2024-2025 Catalog

ENGL 10404. Genre Fundamentals: Poetry. 100 Units.

This course is an introduction to poetry by way of attention to poetry's arts of condensation, its techniques for producing complexities of meaning in small spaces. While our readings are drawn from a wide historical range, they do not aim to provide a representative survey of English-language poetry. Rather, they serve as a series of explorations of the ways poetic signification works. We will practice slowing down our attention, noticing where things get dense or strange, engaging with the play of poetic language and form, and articulating the questions provoked by that engagement. Our aim is to become better at thinking through poetry: that is, both thinking through the questions we articulate as we grapple with poetic language and form, and thinking about the topics poetry grapples with by way of its peculiar modes of encounter with those problems. To give some focus to our explorations, we will turn throughout the course to questions of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and ask how poetry functions as a distinctive medium for exploring the intersections of subjectivity, desire, power, and social form. (Genre Fundamentals, Poetry)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10405. Fantastical London: Literature, Film, Psychogeography. 100 Units.

In a series of classic essays, Walter Benjamin describes Paris as the dreamworld of modernity, crowning it the "capital of the nineteenth century." This course follows Benjamin's critique of the modern city as a "phantasmagoria," but shifts the terrain of his argument to ask: what if London were seen as the center of a distinctly dreamlike modernity? What purchase do literature and art afford in the elaboration of this thought-experiment? In this class we will approach London as a city of utopian wishes and Gothic nightmares, exploring the real social conditions and mapping the built environments that mark the Big Smoke as an enduring site of collective fantasy. We will read writings by British authors like Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, and China Miéville, alongside works of popular and avant-garde film, comics, and critical theory, to accompany our sojourn through the dream-geography of a fantastical London. This course may also involve site-specific field visits to archetypal London locations and an experimental research/ psychogeography final project.  (Fiction, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Cassandra Lerer     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to London Program (study abroad) required.

ENGL 10620. Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment. 100 Units.

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We'll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 26020, GNSE 20620

ENGL 10664. Poetry and Cinema. 100 Units.

On the surface, poetry and film may seem to have little in common. But over the course of the twentieth century, many poets took a serious interest in film and engaged with it as screenwriters and critics, as well as in their poetry. Likewise, many filmmakers looked to poetry as a model for how movies could work; for some, poetry (not fiction or drama) was film's artistic next of kin. This course takes a broad, multi-national survey of poetry and film from the 1920s to the 1970s. How did writers and filmmakers understand the relationship between the two mediums? What kinds of resources and challenges did each medium pose to the other? Poets on the syllabus may include Gertrude Stein, H.D., Langston Hughes, César Vallejo, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Benjamin Fondane, Pierre Reverdy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Likely filmmakers include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Dudley Murphy, Kenneth Macpherson, Fernando de Fuentes, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. (All texts will be in English; films will be screened with English subtitles. The course will include weekly film screenings outside of regular class meetings.)  (Poetry, 1830-1990).

Instructor(s): Jack Chelgren     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10709. Genre Fundamentals: Fiction. 100 Units.

through the present, we'll consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We'll ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures do they provide? If fiction is't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to generative AI, how do fiction and technology interract? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we'll consider fictions and theories of fiction from authors including George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison. Our discussions will take up topics including point of view, the relationship between narrative and time, the powers of realism and its contraries, and the experience of suspense. (Genre Fundamentals, Fiction)

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10800. Introduction to Film Analysis. 100 Units.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works. Films discussed will include works Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, Shirin Neshat, Lucrecia Martel, and Wong Kar Wai.

Instructor(s): James Chandler, James Lastra, staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): Required of students taking a major or minor in Cinema and Media Studies.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20300, CMST 10100

ENGL 11200. Fundamentals of Literary Criticism. 100 Units.

An introduction to the practice of literary and cultural criticism over the centuries, with a particular emphasis on theoretical debates about meaning and interpretation in the late 20th century and present. (Genre Fundamentals, Theory)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 12125. Living Queer: Experiences, Encounter, Affinities. 100 Units.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore representations and expressions of queer and trans lives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Assembling a diverse archive of artistic works and cultural artifacts (fiction, memoir, film, lyric poetry, anthology, activist ephemera) together with foundational works in the study of sexuality and gender, we will ask: How do hegemonic institutions, discourses, and definitions - from medical models of pathology to hostile bureaucratic infrastructure - shape the expressive forms available to queer and trans people? And how does the literary, artistic, and activist work of queer and trans people work in turn to reshape those very expressive possibilities? How can individual experiences of isolation and marginalization form the basis of a community or subculture? How are erotic creativity, imaginative life, and political action linked? Our readings will introduce a range of critical and creative methods - such as oral history, ethnography, autobiography, performance - that scholars and artists have used to theorize and represent queer life. Through short "micro-assignments," we will try out these methods for ourselves. By interweaving the creative work of queer and trans people and communities with practical experiments in research and making, we will aim to broaden our collective understanding of what it might mean to "live queer." (Previous experience in gender and sexuality studies is not required for this course.)

Instructor(s): Sarah McDaniel     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12125

ENGL 12320. Critical Videogame Studies. 100 Units.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAAD 12320, CMST 27916, GNSE 22320, SIGN 26038

ENGL 12460. Medieval Experimental Style. 100 Units.

This course focuses on medieval experiments in writing Middle English - an undertaking necessarily experimental in a period when French and Latin dominated literary production. We'll also consider some twentieth- and twenty-first-century responses to medieval experimental poetics, by reading the work of writers who self-consciously appropriate the experimental styles of Middle English (e.g., Robert Glück, Zadie Smith, Patience Agbabi, and Caroline Bergvall). We will read texts by medieval authors likely to include Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, the playwright known as the "Wakefield Master," and the author of The Owl and the Nightingale. No previous experience with Middle English is expected or required. (Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 12522. Chaucer's Dream Poems. 100 Units.

This course takes Chaucer's three dream poems as the basis to explore the English poet's experimental verse and the nature of medieval poetry in the later fourteenth century. As a class, we'll test ways of reading and interpreting this philosophically ambitious and riddling body of writing. No previous experience with medieval literature required. (Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 12704. Writing Persuasion: Health and Environment. 100 Units.

A writing-intensive course in persuasive techniques that influence opinions and attempt to change behavior. This year our focus will be on an issue that presents a challenge for persuasion theory: the environment. People are notoriously slow to change their beliefs and behavior on environmental issues, and persuasion theory suggests reasons why this might be the case. Environmental problems ask readers to weigh costs that affect one group against benefits that might accrue to someone else. They involve time frames ranging from moments (which are easy to think and write about) to millennia (not so easy) to geological epochs, a time scale so remote from our experience as to be opaque to the imagination. Environmental problems are complex in ways that make them difficult to capture in a coherent, emotionally compelling narrative. Many individually innocuous and seemingly unrelated environmental events can converge over time to produce consequences that are counter-intuitively larger and graver than their causes. This felt disparity between actions and outcomes can violate an audience's sense of fairness, biasing the audience against a persuasive appeal.

Instructor(s): Tracy Weiner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 12704, ENGL 32704, CEGU 22704

ENGL 12722. The Poetry and Prose of John Donne. 100 Units.

This course will examine the life and career of John Donne, one of the most important and influential early modern poets and thinkers writing in English. We will read Donne's love poetry, his religious poetry, his satirical poems, and his progress poems. We will also read some of his prose works: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions along with selections from his sermons and polemical treatises. Throughout, we will engage with the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to Donne and his writings. (Pre-1650, Poetry)

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Winter

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

Academic and Professional Writing, a.k.a. "The Little Red Schoolhouse"or "LRS" (English 13000/33000) is an advanced writing course for third- and fourth-year undergraduates who are taking courses in their majors or concentrations, as well as graduate students in all of the divisions and university professional programs. LRS helps writers communicate complex and difficult material clearly to a wide variety of expert and non-expert readers. It is designed to prepare students for the demands of academic writing at various levels, from the B.A. thesis to the academic article or book--and for the tasks of writing in professional contexts.

Instructor(s): L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner     Terms Offered: Spring Winter
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): ENGL 33000

ENGL 13512. The Future. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the future as imagined by American science fiction of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will pay attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged; on the other, we will work to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. We will deploy different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to apprehend the stakes and the strategies for imagining future worlds. After some initial attention to the magazine and pulp culture that helped to establish the genre, we will spotlight major SF movements (Afro Futurism, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, etc.) and major authors (including Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work in different media (e.g., film, radio, graphic narrative). (Fiction, Theory)

Instructor(s): Bill Brown     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26088, CCCT 13512

ENGL 13520. Introduction to African 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, African American literature. 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. (Fiction, Poetry, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Ken Warren     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 13570. Conspiracy, Theorized. 100 Units.

