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

Second-year standing or higher and completion of the general education requirement in social sciences or humanities, or the equivalent required for courses in this sequence. 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

Instructor(s): R. Strier     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10700. Introduction to Fiction: The Short Story. 100 Units.

In the first half of this course, we focus on the principal elements that contribute to effect in fiction (i.e., setting, characterization, style, imagery, structure) to understand the variety of effects possible with each element. We read several different writers in each of the first five weeks. In the second half of the course, we bring the elements together and study how they work in concert. This detailed study concentrates on one or, at most, two texts a week

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

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

Terms Offered: Autumn, Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20000,CMST 10100,ARTV 25300

ENGL 11100. Critical Perspectives. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Not offered 2011-12

ENGL 11902. The Long History of Nostalgia. 100 Units.

Nostalgia is now a catch-all concept to express how modernization has injured our sense of well-being. Mixing pleasure and pain, sentimentality and irony, fantasy and memory, nostalgia is contradictory and baffling. In looking at the very distant past and our contemporary moment, this course works toward an understanding of this paradigmatically modern condition

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

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

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

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

This course is a survey of major trends and theatrical accomplishments in Western drama from the ancient Greeks through the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, medieval religious drama, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with some consideration of dramatic theory by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, and Dryden. The goal 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. Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with other members of the course. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended

Instructor(s): D. Bevington, H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): 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 late seventeenth century into the twentieth (i.e., Molière, Goldsmith, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard). Attention is also paid to theorists of the drama (e.g., Stanislavsky, Artaud, Grotowski). The goal 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. Students have the option of writing essays or putting on short scenes in cooperation with other students. End-of-week workshops, in which individual scenes are read aloud dramatically and discussed, are optional but highly recommended

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 is the acquisition of 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 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

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

ENGL 15000. Old English Poetry. 100 Units.

A reading of some of the major poems in Old English. In addition to the texts, the course will examine the nature of the textual and critical problems encountered in studying this literature. There will be a term paper and a final examination

Instructor(s): C. von Nolcken     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 14900 or equivalent

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

Instructor(s): J. Schleusener     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25700

ENGL 15800. Medieval Epic. 100 Units.

We study a variety of heroic literature, including Beowulf, The Volsunga Saga, The Song of Roland, The Purgatorio, and the Alliterative Morte D'Arthur. A paper will be required, and there may be an oral examination

Instructor(s): M. Murrin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25900,RLST 26308

ENGL 16202. Spenser. 100 Units.

The class reads all of The Faerie Queene, plus The Shepheardes Calendar, the Amoretti, Epithalamion, and Prothalamion. Requirements are a final essay and perhaps an oral examination

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

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

We will consider several of Shakespeare's major histories and comedies from the 1590s, roughly the first half of his professional career. These will include, among others, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

Instructor(s): B. Cormack     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21403,TAPS 28405

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

This course studies 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 read include Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear (quarto and folio versions), Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest

Instructor(s): R. Strier     Terms Offered: Winter
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

Instructor(s): J. Scodel     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 22205,CMLT 26601

ENGL 16712. The Problems of Self in Renaissance Literature. 100 Units.

This course treats the category of the self in Petrarch's Letters on Familiar Matters and My Secret Book, Montaigne's Essays, Shakespeare's Richard II and Hamlet, and Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. In these works, the self is not treated as a coherent entity but as a problem fraught with tensions and contradictions. To the extent that these four Renaissance authors helped invent the self, they did so by discovering it as something fluid, malleable, overheated, and anxious. The larger problem of individualism in Western intellectual history frames this course, but much of our work entails a close reading of these texts to investigate how notions of the self are shaped by the skillful manipulation of language

Instructor(s): R. Eisendrath     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 16714. English Renaissance Drama: Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Webster, Shakespeare. 100 Units.

This course will offer a series of juxtapositions of great Renaissance plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries with Shakespeare's own work: Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Macbeth as tragedies of temptation and sin, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet as revenge tragedies, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as comedies with a satirical bent, and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Shakespeare's King Lear as terrifying glimpses into the apocalypse

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

ENGL 16909. Drama in Performance; Ben Jonson's Volpone. 100 Units.

