2017-2018

This course considers recent scholarship in the theory and sociology of textual production and reception—the histories of authorship, publishing, dissemination, distribution, and transmission on the one hand; and the histories of reading, listening, and viewing on the other. Our initial sessions explore classic and cutting edge statements about what the history of the book is (or was, or should be). Then, focusing especially on literary history, we survey the history of the book in America from the colonial period to the present (or from the hand-press period to the internet). Though we range widely over texts, periods, and locations we will concentrate on two primary ways of conceiving of book history: the book as a materialization of social relations and the book as a mediator of social relations; in other words, the book understood as a historical effect and as a historical cause of social life. (18th/19th)

The seminar examines the sociological, literary and historical work of W.E.B. Du Bois from The Philadelphia Negro (1899) to Dusk of Dawn (1940). The course will consider the relation between literature, visual graphics, and sociology; the constituents of “the Negro problem” or the color line as it is articulated in fiction, social science, and history; the structural continuities between the plantation and the ghetto as forms of racialized enclosure; the afterlife of slavery and the evolving program for freedom; the role of the novel and autobiography in extending and breaking the form of sociological investigation; and the poetics of counter-history. Please note, due to a technical issue, this course is also listed on this site as ENGL 67410. This is not an active course number. Please use ENGL 46822. PQ: Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Hank Scotch, cisubmissions@gmail.com. Course taught May 7 - May 30.

Re-Assemblage is a theory/history–design/build studio taught by an architect/artist and a cultural theorist. The course will engage the conceptualization of assemblage across several fields (archaeology, art, performance, poetics, geography, urbanism) and the history of assemblage practices (with a particular focus on the Art of Assemblage show at MoMA in 1961, but addressing recent work as well). This engagement will be coupled with, and prompted by, studio experiments across a range of scales, media and sites, as we collectively explore the material and theoretical problems, paths and projects of re-assemblage. There will be individual and small group projects throughout the course, and the group as a whole will construct a book, a projection, and an installation. Over the course of the quarter visiting scholars, artists, and architects will contribute to the conversation. Students need not have an art, design, or computer background but need to be prepared to develop skills quickly and to learn from one another. The course will meet twice a week, once as a seminar and once as a studio; chances are that we will take one required weekend field trip. Supported by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the course is an experiment in the convergence of theory, history, and practice. It is open to both graduate and College students. To express interest in taking the course please contact Zachary Cahill (zcahill@uchicago.edu), curator at the Gray Center.

This course examines Ashkenazi Jewish literary narratives about geopolitical borders and border-crossing though travel and migration, engaged with questions about the linguistic borders of Yiddish itself. As a diasporic language, Yiddish has long been constructed as subversively internationalist or cosmopolitan, raising questions about the relationships between language and nation, vernacularity and statelessness. This course explores the questions: How do the diasporic elements of the language produce literary possibilities? How do the “borders” of Yiddish shape its poetics? How do Yiddish poets and novelists thematize their historical experiences of immigration and deportation? And how has Yiddish literature informed the development of other world literatures through contact and translation? Literary and primary texts will include the work of Anna Margolin, Alexander Harkavy, Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Yankev Glatshteyn, Yosef Luden, S. An-sky, and others. Theoretical texts will include writing by Wendy Brown, Dilar Dirik, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wendy Trevino, Agamben, Arendt, Weinreich, and others. The course will incorporate Yiddish journalism and essays, in addition to poetry and prose. All material will be in English translation, and there are no prerequisites.

