2016-2017

Beginning first with a history of the genre, the course will focus on the post45 era beginning with celebrity criminal and writer, Charyl Chessman. We will read classics like In Cold Blood, and yes, at 1,000 pages+, The Executioner’s Song, and works of extraordinary commercial success, like Ann Rule’s Stranger Beside Me. We will also most likely look at true crime on the radio and on film. To aid us in our reflections, we will read scholars and critics like Mark Seltzer, Karen Haltunnen, and Janet Malcolm among others. Graduate: (20th/21st)

This course will study five major poets, English and American, who wrote about their personal relation to God, religion, and/or the transcendent. Readings are in the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, G. M. Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. The last third of the course will focus on The Four Quartets. It will treat the poets as writers and as religious thinkers. The approach will be both internal -- reading selected poems carefully -- and comparative, reading the poets in relation to one another. The course will require a final paper and perhaps a mid-term exercise. Undergraduate: (C, E, G) Graduate: (Med/Ren)

This course on Shakespeare's English history plays will adopt an unusual stratagem of reading the plays in order of the historical events they depict: that is, starting with King John, who ruled England from 1199 until his death in 1216, then (after a sizable interval of time devoted to the reigns of Henry III, 1216-1272, Edward I, 1272-1307, Edward II, 1307-1327, and Edward III, 1327-1377, not dramatized by Shakespeare), Richard II (reigned 1377-1390), Henry IV Parts I and II (1399-1413), Henry V (1413-1422), Henry VI Parts I-III (1422-1461 and 1470-1471, alternating with Edward IV, 1461-1470, 1471-1483), Richard III (1483-1485), and finally Henry VIII (1509-1547, having succeeded his father, Henry VII, who reigned from 1485-1509 and whose reign is not celebrated by a Shakespeare play). The emphasis will be on the great plays, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and II, Henry V, and Richard III. My hope is that this approach will enable us to explore Shakespeare's concept of English history over a large sweep of time, leading up to the Tudor dynasty that began with Henry VII's victory over Richard III in 1485 and concluded with the long and successful reign of Elizabeth I, Henry VIII's daughter, whose rule ended with her death in 1603, soon after Shakespeare had completed his writing of all these plays except Henry VIII. We will be reading the plays in the order in which they were printed in the first complete edition of Shakespeare works in the 1623 First Folio. Undergraduate: (D, E) Graduate: (Med/Ren)

What makes the present historical? Where does the present stand in relation to history? Anxieties about when the present began, and about whether or not it had a future, make the end of the second millennium a fruitful locus for looking at ideas of history as they were refracted by theory, criticism, journalism, and art. In this course, students will familiarize themselves with the forces at play in shaping representations of history and the present at the end of the 20th century, including mythology, spirituality, theology, as well as nationality and transnationality. They will also pay attention to the rhetorical and stylistic conventions of writing and making art about historical change and stasis. In their writing assignments, students will explore both scholarly and non-scholarly (e.g. journalistic) styles. Focusing primarily on the U.S., the course will zoom in on three important nexuses for historical imagining: the afterlives of the social movements loosely associated with the 1960s (e.g. Civil Rights, feminism, the New Left, anti-war activism); the end of the Cold War and the intensification of globalization discourses; and the AIDS crisis. Case studies will derive from the novels, plays, films, or journalistic essays of figures like Renata Adler, Toni Cade Bambara, Michael Cunningham, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Kushner, John Cameron Mitchell, Peter Watkins, and David Wojnarowicz. The course will also survey key arguments by critics and theorists, such as George B.N. Ayittey, Wendy Brown, Jacques Derrida, Francis Fukuyama, Fredric Jameson, and Alondra Nelson. (B, H)

From Jane Addams’ Hull House to the demolition of large public housing projects such as Cabrini Green, Chicago has played an outsized role within the national imagination about how different types of housing past, present, and future have worked or failed to work. This class will explore the narratives told about various forms of dwelling in Chicago in order to tell a broader story about how housing can alternatively make and unmake people and communities, fold or exclude inhabitants from spaces, economies and social imaginaries. Possible texts include: Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff Dwellers, Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, Edna Ferber, So Big; Nella Larsen, Passing; Arthur Meeker, Prairie Avenue; Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices; Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm; Frank London Brown, Trumbull Park; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Chris Ware, Building Stories; Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories. (B, G)

Beat writers formed one of the earliest, and most publicly engaged, movements in American literary culture of the postwar period. They also captivated American popular culture by redefining the genres, platforms, and technologies of modern literary production, and by making literature the vehicle for an ethics of living that purported to subvert norms of race, gender, and class. This course examines the literary achievement and cultural impact of the Beats in the period spanning the end of WWII and the end of the Vietnam War (1945-1975), focusing on the wide breadth of their experimentation with various forms and media (the open-form novel and poem, the modern poetry reading, the spoken word recording), their diverse identities as authors (working-class, female, non-white), and their role in a plurality of social movements (Free Speech, Second-Wave Feminism, Black Power). The course syllabus includes the three authors typically considered the preeminent Beat writers (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs) but devotes great attention to women and minority writers central to the Beat movement (Diane di Prima, Helen Adam, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman). (C)

From Julia de Burgos’ feminist poems of the 1930s to poetry of the Chicano Movement, Nuyorican performance poetry, and contemporary “Avant-Latino” experiments, this course explores the eclectic forms, aesthetics, and political engagements of Latin@ poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. (C)

The increasing popularity of cinema alternately attracted and alarmed Modernist writers, who looked to the emerging art form both as an inspiration and as a foil for their own work. This course explores the influence that the recording, editing and exhibition of film had on the literary practices of Modernist writers. We will look at the fiction of writers such as Woolf, Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen; and at Modernist writers’ essays on the medium. How did cinematic experiences of glamor, temporality, anonymity and technology affect the experiments of writers who wanted to innovate their own medium? How can the emergence of cinema help us think about literary Modernism's approach to narrative and subjectivity? (G)

In this course we will examine that period known as the Harlem Renaissance, partly as an exercise in literary criticism and theory, partly as an exercise in literary and intellectual history. Our objectives will be to critique the primary texts from this period and at the same time to assess the efforts of literary scholars to make sense of this moment in the history of American cultural production. (B, G, H)

This course reads works of postcolonial literature and theory in order to consider the entanglements of the figures of “women” and “natives” in colonial as well as postcolonial discourse. We will discuss topics such as the persistent feminization of the profane, degraded, and contagious bodies of colonized natives; representations of women as both the keepers and the victims of “authentic” native culture; the status (symbolic and otherwise) of women in anti-colonial resistance and insurgency; and the psychic pathologies (particularly nervous conditions of anxiety, hysteria, and madness) that appear repeatedly in these works as states to which women and/as natives are especially susceptible. And we will ask whether a theoretical concept such as écriture feminine, which identifies forms of literary production that register the specific traces of female difference, is meaningful in the context of embodied experience that is raced as well as gendered. (B, H)