This course will explore the function of conspiracy theorizing in American politics and culture, focusing in particular on the relationship between the affective life of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theories' function as vernacular epistemologies of populist political critique. Why have conspiracy theories been so popular in American culture from the founding on? Why do they have such renewed energy today? How have conspiracy theories built upon one another to develop an alternate history of America and the world? In asking these questions, we will track how these theories reproduce ideologies of race, nation, empire, and gender. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 13580. Introduction to Asian American Literatures. 100 Units.

This is a survey course that introduces students to the complex and uneven history of Asians in American from within a transnational context. As a class, we will look at Asian American texts and films while working together to create a lexicon of multilingual, immigrant realities. Through theoretical works that will help us define keywords in the field and a wide range of genres (novels, films, plays, and graphic novels), we will examine how Asia and Asians have been represented in the literatures and popular medias of America. Some of the assigned authors include, but are not limited to, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Fae Myenne Ng, Nora Okja Keller, Cathy Park Hong, Ted Chiang, and Yoko Tawada.

Instructor(s): Mee-Ju Ro     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 13580, RDIN 13580

ENGL 13582. Crime/Fiction. 100 Units.

What is the relationship between plotting a crime and plotting a narrative? In this course, we will examine the genre of crime fiction but work to push against the borders of the category to include works on and discussions about the politics and poetics of confession, the affinities between testimony and fiction, and the racialization of crime. (Fiction)

Instructor(s): Mee-Ju Ro     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 13590. Race and Time. 100 Units.

In this advanced undergraduate course, we will explore the relationship between race and time. How might a concept of time already be racialized? How does the racialized subject experience time? How might such a temporality be figured through literary narratives? We'll take up these and a host of other questions pertaining to the politics and poetics of time through a literary, theoretical, and cinematic study that asks us to think critically about schemas of time in the works of writers of colour. Some of the assigned authors and writers include, but are not limited to, Ted Chiang, Shani Mootoo, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Lee Walters, Yoko Tawada, and Frantz Fanon.

Instructor(s): Mee-Ju Ro     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 13590

ENGL 15002. Disability Now and Then: Bodies, Minds, Media. 100 Units.

What do saints' lives and The Midnight Club (Netflix, 2022) have in common? If they seem historically distant, both texts nonetheless show disabled characters in complex relation to their communities. This course looks at contemporary texts alongside Middle English ones to ask how medieval English literature can illuminate our present understanding of disability in media. While Middle English literature lacks our term disability, it is populated with figures whose bodies and minds are depicted as deviating from the norm. Through pairings of medieval and contemporary texts, as well as disability theory readings, we will examine how stories now and then 1) moralize bodily difference, 2) figure disabled bodies of intersecting identities, and 3) attempt to express in words exclusion from and participation in communal life. Questions we will ask: How do the portrayals of disabled characters reveal a society's definition of the normal (what disability studies terms the "normate")? Which stereotypes do literary texts perpetuate about disability, and can we produce readings that counter these harmful portrayals? Can barriers to access lead to creativity and imagination? Finally: what role do literary histories play in helping us understand medieval and contemporary conceptions of disability? Our work will culminate with a visit to the Newberry Library and a creative project. (Pre-1650, Theory)

Instructor(s): Jo Nixon     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 15004. War, Culture, and Imperialism: Russia and the West from the 19th Century to the Present. 100 Units.

This course will survey literature shaped by the history of imperial conflict between Russia and "The West," ultimately with a view to better understanding our current geopolitical situation and mediascape. The course will be anchored in the nineteenth century, focusing on writing related to the Crimean War (1853-6) and the long contest between Britain and Russia for domination in Central Asia and India known as "The Great Game," but it will also provide a snapshot of Cold War cultural production, with an emphasis on ideological dissent among Black radicals and Russian emigres, before turning finally to our contemporary moment. (Fiction, 1830-1940)

Instructor(s): Kevin King     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 15004

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

An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career, when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, and Henry V. Together, we will read some of Shakespeare's queerest and most delightful comedies in conversation with darker troubling plays that revolve around sexual violence, racism, nationalism, and political theory, and we will see how such topics put generic boundaries to the test. Valuing those classics for their timeless craft but also for the situated cultural horizon that they evidence, we will explore what it means to take comedy and history seriously. Three short papers will be required. (Pre-1650, Drama, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Noémie Ndiaye     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): General education requirement in the humanities.
Note(s): Course includes a weekly discussion section.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21403, TAPS 28405

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

This course explores mainly major plays representing the genres of tragedy and romance; most (but not all) date from the latter half of Shakespeare's career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. Section attendance is required. (Pre-1650, Drama)

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21404, TAPS 28406

ENGL 17504. John Milton's Paradise Lost. 100 Units.

In this course, we will read Milton's Paradise Lost, paying close attention to questions of genre, style, and poetics as well as the theological, philosophical, anthropological, and political commitments that shape its verse. Although we will focus on the epic itself, we will also consider highlights from the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to the poem. (Poetry, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 17950. The Declaration of Independence. 100 Units.

This course offers an extended investigation of the origins, meanings, and legacies of one of the most consequential documents in world history: the Declaration of Independence. Primary and secondary readings provide a series of philosophical, political, economic, social, religious, literary, and legal perspectives on the text's sources and meanings; its drafting, circulation, and early reception in the age of the American Revolution; and its changing place in American culture and world politics over nearly 250 years. (1650-1830, 1830-1940) In addition to the noted class times, there will also be discussion sections to be scheduled once the class begins.

Instructor(s): Eric Slauter     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 17604, SIGN 26039, FNDL 27950, HMRT 17950, LLSO 27950

ENGL 18108. Culture and the Police. 100 Units.

How do cultural products facilitate, abet, and enable the form of social ordering that we call policing? This course will explore the policing function of what modernity calls "culture" by exploring the parallel histories of policing, the emergence of modern police theory, and the rise of the novel. We will focus in particular on how both literature and the police emerge to navigate a series of linked epistemological and political problematics: the relation between particularity and abstraction, the relation between deviance and normalcy, and indeed that of authority as such. While we will focus on texts from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, students with a broader interest in policing are encouraged to enroll. Readings will include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, G.W.F. Hegel, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, in addition to historical documents including gallows narratives, newspapers, and early theorizations of the police concept. (Fiction, 1650-1830, 1830-1940, Theory)

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): This is a research and criticism seminar intended for third-year English majors.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 18108

ENGL 18250. Irish Literature and Cinema. 100 Units.

Major works of poetry, fiction, drama, and film. In literature, the course ranges from Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney and Anna Burns, and, in cinema, from silent film to Neil Jordan and Lenny Abramson. Literature and cinema are intertwined through all the weeks of the quarter in various connections (including Hitchcock's adaptation of O'Casey's JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK). (Fiction, Poetry, Drama, 1650-1830, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Jim Chandler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 21650

ENGL 18252. British and Irish Cinema Since 1930. 100 Units.

We will be screening and discussing key films from almost a century's worth of cinema on the British-Irish archipelago, including works of the early Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McKendrick, David Lean, Frank Launder, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, Joseph Losey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan, Amma Asante, Steve McQueen, and Lenny Abramson. Some priority will be given to films with London settings and locations, such as Frears's My Beautiful Launderette. We may also look at London-based films by non-British directors. Sylvio Narrizaon's George Girl, for example, or Antonioni's Blow-up. Possible field trips include Ealing Studios, site of British cinema for much of the twentieth century, and Hitchcock's studios in Islington, not far from our London Campus, where he worked before his departure for America.

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Study Abroad Program

ENGL 18600. Zizek on Film. 100 Units.

Slavoj Zizek has used film as the great expositor of his theories of ideology, perversion, sexuality, politics, nostalgia, and otherness. In this discussion-heavy course we will watch a lot of film from the directorial subjects of his main discussions (Chaplin, Rossellini, Lynch, Haneke, Kieślowski, Tarkovsky, von Trier, Hitchcock, and others) alongside Zizek's theoretical writings on their film. The course examines why for the man who has been called the "Elvis of cultural theory" film is such a perfect lens through which to examine social situatedness and intersubjective "aporia." There is no "paperwork" assigned for the course. The course is conducted seminar style and participants are expected to be vocal, prepared, and somewhat ornery.

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27201

ENGL 19205. Poetry in the Land of Childhood. 100 Units.

Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate "fibred" spaces like these have a special relation to childhood-both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-that is, from the birth of children's literature to its "golden age"-and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children's poetry collections, through William Blake's "forests of the night," and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. (Poetry, 1650-1830, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 19205

ENGL 19500. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. 100 Units.

This course examines the major works-novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays-of two of Romanticism's most influential women writers. We will attend to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft's stylistic theories, and Shelley's scenes of imaginative sympathy. (Fiction, 1650-1830).

