Courses

In this course we will survey the works of Edgar Allan Poe. While attending closely to his texts, we will place Poe in the cultural and literary contexts in which he wrote. In some cases, we will challenge his politics and silences. In others, we will come to understand Poe as a shrewd author attempting to negotiate the rapidly growing yet unstable antebellum print market. Students can expect to read essays, verse, short prose fiction, and a novel. We will also survey a range of literary criticism to assist our readings. Final projects will involve a research component.

From 17th-century public dissections to the sewage scene on “Ted Lasso”, how has medicine and public health been represented in London’s popular media? In the city’s theatrical productions, museum exhibitions, literature, film, and television, where do representations of Western medicine reflect, undermine, or strengthen its authority, particularly as it became an increasingly professionalized and distinct discipline to the exclusion of other systems of knowing? We’ll look at the tools cultural producers use to reinforce, challenge, or complicate medical theories and definitions of what makes a healthy body, a raced body, a gendered body. With particular attention to horror and satire, we’ll track anxieties and hopes over the “medicalized” body and the “healthy” city, drawing on scholarship in critical race theory, queer studies, disability studies, and media theory. This course focuses on research methodology and producing original, personally meaningful scholarship. Each week we will visit a different archival or cultural site, speak with scholars in the field, create a network of peer support, and ultimately build a robust toolkit for our own work. The final project is an independent research paper scaffolded through a series of mini-assignments and peer workshops. Our syllabus is intentionally conceptual and capacious—spanning centuries, mediums, and disciplines—in order to open up points of entry for every student to make their own

How do we approach literature that’s being made at the same time we’re studying it? Keeping an eye on how factors including race, gender, class, prestige, corporate structures, and social media inflect how books get made, read, and acclaimed, we will read “mainstream” “literary” hits and cult darlings of the past five years, likely including Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Torrey Peters, Otessa Moshfegh, Ling Ma, and Helen DeWitt; as well as experimental/small-press fiction. This course explores how literary fiction is embedded in a complex economic ecosystem; we will analyze how recent literature reflects, dissents from, or dodges the politics of the publishing industry. In doing so, we cover theories of cultural production from the Frankfurt School through the present, and recent popular literary criticism. Throughout, we aim to develop strategies for keeping up to date with the landscape of literature. Course assignments will include the chance to develop a review essay for a popular audience.

This course examines Blackness and Indigeneity in the Gothic literature (broadly conceived) of the Caribbean and the American South. How does the grotesque and the sublime manifest in Caribbean and Southern Gothic texts, and how do these themes bear upon the constructs of Blackness and Indigeneity, particularly as they relate to questions of abjection and land? We will read the work of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Maryse Condé, William Faulkner, Edwidge Danticat, and Leanne Howe alongside theoretical texts from Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Indigenous Studies.

From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society’s understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity—especially relating to class, gender, and race—become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists.

This class explores the literature of advice, wisdom, and instruction in the Middle Ages. Students will consider the formal and rhetorical properties of texts that want to tell us how to live, as well as their relationship to narrative and poetic forms. This course explores the literature of advice, wisdom, and instruction in the Middle Ages. Is literature, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living?” In this class, we’ll aim to understand “literature” and “life” as historically emergent and culturally contingent concepts. We’ll consider the formal and rhetorical properties of these texts that want to tell us how to live, as well as their relationship to narrative and poetic forms. What makes these texts so compelling or so off-putting? What does the compulsion to deliver and receive advice, wisdom, and instruction tell us about the project of constructing a “self,” in the Middle Ages and now? Although the readings for this course will come primarily from the medieval period, we’ll also range across topics such as ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature and “self-help” as a modern commercial phenomenon. The eclecticism and contradictions of these texts will be of particular interest. Readings will include selections from: The Book of Proverbs, Old English Maxims, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. (Pre -1650)

The NSA spies on us through our phones. Tech companies sell our personal data. Friends post embarrassing pictures of us on social media. There can be little doubt that in an increasingly interconnected world, our right to privacy is under attack. But what is this “privacy” that appears to us at once so essential and so precarious? In this course, we will take up fictions in which privacy appears simultaneously desirable and impossible. While we will encounter works from a variety of periods, we’ll pay particular attention to the eighteenth century, an era that witnessed the side-by-side emergence of both the modern novel and the modern concept of privacy. Among our guiding questions: how does fiction shape the way we understand privacy? And how might our understanding of privacy have shaped the history of literature?
We will read literary works by a variety of authors, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jane Austen, Eliza Haywood, Herman Melville, and Kazuo Ishiguro. We will also engage with several notable theorists of privacy, including John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault.

