Courses

This course offers an introduction to reading literary nonfiction – or rather, to reading texts that have only sometimes been considered “literary,” with literary methods. We’ll read nonfiction genres while thinking about “nonfiction” as a category, one we use and read in every day and yet rarely think about: what do we use this category for? Why did it emerge, in the late 19th century in English, and did it describe something new about nonfictional genres that became part of the Western literary tradition much earlier? We will read key texts in central genres like the essay, the autobiography, history, and journalism, asking what these genres share and whether the fact that texts in these genres make a claim to being true in some way influences how we read them. We will also read examples of texts that challenge our notions about what these genres do and how we define them: from documentary poetry to commercial self-help. Readings may include: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston’s Of Mules and Men, Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Manual of Baby and Childcare and Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. (Theory)

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. (Theory)

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.

The singular modernist writer Gertrude Stein once claimed that she invented 20th century English by reinventing the sentence, a reinvention that sounds like her famous quip “A rose is a rose is a rose.” This course starts from that claim as a provocation: what kind of prose style can Stein claim to have “invented,” who followed her in using these new sentences, and what kinds of political, philosophical, and literary changes revolved around the English sentence? We’ll ask these questions as we read across Stein’s idiosyncratic body of writing and its complex relationship to her modernist contemporaries and the later 20th century writers she influenced. Stein was neither strictly novelist nor poet nor critic, but sometimes all three, other times none of the above; she was in a long term, open-secret lesbian partnership at the turn of the 20th century, a lifelong American expat to Paris, ambivalently Jewish, a fascinated and problematic critic of race relations. She was also a prolific art collector and, more importantly, people collector. In addition to reading key works by Stein, other writers and artists we might look at include William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Jill Johnston, and Lydia Davis. (Fiction, 1830-1990, 20th/21st)

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. (Fiction, 1650-1830, 18th/19th)

This course explores the origins of the genre that we would today call "horror" by examining its foundational roots in the literature of the Romantic era. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays concerned with the supernatural, with hauntings and ghosts, with ruins and lost worlds. We will consider the socioeconomic and historical conditions that helped give rise to this kind of aesthetic production. We will also consider the uses and purposes of the horror genre today.

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. (Drama, Pre-1650)

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. (Poetry)

This course explores 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 development and/or collapse. 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 climate fiction can render the consequences of climate change intelligible—telling stories that range from the despairing to the hopeful, the surreal to the realistic—we will also debate modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction may include Virginia Woolf, Kim Stanley Robinson, H.G. Wells, Jeff VanderMeer, E.M. Forster, Ben Lerner, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory may include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Amitav Ghosh.

Tarot cards, incantations, healing charms, constellations. These have in common not just their purported magic properties, but aesthetic expressiveness: their appearance and perceptible form are linked to their supernatural power. In this course, we will explore the relationship between art and magic, tracing the reciprocal pathways of influence and inspiration between the occult as a domain of oppositional religion, and cultural developments in modern poetry, fiction, visual art, and film (often spurred by occult practitioners themselves.) How has occultism functioned as an aesthetically productive source of contradiction, conflict, and questioning, even as multiple occult traditions seek to consolidate meaning in a world of changing values? We will map the myriad ways that the hidden, discredited, and rejected traditions that constitute occultism continue to exercise a powerful fascination upon modern society despite its supposed “disenchantment”; likewise, the ways that art has been used as a vehicle for contesting the disenchanted world and voicing its discontents. Readings may include work by Leonora Carrington, H.D., Robert Duncan, Dion Fortune, Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger. (Theory, Fiction, 20th/21st)

What is lesbian literature? Should any text produced by a self-identified lesbian be considered part of its canon, or are there identifiable lesbian styles, forms, conventions, or other parameters through which we might define it? What is the relationship between modernism and the explosion of literary works taking up lesbian themes in the 20th century? In this course, we will tackle these questions and more while reading lesbian literature across the 20th century, beginning with queer(ed) works from writers of modernist period–Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Nella Larsen, before moving on to think about lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s, radical feminist science-fiction of the 1970s, and Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 transgender novel Stone Butch Blues, among others. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