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29501, GNSE 19500

ENGL 19902. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. 100 Units.

A controversial art exhibition organized by Roger Fry, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists," provoked Virginia Woolf to write that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." The Bloomsbury Group, renowned for its role in vilifying Victorian culture and promoting English modernism, was no less famous for its own efforts to change human character: for its unprecedented understanding of aesthetics, economics, social politics, and sexuality. Taking advantage of our particular location in London (the neighborhood in which the group lived, met, wrote, and painted), this course will provide the opportunity to engage a broad spectrum of Bloomsbury work: the essays and fiction of Virginia Woolf; the art of Venessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry; the macroeconomics of John Maynard Keynes. This engagement will unfold through different analytics (formalist, psychoanalytic, materialist), and with sustained recognition of two Bloomsbury institutions-the short-lived Omega Workshops, and the enduring Hogarth Press. The British Library and the Tate Modern will provide us with intimate access to literary and visual texts, and we will talk with contemporary writers about the cultural legacy of this coterie. (Fiction, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Bill Brown     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

ENGL 19960. Comedy from the Margins. 100 Units.

This course examines the centrality of normativity to our conceptions of funniness, reading theories of comedy alongside stand-up, sitcoms, dramedy, and romantic comedy. We will ask: in what ways do comedic formulas establish ideas of the "normal" in order to subvert (or perhaps reinforce) them? How, does comedy about the "strange"-as the foreign, the queer, the excessive or the abject-reframe structures of sociality often taken for granted, forcing us to grapple with questions of citizenship and belonging, gendered and sexual norms, racialization and power? In addition to theories of comedy and joke theory, students will analyze theoretical works on race, gender and sexuality alongside popular television series, talk shows, and comedy specials. Possible texts and comics include: Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Insecure, Reservation Dogs, Ramy, Atlanta, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Julio Torres, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Jacqueline Novak, Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, and Ronny Chieng. (Theory, 1830-1940)

Instructor(s): Shirl Yang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 39960, GNSE 19960, CRES 19960

ENGL 19970. Organized Crime Fiction. 100 Units.

This course takes up cultural representations of organized crime in literature, film, and television as loci for thinking about intersections of capitalism, globalism, migration, violence, and family. Texts may include My Brilliant Friend, The Godfather, Infernal Affairs, The Wire, Eastern Promises, and Shark Tale. (Fiction, Theory)

Instructor(s): Jennifer Yida Pan     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 20000. History of the English Language. 100 Units.

If you have ever wondered why we say, "one mouse" and "two mice," but not "one house" and "two hice," this course will offer some answers. We will study the historical development of the English language, from its Proto-Indo-European roots through its earliest recorded forms (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English) up to its current status as a world language. Now spoken by more than 1.5 billion people, English is a language that is constantly evolving, and students will gain basic linguistic skills necessary for analyzing the features of its evolution. We will study variations in the language (including variations in morphology, phonology, syntax, grammar, and vocabulary) and its development over time and across regions. We will also examine sociological, political, and literary phenomena that accompany and shape these changes in the language. (Pre-1650, 1650-1830, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Benjamin Saltzman     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 20140. London: From Industrial City to Financial Center. 100 Units.

Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two "revolutions," the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. Some of the materials we will look at are Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, George Gissing's The Netherworld, Mike Leigh's High Hopes, John Lanchester's Capital, among other supporting texts (on urban globalization, the poverty maps of Michael Booth). (Fiction, 1830-1990).

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to London Program (study abroad) required.

ENGL 20148. English Renaissance Verse and the Poetics of Place. 100 Units.

This course will explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry by focusing on the poetic treatments of diverse places, including commercial, legal, and theatrical London venues, courtly palaces, aristocratic country houses and rural estates, churches, prisons, and imaginary 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. Trips within and close to London might include the Tower of London, the Whitehall Banqueting House, the Globe Theater, Hampton Court, Penshurst Place, and Knole. (Poetry, Pre-1650, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Joshua Scodel     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

ENGL 20158. Living (in) London: Human City, Urban Spaces, Metropolitan Encounters. 100 Units.

How have people inhabited London over time? And how are these varied forms of living reflected in the vast body of texts by writers and film makers who have made London their home? National capital and imperial metropolis, London is also a network of local neighborhoods in which communities have developed over time. In this course we will examine texts by an assortment of Londoners from the 19th and 20th centuries who write about urban sites of human interaction and encounter. Our course will consider London locations as places of compassion, repression, brutality, hospitality and rejection, resistance and compliance, friendship and love. How are these possibilities - both affective and political, personal and public - related to the various environments of the city? How are human relationships shaped by the specific forms of city buildings and institutions? And how have these urban places been impacted by styles of city living, changing populations, and the different communities that have inhabited them? In short, how do Londoners live together? Our texts will include Mary Prince, History of a West Indian Slave, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, James Berry, Windrush Songs, Derek Jarman, "The Last of England", Steve McQueen, "Mangrove", and essays by Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Ghassan Hage.

Instructor(s): Jo McDonagh     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

ENGL 20161. 21st Century Ethnic American Literature. 100 Units.

This class will read US novels and short stories by African-American, American Indian, Asian-American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in critical cultural race studies. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22161, CRES 40161, MAPH 40161, ENGL 40161, AMER 40161

ENGL 20162. Eighteenth-Century Black Lives: Black London in and Around Abolition. 100 Units.

This course will focus on representations of Black life and experience in literature published during the age of the British slave trade and abolition, as well as on more recent writing that seeks to imagine, honor, or reckon with the unrepresented Black lives of this period. During the first two weeks of the course, our reading will center on eighteenth-century writing. Primarily, we will focus on the work of prominent Black writers in London in and around abolition, including the life narratives of the formerly enslaved Olaudah Equiano (1789), Ottobah Cugoano (1787), and Mary Prince (1831), the published letters of Ignatius Sancho (1780), and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters (1773). We may also read selections from white-authored abolitionist poetry, relevant legal cases, as well as the anonymously published novel, The Woman of Colour (1808). In our third week, we will tum to a number of recent works that look back to the eighteenth century in order to reimagine the past and present of Black life in British culture, or to reclaim ·a place in the national imaginary: Honoree Fanonne Jeffers' The Age of Phillis, M. NourbeSe Philip's Zangl, and perhaps a play or two 0asmine Lee-Jones' Curious, Jackie Sibblies Drury's Marys S eacole, Giles Terera's The Meaning of Zon!). We will supplement our reading with selections from historians, cultural theorists, and literary critics (likely to include Paul Gilroy, Christina Sharpe, Simon Gikandi, Peter Fryer, and others).

Instructor(s): Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

ENGL 20170. Experiments in Kinship and Care. 100 Units.

In this class, we'll examine the notions of kinship and care, analyzing them both as conceptual frameworks and as concrete forms of being-together in human and more-than-human relations. Kinship and care are uncertain territories, fluctuating and dynamic; sites of possibility and futurity. Kin-making and care-giving practices reveal existing structures of oppression as well as the utopian possibilities within relation. We'll spend much of our time engaging with a set of "experiments" or case studies-historical, science fictional, and critical accounts of community-to see how connection appears as a mode of resistance or survival. Throughout, our collective goal will be to think together about living together. Readings may include SF from Octavia Butler, Claire Coleman, Ursula Le Guin, Wu Ming-Yi; theoretical and critical work from Sara Ahmed, Leela Gandhi, Donna Haraway, Laura Harjo, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Audre Lorde, José Esteban Muñoz, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Dean Spade, Kim Tallbear, Anna Tsing.

Instructor(s): William Hutchison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41170, MAPH 40170, GNSE 21170, ENGL 40170

ENGL 20171. Robots, animals, technologies: Science fiction and the more-than-human. 100 Units.

Science fiction allows encounters with other beings that variously encourage or strain the bonds of kinship, and many of those beings are related to entities with whom we already share a world. From companion animals and modified humans to starfish and androids, estrangement from familiar categories allows us to trouble assumptions about the certainty of species, the superiority of consciousness, and what care looks like in relation with those who may not respond to, recognize, or return care in familiar ways. In this class, we'll look at relations with the more-than-human in the context of urgent and emergent lived experience, in which social, political, and environmental realities require a response that thinks beyond entrenched approaches and takes wild and revolutionary imagination as a reparative possibility. We'll explore these and other questions through science fiction novels, poetry, graphic novels, music, and video (by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Janelle Monae, Grant Morrison, Margaret Rhee, and others). We'll engage with theoretical work on topics including multispecies kinship, race and technology, and non-conscious/non-biological life (by Karen Barad, Beth Coleman, Wendy Chun, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Shannon Mattern, Sophia Roosth, Alan Turing, and others). [Note: this class pairs well with "Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the more-than-human" offered in Spring, and may also be taken as a stand-alone course.]