In this course, we will mount a production of Volpone, or the Fox. Through careful reading of the text and rigorous rehearsals, students will become scholars of Shakespeare’s great contemporary, Ben Jonson, as well as Volpone’s performers and producers. (Note: Rehearsals will exceed class time.) No performance experience needed; two short written assignments required

Instructor(s): L. Kolb     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 17501. Milton. 100 Units.

This course will follow Milton's career as a poet and, to some extent, as a writer of polemical prose. It will concentrate on his sense of his own vocation as a poet and as an active and committed Protestant citizen in times of revolution and reaction. Works to be read include the Nativity Ode, selected sonnets, A Mask, Lycidas, The Reason of Church Government, selections from the divorce tracts, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. There will be a mid-term exercise and a final paper

Instructor(s): J. Scodel     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21201

ENGL 17806. Seduction and the Novel: 1760-1830. 100 Units.

The late eighteenth-century novel is rife with literary representations of prostitution, homosexuality, compulsive libertinism, obsession, scandal, indifference, fleeting infatuation, and undying first love. These are just some of the avenues we will explore in looking at the relationship between seduction and the novel

Instructor(s): S. Taylor     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 18910. Theories of the Novel. 100 Units.

This course introduces undergraduates to some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: how are novels formally unified (if they are)? What are the ideological presuppositions inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices do novels encourage? What makes a character in a novel distinct from character in other fictive systems? Readings include Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, Great Expectations; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway critics covered include Lukacs, Bakhtin,  Watt, Jameson, McKeon, D.A. Miller, Woloch, Moretti, and others

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

ENGL 20102. London Program: Victorian London in Literature and Art. 100 Units.

This course will focus on two important works of fiction that represent Victorian Britain through their uneasy mappings of center and periphery, native and alien other, circa 1850. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), set on the open moors of turn-of-the-century Yorkshire—another country for urban readers from London and the south—uses its representations of national otherness to portray the uneasy relations between center and periphery, native and other, as a state of perpetual potential revolution between antagonists: of genre (domestic versus gothic fiction), geography and culture (south/north, civilized/wild, metropolitan/provincial, English/other), and language, gender, and class. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3), set in mid-Victorian London, explores many of the same apparent divides by focusing on London’s internal others: the slums that surround and threaten its legal and domestic centers, the alien inhabitants at the metropolitan heart. To more fully contextualize these central fictions in the literary and visual landscapes of Victorians at mid-century, we will use selected poetry, non-fiction, and visual arts together with site visits to London museums and neighborhoods and an optional day trip to Haworth in Yorkshire. (The group's 4-day trip earlier in the quarter to Cornwall and Devon should also provide occasion to think about center-periphery relationships.) Several short papers plus one in-class group presentation from on-the-ground research into some aspect of Victorian London

Instructor(s): E. Helsinger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Students will be expected to read the core texts, Wuthering Heights and Bleak House, over the summer.

ENGL 20104. London Program: Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur. 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 Geoffery 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. Early in the course we will visit sites traditionally associated with King Arthur, including Tintagel Castle and St. Michael’s Mount on Cornwall and Glastonbury Abbey and Cadbury Castle in Somerset. Later won we will examine nineteenth-century visual representations of the legend in London collections, most obviously the Tate gallery. We will end with a viewing of the 1975 Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail

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

ENGL 20120. London Program: Slums and Slumming: Late Victorian East End. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): E. Hadley     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20215. Wordsworth and Byron. 100 Units.

We will read widely from the two towering poets of the romantic age, focusing initially on Wordsworth including the Lyrical Ballads, his great autobiographical poem The Prelude and The Excursion before we turn to Byron and get as far as the quarter allows into his satirical masterwork Don Juan. Select secondary readings highlight a range of approaches to these poets and the period

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

ENGL 20216. Poetry and Religion. 100 Units.

