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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 2007 Courses
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| 10400 | Introduction to Poetry | |
| 11100 | Critical Perspectives | |
| 12800 | Theories of Media | |
| 13000 | Academic and Professional Writing (LRS) | |
| 13900 | History and Theory of Drama 2 | |
| 15204 | Unworthy Bodies: Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript | |
| 16401 | Renaissance Revenge Drama | |
| 16500 | Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies | |
| 18901 | Origins of the English Novel | |
| 20204 | Wordsworth: Theory and History | |
| 22202 | Reading Freud | |
| 24000 | Ulysses | |
| 25404 | The American Novel 1790-1860 | |
| 25911 | Urban Zones of Modernism and Modernity | |
| 27200 | New England Literary Cultures | |
| 27600 | Cinema in Africa | |
| 29819 | The Modernist Long Poem | |
| 29820 | Wallace Stevens and After |
10400
Introduction to Poetry
von Hallberg, Robert
TuTh 10:30-11:50
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.
11100 Critical Perspectives
Torrey, Nicholas
MW 3:00-4:20
Wolff, Nathan
TuTh 10:30-11:50
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.
12800
Theories of Media
Mitchell, W.J.T.
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. PQ: Any 100-level ARTH or COVA course, or consent of instructor.
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
13900
History and Theory of Drama 2
Bevington, David
TuTh 12:00-1:20
A survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden. The 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.
15204
Unworthy Bodies: Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript
Kim, Susan
The four "other" works in the Beowulf manuscript, the "Wonders of the East," the "Letter from Alexander to Aristotle," Judith, and the "Life of St. Christopher," are rarely examined closely, even for the context they provide for Beowulf. Yet these texts provide much insight not only into the reading of Beowulf, but also into Anglo-Saxon literature and culture, as well as the construction of modern interpretations. In Kenneth Sisam's phrase, these works at the very least indicate "a special interest in monsters" throughout the manuscript. This "special interest in monsters," and its own other, the interest in normative corporeal, linguistic, religious, and cultural identity, will be the focus of the seminar. In addition to the five works of the Beowulf manuscript, we will read, as both primary and secondary texts, a number of critical and theoretical studies. This course meets at the Newberry Library. (For further information, contact Christina von Nolcken at mcv4@uchicago.edu).
16401
Renaissance Revenge Drama
Mazzio, Carla
MW 1:30-2:50
This course will explore tropes and dramas of revenge in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. We will consider revenge as a form of performance and repetition, as a mode of historical representation, and as a genre preoccupied with questions of agency, justice, social and national forms of government, and the possibility of articulating-and inflicting-various forms of hurt. We will compare revenges by Shakespeare such as Titus Andronicus and Hamlet with other contemporary revenge dramas such as The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi, and consider the relationships between theater, revenge, and vocabularies of vulnerability, injury and compensation available to Renaissance writers and dramatists.
16500
Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Bevington, David
TuTh 1:30-2:50
An exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history play and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida.
18901
Origins of the English Novel
Macpherson, Sandra
TuTh 9:00-10:20
Origins of the English Novel: a survey of English novels written before 1800, and of the critical literature on the rise of the novel form in England. Texts will include secondary criticism by Watt, McKeon, Gallagher, Lynch, Woloch, Miller; and novels such as Behn's Oronooko, Heywood's Love in Excess, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Burney's Camilla, and Sterne's Sentimental Journey.
20204
Wordsworth: Theory and History
Chudgar, Neil
TuTh 12:00-1:20
This is a course about theory--what it is, why it happens, and how it relates to literature and history. Our discussion will be focused by Wordsworth's early poems, which have provoked intense theoretical interest ever since their publication. We will read Wordsworth's texts; examine how theory has engaged with them, from 1798 to the present; and investigate how history informs those theoretical engagements. Although Wordsworth will focus our discussion, students will be encouraged to use the ideas of this course to pursue their own theoretical interests, whatever they may be.
22202
Reading Freud
Miller, Mark
TuTh 10:30-11:50
The fate of Freud's writings in the late 20th and early 21st century has been a peculiar one. On the one hand, his work had been declared by many to be unscientific, intellectually bankrupt, and morally suspicious. On the other, his writings continue to be a source of inspiration and provocation, both directly and indirectly, not only to psychoanalytic theory, but to feminism, queer theory, film theory, literary and cultural studies, and throughout the arts and popular culture. This is clearly a situation that calls for some rethinking of what Freud's work amounts to. The purpose of this course will be to take some initial steps towards such a rethinking, by returning to a careful consideration of Freud's texts. We will mainly be concerned with Freud not as the source of a theory of the psyche, much less a theory capable of yielding a therapeutic practice, but with Freud as a speculative thinker concerned with the ontology of desire, a thinker nagged by questions with respect to which he remained restless and uncertain. As such, we will to a large extent set to the side some topics that many have taken to be the central ones for understanding psychoanalysis, including Freud's various psychic topographies, the Oedipus complex, traumatic and developmental narratives generally, and the therapeutic situation; and when these do concern us, they will be as sites of disturbance rather than the production of perspicuous theory. The exact reading list is yet to be determined, but it will most likely include Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a case study or two such as Dora or the Wolf Man, selections from The Interpretation of Dreams, "Mourning and Melancholia," "The Economic Problem of Masochism," and "A Child is Being Beaten."
