ENGL 10200-10300. Problems in the Study of Gender; Problems in the Study of Sexuality.

This two-quarter interdisciplinary sequence is designed as an introduction to theories and critical practices in the study of feminism, gender, and sexuality. Both classic texts and recent conceptualizations of these contested fields are examined. Problems and cases from a variety of cultures and historical periods are considered, and the course pursues their differing implications in local, national, and global contexts. Both quarters also engage questions of aesthetics and representation, asking how stereotypes, generic conventions, and other modes of circulated fantasy have contributed to constraining and emancipating people through their gender or sexuality.

ENGL 10400. Introduction to Poetry. 100 Units.

This course involves intensive readings in both contemporary and traditional poetry. Early on, the course emphasizes various aspects of poetic craft and technique, setting, and terminology, as well as provides extensive experience in verbal analysis. Later, emphasis is on contextual issues: referentially, philosophical and ideological assumptions, as well as historical considerations. (A, C)

Instructor(s): J. Scappettone     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10704. Form as Content: The Arts of Reading Fiction. 100 Units.

This course will explore various ways in which great fiction elicits the reader in the creation of meaning. Diction and syntax, plot and characterization, setting and context, allusion and reference: these and other techniques will be studied as sources of readerly pleasure. Strong emphasis will also be placed on building arguments, as students learn to construct micro- and macro-theses in their service of their "so what"s. (B)

Instructor(s): W. Veeder     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10705. Narrative and Memory. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to key concepts in the study of narrative by examining how prose fiction contends with the workings of memory. We will read 20th century and contemporary novels to ask how these texts represent memory formal strategies these authors develop in order to do so. We will pay particular attention to works that reflect on the elusiveness of the past and on failures or disruptions of acts of recall. We will also consider some works from genres adjacent to and influenced by prose fiction, such as the graphic novel and the literary memoir; for comparative purposes, we will watch one or two films and discuss cinematic approaches to issues such as unreliable narration and disordered or shifting temporalities. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Ama Ata Aidoo, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Tayeb Salih, Art Spiegelman, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, and Teju Cole; films by Chris Marker, Michael Haneke; supplemental readings by Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Hayden White, and Cathy Caruth. (A, B)

Instructor(s): S. Thakkar     Terms Offered: Autumn 2013

ENGL 10706. Introduction to Fiction. 100 Units.

This course will explore concepts and analytical tools for reading and interpreting fiction and other narrative forms. We will emphasize formal concerns about narrative voice (omniscience, irony, unreliability, and free indirect discourse) alongside socio-historical and literary-historical perspectives on the uses and pleasures of narrative art. To foreground the problem of narrative itself, we will consider texts from a variety of time periods, with widely varied approaches to the form (from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Jane Austen to Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto). Requirements include several short essays and a final examination. (A, B)

Instructor(s): T. Campbell     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10707. Haunted Spaces, Suspect Cases: American Gothic, 1900-1960. 100 Units.

This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov, on through the next generation, O'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver, and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan, and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender, and psychology. Writing is also an important concern of the course. There will be two papers and an individual tutorial with each student. (B, G)

Instructor(s): William Veeder     Terms Offered: Autumn 2013

ENGL 10800. Introduction to Film Analysis. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Y. Tsivian, Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn, Spring
Note(s): Required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 10100,ARTH 20000,ARTV 25300

ENGL 12002. Critique of Humanism. 100 Units.

This course will provide a rapid-fire survey of the philosophical sources of contemporary literary and critical theory. We will begin with a brief discussion of the sort of humanism at issue in the critique—accounts of human life and thought that treat the individual human being as the primary unit for work in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. This kind of humanism is at the core of contemporary common sense. It is, to that extent, indispensable in our understanding of how to move around in the world and get along with one another. That is why we will conduct critique, rather than plain criticism, in this course: in critique, one remains indebted to the system under critical scrutiny, even while working to understand its failings and limitations. Our tour of thought produced in the service of critique will involve work by Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Freud, Fanon, Lacan, and Althusser. We will conclude with a couple of pieces of recent work that draws from these sources. The aim of the course is to provide students with an opportunity to engage with some extraordinarily influential work that continues to inform humanistic inquiry. (H)

Instructor(s): C. Vogler     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 21225,ENGL 34407,PHIL 31225

ENGL 12300. Poetry and Being. 100 Units.

