Twentieth Century, Contemporary, and Transnational

In this field at Chicago, as at many institutions, faculty and students often work across national cultures and disciplinary divides, using a variety of critical paradigms.  This is true for the very strong groups in film and media studies, modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, cultural studies, twentieth-century theory (particularly Frankfurt School aesthetics and feminist and gender theory), and fiction and popular culture listed under the Americanist heading, including Miriam Hansen, James Lastra, Robert von Hallberg, Oren Izenberg, Bill Brown, Lauren Berlant, and Deborah Nelson, many of whom direct projects and offer courses on Continental and British materials in addition to their work in American.  Working primarily in modern and contemporary British literature, Lisa Ruddick focuses on modernist fiction, poetry and poetics, and psychoanalytic theory, while Loren Kruger is a transnational comparatist specializing in drama, performance studies, and Marxist theories of modernism, with a particular strength in South Africa and Africa but broad knowledge of German, French, British, and American twentieth-century theater.  Leela Gandhi works on fin de siècle and early twentieth-century transnational radicalism and teaches courses on postcolonial theory and Indo-Anglian literature.  W. J. T. Mitchell also works on twentieth-century literary, aesthetic and political theory as well as art and media theory.  Lawrence Rothfield and Robin Valenza offer courses on twentieth-century and contemporary cultural and public policy.  The Department frequently collaborates with colleagues in History, Anthropology, Political Science, South Asian, East Asian, Comparative Literature, and the Center for Latin American Studies, for both curricular offerings and the direction of oral examinations and dissertations in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory and transnational and global literatures and cultures.  Resources are particularly strong for students interested in South Asian, East Asian, African, and Latin American or Caribbean cultures as these form parts of British and Anglophone literary cultures.

Salman Rushdie
Mokhtar Paki, 2001

Primary Faculty

Leela Gandhi

Loren Kruger

Lisa Ruddick
 

Associated Faculty

Elaine Hadley

W. J. T. Mitchell

Lawrence Rothfield

Robin Valenza

Selected Courses

• Marxism and Modern Culture
• Modernity and the Sense of Things
• Objects and Artifacts
• Towards Modernity
• Realism, Modernism, Socialism: The Politics of Literary Form
• The Modernist Child
• Frankfurt School on Cinema, Modernity, and Mass Culture
• Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Modern Poetry
• Poetry and Socio-linguistics
• Elements of Poetry and Poetics
• Radical Poetics
• Poetry and Being
• The Cinematic Lyric
• T.S. Eliot
• Gottfried Benn and T.S. Eliot
• Contemporary Book-Length Poems and Lyric Sequences
• Joyce’s Ulysses
• Virginia Woolf
• Fiction’s Fictions
• The Short Plays of Samuel Beckett
• Brechtian Representations: Theatre, Theory, Cinema
• Drama, Theatre, Spectacle, Performance
• Interpreting Imperialism
• The Homoerotics of Empire
• South African Literature in English: Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and Other Canonizations & Contestations
• Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and Southern African Writing
• Three African Women Writers
• Dialectic Today
• Literary Criticism and Theory Since Kant
• Topics in Literary Theory
• Critical Theory and the Life of Literature
• Totemism, Fetishism, and Idolatry
• Space, Place, and Landscape
• Media Theory
• Female Genius
• Psychoanalytic Interpretation