Courses

This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “porn,” “filth,” “art,” “adult,” “hardcore,” “softcore,” “trash,” and “extremity.” We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography’s invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically.

This course examines the centrality of opaque figures, happenings, and details to the workings of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel. To what degree are obscure elements in a work of fiction methodical in their appearance? Are enigmas necessarily code for something else? Where does the figure of the narrator live, exactly? Are characters more easily visualized, or less, when markers of race, class, and/or gender are invoked? Our first aim will be to identify the formal strategies and styles of opacity in modern and contemporary novels; our second will be to craft literary-critical arguments about the political and historical attitudes that seem to underlie these decisions. We’ll examine the assumptions and paradoxes of novel form brought to the fore by its blurry parts, and consider how these parts offer frameworks for analyzing the wayward activities of perception, belonging, and power. Through discussion and writing assignments, students will hone their skills of close reading, argumentation with concepts, and critical practice. Prospective reading list includes Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and recent novels by Raven Leilani and Weike Wang. 

In this course, we will survey the works of the poet William Wordsworth. We will read widely from his body of verse, paying close attention to questions of style, genre, and form. Throughout his poems and essays, Wordsworth addressed many questions that still matter to us today. What role might poetry play in modern life? How might we understand the relationship between the human imagination and the natural world? Can poetry help us make sense of history? We will consider these questions alongside Wordsworth’s poetic explorations of childhood, memory, autobiography, and political revolution. Select secondary criticism will help us understand Wordsworth’s cultural and historical context.

Jane Austen was a master stylist. This is one of many reasons why her novels have had such a lasting cultural impact. But what specifically are we talking about when we refer to Austen’s “style”? This course attempts to answer this question by exploring the development of Austen’s style across three of her major novels: the early Northanger Abbey (1803), the middle-period Sense and Sensibility (1811), and the late Persuasion (1818). Throughout, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret one of her trademark formal techniques, free indirect discourse. We will also address the question of literary style alongside a host of related topics: narration, characterization, focalization, and voice. Select secondary readings may include works by narratologists, philosophers, and literary critics.

This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love.

This course is an introduction to poetry by way of attention to poetry’s arts of condensation, its techniques for producing complexities of meaning in small spaces. While our readings are drawn from a wide historical range, they do not aim to provide a representative survey of English-language poetry. Rather, they serve as a series of explorations of the ways poetic signification works. We will practice slowing down our attention, noticing where things get dense or strange, engaging with the play of poetic language and form, and articulating the questions provoked by that engagement. Our aim is to become better at thinking through poetry: that is, both thinking through the questions we articulate as we grapple with poetic language and form, and thinking about the topics poetry grapples with by way of its peculiar modes of encounter with those problems. To give some focus to our explorations, we will turn throughout the course to questions of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and ask how poetry functions as a distinctive medium for exploring the intersections of subjectivity, desire, power, and social form.

In a series of classic essays, Walter Benjamin describes Paris as the dreamworld of modernity, crowning it the “capital of the nineteenth century.” This course follows Benjamin’s critique of the modern city as a “phantasmagoria,” but shifts the terrain of his argument to ask: what if London were seen as the center of a distinctly dreamlike modernity? What purchase do literature and art afford in the elaboration of this thought-experiment? In this class we will approach London as a city of utopian wishes and Gothic nightmares, exploring the real social conditions and mapping the built environments that mark the Big Smoke as an enduring site of collective fantasy. We will read writings by British authors like Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, and China Miéville, alongside works of popular and avant-garde film, comics, and critical theory, to accompany our sojourn through the dream-geography of a fantastical London.

This course may also involve site-specific field visits to archetypal London locations and an experimental research/ psychogeography final project.  (Fiction, 1830-1990, Theory)

The relationship between the construct of idealized femininity and food consumption has a long and troubled history; this course looks at this relationship through premodern Anglophone Literature. From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, this course situates discourses about "proper" gender performance and "proper" eating habits alongside those of race, religion, sexuality, commodity trade, and colonization to reveal the messy and complicated sociopolitical history of the dinner table.(Fiction, Pre-1650)

This course will explore the centrality of satire to the African American novel. By examining the genre of satire in general and in a set of African American novels and short stories, we will attend to how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. Focusing on the relationship between racism and capitalism, we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fiction writers may include Percival Everett, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Cord Jefferson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ishmael Reed. Critical writers may include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren.

This course explores the power of satire in works of fiction written by black Americans. As we read novels and essays written under the racist regime of Jim Crow and in its aftermath, we will approach satire as a flexible expressive practice that shapes critical judgment into an artistic form. Foundational to the form of the novel, satire is one of the oldest means by which literature has tried to intervene in the world. By examining the genre of satire in general and as African American writers have used it to interrogate the relationship between racism, capitalism, and cultural production in the U.S., we will examine how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. With an attention to the political economy of racism in the US and the role of literature in anti-racist struggle, we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fictional works include George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), an incisive work of science fiction and the first great African-American satirical novel; Ishmael Reed's carnivalesque "NeoHooDoo" novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972); and Percival Everett's experimental novel Erasure (2001) along with its recent film adaptation, American Fiction (2023). Critical writers may include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, Zora Neale Hurston, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren. 