This course will consider the modern, English, Judeo-Christian poetic tradition and investigate forms of private and public lyric, Biblical imagery and concepts, and religious movements and communities. We will read from the Psalms and Psalm translations, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Crashaw, and Vaughan, the hymns of Watts, Wesley, Smart, and Cowper, Romantic and Victorian poets, T.S. Eliot, and Czeslaw Milosz

Instructor(s): E. Nerstad     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 20217. William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. 100 Units.

This course examines Blake’s relation to the art and ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who helped establish his reputation in the late 1800s. We will begin with several of Blake’s early illuminated works, attending closely to the kind of interpretation his “composite art” demands. With this conversation guiding us, we will then turn to Pre-Raphaelite images and texts, especially the work of Millais, Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Prior experience with poetry and/or art history is useful but not required

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

ENGL 20900. Fantasy and Science Fiction. 100 Units.

This course will concentrate on works of the “classic” period (1930s-60s). It will, however, begin with representative authors from the nineteenth century like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, as well as some from the early twentieth century like David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus and H. P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness. Worth special attention will be authors like C. S. Lewis and Ursula LeGuin who worked in both genres at a time when they were often contrasted. The two major texts which will be discussed will be one from each genre, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Herbert’s Dune. Theory will be historical, that held by the authors or applied to their stories within the period. Most of the texts we will read come from the Anglo-American tradition with some significant exceptions like short works by Kafka and Borges

Instructor(s): M. Murrin     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 21800,RLST 28301

ENGL 21903. The Victorian Novel. 100 Units.

This is a course that considers the Victorian novel within the broader history and theory of the novel form, its function within Victorian society, and its dialogue with other forms of cultural representation during the period. We will read novels or novellas by Dickens, Gaskell, Bronte, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy, and, at the end of the quarter, consider the continuing impact of the Victorian multiplot novel on contemporary writing. Along with the novels, we will be reading secondary scholarship on the novel, and contemporary primary materials that join the discussions expressed in the novels themselves

Instructor(s): E. Hadley     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 21915. The Politics of Aestheticism. 100 Units.

Because the founding gesture of British aestheticism was to deny the social and political utility of art, the movement provoked critics to unmask its implicit social and political investments from its inception. In this course we return to this longstanding question, turning a critical eye on the meaning of “politics” and the boundaries of “aestheticism.” Among the topics we will consider are the relation between aestheticism and atheistic materialism; the textual encoding of homoeroticism and Greek pederasty; exoticism and japonisme; feminism and misogyny; relations to ecology and environmentalism; and the Frankfurt school critique of aestheticization. Authors may include Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Arthur Symons, John Davidson, Ouida, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Michael Field

Instructor(s): B. Morgan     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 21916. Science and Literary Imagination. 100 Units.

This course focuses on how Victorian writers explore scientific concepts in fiction and poetry. We will interpret “science” broadly to include major developments such as theories of evolution and heredity in biology and the atomic theory in physics, as well as branches of research that are now either discredited or entirely transformed: phrenology, physiognomy, degeneration, biogenetic recapitulation, atavism, mesmerism, moral management, sexology, and hysteria. Our aim will be to examine the role of literature in its relations with science: What possibilities for imagining the implications of scientific theories do literary works offer that may be unavailable in nonfiction prose? Beyond addressing science thematically, how does literature respond formally, for example reimagining structures such as “character” or genres such as the bildungsroman in light of biological and psychological explanations of how humans think, reason, and develop? As we explore these questions within a particular historical context, we will consider how recent critics have offered theoretical justifications for and modes of relating science and literature. Authors may include Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, R.L. Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Charles Kingsley, Alfred Tennyson, A.C. Swinburne, Samuel Butler, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Abbot, and John Davidson

Instructor(s): B. Morgan     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 21917. Victorian Things: Significant Objects in 19th Century Fiction. Units.

Why is there so much stuff in Victorian novels? Were authors driven commodity-mad by the consumerism of their culture, or is there another, more complex reason for this material plenitude? This course will investigate, through the crowded object worlds of several nineteenth-century novels, how Victorian readers and writers encountered and understood things in fiction.