This course will examine a range of media—dance, sculpture, film, literature, theater—from the 1960s to the present, tracing how artists have engaged in ecological thought and action as climate anxiety has ramped up over the past several decades.We will examine some historical case studies that demonstrate the role performance has played in activism and social change. We will contemplate the ways aesthetic practices have attempted to understand and engage with the non-human world. Moving through texts that register some of the affective and emotional coordinates of climate change—grief, dread, even cringe—we will land on a study of materiality, focusing on how rocks, stones, and other earthly materials both challenge and facilitate aesthetic expression. This course will survey some key topics in literary ecocriticism and performance studies, while also introducing students to an eclectic array of contemporary artists whose work is especially helpful for reflecting on how the field of aesthetics interacts with climate catastrophe. Together, we will attempt to identify what thinking about performance—whether live, mediated, artistic, or social—can tell us about the ecological conditions we inhabit, and how attending to ecology—the series of relations and interactions that sustain us—can reveal new things about performance.

Whether in the doctor’s office or in our TikTok algorithm, messages about body weight, size, and shape are ubiquitous in our current moment. This class tracks the history of this phenomenon through early modern English literary representations of fatness, thinness, and everything in between. Thinking with critical race, trans, and queer theory, we will read widely from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales through William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor to Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World to unpack how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England theorized fatness and thinness through and with theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. (Pre-1650, Medieval/Early Modern)

Shape-shifting spirits, time-traveling algae, and secret islands: these are some of the climate objects we will encounter in this course that surveys representations of storms (and other really bad weather) in popular Anglophone literature from Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest (1611) to Rita Indiana's experimental climate novella Tentacle (2015). We will question: how did early colonizers attempt to use thunder and rain (pathetic fallacy) in their various writings to justify the expulsion of Indigenous peoples? What prompted 20th-century Haitian poets to liken the devastation of hurricane season to the political upheaval brought on by U.S military presence? Questions of the cultural and political will be at the forefront of our literary endeavors. With help from scholars including Christina Sharpe, Kim Hall, and Richard Grove, we will develop an (eco)critical reading practice that interrogates what “makes” the weather in narratives and counternarratives of imperialism. (Theory)

This course explores how works of fiction and film from the late-nineteenth century to the present have engaged with and anticipated ideas about art, mindedness, emotion, and agency that are at the heart of contemporary debates about the cultural impact of generative AI. If generative AI poses a challenge to literature and art, what is this challenge? What are literature and art that AI-generated text and images are not? Moving from modernist explorations of automatic writing and the unconscious to sci-fi speculations about robots and mind-uploading, we will analyze how aesthetically ambitious works of narrative fiction and film reflect on what sets their meaning apart from the products of machines, and what sets their artistry apart from mere algorithms and marketing. Readings in literary theory and social history will attune us to the relationship between abstract questions like “what is meaning?” and concrete processes like capitalist automation—machines replacing human labor, for profit. Fictional authors and directors may include Bertrand Bonello, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Ted Chiang, Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Egan, William Gibson, Henry James, and Fritz Lang. Critical writers may include Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benn Michaels, Robert Pippin, Matteo Pasquinelli, Hito Steyerl, Lisa Siraganian, and Vauhini Vara.

This course explores what literature can teach us about the law, and vice-versa. Through fiction, films, statutes, and court cases drawn from the legal and literary history of the United States, students will ask questions such as: How do legal concepts rely on literary techniques such as storytelling? What laws shape literature, both in its writing and in its reception in society? And how do we interpret the language of both literary and legal texts? Course topics will be organized roughly around major practice areas of the law—such as contracts, torts, property, constitutional, and criminal law—as well as cases presently before the Supreme Court. Students interested in legal and non-legal careers alike will explore the history, context, and unfolding present of the laws and literature of the United States. Likely readings include work by authors Charles Chesnutt, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison as well as landmark court cases Plessy v. Ferguson, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Obergefell v. Hodges.

In this course, students will read Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Through this text, we will explore a variety of issues still relevant to our contemporary moment, including questions of racial prejudice, environmental destruction, violence against both human and nonhuman beings, and threats to democracy. Students will engage with a variety of critical perspectives, including those from queer theory, Black studies, ecocriticism, Marxism, feminism, and book history. In addition to a thorough understanding of this one text, students will gain a deeper understanding of Melville’s career, his historical context, and creative adaptations of his work since its nineteenth-century publication.