“The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t,” writes French author Marie Darrieussecq in her 2023 memoir on insomnia, Sleepless. Darrieussecq exemplifies, here, a pithy grandiosity commonly born out of the debilitating state of insomnia. In this course, we will explore the broader history of literary insomnia by focusing on early modern English articulations of sleeplessness alongside their political and intellectual contexts—for instance, classical theorizations of insomnium (sometimes glossed as “nightmare”), melancholy, and the cultural politics of “biphasic sleep.” Students will also be encouraged to think alongside contemporary research and depictions of insomnia, especially as the condition becomes increasingly concerning in our increasingly sleep-deprived world. What might historical and literary study offer ongoing investigations of sleeplessness? From the bewitching “incubus” in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, to Macbeth’s dramatization of "murder'd sleep," to the poetic descriptions of "slumb'rous weight" and hellish restlessness in Milton’s Paradise Lost, this course seeks to uncover insights yielded by various efforts to render in writing this uniquely oppressive state of restlessness. 

This course will explore novels about climate change alongside works of critical theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. We will investigate how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its future persistence or supersession. In particular, we will attend to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to “make it new.” Thus, at the same time as we study the ways in which science fiction can render intelligible the causes and consequences of climate change, we will also debate modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction may include Kim Stanley Robinson, Jeff VanderMeer, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory may include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Amitav Ghosh, McKenzie Wark, and Darko Suvin.  (Fiction, 1830-1990, Theory)

The 20th century was rocked by a series of historical events that challenged the public to face the unimaginable: whether that meant finding language to absorb the violence of the Holocaust or articulate a connection to a history of enslavement, conceptualizing the potential for mutually-ensured destruction created by the atomic bomb or imagining environmental catastrophe. For some writers, the unimaginable has demanded that artists and writers find starkly unadorned ways of documenting it; ways of showing the public that what has happened is in fact real. At other times, the reality of the unimaginable could only be captured by the imaginary: American writers invented forms of writing the real that were absurdist, surreal, increasingly turning to innovations in genre fiction. How did these writers shape or reshape a sense of history as it was happening? What styles of writing are closest to the real? How does the fantastical grapple with history and testimony? The syllabus will pair texts that take documentary approaches to the major events of the century with those that use unreal and surreal ones. Possible pairings include John Hersey's "Hiroshima" with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and WEB DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire with Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Octavia Butler's Kindred with Angela Y. Davis' Women, Race, and Class. 

From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with radical politics. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter: the more style, the less substance: for example, the counterculture’s tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement and the Black Panthers’ star power is “radical chic” that undermined the seriousness of their willingness to use revolutionary violence. Why did political activists write and perform their politics this way? What made these politics radical – that is, what is it about them that rethought something from its roots or foundations? Does radical style always suggest a radical politics? This class mixes cultural history, political theory, and literary approaches to the moment of the new social movements of the 1960s. We’ll read the serious political texts that invented modern ideas of race, sex, gender, and class politics as having style of their own, and we’ll read them alongside the film, poetry, theater (street and otherwise) that made characterized the 60’s. We’ll also make good use of archives in Chicago, which was one of the primary centers for New Left political activity, and students will have a chance to do firsthand archival research. 

“We are scavengers,” reports the anonymous narrator of a 1990 manuscript written by theater maker Rachel Rosenthal. “The land doesn’t nourish us because the deserts are everywhere.” Environmental dread has loomed large over the past few decades, and practitioners working in a range of media have increasingly foregrounded the ecological as a primary aesthetic concern. This course will investigate how recent performances have sought to understand, address, and redress climate catastrophe. We will look to a range of material—possibly including work by Rosenthal, performance collective The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, playwrights Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, choreographers Jerome Bel, Radouan Mriziga, and Lara Kramer, artists Rebecca Belmore and Olafur Elliason, and many others—in order to examine what tactics performance offers for reckoning with environmental collapse.

In medieval literature, various modes of desire intersect in surprising ways: spiritual devotion unfolds through sensual longing, and personal pleasure intertwines with sacrificial love, producing structures of desire that are conflicting, disorienting, and not so dissimilar from our own. In this course, we will survey a range of late medieval genres to unpack the richly imaginative and experimental discourses of desire housed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Readings will include dream-vision poems like Pearl, where we will consider the overlaying of economic, domestic, and apocalyptic fantasies; to the hagiographical Book of Margery Kempe, where we will think through the entanglement of gender, embodied spirituality, and erotic encounter. We will interrogate how medieval texts trouble modernity's construction of "sacred" and "secular" desire as constitutive opposites, coming up with our own terms to better describe the interplay between these categories. How do medieval texts blend seemingly different modes of desire—holy and profane, specific and ambiguous, linear and asynchronic—to construct, obscure, and defamiliarize their objects of desire? What claims to selfhood, language, and knowledge are made by these hybrid models of desire and the multiple meanings they allow? Familiarity with medieval literature or Middle English is neither required nor expected.