This course involves close analysis of poems from a variety of periods, exposure to various critics' perspectives on literary form, and a series of theoretical readings on creativity, play, and emotion, which we will place in dialogue with our interpretations of individual poems. Theoretical areas to be explored include psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology. (C, H)

Instructor(s): L. Ruddick     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Intro to Poetry (ENGL 10400) or an equiv course at another institution or consent of instructor.

ENGL 12700. Writing Biography. 100 Units.

Prerequisite(s): To apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/submission.
Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 26001,CRWR 46001,ENGL 32700

ENGL 12800. Theories of Media. 100 Units.

This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat" in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and such modern texts as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of such concepts as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at such recent films as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. Students will be expected to do one "show and tell" presentation introducing a specific medium. There will also be several short writing exercises, and a final paper. (H)

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 30800,ARTH 25900,ARTH 35900,ARTV 25400,CMST 27800,CMST 37800,ENGL 32800

ENGL 13000. Academic and Professional Writing (The Little Red Schoolhouse) 100 Units.

Instructor(s): L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner     Terms Offered: Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Note(s): This course does not count towards the ISHU program requirements. May be taken for P/F grading by students who are not majoring in English. Materials fee $20.
Equivalent Course(s): ISHU 23000,ENGL 33000

ENGL 13800. History and Theory of Drama I. 100 Units.

The course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, classical Sanskrit theater, medieval religious drama, Japanese Noh drama, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Molière, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, Corneille, and others. Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with other members of the course. The goal of these scenes is not to develop acting skill but, rather, to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended. (D, E)

Instructor(s): D. Bevington     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Preference given to students with third- or fourth-year standing.
Note(s): May be taken in sequence with ENGL 13900/31100 or individually. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 31200,CLCV 21200,CMLT 20500,CMLT 30500,ENGL 31000,TAPS 28400

ENGL 13900. History and Theory of Drama II. 100 Units.

This course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the eighteenth century into the twentieth (i.e., Sheridan, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill, Kushner). Attention is also paid to theorists of the drama (e.g., Stanislavsky, Artaud, Grotowski). Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with other members of the course. The goal of these scenes is not to develop acting skill but, rather, to discover what is at work in the scene and to write up that process in a somewhat informal report. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended. (D, G)

Instructor(s): D. Bevington, H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Note(s): May be taken in sequence with ENGL 13800/31000 or individually. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 20600,CMLT 30600,ENGL 31100,TAPS 28401

ENGL 14900. Old English. 100 Units.

This course is designed to prepare students for further study in Old English language and literature. As such, our focus will be the acquisition of those linguistic skills needed to encounter such Old English poems as Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and The Wanderer in their original language. In addition to these texts, we may also translate the prose Life of Saint Edmund, King and Martyr and such shorter poetic texts as the Exeter Book riddles. We will also survey Anglo-Saxon history and culture, taking into account the historical record, archeology, manuscript construction and illumination, and the growth of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline. This course serves as a prerequisite both for further Old English study at the University of Chicago and for participation in the Newberry Library’s Winter Quarter Anglo-Saxon seminar. (C, E)

Instructor(s): C. von Nolcken     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 34900,GRMN 34900

ENGL 15200. Beowulf. 100 Units.

This course will aim to help students read Beowulf while also acquainting them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the poem as edited in Klaeber’s Beowulf (4th ed., Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008). Once students have defined their particular interests, we will choose which recent approaches to the poem to discuss in detail; we will, however, certainly view the poem both in itself and in relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture in general. (C, E)

Instructor(s): C. von Nolcken     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: ENGL 14900/35900 or the equivalent
Note(s): Cross listed courses are designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 35200,FNDL 28100,GRMN 32900

ENGL 15301. From the Annals of Wales to Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur in Legend and History. 100 Units.