This class explores the relations between imaginative writing, embodiment, and medical care. We will take up literary texts that grapple with culturally charged illnesses from the 1800s-present (e.g. TB, hysteria, cancer, AIDS), as well as theoretical texts that will help us think through the importance and problems with mediating the body in language.

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 will focus on the development of Black literary and political writing, while also keeping a critical eye on the institutionalization of Black Studiers. Authors include Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, CLR James, Ida B Wells, Fanon, Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, and more.

This course surveys key historical movements, playwrights, and theatrical styles that have shaped the contemporary theatrical landscape. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and performances, students will explore the social, cultural, and political contexts that influenced the creation and reception of modern and contemporary drama. Topics covered include the emergence of realism and naturalism in the late 19th century, the rise of avant-garde movements such as expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism in the early 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance, the rise of political theater and feminist theater in the 1960s and 1970s, and the ongoing evolution of drama in the late 20th and 21st century. The course culminates in a scene project assignment that allows students put their skills of interpretation and adaptation into practice. No experience with theater is expected. Fulfills the Genre Fundamentals requirement in English.

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 takes Chaucer's three dream poems as the basis to explore the English poet's experimental verse and the nature of medieval poetry in the later fourteenth century. As a class, we'll test ways of reading and interpreting this philosophically ambitious and riddling body of writing. No previous experience with medieval literature required.

This is a survey course that introduces students to the complex and uneven history of Asians in American from within a transnational context. As a class, we will look at Asian American texts and films while working together to create a lexicon of multilingual, immigrant realities. Through theoretical works that will help us define keywords in the field and a wide range of genres (novels, films, plays, and graphic novels), we will examine how Asia and Asians have been represented in the literatures and popular medias of America. Some of the assigned authors include, but are not limited to, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Fae Myenne Ng, Nora Okja Keller, Cathy Park Hong, Ted Chiang, and Yoko Tawada.

What is the relationship between plotting a crime and plotting a narrative? In this course, we will examine the genre of crime fiction but work to push against the borders of the category to include works on and discussions about the politics and poetics of confession, the affinities between testimony and fiction, and the racialization of crime.

This course will survey the literary, political, and life writing of radical circum-Atlantic travelers and emigrants in the long nineteenth century. We will focus on how the movement of these people and their ideas between the Caribbean, the United States, and Britain impacted the various political formations and reform movements in which they took part. From fugitive and formerly enslaved Black West Indians and African Americans who became leaders and propagandists in British working-class movements to British working-class political refugees who joined the anti-slavery cause in the United States, and beyond, we will consider the productive yet uneven ways in which a diverse, multiethnic and transnational group of writers contributed to a single radical literary tradition. Readings may include periodicals, political tracts, letters, poetry, novels, and memoirs by such writers as Robert Wedderburn, James Dawson Burn, Frederick Douglas, and Claude McKay as well as key historical and critical works like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra.

How do cultural products facilitate, abet, and enable the form of social ordering that we call policing? This course will explore the policing function of what modernity calls “culture” by exploring the parallel histories of policing, the emergence of modern police theory, and the rise of the novel. We will focus in particular on how both literature and the police emerge to navigate a series of linked epistemological and political problematics: the relation between particularity and abstraction, the relation between deviance and normalcy, and indeed that of authority as such. While we will focus on texts from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, students with a broader interest in policing are encouraged to enroll. Readings will include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, G.W.F. Hegel, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, in addition to historical documents including gallows narratives, newspapers, and early theorizations of the police concept.

This course surveys the landscape of contemporary back theater-makers and performance artists (and may include, where relevant, the historical predecessors they explicitly invoke or work against). What forces animate works of contemporary black theater and performance? What tropes or conventions do they jettison, and which do they keep? Is there enough uniting these works that an underlying coherence prevails, or does studying them alongside one another instead reveal the dissolution of a racial center?