This class offers a survey of the Late-Modernist British poetry movement The British Poetry Revival and its afterlives. After WWII, in resistance to a perceived stagnancy in British verse, and inspired by many of the young U.S. poets collected in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology (1960), young British poets collected around England and renewed British Modernism. Initially clustered around London, Cambridge, and some Northumbrian cities, the movement (dubbed “The British Poetry Revival”) has since grown to include the most innovative and vital poetic work written throughout the British Isles. 

Dense, loud, bombastic, aggressive: this vast corpus of work will offer students a view into recent British culture, economy, and politics, its world after the putative terminal decline of the empire, and its claimed “special relationship” with the United States. Its poets are now not just British, include among their number more women and queers, and are dispersed throughout the British Isles. This course will offer a survey of this movement from the 1960s to the present; reading will include its writing: from poetry to performance, correspondence to hallucinatory prose. Students will be asked to consider that poetry does not always look or feel the way we want it to, or the way we think it should.

This class will examine paranoid post-war American literature and cinema with a particular focus on its relationship to the revolutionary energy of the 1960s. We will read short works by Philip K. Dick, Sam Greenlee, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, and Diane Johnson. Possible films are The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and Soylent Green. Secondary texts will include Jameson, Foucault, Freud, Marx, Donna Haraway, and Eve Sedgewick.

This course intends to analyze the rhetorics used by (and against) neurodivergent thinkers and writers, while simultaneously tracking the co-formation of a classroom environment that is sensitive to neurodivergence and the underexplored models of knowledge-building such an environment may produce.

What does it mean to be a critic? And how do you write good criticism? In this class, we will study and practice criticism as an art—a medium of creative writing designed to provoke thought, offer ways of viewing the world, and leave readers entertained. Alongside pieces of criticism from various fields—literature, music, film—we’ll read reflections and manifestoes on the purpose of criticism, and reflect ourselves on the landscape of criticism today. Where in our own time is criticism practiced? Strung between rapidly changing media and academic worlds, criticism is widely seen as being endangered, and yet, with the past decade’s resurgence of small, lively intellectual and cultural magazines, others have claimed that we live in a golden age of criticism. We will try to make sense of this, while meanwhile taking ourselves seriously as critics: sharing with each other the work of critics we admire and writing our own critical essays.

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science.

On the surface, poetry and film may seem to have little in common. But over the course of the twentieth century, many poets took a serious interest in film and engaged with it as screenwriters and critics, as well as in their poetry. Likewise, many filmmakers looked to poetry as a model for how movies could work; for some, poetry (not fiction or drama) was film’s artistic next of kin. This course takes a broad, multi-national survey of poetry and film from the 1920s to the 1970s. How did writers and filmmakers understand the relationship between the two mediums? What kinds of resources and challenges did each medium pose to the other? Poets on the syllabus may include Gertrude Stein, H.D., Langston Hughes, César Vallejo, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Benjamin Fondane, Pierre Reverdy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Likely filmmakers include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Dudley Murphy, Kenneth Macpherson, Fernando de Fuentes, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. (All texts will be in English; films will be screened with English subtitles. The course will include weekly film screenings outside of regular class meetings.)  (Poetry, 1830-1990).

This course offers an introduction to narrative fiction. Taking up texts from a range of historical moments, we will consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We will ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures can they offer? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we will explore key elements of narrative and try out different ways of interpreting fiction. Our discussions will take up topics including point of view, characterization, the relationship between narrative and time, the role of narrative in shaping identities, the powers of realism and its contraries, and the experience of suspense.

This course offers an introduction to the study of prose fiction. Taking up texts from the medieval period through the present, we'll consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We'll ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures do they provide? If fiction isn't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to generative AI, how do fiction and technology interact? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we'll consider fictions and theories of fiction from authors including George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison. Our discussions will take up topics including point of view, the relationship between narrative and time, the powers of realism and its contraries, and the experience of suspense.

An introduction to the practice of literary and cultural criticism over the centuries, with a particular emphasis on theoretical debates about meaning and interpretation in the late 20th century and present.

This course provides an introduction to the written materials of women artists who belonged to various twentieth-century avant-garde movements and circles. The institutions of “woman art” and “the avant-garde” will come under scrutiny as we consider the literary and archival miscellany of pan- & non-sexual, cross-generational, inter-aesthetic, multilingual, and transnational works by such makers as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo, and Yoko Ono. How do these artists conceive of their work and process as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view of those realities provide an account of the identificatory powers of their gender and sexuality? We will examine the ways in which abstraction in writing becomes useful for commenting on issues raised by feminist and queer theory, periodization, canonization, and institution.

Taking to the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center, we will also open up the criticism, diaries, and letters of these artists to gain a new perspective on their creative processes. In addition to learning how to constellate these materials with the course readings, students will acquire hands-on experience in archival research, annotation, and curation as they make an archival project of their own. Students’ final projects will serve as the basis for a prospective library exhibition in concert with Special Collections.