We will consider the historical origins of the Arthurian Legend and some of the ways in which it has subsequently been reshaped and used in great Britain. We will concern ourselves first with how the legend was treated in the Middle Ages, most importantly by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and Thomas Malory in the fifteenth. Then we will turn to the extraordinary revival of interest in the legend that started with the Victorians and which has continued almost unabated to the present. In our discussions we will consider such matters as the various political uses that have been made of the legend as well as some of the reasons for its enduring popularity. We will end with a viewing of the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (B, E)

Instructor(s): C. von Nolcken     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 15500. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 100 Units.

This course is an examination of Chaucer's art as revealed in selections from The Canterbury Tales. Our primary emphasis is on a close reading of individual tales, but we also pay attention to Chaucer's sources and to other medieval works that provide relevant background. (C, E)

Instructor(s): M. Miller     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25700

ENGL 16500. Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies. 100 Units.

An exploration of Shakespeare's major plays in the genres of history play and romantic comedy, from the first half (roughly speaking) of his professional career: Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Troilus and Cressida. (D, E)

Instructor(s): D. Bevington     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21403,ISHU 26550,TAPS 28405

ENGL 16600. Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances. 100 Units.

This course will study the second half of Shakespeare's career, from 1600 to 1611, when the major genres that he worked in were tragedy and "romance" or tragicomedy. Plays to be read will include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear (quarto and folio versions), Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. There will be one short and one longer paper. Section attendance is required. (D, E)

Instructor(s): R. Strier     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): ENGL 16500 recommended but not required.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21404,TAPS 28406

ENGL 16711. Hamlet and Critical Methods. 100 Units.

Shakespeare's Hamlet has probably inspired the most criticism of any play in world literature, and it has certainly inspired some of the greatest criticism. This course explores the goals, presuppositions, strengths, and limitations of different kinds of scholarship and criticism by focusing upon the variety of approaches that have been (or in some cases, could be) applied to Shakespeare's play. The course will focus on modern editorial theory and practice; classical and neoclassical discussions of mimesis, plot, and theatrical affect; Romantic, psychoanalytic, and postmodern discussions of Hamlet as character; recent literary historical discussions of sources and genre; new critical, new historicist, and feminist analyses of the play's imagined world; as well as performances and literary adaptations of Hamlet conceived of as interpretations of the play. (D, E, H)

Instructor(s): J. Scodel     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 16910. The English Renaissance in Context. 100 Units.

This course provides students with an introduction both to English Renaissance literature and to reading literature in context. It covers major authors and works from the period while teaching students about how works of literature affect one another and how one work changes how we read another. (E)

Instructor(s): P. Goldfarb     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 18106. The Many Media Provocations of Laurence Sterne. 100 Units.

This course reads Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey—and a few of the works these works have inspired—in light of the long reach of this eighteenth-century novelist across time and media, from travel-writing and engraving to film and the graphic novel. (B, F)

Instructor(s): L. Caldwell     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20129. London Program-Romantic London. 100 Units.

This course examines British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries alongside the new cultural institutions of the moment that were inventing “high” culture even as they brought the arts before unprecedentedly democratic audiences. The period witnesses the emergence of the Foundling Hospital (1741), the British Museum (1753), the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (1754), the Royal Academy of Art (1768), and the National Gallery (1824). With a special focus on the urbane forms of poetry and the essay, we will address the relevance of this sweeping reordering of the arts both for individual authors and for the literary sphere as a whole. Primary texts will include the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats and the essays of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. But we will also consider the actual sites of these institutions as primary texts in their own right, and thus draw upon the unique perspective London itself will allow us. (C, F)

Instructor(s): T. Campbell     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20130. London Program-Transnational Shakespeare. 100 Units.