Instructor(s): William Hutchison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40171, MAAD 25171, MAPH 40171

ENGL 20180. Women Writing God. 100 Units.

This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of critics such as Luce Irigaray, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Judith Butler, we explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity simultaneously understood to be unrepresentable and to have a masculine image. Texts range from premodern mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Instructor consent required for first and second year undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25180, GNSE 45180, MAPH 40180, ENGL 40180

ENGL 20182. Early Modern Loss and Longing. 100 Units.

This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc.) (Med/Ren, 18th/19th).

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40182, GNSE 22182, MAPH 40182, GNSE 42182

ENGL 20190. The Gender of Modernity. 100 Units.

This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by women and queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider modernist revisions of these concepts for their effect on America's broader social and political terrain and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? This class doubles as an advanced introduction to gender and sexuality studies, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism. As we map the contours of a feminist and queer modernity, we will also be staging a series of encounters between our literary objects and influential theoretical texts. In so doing, we will consider a range of methodological orientations - psychoanalytic, queer, Black feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, historicist, and so on - as themselves telling divergent stories about what it means to be a sexed and gendered body in American modernity. Readings may include works by Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein; theoretical and critical work from Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Lee Edelman, Rita Felski, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, Alys Weinbaum.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25150, MAPH 40190, ENGL 40190, GNSE 45150, AMER 40190

ENGL 20212. Romantic Natures. 100 Units.

Our survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (especially the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will also address foundational and recent critical-theoretical approaches to the many "natures" of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic and dangerously erotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism of the naturalist Gilbert White, the emergence of geological "deep time," and the (literal) fruits of empire and vegetarianism. (Poetry, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 20224. Water Worlds. 100 Units.

Taking its cue from a remarkable convergence of interest in recent and forthcoming cultural touchstones like Avatar: The Way of Water, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Wakanda Forever (along with recent scholarship on the cultural history of swimming; popular fascination with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution; recent theoretical embrace of aquatic scenes or modes of criticism and being; and productive conceptual distinctions between depths and shallows, fresh and saltwater, and the liquid and solid), this course examines foundational and new aquatic scenes of imagination: literary, cinematic, historical, and theoretical. (Fiction, Theory).

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 20226. Subgenres of British Romantic Fiction: Gothic, Historical, Courtship. 100 Units.

Survey of three major subgenres of the British Romantic novel: Gothic, Historical, Courtship, likely including work by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, James Hogg, and Maria Edgeworth. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20228. William Blake: Poet, Painter, and Prophet. 100 Units.

A survey of the major poetic and pictorial works of William Blake, centrally focussed on his illuminated books, from the early Songs of Innocence and Experience to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the books of the revolutionary period of the 1790s: Europe, America, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen. We will also consider the later prophecies, Milton: A Poem and Jerusalem, along with Blake's work as an illustrator of Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible. Blake's engagement with the political and religious controversies of his time will provide context, along with his pioneering exploration of dialectical modes of thought and radical forms of humanism (Poetry, 1650-1830, Theory; 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20228, ENGL 30228, ARTH 30228, FNDL 20228

ENGL 20230. Iconology East and West. 100 Units.

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language-the interplay between the "icon" and the "logos." A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as "Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words":  诗中有画，画中有诗. This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts. The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between "East" and "West" that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study. (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): WJT Mitchell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment in the course will be with the consent of instructor; it is open to students at all levels, but enrollment will be limited to 15. Students should send a one page statement of their interest to W. J. T. Mitchell (wjtm@uchicago.edu)
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20033, ENGL 30230, CMLT 20230, ARTV 20033, ARTV 30033, ARTH 30033, CMLT 30230

ENGL 20242. Structural -isms. 100 Units.

What does it mean to designate "structure" as the operative force in discrimination against categories of person-as in appeals to structural racism or structural violence on the basis of gender? And how can we approach this question by attending to aesthetic uses of structure and form, especially as these have been understood in such paradigms as structuralism and recent literary formalisms? How do we read for structure, in reading for racism and for systemic discrimination on other bases? We'll focus on intersections of race, gender, and class (in U.S. contexts) as these categories have been reconfigured in the past half century or so. To explore appeals to structure, we'll consider definitions of literary and aesthetic form, debates about structure vs. agency, and questions of individual and collective action as mediated by institutions. Readings will balance theory with examples drawn from fiction, documentary film, built form, and other media. Throughout, we'll pay particular attention to problems of structure construed as problems of narrative, as we develop sharper terms for understanding how discrimination proceeds structurally.

Instructor(s): Rowan Bayne     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Instructor consent required for undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22141, CRES 40141, GNSE 45141, GNSE 25141, ENGL 40141, MAPH 40141

ENGL 20250. Means of Production I: Contemporary Literary Publishing (Books) 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a manuscript of poetry 'make it' onto the list of a literary publisher, and from there to the bookshelves of the Seminary Coop? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Visits with literary editors and authors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. (Poetry)

Instructor(s): Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20252. Means of Production II: Contemporary Literary Publishing (Magazines) 100 Units.

How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review, or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. We will begin with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry and poetry in translation as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the production of literary magazines in the second half of the term. Visits with magazine editors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include researching and soliciting work from contemporary poets for The Paris Review. Note, "Means of Production I: Books" is not a prerequisite for this course. (Poetry)

Instructor(s): Srikanth Reddy     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): "Means of Production I: Books" is *not* a prerequisite for this course.

ENGL 20260. Housekeeping: Domestic Drama and Material Culture. 100 Units.

The theatre represents a new and wildly successful commodity in the early modern English market. Yet it is often kept separate from other fashionable goods of the period by virtue of its intangible form. This course overturns the orthodoxy that an early modern play was a co-imaged event and the early modern theatre was an "empty space" by attending to the Renaissance theatre's frequent recourse to household stuff. We will read plays designed for private performance, that use the fixtures of the household to build theatrical worlds. We will investigate dramatists who liken the playhouse to key venues of commodity culture, including the pawnshop, the Exchange (the precedent of the shopping mall), and the fairground. We will draw from Henslowe's Diary to recover the business of theatrical property-making and the allure of a company as disclosed by its holdings. All the while, we will question how the fiction of emptiness takes hold in theatre history, and how plays that depict a furnished world are relegated to second-class genres like domestic tragedy and city comedy. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22260, TAPS 30362, ENGL 40250, TAPS 20362, GNSE 40250

ENGL 20266. Coming of Age: Autobiography, Bildungsroman, and Memoir in Victorian Britain and its Empire. 100 Units.

In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of "coming of age" stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological "invention" of adolescence. (1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22266

ENGL 20300. Living in Our Last Days: Blackness and Apocalypse. 100 Units.

What does it look like to survive the end of the world? Maxine Lavon Montgomery describes apocalypse as a "cataclysmic upheaval that portends the end of an old era and the beginning of an altogether new reality". This course explores what it would mean to consider slavery as an apocalyptic event that both shapes the world we currently inhabit and impacts present and future moments of disaster. What does an apocalypse look like in the afterlife of slavery? How do conditions of antiblackness shape the ways people experience both natural and manmade events of catastrophe such as hurricane, disease, and genocide? In addition to reading and discussing texts including Parable of the Sower, Salvage the Bones, and The Deep, this course will address these questions by engaging with the works of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 20300, ENGL 30300, RDIN 30300

ENGL 20304. Medieval Romance. 100 Units.

Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and science fiction. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics. (Pre-1650; Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21304, ENGL 40304, GNSE 41304

ENGL 20360. Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England. 100 Units.

This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20360, GNSE 20126

ENGL 20422. Black Girlhood. 100 Units.

First popularized on social media in 2013, the phrase "Black Girl Magic" has expanded far beyond its initial use as a twitter hashtag. It can be seen on (a bunch of different objects and the cover of many children's books and poetry anthologies). However, the visibility of the phrase did not come without controversy. Some critics argued that rather than being an uplifting rallying cry for positive depictions of black girlhood, it instead reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes of the "strong black woman". This debate leads us to question: How do black girls tend to be depicted both popular media and in literature? How might these depictions differ depending on author, type of media, or social context? What do they say about the ways that black girls experience childhood, gender, and friendship? To engage with these questions, this course will explore literary works including The Bluest Eye, Betsey Brown, and Abeng, along with television shows such as Lovecraft Country to examine 20th and 21st century depictions of black girlhood. We will also think with theoretical works of black feminism and black girlhood studies.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 20400, GNSE 33167, GNSE 23167, ENGL 30422, RDIN 30400

ENGL 20458. Faeries, Demons and Alchemists: Science, Magic and the Supernatural in Early Modern England. 100 Units.

