Eng 137. Creating Fiction. PQ: Consent of instructor. Enrollment is limited. Prospective students must submit a five to ten page writing sample by February 16, 1996. Our first goal is to create a writer's workshop. As a group of fiction writers we come together to foster a stimulating, comfortable, maybe even inspirational environment in which to share and critique our work. Plundering the authorial bag of tricks, we will start out with a number of fiction exercises and progress to complete short stories and /or chunks of novels or other genres. Our second goal is to study the craft of writing, to examine literature as a product of the creative imagination. We explore the rich variety of narrative techniques in the late twentieth century and see what authors and other publishing professionals have to say about their business. M. Abergel.
Eng 140. History and Theory of Drama III (=GS Hum 250). This course focuses on modern (nineteenth and twentieth century drama) but also uses plays by Shakespeare and Euripides to illuminate the modern character of the complex and often ambiguous relationships between the dramatic text and the theater event. We begin with the familiar--contemporary domestic drama and the realist form--and go on to the less familiar, reading plays that challenge received notions of realism; Elizabethan tragedy, Brechtian epic theater, avant-garde assaults on representation, and third world transformations of Western drama. Playwrights and theorists include Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, and plays on Chicago stages in the spring. Students should expect to pay about $40 for theater tickets. L. Kruger. (MW 11:30-12:20 (Lec), F; 11:30-12:20 (Dis), W 4:30-6:30 (Scr--occasional), TH (Theater--occasional)
Eng 164. Friendship and Renaissance Drama. This course brings together classics of the "friendship canon" with drama from the English Renaissance, a period in which friendship ideas enjoyed a high level of literary interest and political value. This conjunction of classical texts and English plays suggests that while interest in friendship spans historical time, specific moments in history approach friendship with unique concerns. Renaissance drama took friendship very seriously and so provides a rich field for the exploration of friendship issues: the role of likeness and difference; the relation of friendship to love and sexuality; the difference between patronage and friendship and between flatterers and friends; and the divergence between friendship (as a mode of companionate counsel) and political relations (as a mode of hierarchical authority and power). Texts include Plato's Lysis; part of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; Cicero's De Amicitia; selections from Erasmus, Montaigne, and Bacon; the anonymous Arden of Faversham; Lyly's Campaspe; Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and Henry IV, 1 and 2; Marlowe's Edward II; Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam; Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen; and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford's The Witch of Edmonton. We end our consideration of the field of "friendship theory" by moving to contemporary writers and looking at short essays on friendship by Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault. L. Shannon. (TTh 1-2:20)
Eng 236. Literary Historicism and "Liberation:" Fictional and Filmic Representation of Gay Male Culture, 1890-1968. This course is designed as both an introduction to issues and methods in the area of literary criticism known as "historicism," and also as a course in the particular case of twentieth century representations of homosexual men and their culture. We cover roughly the historical interval from the end of Victorian culture to the emergence of the figure of the gay man into the mass-produced literature of the American Cold War years. Because film emerged through this period as an important mode of communicating these representations to a mass audience, we place equal emphasis on the filmic and the printed texts. Attendance at the film screenings is, therefore, a mandatory part of class participation. Among the topics to be discussed are the role of language and literature in the formation and consolidation of group identity; the changing conceptions of "masculinity" and "maleness" during the twentieth century; the role of industrialization and mass cultural forms in the emergence of new identities; the challenges of making historical arguments based on relatively recent (and often anonymous/pseudonymous) documentary evidence; and current debates about the research and writing of literary and social history. Literary texts by James, Wilde, Niles, Ford and Tyler, Levenson, Vidal, Baldwin, Rechy. Films by: Roach, Bryant, Beaumont, Hitchcock, Minnelli, Dearden, Schlesinger. Critical texts by: Symonds, Freud, Chauncey, Foucault, Fuss, Butler, Sedgwick, Russo, Hall, D'Emilio, Dollimore, Miller. S. Mendel. (MW 11:30-12:50)
Eng 289. Women and Film: Feminist Approaches to Cinema Studies. This course surveys major issues and analytic approaches in contemporary feminist film studies. The first weeks offers an introduction to film theory through readings that focus on psychoanalytic and semiotic film analysis as it was developed in the 70s and early 80s. We then examine the feminist refutations and revisions of these theories as they apply to specific films. Discussion focuses on the following questions: Does film objectify the female image or do attempts to deny female agency inevitably fail? How does a discourse develop around a female star and alter the meanings of films in which that star appears? Does gender function differently in various Hollywood genres? How does the cinema address or position the female spectator differently from the male spectator? How do race and sexuality complicate these questions of gender? After considering these theoretical issues, we study film's relationship to gender in a historical context. We look at specific case studies that explore the varied ways women have responded to film over time, from the silent era to the age of the VCR. In the last weeks of the course, we study contemporary feminist filmmakers who use their films both to address and to create alternative feminist communities. Class participation includes the screening of two films per week. A. Siomopoulos. TTh 1-2:20; (Lec) M 4:30-7:30 (Scr), Th 7:15-10:15 (Scr)
Updated January 2, 1996