“I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause which I see arising in these committees. You are like the Alien [and] Sedition Act, and Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.” —Paul Robeson, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1956 What we think of as modernity can be said to begin with the birth (or rebirth) of the citizen. During the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions in Britain, France, and North America sought to recast political society as a structure built upon social contracts and natural rights of the people rather than the divine right of kings. But this same era also saw the rise of transoceanic empires and chattel slavery. Its new republican governments generally excluded all but white men (and often all but white men who owned property) from the vote or from most spheres of political agency and authority. Indeed, the category of citizen was (and remains) exclusionary as well as inclusive, frequently deployed to mark those outside its boundaries and protections. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the constructions of race, gender, and nation continued to shift into new forms, and many literatures of these centuries focus on how “the citizen” is conceived and reinvented into the present. This course will discuss how these tensions and debates influence literature and political discourse over four centuries, a breadth that will allow us to trace the concepts and critiques of citizenship as they have come to shape our contemporary world. A class that is interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transatlantic in its material, drawing on political science, theory, and history in addition to literature, this course will be of broad interest to undergraduates and graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond. Primary readings will include William Shakespeare, Tobias Smollett, Olaudah Equiano, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Miné Okubo, and Claudia Rankine. Secondary and theoretical readings will include Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Lord Mansfield, C. L. R. James, Paul Gilroy, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Achille Mbembe, Emma Goldman, and Harry Harootunian. Undergraduates should be prepared for an MA-level reading load but will write final papers of the standard length for upper-level undergraduate courses (8-10 pages versus 12-15 for MA students). MA students interested in pursuing a particular research topic in-depth will be given supplemental readings. There will also be an optional series of workshops on research and methodology available for MA students.

This course investigates the interplay between autobiographical life writing (most broadly defined as a type of writing that takes the author’s own life as its main subject) and sexuality. How does autobiographical life writing render notions of gender, sexual orientation, and intimacy? And how do these notions, as they circulate across personal and public realms, in turn shape the rubric of autobiographical life writing?Readings combine autobiographical life writing with pertinent scholarship. While surveying relevant cases across history, the course mainly zooms in on English-language, North American works published since the mid-20th century. Primary texts encompass short- and long-form pieces, from bestselling tell-alls to works associated with various avant-gardes.

Theater has always needed the concept of directing when staging a play. However, the role of the director as we know it has emerged only with the beginning of modern drama. This course will investigate the role of the director as an intersection between text, theory, and performance. The course explores the impact of the director in shaping modern drama, as well as critical approaches of literary and theatrical theory. We will deal not only with the historical development of the director’s role and textual interpretation, but also with the dynamics between theory and practice, and the changes in the concepts of space, acting, and performing. We will focus on approaches and writings by André Antoine, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Konstantin Stanislavski, Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, Jacques Copeau, Leopold Jessner, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett. We will examine these approaches in relation to literary theories of performativity (John Austin, John Searle, Judith Butler, Mikhail Bakhtin). We will also be interested in testing whether these theories match the practice, and discuss the potential of constructing a theory of acting, performing, and directing today. (D)

Students will begin by taking up the Norton edition and reading the novel through; discussion will then proceed by re-reading (along with some other materials from that edition) taking up various topics, e.g Eliot's self-presentation of her authorial aims, some important fictional choices (e.g: why a provincial town? why set the novel in 1832? etc.). Then we will consider the complex set of plots and their relation to each other. Other questions: how does the book represent itself as a model for the novel as a genre? Where does it fit in Eliot's career? There will be unexpected questions. This is the sort of course in which it is important to follow where the class leads.

Romantic period novels teem with disconcerting life-forms having trouble with the business of living –outcasts, prisoners, madwomen, paupers, immortals, wretches, sufferers of many kinds. The most famous of these is the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but he is only one of many precarious figures that test the limits of sympathy, sociality, the biopolitical imagination and the boundaries of being alive. This course will investigate such creatures and their forms of suffering in British novels from the 1790s through the 1830s, asking what their function is in the development of the novel form; why they are often linked to the uncanny, the supernatural and the irrational; and how vulnerability, suffering and wretchedness work in relation to revolution, optimism and biopolitical rationality. Readings will include novels (Shelley, Godwin, Edgeworth among them), political philosophy and poetry of the period, and theoretical and critical work (Foucault, Butler, Agamben, among others). (B, F)

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which are discussed through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. Along with questions of film technique and style, we consider the notion of the cinema as an institution that comprises an industrial system of production, social and aesthetic norms and codes, and particular modes of reception. Films discussed include works by Hitchcock, Porter, Griffith, Eisenstein, Lang, Renoir, Sternberg, and Welles.