2014-2015 Catalog

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): L. Ruddick     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10600. Introduction to Drama. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to key concepts and interpretive tools to read and understand drama both as text and as performance. Students will learn to read plays and performances closely, taking into account form, character, plot and genre, but also staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. We will also consider how various agents—playwrights, directors, actors, and audiences—generate plays and give them meaning. Essential plays from a range of periods: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Calderon, Kleist, Ibsen, Wilder, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard, Parks, McCraney. (A, D)

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

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. Requirements include several short essays and a final examination. (A, B)

Instructor(s): K. Warren; R. So     Terms Offered: Winter, Spring

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 11004. History of the Novel. 100 Units.

In this course we will read one great novel from each of the four centuries from the 18th to the 21st. These will probably include Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (in translation), Jane Austen’s Emma, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. There will also be an opportunity to discuss the (better) movies based on some of these novels (e.g., Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, based on Emma). In addition, we will read a selection of short fiction by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and others. Assessment will be based on two papers of five to seven pages, regular contributions to the Chalk discussion board, and joint class presentations. (B, F)

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

ENGL 11501. Chaucer and the Literary Voice. 100 Units.

This course serves as introduction and intensive exploration of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Since Chaucer’s writings consistently foreground questions of who is “speaking” in his writing, we will take “literary voice” as our guiding heuristic, and examine relationships between speech, writing, translation, and dramatis personae. The class will read works from Chaucer’s lyrics, dream visions, and Canterbury Tales. (C, E)

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

ENGL 11904. Introduction to Modernism. 100 Units.

This course will focus on major literary works of modernism in English. Works studied will include some combination of poetry by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), W. H. Auden, and Mina Loy, and fiction by Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Rebecca West. There will also be opportunities to work on modernist music and visual art, including a trip to the Art Institute. Assessment will be based on two papers of five to seven pages, regular contributions to the Chalk discussion board, and joint class presentations. (B, C, G)

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

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)

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)

Instructor(s): D. Bevington     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 14801. Monsters and Men: Difference and Fear in Medieval England. 100 Units.

In medieval England as now, depictions of the “monstrous” in popular culture provide insight into social pressure points: monsters represent cultural anxieties translated into bodily forms. In this class we will look at some notable medieval monster-narratives accompanied by modern critical works which strive to illuminate the ramifications of monstrosity. (C, E)

Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 15600. Medieval English Literature. 100 Units.

This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also  some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England. (C, E)

Instructor(s): M. Miller     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 15600

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)

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)

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

ENGL 17512. Lyric Events and Objects. 100 Units.

Western poetry, at least since Ovid, has set into complex play a yearning for the repeatable evanescence of the aesthetic encounter and for the permanence of the monument, often mediated through the body in youth, in ecstasy, in aging, and in anticipation of death. This course will look at different versions of this dialectic, and may include works by Ovid, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Góngora, Herrick, Gray, Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire, Trakl, Berryman, Hart Crane, Oppen, Rukeyser, Frank O'Hara, W. S. Graham, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Members of the class will be invited to propose works for discussion, and we may also consider a few related paintings. (C)

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

ENGL 17514. Literature of the Scientific Revolution. 100 Units.

This course explores the relationship between literary and scientific experiment during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, when something like “modern science” first began to take shape. We’ll discover convergences between new conceptions of scientific method and innovations in literary writing, and we’ll seek to understand how the same set of intellectual impulses might lead to events as different as Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter and Milton’s dictation of Paradise Lost. Readings will be drawn from the work of philosophers, scientists, essayists, fiction-writers, and poets, including figures like Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Browne, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Anne Conway, Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson. (E)

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

ENGL 20132. London Program: Loneley Londoners. 100 Units.

For centuries, London has served as a vibrant literary and cultural home of the African diaspora, but it has not always been very homely. This course takes its title from Samuel Selvon’s seminal Lonely Londoners (1956), a novel that carefully juxtaposes the pleasures black subjects derived from participating in and contributing to British culture alongside the feelings of outrage, insecurity, and loneliness constitutive of their migratory experience. Taking our cue from Selvon, in this course we will explore the complicated ways in which black writers in London negotiated slavery, colonialism, migration, metropolitan and global racism, the post-war decline of the British Empire, and African and Caribbean independence. Readings include eighteenth-century writers such as Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, Victorian writers such as Mary Seacole, interwar writers such as C. L. R. James and Jean Rhys, Windrush generation novelists including Selvon and George Lamming, and contemporary writers like Andrea Levy. In addition, the class will take field trips to the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton as well as to Liverpool, where we will visit the International Slavery Museum and explore the cultural traces of slavery in a city built upon the slave trade. (B, F, G)

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

ENGL 20133. London Program: Henry James in London. 100 Units.

