery
Plotinsky, Benjamin
TuTh 9:00-10:20
B,F,H
Students in this course explore the field of Shakespearean imagery, studying nine plays and one poem to recognize and understand the complicated networks of images that underlie much of Shakespeare's work. Emphasis is placed on close reading.
18600 Classical Film Theory
Lastra, James
F
This course examines major texts in film theory from Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg in the 1910s through André Bazin's writings in the 1940s and 1950s. We will devote special attention to the emergence of issues that continue to be of major importance, such as the film/language analogy, film semiotics, spectatorship, realism, montage, the modernism/mass culture debate, and the relationship between film history and film style. We will concentrate on the major theoretical writings of Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Bela Balazs, Bazin, as well as writings by Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Jean Mitry, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and others.
19501 Epistolary Novel in Europe
Schiffman, Robyn
The enduring appeal of epistolary fiction, from its sixteenth-century beginnings through to its resurgence in the last thirty years, reveals our fascination with reading other people's private thoughts and reflections. This course examines the European novel of letters during its heyday from the 1740s through its decline in the 1840s. We will concentrate on how epistolary novels provide unique access to the modern sexual self as expressed in marriage, adultery, homosexuality, and incest. Novels include Richardson's Pamela (1741), Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748-49), Goethe's Werther (1774), Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons (1782), Brown's, The Power of Sympathy (1789), Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), as well as E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (1816), excerpts from Walter Scott's Redgauntlet (1824), Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844-45), and Thomas de Quincey's, "The English Mail Coach"(1849). All texts will be read in English, but students who know French or German will be encouraged to read the relevant texts in the original.
20202 Lyrical Ballads: Romantic Experiment in the 1790’s
Strang, Hilary
This course examines and contextualizes a book often seen as initiating the 'Romantic Age,' Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. We will concentrate on Wordsworth's contributions to the text, including the famous Prefaces of 1800/1802, asking what it means, in the wake of the French revolution and the social and political upheavals of the 1790s in Britain, to claim to be "a man speaking to men." To this end, we will explore the emergent idea of the rights of man, the Romantic engagement with Enlightenment anthropology, as well as texts that interrogate the very promise that such notions of "man" seem to hold out. In addition to Lyrical Ballads, readings may include significant selections from Burke, Paine and Wollstonecraft; poems by Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and Blake; as well as significant contemporary criticism. Regular class participation, weekly response assignments, a presentation and a final paper will be required.
20702 Anomalous Ireland
Skeen, Catherine
The study of Ireland and its literature tends to be dominated by narratives: narratives about the "nation," for example, or the Gael, the Catholic church, the "land," colonialism, sectarianism, or language. Relying on continuities, samenesses, "traditions," these narratives achieve a sweeping explanatory power - but at a cost. They tell us little about anomalous" Ireland : the writers, texts, periods, and places that don't seem to (or don't want to) "fit." In this course we will turn our attention to Irish anomalousness, trying to understand it as a useful trope - one that puts pressure on dominant narratives about Irish culture and literature - while trying to resist the temptation to turn it into yet another sweeping narrative. Readings will be drawn from the last three hundred years and will fall into three (overlapping, but distinct) categories: (1) those that propose a kind of anomaly status for Ireland itself (eighteenth-century poems and economic tracts; famine writings; postcolonial theory), (2) those that are odd or anomalous from the point of view of generic convention or the Irish literary canon (Swift; Beckett; nineteenth-century Irish novels), and (3) those that explore subjects and subjectivities that have historically been construed as anomalous within "Irish" culture (gender and sexuality; the city; emigrants/immigrants; non-Catholics). Students will be required to do archival work, an in-class presentation, one short and one longer paper.
20801 Roaring Girls: Gender and Renaissance Drama
Murray, Stephanie
This course will address some of the issues, themes, and techniques of reading Renaissance drama, both as a historical period and as a literary genre. The primary focus of the course will be on how gender, culture, and class is represented in the plays, through physical presentation onstage, through what other characters say about female characters, and through what the female characters themselves have to say. Close reading will be essential in this process, as the specific language of gender will be investigated, but we will also be addressing the historical context of these representations through consideration of the material environment of the original staging.