This course travels through the cultures and genres of the Renaissance in order to bring Shakespeare's world into focus. We'll chart the course of Renaissance Humanism as it moves through space and time, explore the impact of the transatlantic encounter on literary writing, and inhabit scenes of political and confessional conflict that play out on both the stage of world history and that of Shakespeare's theater. In addition to such works as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Henry IV (1 and 2), Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest, readings will be drawn from authors including Petrarch, Wyatt, Rabelais, Machiavelli, Columbus, Cortés, Marlowe, Montaigne, and Calderón. (D, E)

Instructor(s): D. Simon     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20220. British Poetry of the Long 1930s. 100 Units.

W. H. Auden dominated the poetic landscape of his time and his influence has been powerfully felt in later English and American poetry. Less celebrated British poetry of the 1930s and early 1940s offers a fascinating range of modernist and counter-modernist aesthetic strategies negotiating political crisis. This course will encounter Marxist, Scottish nationalist, quasi-Fascist, Surrealist, collage, feminist, and proletarian poets. The poetic response to the Spanish Civil War will be a special focus. (C, G)

Instructor(s): J. Wilkinson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 30220

ENGL 20601. Jane Austen (Junior Seminar) 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to the novels of Jane Austen, and to the work of some of her contemporary writers (possibly to include Burney, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, Edgeworth). We will also read some significant work in Austen criticism, focusing on Austen’s innovations in the novel form, as well as on issues of gender, power, sentimentalism, and judgment. (B, F)

Instructor(s): H. Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 21920. Victorian Ruin. 100 Units.

‘Victorian Ruin’ invites students to investigate the lavish and fascinating pessimisms of Victorian literature. We will draw from a variety of genres to think about the imaginative work of Victorian texts preoccupied with the depredations of modern life: novels of disillusionment, essays forecasting cultural degeneration, poems lamenting the loss of traditional sexual, religious, and social forms. (G)

Instructor(s): D. Brown     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 21921. Victorian Poetry. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): M. Hansen     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 22207. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature. 100 Units.

How can psychoanalysis be used as a framework for understanding literary texts? In this course, students will read a series of influential psychoanalytic works from Freud's Dora to contemporary relational psychoanalysis, as well as a number of literary-critical works that draw on psychoanalytic theory. At each meeting we will pair a theoretical or critical text with a work of poetry or fiction, using the theory to shed light on the literary text and occasionally vice versa. The course is intended both to help students to refine their skills as close readers of literature and to provide insight into some of the varied ways in which psychoanalytic thinkers have pondered what it is to be human. Psychoanalytic readings include works by Freud, D. W. Winnicott, Lewis Aron, Christopher Bollas, and Jeannine Chasseguet-Smirgel. (H)

Instructor(s): L. Ruddick     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 22208. Lacan. 100 Units.

Will focus on Lacan’s accounts of identification, desire, normativity, and the drive, with attention to his critique of ego psychology. Readings from Ecrits and Seminars 2, 7, and 10. (H)

Instructor(s): M. Miller     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 23100. Immigration and Deregulation in Recent British Fiction. 100 Units.

This course looks at the impact on British fiction of the two most powerful forces transforming British life from the 1950s to the present—mass immigration and financial deregulation. The period covered will be that of Thatcher’s governments and their extended aftermath. Core novels are White Teeth and NW by Zadie Smith, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Money and London Fields by Martin Amis, and Capital by John Lanchester. (B)

Instructor(s): J. Wilkinson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 33525

ENGL 23413. Introduction to Literary Theory. 100 Units.

This course will survey some of the theoretical positions that have been most influential for literary study: formalism, structuralism, deconstruction and poststructuralism, Marxism. Readings will be drawn from the writings of Immanuel Kant, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, and T. J. Clark. Students will be asked to write three analyses for class presentation. (H)

Instructor(s): F. Ferguson     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 24002. Joyce's Ulysses: An Introduction. 100 Units.

This course consists of a chapter-by-chapter introduction to Ulysses. We will focus on such themes as the city, aesthetics, politics, sex, food, religion, and the family, while paying close attention to Joyce’s use of multiple narrators and styles. Students are strongly encouraged to read Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Homer’s Odyssey as preparation for this course. Assignments will consist of bi-weekly quizzes, collaborative class presentations, regular contributions to the class blog, and 2–3 papers. Students are also required to attend the sessions on Ulysses at the conference on Forms of Fiction on November 7–9, 2013. (B, G)

Instructor(s): M. Ellmann     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 33637

ENGL 24101. Middlemarch. 100 Units.