This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis. (Pre-1650, 1650-1830; 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40458, MAPH 40458

ENGL 20460. Renaissance Now. 100 Units.

This class will think about the reception of the Renaissance, in scholarship and popular culture, or from Burkhardt to Beyonce. What is at stake in the term? What does it mean to periodize a Western cultural past in this way, or to be founding a Renaissance in the present? Readings will include seminal accounts of the Renaissance by thinkers such as Jacob Burkhardt, Aby Warburg, Paul Oscar Kristeller and Joan Kelly, as well as contemporary cultural objects ranging from the film Shakespeare in Love to the fiction of Hilary Mantel and work in the visual arts by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales. (Theory, 1830-1990; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40460, ENGL 40460

ENGL 20464. The Lives of Others. 100 Units.

How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography).  Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or "work on the self" as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by primary readings that likely include Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishiguro, Werner Herzog, Maggie Nelson, Amitav Ghosh, and J.M. Coetzee. (Fiction, Literary/Critical theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40464, MAPH 40464

ENGL 20562. Renaissance Freedoms. 100 Units.

This course explores early modern debates about human agency across multiple registers: political, philosophical, religious, erotic. Texts include selections from the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Carey, Margaret Cavendish and John Milton. (Poetry, Pre-1650, 1650-1830; Med/Ren

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40562, ENGL 40562

ENGL 20565. Postcolonial Aesthetics. 100 Units.

What do we mean by the "postcolonial aesthetic"? In this course, we read and think through the literary and conceptual resources that might help us reconstruct this notion - from Deepika Bahri, to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Our goal is to attend to "the aesthetic" as an experience that reshapes subjectivity in terms of our relation to ourselves and others. By engaging with twentieth-century novels, memoir, and film, we consider how this postcolonial aesthetic might function. What habituated forms of perception or common sense notions does it seek to interrupt? What ways of sensing and living does it offer? Readings will likely include Ashis Nandy, Deepika Bahri, Theodor Adorno, Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Arundhati Roy, and Jean Rhys. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40565, ENGL 40565

ENGL 20566. Performing Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space. 100 Units.

This Gray Center Fellowship course considers the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. Co-taught by Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone, the course will feature film screenings and panels on embodied style, narrative, time, and the built environment, along with skateboarding's anti-scarcity and communal structures that both subvert and reframe capitalist competition. Students will produce a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.

Instructor(s): Tina Post, Kyle Beachy, and Alexis Sablone     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 20566, TAPS 20420

ENGL 20720. Film and Fiction. 100 Units.

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain-the problem that some have labeled "medium specificity" in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in non more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form? Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of "fidelity" a far too limiting in scope? But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the "film based on fact," especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman? What has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts in particular cases?

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Students enrolled in the course will be expected to attend screenings and participate in class discussions. There will be a written exercise at midterm (3-4 pp.) and a longer final paper (12pp.).
Note(s): (Fiction, 1650-1830, 1830-1940)
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25820

ENGL 20750. The Adventures of Augie March. 100 Units.

Court Theatre has commissioned Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright David Auburn, AB'91, to write a stage adaptation of Saul Bellow's novel of mid-century Chicago, The Adventures of Augie March. Students in this course will assist in the dramaturgical preparations for the Spring 2019 premiere of Auburn's work, and in so doing acquire hands-on experience of the techniques involved in bringing literary works to stage. They will engage in close readings of the novel and its relationship to drafts of the script, examine how Bellow drew from his own coming-of-age experiences as an immigrant in Depression-era Chicago to create the character of Augie March, and seek out primary source materials at libraries and museums throughout the city to help contextualize the work for the director, actors, costume and sound designers. Guest lectures will include David Auburn, Court Theatre Artistic Director Charles Newell, and Dr. Peter Alter, Curator of the Studs Terkel Oral History Center.

Instructor(s): N. Titone     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at first class is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20750

ENGL 21210. The Enterprise of Middlemarch. 100 Units.

Students will begin by taking up the Norton edition and reading the novel through; discussion will then proceed by re-reading (along with some other materials from that edition) taking up carious topics, e.g Eliot's self-presentation of her authorial aims, some important fictional choices (e.g: why a provincial town? why set the novel in 1832? etc.). Then we will consider the complex set of plots and their relation to each other. Other questions: how does the book represent itself as a model for the novel as a genre? Where does it fit in Eliot's career? "There will be unexpected questions. This is the sort of course in which it is important to follow where the class leads."

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21210, GNSE 21211

ENGL 21212. Postcolonial Bildungsroman. 100 Units.

In this course, we consider the novel of subject formation in the twentieth-century, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial adaptations of this form. We examine how different instances of the genre play across tropes of aesthetic education, self-making, and nation-building. Readings will likely include Conrad's Lord Jim, E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, as well as key critical pieces by Mikhail Bakhtin, Marc Redfield, and Jed Esty, among others.

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40202, ENGL 40202

ENGL 21215. Hamlet: Adventures of a Text. 100 Units.

After a lifetime with Hamlet, I've become increasingly interested by the fluidity of the text: not only is there much too much of it, but there are also significant differences between the 2nd Quarto and the Folio-to say nothing of the 1st quarto. Nevertheless, there is (in my mind at least) no question that we have Hamlet! I intend with this class to explore the play in quest (as it were) of the essential Hamlet, reflecting on its contradictions, shifting perspectives, puzzles. For instance: why doesn't Hamlet go back to Wittenburg-is it his ambition, his mother, his sense that he has to deal with his uncle, or is it something else? Is Hamlet mad or feigning or something in between? Is he changed by his adventure with the pirates? Etc. We will use both volumes of the Arden 3rd edition. First, we'll spend some weeks going through the Folio text scene by scene, then we'll tackle the 1st Quarto, inquiring into Shakespeare's creative process and his relation to actual production. Some attention will be given also to the history of the reception of Hamlet. Instruction by discussion; final paper preceded by required submission of a project and opportunity to submit a draft for comments.

Instructor(s): J. Redfield     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Graduate Students by Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21215

ENGL 21301. James Joyce: Ulysses. 100 Units.

This course considers themes that include the problems of exile, homelessness, and nationality; the mysteries of paternity and maternity; the meaning of the Return; Joyce's epistemology and his use of dream, fantasy, and hallucinations; and Joyce's experimentation with and use of language.

Instructor(s): S. Meredith     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21300

ENGL 21360. Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation. 100 Units.

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the 200 years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries - not to mention a thriving "Janeite" fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the "rise of the novel" in English are often drawn to Austen as an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen's completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21303, ENGL 41360, MAPH 40130, GNSE 41303

ENGL 21370. Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers. 100 Units.

Since the Renaissance beginnings of the "age of sail," the ship has been one of literature's most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. And they are Michel Foucault's example of the heterotopia par excellence. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the "Middle Passage" of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to open to 3rd and 4th years.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21370, GNSE 41370, MAPH 41370, ENGL 41370

ENGL 21420. Futures Other Than Ours: Science Fiction and Utopia. 100 Units.

Science fiction is often mistaken for a variety of futurism, extrapolating what lies ahead. This class will consider what kind of relationship science fiction might have to the future other than prediction, anticipation, optimism or pessimism. How might science fiction enable thinking or imaging futures in modes other than those available to liberalism (progress, reproduction, generation) or neoliberalism (speculation, anticipation, investment)? This class asks how science fiction constitutes its horizons, where and how difference emerges in utopias, and what it might be to live in a future that isn't ours. Readings may include SF works by Delany, Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Robinson, Banks, Ryman, Jones; theoretical and critical readings by Bloch, Jameson, Suvin, Munoz, Murphy, and others.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Email the instructor directly for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41420, MAPH 41400

ENGL 21644. American Muckrakers: The Literature of Exposé, 1900/2000. 100 Units.

This seminar examines the genre of American "muckraking," a form of journalism and fiction intended to expose social and economic injustices. We attend, in particular, to writers active in the years surrounding 1900, when muckraking narratives enjoyed great social influence, and then turn to the new crop of prominent muckrakers that emerged around 2000. In coining the term "muck-rake" in a 1906 speech, President Theodore Roosevelt linked the genre's aesthetic deficiencies to a potentially dangerous political impact: Its tendency towards "hysteric sensationalism" threatened to provoke a "morbid and vicious public sentiment" marked by cynical apathy. Though we may not end up agreeing with Roosevelt, the seminar picks up his emphasis on the relationship between the aesthetics and politics of exposé in our examination of muckraking media. We will discuss the narrative strategies of a genre often designated as "bad" literature, focusing, in particular, on the link between its purported aesthetic deficiencies-populism, sentimentalism, melodrama, sensationalism-and its political mission. Last but certainly not least, this seminar situates muckraking narratives in their historical contexts-what they hoped to expose, why, and what impact they ended up having. Texts in this course may include the work of: Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Norris, Lincoln Steffens, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Schlosser, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Laurie Garrett.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41644, MAPH 41600

ENGL 21690. Empire and the Novel. 100 Units.