Instructor(s): K. Hunt     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 22205. Psyche and Literature. 100 Units.

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

ENGL 22206. Fin de Siecle. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): M. Ellmann     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 22303. The Art of Fiction: Henry James, 1902-1904. 100 Units.

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

ENGL 22815. U.S. Latino Literary and Intellectual History: Subject to Citizen. 100 Units.

How does one go from being a subject of the king to becoming a citizen? From where does one acquire the language to think of equality? In the late eighteenth century, many revolutionary Spaniards and Spanish Americans travelled throughout the Atlantic world seeking to make the philosophy of equality a reality and gain independence of the Spanish colonies. They travelled to and from Europe and Spanish America; and on to New Orleans, Charleston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York. Through their voyages, these individuals would bring this new political language of rights to the places they visited, imbibing of this political philosophy by reading and through conversations and discussions. They produced, as well, a plethora of publications and writings that circulated throughout the Atlantic world. Through lecture and discussion, students in this interdisciplinary course learn of these individuals, their circuits of travel, and their desire to create a modern world. Our focus is on the communities, individuals, and texts that were published and circulated in what is today the United States. We begin with the late eighteenth century and work our way through the nineteenth century. Classes conducted in English; most texts in English

Instructor(s): R. Coronado     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Reading knowledge of Spanish and French helpful.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22815,LACS 22815,CMLT 22401,GNDR 22802,SPAN 22815

ENGL 23500. What's Love Got to Do with It?: The Genres of Modern Romance. 100 Units.

Love brings with it romantic promises that are supported by an elaborate culture of representations. Using materials from cinema, literature, the visual arts, and cultural theory, we pose questions about the genres of romance and the construction of romantic subjectivity. This involves rethinking gender, sexuality, diverse locations and modes of embodiment, desire, love, narrative, pain, and diverse modes of representation. Subjects include the relation of the pornographic and the erotic; of high, avant-garde, and popular culture; of hetero-, homoerotic, and queer scenes of pleasure; conventional “women’s culture” sites like magazines and talk shows; popular music; and sex-radical art

Instructor(s): L. Berlant, L. Letinsky     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25500,ENGL 44300

ENGL 23501. The Church on the Brain; the State on the Body. 100 Units.

The motivating thought behind our investigation is the thesis that a great deal of American cultural production during the mid-twentieth century is characterizable as having, in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “the Church on the brain.” Over the course of the quarter, we will generate interpretations of what O’Connor’s phrase might mean as we explore literary, musical, filmic, and political texts that clearly articulate this preoccupation. We will examine O’Connor’s own work, which “mentions Christ” repeatedly, as well as less obvious candidates, including Norman Mailer, whose work organizes and conflates perceptions of and questions about the relations between religious belief (the Church on the brain), political domination, and disciplinary power (the State on the body)

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

ENGL 24000. Ulysses. 100 Units.

This course takes students through Joyce’s novel and exposes them to various recent critical approaches, with some excursions also into materials contemporary to Ulysses that can be placed in dialogue with the novel

Instructor(s): L. Ruddick     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 24001

ENGL 24202. Romantic Fiction and the Historical Novel. 100 Units.

Literary history has come to recognize Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, which establish the historical novel’s “classical form,” as the embodiment of a distinctively Romantic historical impulse. But Scott’s influential practice of history is only one of many models available in its moment, and we will follow the lead of recent critics who have generated considerably more complex accounts of historical fiction by taking issue with presumptions about Scott’s priority—both in his own day and in our own. We will draw upon a mix of foundational and recent criticism to consider a series of sites where Romantic fiction conceptualizes history with special energy: the subject, the imperial Celtic periphery, the romance, commercial modernity, and the everyday

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

ENGL 24306. Asian American Poetry. 100 Units.

