2016-2017

This seminar surveys the study of American culture as it is currently practiced at the University of Chicago. Seminar members read and discuss recent work by faculty specialists from the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Divinity School, and the Law School at Chicago. Though interested in how different disciplines frame questions and problems, we will be attuned to convergences in themes, approaches, and methods. During the last half of our seminar meetings our authors will join us for a focused discussion of their work. Many of our guests will also deliver public lectures the day before visiting the seminar.

This PhD seminar offers a critical introduction to performance theory and its applications not only to theatre but also to performance on film and, more controversially, to ‘performativity’ to fictional and other texts that have nothing directly to do with performance. The seminar will be organized around three key conceptual clusters: a) action, acting, and other forms of production or play, in theories from the classical (Aristotle) through the modern (Hegel, Brecht, Artaud), to the contemporary (Richard Schechner, Philip Zarilli, and others) b) affect, and its intersections with emotion and feeling: in addition to the impact of contemporary theories of affect and emotion (Massumi, Sedgwick) on performance theory (Erin Hurley), we will read earlier modern texts that anticipate recent debates (Diderot, Freud) and their current interpreters (Joseph Roach, Tim Murray and others), as well as those writing about the absence of affect and the performance of failure (Sara Bailes and others) c) archives and related institutions, practices and theories of recording performance, including the formation of audiences (Susan Bennett and with evaluating print and other media yielding evidence of ephemeral acts, including the work of theorists of memory (Pierre Nora) and remains (Rebecca Schneider), theatre historians (Rose Bank, Jody Enders, Tracy Davis and others) as well as current theorists on the tensions between the archive and the repertoire (Diana Taylor) or between excavation and performance (Michael Shanks/ Mike Pearson) Requirements: one or two oral presentations of assigned texts and final paper. To prepare PhDs for professional writing, final paper will take the form of a review article (ca 5000 words) examining key concepts in the field and the controversies they may engender, by way of two recent books that tackle these concepts (20th/21st)

From midcentury writers like John Cheever, John Updike, and Richard Yates to the more contemporary work of Richard Ford, Tom Perrotta and shows like The Real Housewives the suburbs have largely been thought of as a place of homogenous unhappiness. In this class, we will both look at how this narrative has been constructed over the last sixty years while also interrogating the centrality of this claim by looking at works troubling its claims by authors such as Anne Petry, Chang Rae Lee, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alice Childress. Alongside fiction, we will be looking at history, advertising, and film that contextualize the rise of the suburbs, helping us understand the key role the suburbs played and continue to play in the accumulation of wealth, racial mobility, second wave feminism, and policing. (20th/21st)