This course will spend the entire quarter focusing on Eliot's masterwork, with some attention to the novel's literary and intellectual context. (B, G)

Instructor(s): L. Rothfield     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Crosslisted courses are designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 42301,FNDL 22711

ENGL 24304. India in English. 100 Units.

This course examines the emergence of India as a theme in twentieth-century English fiction. We will consider a representative sample of texts, both fictional and non fictional, written about India by Indian and non-Indian writers. The subject will examine the historical contexts for the India-England connection, especially the impact of British imperialism. Elements of postcolonial theory will be brought to bear upon specific textual study. (B, G, H)

Instructor(s): L. Gandhi     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 24313. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Seedy Side of the Atlantic World. 100 Units.

This course will explore literature by and about people who lived at the margins of Atlantic society in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This is a literature of pirates and prostitutes, of migrants and mercenaries, sailors and slaves, who sought to form worlds at the edges of the period’s empires and emergent nation-states. We will explore half-forgotten texts that bear traces of the utopian promise of these alternative and abnormal lives: pirate tales, tracts of black radicals, and accounts of revolutionary shipwrecked sailors forming utopian communities in the Americas. We will also look at more canonical literature that draws upon and negotiates with the seedier side of the Atlantic world: Shakespeare’s Tempest, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Smollett’s Roderick Random, Melville’s Benito Cereno, and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. (B, F, G)

Instructor(s): C. Taylor     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 24319. Picturing Words/Writing Images (Studio) 100 Units.

What is the relationship between reading and looking? Images in mind and images on paper—words in mind and on the page—we will explore the intersection of these different ways to think, read, and look, as we make poems, drawings, paintings, etc., in class. We will investigate the problem of representing language as it is expressed in the work produced in class. Studying works by contemporary visual artists like Jenny Holzer and Ann Hamilton, and practicing poets such as Susan Howe and Tom Phillips will inform our investigation. The course will feature visits to our studio by contemporary poets and visual artists, who will provide critiques of student work and discussion of their own ongoing projects. These visitors will help to frame our artistic and literary practice within the ongoing conversation between word and image in modern culture. We will ask, what are the cognitive, phenomenological, social, and aesthetic consequences of foregrounding the pictorial/visual aspect of alphabetical characters? (C, H)

Instructor(s): J. Stockholder, S. Reddy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing. Previous experience in an arts studio or creative writing course recommended, but not required.
Equivalent Course(s): BPRO 26500,ARTV 26901,ARTV 36901,CRWR 26341,CRWR 46341,ENGL 34319

ENGL 24400. Brecht and Beyond. 100 Units.

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory generally is also considerable. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theater, from the anarchic plays of the 1920s to the agitprop Lehrstück and film, especially Kühle Wampe) to the classical parable plays, as well as the work of his heirs in German theater (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss) and film (R. W. Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge), in French film (Jean-Luc Godard) and cultural theory (the Situationists and May 68), film and theater in Britain (Mike Leigh and Lucy Prebble), and theater and film in Africa, from South Africa to Senegal. (D, H)

Instructor(s): L. Kruger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Intro to Film/International cinema and/or a course in Theater and Performance Studies and/or German or French; second-year standing or above

ENGL 24402. Decolonizing Drama and Performance in Africa. 100 Units.

This course will examine the connections among dramatic writing, theatrical practice, and theoretical reflection on decolonization, primarily in Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th century. Authors (many of whom write theory and theatre) may include the following writers in English, French, and/or Spanish: Aima Aidoo, Fatima Dike, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Fernandez Retamar, Athol Fugard, Biodun Jeyifo, Were were Liking, Mustafa Matura, Jose Marti, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott. (D, G, H)

Instructor(s): L. Kruger     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Third- and fourth-year undergraduate students with at least one previous course in theatre and/or African studies.
Note(s): Working knowledge of French and/or Spanish is required for Comparative Literature status and recommended but not required for everyone else.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28418

ENGL 24408. Before and After Beckett: Theater and Theory. 100 Units.

Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleakness but his experiments with theatre and film echo the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and screen, e.g., Chaplin and Keaton) as well as the artistic avant garde (Jarry). This course will juxtapose these early 20th century models with Beckett’s plays on stage and screen and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Genet, Duras). Contemporary texts include Vinaver, Minyana, in French, Pinter, Churchill, Kane in English. Theorists include Barthes, Badiou, Bert States, and others. Comparative Literature students will have the opportunity to read French originals. (D, G, H)

Instructor(s): L. Kruger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: HUM and TAPS course; this course is for juniors and seniors only; not open to first-year College students
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 24408,TAPS 28438

ENGL 24410. The Dramas of Modernism. 100 Units.

This course seeks to explore the modernists' engagements with dramatic form. Course materials will include plays, radio-dramas, translations of non-Western works, essays on theater, and a series of novels and poems influenced (directly or obliquely) by dramatic techniques. Authors will include Artaud, T. S. Eliot, Beckett, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Woolf, and Yeats. (D, G)

Instructor(s): A. Millan     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 25007. Assemblage: Inorganic Form (Seniors-Only Course) 100 Units.

This course is meant to provoke new modes of conceptualizing and analyzing aesthetic forms—modes derived from within and beyond the literary and plastic arts. To establish a center of gravity for the course we will concentrate on an art exhibition, “The Art of Assemblage” (MOMA, 1961), on the work of particular artists (Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson), and on William Carlos Williams’s “compiled” epic, Paterson (1946–1963). From there we will move both backwards and forwards. Backwards to Coleridge’s theory of “organic form” and Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” to such works as Melville’s Moby Dick and Jean Toomer’s Cane, and to Man Ray’s assembled objects and André Breton’s object-poems. Forwards to Language poetry and language art, recent installation work, and some text-based digital fiction. Along the way, we will be tracking the different uses of the term “assemblage” in archaeology, architecture, anthropology, human geography, and social theory (where Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement has played an especially prominent role). Students will be required to produce a conceptually grounded experiment, to make an oral presentation, and to write a final paper (10 pages) that responds to the course’s overarching question: How might we understand the relation between assemblage as an artistic practice and assemblage deployed as concept of analysis? (H)

Instructor(s): B. Brown     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): 4th Year Students

ENGL 25107. Survey of Early American Literature. 100 Units.

Introduction to the major English-language texts of the period, from the Elizabethans through Fenimore Cooper. (E, F)

Instructor(s): J. Knight     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 25403. American West. 100 Units.

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 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 challenges posed by recent scholars of the New Western History to boosters of the mythic west. (B, F, G)

Instructor(s): J. Knight     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 45403

ENGL 25913. Mapping Modernism. 100 Units.

In this class we’ll be exploring the spaces and places of Modernism, from the streets of Paris to the drawing rooms of London. If the story that literary modernism tells about itself is one about interiority, consciousness and subjectivity, this class will seek to tell a different story, one about modernism’s obsession with its built environment. (G)

Instructor(s): M. Gibbons     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 25933. Literature of 9/11. 100 Units.

This course explores how 9/11 informs 21st-century literature. It understands the category of “literature” broadly: as Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors write in The New Literary History of America, the “literary” is not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form. As such, we will analyze novels, graphic narratives, memoirs, music, films, professional and amateur photography, and civic memorials and public art projects, as well as recent critical and theoretical studies about trauma and mourning, to develop a framework for gauging contemporary cultural and aesthetic responses to and representations of disaster. Texts may include Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Ernie Colón and Sid Jacobson’s 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs (ed. Peress et al), Jenny Holzer’s 7 World Trade Center project, such essays as DeLillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” and the films United 93 and World Trade Center, along with writing by Judith Butler, Marianne Hirsch, E. Ann Kaplan, and Jill Bennett, among others. (H)

Instructor(s): H. Chute     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 25954. New and Emerging Genres. 100 Units.

