2018-2019

This course circulates around five questions: 1) what does it mean to conceive of the foundations of society as forming through structures of prohibition, 2) why is it that these prohibitions primarily take the form of sexual regulation, 3) what are the gendered dynamics of these prohibitions, 4) why are these conceptions always formulated through studies of cultural otherness, 5) what dangers and potentialities reside within the concept of transgression? As is clear from these fundamental questions,this class is not primarily a study of taboo as a theoretical concept, but rather of the ways in which the concept of taboo is used in specific discourses internal to 20th and 21st-century social sciences, cultural theory and psychoanalysis (Theory)

This course is intended as an introduction to the study of videogames in the humanities. Topics include videogame form (visual style, spatial design, sound, and genre); videogames as a narrative medium; embodiment and hapticity in videogame play; issues of identity/identification, performance, and access related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, ability, and class; and rhetorical, educational, and political uses of videogames. Just as the videogame medium has drawn from older forms of art and play, so the emerging field of videogame studies has grown out of and in conversation with surrounding disciplines. With this in mind, readings and topics of discussion will be drawn both from videogame studies proper and from other fields in the humanities – including, but not limited to, English, art history, and cinema and media studies. Undergraduates should be prepared for an MA-level reading load but will write final papers of the standard length for upper-level undergraduate courses (8-10 pages versus 12-15 for MA students). MA students interested in pursuing a particular research topic in-depth will be given supplemental readings. This course will also be designed to take advantage of the University of Chicago’s videogame collection, and will require game play both individually and as part of group play sessions.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” – so wrote Wallace Stevens in one of his aphoristic “Adagia.” A giant of modernist English poetry, Stevens grappled deeply and protractedly in both his poetry and prose with the particular character and problems of the modern situation – what he called “modern reality” – particularly the need, as he saw it, for a new “supreme fiction” giving meaning and purpose to human life, a fiction he sought to rediscover or recreate in and through (his) poetry. We will read widely from Stevens’ poems, essays and aphorisms with a view to comprehending and evaluating his poetics of modern reality.

This course uses the cases of the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas to track the entanglement of literature and critical space studies. We will engage with critical geography studies, considerations of everyday life, and cultural studies of urbanism to interrogate the relationship of literature and cinema to the politics of space. Students will learn to read contemporary literature through the political construction of the lived world, and to think with current scholarship on race, space, gender, sexuality, and ordinary life. Includes fiction by Chester Himes, Michelle Tea, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, and theoretical and critical works by Karen Tongson, Sara Ahmed, Michel de Certeau, and Nigel Thrift.

“This scepter’d isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise.” — Shakespeare,Richard II(II.i.40-2) The island as a space of possibility – of discovery, of (re)imagination, and of otherness – is a concept with a very long history in Anglophone literature. Indeed, Britain’s own archipelagic geography (a landscape unique among Europe’s imperial powers) has often been invoked for a range of rhetorical ends. John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Richard II uses the idea of Britain as the “scepter’d isle” as both a source of comfort (England as especially favored) and the foundation of critique (favor squandered). With the rise of transoceanic empires, writers throughout Great Britain, its colonial dominions, and other literary traditions imbued the symbol of the island with ever-increasing layers of meaning. Yet the island was also always already a location of anxiety, hostility, and liminality – of alternate cultural practices and systems of belief, of indigenous peoples who refused the claims of the colonizer, and where the meaning of Europe itself was destabilized in the colonial encounter. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European writers often deployed the island to think through the implications of empire for the metropole, anticolonial writers turned to the island as a site of resistance and recuperation. This transhistorical course will discuss the many significations of the island in metropolitan, colonial, and postcolonial literature as a lens into the conflicts and debates of imperialism. Primary readings may include William Shakespeare, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, James Grainger, James Cook, Herman Melville, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Aimé Césaire. Secondary and theoretical readings may include Dominique-Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Vanessa Smith, Margaret Mead, Marshall Sahlins, Édouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The course will be of broad interest to undergraduate and graduate students throughout the humanities and social sciences.

