Courses

This course asks students to think critically and meta-critically about the role and presence of higher education/ academics, university life and college experience(s) in American literature, particularly as it has appeared within the genre of the novel. To that end, this course combines literary studies alongside the still nascent “critical university studies” to ask, at the most basic level, how different American writers—across different times and spaces—have envisioned what living and learning within a college/ campus looks like. And furthermore, how this affects—or doesn’t—the broader American society under which these colleges exist within. Students will read within the diverse, but fluid, genre of “campus novels” and these readings may include Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stoner by John Williams, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed. Films that students will watch may include National Lampoon’s Animal House, Good Will Hunting and Accepted.

Ranging from the spectacular to the hidden, from the national to the domestic, affecting people unequally across races and genders, violence often confounds our expectations for representation. Similarly, property, itself unequally distributed, either appears or disappears depending on how we tell a story. Narrative is a crucial aspect of how we both reveal and conceal the presence of violence and property in everyday life.
Taking its material from US literature prior to the twenty-first century, this course examines how both violence and property intertwine throughout the literary history of the United States. In this course, we will focus on the ways that literary texts, primarily prose narrative, represent these confusing phenomena to understand the political, aesthetic, and historical implications of both property and violence. We will read a variety of literary texts, including work by Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison with supplemental readings from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives.

From the murderous matriarch to the overbearing stepmother, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary representations of mothers reveal the anxieties, fantasies, and social ideals of reproduction, family, and gender in the period. This course argues that what makes a mom “bad” in these texts is bound up in the racial, gendered, and sexual imagination of early modern England. We will read a broad range of early modern texts from epic poetry to prose fiction, from midwifery manuals to the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, we will confront past (and present) understandings of motherhood, care, femininity, and family structures.

The aim of this course is to approach nonfiction as literature, to think critically about what the term “nonfiction” means and why the writings it describes have traditionally been seen as less “literary”: we will ask such questions as, what do nonfiction genres like journalism, essay, and memoir share with each other? Is the writing’s claim to truth something we can discern in the form of a text, and if not, what purpose does the concept of nonfiction serve in our publishing and reading culture? We will explore a few different theoretical approaches to “nonfiction” and some of the concepts or histories that shape our use of this term and sense of its meaning, including language philosophy, narratology, and literary theories of fiction. And we’ll read these theories alongside texts that work as case studies by either exemplifying or challenging what we think of as “nonfiction,” such as: WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and 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.

The idea of automatic writing, or writing undertaken without conscious control, animates some of literary modernism’s most groundbreaking works. This course traces a history of automatic writing from late-nineteenth-century hypnotism and literary impressionism, through Gertrude Stein and Surrealism, to midcentury photography and the emergence of postmodernism. Readings in psychology and literary criticism will guide us as we investigate not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing, but also, and more fundamentally, the concept of the “automatic” that underpins how we think about art, mindedness, and agency. Course texts may include the prose of James Agee, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, and Muriel Spark; the poetry of André Breton and Gertrude Stein; and the critical writing of Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Pierre Janet, and Ruth Leys.

In this course, we will examine the short story “cycle,” a textual form which is structured as a collection of shorter narratives but expresses a certain interconnectedness (by way of common themes, characters, settings, etc.) between the stories that compels us to treat the work as somehow “whole.” In our discussions of these works, I aim to: explore the relationship between the generic unit of the story cycle and literary movements like American literary regionalism/”local color” fiction, the Harlem Renaissance, and Southern Gothic; delineate the popular-aesthetic mandates of the post-Reconstruction publishing industry in the US; and interrogate the ascendancy and prestige of the category of “the Modernist Novel” relative to short fiction in the early 20th century. Possible authors include: Eudora Welty, Jean Toomer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Hunter Austin.