This course investigates how the rise of the nineteenth-century British novel is intimately linked to the expansion of the British Empire. Many understand that this empire was based on unfair trade relations, indigenous genocide, and the exploitative labor of millions, but it can be difficult at times to see how this atrocious history fits into the domestic and metropolitan realism of the novel. How does the practice of imperialism impact the conventions of domestic fiction? How are the novel's constructions of gender, race, and class related to the political status of colonized and enslaved peoples? Our focus will be to connect narrative form with the realities of imperialism and colonial rule, but we will also draw on other genres of nineteenth-century cultural production such as autobiography, visual art, and political essays in order to help us trace the sociopolitical conditions that made empire possible. Fictional readings may include work by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and others. Non-fictional readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Karl Marx, Mary Jane Seacole, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak. (Fiction, 1830-1940, Theory)

Instructor(s): Rebeca Velasquez     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 21692. Mapping Racial Formations of Citizenship through the Novel. 100 Units.

How is race central to the concept of citizenship? This course investigates the racial roots of the development of citizenship within nineteenth- and twentieth- century histories of slavery, colonialism, migration, eugenics, and miscegenation, with primary focus on the novel. To be a 'citizen' means to claim political belonging in a particular nation-state, but the status of one's racial identity complicates one's access to the rights and privileges that citizenship presupposes. In this course, we trace how the construction of race is integral to the varied meanings of citizenship's lexicon: individual and collective identities, kinship, self-determination, subjectivity, nationhood. Along the way, we will examine the ways that the novel makes visible radical forms of memory, affect, intergenerational forms of connection, and other practices that exceed racialized definitions of the 'citizen' and civic inclusion. Our focus will be to connect narrative form with the realities of racialized citizenship, but we will also draw on other genres of cultural production such as autobiography, visual art, and political essays in order to help us trace the sociopolitical connections between race and citizenship.

Instructor(s): Rebeca Velasquez     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 21710. Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the more-than-human. 100 Units.

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the capitalocene could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Katherine Yusoff, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes, Mike Davis and more).

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 21710, MAPH 41710, ENGL 41710

ENGL 21720. Science fiction against the state. 100 Units.

Ursula Le Guin's anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We'll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41720, GNSE 21720, MAPH 41720, ENGL 41720

ENGL 21926. People, Places, Things: Victorian Novel Survey. 100 Units.

Quarter Systems and the Victorian novel do not mix well, which is only to say that this course cannot aspire to a comprehensive accounting of the Victorian novel, or the myriad forms of the novel that emerged during Victoria's reign (1837-1901). What it does seek to do, however, is give you some little sense of the Victorian novel's formal and thematic range in a few of the uncharacteristically shorter novels of the period, and-in the bargain-give you a few critical tools and concepts to better figure out what these novels are and what they might be doing. Critical approaches to the Victorian novel are as varied as the novels themselves, perhaps, but I've tried to give you access to some of the more recent interventions that centrally query character and characterization (people), things and the circulation of things, and location and spatialization (places). Jane Eyre, Hard Times, Lady Audley's Secret, The Warden, Jude the Obscure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Fiction, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 22200. Marxist Literary Criticism: Fredric Jameson. 100 Units.

This seminar will provide students with an overview of Marxist literary criticism via the career of one of its most innovative living practitioners.

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Recommended: BA - ENGL 11200: Fundamentals of Literary Criticism
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 22200

ENGL 22212. Special Topics in Criticism and Theory: Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units.

An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism. (Theory, 1840-1990)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20134, CCCT 22212

ENGL 22352. Black Game Theory. 100 Units.

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream "AAA" games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 32352, CMST 22350, MAAD 12350, RDIN 32350, CDIN 32350, CMST 32350, RDIN 22350

ENGL 22360. Working 9 to 5. 100 Units.

This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space. (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 42360

ENGL 22408. Trans Genres. 100 Units.

This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism. (Theory).

Instructor(s): C. Riley Snorton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 20408, GNSE 20133

ENGL 22434. Extinction, Disaster, Dystopia: Environment and Ecology in the Indian Subcontinent. 100 Units.

This course aims to provide students an overview of key environmental and ecological issues in the Indian subcontinent. How have the unique precolonial, colonial, regional and national histories of this region shaped the peculiar nature of environmental issues? We will consider three major concepts-"extinction", "disaster" and "dystopia" to see how they can be used to frame issues of environmental and ecological concern. Each concept will act as a framing device for issues such as conservation and preservation of wildlife, erasure of adivasi (first dwellers) ways of life, environmental justice, water scarcity and climate change. The course will aim to develop students' ability to assess the specificity of these concepts in different disciplines. For example: What methods and sources will an environmental historian use to write about wildlife? How does this differ from the approach an ecologist or literary writer might take? Students will analyze various media: both literary and visual, such as autobiographies of shikaris (hunters), graphic novels, photographs, documentary films, ethnographic accounts and environmental history.

Instructor(s): Joya John     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 25310, HIST 26806, GLST 25310, CRES 25310

ENGL 22444. Arts of Life. 100 Units.

By foregrounding significant Enlightenment and Romantic configurations of the problem of the "arts of life," and with a special emphasis on poetry, this course examines the mobile border between aesthetics and necessity in the long eighteenth century moment and in our own. In The Arts of Life (1802), John Aikin surveys the means of provision of food, clothing, and shelter in the Romantic age by means of a watchword distinction between those arts either "absolutely necessary for life's preservation" or "conducive to comfort and convenience," as against those "ministering to luxury and pleasure." The same idea memorably animates the aesthetic counter-tradition running from William Blake's "arts of life and death" to William Morris's "lesser arts of life. In contextualizing the problem of the "arts of life," we will resurrect productive historical thinking about an aesthetics that inextricably inheres within practices "necessary for the preservation of life." We will also explore the enduring vitality of such a notion in our own moment of ecological crisis and of casualized cultural arts (ostensibly marked by eclipsed autonomy for art's producers, consumers, and critics alike), with particular focus on problems of design and the affordances of form; on literature's evolving location among the "arts of life"; and on the present reinvigoration of craft and design in popular visions of the aesthetic. (Poetry, 1650-1830; 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 32444

ENGL 22505. Staging Islam: Traps and Trappings of Representation. 100 Units.

From terrorists to "good Muslims," standards in the racial, cultural, and religious representations surrounding Islam have fluctuated across U.S. media. How do we conceptualize the nature of visual perception and reception? The history of colonialism, secular modernity, gender, patriarchy, and the blurred distinctions between religion and racialization have all contributed to a milieu of visual cultures that stage visions of and arguments about Islam. Hostility towards Muslims has not abated as we venture well into the 21st century, and many remain quick to blame an amorphous media for fomenting animosity towards the "real" Islam. We take these essentialist terms of engagement as the start of our inquiry: what is the promise of a meaningful image? What processes of secular translation are at work in its creation and consumption? Is there room for resistance, legibility, and representation in U.S. popular culture, and what does representation buy you in this age? We will pair theoretical methods for thinking about imagery, optics, perception, and perspective alongside case studies from film, stage, comedy, streaming content, and television shows, among others. Students will critically engage and analyze these theories in the contexts from which these works emerge and meld into a mobile and diasporic U.S.context. Together, we will reflect on the moral, political, and categorical commitments vested in different forms of media against historical trends of the 20th & 21st century.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32500, CRES 22500, ENGL 32505, RDIN 22500, RLST 27555

ENGL 22680. Queering the American Family Drama. 100 Units.

This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.

Instructor(s): L. Buxbaum     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20116, TAPS 22680, SIGN 26080

ENGL 22817. Pale Fire. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 29610, REES 20020, FNDL 25311, REES 30020, GNSE 39610

ENGL 22930. Intro to Critical Race Theory. 100 Units.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently filled headlines as it has become a hotly debated topic in U.S. political, educational, and media discourse. However, the tenets and thinkers that shape CRT tend to be left out of the conversations that dominate the media. What is this theoretical framework? Who are the thinkers who shape and contribute to these theories of the construction of race? What does CRT say about the relationship between race and institutions, such as the United States' legal system or education? To address these questions, students in this course will read and engage with foundational texts of CRT by scholars including Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Cheryl Harris. In addition to learning the key tenets of this theoretical framework, students will also use it to think across disciplines, institutional structures, and forms of media.

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 12900, RDIN 22900

ENGL 23120. Translation Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how "world histories" may be hidden within "word histories," as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will regularly carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36210

ENGL 23306. Writing after Windrush. 100 Units.