This course offers an extended investigation of the origins, meanings, and legacies of one of the most consequential documents in world history: the Declaration of Independence. Primary and secondary readings provide a series of philosophical, political, economic, social, religious, literary, and legal perspectives on the text’s sources and meanings; its drafting, circulation, and early reception in the age of the American Revolution; and its changing place in American culture and world politics over nearly 250 years. (1650-1830, 1830-1940)

In addition to the noted class times, there will also be discussion sections to be scheduled once the class begins. There is also an optional in-person component to be held in Special Collections.

Major works of poetry, fiction, drama, and film. In literature, the course ranges from Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney and Anna Burns, and, in cinema, from silent film to Neil Jordan and Lenny Abramson. Literature and cinema are intertwined through all the weeks of the quarter in various connections (including Hitchcock's adaptation of O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK).

A controversial art exhibition organized by Roger Fry, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” provoked Virginia Woolf to write that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” The Bloomsbury Group, renowned for its role in vilifying Victorian culture and promoting English modernism, was no less famous for its own efforts to change human character: for its unprecedented understanding of aesthetics, economics, social politics, and sexuality. Taking advantage of our particular location in London (the neighborhood in which the group lived, met, wrote, and painted), this course will provide the opportunity to engage a broad spectrum of Bloomsbury work: the essays and fiction of Virginia Woolf; the art of Venessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry; the macroeconomics of John Maynard Keynes. This engagement will unfold through different analytics (formalist, psychoanalytic, materialist), and with sustained recognition of two Bloomsbury institutions—the short-lived Omega Workshops, and the enduring Hogarth Press. The British Library and the Tate Modern will provide us with intimate access to literary and visual texts, and we will talk with contemporary writers about the cultural legacy of this coterie.

This course will explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry by focusing on the poetic treatments of diverse places, including commercial, legal, and theatrical London venues, courtly palaces, aristocratic country houses and rural estates, churches, prisons, and imaginary landscapes. Poets might include Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Marvell, Philips, and Cowley. Genres might include sonnet, epithalamion, satire, pastoral, georgic, epistle, epigram, country-house poem, and ode. Trips within and close to London might include the Tower of London, the Whitehall Banqueting House, the Globe Theater, Hampton Court, Penshurst Place, and Knole.

This course will focus on representations of Black life and experience in literature published during the age of the British slave trade and abolition, as well as on more recent writing that seeks to imagine, honor, or reckon with the unrepresented Black lives of this period.
During the first two weeks of the course, our reading will center on eighteenth-century writing. Primarily, we will focus on the work of prominent Black writers in London in and around abolition, including the life narratives of the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano (1789), Ottobah Cugoano (1787), and Mary Prince (1831), the published letters of Ignatius Sancho (1780), and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters (1773). We may also read selections from white-authored abolitionist poetry, relevant legal cases, as well as the anonymously published novel, The Woman of Colour (1808).
In our third week, we will tum to a number of recent works that look back to the eighteenth century in order to reimagine the past and present of Black life in British culture, or to reclaim ·a place in the national imaginary: Honoree Fanonne Jeffers' The Age of Phillis, M. NourbeSe Philip's Zangl, and perhaps a play or two 0asmine Lee-Jones' Curious, Jackie Sibblies Drury's Marys S eacole, Giles Terera's The Meaning of Zon!). We will supplement our reading with selections from historians, cultural theorists, and literary critics (likely to include Paul Gilroy, Christina Sharpe, Simon Gikandi, Peter Fryer, David Olusoga, Gtetclten Gerzina and others).

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. (

Survey of three major subgenres of the British Romantic novel: Gothic, Historical, Courtship, likely including work by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, James Hogg, and Maria Edgeworth.

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.

How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review, or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? 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. We will begin with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry and poetry in translation as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the production of literary magazines in the second half of the term. Visits with magazine editors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include researching and soliciting work from contemporary poets for The Paris Review. Note, "Means of Production I: Books" is not a prerequisite for this course.

In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of “coming of age” stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological “invention” of adolescence.

Quarter Systems and the Victorian novel do not mix well, which is only to say that this course cannot aspire to a comprehensive accounting of the Victorian novel, or the myriad forms of the novel that emerged during Victoria’s reign (1837-1901). What it does seek to do, however, is give you some little sense of the Victorian novel’s formal and thematic range in a few of the uncharacteristically shorter novels of the period, and—in the bargain—give you a few critical tools and concepts to better figure out what these novels are and what they might be doing. Critical approaches to the Victorian novel are as varied as the novels themselves, perhaps, but I’ve tried to give you access to some of the more recent interventions that centrally query character and characterization (people), things and the circulation of things, and location and spatialization (places). Jane Eyre, Hard Times, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Warden, Jude the Obscure, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

This seminar will provide students with an overview of Marxist literary criticism via the career of one of its most innovative living practitioners.