This course will focus on James’s vacillating attitudes toward London and toward British society. We will read his accounts of the city for the American press (“London Sights,” “London in the Dead Season,” etc.); an early novella, A London Life (1889); and one of his last novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), set in both London and Venice. (In addition we will read one or two stories, and excerpts from other novels.) Our questions will revolve around the literary production of London as built space, as social space, and as a kind of medium (at once a system of communication and an atmosphere). (B, G)

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

ENGL 20134. London Program: Renaissance. 100 Units.

This course explores major lyric poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by focusing on their treatments of diverse places and locales, including city, court, and country (the traditional topographical and ideological divisions of English society), homes, churches, colleges, prisons, and imaginary and fantastical landscapes.  Poets might include Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Marvell, Philips, and Cowley. Genres might include sonnet, epithalamion, satire, pastoral, georgic, epistle, epigram, country-house poem, and ode. (C, E)

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

ENGL 20212. Romantic Natures. 100 Units.

This survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (with an emphasis on the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will address foundational and recent critical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism and naturalism of Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” the (literal) fruits of empire, vegetarianism, and the place of pets. (C, F)

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

ENGL 20213. British Romanticism and Slavery. 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to the varieties of British Romantic writing by focusing on one of the major political, cultural, and ethical problems of the period 1770–1833: the trade and exploitation of African slaves in the British Empire. Our readings and discussions will address a series of related questions: How did Britons (including major figures of British Romanticism) experience the fact of slavery in distant zones of the Empire? What were the reasons and terms motivating pro-slavery and abolitionist parties? What representational strategies did poets, novelists, lecturers, and pamphleteers adopt in describing the slave trade and plantation life? To what extent did the discourses of slavery draw from or influence contemporary notions of political and aesthetic freedom? (C, F)

Instructor(s): C. Picken     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 20221. Unsettling Metaphysical Poetry. 100 Units.

Through the close study of key sixteenth and seventeenth century English religious poets (Robert Southwell, John Donne, Amelia Lanyer, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne—with some guest appearances) this course explores the early modern period’s surprisingly subversive modes of relating to the divine, scripture, the body, uncertainty, and death among other subjects. (C, E)

Instructor(s): A. Marcus     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 20405. Re-form: Literary and Aesthetic Reformations in the Long 19th Century. 100 Units.

This course will examine the changing theories and practices of artistic form in the poetry, prose, paintings, and prints of major Romantic, Victorian, and Fin-de-siècle British writers/artists, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Morris, Pater, and Wilde. (F, G)

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

ENGL 20602. Junior Seminar: Jane Austen and Criticism. 100 Units.

This Junior Seminar will focus on analytical, research, and bibliographic skills necessary for producing a substantial seminar paper (around 15 to 20 pages). Reading for the course will include all of Austen's novels, selections from her correspondence, and a series of excerpts from the critical commentary on her work: Sir Walter Scott's praise for her writing in the early nineteenth century, as well as the work of recent scholars like D. A. Miller and Claudia Johnson. We'll talk about issues of style and of popular reception. (B, F, H)

Instructor(s): H. Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Third-year English majors only. Consult "Junior Seminars" under "Program Requirements" for more information.

ENGL 21202. The Brontes and the 'Psychological Novel' 100 Units.

This course takes the novels of Emily and Charlotte Bronte as a case study for novel theory and criticism. In particular we will consider what it has meant to claim that the Brontes’ novels have a special relationship to or claim on the psychological. What is at stake in the critical interest in subjectivity, interiority and depth in these novels? What might it mean to read these (or any) novels without or against a privileging of the psychological? We will look at significant critical movements in Victorian novel studies (ideology critique; gender theory; historicism; etc.) that have taken the Brontes’ novels as their objects while we read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and other nineteenth century texts.

Instructor(s): Strang, Hilary     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2014-15
Note(s): Current MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College. All others by instructor consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41200,ENGL 41202

ENGL 22209. Crowds in fin de siècle Modernism. 100 Units.