In this course, we survey various modes of literary impersonation and appropriation, such as plagiarism, parody, camp, adaptation, (false) attribution, piracy, citation, and hoaxes. We examine different perspectives on the uses and abuses of appropriation and think about the relevance of considerations such as intention, context, material form, and institutional frames, as evaluative criteria. We read pieces by Linda Hutcheon, Paul Saint-Amour, Hua Hsu, Susan Sontag, Martin Harries, and Adrian Johns, together with literary works that stage imposture and appropriation as themes such as Ern Malley, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Sherman Alexie. In these contexts, we also look at the work of “appropriation artists” like Richard Prince, Kenneth Goldsmith and Sherrie Levine and their critiques of notions of originality, authenticity, and celebrity; along with what Bruce LaBruce identified as a new tendency towards genres of reactionary burlesque.

This course targets in on the entanglements between science and literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in America—a historical moment when these realms did not appear nearly as divided as they do now. In particular, we attend to the period’s exciting developments in biology, which promised to revolutionize contemporary notions of human being. Our analysis of American fiction will center on the subjects and methods that writers adopted (imaginatively and often critically) from fields like evolutionary science, microbiology, and experimental psychology. But the course syllabus also includes American scientists who wrote fiction: What types of knowledge did they hope to produce in becoming literary? The aim of our inquiry will, in large part, be to examine the role of literature in shaping the significance of science in American culture, as well as the role of science in helping to build an American literary canon. Along the way, we will track the kinds of experiments in form and genre that such literary-scientific hybrids might produce. Readings may include works by Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Silas Weir Mitchell, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. Theoretical and critical works will be drawn from the history of science, science and technology studies, and nonhuman studies.

This course will introduce students to early English literature through manuscript studies and book history. Throughout the course we will reflect on archival research as a critical practice: how do the material histories of early texts invite us to rethink the fundamental categories that organize literary history, like authorship or canonicity? The course will be both a practicum (teaching the basics of paleography, codicology, and textual editing) and an ongoing conversation about the archives of literary history, as sites of interpretation, memory, and erasure. We will meet in the Special Collections Research Center, and use the collections of the University of Chicago. We will first focus on the archives of Chicago’s Chaucer Research Project and its principals, John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, who tried to establish an authoritative text of the Canterbury Tales in the early twentieth century. The second half of the course will focus on print culture and reading practice, with a focus on Chicago’s collection of early modern commonplace books. Students will propose and pursue a research project in the U of C or Newberry Library collections, on a topic of their choosing. Students will produce a piece of scholarship that reflects both careful research in those collections and thoughtfulness about the place of that research in critical practice. This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.

Corporations suffuse our lives. We study with them, work with them, consume their products—even become part of them through the purchase of stock. But what, exactly, is a corporation? In this course, we will trace the evolution of the US corporation from its historical roots through the present day. Our focus will be twofold: the evolving rights and responsibilities of the corporate person in law, and the ways that individual humans both inside and outside the corporate structure have imagined that person in a wider social context. Texts will include US court cases, legal treatises, historical analyses, novels, and cultural ephemera. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the persistent and evolving problems of corporate personhood and corporate social responsibility, both from a business and a consumer perspective.

This course will consider how medieval English readers came to knowledge of their world, and imagined a place within it, through genres of travel narrative such as the pilgrim’s itinerary, the merchant manual, and the saint’s life. We will reflect on genre as concept en route: how did generic conventions and strategies organize this knowledge of unknown lands, other peoples, and distant marvels? We will read medieval texts like Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, and the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, along with medieval and modern literary theory, to survey how vernacular literature presented a picture of the world and charted paths across it. Students will leave the class proficient in reading Middle English (the precursor of modern English). No previous experience with the language is required, and an optional weekly reading group will meet to work through passages in this half-new language.