In this course we will read the work of Asian American poets who forego received lyric forms, genres, and styles in the search for a new literary idiom capable of investigating their own unique trans-national historical moment. Thus we will focus on the work of “experimental” writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, John Yau, and Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, along with texts by emerging poets such as Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City and Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe. Topics of interest will include representations of war (the conflict in Vietnam, the Korean War), the notion of formal mastery as cultural assimilation, and the relationship between Asian American experimental poetics and West Coast Language writing

Instructor(s): S. Reddy     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 43703

ENGL 24308. The Afterlives of Gandhi. 100 Units.

This course deals with transnational textual, political, and theoretical transmissions of the Gandhi idea in the first half of the twentieth century

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

ENGL 24309. Navigating Global Literature. 100 Units.

Tracing routes through novels and poetry (predominantly post-1970’s) that grapple with transborder flows, conjunctions and dislocations, we look at textual and aesthetic responses to different experiences of mobility and globalization. We read works discussing Bay Area intimacies, organ transplant, political ecology and the dictation class

Instructor(s): D. Chia     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 24400. Brecht and Beyond. 100 Units.

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the twentieth century. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht’s own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920’s to the agitprop Lehrstück to the classical parable plays, as well as the works of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill), and sub-Saharan Africa (Soyinka, Ngugi, and various South African theatre practitioners). We will also consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht’s own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard

Instructor(s): L. Kruger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Completion of the general education requirement in Theater and Performance Studies and/or Humanities; second-year standing or above.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 26200,CMLT 20800,TAPS 24835

ENGL 24406. "Impossible" Theaters. 100 Units.

This course explores a range of texts that adopt dramatic form but resist the possibility of their own performance in order to ask: what happens to theater when there can’t be a theater? Like its texts, the course transgresses disciplinary, generic, and temporal boundaries, bringing together from various centuries philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, exceptionally long or short plays, novel chapters in dramatic form, monologue and dialogue poems, and censored plays, all bound together by their ostensible unperformability. What power does the theater hold as a metaphor? What dangers does it threaten as an embodied event? How do the borders of perceived theatrical possibility change over time? What happens when performers stage drama written for the page? What, if anything, is unstageable, and why?

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

ENGL 25403. American West. 100 Units.

his 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

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

ENGL 25407. Emily Dickinson. 100 Units.

In this course we will read and reflect on the lyrics and the letters of Emily Dickinson within and against a number of critical contexts. For the first few weeks we will acquaint ourselves with her corpus, reading deeply and widely her poetry and prose. We will also work to contextualize Dickinson’s writing within the culture, history, and politics of the mid l9th century, focusing particularly on issues of gender, professional authorship, and the culture of domesticity. In subsequent weeks we will consider Dickinson’s lyrics in terms of recent critical debates centering variously on gender and sexuality, the role of biography in literary criticism, the politics of editorial intervention, the material history of Dickinson editions, the status “originality” in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the utopian politics of the numerous hypertext projects focused on Dickinson’s manuscripts and letters

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

ENGL 25408. 'Pain—expands the Time': American Elegy. 100 Units.

This course will track the elegiac strain in the American poetic tradition from the 17th through the 20th century. Reading this corpus in conjunction with recent critical studies, we will explore how the genre shapes and is shaped by the regimes of gender, class, race, and sexuality that apportion subjective experience

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

ENGL 25409. Melville. 100 Units.

In this course we will read the works of a single author, Herman Melville, examining the social and historical circumstances to which his works respond, as well as the works’ reception history, particularly their role in the consolidation of a distinctly American literary canon

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

ENGL 25502. American Women Writing at the Mid-Century. 100 Units.

American Women Writing at the Mid-Century: The absent "'s" in the title of this course suggests the ambivalence with which many, though certainly not all, women writers from the mid-20th-century would treat the category of the "woman writer" when later applied to them. While the many women writers from this period enjoyed critical esteem and mass popularity (rarely at the same time, of course), their contributions to both American literature and women's literature remain under-described. This course will survey a range of writing from pulp novel to poetry. Some possible figures: Bannon, Bishop, Bowles, Brooks, Highsmith, McCarthy, Moore, O'Connor, Paley, Petry, Stafford, Yamamoto

Instructor(s): D. Nelson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNDR 24703

ENGL 25600. The Poet In The Novel. 100 Units.