In this course we will attend to several kinds of experimental texts that emerged during the long eighteenth century in Britain: descriptions (and critiques) of scientific experiments featuring microscopic observation (Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Margaret Cavendish); early fictional and non-fictional ethnographic narratives (Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Montagu, and Samuel Johnson); and the emergence of the first science fiction novels (Cavendish and Mary Shelley). Throughout we will pay close attention to the rhetoric of witnessing in both literary and scientific texts, and we will also consider the relation between early scientific writing and ideologies of colonialism.

What does it mean to establish, challenge, or respect interpersonal boundaries—for the imagined wellbeing of a child, lover, or stranger? What does it take, in other words, to be a “good enough” (rather than distant or overbearing) parent, partner, or friend? And how does a person’s psychic development in a “good enough” environment bring about their participation in various spheres of cultural activity? In this course, we will closely attend to essays by key figures in object relations psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Masud Khan, Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, Adam Phillips) and literary criticism (Barbara Johnson, Leo Bersani, Mary Jacobus, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant) alongside recent novels and films that play out the surprising difficulty of being good enough.

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.

The study of poetry has been fundamental to criticism, certainly to literary criticism, for nearly as long as “English” has existed as a modern discipline. It served liberal education well in this central role in developing the capacities of aesthetic sensibility and the powers of analysis and judgment. But when the lyric was enshrined at the heart of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards in the 1920s, it was initially all about the focus on “the poem itself.” And typically it was about the poem on the page--rather than in the air, or the ear--and often about the poem in isolation from other considerations. Much good came of the decades of attention bestowed on poetry understood in this way--a great refinement in critical attention and appreciation, and a rich repertoire of terms for critical description and discrimination. In this course, we will try to reap some of the advantages of proceeding in this way with the study of poetry. But we will also be looking at poetry beyond the page, at poems in relation to other poems, at poems in relation to other forms and other things, including the history of poetic innovation. Selecting examples from across the English language and beyond, we will proceed from simple examples to more complex ones, and from more elementary topics in prosody and poetics to more advanced issues.

Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) reinvented the American musical. This course explores his work as a lyricist and composer, and his influence on writers including Jonathan Larson, Jeanine Tesori, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

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. (Pre-med)

This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov; on through the next generation, O'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver; and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan, and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender, and psychology. Writing is also an important concern of the course. There will be two papers and an individual tutorial with each student.

This course offers an introduction to the fundamentals of narrative fiction. Together, we will explore concepts and analytical tools for reading and interpreting fiction, paying particular attention to the relationship between narrative, time, and history; the role of narrative in shaping both personal and national or collective identity; the relationship between allegorical and realist modes of representation; the status of fiction and of fictional characters. Throughout, we will be alert to formal concerns (about narrative voice in particular—omniscience, irony, free indirect discourse, etc.), as well as to socio-historical and literary-historical perspectives on the uses and pleasures of narrative art. In order to foreground the problem of narrative itself, we will consider texts from different time periods, with widely varied approaches to the form. The thematic focus for the term will be on kinship.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College.

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

This course focuses on the future as imagined by American science fiction of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will pay attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged; on the other, we will work to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. We will deploy different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to apprehend 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 Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work in different media (e.g., film, radio, graphic narrative).

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.

In this advanced undergraduate course, we will explore the relationship between race and time. How might a concept of time already be racialized? How does the racialized subject experience time? How might such a temporality be figured through literary narratives? We’ll take up these and a host of other questions pertaining to the politics and poetics of time through a literary, theoretical, and cinematic study that asks us to think critically about schemas of time in the works of writers of colour. Some of the assigned authors and writers include, but are not limited to, Ted Chiang, Shani Mootoo, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Lee Walters, Yoko Tawada, and Frantz Fanon.