This course focuses on the history, concerns, aesthetics, movements, and culture of the gay men's novel, without the boundaries of time period, nation, or original language. The goal for students is to think in-depth about the relationship between sexual identity and narrative form, to learn about gay men's literary lineages and movements, and to think through queer theoretical concepts through fiction authored by gay men.

This course analyzes the concept of physical responses to aesthetic production, specifically framed by the concept (following Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Richard Dyer) of the "body genre" in literature and film. We will analyze body genres such as the tearjerker, horror, comedy, pornography, and other affective responses to aesthetic production such as disgust, shock, and cringe as they are theorized by scholars in literary studies, film studies, affect studies, audience studies.

This course will examine the life and career of John Donne, one of the most important and influential early modern poets and thinkers writing in English. We will read Donne’s love poetry, his religious poetry, his satirical poems, and his progress poems. We will also read some of his prose works: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions along with selections from his sermons and polemical treatises. Throughout, we will engage with the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to Donne and his writings.

This course takes cue from what Lisa Lowe describes as the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of the term “Asian American” and considers a wide range of texts, images, and films ranging from early 20th century to the contemporary. What is politically and ideologically productive in employing “Asian American” as a pan-ethnic signifier? What are its shortcomings? And how do the parameters of this term alter in accordance with its specific historical and social contingencies? How do artists within different mediums negotiate their identity/identities through their chosen aesthetic form? 
To offer a fuller portrait of the capaciousness of how Asian American artists attend to their self-representation, this course brings together texts that are familiar to a broader public as well as those that linger on the fringe of institutional canonization, ranging from H. T. Tsiang’s lesser known but delightfully off-the-rails The Hanging on Union Square to Maxime Hong Kingston’s landmark autobiographical novel Woman Warrior; from John Yau’s acerbic commentary on how Asiatic stereotypes proliferate in Hollywood media in “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poetic vignettes that double as cinematic montages in DICTEE. We will also be looking at selected visual art pieces and films alongside literary texts, such as the works of Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing.

From prophetic texts of the ancient world to more recent fascinations with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, nuclear winter, and other forms of systemic collapse, the genre of apocalypse has given extraordinarily fertile expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. Readings will include novels by Daniel DeFoe, Max Brooks, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin, as well as the Book of Revelation from the Christian New Testament, and excerpts from the medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland. The course will conclude with two 1968 US films, Planet of the Apes and Night of the Living Dead.

In recent years, Herman Melville's work has received considerable attention, and not simply within literary studies; anthologies devoted to "Melville and philosophy" and "Melville and political theory" have appeared, and in 2025-26 his writings will be central to a conference on law and literature at the UChicago Law School.  What is it about Melville's corpus that has made it amenable to so many different kinds of conversations, and what about it sparks particular interest during our present moment?   

Students in this class will have a chance to think across the disciplines with Melville by reading some of his most important work—from the exhilarating, epic ride that is Moby-Dick to shorter pieces from Benito Cereno, a tale of mysterious events aboard a slave ship, to "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street."  We'll read these remarkable narratives in the company of critical materials situating them in relation to questions of democracy, religion, colonialism, capitalism, the natural world, the speculative, and more. 

An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career, when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, and Henry V. Together, we will read some of Shakespeare’s queerest and most delightful comedies in conversation with darker troubling plays that revolve around sexual violence, racism, nationalism, and political theory, and we will see how such topics put generic boundaries to the test. Valuing those classics for their timeless craft but also for the situated cultural horizon that they evidence, we will explore what it means to take comedy and history seriously. Three short papers will be required.

In this course, we will read Milton's Paradise Lost, paying close attention to questions of genre, style, and poetics as well as the theological, philosophical, anthropological, and political commitments that shape its verse. Although we will focus on the epic itself, we will also consider highlights from the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to the poem.

As rare first-person accounts of an institution that claimed the lives of millions, slave narratives occupy an important, almost sacred position in the history of American letters. In part, this course will offer a literary history of this genre of writing. We will consider the relationship of the slave narrative to other available genres of life writing: spiritual autobiography, captivity narratives, gallows narratives, and so on. We will consider a host of political problems that the slave narrative raises, such as: What levels of autonomy or agency could black writers hope to achieve in relation to white editors, sponsors, and abolitionist organizations? What is the evidentiary value of these narratives? How do the generic conventions of the slave narrative conscript black subjects into just giving "the facts" to white "philosophers," as Frederick Douglass would critique, instead of enabling black subjects to theorize slavery and freedom in their own names? At the same time, we will explore print media not typically considered under the rubric of the "slave narrative" to thicken our understanding of black life-making in the shadow of slavery: legal petitions, court testimony, letters, and early novels.

We will be screening and discussing key films from almost a century’s worth of cinema on the British-Irish archipelago, including works of the early Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McKendrick, David Lean, Frank Launder, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, Joseph Losey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan, Amma Asante, Steve McQueen, and Lenny Abramson. Some priority will be given to films with London settings and locations, such as Frears’s My Beautiful Launderette. We may also look at London-based films by non-British directors. Sylvio Narrizaon’s George Girl, for example, or Antonioni’s Blow-up. Possible field trips include Ealing Studios, site of British cinema for much of the twentieth century, and Hitchcock’s studios in Islington, not far from our London Campus, where he worked before his departure for America.

Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate “fibred” spaces like these have a special relation to childhood—both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, from the birth of children’s literature to its “golden age”—and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children’s poetry collections, through William Blake’s “forests of the night,” and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

If you have ever wondered why we say, “one mouse” and “two mice,” but not “one house” and “two hice,” this course will offer some answers. We will study the historical development of the English language, from its Proto-Indo-European roots through its earliest recorded forms (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English) up to its current status as a world language. Now spoken by more than 1.5 billion people, English is a language that is constantly evolving, and students will gain basic linguistic skills necessary for analyzing the features of its evolution. We will study variations in the language (including variations in morphology, phonology, syntax, grammar, and vocabulary) and its development over time and across regions. We will also examine sociological, political, and literary phenomena that accompany and shape these changes in the language.

Posters, publications, social media graphics, handbills, and other graphic materials have long played a role in sustaining and shaping social movements. In this course, which is part studio class and part discussion, we will discuss the role of graphic design in building collective identity for social movements, with a particular focus on the labor movement. Students will identify artifacts from contemporary or past social movements and use them as the basis for writing and designing a small publication. (Theory)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions—at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek to control nature? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power? What are the effects of social marginalization and isolation?—are more relevant today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (including Plutarch’s Lives, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. We will consider some of the many afterlives of Frankenstein (including James Whale’s classic films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Ahmed Saadawi’s absurdist war novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Victor LaValle’s comic book series, The Destroyer, and Rachel Ingalls’s suburban fairy tale, Mrs. Caliban) as a test case for better understanding processes of literary adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality more generally. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.

Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two “revolutions,” the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. Some of the materials we will look at are Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Gissing’s The Netherworld, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, John Lanchester’s Capital, among other supporting texts (on urban globalization, the poverty maps of Michael Booth).

Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two “revolutions,” the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. Some of the materials we will look at are Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Gissing’s The Netherworld, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, John Lanchester’s Capital, among other supporting texts (on urban globalization, the poverty maps of Michael Booth).

Taking its cue from a remarkable convergence of interest in recent and forthcoming cultural touchstones like Avatar: The Way of Water, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Wakanda Forever (along with recent scholarship on the cultural history of swimming; popular fascination with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution; recent theoretical embrace of aquatic scenes or modes of criticism and being; and productive conceptual distinctions between depths and shallows, fresh and saltwater, and the liquid and solid), this course examines foundational and new aquatic scenes of imagination: literary, cinematic, historical, and theoretical.

This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a manuscript of poetry 'make it' onto the list of a literary publisher, and from there to the bookshelves of the Seminary Coop? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Visits with literary editors and authors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.

The book format has been shaped by developments in technology, materials, distribution, and reading habits. This course will focus on the form of printed books through the lens of graphic design. Students will develop the practical skills necessary to typeset, print, and bind a modest book. We’ll discuss developments in printing technology (letterpress, offset), access to tools (movable type, paste up, desktop publishing), mass reproduction, distribution methods, and reading habits that have shaped the book form. No prior design/typesetting experience required. (Theory)

“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

“Writing After Windrush” explores the legacies of Windrush in fiction and poetry, visual arts, and social movements, interpreting “writing” as a broad range of media and discourse. Beginning with Henry Swanzy, Una Marson, and their leadership on the BBC radio show Caribbean Voices, we will engage with the creative works of Windrush migrants and their descendants: Trinidadian British novelist Samuel Selvon, Jamaican British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Guyanese British mixed-media artist Hew Locke, and others. To understand social struggle, we will study the life of activist Claudia Jones and her founding of the West Indian Gazette And Afro-Asian Caribbean News. We will consider the memory of Windrush through the moving image, in Steve McQueen’s 2020 anthology series Small Axe. Finally, we will examine the 2018 Windrush Scandal, in which at least 83 Britons were unjustly deported, in conversation with works like Hazel Carby’s account of the intertwined histories of Jamaica and Britain, Imperial Intimacies (2019). Throughout, we will travel throughout London for museum and studio visits, food, and more.

This course introduces students to early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe when their work is available in translation--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus). In this course, we will analyze the complex work and lives of those brilliant playwrights through various critical lenses including intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies.

An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP. 

An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP. 

Current political and recent academic debate have centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed. Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, HG Wells, will be among the writers explored.

In conjunction with the Court Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin the Sun, this course will place Hansberry’s play in its literary and historical context to understand more thoroughly the play’s success in its historical moment and its ongoing importance. We will also discuss subsequent theatrical and cinematic productions and adaptations. Among the other works we will consider are: James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Bean Eaters, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

In this co-taught three-week and in-person course between the Departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism--hearing, taste, touch, and smell--to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding our classes entirely out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city’s foundations in phenomena such as the colonization of the ancestral homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy and trade routes of many other indigenous groups; the filling in of swamp; the redirection of the river; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure--all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible and audible, providing forums for experimental documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate, and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene.