ENGL 25925. Flux Americana: Tramps and Tramping in American Literature. 100 Units.

The 1870s marked the emergence of a new figure in American culture, the tramp. Vagabonds and itinerants predate the period, but the tramp was unique, appearing amidst territorial expansion and economic turmoil. Dubbed a social “evil” upon his emergence, the tramp underwent a positive transformation over the course of the twentieth century, largely as a result of representations in film, music, and literature. From Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” to Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty (young and old), the tramp is a figure with whom countless Americans identify. But are there limits to this identification? What happens to the verb tramp (what one does) when it becomes the noun tramp (who one is) as it did in the 1870s? Can the process of tramping be distinguished from the figure of the tramp? If so, what does a shift in focus from figure to process reveal about American attitudes toward class, race, sex, and mobility?

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

ENGL 25943. Radical Documentary. 100 Units.

This course will examine the nostalgic and utopian impulses of documentary work in a range of genres: prose, poetry, photography, and film. We will be charting the extreme transformations of regional and urban culture that took place over the turn of the 20th century as they were expressed—and produced—by works of experimental documentary in various media. Texts studied may include constellations of John Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter and selected field recordings; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and His Friends; Jean Toomer, Cane; Sterling Brown, Collected Poems; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noise” & selected futurist poems and recordings; Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye and Enthusiasm; Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, selected WPA project writings & poems; Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative; Gregory Whitehead, works for radio; Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool in tandem with relevant theories and histories of documentary; Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; various authors, Intersection/Chainlinks

Instructor(s): J. Scappettone     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25943

ENGL 25944. Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography. 100 Units.

This course will incorporate attention to the rich and complex procedure of creating books like Fun Home and Are You My Mother? with other primary readings and a wealth of secondary works on autobiography and attendant issues concerning narrative theory, historiography, gender, and format and book arts. In this vital and intense course students would learn about how to produce visual stories themselves as well as theorize about them

Instructor(s): H. Chute, A. Bechdel     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 46101

ENGL 25945. Digital Storytelling. 100 Units.

This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. Along the way, we will analyze cyberpunk fictions, text-based computer games, interactive dramas, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, and Alternate Reality Games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the semester, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted unceasingly by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine

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

ENGL 25946. Retailing Bodies: Anomalous Embodiment in American Reality TV. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the representation of anomalous bodies in contemporary American visual culture, specifically in the mushrooming genre of reality television. Collectively we will work to parse the logic of various programs’ representations of the body, in order to apprehend the intricacies and incoherencies of what Anna McCarthy has called the “dissemination of vernacular common sense.”

Instructor(s): M. Fink Berman     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 25947. Ubiquitous Mediation: Time, Narrative, Materiality. 100 Units.

How has the digital paradigm altered the ways we think about cultural tradition and the history of cultural forms? This course will attempt to trace the contours of this question through valences in the literary and cinematic tradition, focused through a sequence of conceptual pairings: temporality and history, narrative and form, materiality and virtuality, gesture and inscription, politics and aesthetics. What categories are newly implied by the reconfigurations and diffuse effects imposed by ubiquitous digital mediation? What, if any, difference characterizes the questions we bring to cultural texts now? What is the nature and status of literary form in an age of haptic media? What happens when language hovers off the page to be formalized in cinematic works and installation settings? How do we make sense of the complexity with which contemporary practitioners use media to articulate questions of modernity and ‘minor’ histories, inequitable distributions and historical memory, the materiality of language and the status of literature? This course aims to find its answers through careful formal analysis of exemplary intertextual practices, whose commitment to hybridity we will accept as articulating the dimensions and stakes of literary and cinematic form in an intermedial, mediated age

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

ENGL 26000. Anglo-American Gothic Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. 100 Units.