21401 Theories of Sex and Gender
Berlant, Lauren
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Introduction to Theories of Sex/Gender: Ideology, Culture, and Sexuality: This year this interdisciplinary course will focus on embodiment and ordinariness, or bodies in space, traversing the work of geography and related disciplines. Beginning with the formalist materialism of Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Jim Clifford, and Gayatri Spivak, we will then turn to more practice-based non-spaces made by the performance of emotion, attachment (rhizomatics), rhetorical exchange (from hate speech to blogging), and sex. Theorists from this section will include: Rosi Bradotti, Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Ann Cvetkovich, Lisa Duggan, David Eng, Saidiya Hartman, and Kathleen Stewart. MAPH and English students given preference. PQ: Consent of instructor required; GNDR 10100-10200 recommended.
22900 Utopia / Dystopia: An Introduction
Rzepka, Adam
MW 3:00-4:20
This course will introduce students to a wide range of utopian and dystopian writing, including both definitive models and unusual limit-cases. The readings follow a long chronology from Plato’s foundational proposals in the Republic to William Gibson’s invention of cyberspace in Neuromancer, and range through literary, philosophical, historical, fantastical, and architectural genres along the way.
24101 Middlemarch
Rothfield, Larry
TuTh 9:00-10:20
C,E,H
This course will spend the entire quarter focusing on Eliot's masterwork, with some attention to the novel's literary and intellectual context.
25103 Black Women Writers of the 1940s and 1950s
Goldsby, Jacqueline
TuTh 9:00-10:20
When and Where They Entered: Black Women Writers of the 1940s and 1950s: 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?
25303 Approaches to American Studies
Orchard, William
This course will take measure of what Donald Pease has called the "disciplinary unconscious and field imaginary" of American Studies. In doing so, we will explore a variety of themes, theoretical influences, and methodological approaches currently alive in American Studies as well as survey works that were fundamental to the field's establishment. While American Studies is often figured as an interdisciplinary endeavor that occurs between existing disciplinary formations, this course will think of the field as transdisciplinary. The class will consider how to research and work across disciplines while still producing work that participates in the conventions of a given discipline. In particular, we will explore why American Studies' investments in material reality and popular experience have been attractive to scholars trained in literature departments. In our practical attempts to utilize these approaches, we will collectively reflect on two texts during the course. For the first half of the course, the text will be Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"(1856), while the film Nurse Betty (dir. Neil LaBute, 2000) will be our focus for the final half.
25501 Wandering Women
Burstein, Jessica
MW 3:00-4:20
What are the semantics of a sidewalk? What does it mean to walk to be free to choose one's own way? This course engages the conjunctions of mobility, urbanity, and female subjectivity. We will explore the relationships between depictions of female sexuality and activities such as shopping, prostitution, tourism, and flâneurie. Texts and authors will include Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha," Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Dorothy Parker. We will read as well a few critical texts to (dis)orient ourselves, including Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel.
25800 The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow
Warren, Kenneth
TuTh 1:30-2:50
A,C,E,G
Taken as a whole, the fiction of Richard Wright, Willam Faulkner, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor and James Baldwin constitutes a powerful testament to the common humanity of black and white Americans in a nation where "separate but equal” in matters of race was deemed consistent with the law of the land. How decisive was the humanistic eloquence of these writers in helping to shift the nations legal climate against de jure segregation? How successful was the American novel of race in coming to terms with the turbulent social reality of the civil rights era?
