2016-2017

This course will track the literary development of the concept and practice of "ecopoetics," with particular focus on the complex ethical responses that ecologically-minded poets and thinkers have made to the quandary of global warming and the emergence of the anthropocene. How might "lyrical thought" spawn modes of ecological practice and global-mindedness that are otherwise unthinkable in other disciplines and fields? In attempting to develop answers to this question, the course will place special pressure on the concept of "nature" and how such a concept creates the conditions for cultural forms that either contribute to, or work against, the specter of climate change. Is there one Nature or are there many natures? If poetry can produce, describe, and translate world(s), can poetry also "save the world"? We will read texts that look closely at how these two discourses--lyric and nature--in fact construct synthetic forms of ecological thinking. How might an “ecology of the mind” reflect or narrate the depressive environmental conditions of today? Can ecopoetry still be meaningful and productive in an age of rampant environmental desecration? (C, H)

Afrofuturist creative and theoretical production has exploded in recent years, emerging as a significant intellectual framework for understanding the history of race and identity, the legacies of colonialism, theories of science and technology, and the making of the modern world. While the term “Afrofuturism” was not coined until the 1990s and remains a controversial label, this course traces the historical roots and contemporary expressions of this diverse global genre (or set of genres). Taking a transdisciplinary approach, we will examine the contexts and debates that shaped and were shaped by works of speculative fiction, science fiction, and futurism from across Africa and the African diaspora. Topics include slavery and emancipation, empire and decolonization, pan-Africanism, theories of modernity and technoculture, the Cold War and the making of the “Third World,” Civil Rights, as well as connections to related genres such as Indigenous Futurism and Silkpunk. We will take an intersectional approach to consider not only race but other categories of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Texts include secondary critical analysis as well as global music, film, literature, and visual artforms created from the 19th through the 21st century, including works from Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and across the global African diaspora, particularly the United States. Students will leave the course with knowledge of major Afrofuturist themes and related works as well as improved critical reading, speaking, research, and writing skills. Evaluation is comprised of a combination of oral discussion, critical reading and response, written assignments, independent research, and in-class presentation. (B, H)

This course is a comprehensive survey of the work of Chicago writer and activist Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) and an exploration of the artistic and social movements to which she contributed. Brooks was among the most preeminent African American poets of the twentieth century, and she was celebrated during her career as the voice of the social and political concerns both of Black Chicago and of the African Diaspora. In this course we study Brooks’s poetry, from the social realism of A Street in Bronzeville (1945) to the later political poetry of Riot (1968) and Children Coming Home (1991); her prose fiction, including the autobiographical novella Maude Martha (1953); and her memoirs. Along the way, we use close reading to examine Brooks’s aesthetic transformations from high modernism to what she called “versejournalism” and a late, vatic public poetry; and we situate Brooks’s writing in its historical contexts to study her involvements in anti-Jim Crow social protest, Black Arts Movement race nationalism, and Pan-African transnationalism. As a class we will visit sites of importance to Brooks and her life and work in Chicago (e.g., the South Side Community Art Center), and we will invite several speakers to help us understand how Brooks’s work touched social and political life in and beyond Chicago. (C)

Life in the nineteenth century seems to be sometimes the object of political power (population, poverty legislation, sanitation reform, biopower), sometimes the rich and textured subject of the developing realist novel. This class will pursue where and how the concept of life moves between these sites. We will ask questions around the divide between human and non-human life in this period; the right over life, including the right to kill; and how and when nineteenth century novels engage with pluralities, communities or multiple lives. Readings will include novels (Shelley, Dickens, Bronte, Hardy); political and philosophical writing of the period (Malthus, Paine, Mill, Eliot, among others); theoretical texts (Agamben, Foucault, Marx) and literary criticism. Undergraduate: (B, G, H) Graduate: (18th/19th)

This experimental course seeks to disrupt dominant narratives about “the future”: a monolithic concept that often comes from technologists and policymakers. Instead, we explore what alternative futures might look like when imagined by and with marginalized communities. Beginning with movements such as Afrofuturism, we will read speculative and science fiction across media, including short stories, critical theory, novels, films, transmedia narratives, and digital games. Rather than merely analyzing or theorizing various futures, this course will prepare students in hands-on methods of “speculative design” and “critical making.” Instead of traditional midterm essays and final research papers, the work of the course will consist primarily of blog responses to shared readings, coupled with short-form, theoretically-founded, and collaborative art projects. These projects will imagine alternative futures of climate change, gender, public health, finance, policing, and labor. The work will be challenging, transdisciplinary, and will blur expectations about the relationship between theory and practice at every turn. As such, it is not a course for the craven; it is a course for students who wish to explore the complexities of collaboration and the sociopolitical possibilities of art. Undergraduate: (B, H) Graduate: (20th/21st)