In the nineteenth century, gothic fiction in English is an Anglo-American phenomenon. America’s first internationally recognized literary masterpiece, Rip Van Winkle, is written in England and appears the same year as Frankenstein. Our course will study the transatlantic aspect of the gothic tradition, while we also give full attention to the particular qualities of individual texts. Close reading will be central to our project.  Attention to textual intricacies will lead to questions about gender and psychology, as well as culture. Our authors will include Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Poe, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Thomas Hardy

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

ENGL 26706. New York School Poetry. 100 Units.

This course approaches the poetry and painting of Manhattan during its rise to international pre-eminence as an artistic center, through the work and friendships of Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). It introduces the New York School of poetry, notably O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and John Ashbery, referring to visual art from de Kooning to Fairfield Porter. Side-glances at film, photography, music and dance, can be offered according to student interest. The course will develop primarily through reading poems, although students will be directed to the critical and historical context

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

ENGL 26905. American Novel Between the Wars: 1919-1945. 100 Units.

This course explores the changing contours of the American novel through three major historical periods: the Jazz Age (20s), the Great Depression (30s), and World War II (40s). Authors to be read include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and others. In particular, we will situate our readings of these authors within a broad field of evolving social formations. We will look at how the American novel interacts with intensifying questions of racial justice and equality; the emergence of “new media” forms such as the phonograph, early film, and the telegraph; class agitation and labor movements; and, new patterns of American internationalism. Last, we will consider how this formative time in U.S. culture served to foment the rise of the “American century” in the 1950s

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

ENGL 26906. Wayward Shots: Alternative Aesthetics of the American West. 100 Units.

No genre is more obviously tied to American identity than the Western. Long a means of reinforcing ideologies of expansionism, misogyny, racism, unfettered capitalism, recent decades have seen the emergence of counter discourses within the genre that instead favor the previously disenfranchised, such as Native Americans and women

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

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

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

ENGL 27307. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the Problem of Democracy. 100 Units.

Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel, Invisible Man (1952) is, among other things, an extended reflection on the relationship between literary fiction and the idea and practice of democracy. In this course we will focus on Invisible Man as well as Ellison’s collected essays, in order to understand Ellison’s effort to articulate novel-writing and politics. Among the questions we will explore is whether a novel that spoke so well of the problem of democracy in a society that was still legally segregated can continue to speak for our post Civil-Rights world

Instructor(s): K. Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25801

ENGL 27308. African-American Autobiography. 100 Units.

This course surveys African-American life-writing from the colonial era to the present. We will ask how African-American writers have negotiated the relationship between self and community, memory and history, and narrative design and truth in their autobiographical presentation. Readings by Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, Washington, Du Bois, Johnson, Hurston, Wright, King, Malcolm X, Shakur, and Lorde

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

ENGL 28609. J. M. Coetzee: Ethics, Politics, Storytelling, Autobiography. 100 Units.

Reading both novels and memoirs, this course will examine the tension between the ethical and the political that runs throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre; it will also explore Coetzee’s concern with the ethics of storytelling, the act of confession, and the relation between fiction and truth. Primary readings will include Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and others.

Instructor(s): I. Duncan     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2011-12

ENGL 28812. The Little Magazine and the Little Book, 1912-2012. 100 Units.

This course begins with Poetry magazine’s founding in 1912 and continues to explore modes of small press poetry publication throughout the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first). We make extensive use of the library’s holdings to generate our objects of inquiry; additionally, we will have class visits from contemporary publishers

Instructor(s): S. Anderson     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 29300. History of International Cinema I: Silent Era. 100 Units.

This course introduces what was singular about the art and craft of silent film. Its general outline is chronological. We also discuss main national schools and international trends of filmmaking

Instructor(s): J. Lastra     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent enrollment in CMST 10100
Note(s): This is the first part of a two-quarter course. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28500,ARTH 38500,CMLT 22400,CMLT 32400,CMST 28500,CMST 48500,ENGL 48700,MAPH 33600,ARTV 26500,ARTV 36500

ENGL 29600. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960. 100 Units.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir

Instructor(s): Y. Tsivian     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28600,ARTH 38600,CMLT 22500,CMLT 32500,CMST 28600,CMST 48600,ENGL 48900,MAPH 33700,ARTV 26600

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.