An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism.

This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism.

This is a research-intensive course which aims to provide both theoretical frames and methods for research for exploring topics related to migration and literature in the contemporary world and in historical contexts. We will explore various aspects of the migratory experience; the ways in which literary texts shape or shed light on them; and how contemporary theories help us to understand migration and its literatures. Key terms will include migration, mobility, exile, refugees, settlement, kinship, border crossing, bureaucracy. We will ask questions such as: how do print and other forms of information enable/regulate movement? What happens when we cross a border? What is a stake in settlement? Who is a refugee? How do children function in the migratory imagination? The assessment for the course will include an outline of a research project of your own devising. In class we will focus mainly on anglophone texts from the nineteenth century onwards, but you will be free to consider your own materials and develop your own archive.

An instructor within ENGL agrees to supervise the course and then determines the kind and amount of work to be done. These reading courses must include a final paper assignment to meet requirements for the ENGL major, and students must receive a quality grade. Students may not petition to receive credit for more than two ENGL 29700 courses. Students may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar.

Senior students completing a Critical BA Project may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the faculty BA advisor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar. This course may not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the major, but it may be counted as a departmental elective.

Henry James is perhaps the single most acclaimed American novelist. And yet some of his most extraordinary writing sits outside his novels, in his shorter fiction and critical prose. Focusing on those shorter forms, this course examines James's theory of fiction, his vexed relations with the marketplace, and his relentlessly ambitious formal experimentation. We'll also consider the scholarly conversation about his work. Observing remarkable change over the course of a career that extends from the Victorian period into the era of modernism, we'll read texts in a range of genres, taking up early ghost stories, landmark critical essays, travel writing, autobiographical writing, and late masterworks of short fiction.

This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media.

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.

Survey of eighteenth-century British "rise of the novel" criticism and theory.

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 examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc.)

Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and SF. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics.

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.

This course will explore Black writers’ improvisations with the concept of freedom alongside key political-philosophical of the 18th and 19th centuries. Readings will include Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Robert Wedderburn, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and more.

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.

This course will examine the works of George Eliot in their intellectual and print contexts. We will look at selected works from across her oeuvre including some of her translations from German, her journalism, short fiction, poetry and novels, as well as letters and journals. During the course we will emphasize her immersion in contemporary debates by considering her exchanges with friends and associates, people like, for example the writer, George Henry Lewes, the evolutionary philosopher and biologist, Herbert Spencer, feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Edith Simcox, and legal theorist, Henry Sumner Maine.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how “world histories” may be hidden within “word histories,” as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own.

This seminar offers a critical introduction to performance theory organized around three conceptual clusters: a) action, acting, and forms of production or play, in theories from classical (Aristotle) through modern (Hegel, Brecht, Artaud), to contemporary (Richard Schechner, Philip Zarilli, others)
; b) affect, and its intersections with emotion and feeling: in addition to contemporary theories of affect and emotion we will read earlier modern texts that anticipate recent debates (Diderot, Freud) and their current interpreters (Joseph Roach, Erin Hurley and others), as well as those writing about the absence of affect and the performance of failure (Sara Bailes etc); and c) archives and related institutions and theories of recording performance, including the formation of audiences (Susan Bennett) and evaluating print and other media recording ephemeral acts, including the work of theorists of memory (Pierre Nora) and remains (Rebecca Schneider; Mark Fleishman), theatre historians (Rose Bank, Ellen Mackay etc) and tensions between archive and repertoire (Diana Taylor).

This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (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, Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno’s Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film.

This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize the early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to "queer" modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism's less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins--lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism and cultural studies.

Taking its cue from José Esteban Muñoz’s 2006 essay in Signs, this course interrogates negative affective categories as they are expressed in US ethnic literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Muñoz argues, “depression has become one of the dominant affective positions addressed within the cultural field of contemporary global capitalism”; this course explores orientations such as depression, shame, sickness, and melancholy to think critically about racial formations amidst capital and how these are posed alongside literary questions. Primary texts may include Larsen, Ozeki, Morrison, and Okada; secondary texts may include Ahmed, Freud, Muñoz, Cheng, and Spillers.

