2020-2021

This course explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about Blackness, in long-term processes of racial formation, and in global racial struggles from the early modern period to the present. Students will read Shakespearean plays portraying Black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American, Caribbean, and Post-colonial rewritings of those plays by playwrights Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Bernard Jackson, Djanet Sears, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Lolita Chakrabarti, and film-makers Max Julien and Jordan Peele. Students will also get to speak and think with theatre-makers Keith Hamilton Cobb, Kim Weild, and Debra Ann Byrd when they visit this class as part of the UChicago “Black Baroque” focus series during Weeks 5 and 6.

This course explores the various strategies and techniques that authors have used to tell stories that claim in one way or another to be realistic. As we take up how storytellers "make it real" we will address key elements of narrative, including point of view, characterization, voice, tone, diction, syntax, setting, symbolism, pacing, modes of mediation, intertextuality, motifs, and figuration. We will focus primarily on novels and short stories, with a nod to the graphic novel at the conclusion of the course. 

The course studies Milton’s major poetry with an emphasis upon his sense of history—poetic, national, and cosmic. 

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).

What is consciousness? What is it like to be conscious? This course answers these questions by examining the emergence and development of consciousness as a concept. As a phenomenon, consciousness probably came into being deep in evolutionary time. Yet as a concept consciousness is relatively new: the European notion of consciousness emerges in the late seventeenth century. This course draws on literature, history, philosophy, and psychology to examine how the concept of consciousness came to possess its explanatory dominance. We will start by acquiring a sense of what consciousness now means in philosophy, biology, neuroscience, and fiction, paying particular attention to how the concept differs from similar ideas in ancient Indian philosophy. We will then turn to two important historical moments. First, we will examine the interplay between philosophy and literature in the late seventeenth century, reading texts by René Descartes, John Milton, Thomas Traherne, and John Locke. Second, we will focus on how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the psychology of William James relates to the “stream of consciousness” techniques in the work of Virginia Woolf. This course stresses historical contingency—consciousness has a birthdate—in order to explore a consequence that follows from this fact: the extent to which current uses of this concept are still shaped by the historical circumstances that conditioned its emergence.

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. 

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 explore the reciprocity of breathing in and out as a key to cognitive and aesthetic practices built on conscious somatic traditions, on poetics of critical voicing and unvoicing. 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 explore the long history of engagement with this element as it has been used to signify and enhance the circulation and interception of ambient forces, signs, and voices in literature, performance, audiovisual and electronic media, and perhaps sculptural and architectural sites. 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.

One effect of early English capitalism is its raising of the question, what constitutes a lot? and its practical correlate, how is abundance to be measured? This course reads early modern drama and popular print alongside inventories, bills of mortality, and other evidence of social and object quantification to study the separation of things from stuff and commoners from the commonty. 

By foregrounding significant Enlightenment and Romantic configurations of the problem of the “arts of life,” this course examines the mobile border between aesthetics and necessity in the long eighteenth century moment and in our own. In The Arts of Life (1802), John Aikin surveys the means of provision of food, clothing, and shelter in the Romantic age by means of a watchword distinction between those arts either “absolutely necessary for life’s preservation” or “conducive to comfort and convenience,” as against those “ministering to luxury and pleasure.” The same idea memorably animates the aesthetic counter-tradition running from William Blake’s “arts of life and death” to William Morris’s “lesser arts of life.”
 

In contextualizing the problem of the “arts of life,” we will resurrect productive historical thinking about an aesthetics that inextricably inheres within practices “necessary for the preservation of life.” We will explore the enduring vitality of such a notion in our own moment of ecological crisis and of casualized cultural arts (marked by eclipsed autonomy for art’s producers, consumers, and critics alike), with particular focus on new directions in design theory and the affordances of form; on literature’s evolving location among the “arts of life”; and on the present reinvigoration of craft and design in popular visions of the aesthetic. 

Translation is one of the central mechanisms of literary creativity across the world. This course will offer opportunities to think through both the theory and practice of this art form and means of cultural transmission, focusing on the problems of translation of and by poets in a variety of languages: it will emphasize precisely the genre most easily “lost in translation,” as the truism goes. Topics to be discussed will include semantic and grammatical interference, loss and gain, the production of difference, pidgin, translationese, bilingualism, self-translation, code-switching, translation as metaphor, foreignization vs. nativization, and distinct histories of translation. The workshop will offer students a chance to try their hands at a range of tactics of translation.