What happens when we take seriously stories that can't be vedrified? In this course, we’ll explore how bodies and the stories told about them are often assumed to track truth. Rooted in Black Studies and Trans and Queer Studies, we’ll examine how bodies—through rumor, gossip, and even lies—become sites where power and identity are made and unmade. Rather than dismissing these untidy truths, we’ll learn to read them as responsive disruptions to the historical moments in which they took place, as approaches to reconsider belonging, power, and knowledge. Drawing on the work of scholars like Stephen Best, we’ll explore how rumor and gossip function as strategies of self-making, challenging dominant narratives and revealing the messy realities that shape the world around us. We will engage with the works of scholars such as C. Riley Snorton, Jayna Brown, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Édouard Glissant as well as the autobiographical writings of Harriet Jacobs. This course encourages a collaborative approach, where students will be invited to bring in their own “messy” objects of study that reflect their engagement with specific conscriptions of race, gender, sexuality, and body politics. Central to our study will be genealogies of refusal—how Black feminist thought, queer critique, and minoritarian theory not only confront but actively reimagine dominant structures of power. (Theory)

What is madness? What does it mean to go crazy? What does it mean to be driven crazy? This course examines different forms of madness, probes the relationship between race, gender, and disability, and explores the potential wisdom found in madness by looking to madwomen in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. We will both consider madness as an object within literary studies and the lived experience of the madwomen characters and authors through the lens of Mad studies and activism. Tentative readings include The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970), Freshwater (Emezi, 2018), excerpts from The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang, 2019), and others. Students will also be asked to engage spaces that center the Mad such as the Center for Mad Culture and Project LETS. This course will include writing components that ask students to read literary texts and/or cultural moments through mad methodology and a final essay in lieu of an exam. (Theory, 1830-1990, 20th/21st)

This course explores the unique challenges of experiencing performance through the page. Students will read plays and performances closely, taking into account not only form, character, plot, and genre, but also theatrical considerations like staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. We will also consider how various agents—playwrights, readers, directors, actors, and audiences—generate plays and give them meaning. While the course is not intended as a survey of dramatic literature or theater history, students will be introduced to a variety of essential plays from across the dramatic tradition. 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. (Drama)

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. (Theory)

This course examines the relationship between incarceration and medical experimentation in America, exploring how carceral spaces—prisons, asylums, detention centers, plantations—have been made into medical laboratories. Students will think about physical modes of confinement as well as symbolic and systemic strategies that have been used to enlist minoritarian and disenfranchised bodies in the production of medical knowledge. Readings will focus on literary fiction (novels, short stories, comics) and critical theory (critical race studies, disability studies) centering issues of bodily autonomy, informed consent, and racialization in the prison and the laboratory.

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 is't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to generative AI, how do fiction and technology interract? 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.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of the novel by examining at least one novel from each of the last four centuries, including our own 21st, and from all parts of the world (some in translation). We will think about various novel forms that develop over time, including, for instance, epistolary novels, the gothic, bildungsromans and the picaresque. We will also consider the afterlife of these novels in other media, especially in film, and discuss how and why they have proved so adaptable to cultural change. Additional material (fiction, theory, and criticism) will be assigned to complement discussion of the set texts. The novels may include Dangerous Liaisons, Pride and Prejudice, Rajmohan’s Wife, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Blackouts.

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. (Introductory Genre, Theory)

In this course, we will look at fictional representations of ways of life that don’t fit neatly into accounts of productive labor (or work that is understood to create economic value) from the eighteenth century to the present. Moving across economic theory, poetry, drama, novels, and film, we will examine how depictions of so-called unproductive labor—from butlers and nurses to beggars and sex workers—challenge orthodox understandings of what it means to participate in the economy and contribute to society. Readings may include literary texts by Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, George Bernard Shaw, John Osborne, Margaret Atwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro; films from The Full Monty to Nomadland; and writings by economists and sociologists from the eighteenth century to the present. (Fiction)

How did American science fiction imagine the future? While paying some attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged, we will work above all to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. The course will provide different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to explore the stakes and the strategies for imagining future worlds. After some initial attention to the magazine and pulp culture that helped to establish the genre, we will spotlight major SF movements (Afro Futurism, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, etc.) and major authors (including Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work across different media.