Writing After Windrush" explores the legacies of Windrush in fiction and poetry, visual arts, and social movements, interpreting "writing" as a broad range of media and discourse. Beginning with Henry Swanzy, Una Marson, and their leadership on the BBC radio show Caribbean Voices, we will engage with the creative works of Windrush migrants and their descendants: Trinidadian British novelist Samuel Selvon, Jamaican British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Guyanese British mixed-media artist Hew Locke, and others. To understand social struggle, we will study the life of activist Claudia Jones and her founding of the West Indian Gazette And Afro-Asian Caribbean News. We will consider the memory of Windrush through the moving image, in Steve McQueen's 2020 anthology series Small Axe. Finally, we will examine the 2018 Windrush Scandal, in which at least 83 Britons were unjustly deported, in conversation with works like Hazel Carby's account of the intertwined histories of Jamaica and Britain, Imperial Intimacies (2019). Throughout, we will travel throughout London for museum and studio visits, food, and more. (Fiction, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Study Abroad Program

ENGL 23421. Transcontinental Romanticism. 100 Units.

In 1836, at the age of 26, Margaret Fuller began teaching the great works of German Romanticism to students at Amos Alcott's radically progressive Temple School in Boston. Fuller's passion for the German Romantics and their propagation in America is representative of the profound importance that the "American Transcendentalists" (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) attributed to German literature and its potential to shape American culture and values. In this course, we will explore the elective affinities between German Romanticism and its American counterpart, tracing the ways in which the two traditions mutually illuminate each other. Each unit will pair one major German and one major American text or artwork. Themes / pairings include: gender and mythology in Novalis' fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Fuller's fairy tales; spiritual landscapes in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School; slavery and abolition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience;" exemplarity and individualism in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Nietzsche's "Schopenhauer as Educator."

Instructor(s): Simon Friedland     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 23421, GRMN 23421

ENGL 23708. The Poetry and Prose of Thomas Hardy. 100 Units.

A Victorian and a Modernist, a rare master of the arts of fiction and poetry, Thomas Hardy outraged Victorian proprieties and helped to make 20th century literature in English possible. Close reading of four novels and selected early middle, and late poems by Hardy, with attention to the contexts of Victorian and Modern literary culture and society.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Winter. Not offered 21-22.
Note(s): For graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 46011, FNDL 26011, ENGL 43708

ENGL 24119. Literature and Citizenship. 100 Units.

What we think of as modernity can be said to begin with the birth (or rebirth) of the citizen. During the 17thand 18th centuries, revolutions in Britain, France, and North America sought to recast political society as a structure built upon social contracts and natural rights of the people rather than the divine right of kings. Yet the category of citizen was (and remains) exclusionary as well as inclusive, frequently deployed to mark those outside its boundaries and protections. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the constructions of race, gender, and nation continued to shift into new forms, and many literature of these centuries focus on how "the citizen" is conceived and reinvented into the present. This interdisciplinary, trans-historical, and transatlantic course will discuss how these tensions and debates influence literature and political discourse over four centuries, a breadth that will allow us to trace the concepts and critiques of citizenship as they have come to shape our contemporary world. Primary readings will include William Shakespeare, Tobias Smollett, Olaudah Equiano, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Miné Okubo, and Claudia Rankine. Secondary and theoretical readings will include Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Lord Mansfield, C. L. R. James, Paul Gilroy, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Achille Mbembe, Emma Goldman, and Harry Harootunian.

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40110, MAPH 40110

ENGL 24240. Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the works of early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe (in translation)--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus), among others. In this course, we will read and think through the complex plays and lives of those brilliant authors through various critical lenses such as intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Noémie Ndiaye     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 24252. Black Quietude. 100 Units.

This course considers modes of quietude as they intersect experiences of blackness. What can be conveyed or contained in moments of stillness or quiet? Is black quietude a moment of universalism that transcends the determinations of race? Or do black subjects carry or project the experience of racialization into their spaces of quiet? Do we define quiet for the black subject on the same terms as for other racial categories? (Theory)

Instructor(s): Tina Post     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 24252

ENGL 24255. America's Literary Scientists. 100 Units.

This course targets in on the entanglements between science and literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in America-a historical moment when these realms did not appear nearly as divided as they do now. In particular, we attend to the period's exciting developments in biology, which promised to revolutionize contemporary notions of human being. Our analysis of American fiction will center on the subjects and methods that writers adopted (imaginatively and often critically) from fields like evolutionary science, microbiology, and experimental psychology. But the course syllabus also includes American scientists who wrote fiction: What types of knowledge did they hope to produce in becoming literary? The aim of our inquiry will, in large part, be to examine the role of literature in shaping the significance of science in American culture, as well as the role of science in helping to build an American literary canon. Along the way, we will track the kinds of experiments in form and genre that such literary-scientific hybrids might produce. Readings may include works by Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Silas Weir Mitchell, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. Theoretical and critical works will be drawn from the history of science, science and technology studies, and nonhuman studies.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to 3rd and 4th years in the College and MA students
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 34255, MAPH 34255

ENGL 24503. 20th Century American Drama. 100 Units.

Beginning with O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' through the American avant-garde to the most recent production on Broadway, this course focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant impact with regard to dramatic form in context to specific decade as well as cumulatively through the twentieth century. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards production possibilities, both historically and hypothetically. ATTENDANCE AT FIRST CLASS SESSION IS MANDATORY.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20110, ARTH 25885

ENGL 24510. Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world. 100 Units.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24511, CMLT 24510, MAAD 14510

ENGL 24526. Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. 100 Units.

This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Christine Fouirnaies     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24526, ENGL 34526, GNSE 34526

ENGL 24528. Seeing Ourselves: Photography and Literary Non-Fiction. 100 Units.

What knowledge about ourselves can photographs provide? Can photographs change the way we see ourselves--collectively, individually? Photography has been around for almost 200 years, yet its dominance in our lives seems only to increase. This course examines photography's influence on our everyday lives, particularly on conceptions and portrayals of the self. We will see how theorists have grappled with the phenomenon of photography, engaging the written word to address its conundrums, dangers, and attractions. With the help of these theorists, we will question the promises that photographs seem to make about representing the world. The purpose of this course is also, however, to take seriously the affective, documentary power of photography. We will thus analyze the creative use of photographs in the non-fiction (or nearly non-fiction) of major 20th- and 21st-century writers (philosophers, critics, journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, activists). Photography will emerge as a productive medium for navigating issues of memory, identity, race, gender, authenticity, agency, publicity, and art. With keen attention to the different capabilities of writing and photography, we will explore the dynamics of self-expression, the ethics of representing others, and the politics of image-text depictions. (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Christine Fournaies     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 34528

ENGL 24540. Islands and Otherness. 100 Units.

The island as a space of possibility - of discovery, of (re)imagination, and of otherness - is a concept with a very long history in Anglophone literature. Indeed, Britain's own archipelagic geography (a landscape unique among Europe's imperial powers) has often been invoked for a range of rhetorical ends. John of Gaunt's famous speech in Richard II uses the idea of Britain as the "scepter'd isle" as both a source of comfort (England as especially favored) and the foundation of critique (favor squandered). With the rise of transoceanic empires, writers throughout Great Britain, its colonial dominions, and other literary traditions imbued the symbol of the island with ever-increasing layers of meaning. Yet the island was also always already a location of anxiety, hostility, and liminality - of alternate cultural practices and systems of belief, of indigenous peoples who refused the claims of the colonizer, and where the meaning of Europe itself was destabilized in the colonial encounter. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European writers often deployed the island to think through the implications of empire for the metropole, anticolonial writers turned to the island as a site of resistance and recuperation. This transhistorical course will discuss the many significations of the island in metropolitan, colonial, and postcolonial literature as a lens into the conflicts and debates of imperialism.

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 34540, MAPH 34540

ENGL 24655. Forgeries and Flippancies: Literary "Fakes" 100 Units.

This is a course on fakes, forgeries, hoaxes, and all manner of intentional anachronisms designed to forge fake pasts, with a particular emphasis on how invented texts and artifacts might impact contemporary society and the "post-truth" world. By engaging in weekly case-studies around four central authors (Samuel Constantine Rafinesque, Pierre Louys, James Macpherson, Thomas Carlyle), students will learn to describe and categorize different kinds of such "flippancies" and to articulate their political weight across time. Examples include invented poems from Ancient Greece, spurious Native American epics, forged ancient Scottish epics, and the like. Our study of the main texts will be accompanied by a look at other forgeries that have played a not so fake role in the course of history (such as the Donation of Constantine). This course is appropriate to undergraduates of all levels interested in critical theory, the study of premodern cultures in a political dimension, as well as contemporary debates about cultural appropriation.

Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 24655

ENGL 24951. Animals, Ethics and Religion. 100 Units.

