Courses

This course surveys Gothic poetry from its beginnings with the graveyard poets of the eighteenth century to Edgar Allan Poe and his Victorian inheritors. We will focus on how the thematic hallmarks of the Gothic such as supernatural horror, medieval romance, and extreme emotion allowed Romantic poets to interrogate conventional ideas of beauty and literary value. A major aim of this course is to develop our critical language for discussing aesthetics and genre, both to enrich our sense of literary history and to understand how the Gothic continues to shape how we talk about genre today: from horror movies to goth and emo music. Poets include John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Poe, and Christina Rossetti. Secondary readings include aesthetic theory by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Ann Radcliffe, and Thomas De Quincy. 

In this course, we’ll read three or four major novels by Jane Austen, alongside selections from her unfinished works and recent film adaptations. We’ll explore the world in which Austen was writing, and ask why her fiction continues to captivate audiences. From her time to ours, Austen has been notoriously difficult to pin down. Is her vision essentially conservative -- valuing tradition and hierarchy, nostalgic for a passing way of life? Or is it democratic, progressive, perhaps even radical? Is Austen a hopeless romantic, a ruthless enforcer of the conjugal imperative (everyone married off in the end!), or a scathing feminist critic of existing institutions (from property laws to marriage)? We’ll think together about the techniques of narrative voice, point of view, and irony that make possible such wildly different readings. Throughout the course, we’ll work to do justice to the complexity of Austen’s writing and thinking on its own terms, and in its own context. We’ll also follow her fiction to our present, and consider what we still want from her characters, plots, and style.

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.

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.

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. 

What is the history of the book? Built around the collections at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, participants in this course will attend to the full lifecycle of the book, from the practices of early printers, booksellers, binders, and readers to the activities of modern antiquarian dealers and collectors. Students will study a wide range of manuscript and printed media, and learn how to “read” the meanings and significance of different types of material evidence, such as paper, ink, bindings, repairs, and marks of ownership. Topics include book production, oral and manuscript cultures, the development of printing, copyright, the economics of book production and distribution, libraries and the organization of information, and reading and readership. This course is taught in partnership with the Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book and will include a sponsored field trip to a paper making studio. Students will be evaluated based on their participation and final project on an item of their choosing from the Rare Books collection. This course is designed to be hands-on, providing students with new perspectives and skills relevant to work within and beyond the academy, including in libraries, archives, auction houses, and antiquarian bookselling. 

At 12:30pm, a train departs Chicago heading due West. Where does it end up two minutes later: in a mathematics problem set? a scientific thought experiment? a literary fiction? This course explores how and why literary tropes, genres, and narrative tendencies find their way into structures of scientific thinking---and vice-versa. We examine what happens when scientific ideas serve as literary premises in the hands of writers like J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Samuel Delany, and Ted Chiang. Reading these authors alongside works of criticism and fiction penned by practicing scientists---including a comparative study of Monet and Relativity by UChicago physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as well as short stories by his colleague Leo Szilard---helps us investigate how aesthetic forms inflect scientific thought and practice in turn.

This course offers an introduction to the study of prose fiction. Taking up texts from the medieval period through the present, we'll consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We'll ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures do they provide? If fiction isn't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to AI, how do fiction and technology interact? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we'll consider fictions and theories of fiction from authors including George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison. Students will complete five short weekly assignments and two larger projects; the assignment sequence is structured for flexibility, offering choice in topics, due dates, and formats, including creative as well as more conventionally academic options.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of the novel by examining novels from 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, bildungsroman 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. Discussions sections will take place in Special Collections in the Regenstein Library.  The novels may include Dangerous Liaisons, Pride and Prejudice, Rajmohan's Wife, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. 

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.

How do big forces—a tsunami, authoritarian regimes, illness and death—imprint themselves on a single life? In this course, we will read contemporary memoirs to understand how writers convey the self, share personal truths, and narrate lives in a specific place and moment in time while also offering universal lessons to readers. Toni Morrison’s thinking about life writing will guide our reading. And memoirs, both literary and graphic, may include those of Joan Didion, David Wojnarowicz, Edwidge Danticat, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Kiese Laymon, and Sonali Deraniyagala. Throughout the quarter, we may have special guests or visit book events.

