2017-2018

This course considers the centrality of war—and three specific wars—to Anglophone modernism. We will examine literary representations of three conflicts that dramatically shaped European society and cultural production in the first half of the 20th century: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Moving from the combative violence of the pre-World War I avant-gardes to the emergence of fascism in the 1920s and the aerial bombing of urban centers, our course will investigate the blurred line between literature and history in years of profound crisis. We will read works by both combatants and non-combatants, and encounter a fundamental dilemma that split modernist writers and artists throughout the period: should art reflect social and historical conditions or exist “for its own sake”? Readings will include the British war poets, Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), along with essays by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and W. G. Sebald. (B, G, H)

This course examines the relationship between mobility, spatial politics, and poetic form in modernism. From vers libre to Surrealist dérives, modernist literature draws strongly on the political, ethical, and imaginative significance of movement, fundamentally connecting mobility to notions of freedom, progress, and change. Moreover, the explosion of modernist art and literature in France and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took place in a social context of radical changes in forms of individual and collective movement. Technologies like the subway, the automobile, the plane, and the bicycle altered notions of space and time, while women exercised new forms of autonomy of movement and transgressed gendered notions of public space. In the same decades, two World Wars reshaped Europe’s borders, passports were introduced, and waves of refugees fleeing religious persecution and war heightened xenophobic desires for closed borders and regulation—desires reaching their height in the trains, ghettos, and death camps of the Holocaust. In readings extending from the flâneur poems of Charles Baudelaire to the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound, we will investigate the spatial poetics—and politics—of writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, Hope Mirrlees, T. S. Eliot, and the Surrealists, and consider the connections between the poetic line and spatial movement, along with concepts like transport, crossing, passage, progress, flight, etc. French readings will be provided in English. (C, G, H)

This course will address literature in the picaresque tradition, from the first picaresque novel—the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes—through William Wordsworth’s poetry. Picaresque novels are known for their roguish heroes, off-color humor, and episodic structure. They also, however, tell the stories of some of the period’s most vulnerable people: the poor, women, children, and slaves. We will think about the picaresque both historically—as a response to early European capitalism—and formally—as a literary form attuned to the lives of precarious populations. Readings will include Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Nashe, Defoe, Voltaire, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Marx. (B, F)

In this course, we will investigate the origin and nature of the modern novel by reading a selection of eighteenth-century British fiction. Eighteenth-century novels were written during a period when novelists were still working out elemental questions about their art form: what is a fiction, as opposed to a truth or a lie? How can prose narrative describe human subjectivity and society? Are novels art or entertainment? Readings will include novels by Behn, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Austen, and criticism by Watt, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. (B, F)

This experimental, writing-intensive course provides students with both an introduction to key texts in critical literary theory and a workshop environment in which to practice this theory with select works of contemporary literature. Students in the course will form small teams organized by a chosen novel, which will be their common object to think through the theory we read as a class. We will then alternate “reading” weeks, which will be organized by schools of critical thought, with “writing” weeks, in which students apply these schools of thought to their chosen novel and teams meet to workshop each other’s essays. In this way, students are asked to try on a range of different theoretical idioms and approaches, with an emphasis on writing as a way of metabolizing them. Given the time constraints of the quarter, the course will prioritize theoretical texts from a feminist and queer tradition, informed by Marxism and psychoanalysis. (H)

Seventy-five years ago a group of scientists launched the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, commonly known as CP-1, at the University of Chicago under Stagg Field. This course will be part of the commemoration and reflection taking place across the University this fall. Its goal will be to explore the ensuing Nuclear Age from different disciplinary perspectives by organizing a ring-lecture. Each week’s lecture, delivered by faculty from fields across the university (for instance, Physics, Biomedicine, Anthropology, and English), will be followed by a discussion section to synthesize and integrate not only the material from the weekly lectures, but the many events happening at the University this fall. CP-1 was not only a scientific achievement of the highest magnitude, but also a civilization-changing event that remains at the boundary of the thinkable.

This course is a survey of fiction in English from 2001 to the present. We will approach this fiction through three different lenses: history, form, and media. Historically, how does literature respond to and register emerging social anxieties around issues including cultural diversity, terrorism, and climate change? Formally, how have novels developed new strategies of representation in the way characters are developed, plots are narrated, and sentences are written? And in terms of media, how do novels remain novel when digital and social media increasingly take up some of the traditional functions and platforms of the novelistic enterprise? We will explore these questions through works by authors including Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, Tao Lin, Marie Calloway, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead, Barbara Browning, Nell Zink, and Chris Ware. Our primary goals are two: to develop close reading skills that can pick out emerging patterns in novel form; and to develop knowledge about our contemporary social and cultural landscape in order to relate these patterns to history and other media. (B)

Historicist scholars have recently argued that lyric as we know it was invented by twentieth-century criticism. They suggest that the familiar approach of interpreting poems by relation to a "speaker" makes it difficult to appreciate poetry's historical variety. This class tests this claim by comparing major twentieth-century critical approaches: how is lyric defined? what is its significance among other poetic and non-poetic genres? how should it be read and interpreted? Beginning with a small number of influential nineteenth-century readings, we will consider twentieth-century examples from Russian Formalism, Practical Criticism, New Criticism, phenomenology, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism, gender and sexuality criticism, Marxist ideology critique, and Historical Poetics. (C, H)

A kinship between poetry and mental illness is a commonplace in myth, received opinion, and literary history, whether formulated as divine inspiration or as bipolar disorder. Similarly, the pejorative ascription of insanity to poets has been a commonplace of literary review and criticism. ‘My vocabulary did this to me’ are the reputed dying words of the poet Jack Spicer who claimed to respond to dictation as though himself a radio tuning to messages. Language’s dictation, however experienced, unites mental disorder and the literary arts – the pressure of language that might become unhinged. What of the reader? Aesthetic response also is both formally contained and threatens to become unhinged. This class will read works of Outsider Poetry and Fiction, and will consider how best to respond.

Focusing on the theory, history and practice of poetic translation, this seminar includes sessions with invited theorists and practitioners from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Taking translation to be an art of making sense that is transmitted together with a craft of shapes and sequences, we aim to account for social and intellectual pressures influencing translation projects. We deliberately foreground other frameworks beyond “foreign to English” and “olden epochs to modern”—and other methods than the “equivalence of meaning”—in order to aim at a truly general history and theory of translation that might both guide comparative cultural history and enlarge the imaginative resources of translators and readers of translation. In addition to reading and analysis of outside texts spanning such topics as semantic and grammatical interference, gain and loss, bilingualism, self-translation, pidgin, code-switching, translationese, and foreignization vs. nativization, students will be invited to try their hands at a range of tactics, aiming toward a final portfolio of annotated translations.