The last twenty years in American letters has exhibited a turn toward autofiction: works of literature at least in part fictitious in which the protagonist and narrator bear the same name as the author (and some of the latter’s history). This course investigates this turn by way of a number of exemplary literary texts (those of John Edgar Wideman, Philip Roth, and Sheila Heti, among others) while investigating the workings of the parts of speech on which it seemingly turns: “I.”

Around the turn into the twenty-first century, psychology "went neurological": human struggles that had long been viewed as expressions of complex inner conflicts and interpersonal dynamics began more and more to be described, and treated, as forms of brain disease.  A 2009 essay, "The Rise of the Neuro-Novel," worried about ways this shift might wreak havoc on the fiction-writer's art.  More recently, however, theories of neurodivergence have pushed back against some of the pathologizing language of abnormal psychiatry, while pop-Freudian stories of trauma seem omnipresent in novels, TV, and film. 

This class asks how this turmoil in accounts of personhood has played out in fiction from the 1990s through the present, and, in particular, its effects on narrative form.  What do tales of psychiatric diagnosis have to do with detective fiction?  Can a trauma narrative be written without a "self"?  What happens when magical realism infiltrates stories of psychic development?  Or when Western and non-Western accounts of interiority collide?  Authors to be read include Ian McEwan, Helen Oyeyemi, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Raven Leilani, Tom McCarthy, and others; we'll read these together with materials from contemporary philosophy, psychology, the history of science and medicine, and literary and cultural criticism. 

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, drama on social media, remote online theater on platforms like Zoom, algorithmic and AI theater, mixed reality performance, and transmedia performance. One unit of the course attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic.

What knowledge about ourselves can photographs provide? Can photographs change the way we see ourselves--collectively, individually? Photography has been around for almost 200 years, yet its dominance in our lives seems only to increase. This course examines photography’s influence on our everyday lives, particularly on conceptions and portrayals of the self. We will see how theorists have grappled with the phenomenon of photography, engaging the written word to address its conundrums, dangers, and attractions. With the help of these theorists, we will question the promises that photographs seem to make about representing the world. The purpose of this course is also, however, to take seriously the affective, documentary power of photography. We will thus analyze the creative use of photographs in the non-fiction (or nearly non-fiction) of major 20th- and 21st-century writers (philosophers, critics, journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, activists). Photography will emerge as a productive medium for navigating issues of memory, identity, race, gender, authenticity, agency, publicity, and art. With keen attention to the different capabilities of writing and photography, we will explore the dynamics of self-expression, the ethics of representing others, and the politics of image-text depictions.

This course will consider works of literature and cinema from 1884-2018 that take place in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and rural California to offer a case study for everyday life and critical space theory. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and ending with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother you, we will also consider how “the west” provides an opportunity for reconsidering canon formation and genre.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a wildly experimental collection of narrative poetry that assembles rhetorically, conceptually, and affectively incongruous material in ways that challenge medieval and modern notions of aesthetic form. This course will explore the poetry’s aesthetic strangeness in relation to its probing of medieval social forms, including polities and the hierarchies that shape them, organizations of gender, sexuality, and the human body, figures of otherness such as the Jew and the Saracen, and figures of intimate otherness such as Christ, Mary, the child, and courtly and other love objects. Those taking the course for graduate credit will also read a variety of other materials from medieval culture, scholarly work on Chaucer and the middle ages, and theoretical engagements with the course’s conceptual topics.

This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change—the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion’s inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask whether and how we might also do the same.

This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis.

This class will think about the reception of the Renaissance, in scholarship and popular culture, or from Burkhardt to Beyonce. What is at stake in the term? What does it mean to periodize a Western cultural past in this way, or to be founding a Renaissance in the present? Readings will include seminal accounts of the Renaissance by thinkers such as Jacob Burkhardt, Aby Warburg, Paul Oscar Kristeller and Joan Kelly, as well as contemporary cultural objects ranging from the film Shakespeare in Love to the fiction of Hilary Mantel and work in the visual arts by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.

How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography).  Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or “work on the self” as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by primary readings that likely include Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishiguro, Werner Herzog, Maggie Nelson, Amitav Ghosh, and J.M. Coetzee.

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the 200 years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the present could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes and more)

This course reads science fiction and other texts (including theory, essays and zines) that imagine what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, and thus beyond or against the law, the police and capitalism. We will engage with these other worlds in an attempt to formulate our own visions of other possible forms of communal life and relation. We will pay particular attention to questions of liberatory struggle; borders, policing and imprisonment; race, gender, family and social reproduction; and environment and ecological relations. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including encampments, blockades, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Tade Thompson, Octavia Butler, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors may include Saidiya Hartman, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Orisanmi Burton, Joy James and David Graeber.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We’ll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We’ll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required.

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream “AAA” games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.
The emphasis of the course will be on critical theory and cultural studies approaches to Black games. This combination of topics may seem counterintuitive insofar as games are sometimes approached as a lightweight cultural medium whereas Blackness is a serious cultural, sociopolitical, and historical concept. Resisting this frame, we approach games as a form that enables experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media, telecommunication networks, and racial capitalism. This is not a course for the craven.

