2016-2017

This course will focus on intensive readings in major American novels that tackle the question of race and racial difference. Readings will begin in the early twentieth century with Henry James and Charles Chesnutt, move through the interwar period with Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, and conclude with the post-war period with Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and others. The class will include some critical material from major theorists of literature and race, such as Henry Louis Gates. (B, H)

This course examines nineteenth-century Anglophone writing about nature and the environment in the context of our present situation of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity collapse. If we now live in a world where there is no longer such thing as “nature” untouched by humans, this is in part as a result of processes of industrialization that were set into motion in the nineteenth century. This course explores some of the ways in which nineteenth-century writers already understood the idea of a “natural environment” to be culturally made, and the forceful literary critiques of industrialization that the period produced. Particular attention will be given to English-language writers beyond Britain and the United States. Authors will include Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Olive Schreiner, Toru Dutt, and Sarojini Naidu. (B, G)

This course will survey a range of literary works which take the disgusting as their principle aesthetic focus, while also providing students with an introduction to core issues and concepts in the history of aesthetic theory, such as the beautiful and the sublime, disinterested judgment and purposive purposelessness, taste and distaste. At the same time, our readings will allow us to explore the ways in which the disgusting has historically been utilized as a way of producing socially critical literature, by representing that which a culture categorically attempts to marginalize, exclude and expel. Readings will engage with the variety of aesthetic functions that the disgusting has been afforded throughout modern literary history, including the carnivalesque and grotesque in Rabelais and the bawdy and satirical in Swift; revolted Victorian realism and gruesome Zolaesque naturalism; Sartre’s existential nausea and Kafka’s anxious repulsion; as well as Thomas Bernhard’s experiments with contempt and William Burroughs’ hallucinogenic inversions of pleasure and disgust. Prerequisite: Strong stomach. (F, G, H)

Current political and recent academic debate has centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed. Readings will include some of the following literature, Hard Times, Le Pere Goriot, The Jungle, The Time Machine, Native Son, Landscape for a Good Woman, White Tiger, and some of the following economic and political texts Principles of Political Economy, The Acquisitive Society, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Capital (Marx and Piketty), The Price of Inequality and Inequality Re-examined. Undergraduate: (B, G, H), Graduate: (18th/19th)

Getting rich quick is practically synonymous with the American Dream. But while a fortune might alleviate financial hardship, it creates problems of its own. Like our present moment, the turn of the 20th century saw rapid changes in technology and finance generate unprecedented wealth inequality. In this period of rapid urbanization and industrialization, writers explored how rapidly changing financial circumstances might change a person’s life. This course surveys major American novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ask questions like: How does money articulate with social class in the context of American political ideology? How do writers represent the moral status and responsibilities of the wealthy as different from those of the poor? What can literary texts tell us about the world in which they were produced and consumed? Readings will include texts by William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. (B, G)

This course considers the power of the West as an imagined construct, an ideologically charged and prophetic “direction” in American cultural production. Beginning with Elizabethan dreams of wealth and haven, as well as Revolutionary and Jeffersonian articulations of America’s redemptive role in world politics, we will focus primarily on 19th century novels and paintings of westwarding as an American “Manifest Destiny.” Finally, we will turn to the marketing of the west in dime novels, the Wild West Show, Hollywood films, and contemporary television. Throughout the quarter we will follow out the contemporary challenges posed to boosters of the mythic west. (B, G)

This course surveys the last one hundred years –– from the outbreak of World War I to the Syrian Civil War ––through the lens of texts written by and about refugees, economic migrants, stateless subjects, and camp denizens. By reading the refugee experience across the 20th and 21st centuries, this course offers undergraduate students with diverse interests an opportunity to rethink some of the most important concepts in contemporary life: security, humanity, the human, the state, race, class, and the global. In addition, it will also provide a strong grounding in past and contemporary global literatures. Readings will include novels, poems, essays, and testimonies from Bessie Head, Chris Cleave, Edwidge Danticat, Mahmoud Darwish, Muriel Rukeyser, Franz Kafka, Chimamanda Adichie, Leon Uris, Russell Banks, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Flannery O’Connor, Dave Eggers, and John Berger. (B, G, H)

This course provides a survey of Irish fiction in its historical context from Maria Edgeworth to Emma Donoghue. We’ll study novels and short stories by some of the following writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and Patrick McCabe. We’ll also study two films directed by Neil Jordan, The Crying Game (loosely based on Frank O’Connor’s story Guests of the Nation) and The Butcher Boy, based on Patrick McCabe’s novel of the same name. Assignments are likely to include two essays, regular Chalk posts, and joint class presentations. (B, G)

This course will explore the material repercussions of built, neglected, and mythologized environments on those who imagine and inhabit them, and the way the literary arts contribute to their shape. We will place the literature of the metropolis into dialogue with the writings and plans of architects and urbanists on the one hand, and activist/occupants on the other. We will study the creation (and sporadic dismantling) of the city from the perspective of its builders and inhabitants—moving swiftly from the nineteenth-century flaneur through Situationism, from the utopian schemes and conceptual architectures of the ‘60s and 70s and Occupy movements. A range of cities, visible and invisible, will be under consideration, with Chicago as our immediate case study: students will be required to attend or respond to a major symposium on Gwendolyn Brooks cosponsored by the University in April. In tandem with the reading of literary texts by authors ranging from Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf through Italo Calvino and Anne Boyer, we will engage with architectural history and theory, encountering works by figures such as Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier, Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhass, Superstudio, and Pier Vittorio Aureli. (B, G, H)

This course examines the collisions and collaborations of verbal and visual media in the avant-garde circles of the early 20th century in Britain and France. We will develop a formal vocabulary for discussing visual artworks and hone critical skills in the analysis of temporal and spatial media. An openness to serious play and mental flexibility are a must. We will read poetry, fiction, criticism, and a play, and look—really look—at book arts, collage, painting, sculpture, film, and photography. Artists and authors will include Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, John Heartfield, Walter Benjamin, Robert Capa, Luis Buñuel, Claude Cahun, and Josephine Baker. (G)