The increasing urbanization of late 19th and early 20th century Europe witnessed the advent of a comparatively novel social phenomenon and cultural trope: the crowd. Crowds have been represented as alienating, faceless monstrosities and as liberatingly anonymous environments of self-realization.  They are figured as manipulable but also as bullying, as hotbeds of rumor, irrationality, madness, sedition, and communicable disease, but also as sites of transcendent super-personal experience, invention, historical progress, and the groundspring of political legitimacy. Crowds have a (statistical, sociological, psychological) life of their own which confronts and contrasts with the life of the individual. They confirm the flâneur in his ironic distance and insulated subjectivity even as the phenomenology of “merging with” or “melting into” the crowd challenges prevailing notions of individual identity and personal responsibility. This class will examine a variety of literary and visual representations of the crowded turn-of-the-century European metropolis in conjunction with contemporaneous psychological, sociological, and philosophical reflections on the significance of modern multitudes. Though our focal texts are historical we will also consider modulations of these themes in our own social environment of viral videos, big data, cyberbullying, crowd-sourcing, and zombie movies. We will study works by Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Gustave Caillebotte, Sigmund Freud, Siegfried Kracauer, Fritz Lang, Édouard Manet, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georges-Pierre Seurat, and Georg Simmel.

Instructor(s): Daniel Smyth     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2014-15
Note(s): Current MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College. All others by instructor consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34250

ENGL 22210. Marxism and Psychoanalysis. 100 Units.

Much contemporary work on ideology inherits a tradition of work that draws on both Marxism and psychoanalysis. The aim of this course is to provide the background for reading such work. Readings from Marx, Lacan, Althusser, Gramsci, Jameson, Zizek, Berlant. (H)

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

ENGL 22403. Ekphrasis and the English Avant-Garde, 1850-1930. 100 Units.

This course will attempt to trace a lineage that runs from the early “avant-garde” of John Ruskin’s social thought and aesthetic ideology all the way to the more recognized avant-garde of the Vorticist movement during the First World War. The course will strive to rupture the traditional notion that the “avant-garde” signifies exactly that, a rupture, and not, rather, a covert continuity of underground, anti-mainstream, anti-industrialized aesthetic practices. What might an “English” avant-garde mean outside its privileged location in high modernism (what might, for instance, a “Victorian avant-garde” come to signify?) and how does this avant-garde disguise its vanguardism in a seemingly conservative system of antiquarian desire (the return to nature, to medievalism, to a handcraft market, to a pre-Raphael state, etc.)? We will also investigate the complicated relationship shared by the seemingly opposed media of the visual arts (painting, photography, interior design), and that of textual production (poetry, prose, novel-writing). What occurs when painters/poets transition from one medium to another: is there an unavoidable slippage, overlap, or contamination of the lexical and graphical systems of composition? How does the Ut pictura poesis tradition keep the need for the “avant-garde” alive in generating alternate markets of practice, consumption, and social change? (B, C, G)

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

ENGL 23400. Virginia Woolf. 100 Units.

Students read six of Woolf’s major works (fiction and intellectual prose), as well as short works by other modernists. (B, G)

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

ENGL 23408. Quantitative Methods for Literary Studies. 100 Units.

This methods-based course explores critical and theoretical interest in the quantitative study of literature from the Enlightenment to the present. Topics include: concordance-making in the eighteenth century; attributing authorship in the nineteenth century; the rise of statistical stylistics and new criticism in the early twentieth century; the introduction of computer-assisted analysis in the late twentieth century; and the various quantitative methods (including data mining, “distant reading,” “literary Darwninsm,” and “culturomics”) pursued by twenty-first century scholars. In studying this history, and in replicating and adapting both older and more recent quantitative analyses of literary texts, students chart literature’s engagement with other disciplines and pursue what University of Chicago English professor Edith Rickert described in her 1927 book on quantitative analysis as “new methods for the study of literature.” (H)

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

ENGL 23415. Theories of the Novel. 100 Units.

This course explores some of the fundamental conceptual issues raised by novels: In what way do plot, character, and authorial intention function in the novel, as opposed to other genres? How are novels formally unified (if they are)? What special problems are associated with beginnings and endings of novels? How do such basic features as titles and chapter divisions contribute to novelistic meanings? What are the ideological presuppositions—about gender, race, and class, but also about the nature of social reality, of historicity, and of modernity—inherent in a novelistic view? What ethical practices and structures of affect do novels encourage? (H)

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

ENGL 24314. America in the World: Introduction to Transnational Literature. 100 Units.