“Freedom” under capital, Marx wrote, contains a fundamental contradiction. The worker is free to sell their labor because they have escaped medieval serfdom – but they are also “free” of land, property, tools, or machinery to create their own wealth: “And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Since at least the eighteenth century, British and American literature has explored, and is often structured by, this conflict. On the one hand, the novel tells the story of the sovereign individual, guiding their own fortunes and producing order out of a fantasy “state of nature.” On the other hand, radical and proletarian writers have deployed the novel – and later, the screen – as a genre of class struggle, critiquing the violence of capital and how that violence intersects with the violences of racism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This course will read widely in literary and filmic representations of work and workers from the co-emergence of the novel and modern capital in the early eighteenth century through the present. Primary readings/viewings include Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Attaway, Tomás Rivera, Jamaica Kincaid, Colin Higgins, Mike Judge, and Barbara Kopple. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, Marxist and feminist theory, and histories of race, organizing, and solidarity. Open to graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergrads.

This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival research methodologies with a focus on gender and slavery in the Americas. Students will apply their knowledge by working in historical and contemporary archives via two trips to special collections: one to view archival texts from the period and another to find an archival object of the student’s choosing that will provide the topic of their final research paper.

An examination of a series of efforts, in multiple disciplines, to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion. We will consider the more recent “affective turn” in relation to a longer intellectual tradition, as we examine a range of terms and concepts including affect, emotion, structure of feeling, atmosphere, and mood, in readings by Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Eve Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant and others.

This course serves as both an introduction to horror literature and cinema of North America and a seminar on how race and space are mobilized to reflect social problems in literature and film. Taking a spatial framework that includes Canada, the United States, and Mexico, we will interrogate how Indigeneity is reimagined through zombies and werewolves; how the Gothic is newly invented by Mexican authors; and how ghosts and hauntings can be rethought in a Chinese-Canadian immigrant community. We will also read major texts in the history of monster theory, the uncanny, and abjection. Secondary readings include Sigmund Freud, Nina Auerbach, and Donna Haraway; primary readings might include fiction by Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, and Stephen Graham Jones; films may include works by Carlos Enrique Taboada, George Romero, and Jeff Barnaby.

In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign.

In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

This course introduces students to methods and debates in the history of reading by studying readers in Britain and the US during the long nineteenth century. Our discussions and readings will take up a range of questions: how did nineteenth-century readers learn to read? What practices of reading did they consider valuable, and which did they consider inept or shameful? With an eye to technological innovation and political change, we'll consider the effects of new printing techniques, railroads, and the expansion of public education. Through work at the Special Collections Research Center, students will develop hands-on familiarity with the material forms that shape and reflect the reading practices of the period. Focusing our investigation through a sequence of case studies of key works of fiction, we'll also spend a substantial portion of our time reading scholarship: we'll learn from current research on marginalized readers, reading societies, serialization, reading out loud, professionalized academic reading, and the circulation of pirated text.

The United States today is in the midst of an incarceration crisis, one in which millions of Americans are currently warehoused within, or have passed through, carceral institutions. Many scholars locate the emergence of this punitive turn in the 1970s, and with good reason: the landscape of penality and confinement looks much different in earlier historical periods. Turning to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this course will explore literary, philosophical, and pragmatic engagements with the prison across the British Empire and in the postcolonial United States. By tracing the particular fears and fantasies that grouped around institutions of confinement, we will explore the logic by which an institution once marginal to social life has become so central to society that incarceration is now a conventional form of life. This course will involve a robust research component, culminating in a final paper; while this course is rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students will be welcome to pursue research on contemporary regimes of incarceration. Our theoretical readings will include Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Our archive of literary, philosophical, and practical texts will include the Newgate Calendar, Cesare Beccaria, Oliver Goldsmith, John Gay, Jeremy Bentham, James Williams, Harriet Jacobs, and Austin Reed.

This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students in English, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching. With the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, the course is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy to help students reflect on and talk about their practice. Students will have significant opportunities to practice conceiving, designing, and running a college-level course in English, e.g., the opportunity to construct a sample syllabus, to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to grade a common paper.

This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students in English, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching. With the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, the course is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy to help students reflect on and talk about their practice. Students will have significant opportunities to practice conceiving, designing, and running a college-level course in English, e.g., the opportunity to construct a sample syllabus, to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to grade a common paper.

This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students in English, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching. With the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, the course is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy to help students reflect on and talk about their practice. Students will have significant opportunities to practice conceiving, designing, and running a college-level course in English, e.g., the opportunity to construct a sample syllabus, to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to grade a common paper.

This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to advanced literary studies. Readings are drawn from four modes of inquiry that helped to produce our discipline and that continue to animate scholarship in the present – namely, philology, criticism, aesthetics, and genealogy. In addition, participants will complete several short assignments meant to familiarize them with common skills and practices of literary studies.

This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to advanced literary studies. Readings are drawn from four modes of inquiry that helped to produce our discipline and that continue to animate scholarship in the present – namely, philology, criticism, aesthetics, and genealogy. In addition, participants will complete several short assignments meant to familiarize them with common skills and practices of literary studies.