24000
Ulysses
Ruddick, Lisa
MW 3:00-4:20
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.
25404
The American Novel 1790-1860
Slauter, Eric
MW 1:30-2:50
A survey of major and minor texts from the eighteenth century to the present with special attention to relations between the American novel and American politics and to the rise, fall, and reconfiguration of different fictional modes (epistolary, gothic, sentimental, realist, modernist, postmodernist).
25911
Urban Zones of Modernism and Modernity
Scappettone, Jennifer
MW 4:30-5:50
This "geographical history" of modernism will track intertwining and clashing forces defining the 20th-century avant-garde through their topographical touchstones. We will examine literary representations of delimited zones summoned in documentary or preservative modes as well as utopian projections and schemes for the metropolis writ large. Occupying the objectives of outsiders and insiders in tandem, we will consider texts not only as representations of urban space, but as inventors of it. We will try to detect the reciprocal interference of public and private interests, work and leisure, fortune and emiseration within the several precincts of our concentration as we ask what new languages and forms were enabled by an urban compression of variegated ethnic and linguistic traditions. Our primary sites of focus will be Paris, Venice, and New York, but we will necessarily (and according to class interests) digress "elsewhere." Major readings will be drawn from Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, Elias Canetti, and T.J. Clark-and from Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, F.T. Marinetti, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and Louis Zukofsky; we will also consider pertinent visual and architectural projects. Readings will be given in English, but students with experience in other languages are encouraged to read primary texts in the original. Two papers and a presentation to the seminar will be required.
27200
New England Literary Cultures
Knight, Janice
TuTh 12:00-1:20
Often termed the "American Renaissance," the three decades between 1830 and 1860 marked the emergence of some of America's most influential writers and texts. We will read selected works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville (including Moby Dick), Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Margaret Fuller. In some sense, this course might be titled "Transcendentalism and Its Discontents." In the decades leading up to Civil War, the philosophical idealism of Emerson and Thoreau was countered by authors for whom human nature was leavened by self-interested desire, destructive perfectionism, and capitalist greed. We will explore projects of reform (focusing especially on abolitionist writings) and utopian experiments, as well as the political critiques characterizing the work of such writers as Melville and Stowe. Our discussions will also be attentive to such issues as the tension between cultural tradition and literary innovation, the resonances between the literary and visual arts, the relationship between religion and reform, "high" art and popular literary expression, and the politics of culture in these crucial decades that marked the emergence of a home-grown, American romantic tradition.
27600
Cinema in Africa
Kruger, Loren
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.
29819
The Modernist Long Poem
Reddy, Srikanth
TuTh 3:00-4:20
Modernist poetry is most often studied in its lyric form. (The highly impacted poetic couplet of Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" provides a typical example). But Modernist verse is a far more sprawling, complex, and unruly affair than it might seem to be from the miniaturist's perspective. In this course we will examine several works of longer Modernist poems by writers such as Eliot, Williams, and Stein in order to consider the problems of literary ambition, scope, and complexity within the period. The careful and attentive reading of major Modernist texts such as Eliot's "Four Quartets" will take priority over any particular theoretical or critical methodology over the course of the quarter. This class is open to advanced undergraduates and master's students.
29820
Wallace Stevens and After
Olson, Liesl
MW 3:00-4:20
This course will examine modern and contemporary poetry's challenge to the ideals of romanticism, looking closely at how the imagination has been reconsidered in more recent American poetry. While some accounts of post-war American poetry situate T.S. Eliot and/or Ezra Pound as modernism's most driving influences, this course proposes to look at the different legacy of Wallace Stevens, whose presence in contemporary poetry continues to grow, both in avant-garde and more mainstream poetic circles. We will begin with Stevens's long poems and his critical essays, considering how he defines the difference between romanticism and sentimentalism, his discussion of analogy and metaphor, the tension between "imagination and reality," and his theory of the commonplace. Readings will likely include the poetry of Louis Zukofsky, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Clark Coolidge, Jorie Graham, and Robert Duncan. At least one class (possibly two) will be dedicated to examining manuscripts from the poetry archives at the Regenstein.
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