26701 Whitman and His Successors
von Hallberg, Robert Strand, Mark
M 3:00-5:50
C,D
This course will treat Whitman's poetry, and then its influence on two later poets: the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
28101 The Films of Max Ophuls
Hansen, Miriam
F
Max Ophuls has variously been discussed as master of the long take and mise-en-scene, of theatrical adaptation and self-conscious narration; as director of the "woman's film," of melodramatic pathos and irony; and as artist and analyst of erotic - and cinematic -- obsession. Following the trajectory of his life and work from Germany through France, Italy, Hollywood, and back to Europe, we will consider Ophuls' films in terms of style and genre; the question of his gynocentric aesthetic and the feminist debate surrounding it; authorship and industrial production; and the challenge diasporic film practice poses to paradigms of national cinema and national film history. Films include Liebelei, La Signora di tutti, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, The Reckless Moment, La Ronde, Madame de..., Le Plaisir, and Lola Montès.
29300 History of International Cinema I-Silent Era
Gunning, Tom
The aim of this course is to introduce students to what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological; we will also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking.
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.
29809 Advanced Seminar: Poetry
Reddy, Srikanth
M 3:00-6:00
This course is an advanced creative writing seminar intended primarily for seniors writing honors theses in creative writing as well as graduate students who are writing poetry at an advanced level. (There is, however, usually enough room in the class to accommodate additional students -- so all qualified undergraduates are encouraged to apply). Because it is a thesis seminar, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic "projects." We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, the long poem, the poetry collection, and the book-length poem as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic "projects," considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students' work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.
P.Q. Consent of instructor, email submission of 3-5 poems to creative writing department.
29815 Literary Seminar: Stein & Wittgenstein
Reddy, Srikanth
W 3:00-6:00
C,D
This course will examine the work of Gertrude Stein in light of Wittgenstein's writings on language and reality. Our exploration will take place primarily in the field of poetics; we will consider Wittgenstein's Tractatus, for instance, as offering something of a philosophical "gloss" on texts such as Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation." Topics will include the role of language games in Stein's oeuvre; aphorism and Modernist poetics; the place of digression in the philosophical lyric; the meditative epic; the interpenetration of philosophical and poetic discourse in early twentieth- century intellectual life. Open to undergraduates and graduate students.
29816 Advanced Seminar: Creative Writing Fiction
Obejas, Achy
W 6:00-9:00
The advanced fiction course focuses on the extended development necessary for the completion of longer material, specifically the creative thesis. Students should already have a body of work in process (this can be in many different stages), and be prepared to discuss their ideas and plans for their final manuscript in lieu of a formal proposal. This course will concentrate on putting it all together: such matters as novel structure and movement/ collected short story structure and movement, dimensions of point of view, voice, character development, theme and other questions students have within the writing process. A workshop format will be utilized to give maxim feedback and greater understanding of audience in writing. PQ: Consent of instructor.
29817 Honors Seminar: Prose
Stielstra, Megan
Th 3:00-6:00
This advanced fiction course focuses on the extended development necessary for the completion of longer material, specifically the creative thesis. Students should already have a body of work in process (this can be in many different stages), and be prepared to discuss their ideas and plans for their final manuscript in lieu of a formal proposal. This course will concentrate on putting it all together: such matters as novel structure and movement/ collected short story structure and movement, dimensions of point of view, voice, character development, theme and other questions students have within the writing process. A workshop format will be utilized to give maximum feedback and greater understanding of audience in writing. The major goals of the advanced fiction seminar course are to guide students in the discovery of the structure of their novels, or, if they are writing short story collections, the many and varied ways in which a short story can be told. The activities of the course will emphasize close reading of the assigned texts with particular to the way in which how point of view is affecting the overall structure and movement of the assigned novels or short stories. Recall and comment activities will be used extensively, as well as journal work aimed directly at writing problems and solutions the student is encountering in his or her own fiction, small group activities that utilize the group as a stand-in for the book-buying audience beyond the classroom, as well as extensive rewriting of selected sections of the beginning, middle, and endings of the students' books. PQ: Consent of instructor.
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
English Department Home | Contact
Us | Humanities | UChicago