I shall compare and contrast the two works, which in my opinion have themes and aspects closely in common. HJ regarded the tendency of human beings to exploit and tyrannise others – the noble ones, the weak, the innocent – as among the great wickednesses. Both the novel and the novella deal with appropriation and ‘possession’. In The Portrait, Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle conspire to rob the noble-minded but overly self-willed Isabel Archer of her freedom and her dignity. In The Turn, ostensibly the spirits of the deceased Peter Quint and Miss Jessel seek to possess the hearts and souls of the children Myles and Flora – but do the ‘ghosts’ exist, or are they the fevered invention of the unnamed governess who narrates the story, who is afire with unrequitable longing for the children’s handsome uncle? I shall consider this in light of HJ’s own remarkable family – his brilliant but erratic father, his loved and envied brother William, one of America’s greatest philosophers, and their highly intelligent but neglected and neurasthenic sister Alice who, when she was facing an early death, wrote to William to plead: ‘When I am gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else…’ All the Jameses had a morbidly acute sense of the darkness underlying life; Henry Senior and William both suffered what in Swedenborgian terms is known as a ‘vastation’, an involuntary, brief but horrifying glimpse into the depths of an evil abyss, while Alice, who all her adult life suffered from nervous attacks and prostrations, would sometimes signer her letters, ‘Yours very truly, Invalid.” These themes and sub-themes I shall place within a wider consideration of the nature of evil, posing the question, is there such a thing as evil, or are there only evil deeds?

This course brings together literary and theoretical explorations of the gendered division of labor from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Taking as our historical frame of reference the transformations of the world of work since the industrial revolution, we will focus on close readings and discussion of texts that depict or theorize the social organization of forms of work, the subjective experience of work, the relationship between work and community, and the divided spaces of the household and workplace. We will also examine the ways in which fiction reflects, problematizes and transforms social problems. Topics to be considered include the relationship between production and reproduction, care work and the labor market, debates over waged and unwaged work, and the intersections of gender, class, and race in the construction and division of labor. Authors will include Flora Tristan, Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, Émile Zola, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Selma James, and Annie Ernaux. (B, G, H)

This course explores the construction of a Eurasian ideology based on the contested geopolitical and poetic imaginary of the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Attending to the conceptions of race and ethnicity that this system produced, the course draws connections between a Eurasianist ideology and disciplinary work in linguistics, geography and biology. Tracing its historical break from imperial Russia after the 1917 revolution and a cultural rupture with a notion of European modernity, we will explore Eurasianism’s ties with orientalist discourses developed during the nineteenth century such as Pan-Slavism, Slavophilism, and Pan-Turkism.   In this course we will examine a diverse archive that includes a selection of primary orientalist ethnological sources, Russian and Turkic literary works and film, as well as contemporary theoretical approaches to empire in the region (particularly centered around the institution of Russian/Soviet Orientalism). Our primary focus will be the development and institutionalization of these concepts in the Soviet metropole and on the periphery during amidst periods of Soviet expansion beginning with a brief discussion of Russian imperial expansion during the nineteenth century, proceeding with the period of Soviet expansion during the 1920s, and ending with a look to transnational connections with the non-aligned movement between the 1950s-1970s. Breaking from dominant theories of the formation of the multinational Soviet empire, which focus on the western republics, this course explores the role of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Muslim cultural identity, and Soviet international diplomacy on the construction of Eurasianism. Undergraduate: (B, G, H)

This course introduces the models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The texts to be discussed include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller; Victor Segalen’s Stèles; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, Carmen, and the film adaptation U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s “Lower Depths;” Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, The Village Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants, and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, The Overcoat, and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.” (B, H)

Why are some animals considered food and others objects of religious devotion? Why do we treat dogs like family and kill flies without a second thought? Why do animals appear so frequently as metaphors in our everyday speech? In this course, students will explore these questions by reading texts featuring animals in literature, scripture, and theory, ranging from the Bible, Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor and J.M. Coetzee. We will bring these diverse texts together in order to investigate how animals illuminate religious questions about the relationship among humans, animals, and the divine. (B)