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’s America is In the Heart, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.

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. Through a focused query into the relationship between narrative form and content, we will work our way through a syllabus that takes its point of departure from the conventions of the crime fiction genre but migrate outside of it. Some of the assigned authors/filmmakers include, but are not limited to, Foucault’s I, Pierre, Young Ha Kim’s Diaries of a Murderer, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave.

Close reading of the Canterbury Tales, with particular attention to the ways Chaucer’s experiments in literary form open onto problems in ethics, politics, gender and sexuality.

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.

This course explores mainly major plays representing the genres of tragedy and romance; most (but not all) date from the latter half of Shakespeare's career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. Section attendance is required.
(Medieval/Early Modern,  Drama)

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. (Poetry, Medieval/Early Modern, 1650-1830)

This course traces the history of the idea that the world might resemble a stage from its ancient roots to its current relevance in politics, social media, and gender expression, among other areas. We will explore these questions by reading performance texts and performance theory from classical to contemporary, by attending plays and watching films, and by considering non-theatrical events as occasions for performance. Students will gain a grounding in performance studies as a discipline and will learn how that critical lens can fundamentally alter how we understand social life and identity. (Drama, Theory)

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.

We’ll spend a first segment of the course on poetry and literature (and manifestos by William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley), a second segment on design and architecture (focusing on William Morris and other nineteenth-century figures), and a third segment on fashion (focusing on Alexander McQueen and other UK figures). Excursions will be related to fashion (potentially to Savile Row, the epicenter of men’s suits and tailoring) and design, along with some more casual literature-related walks. 

Students in this course will be invited to reflect on their journeys to and around the city of London alongside representations of walking from the Romantic literary tradition. For the Romantics—William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and others—walking was a powerful source of creative inspiration as well as a means of self-fashioning, contemplation, and learning about the world. Our primary texts will be poems and essays that explore the confluence of walking, thinking, and writing, in London or its environs. Each of our meetings will be organized around a particular walk, route, or trajectory and the set of concerns it suggests: the relation of country to city, urbanization and industrialization, mobility and embodiment, cosmopolitanism, sociability and solitude, and aesthetics.

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. (Poetry, 20/21st)

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)

This course trains students how to conduct research in the field of literary studies. We will learn and practice techniques of archival research, theoretical writing, close reading, literary history, digital methods, and other interdisciplinary approaches. We ask how and where do we do research? – in libraries, on computers, on field trips? What is an archive? Students will have the opportunity to begin to develop a new research project of their own design. This course is required for students who intend to write a BA Thesis in pursuit of the intensive track of the English major. However, it is open to all other students as well. Note: course will be offered in the Autumn (taught by Benjamin Saltzman) and Spring (taught by Josephine McDonagh). 

This course trains students how to conduct research in the field of literary studies. We will learn and practice techniques of archival research, theoretical writing, close reading, literary history, digital methods, and other interdisciplinary approaches. We ask how and where do we do research? – in libraries, on computers, on field trips? What is an archive? Students will have the opportunity to begin to develop a new research project of their own design. This course is required for students who intend to write a BA Thesis in pursuit of the intensive track of the English major. However, it is open to all other students as well.

Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time.

Capital is frequently described as a difficult-to-categorize text: part satire, part history, part theory. Yet for all this ambiguity, there is a sense in which the subtitle makes its generic affiliation quite clear: it is a “critique of political economy.” What exactly is “critique,” and how, in light of recent debates in literary studies, might reading Capital sharpen our sense of what it can and cannot do? And to what extent can it be considered a creative or poetic practice, as much as one committed to truth? (Theory, 1830-1990, 18th/19th Century)

How to write a life? Virginia Woolf grappled with this question, and so will we in this course. How, indeed, does one write, not only one’s own life, but the life of others, particularly when strong feelings are involved? We will study Woolf’s reflections on how to capture a life along with her attempts to do so, delving into her essays, novels, and life-writing (letters, diaries, and auto/biographical works). With the different literary genres, along with Woolf’s various engagements with other arts, we will see different approaches to re/creating personalities and inter-personal relationships emerge. To help us understand Woolf, we will examine her Victorian background, her Bloomsbury circle, and the Modernism with which she is associated. We will also engage with relevant theories of selfhood, sexuality, and auto/biography. At stake in our investigations is the role and critical potential of the personal in literary production. We will discuss this while taking up subjects such as familial relationships, the meaning of friendship, and the complexities of love. Throughout, we will consider Woolf’s relevance for today, and we will conclude with how Woolf’s own life has been taken up by others. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