Do dreams mean anything? The dream vision was one of the most experimental, provocative, and richly imaginative genres of the Middle Ages. Like real dreams, these literary texts were wrought with interpretive potential yet bewilderingly ambiguous. In this course, we will study how medieval writers used the surreal dream- vision framework to explore complex philosophical issues around love, grief, fortune, consolation, imagination, and belief. We will learn about medieval and modern theories of dream interpretation, from Macrobius to Freud, as we test out different ways of reading dream-vision literature. Texts will include the noisy dreamscape of Chaucer’s The House of Fame, the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of Pearl, and the disorienting dream-within-a-dream of Piers Plowman.

Anxiety has many shapes—dread, fear, shame, despair, uncertainty, stress, paranoia. How were these feelings conceptualized differently in the past than they are today? In this course, we will explore anxiety as both a visceral feeling and an ambiguous experience that unfolds at the intersections of the body, mind, and social world in the Middle Ages. We will interrogate how medieval literature responds to historical anxieties around gender normativity, reproduction, religious/racial difference, ethical ambiguity, and death. Reading medieval texts alongside psychoanalysis, affect theory, and existential philosophy, we will explore a range of topics, from body dysphoria in The Romance of Silence, to the grotesque afterlife in The Dispute Between the Body and Worms, to madness and social alienation in Thomas Hoccleve’s My Complaint. We will also discuss the foundational literary studies concepts of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” and “paranoid reading,” where anxiety becomes an indispensable feature of how we read and interpret literature.

This course traces Shakespeare’s poetic invention and theatrical intelligence from his earliest, highly popular efforts at tragedy (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet) to his later-career highlights (Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra). Having developed a working knowledge of Shakespeare’s tragic dramaturgy, we will turn our attention to some examples of Romance (The Winter's Tale and The Tempest), a curious genre that complicates and subverts tragedy's mood and form. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary compositions, embodied expressions, and witnesses to the tumultuous time in which Shakespeare lived. Section attendance is required.

This course introduces students to the foundations of American literary fiction. Beginning with the historical, political, and religious contexts of the nation, we will read work across fictional genres, including the romance, the gothic, realism, local color fiction, sentimentality, and the novel. Students will read work by authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as criticism of these works.

This course will explore the literary movement known as Romanticism through a survey of three “young Romantics”: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. We will devote three weeks to reading the major works of each, which include some of the most gorgeous and idealistic poems in the English language—as well as some of the funniest. There will be three formal assignments: a dramatic poetry recitation, an ongoing "poetic criticism" journal, and a traditional literary analysis paper (complete draft due in Week 6; revised draft due on the last class)

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. 

This course considers the love of violence, the violence of love, and the idea of the pagan past in the literature of the later Middle Ages. We'll spend the largest part of our time on Geoffrey Chaucer's epic romance Troilus and Criseyde. No previous experience with medieval literature is required.

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 are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain? 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. 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? Fiction by, among others, Guy de Maupassant, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Hughes, James M. Cain, and Graham Greene. Films by, among others, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Patricia Rozema, and David O. Russell. 

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. In this hands-on course we will review the anatomy of letterforms, the properties of different typefaces, and learn to control and manipulate type to produce different formal results. Students will use Adobe Creative Suite to control vectors and experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text. No prior design/typesetting experience required.

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.

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.

What makes reading pleasurable, and how has reading for pleasure changed over time? How does a book devoured with relish in one era become flatly boring in the next? This course examines practices of pleasure reading in Britain and the US from the eighteenth century through the present. Taking cues from the friendships, literary societies, and book clubs that have been key sites for pleasure reading in the past, the course and its assignments are structured to offer the experience of social reading in a community: students will trade transcribed verses, read out loud to each other, exchange letters, and, at the end of the term, share presentations in a convivial setting. Together, we'll test out once-popular works on our own sensibilities, taking up acclaimed favorites and also texts disparaged as vapid, addictive, or corrupting. As we sample page-turners, smut, and trash, we'll investigate how texts migrate in and out of those classifications. A visit to the Special Collections Research Center will help us to think about texts' material forms; we'll also try out audiobook formats and watch one film adaptation. We'll conclude the term by considering pleasure reading in our own moment, using historical perspective to better understand the current outcry about waning attention and reading's decline.