In anglophone immigrant literary narratives, there is a place of particular poignancy and longing reserved for meditations upon food. What is the role, the space, and the import of food in immigrant lives? What diminution accompanies the loss of your own food, and what desire attaches to the rediscovery, or the replication of it in a foreign land? What are the stakes involved in charting out a dominion of your own familiar flavors or adapting to a new palate in an unfamiliar milieu? This course charts a few of these concerns and uses food writing as a point of entry into modes of being and making in immigrant literature, considering that emigration is a displacement that is sometimes impelled and accompanied by trauma, and characterized by rapid modes of adaptation to an unfamiliar and frequently hostile environment. Readings are likely to include fiction and poetry by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amy Tan, Imtiaz Dharker, Amarjit Chandan, Monique Truong, and Cristina Henríquez. These primary texts will be supplemented by critical and analytical readings about patterns of displacement and consumption in immigrant lives and literature.

What do saints’ lives and Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Club (Netflix, 2022) have in common? If the two seem historically distant, both texts nonetheless show disabled characters in complex relation to their communities. This course looks at contemporary texts alongside Middle English ones to ask how medieval English literature can illuminate our present understanding of disability in media.

While Middle English literature lacks our term disability, it is undeniably populated with figures whose bodies and minds are depicted as deviating from the normal body. Through unexpected pairings of medieval and contemporary texts, as well as readings in critical disability theory, we will examine how stories now and then 1) moralize bodily difference, 2) figure disabled bodies of intersecting identities, and 3) attempt to express in words the possibilities for exclusion from and participation in communal life.

Questions we will explore: How do the portrayals of disabled characters reveal a society’s definition of the normal (what disability studies terms the “normate”)? Which stereotypes do literary texts perpetuate about disability, and can we produce readings that counter these harmful portrayals? Can barriers to access lead to opportunities for creativity and imagination? Finally: what role do literary histories play in helping us understand medieval and contemporary conceptions of disability? Our work will culminate with a visit to the Newberry Library to conduct primary research as well as a final creative project.

This course will survey literature shaped by the history of imperial conflict between Russia and “The West,” ultimately with a view to better understanding our current geopolitical situation and mediascape. The course will be anchored in the nineteenth century, focusing on writing related to the Crimean War (1853-6) and the long contest between Britain and Russia for domination in Central Asia and India known as “The Great Game,” but it will also provide a snapshot of Cold War cultural production, with an emphasis on ideological dissent among Black radicals and Russian emigres, before turning finally to our contemporary moment.

A course on experimental poetry of the late 14th century, with special attention to how formal techniques of disorientation and discontinuity are related to the philosophical, ethical, and political ambitions of poetry.

A study of John Milton’s major writings in lyric, epic, tragedy, and polemical prose, with particular emphasis upon his evolving sense of his poetic vocation and career in relation to his vision of literary, religious, political, and cosmic history.

This course examines the major works—novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays—of two of Romanticism’s most influential women writers. We will attend to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft’s stylistic theories, and Shelley’s scenes of imaginative sympathy.

This course examines the centrality of normativity to our conceptions of funniness, reading theories of comedy alongside stand-up, sitcoms, dramedy, and romantic comedy. We will ask: in what ways do comedic formulas establish ideas of the “normal” in order to subvert (or perhaps reinforce) them? How, does comedy about the “strange”—as the foreign, the queer, the excessive or the abject—reframe structures of sociality often taken for granted, forcing us to grapple with questions of citizenship and belonging, gendered and sexual norms, racialization and power? In addition to theories of comedy and joke theory, students will analyze theoretical works on race, gender and sexuality alongside popular television series, talk shows, and comedy specials. Possible texts and comics include: Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Insecure, Reservation Dogs, Ramy, Atlanta, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Julio Torres, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Jacqueline Novak, Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, and Ronny Chieng.

This course takes up cultural representations of organized crime in literature, film, and television as loci for thinking about intersections of capitalism, globalism, migration, violence, and family. Texts may include My Brilliant Friend, The Godfather, Infernal Affairs, The Wire, Eastern Promises, and Shark Tale.