This course focuses on narratives in which the category of “girl” or “girlhood” is under construction, or called into question. We’ll begin with a number of foundational works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Louisa May Alcott, Harriot Jacobs), and will move into novels, films, comics, and memoirs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (likely to include texts by Zitkala-Sa, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Myriam Gurba, and films by Peter Weir, Todd Solondz, Celine Sciamma). Throughout, the course will draw on work from fields like sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory to consider changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and development, as well as the way that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape categories and narratives of “girlhood.”

This course considers modes of quietude as they intersect experiences of blackness. What can be conveyed or contained in moments of stillness or quiet? Is black quietude a moment of universalism that transcends the determinations of race? Or do black subjects carry or project the experience of racialization into their spaces of quiet? Do we define quiet for the black subject on the same terms as for other racial categories? (Theory)

Caribbean literature is having a moment. NPR reported in 2023 that “this region has long been punching above its weight on the international literary scene.” We will read Safiya Sinclair’s (Jamaica/U.S.) How to Say Babylon, a memoir of self-discovery after being raised by an authoritarian father; a new translation of Mayra Santos Febres’ (Puerto Rico) collection of migration poems, Boat People; Myriam Chancy’s novel What Storm, What Thunder (Haiti/Canada/U.S.), set after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and poems from Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad & Tobago) and Dionne Brand (Canada/T&T). Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

This seminar focuses on family sagas: multigenerational stories of intimacy, friction, and survival in women's writing of Africa and the African diaspora. We will focus on three recent, acclaimed novels: Yaa Gyasi’s (US/Ghana) Homegoing (2016), Tiphanie Yanique’s (U.S. Virgin Islands) The Land of Love and Drowning (2014), and Namwali Serpell’s (US/Zambia) Old Drift (2019). We will both study the techniques that these writers use to craft their stories and test them out in short stories or novel excerpts of our own. Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

One of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the native Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called “the Bible of America.” It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical change, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we’ll read this full work closely (in multiple translations, while engaging its original K’iche’ Mayan language), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we’ll examine its mirroring in Genesis, Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Diné Bahane’ to consider how epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this tension between cosmos and politics, we’ll examine contemporary adaptations of the Popol Vuh by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock, Humberto Ak’ab’al, Xpetra Ernandex, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the U.S. today. As a capstone, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking about how this story of world creation implicates us to this day.

In this course students will study poetry, literature, and art written with dreams and dream practices to better understand the relation between dreaming and writing; and to gain some creative practice in connecting their own writing to their dreaming. We will read literature from a broad range of cultural and historical locales to gain an expanded sense of oneiric writing. And we will intensify that reading with regular writing exercises meant to elicit poetics from the subconscious. In doing so we will trouble simplistic accounts of the subconscious as merely suppressed or hidden consciousness, considering instead how the psychology of nightly visions relates to social, political, historical, and anthropological worlds. Students will be expected to maintain daily/nightly writing journals with weekly prompts to facilitate creative works. Final projects will consist of a polished portfolio or some equivalent. (Poetry, Theory)

In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an “artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian” who must “make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” All in all, his artistic mission was to express “what it is like to be alive.” Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin’s concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Many political observers argue that the challenges of our current political moment stem from the causes and responses to the financial crisis of 2008. In this course we will examine literary fiction, films, and television from the US, the UK, and Asia to understand how the challenges of representing the 2008 reflected and contributed to the crisis. In doing so we will also seek a better understanding of neoliberalism as a theory and a politics. Among the texts we will take up are several novels, Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger: A Novel; Rachel Cusk, Transit; Ben Lerner, 10:04: A Novel; and John Lanchester, Capital: A Novel; two films, The Big Short (Adam McKay) and Parasite (Bong Joon Ho); and the first season of the television series, Severance. (Fiction, Theory, 20th/21st)