This class will examine different theories about the meaning and social role of literature over a historical long durée. Why do we find literature valuable? What do we ask from it, and what is it able to provide? Is art's very uselessness the key to its role in the lives of readers? Or can we expect literature to effect changes in the world we live in? Does literature serve a therapeutic function? An expressive one? To what or whom is a writer responsible? Students will develop their own answers to these questions, and also examine how attitudes about the function of literary text have changed over the last few centuries— centuries that have seen a staggering transformation in the growth of literacy and the volume of print and digital culture. Readings will range from the Renaissance to the 21st century, and may include texts by Philip Sidney, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Jaques Ranciere, and Gayatri Spivak.

This course examines literature, film, theory, and historical sources that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood, the domestic sphere, and "women's work." We will focus in particular on how issues of reproduction intersect with debates about citizenship and political belonging. The course spans the late nineteenth century into the present and will be centered in the U.S.

Across the Atlantic world, the 1790s were a decade of massive transformation and political possibility. Grounded in material conditions and material struggle, guided by emergent and often quite radical political theory, revolutions in Europe and North America took on monarchy, slavery, and inequality broadly defined. At the same time, the 1790s were a decade of reaction -- when extant hierarchies fought against those transformations with increasing anxiety, and empire and imperial capital continued to rapidly expand. This course will read widely in literature and political theory from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that attempted to represent, and to produce, these transformations, as well as modern theory and criticism in anti-racism/postcolonialism, feminism/gender theory, carceral studies, and Marxist analysis to better understand the legacies of this remarkable political moment.

Within an overarching frame that stretches between Moby Dick and the present, this course will focus foremost on 20th c. literary collage, both poetry and prose fiction, with particular attention to Williams, Rukeyser, Burroughs, Ashbery, Reed, Howe, Acker.

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 class will provide a varied overview of the theory and history of “literary persons,” including recent scholarly perspectives. Rather than being stabilized via a single genre (i.e., the realist novel), literary persons will be treated more capaciously, in their adjacency to personification, lyric and dramatic personae, and varied genres of narrative, from the Middle Ages to the present. The class will be more or less evenly divided between primary and secondary works.

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

This course attempts to unpack the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy by examining how each discourse draws on the power of poiesis in different ways. We will approach this topic by examining four discourses: first, formal treatments of poetry and poetics from antiquity (Plato, Aristotle) through the late Renaissance (Sidney, Tasso, Milton); second, explicitly fictional thought experiments employed by philosophers (Avicenna, Ibn Tufayl, Descartes, Locke, Condillac); third, poetry explicitly invested in the making of fictional worlds (Spenser, Milton, Cavendish); and fourth, recent scholarship on poetry’s relationship to philosophy (Stanley Rosen, Victoria Kahn, Ayesha Ramachandran, Russ Leo, Guido Mazzoni, and others).

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.

This course enables higher-level students and scholars to think critically and creatively in the disciplinary intersection of anthropology and poetics, reading anthropological texts that are poetically disposed, and reading poetic texts that are anthropologically orientated—in order to help them frame the problem of multi-disciplinarity in their own work. In the end the course is really about trying to train disciplinary self-reflection by amplifying the noise of disciplines when they intersect or overlap, and hence to encourage students to be more self-reflective and commanding of their own disciplinary formation (whatever that might be).

In what tangled ways does poetry transform through dialogue across linguistic and geographical distances, and through performance, translation, and collaboration? This seminar takes a comparative, hemispheric approach to 20th- and 21st-century poetries from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to Canada, with significant attention to Latinx poets. We will examine developments in poetic form, especially transformations of the epic and the lyric, in conjunction with questions of modernization, globalization, and colonialism, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. This course is held in tandem with Fall quarter events including Chicago’s Lit & Luz Festival, which stages Mexican-U.S. artistic collaborations. Seminar members will have the opportunity for dialogue with poets and translators who visit our seminar and/or give poetry readings on campus. (No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required.)

This course is intended for graduate students in the English doctoral program who can best meet program requirements by study under a faculty member's individual supervision. The subject, course of study, and requirements are arranged with the instructor.