What does it mean to call a work of literature transnational? And more importantly, what does it matter? Despite the recent surge in the term’s stock neither of these questions elicit self-evident answers. Given the general lack of clarity, this course aims to survey the transnational turn in literary studies with an eye to developing students’ abilities to speak and write cogently about the global dimensions of a literary text. We will take up a particularly rich sub-discipline within transnational studies: the study of American literature in an expanded cultural and historical field. We will read a variety of canonical texts written over the past century or so, treating them as archives of ideas and processes that originate and circulate outside of the nation. Primary readings will include novels that address the African diaspora and Black Atlantic (Morrison, Larsen), the hemispheric Americas (Diaz, Didion), interwar modernism (Faulkner), and postwar cosmopolitanism (Bellow, Bowles). Critical readings will orient and introduce us to key debates within the field, including questions of empire, war, diaspora, political economy, and decolonization. Through close formal analysis we will test the capacities of fiction to convert these global developments into rich aesthetic narratives that help us remap America’s place in the world. (B)

Instructor(s): H. Bakara     Terms Offered: Autumn

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 24409. Beckett Beyond the 'Absurd' 100 Units.

As an author who dislikes being pigeonholed, Samuel Beckett nonetheless gets labeled as an Absurdist, even the father of the Theater of the Absurd. It is not as if this label is entirely unmerited, but his philosophical interests reach beyond the species of existentialism that was fashionable at the moment of his literary debut. This course will look at theatrical and prose texts spanning Beckett’s career, in conjunction with a variety of philosophical texts from the Cartesian, continental, and analytic traditions, to see how Beckett re-appropriates and transforms philosophical problems and themes within a literary context. Specifically we will look at how Beckett reorients the relations between philosophical skepticism, the philosophy of language, and the problem of meaning.,

Instructor(s): B. Berry     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25011

ENGL 24807. South African Fiction and Film. 100 Units.

This course examines the intersection of fiction and film in Southern Africa since mid-20th-century decolonization. We begin with Cry, the Beloved Country, a best seller written by South African Alan Paton while in the US, and the original film version by a Hungarian-born British-based director (Zoltan Korda) and an American screenwriter (John Howard Lawson), which together show both the international impact of South African stories and the important elements missed by overseas audiences. We will continue with fictional and non-fictional narrative responses to apartheid and decolonization in film and in print, and examine the power and the limits of what critic Louise Bethlehem has called the “rhetoric of urgency” on local and international audiences. We will conclude with writing and film that grapples with the complexities of the post-apartheid world, whose challenges, from crime and corruption to AIDS and the particular problems faced by women and gender minorities, elude the heroic formulas of the anti-apartheid struggle era. (B)

Instructor(s): L. Kruger     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 24204

ENGL 25010. Comparative Migrations. 100 Units.

"Comparative Migrations" interrogates how literature and film takes up the issue of migration across the globe. How do these texts represent the experiences of dislocation, marginalization, and acculturation usually associated with migration across literary traditions? How do the ideas of home, longing, and belonging shift throughout these texts? How do distinct historical, social, cultural and political parameters impact both the writing and reading of these texts? Texts under consideration will include novels by Samuel Selvon, Calixthe Beyala, Milton Hatoum, and Junot Diaz and films by Gurinder Chadha, Pedro Costa, and Mathieu Kassovitz. Theorists include Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Édouard Glissant, Michel Foucault, and Miguel Vale de Almeida.

Instructor(s): C. Patel     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25010

ENGL 25108. American Renaissance. 100 Units.

The three decades between 1830 and 1860 marked the emergence of some of our most influential writers and texts. We will read selected texts, paying special attention to issues of cultural tradition and literary innovation, religion and reform, politics and culture, and the emergence of an American romantic tradition. We will read works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Margaret Fuller. (B, G)

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

ENGL 25202. Spirit Worlds. 100 Units.

In this course we will explore how colonial subjects understood "selves": how they described their spiritual experiences and how they expressed their interior lives. We will also track changing descriptions and explanations of the “supernatural” from the colonial period to the end of the 19th century. Religious ecstasy, trance, prophecy, fortunetelling, witchcraft, and ghosting are some of the practices we will consider in our archival explorations. Our readings will include texts by John Cotton, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, and William James, as well as recent critical work on melancholy, trauma, subject formation, popular religion, and the passions. (F)

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

ENGL 25215. Catching Spies. 100 Units.