What does it mean to feel raced, and how does performance work with or against such feelings? Why and how does a performance of racial identity come to be perceived as “authentic?” What is at stake in performances that that cross real or imagined racial lines? This upper-level class delves into the topic of performativity as it intersects with race in the American context. Some historical background is studied, but we will mostly explore performativity’s intersection with race in contemporary America. Course assignments are a mix of the theoretical, dramatic, and performative. (In other words, some of our readings theorize performativity while others put theory into play.)

What happens when plays know they’re plays? All theater frames time, space, and action, selecting a slice of life and asking us to look at it closely. The plays we’ll study in this course—which range from early modern to contemporary, from comic to tragic—make that framing impossible to ignore. Plays about theater push us to ask fundamental questions: How do we know what is real? How are identity, revenge, race, and power performed? Who is allowed to perform and who is forced to perform for others? Is theatrical spectatorship complicit in cultural violence? And why do artists keep returning to these questions at moments of cultural change?  

What happens when plays know they’re plays? All theater frames time, space, and action, selecting a slice of life and asking us to look at it closely. The plays we’ll study in this course—which range from early modern to contemporary, from comic to tragic—make that framing impossible to ignore. Plays about theater push us to ask fundamental questions: How do we know what is real? How are identity, revenge, race, and power performed? Who is allowed to perform and who is forced to perform for others? Is theatrical spectatorship complicit in cultural violence? And why do artists keep returning to these questions at moments of cultural change?

Focusing on the first season of Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s 2022 dystopian television series, Severance, along with three recent novels—Vicenzo Latronico’s Perfection, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where are You?—this course will examine what happens when the idea of work as a social activity threatens to disappear from the ways in which we imagine our worlds. We will explore the political and social dimensions of work dramatized in these fictions in relation to analyses of labor by social theorists and economists, to ponder whether this disappearance (imagined or real) is a new phenomenon, and therefore something desirable, or merely an intensification of the processes of modernization, including mechanization, streamlining, outsourcing, etc. that have been going for two centuries or more within a world defined by capitalism. In addition to regular class attendance, students will be expected to attend Monday evening screenings. Episodes usually run just under an hour, and we will allow 15 minutes for discussion recap. Refreshments will be provided. Assignments: Maintain and submit a handwritten journal; complete one episode analysis (5 pages); and write a final 6-7-page essay.

This course will explore the emergence and diffusion of a distinctly US American genre: the declaration of independence. In the first half of this course, we will explore the textual and cultural history of the American Declaration. In the second, we will explore the global diffusion of this genre through sites of anti-colonial antagonism and national formation, possibly including revolutionary France, Haiti, and India. Readings will include George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Olympe de Gouges, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simón Bolívar, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and more.

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.

What kind of aesthetic category is “coziness”? What makes for a cozy place, and what exactly do we hope to experience there? What are coziness’s objects, and what do they hold for us? Who is included in coziness’s “we/us,” and why? This class will explore coziness’s aesthetics and its affects. We’ll consider the appeal of locations like the cottage, the garden, the pub, and the cozy mystery to discern what coziness can teach us about domesticity, tactility gender, rurality, labor, innocence, or danger (among other possible topics).

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.

From the art and science of the Great Migration to hip hop’s contemporary renderings of cities now , this course will look at the ways Black artists and thinkers have staged encounters with urban life. From W.E.B Du Bois’ sociological surveys and Gwendolyn Brooks’ mid-century experiments in urban sight, to Spike Lee’s staged urban explosions and Kendrick Lamar’s Compton soundscapes, this course explores both the dreams and the despairs
yoked to being Black in the city.

Our class will read two of Toni Morrison’s novels, Beloved and A Mercy, that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate these novels together through supplementary materials such as essays, films, and poetry of various scholars, as well as Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America.

