Mark Miller | Department of English Language and Literature

Associate Professor

Walker 407

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1993

Teaching at UChicago since 1997

Research Interests: Critical Theory| Gender and Sexuality| Medieval Literature| Literature and Philosophy

Biography

My work is situated historically in late-medieval literature and culture, and conceptually in the intersections of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory with ethics, theory of action, and philosophical psychology. My book Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 2004) investigates the ways Chaucer's philosophical interests can help us read his representations of gender and sexuality; one of its main concerns is to understand the often tortured logics of erotic desire and romantic love. In my current book project, I'm trying to understand the psychology and ideology of sin in the late middle ages: the structures of guilt, shame, and pollution that attend it; its erotics; its relation to the ambitions of moral perfection and utopian sociality; the centrality to it of the spectacle of Christ's crucifixion. The texts I'm focusing on include Langland's Piers Plowman, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the works of the Gawain poet, and hagiographical and mystical writing. My teaching within medieval studies includes courses on medieval gender and sexuality, the theory, practice, and phenomenology of bodiliness and ensoulment, perfectionism and utopianism in fourteenth-century England, and Chaucer. I also teach more conceptually focussed courses on theories of sexuality and (with Jay Schleusener and Candace Vogler of the Philosophy Department) on literature's forms of philosophical work.

Selected Publications

Work in progress: Handling Sin: Conditions of the Ethical in Fourteenth-Century English Literature
"The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010): 215-56.
Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
"Subjectivity and Ideology in the Canterbury Tales," in A Companion to Medieval English Literature, c. 1350-1500, ed. Peter Brown (Blackwell, 2007)
"Naturalism and its Discontents in the Miller's Tale," ELH 67 (Spring 2000), 1-44
"Displaced Souls, Idle Talk, Spectacular Scenes: Handlyng Synne and the Perspective of Agency," Speculum 71 (July 1996), 606-32

Teaching

2017-2018 Courses: Autumn 2017, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages (graduate); Winter 2018, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics in Medieval Literature (undergraduate), Medieval Longing: Affect, Aisthesis, Desire (graduate)

Graduate: Body and Soul; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Perfection and Utopia in Late Medieval England; Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages; Philosophical Literature; Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and Early Poetry; Foundations of Interpretive Theory; Reading Freud; Lacan and the Subject of Ethics.

Undergraduate: Reading Cultures; Problems in the Study of Sexuality; Middle English Literature; Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages; Reading Freud.

Subject Area: Medieval, Gender and Sexuality Studies, British Literature, Critical Theory and Objects of Study

Recent Courses

ENGL 10404 Intro to Poetry (Formerly "Genre Fundamentals: Poetry")

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.

Mark Miller

2024-2025 Winter

Genre Fundamentals

Poetry

ENGL 15107 Some Versions of the Apocalypse

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

Mark Miller

2024-2025 Spring

Fiction

ENGL 35500 Chaucer: Canterbury Tales

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

Mark Miller

2024-2025 Spring

Med/Ren

Pre-1650