From the moment of its first publication in 1884 through its recent re-imagining by Percival Everett in his 2024 novel, James, which retells the story of Huck from the perspective of Jim, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has elicited intense adulation and condemnation. In this course, we will take up Twain’s novel in its historical moment and across the long history of its reception, seeking to understand what the novel has meant for its many readers and whether it should continue to merit our attention and admiration in the present. Our goal is not merely to understand Twain’s novel, but also to see what it tells us about American literature as a whole. In addition to Twain’s novel and Everett’s retelling, we will read commentary by Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison and various other writers and critics. (Fiction, 18th/19th, 1830-1990)

Spanning works from the antebellum period to contemporary hip hop, this course will look at the ways Black artists have staged encounters with urban space. We will pay close attention to not just how Black artists have represented the city but the methodologies they have experimented with to study and survive it. From the juxtaposition of Southern and Northern cities in pre- and post-Great Migration literature, to Gwendolyn Brooks’ mid-century experiments in urban sight, Spike Lee’s staged urban explosions and Kendrick Lamar’s Compton soundscapes, this course complicates both the dreams and the despairs yoked to being Black in the city.  (Fiction, 20th/21st, Theory)

This course will introduce you to early modern women playwrights from England (Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn) and from continental Europe (the French Marguerite de Navarre and Madame de Villedieu, the Italian Antonia Pulci and Margherita Costa, the Spanish Ana Caro and—beyond Europe— the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). We will analyze the complex works, ideas,
and lives of those brilliant playwrights through the lenses of intersectional trans inclusive feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. Throughout, we will remain alert to the sense of possibility that suffuses these plays’ political imagination. This course is open to MAPH students and to
PhD students upon request (Drama, Medieval/Early Modern)

This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald. (20th/21st)

We will examine the notion of the symbolic from three perspectives: the phenomenological/philosophical, the computational, and the psychoanalytic. First we will look at modernity’s relation to the symbolic as treated in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, and Panofsky. Next, we explore the symbolic in Turing’s theorization of a universal computing machine and Claude Shannon’s invention of information entropy. Secondary sources and Benjamín Labutut’s “novel,” The Maniac will also be read. Finally we will take up Lacan’s work in reference to the foregoing contexts, including essays by Friedrich Kittler, Barbara Johnson, and Lydia Liu.

The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing.

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 critiques 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, and Arundhati Roy). (Theory; 20th/21st)

This course explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about Blackness, in long-term processes of racial formation, and in global racial struggles from the early modern period to the present. Students will read Shakespearean plays portraying Black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American, Caribbean, and Post-colonial rewritings of those plays by playwrights Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Bernard Jackson, Djanet Sears, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Lolita Chakrabarti, and film-makers Max Julien and Jordan Peele. This course is open to MAPH students and to PhD students upon request. (Drama, Medieval/Early Modern)

Within this course, American poetry of the late 20th and the 21st centuries will serve as our primary textual/material object, but our conceptual object (or optic) will be derived, in the first instance, from work in visual media and various accounts of that work. Of course, distinctions between the visual and the verbal, the graphic and the discursive, often break down within collage practices. Writers will include Brion Gysin, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Susan Howe, Robin Coste Lewis, and Tan Lin. Some of our time will be spent in the Regenstein's Special Collections, and in the Smart Museum.

Typography generally refers to the arrangement of type on a surface. It often goes unnoticed, because the way words look — their shape and typographic form — is secondary to the meaning they carry. Typography is one of the richest areas for formal exploration in graphic design. This course explores major shifts in the reproduction of the written word: from type foundries and linotype to bitmap fonts, open type, and variable type. Working in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, students will experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text in multiple scripts and languages. Typographic history and theory will be discussed in relation to course projects.

This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam.

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.
(Fiction, Literary/Critical theory; 20th/21st)

Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability. (Medieval/Early Modern)

Since the Renaissance beginnings of the “age of sail,” the ship has been one of literature’s most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. Note: one session will be held at the Newberry Library's maps collections. (Fiction, 18/19)

This course, co-taught between English and Art History, considers art and social photography alongside works of prose, poetry, and fiction from the United States. We will consider: what critical methods might bridge literature, art history, and cultural studies? Why study works of art and literature together? How might captions and placards be considered critical writing? The course will include museum and archival visits to help students learn further research skills in the disciplines.