This course explores late twentieth and early twenty-first century genres as they have emerged in literature and new media. Throughout the quarter, we will turn to genres that follow “postmodernism”—a now-standard category that describes literary experiments that unfolded in the years following World War II. The genres that will concern us may include cyberpunk fiction, new weird literature, the post-ironic novel, the graphic novel, the complex narrative television serial, the survival horror videogame, the transmedia game, and various genres of electronic and location-based literature. Through a survey of the literature of our historical present, we will examine movements that complicate and depart from the earlier literary category of the “postmodern.” We will also interrogate the very category of the “new.” Novelty, in our historical moment, is so often celebrated. Still, it remains an open question of contemporary literature and politics alike whether we, like the modernists of the early twentieth century, can or should “make it new.” Course requirements include engaged participation in class discussion, a special topic presentation (in pairs), several blog entries, a midterm paper, and a final research paper (along with an abstract and presentation). There will be no additional exams. (B)

Instructor(s): P. Jagoda     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 25956. Disability Studies: An Introduction. 100 Units.

This course introduces disability as a critical category, and is grounded in readings of 20th century American novels from Winesburg, Ohio to Geek Love. Students will become conversant in disability studies’ foundational insights as well as new directions in the field (intersections with critical race studies and queer theory, for instance). (B, H)

Instructor(s): M. Fink     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 26206. Race and Space. 100 Units.

This course will look at the way that race is as much a product of space as it is of blood, skin, vision, or law. How does space determine the way we perceive race and how does race color the ways we experience and relate to space? Starting with post-antebellum rewritings of slavery’s spaces, moving through the hysteria surrounding passing and urbanization in the 1920s, the role of the mid-century suburbs in reorganizing racial categories, the post–Civil Rights post-industrial city and the shoring up of the ghetto, to the current intersections between ideas of the post-racial and the post-spatial, this course will explore the novel as a key site for mediating the changing linked experience of race and space. (B, G)

Instructor(s): A. Brown     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 26207. Success, Failure, and the American Dream. 100 Units.

Americans live in the shadow of “The American Dream”—a term that summarizes a set of both social and emotional values. This course moves chronologically from the 19th to the 20th century, thinking broadly about the ethos of success and the lessons of failure in the United States. Readings include Franklin, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Fitzgerald, and Mamet. (G)

Instructor(s): A. Jacobs     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 26900. Late 20th Century U.S. Literature and Culture. 100 Units.

Ranging across genres and media platforms, this survey course covers the major aesthetic innovations of the late 20th century in their historical context. Beginning with the end of World War II and ending at 9/11, each week will contain one major reading and several smaller ones as well as samplings of other arts (photography, film, performance art, etc.) relevant or analogous to the readings.

Instructor(s): D. Nelson     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Register via discussion section

ENGL 26908. The American Novel, 1880-1920. 100 Units.

Intensive readings in American fiction during its rise to prominence. Likely authors will include Mark Twain, Henry James, W. D. Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. We'll pair close readings of the texts with broader considerations of the period's massive social transformations: urban industrialism and labor, migration and race relations, the rise of new forms of media, consumer culture, and shifting gender norms.  (B, G)

Instructor(s): R. So     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 26911. Late 20th Centrury U.S. Literature and Culture. 100 Units.

Ranging across genres and media platforms, this survey course covers the major aesthetic innovations of the late 20th century in their historical context. Beginning with the end of World War II and ending at 9/11, each week will contain one major reading and several smaller ones as well as samplings of other arts (photography, film, performance art, etc.) relevant or analogous to the readings.

Instructor(s): D. L. Nelson

ENGL 27201. Aesthetic Judgment and 19th Century American Literature. 100 Units.