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

How have people inhabited London over time? And how are these varied forms of living reflected in the vast body of texts by writers and film makers who have made London their home? National capital and imperial metropolis, London is also a network of local neighborhoods in which communities have developed over time. In this course we will examine texts by an assortment of Londoners from the 19th and 20th centuries who write about urban sites of human interaction and encounter. Our course will consider London locations as places of compassion, repression, brutality, hospitality and rejection, resistance and compliance, friendship and love. How are these possibilities – both affective and political, personal and public – related to the various environments of the city? How are human relationships shaped by the specific forms of city buildings and institutions? And how have these urban places been impacted by styles of city living, changing populations, and the different communities that have inhabited them? In short, how do Londoners live together? Our texts will include Mary Prince, History of a West Indian Slave, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, James Berry, Windrush Songs, Derek Jarman, “The Last of England”, Steve McQueen, “Mangrove”, and essays by Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Ghassan Hage.

Our survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (especially the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world.  We will also address foundational and recent critical-theoretical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage topics such as the art of landscape, an influx of exotic and dangerously erotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism of the naturalist Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” and the (literal) fruits of empire and vegetarianism.

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.

This Gray Center Fellowship course considers the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. Co-taught by Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone, the course will feature film screenings and panels on embodied style, narrative, time, and the built environment, along with skateboarding's anti-scarcity and communal structures that both subvert and reframe capitalist competition. Students will produce a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain--the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in none more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form. Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” as far too limiting in scope. But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? Why has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts in particular cases?

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.

This course introduces students to the theories and processes underlying game design through the creation of analog projects. We will be designing for forms that include board games, tabletop games, and live-action games. While no prior design experience is required, some background with game studies will enable more innovative work. This course will be project-based and collaborative in nature.

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?

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory is also considerable. We will explore the range and variety of Brecht's work, from the Threepenny hit to the agitprop film Kühle Wampe) to classic parable plays, as well as Brecht heirs in German theatre and film (RW Fassbinder & Peter Weiss) theatre and film in Britain (Peter Brook & John McGrath), African theatre and film influenced by Brecht, and the NYC post-Occupy adaptation of Brecht’s Days of the Commune.
This course also includes a weekly screening session.

Disputes about sexual difference set feminist factions against each other during the nineteenth century, as in the present; and, like the feminisms of our own moment, nineteenth-century feminisms diverged sharply on questions about race and racism. This course reads US and British prose from 1850-1915 in order to study the debates that shaped feminist thought during that period. Considering a range of varied feminisms (among them: liberal feminism, difference feminism, eugenic feminism, white feminism, etc.), we'll encounter conflicting arguments about the right to vote, access to education, marriage, mothering, and sex. Authors may include: Anna Julia Cooper, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Frances E.W. Harper, John Stuart Mill, Lucy Parsons, John Ruskin, Mary Arnold Ward, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

This course examines ways of seeing, or representation, in the making of gender and sexuality across time and place. We will study feminist and queer literature and arts, and theories of representation across disciplines, on questions from migration and borders to care. For example, how do practices of mapmaking, or narratives of crossing, help us understand intimacy or estrangement? And how might visualizing care move us toward repair or a new world? In taking this lens, we will also consider how gender and sexuality are co-constituted with race, the nation-state, and labor. Through a workshop model, we will build on these foundational and new approaches to representing gender and sexuality together. Participants are encouraged to bring in supplementary texts to build out our archive of transnational gender and sexuality. Our class will culminate in a glossary, made up of short essays by participants on aesthetics, interpretative approaches, and imaginaries.

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.

As we begin to get a feel for the aesthetic, social, and political moods and modes that will come to be the hallmarks of the 2020’s, critics have begun turning back to the 1920’s and its uncanny historical similarities to our current decade—both being preceded by pandemics and eruptions of racial violence, for instance— to think the present. In studying the aesthetic responses of individuals and movements in and to the 1920s, this class will also ask students to consider the utility and limits of this lens in helping us make sense of our emerging now.