This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to advanced literary studies. Readings are drawn from four modes of inquiry that helped to produce our discipline and that continue to animate scholarship in the present – namely, philology, criticism, aesthetics, and genealogy. In addition, participants will complete several short assignments meant to familiarize them with common skills and practices of literary studies.

Required for students in their 2nd year of the English Ph.D. program. In this class, we will perform substantial revisions of a previous seminar paper.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities and simultaneously to a range of creative interventions across fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and the visual arts spurred by the effects of what has come to be named the Anthropocene epoch (despite substantive challenges to the term that we will address)—in a moment of perceived grave environmental crisis. We will consider the differences between, and the potential imbrication of, critical/theoretical and imaginative responses to seemingly insurmountable challenges to the biosphere and their outsized effects on underserved communities. Students will, in turn, be asked to respond critically to the works at hand, but also to conduct their own experimental research and on-site fieldwork in Chicago on an environmental issue of their choosing.

Required for students in their 4th year of the English Ph.D. program and all English Ph.D. students who have not yet entered candidacy.

This class takes as its starting point the medieval transition from orality to literacy. When, where, and how did this transition supposedly take place? What has been at stake in modern narratives of the change? With this transition as our case study, the class examines conjunctions of anthropology, linguistics, medieval studies, media history, and literary history, as these disciplines have contended over the (re)emergence of European literacy. From there, we consider broader issues in world literature and the politics of time, about the comparative study of premodern literatures, western theories of modernization, and the ongoing life of “orature” and oral transmission.

An examination of aesthetic practices composed to serve a political function: to affect beliefs or political positions, form collectives, or direct groups toward political action. Alongside readings in aesthetic and political theory and affect studies, we will examine examples from Russian and Soviet art and literature, the historical avant-garde, the Black radical tradition, and ACT-UP. 

This class will ask after the different forms taken by the collective in nineteenth-century American writing, as a way into theorizing tensions within the notion of collectivity in a broader context.  When abstractions such as "the social," "the people," "the public," "humanity," "life," or "the body politic" are employed in these texts and elsewhere, what forms the referent of such terms?  How are they conceived to hold together, and what is their relation as aggregates to the individuals or individual entities of which they are composed?  How do they relate to other understandings of collectivity, some of which may themselves be present within a given example?  What is the relation between modes of theorizing collectivity and literary mode or genre?

We will explore these and other related questions as well as congruent topics such as democracy, affect, attachment, the crowd, nationhood, sociability, and so forth.  Our literary examples will be derived from such authors as Stowe, Harper, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, James, Chesnutt, and Hopkins, whom we will read together with theoretical writings both from the period and from contemporary scholarship in literary criticism as well as social and political theory.

This class will ask after the different forms taken by the collective in nineteenth-century American writing, as a way into theorizing tensions within the notion of collectivity in a broader context. When abstractions such as "the social," "the people," "the public," "humanity," "life," or "the body politic" are employed in these texts and elsewhere, what forms the referent of such terms? How are they conceived to hold together, and what is their relation as aggregates to the individuals or individual entities of which they are composed? How do they relate to other understandings of collectivity, some of which may themselves be present within a given example? What is the relation between modes of theorizing collectivity and literary mode or genre?
We will explore these and other related questions as well as congruent topics such as democracy, affect, attachment, the crowd, nationhood, sociability, and so forth. Our literary examples will be derived from such authors as Stowe, Harper, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, James, Chesnutt, and Hopkins, whom we will read together with theoretical writings both from the period and from contemporary scholarship in literary criticism as well as social and political theory.

In this course we will examine the expansion of print during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its relationship to the social history of reading. One of the most striking features of this so-called “Print Revolution” was the extension of reading material to new groups of readers: by the end of the nineteenth century, more women, working-class, and child readers existed than ever before. In what distinctive ways did these groups participate in print and manuscript culture? What did they read and to what ends? How did literary texts represent, herald, instruct, or proscribe new readers, and how did new readers comply with, subvert, misunderstand, adapt, or otherwise interact with the texts they read? How did the extension of the “reading habit” to new groups of readers impact the political revolutions, intellectual paradigms, and social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And finally, what kinds of evidence can literary scholars draw upon to make what kinds of claims about reading and readers in the past? We will approach these questions through the lenses of popular literature (especially ballads, chapbooks, satire, and romance) and with the help of literary, historical, and sociological scholarship. 

Required for students in the 5th year of the English Ph.D. program or above, this course will be a venue for converting a chapter of the dissertation into article form.

Required for students in the 5th year of the English Ph.D. program or above, this course will be a venue for converting a chapter of the dissertation into article form.

Required for students in the 5th year of the English Ph.D. program or above, this course will be a venue for converting a chapter of the dissertation into article form.

Required for students in their 6th year of the program and open to all English Ph.D. students on or preparing for the academic job market.

What is the relationship between literature and philosophy? This class attempts to answer this question by reading two philosophically rich literary texts (Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Austen's Persuasion) in relation to a variety of thinkers--from Aristotle to Robert Pippin---who have developed their own, often conflicting accounts of this relationship.