What role does literature play in the construction of a new world? America gains prominence in the 19th c. global imaginary as a kind of experiment in rationality: political, economic, technoscientific. But this is also the time when “the aesthetic,” the experience of a non-conceptual normativity, becomes increasingly important. How could such normativity bear on a world governed by reason? This course will try to think about aesthetic experience as it is both represented and enacted in 19th century American texts. Readings include Edwards, Thoreau, Melville, Jacobs; Kant, Arendt, Foucault.  (G, H)

Instructor(s): J. Duesterberg     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 27306. Introduction to Afro-American Literature: 1892-1974. 100 Units.

This course will examine the political considerations and the literary and critical texts that gave rise to the conception of, and the effort to establish, a distinctively black literary practice. We will seek to understand why the idea of a black literature emerged and the way that this idea shaped aesthetic and critical practices for black writers over the course of the 20th century. (G)

Instructor(s): K. Warren     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 27311. The Beauty of a Social Problem: American Literature, Race Relations, and the Autonomy of Form. 100 Units.

This course studies the concept of the “autonomy of form” as it has been deployed and contested within the American context of literature production and some theoretical accounts of this production. What does it mean to claim that a work of art exist autonomously in the context of slavery, racial segregation, and contemporary economic inequality? We will explore the extent to which our target writers (viz. Poe, Melville, Henry James, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner) imagine, produce, or contest a socially referential aesthetics—a sense of beauty based on or apart from the social problems plaguing the American nation. (G)

Instructor(s): J. Arellano     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 28703. Movies and Madness. 100 Units.

We propose to investigate representations of madness in fictional, documentary, and experimental film. We divide the topic this way to emphasize the different dimensions of cinematic address to questions of mental illness, and the ways that film genres imply distinct formal and epistemological conventions for the representation of insanity. Documentary ranges from instructional and neutral reportage, to polemical, essayistic interventions in the politics of psychiatry and the asylum, the actual conditions of mental illness in real historical moments. Documentary also includes the tendency in new media for "the mad" to represent themselves in a variety of media. With experimental film, our aim will be to explore the ways that the cinematic medium can simulate experiences of mania, delirium, hallucination, obsession, depression, etc., inserting the spectator into the subject position of madness. We will explore the ways that film techniques such as shot-matching, voice-over, montage, and special effects of audio-visual manipulation function to convey dream sequences, altered states of consciousness, ideational or perceptual paradoxes, and extreme emotional states. Finally, narrative film we think of as potentially synthesizing these two strands of cinematic practice, weaving representations of actual, possible, or probable situations with the special effects of mad subjectivity. Our emphasis with narrative film will be to focus—not simply on the mentally ill subject as hero or monster—but on the institutional situation of madness, its place in a social and disciplinary context. Put simply, we want to consider films that portray both insanity and the sanatorium, both the deranged subject and the asylum, both the madwoman and the (often male) psychiatrist, both the irrational subject and the rational system. The overall aim of the seminar, then, is to raise the question of what movies bring to madness that was not representable in pre-cinematic media such as theater, opera, and literature, and what it was that the subject of madness brought to cinema, not only as a thematic issue but as defining possibility of film form as such. A more specific aim will be to establish a context for focusing on American Cold War movies, as well as more recent films that look back to the Cold War era, and films that directly address the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. (H)

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell, J. Hoffman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): BPRO 26400,ARTH 26905,ARTH 36905,ARTV 26411,ARTV 36411,CMST 25550,CMST 35550,ENGL 38703

ENGL 28916. Lolita. 100 Units.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth.” Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration. (B)

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 23900,FNDL 25300

ENGL 29300-29600. History of International Cinema I-II.

This sequence is required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.

ENGL 29700. Reading Course. 100 Units.

An instructor within ENGL agrees to supervise the course and then determines the kind and amount of work to be done.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Petition to Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies and consent of instructor
Note(s): These reading courses must include a final paper assignment to meet requirements for the ENGL major and students must receive a quality grade. Students may not petition to receive credit for more than two ENGL 29700 courses. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.

ENGL 29900. Independent BA Paper Preparation. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. For more information and an electronic version of the petition form, visit english.uchicago.edu/undergraduate/courses. This course may not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the major, but it may be counted as a departmental elective.