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

With the mass mobilization of the US following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, artists of all kinds served in the armed forces or in the war bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean that cultural production stopped. It did, however, mean drastic changes the kind of art that was produced and the ways in which it was disseminated. In short, World War II instigated a dramatic change in the relationship of art to the state. For example, the Library of Congress was established; American publishing was completely overhauled (the first volume of the redoubtable Viking Portable, for instance, was an anthology issued to soldiers); Japanese internment camps had as one of their unintended consequences the opportunity for a new generation of Nisei writers to share and publish their work; American theater saw its boundaries stretched to embrace a wider cross section of the US public; Hollywood and the war department enjoyed a collaboration on mass market as well as training films; refugee intellectuals from Europe congregated in New York and had a remarkable reshaping effect on American culture. The course will follow various streams—mass culture and high culture, film and literature, drama and the visual arts—to explore how new institutions, new cultural producers, and new audiences transformed US culture during the war years.

Numerous commentators have remarked on similarities between late 19th-century Gilded Age America and turn-of-the 21st-century neoliberal America. By focusing on several American novels, beginning with the late 19th- and early 20th-century decades, we will explore the way that US novelists sought to understand the political, social, and imaginative challenges presented by the concentration of great wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

In this course we will examine that period known as the Harlem Renaissance, partly as an exercise in literary criticism and theory, partly as an exercise in literary and intellectual history. Our objectives will be to critique the primary texts from this period and at the same time to assess the efforts of literary scholars to make sense of this moment in the history of American cultural production.

A survey of the major poetic and pictorial works of William Blake, centrally focussed on his illuminated books, from the early Songs of Innocence and Experience to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the books of the revolutionary period of the 1790s: Europe, America, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen. We will also consider the later prophecies, Milton: A Poem and Jerusalem, along with Blake’s work as an illustrator of Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible. Blake’s engagement with the political and religious controversies of his time will provide context, along with his pioneering exploration of dialectical modes of thought and radical forms of humanism.

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language—the interplay between the “icon” and the “logos.” A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as “Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words”:  诗中有画，画中有诗.
This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts.
The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between “East” and “West” that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study.
This course will be coordinated with a parallel seminar at Beijing University.

This course will introduce students to the editorial principles, material and institutional infrastructure, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. 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? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as a preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.

The course will track hymns from the early modern period through the late eighteenth century. We’ll examine the evolution of the hymn as a literary form, focusing on obsolescence and adaptation in literary transmission. We’ll start with the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, and analyze psalters (such as the one produced by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her brother, Sir Philip Sidney) and the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins that were used in Anglican services. We’ll then take up the development of congregational hymns, hymns sung by everyone in a congregation, to track the way that literary adaptation among Dissenters became both common and controversial. We’ll look at Isaac Watts’s multiple hymns for each of the Psalms, his later Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and his Divine Songs for children to get at the importance he and other Dissenters (such as Anna Letitia Barbauld) attached to supplying words to all who could sing or say them. We’ll end with a discussion of “Amazing Grace” and its use in the British abolition movement, and with a discussion of the movement of the literary hymn away from religion altogether in literary hymns, Shelley’s and Keats’s odes.

Designed for graduate students in the humanities, this course begins with fundamental texts on ideology and the critique of capitalist culture by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, Wilhelm Reich and Raymond Williams, before moving to Marxist aesthetics, from the orthodox Lukács to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin) to the heterodox (Brecht), and concludes with contemporary debates around Marxism and imperialism (Lenin, Fanon, and others), and Marxism and media, including the internet. (20th/21st) This course will have a particular focus on guiding students through the conventions of academic writing in the Humanities.

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual (philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, novel chapters in dramatic form, twitter theater, digital theater, algorithmic theater, transmedia games, remote theater.) One unit attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

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

In this course, we will study poetry ‘in the abstract’. We will study various efforts on the part of philosophers, literary critics, and poets themselves to formulate theories of poetic discourse. We will examine a range of historical attempts to conceptualize poetry as a particular kind of language practice, from Greek, Chinese, and Indic antiquity to the present.

