2016-2017

This course will examine the geographically wide-ranging history, knowledge formations, and cultural productions of the global South, defined as the greater Atlantic sphere spanning the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and regions of Central America and West Africa. We will start by surveying the long colonial history of conflict and interaction in the West Indies between European settlers, enslaved African migrants, and indigenous populations, and the singularly complex arrays of locally determined ethnic, cultural, and linguistic formations that they produced. In addressing this history, we will also consider the region’s site-specific definitions of race, migration, settlement, identity, and cultural hybridity. We will then consider the ways in which these notions, along with the region’s own history and landscape, are dramatized in its twentieth-century literature and culture, by reading Gothic works of historical fiction (Carpentier, Faulkner), epic poetry (Walcott), and travel narrative (Hurston), as well as by track the aesthetic development of the region’s music, visual art, and architecture. (B, H)

This course is a survey of United States cultural production from 1945 to the present, organized by specific publics and cultures that these products have precipitated, mediated, or represented. In particular, we will consider the literature and visual culture of four loose groupings: Protest Cultures (especially antiwar and antiracist art and literature from the 1950s-1960s), Sex Cultures (1960s-1970s work from the "sexual liberation," including in its feminist and pro-gay varieties), Trauma Cultures (work memorializing racial, ethnic, and sexual violence in the 1980s-1990s), and Polarized Cultures (artistic production typical of the "culture wars" from the 1990s to the present). The course is therefore structured both chronologically and thematically, inviting students to make historically specific but culturally expansive connections across media, identity categories, political affiliations, and the high/low art divide. To do so, students will develop skills in "reading" novels, poems, photographs, comics, films, and music videos alike for cultural evidence. (B)

An examination of primary works of The New Criticism, British and American. We will consider the theoretical variety and different critical practices of these loosely allied critics, who were often not allies at all. Authors to be studied: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Kenneth Burke, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, W.. Wimsatt, Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur, and William Empson.

With the major new edition of Eliot’s poems by Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks, the new volumes of Eliot’s letters, and two separate new editions of Eliot’s complete prose, we are in a position to rethink the meanings and force of Eliot’s life work. The class will be devoted to careful reading of his poems, essays, plays, and correspondence, with attention to his literary , cultural, and political contexts. (C, G)

Browse through the “Cultural Studies” section of your local bookstore and you are bound to find works on a dizzying array of topics: close readings of vampire films, postcolonial theory, studies of advertising aesthetics, and historical treatises on the cubicle. What do these books have in common? How did this become what we call culture and its study? This course examines the origins, development and institutionalization of cultural studies in Britain, between 1956-1978. The problems that compelled British socialists in this period to develop new methodologies for the study of culture were not so different from those that plague our own time; they too were concerned with changes in the ‘traditional working-class’, with the promises and menaces inherent in new communications technologies and the rise authoritarian populism. Analyzing these phenomena led them to reconsider: What does it mean to call culture a superstructure? Who or what constructs identity? Can symbolic revolts create real change? Some key works we will study include The Long Revolution by Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Policing the Crisis, collectively authored by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. By the end of the course we may hope to gain both a deeper understanding not only of what cultural studies meant in Britain before Thatcher but also what it might become now, in American under Trump. Course intended as an introduction. No prior study of British history or cultural studies required. (H)

In American popular culture, the eighteenth century is remembered today (to the extent that it is remembered at all) as a heady time of revolutions and revolutionaries, when towering figures of the Enlightenment established modern democracy.  This, in many ways, reflects the narrative eighteenth-century writers were developing about their own age.  For British Whigs, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 had been a watershed moment at which the arbitrary rule of kings had been replaced for all time by constitutionalism; the social contract and the civil polity had triumphed over divine-right ideology, ushering in a new, beneficent era of progress.  And, in the 1790s, the French Revolution fired the political imaginations of British radicals who saw the potential for a world made anew – a world of universal suffrage and gender equality, where slavery was abolished.  Clearly, attaining these goals was a long way off.  The debates over the structures, meanings, and nature of consent had tendrils in multiple areas of society – the law, of course, but also in understandings of sexuality, constructions of gender, economics, and colonization.  Questions of rights, agency, and authority (what those categories meant, who could possess them, and who guaranteed them) were by no means settled, and, indeed, throughout the century, calls to curtail the categories of people who should have access to the sphere of political influence were often as boisterous as those to expand such access.  This course will explore how a range of authors in eighteenth-century Britain figured questions of consent, rights, and authority and how the ideological debates these authors mediated continue to inform contemporary politics, cultures, and identities.  We will read works by literary figures such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Mary Hays, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Shelley.  We will consider the writings of some of the major political philosophers of the day, as well, including John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.  We will additionally discuss readings in modern criticism and theory to help us better situate our primary texts in the discourses of modernity and better understand their lasting resonances. (B, F, H)

In 1971, the writer Tomás Rivera described the “Chicano renaissance” as a process of self-invention that involved the “exteriorization of our will”—an effort that motivated a “life in search of form.” This course will examine some of the most ambitious works of literature that are the result of this search. Our guiding inquiries will be simultaneously interpretive, theoretical, and historical: What does it mean to think of form as an “exteriorization” of one’s “will”? Whose will do these forms represent (who is the “us” in Rivera’s “our will”)? What representational strategies enable this exteriorization and dramatize its limitations? Why was the novel so often singled out, and why did some feminist writers prefer instead a collection of letters, poems, journal entries, and personal essays? These questions will inform our study of the consolidation of a self-conscious Chicago literature and its attendant literary history. Students of the course will therefore not only become familiar with exciting works of textual art, they will also study the institutional context that enables the consolidation of “a literature,” and a “literary history.” Authors will include José Antonio Villarreal, Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa. (B)

This course is a working group to develop and implement a large scale alternate reality game (ARG) to be launched in 2017. Students in this course, thus, will not only be learning how to design a game but also contributing directly to the research and construction of this large-scale project that will develop capacities linked to collaboration, leadership, and twenty-first century literacies. In particular, we are interested in discovering how interactive and participatory learning methods might help University students discuss and better understand complicated issues of inclusivity, diversity, and safety.

This course will explore the depiction of animals and the broader concept of animality in Central and East European Literature. We begin with an introduction to the history of literary depictions of animals in Aesop’s Fables, Herder’s “On Image, Poetry, and Fable,” and Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer -- The Story of a Horse.” Franz Kafka‘s stories--such as “The Metamorphosis” and  “Report to an Academy”--will provide an introduction to the main issues of animality: animal conflict and violence, as in Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts; animal hybridity or transformation, as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog; animal engagement speech and writing, as in Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.”  Other authors include Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bruno Schulz and Georgi Gospodinov. In addition to exploring the depictions of animals through close readings of the literary texts, the course will also engage with  major philosophical thinkers whose work touches upon animilaty, including: Jacob von Uexküll, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Jaques Derrida.

Since the “affective turn,” cultural studies has continued to consider how collective feelings like shame, willfulness, envy, and dread penetrate literary and art works. This course serves as an introduction to the structures and unstructures of affect studies through novels concerned with bad feeling. It asks students to consider how vectors of inequality demand fictional explication of negative affects; how authors’ own reading of philosophies of bad feeling might affect our interpretations of their fictions; and how the invocation of particular affects might open up or foreclose particular kinds of interpretation. We will read contemporary affect theorists like xngai, Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, and Eve Sedgwick, and fiction by authors including Toni Morrison, Jeff Jackson, and Kathy Acker. Undergraduate: (B, H) Graduate: (20th/21st)