This course will cover the rich representation of university life in non-professional Renaissance drama (including student-written plays, hazing plays, moralities, and satirical pamphlets, as well as intriguing fragments from lost plays), and the tantalizing glimpses this subject that the public stage offer. Plays include Love's Labour's Lost, The Parnassus Plays, Michaelmas Term, The Marriage of Wit & Science, and several neo-Latin plays in English translation. It will also provide a deep dive into the student scrapbooks of the late 16th / early 17th centuries; students will assemble their own album amicorum based on this curious and compelling form of self-documentation. Half of the course meetings will be taking place in the Regenstein Library's Special Collections. (Drama, Medieval/Early Modern)

This course traces the labor of Black and Native people in relation to Hyde Park, Chicago, beginning with the 1893 World's Fair through Nuclear Development in the 20th century. We will study the afterlives of slavery and native dispossession by visiting local sites and archives. Using methodologies from the fields of Anthropology, Literary Studies and Native Studies, we will foreground the importance of being in place, to situate ourselves as students and teachers in the neighborhood. Students will theorize themselves in place and in relation to those past as they work towards a public facing final assignment. (20th/21st, 1830-1990, Theory)

What do we mean when we say literature? Novels? Poems? Plays? Autobiographies? Essays? And what does it mean to talk about a history of literature?  Perhaps such an effort should mean a discussion of popular works; or the development of national and ethnic group literatures; or tracking the evolution, emergence, and obsolescence of genres; or describing the effect of socioeconomic forces on literary production. In this course we will explore various ways that writers and scholars have understood literary history, and we will discuss how these understanding affect the way we value literary works.  Our readings will include Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel; Eric Auerbach, Mimesis; Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature; Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature? 

This is a Gray Center Seminar taught by Jonathan Flatley (U Chicago) and Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel, two members of CHEAP, the Berlin-based art collective and queer artistic and political framework. 

The aim of this seminar is to help its members recover visions, texts, sounds, concepts, moods and utopian impulses from the 1990s that can help us to see our way out of our current situation, that help us to imagine different worlds.  Through a series of readings, viewings, listenings, and conversations, we will engage in an ongoing collaborative project that will culminate with a collectively composed and designed performance and publication at the end of the quarter.  Two areas of thematic focus will be 1) the nature and effects of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War on political situations ranging in scale from the intimate and personal to the global and geopolitical and 2) the emergence of a new queer politics in response to the AIDS crisis and the corresponding emergence of queer theory.  Our course title is inspired by a 1999 essay by Douglas Crimp, in which he argued for a return to Andy Warhol’s films and art through the methods and concepts offered by cultural studies and queer theory, instead of the ones that a conservative art history had theretofore presented. Crimp’s retrospective look at the gender and sexually transgressive underground film and theater scene of the 1960s in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of cultural, visual and queer studies motivates our desire to get more out of the 1990s for our troubled present.  Readings may include works by Douglas Crimp, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Masha Gessen, Victor Pelevin, Gregg Bordowitz, Joshua Clover, Heiner Müller, Annett Gröschner, Thomas Heise, Christoph Schlingensief, Ida Lupino, Audre Lorde, Francis Fukayama, Boris Mikhailov, Vaginal Davis, Le Tigre, ACT UP, The Lesbian Avengers and Riot Grrrl and Queercore Zines. It may include visits from other artists and writers including CHEAP member Vaginal Davis, Jonathan Berger, and Gregg Bordowitz. 

Requirements for the course will include short weekly assignments drawing on our course texts, and participating in the ongoing collaborative project, which will include both critical and creative work.  Time and schedule permitting, we may wish to arrange occasional workshops outside of class time.

This course introduces students to major works in 20th and 21st century North American monster fiction and cinema through the lens of critical race studies. The class will study and interrogate monster categories like zombies, werewolves, and vampires. Authors include Stephen Graham Jones and Octavia Butler; filmmakers include Guillermo del Toro and George Romero.

In this co-taught 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 the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city's foundations in phenomena such as the filling in of swamp; the river as pipeline; 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, tangible, and audible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene into a final experimental book project.