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.

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 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 regularly carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own. (20th/21st)

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

This course will examine the very long and possibly—very probably—the greatest novel in the English language. We’ll consider the effect of Richardson’s decision to conduct his novel as a series of letters, and we’ll pay particular attention to his extraordinary effectiveness in creating complexity in a fairly simple plot and in tracking an ever-expanding cast of characters. The Penguin edition we’ll be using comes to 1499 pages, and they are over-sized pages. This is a course for committed readers!

This class will read US novels and short stories by African-American, American Indian, Asian-American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in critical cultural race studies.

This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of critics such as Luce Irigaray, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Judith Butler, we explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity simultaneously understood to be unrepresentable and to have a masculine image. Texts range from premodern mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

The theatre represents a new and wildly successful commodity in the early modern English market. Yet it is often kept separate from other fashionable goods of the period by virtue of its intangible form. This course overturns the orthodoxy that an early modern play was a co-imaged event and the early modern theatre was an “empty space” by attending to the Renaissance theatre's frequent recourse to household stuff.
We will read plays designed for private performance, that use the fixtures of the household to build theatrical worlds. We will investigate dramatists who liken the playhouse to key venues of commodity culture, including the pawnshop, the Exchange (the precedent of the shopping mall), and the fairground. We will draw from Henslowe's Diary to recover the business of theatrical property-making and the allure of a company as disclosed by its holdings. All the while, we will question how the fiction of emptiness takes hold in theatre history, and how plays that depict a furnished world are relegated to second-class genres like domestic tragedy and city comedy.

What kinds of writing can literary scholars use to share their discoveries? What new audiences can they reach? How can we best communicate with those audiences, and how can we spark broad and enduring interest in humanities subjects? Taking the changing landscape of academic publishing as a point of departure, this course offers students opportunities to develop writing skills for a variety of academic and professional contexts. Guided by their own individual interests, students will work with primary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, completing three linked projects over the course of the term. This progressive sequence will invite them to look beyond the conventional journal article: we'll consider how to convey humanist ways of thinking and scholarly insight across a range of genres, including podcasts, videos, teaching resources, book and film reviews, book-club presentations, academic conference talks, and annotated transcriptions of finds from the digital archive as well as the library's Special Collections.

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 readings that likely include Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism, Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

This course explores early modern debates about human agency across multiple registers: political, philosophical, religious, erotic. Texts include selections from the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Carey, Margaret Cavendish and John Milton.

What do we mean by the “postcolonial aesthetic”? In this course, we read and think through the literary and conceptual resources that might help us reconstruct this notion – from Deepika Bahri, to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Our goal is to attend to “the aesthetic” as an experience that reshapes subjectivity in terms of our relation to ourselves and others. By engaging with twentieth-century novels, memoir, and film, we consider how this postcolonial aesthetic might function. What habituated forms of perception or common sense notions does it seek to interrupt? What ways of sensing and living does it offer? Readings will likely include Ashis Nandy, Deepika Bahri, Theodor Adorno, Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Arundhati Roy, and Jean Rhys.

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 two hundred 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 a landmark case – 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 Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

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. And they are Michel Foucault’s example of the heterotopia par excellence. 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, this course 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.

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction.

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

This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. 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.

In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women’s reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. in the first few decades of the twentieth century. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around women’s crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around “women’s work” and working class women, the birth control movement, feminist emancipation, marriage and the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing “the race.” Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that sought to dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether.

This course considers the significance of mobility, migration and migrancy in the context of concepts of 18th- and 19th century-modernity, and explores some of their legacies especially in relation to literature.  We will focus on migration in and from Britain mainly in the nineteenth century, and consider, inter alia, how literary and other printed texts intersect with the practices and fantasies of moving and staying still.    Key terms are mobility and stability or stagnancy, emigration and settlement, colonization and decolonization, empire, eviction, dispossession, hospitality, refuge and asylum, and ‘being moved’ in all its senses.