How do we account for 20th century literature's fascination with spies and spying? How do we explain the emergence of this new literary subject with the inauguration of the new century? This course will examine the place the figure of the spy holds for twentieth-century imagination as reflected in literature, theater and film. It will suggest that the spy becomes a locus of fascination for literature when overlooked by the disciplines charged with regulating his actions. In positing espionage literature and film as a response to the law's impossibility of address we will establish the potential the figure of the spy holds to respond to an array of questions relating to identity and subjectivity through such tropes as homelessness and border crossing, sexual difference, theatricality and masquerade, technology and voyeurism.

Instructor(s): T. Abramov     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 25215,CMST 25215

ENGL 25405. The American Classics. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to six of the greatest works of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Lectures invite you to immerse yourselves in the environments in which they were written and to explore the crucial literary, intellectual, social, religious, economic, and political contexts that shaped the production and reception of these distinctly American contributions to world literature. (B, G)

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

ENGL 25419. Our West. 100 Units.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the American West became both owned by and part of the United States. This was a dual conquest: a violent wresting of land from both nature and indigenous cultures as well as a voracious assimilation of knowledge about a place. Beginning in Gold Rush California around 1849 and ending with contemporary culture’s obsession with Western images and themes, this course asks students to apply historical and literary critical methods to literary genres of conquest and of regionalism. We will ask such questions as: What is the relationship between knowing and owning? What links a literature to a geographic space? How does a legacy of conquest mark both a regional and national literature? Readings will include texts by John Rollin Ridge, Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, Frederick Jackson Turner, Frank Norris, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and Cormac McCarthy. (B, G)

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

ENGL 25420. Melville's Material Cultures. 100 Units.

This course addresses the work of a single author, Herman Melville, with special attention to the environments of his works and the material objects that populate them, examining how Melville’s texts represent and mediate relationships between people and things, things and the social, things and history. (B, G)

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

ENGL 25421. Reading Now and Then. 100 Units.

This course provides a general introduction to the study of the history of reading, together with a more specific exploration of reading practices and communities in the nineteenth-century United States. We’ll discuss literary works by Alcott, Dickinson, Irving, and Poe, and scholarship by Roger Chartier and Janice Radway. (H)

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

ENGL 25955. Breakdowns: Representations of Illness in Comics. 100 Units.

This course will explore various modes of representing “breakdowns” of self or illness (both physical and mental) in the medium of comics. Consequently, equal attention will be given to “breaking down” the formal properties of the medium itself, specifically, in the way comics work to communicate the visual-textual demands of illness narratives. Some of the cartoonists we will be reading include Justin Green, Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, and Lynda Barry. (B)

Instructor(s): O. Chavez     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 25957. Contemporary Graphic Narratives. 100 Units.

This survey course focuses on the strongest genre emerging out of graphic literature: graphic nonfiction. Examining the roots of nonfiction comics, we look at early experiments in form and short pieces and explore the diverse book-length texts that shape the field today, from authors such as Art Spiegelman, Keiji Nakazawa, Joe Sacco, Lauren Redniss, Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Lynda Barry. (B)

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

ENGL 25958. The Promised Land: Literature of LA. 100 Units.

Despite being the United States’ second-biggest city, the literary and cultural history of Los Angeles remains minor in comparison to analyses of New York and Chicago. LA and its fantasy zone, Hollywood, are spaces that provide mechanisms for reconsidering how contemporary urban development is fundamentally affected by social movements, cultural artifacts, and the changing dynamics of capitalism in the 20th century. This class pulls together a range of literary, filmic, and theoretical texts in the interest of opening our understanding of how LA might be considered a major contributor to contemporary literary and film culture. We will read short fiction, novels, and one play and see six films. To help us understand why and how LA came to be both loved and hated as the exemplar for the problem of urban planning under late capitalism, we will read three contemporary theoretical essays (written between 1992 and 2012). (B)

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

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. (B, G)

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

ENGL 26208. Death and Dying in American Literature. 100 Units.

Covering American literature from the colonial period to Civil War, we’ll examine death, dying, and the place of the undead through the lenses of religion, conflict, race, and gender. Genres include: Indian captivity narratives, deathbed writing, hellfire sermons, sentimental novels, execution sermons, slavery narratives, witchcraft and possession accounts, and gothic fiction. (B, F, G)

Instructor(s): K. Krywokulski     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 26210,GNSE 26208

ENGL 26403. Environments of Literature. 100 Units.

An introduction to nature writing and environmental criticism/ecocriticism, organized around nineteenth-century narrative representations of landscape, setting, and the nonhuman environment. Authors: Shelley, Thoreau, Ruskin, Hardy, Conrad. Theorists/critics: Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Tim Morton. (B, G, H)

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

ENGL 27312. Outsiders in Southern Literature. 100 Units.