Admission is by consent only: please write a short paragraph briefly sketching your academic background and naming your interest in the course. Send this submission to: jscape@uchicago.edu, amberginsburg@gmail.com

Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person’s inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
 

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 bold 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 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, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. 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, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

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

In this class, we examine U.S.-based fiction, film, and theory from the late twentieth century through the present that centers on models of biological and social reproduction that depart from or disrupt the traditional white bourgeois nuclear family ideal. Cultural objects and theory around queer and trans reproduction will be central to our class archive, as will explorations into the radical potential of assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. However, we will be equally interested in tracing how the legacies and ongoing realities of slavery, settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and capitalist exploitation tend towards the “queering” of kinship relations for Black and Indigenous people, people of color, and poor people.  (Theory, Fiction, 20th/21st)

This course explores what is perhaps the most perverse ideology to emerge from the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: pro-slavery thought. This course will trace the history of pro-slavery thought from its emergence in eighteenth-century Britain through its apotheosis in the Lost Cause literature of the postbellum American South. Alongside readings of literary works (including, for instance, pro-slavery rewrites of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind), we will reconstruct the networks of print, patronage, and commerce that circulated ephemeral print material through the pro-slavery international. This course will be of particular interest to students who want to learn how to work with historical periodicals and pamphlet literature, as well as to students interested in the relationship between interest groups and popular culture.

This course will examine two of the most important works to come out of the English civil wars: Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Both works deal, in radically different ways, with fundamental questions about the nature of human life and human politics. Throughout, we will contextualize each of these works with other texts written by Hobbes, Milton, and their contemporaries, as well as recent work by historians of philosophy, political theorists, and literary critics.

This course takes its impetus from two important recent studies of the contemporary novel, Dorothy Hale's The Novel and the New Ethics (2020) and Timothy Bewes's Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022). Although they foreground some of the same texts—such as J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Zadie Smith's On Beauty(2005)—these books' arguments diverge radically. Hale argues for twentieth and twenty-first-century conceptions of the novel as a privileged site for the encounter with alterity, while Bewes refuses such accounts as inadequate to the post-subjective specificity of contemporary fiction. The present course is meant to serve as a simultaneous survey of a range of primarily twenty-first-century novels and of the development of these critical debates, which have drawn in a number of philosophers as well as literary critics, across the same roughly twenty-year period. Along with Coetzee and Smith, likely authors will include Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom McCarthy, Richard Powers, Paul Beatty, Julie Otsuka, and Joy Williams.

Even as people like and value trees and forests, we have been unable to stop the ongoing and potentially catastrophic deforestation of the planet. With the contemporary ecological crisis in mind, this class will explore the long and varied history of human entanglement with trees, sampling from a broad historical span and moving between literature, philosophy and art (e.g. Ovid, Ruisdael, John Clare, Brothers Grimm, Marx, Pissaro, Cezanne, Varlam Shalamov, John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Carl Philips, Mary Siisip Geniusz, Annie Proulx, Richard Powers, Michael Marder, Charles Gaines, and Zoe Leonard). Topics will include settler colonialism and capitalism as drivers of deforestation; the art history of trees; the recurring impulse to imitate or find kinship with trees; indigenous writing about forests and plants; various efforts to apprehend the specificity of arboreal being without fetishizing it. We will include at least one trip to the University of Chicago’s Warren Woods Ecological Field Station.

We will spend the quarter reading this complex, dense, and posthumously published work on the work of art as a "social fact," supplemented by addition readings from Kant, Bourdieu, Jameson, Felski, and others.

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.) (Poetry, 20th/21st)

How does materiality matter to our understanding of media, new and old? While several distinct mediums (photography, film, digital media) have been charged with “dematerializing” the physical world, so too have they been celebrated for granting us unanticipated access to it. And by now the “materiality of media” has become a familiar phrase, however unevenly deployed. We ourselves will focus, during the first half of this course, on distinct apprehensions of materialism (from Aristotle to Marx to Karen Barad and Giuliana Bruno); thereafter, we will engage artistic practices (print, filmic, musical, digital) to sharpen the way we might talk about the material dimensions of our media environment. We will spend some time in Special Collections and in the Smart Museum.