While apparently worlds apart, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and the K’iche’ Maya story of creation the Popol Vuh (1702) are historically adjacent works of world creation that remind us that world creations happen in historical circumstances, that creation itself is nothing if not historically, socially, and critically tensioned. This class thinks with and between these works to ask conceptual questions about creation and its relationship to myth and history. What are creations for? What kinds of thinking and feeling do they enable? And how should we understand the framework of comparability itself? At the same time, we will rethink the global historical currents within which the texts were written: the early modern anglophone, hispanophone, and indigenous worlds whose interconnections bind together the creation stories told by Milton and the anonymous K’iche’ Maya authors. Listening closely for shared engagements with colonialism, race, religion, political power, historical experience, pedagogy, intellection, imagination, critique, and social crisis, we will look for through-lines between these works but also for distinct points of departure and incommensurability.

This seminar will develop research projects around the topics of Enlightenment(s), nationalisms, and transnationalisms in the Romantic era. Some of the categories for the course will come from traditional faculty psychology (reason, memory, imagination). Some will come from criticism and theory that are sometimes tinged with aesthetic and philosophical ambitions. Our primary emphasis will be on literature, but questions about romanticism in music, the visual arts, and the historical disciplines will be in play. The main focus will fall on English-language literary materials produced in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, but the course may also engage texts by non-British writers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and the Saint Simonians.

Following Jennifer Nash’s charge for Black feminists to “let go” of tightly held intellectual genealogies (intersectionality) and postures (defensiveness), this doctoral seminar takes up new directions and debates in the study of Black feminisms. We’ll study institutional debates and tensions between Black and transnational feminisms (where do we mean when we say Black, and who do we mean when we say transnational), the agonistic relationship between Afropessimism and Black feminisms, among others. Alongside these new works in Black feminisms, we’ll consider the foundational works of Black feminist thought, literature, and art they’re reimagining. Scholars, writers, and artists under consideration include Jennifer Nash, Katherine McKittrick, Jennifer Morgan, Simone Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, Patrice Douglass, Torkwase Dyson, and Canisia Lubrin.

This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival theory and research methodologies that attend to colonialism and slavery between 1650 and 1865. With a focus on how scholars have used the analytics of race and gender to examine this history, our class will examine foundational primary materials and the bodies of scholarship that have grown up around them. We will read the work of Olaudah Equiano, Matthew Lewis, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Samuel Occom, Venture Smith, Black Hawk, Harriet Jacobs, as well as Salem Witch Trial transcripts. In addition, the class will visit UChicago’s Special Collections and the Newberry Library. Students will write on an archival object of their choosing from the period that is relevant to their individual research interests.

This course explores the methodological friction between present-day concepts and the archives of the past. In particular, we look at instances when an organizing concept is arguably anachronistic to the cultural milieu in question. The class will be divided into several units, like “race before race,” “lyric before lyric” “trans before trans,” and “literature before literature.” Readings will include both primary and secondary sources. Along the way, we will also consider different paradigms for understanding literary history, cultural history, and the history of ideas (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Quentin Skinner, Arnold Davidson, Hans Robert Jauss, Sheldon Pollock).

In the first instance, this course surveys a range of thinking (by Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others) that has gone under the banner of ‘new materialism,’ emphasizing the vitality of matter and working to reject anthropocentrism. In the second instance, the course focuses on textual materialism within literary studies (both Susan Howe and Derrida, for instance), ultimately asking how we might begin to understand material texts within a new materialist frame. The widest frame for the course, though, will be provided by the question of how the materialisms of our moment (across fields and disciplines) can be understood through the analytics provided by historical materialism. We will read literary texts from different periods, and we will conduct at least two sessions in Special Collections.