This course will survey Southern literature from the late nineteenth-century to the present, focusing in particular on the experience of social exclusion. Along the way we will also pause to examine the literary legacies of the “Gothic” and the “grotesque.” Authors will include Cable, Chestnutt, Faulkner, McCullers, Capote, Bontemps, Hurston, Williams, Welty, and Allison. (B, G)

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

ENGL 27807. Poetry and Translation: Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

It is frequently said that poetry cannot be translated, or can only be translated with significant loss. Yet translations of poetry continue to appear, and the work of some poets even seems to thrive in translation. Can translation theory help us to account for this apparent paradox? This course will introduce students to classic and contemporary texts of translation theory in the West, with an eye to the relevance of these theories for the difficulties and promises of translating poetry. We will read theoretical texts by Jerome, Dryden, Herder, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Pound and others, and will test these theories against one another and against various English translations of excerpts taken from Dante's Inferno, as well as translations of individual poems from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and Petits Poèmes en prose. Students will have the opportunity to produce their own translations as part of their required work for the course.�

Instructor(s): V. Joshua Adams     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2014-15
Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of one foreign language.
Note(s): Current MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College. All others by instructor consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34310,CMLT 24270,CMLT 34271

ENGL 27808. Oral History as Literature and Sound Art. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to oral history as a method of recording and representing voices that produced a large body of realist literature and experimental audio works in the twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed on American poetry, nonfiction, and audio since the oral history fieldwork projects of the New Deal, but British audio works from the postwar folk revival and the era of deindustrialization will also be examined. Key authors include Carl Sandburg, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Tony Schwartz, Studs Terkel, Mary Chamberlain, Tom Pickard, and Dave Isay. (C, G)

Instructor(s): A. Peart     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 28604. French Avant-Gardes and Anglo-American Modernism. 100 Units.

Gertrude Stein famously stated, “America is my country, and Paris is my home town.” A significant number of major literary modernists writing in English might have agreed with her. Indeed, French history and culture as a whole was variously reflected upon, responded to, torn apart, and reverenced in the writings of modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. S. Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and many others. This course situates the work of important modernist figures of British and American literature alongside the critical and cultural French contexts in which it emerged. From poet Charles Baudelaire, considered by many scholars to be the progenitor of 20th century modernism, to the concrete poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and the Surrealist experiments of Andre Breton, the iconoclasm and formal innovations of French writers from the mid-19th century onward had a definitive impact on Anglo-American modernism and the stylistic and thematic engagements of its practitioners. In this course, we will read key texts of literary and artistic movements like Cubism, Imagism, and Surrealism with specific attention to their local conditions of composition and distribution and a focus on the artistic coteries that welcomed them. At the same time, we will consider modernism’s international aspirations and the wider milieu of national or international audiences to whom this work was addressed. Students who read French are welcome to read French texts in the original, but class discussion and all readings will be provided in English. (C, G)

Instructor(s): R. Kyne     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 28811. The Simple Art of Murder. 100 Units.

Philosophers and literary critics of various stripes have been attracted to the detective story, often taking its intrepid protagonist as a figure for the reader and the genre itself as an exploration into practices of reading and interpretation. This course will examine the form and context of the detective story and some of the key critical and theoretical work the genre has inspired. We will read examples of British and American detective fiction, asking: What is the nature of the pleasure the detective story delivers? How—and why—has this genre become a favorite object of study for some of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century? How does detective fiction, a formula which allows for seemingly endless variety, evoke the ongoing and open-ended dynamic between modern rationality and something like “natural” intuition? We’ll consider the answers to these questions proposed by selected theorists of the genre, as well as the critical and self-reflective writings of the detective-story writers themselves.

Instructor(s): Kerri Hunt     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2014-15
Note(s): Current MAPH students and third and fourth years in the College. All others by instructor consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34125

ENGL 28813. Spirits, Spies, Swindlers and Sleuths. 100 Units.

This course explores great works in U.S. literature and film animated by mystery and suspense, investigating how these literary devices evolve across genres and historical periods to interface with political and ethical questions. We will consider texts by Poe, James, Hammett, Wilder, Chandler, Himes, Hitchcock, Highsmith, Pynchon, Auster, Lynch, and Whitehead. (B, G)

Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 28912-32302. War and Peace.

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.