2016-2017

1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s and early 80s, finds its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being and new bodies of a variety of kinds. This class will read science fiction, feminist theory and current critical work that concerns itself with bios, biology and biopolitics in order to ask questions about the divide between nature and culture, what’s entailed in imagining the future, what gender and genre have to do with each other, and just what science fiction is and does anyway. Authors may include: Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy, McIntyre, Haraway, Malabou, Fortunati, James, Rubin, Firestone. (H)

This course examines the nature and creation of suspense in literature and film as an introduction to narrative theory. We will question how and why stories are created, as well as what motivates us to continue to reading, watching, and listening to stories. We will explore how particular genres (such as detective stories and thrillers) and the mediums of literature and film influence our understanding of suspense and narrative more broadly.  Close readings of primary sources will be supplemented with critical and theoretical readings. Literary readings will include work by John Buchan, Mary Shelly, Arthur Conan Doyle, Feodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Italo Calvino, and J.M. Coetzee. We will also explore Alfred Hitchcock’s take on 39 Steps and Robert Bresson’s Gentle Creature.  With theoretical readings by: Roland Barthes, Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach, Paul Ricoeur, and others. (B, H)

“Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: (In)Action, Surveillance, Terrorism” This course centers on a close reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale and seeks how the novel’s relevance stems in equal measure from Conrad’s prophetic depiction of terrorism fused with his interest in a wider political process and his distrust of state power; in particular, the course explores how these forces determine the individual caught in a confining situation. We read The Secret Agent as a political novel, which in its struggle for solutions defies chaos as well as an imposition of a single ideology or one authorial point of view. In analyzing the formation of the narrative’s ideology we discuss Conrad’s historical pessimism that demonstrates with sustained irony how capitalism breeds social injustice that, in turn, breeds anarchism. The critical texts include several older but still influential readings of the novel’s political and social dimension (Jameson, Eagleton), as well as the most recent pronouncements of A Simple Tale’s complexity. All texts are in English. (B, G)

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov. (C)

This course considers themes that include the problems of exile, homelessness, and nationality; the mysteries of paternity and maternity; the meaning of the Return; Joyce's epistemology and his use of dream, fantasy, and hallucinations; and Joyce's experimentation with and use of language. (B, G)

This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the poem as edited in Klaeber’s Beowulf (4th ed., Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008). Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. (C, E)

This seminar will explore the literature and history of “the dissident,” a central figure of the human rights imagination from the Cold War up to the present. From the global spread of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to the reception of Solzhenitsyn in the United States, a major goal of the course will be to explore how the multidirectional circulation of literature and culture between America and the world has shaped ideas and practices of dissent in a variety of locations. Through close attention to several genres of writing and art, we will explore how the extraordinary ethical pressures faced by dissidents shape literary and artistic form. Along the way we will read novels, poems, essays, and criticism drawn from a range of traditions (from the US and Latin America to Russia and East-Central Europe) as we consider both the possibilities and dilemmas of literary dissidence. For their final project, students will identify a “dissident” writer or artist at work today, whether on the other side of the world or just around the corner in Chicago. (B, H)

In this course, we examine the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. We begin by surveying the development and trajectory of the field, particularly as it develops around debates on revolution and compromise, cosmopolitanism, the psychology of colonialism, and anti-colonial historiography. Alongside this, we consider the recent disciplinary revival of the categories of “global Anglophone” and “world literature” through readings on “literary worlds” to to evaluate these categories, and their contributions to ongoing debates about translation/translatability, vernaculars, rewriting, and mimicry. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experience of geographic and cultural displacement? To better answer this, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around intimacy, belonging, and human rights, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and its possible futures.  Readings will likely include works by Debjani Ganguly, Kamau Brathwaite, Jean Rhys, Amitava Kumar, Sara Ahmed and Amitav Ghosh. (H)

This course pursues the emergence of modern historical fiction at the moment when the “British novel” first joined the literary canon. We will focus upon a series of sites where Romantic fiction conceptualized history with special energy and complexity (the imperial Celtic periphery, commercial life, the everyday, and the mode of romance) while exploring the intrinsic connections between historical fiction and the idea of literary history. Primary authors will include Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole. As a junior seminar, this course is ideally suited for students interested in developing the skills necessary to write a BA Honors paper or those considering graduate work in English. This course will culminate in a substantial critical paper of your own design. Third-year English majors only. (B, F)

This class introduces students to the emerging field of Global Anglophone literature, which analyses texts produced both at the center and the peripheries of Britain’s imperial projects, including Canada, Kenya, Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, South Asia, and Great Britain itself. Beginning with some foundational material on the history and cultures of the British Empire, we will read a wide selection of 20th and 21st century texts from the greater Anglophone world, asking how these fictional works illuminate the forces that have and continue to shape the globalized yet unequal world we inhabit today. Special attention will be paid to global histories of race, indigeneity, gender, economy, development, liberalism, technology, and war. Primary works may include writings by Arundahti Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie J.M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Doris Lessing, Rider Haggard, Michael Ondaatje, Eden Robinson, Nadine Gordimer, Rawi Hage, Chimimanda Adichie, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, V.S. Naipaul, Patrick White, Jack Davis, Mulk Raj Anand, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga. (B, G)