Is modernity a blessing or a curse? Do visions of simpler forms of life bear lessons for the future, or are they idealistic—even dangerous—dreams? How have city life and mass media changed the way we interact with one another? Have we damaged our humanity in the name of technological progress? Questions of this kind are familiar today, at a time when the very foundations of modernity have once again come under critical scrutiny. This class will introduce students to a number of these writers from the rapidly modernizing U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century, as they asked about the dangers and possibilities of both utopian and critical takes on the modern world; likely candidates include Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Sui Sin Far, Frank Norris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Kate Chopin. To wit: Norris portrays a recent college graduate reduced to an animalistic state; Jewett records a dreamlike encounter with a rural world rapidly passing out of existence; Twain sends a modern engineer back in time to King Arthur’s Court; Chesnutt fictionalizes a real-life attempt by white supremacists to turn back time in the American South; Gilman imagines an all-female world in the wilderness; in James, a former New Yorker returns to his native city after decades to find it utterly transformed by the advent of the skyscraper.

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.

Though best known for a single play, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, translator, and critic with a voluminous output. This course introduces students to the variety and influence of one of the central figures in twentieth-century literature and theater by considering Beckett’s better-known plays—both on the page and in recorded performances—alongside select novels, criticism, film, radio, and television pieces. Among the questions we will ask are: What can Beckett’s experiments across media teach us about the presumed and actual limits of form? What happens when a medium becomes the means of its own undoing? What can we learn from Beckett’s career about cardinal developments in twentieth-century drama, literature, film, and television?

What we think of as modernity can be said to begin with the birth (or rebirth) of the citizen. During the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions in Britain, France, and North America sought to recast political society as a structure built upon social contracts and natural rights of the people rather than the divine right of kings. But this same era also saw the rise of transoceanic empires and chattel slavery. Its new republican governments generally excluded all but white men (and often all but white men who owned property) from the vote or from most spheres of political agency and authority. Indeed, the category of citizen was (and remains) exclusionary as well as inclusive, frequently deployed to mark those outside its boundaries and protections. During the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the constructions of race, gender, and nation continued to shift into new forms, and many literatures of these centuries focus on how “the citizen” is conceived and reinvented into the present. This course will discuss how these tensions and debates influence literature and political discourse over four centuries, a breadth that will allow us to trace the concepts and critiques of citizenship as they have come to shape our contemporary world. 

The question of “race” and racial others in US fiction has troubled the form since its emergence, but in the 21st century fiction has tackled particularly thorny issues. The debates in contemporary critical race theory have both criticized and maintained the categories of race and ethnicity in novels and short fiction, and longstanding debates in canonization have demanded rethinking what ethnic fiction is capable of achieving. This class will read US novels and short stories by African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty-five years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in cultural race studies. In this class, you will learn to produce readings on the current moment in a way that accounts for historical events; how to read fiction through a series of generic lenses; and how to work with established and emerging methodologies in critical race studies and literature. 

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

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

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.

Who is allowed to reproduce, under what conditions, and at what cost? This course examines how reproduction is structured, contested, and reimagined across literature, film, and theory. We focus on texts that explore the entanglement of reproductive embodiment with gendered divisions of labor and political struggle under capitalism. Together, we will analyze stories, ideas, and histories that decenter reproduction from its ostensibly “natural” location within the heteronormative nuclear family and the privatized home. Our key protagonists include “bad” moms, “welfare queens,” gestational laborers, queer kin, sex workers, migrants, and women who refuse reproduction altogether. We situate these figures alongside legal and political histories—such as eugenics, chattel slavery, and neoliberal globalization—that shape oppressive reproductive structures and animate feminist struggles to reproduce otherwise. By tracing “reproduction on the margins,” the course develops tools for analyzing the intimate terrain of family, pregnancy, motherhood, sexuality, and gender as sites of labor, crisis, struggle, and potential transformation. Literature and film may include works by Lizzie Borden, Alfonso Cuarón, Gayl Jones, Barbara Loden, Maggie Nelson, Jordy Rosenberg, and others. Theory readings may include Lauren Berlant, Cathy Cohen, David Eng, Saidiya Hartman, Sophie Lewis, Poulomi Saha, Dorothy Roberts, and others. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.

What constitutes a truly free society? Does revolution and liberatory struggle primarily aim to change a government, or must it encompass more sweeping transformations? Who is included – and to what extent – in the new political community that follows? And how might literature and art contribute to the way political change unfolds? The revolutions that shook the Atlantic in the 1790s confronted precisely these questions and in doing so profoundly shaped what became the modern world. In France, absolute monarchy was toppled and a republic was proclaimed. Across the ocean, a rebellion of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue became the Haitian Revolution, abolishing slavery and striving for full racial equality. And in Britain’s near colony of Ireland, although the United Irishmen’s rebellion was ultimately crushed, an independence struggle that would last into the present day was born. At the same time, the 1790s were a decade of reaction – when extant hierarchies fought against these transformations with increasing anxiety, and empire and imperial capital continued to rapidly expand. This course will read widely in English literature and political theory from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that attempted to represent, and produce, revolutionary change, as well as modern theory and scholarship in anti-racism/postcolonialism, feminism and gender theory, carceral studies, and Marxist analysis to better understand the legacies of this remarkable political moment.

We consider how literary works reflect and shape historically shifting cultural and legal conceptions of personhood in the 20th century. What does literary character look like within a longer history of the novel, and what does it make of notions of free will, responsibility, and synthetic personhood. We read selections from Locke, Charles Taylor, Marya Schechtman, Galen Strawson, Joseph Slaughter, and Nihad Farooq, alongside novels by Laclos, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, HG Wells, Vita Sackville-West, Ralph Ellison, and Han Kang.

Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell: these were the un-gendered pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, authors of passionate novels that shocked nineteenth-century readers.  As children, the girls (with their brother Branwell) produced a vast corpus of juvenile writings in which they invented entire fictional worlds (sometimes known as Angria) located in Africa. In this course we ask what it means to think about them as collaborators within a shared domestic environment – as children, and as adults. How did their childhood experience – their education, their reading, their play, their family - shape their work? The course engages with questions of gender, sexuality, race, kinship – and style.  Texts will include Anne’s Agnes Grey, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, as well as Emily’s poetry, and Charlotte and Branwell’s juvenilia.  

This class will provide a varied overview of the theory and history of “literary persons,” including recent scholarly perspectives. Rather than being stabilized via a single genre (i.e., the realist novel), literary persons will be treated more capaciously, in their adjacency to personification, lyric and dramatic personae, and varied genres of narrative, from the Middle Ages to the present. The class will be more or less evenly divided between primary and secondary works. This course counts as a PhD seminar for graduate students in the English department. For permission to register for the course, please contact the instructor. 

The participants in this seminar will be asked to re-examine the notion of “inspiration” in its aesthetic and historical senses, revisiting age-old textual and arts practices based on tropes of channeling, as well as contemporary practices based on embodied, performative and geopoetic notions of interconnection, circulation, receptivity and transmutation—including practices that reflect and refute the denial of the innate interconnectivity of beings. We will delve into the workings of air as an animating element that bridges and binds individuals to both internal and external forces—controllable and uncontrollable, state-sponsored and ambient, or what we would call “natural” under anthropocene conditions. We will examine the modern and contemporary politicization of air as a commons, and will apply our research to the analysis and critique of industrial and post-industrial landscapes. The imagination of air itself becomes central to thinking about utopian or dystopian collectivities in a time of respiratory crisis. Authors to be studied will include Coleridge, Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mira Holzbachová, Ant Farm, Meredith Monk, M. NourbeSe Philip, Mladen Dolar, Cecila Vicuña, Adriana Cavarero, Jordan Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Achille Mbembe, and more.

This course explores the problematics that congeal when the disciplinary norms of anthropology and literary studies intersect. Since the 1970s, such anthropologists as James Clifford, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Paul Rabinow, and Donna Haraway have coordinated cultural analyses through concepts of representation, narrative, poetic form, and voice. Subsequently, poets and writers of the language school, indigenous background, and the ethnopoetics movement, among others, picked up on this anthropological mode to animate those concepts through anthropological concerns with reflexivity, textual thickness, interdiscursivity, metapragmatics, the posthuman, kinship, and intercultural semiotics. These intersections have overlaid literary objects with a kind of interdisciplinary noise, challenging what a literary object is and, as well, what objects we elect to think of as literature. This course will amplify that noise to trouble disciplinary norms of literary studies--especially the study of poetry and poetics--while also tuning into that trouble as a strategy of interpretation. Final papers will be methodological position pieces, orientating analyses of literary objects within this transdisciplinary flashpoint. This course counts as a PhD Seminar for graduate students in the English Department. For permission to register for the course, please contact the instructor. 

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. This course counts as a PhD Seminar for graduate students in the English Department. For permission to register for the course, please contact the instructor.