Why are some animals considered food and others objects of religious devotion? Why do we treat dogs like family and kill flies without a second thought? Why do animals appear so frequently as metaphors in our everyday speech? In this course, students will explore these questions by reading texts featuring animals in literature, scripture, and theory, ranging from the Bible, Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor and J.M. Coetzee. We will bring these diverse texts together in order to investigate how animals illuminate religious questions about the relationship among humans, animals, and the divine.

Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28020

ENGL 24960. California Fictions: Literature and Cinema 1945-2018. 100 Units.

This course will consider works of literature and cinema from 1884-2018 that take place in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and rural California to offer a case study for everyday life and critical space theory. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and ending with Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother you, we will also consider how "the west" provides an opportunity for reconsidering canon formation and genre. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students: 3rd and 4th years in the College email 2-3 sentences about why you want to take the course for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34960, ENGL 34960

ENGL 25318. Literary Radicalism and the Global South: Perspectives from South Asia. 100 Units.

What does it mean to speak of literary radicalism? What are the hallmarks of a radical literature? And how does any such body of radical literature relate to the crucial question of empire, while also seeking to not be limited by that address? This course will explore the theme of literary radicalism through perspectives arising from South Asia. Over the twentieth century the subcontinent has been shaped through a wide variety of social and political movements: from anticolonial struggles to communist organising, feminist struggles, anti-caste mobilisation, indigenous protest and more, with their histories intertwining in different ways. We will start with a consideration of some texts on literary radicalism from other parts of the global South by authors such as Julia de Burgos and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and then move through a detailed discussion of South Asian texts every week to examine particular aspects of literary style and history. We will study texts from a variety of subcontinental languages (in translation, unless originally in English), and across different forms - poetry, short fiction, children's literature, novels, a memoir, a graphic novel and a documentary film on a poet.

Instructor(s): Abhishek Bhattacharyya     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): No prior training in South Asia or literature courses is a requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 25318

ENGL 25320. Debate, Dissent, Deviate: Literary Modernities in South Asia. 100 Units.

This class introduces students to the modernist movement in post-independence South Asia. Modernism will be understood here as a radical experimental movement in literature, film, photography and other arts, primarily aimed at critiquing mainstream narratives of history and culture.  Given its wide scope, we will analyze a variety of texts over the ten-week duration of the class. These include novels, short stories, manifestos, essays, photographs, and films. The chronological span of the class is from the 1930s to the 1970s. Our aim will be to understand the diverse meanings of modernism as we go through our weekly readings. Was it a global phenomenon that was adopted blindly by postcolonial artists? Or were there specifically South Asian innovations that enable us to think about the local story as formative of global modernism? What bearings do such speculations have on genre, gender, and medium, as well as on politics? I will help situate the readings of each week in their specific literary and political contexts. Students will be able to evaluate, experiment with, and analyze various forms of modernist literary expressions emerging out of South Asia. This class will provide them with critical tools to interpret, assess, compare, and contrast cultural histories of non-Western locations and peoples, with an eye for literary radicalism. No prior knowledge of any South Asian history or language is necessary.

Instructor(s): S. Dasgupta     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 35320, KNOW 25320, CRES 25320, SALC 25320, GNSE 25320, GLST 25132

ENGL 25945. Digital Storytelling. 100 Units.

New media have changed the way that we tell and process stories. Over the last few decades, writers and designers have experimented with text, video, audio, design, animation, and interactivity in unprecedented ways, producing new types of narratives about a world transformed by computers and communications networks. These artists have explored the cultural dimensions of information culture, the creative possibilities of digital media technologies, and the parameters of human identity in the network era. This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAAD 14945, CMST 25945

ENGL 25970. Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production. 100 Units.

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu
Note(s): Note(s): English majors: this course fulfills the Theory (H) distribution requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20700, CMST 35954, BPRO 28700, CMST 25954, ENGL 32314, TAPS 28466, MAAD 20700, ARTV 30700

ENGL 26002. Literature and Hunger. 100 Units.

This course pursues themes of hunger the consumption of food, the formation of community, and relation to the sacred, through a sequence of readings in the Western tradition. By reading classic works (The Odyssey, selections from the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures, selections from The Divine Comedy, the Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, Paradise Lost), and modern works by Kafka, Simone Weil, and Louise Gluck, we will examine how different philosophies have imagined the acceptance or rejection of love, life, and the sacred in terms of the symbolism of food. Class work will involve close analysis of literary works, even those in translation; intensive critical writing; and secondary readings in literary criticism, anthropology, theology, and psychology.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn. Not offered in 2021-2022.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26002, SCTH 26002

ENGL 26017. Literary Biography. 100 Units.

Literary Biography: A Workshop. We will study four major literary biographies: Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), Walter Jackson Bate's John Keats (1964), and Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (1996). While analyzing the arts of literary biography, students will compose a biographical sketch of their own (20 pages), using primary materials from the Special Collections in the Regenstein Library and elsewhere, as appropriate. The course combines literary criticism and creative writing.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn. Course will be taught Autumn 2021.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36077, SCTH 36017

ENGL 26018. Poetry and Trauma: Hayden, Lowell, Plath. 100 Units.

We will read the poems of three 20th century American poets, Robert Hayden, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, with an eye to the historical and psychological wounds suffered by the poets and the transformation of wounds into art. By close attention to both text and context, we will try to feel our way into the mysteries of poetic creation and human resilience.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 36018, ENGL 36018

ENGL 26150. American Literature and Photography. 100 Units.

This class considers how photographic techniques spurred new literary methods. We'll discuss how visual media impact the development of forms, methods, and genres of literature, and how pictures and novels can be read together. Students will learn how to consider the visual register in novels, and how the drive to make fiction "real," or "photographic," helps to shed light on many attendant issues - the question of evidence, the problem of reliability, the terms of objectivity. We will discuss the drive to narrate real events in photographic and literary terms, and the limits of representation. Furthermore, we will think carefully about how discourses of race and poverty are imbricated with the development of photographic technologies and methods, and how racial groups such as American Indians are invented and reinvented in the advent of the mobile camera. Primary texts include fiction by Stephen Crane, Ella Cara Deloria, and Ralph Ellison and secondary texts include works from Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, and Gerald Vizenor.

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Instructor consent required for undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 45150, MAPH 40150, AMER 25150, AMER 40150

ENGL 26223. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. 100 Units.

An intensive study of these two poets, whose work differs radically, but whose friendship nourished some of the most enduring and original poetry of the American 20th century. Close attention to the poems, in the light of recent biographical work and new editions.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36222, SCTH 36002

ENGL 26230. Death Panels: Exploring dying and death through comics. 100 Units.

What do comics add to the discourse on dying and death? What insights do comics provide about the experience of dying, death, caregiving, grieving, and memorialization? Can comics help us better understand our own wishes about the end of life? This is an interactive course designed to introduce students to the field of graphic medicine and explore how comics can be used as a mode of scholarly investigation into issues related to dying, death, and the end of life. The framework for this course intends to balance readings and discussion with creative drawing and comics-making assignments. The work will provoke personal inquiry and self-reflection and promote understanding of a range of topics relating to the end of life, including examining how we die, defining death, euthanasia, rituals around dying and death, and grieving. The readings will primarily be drawn from a wide variety of graphic memoirs and comics, but will be supplemented with materials from a variety of multimedia sources including the biomedical literature, philosophy, cinema, podcasts, and the visual arts. Guest participants in the course may include a funeral director, chaplain, hospice and palliative care specialists, cartoonists, and authors. The course will be taught by a nurse cartoonist and a physician, both of whom are active in the graphic medicine community and scholars of the health humanities.

Instructor(s): Brian Callendar     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 26230, HIPS 26230, KNOW 36230, ENGL 36230, ARTV 20018

ENGL 26249. Literature and the Financial Crisis of 2008. 100 Units.

Many political observers argue that the challenges of our current political moment stem from the causes and responses to the financial crisis of 2008. In this course we will examine literary fiction, films, and television from the US, the UK, and Asia to understand how the challenges of representing the 2008 reflected and contributed to the crisis. In doing so we will also seek a better understanding of neoliberalism as a theory and a politics. Among the texts we will take up are several novels, Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger: A Novel; Rachel Cusk, Transit; Ben Lerner, 10:04: A Novel; and John Lanchester, Capital: A Novel; two films, The Big Short (Adam McKay) and Parasite (Bong Joon Ho); and the first season of the television series, Severance.(Fiction, Theory)

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): LLSO 26249, SIGN 26064

ENGL 26250. Richer and Poorer: Income Inequality. 100 Units.

Current political and recent academic debate have centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed. Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, HG Wells, will be among the writers explored. (Fiction, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26004

ENGL 26252. The Moment of Raisin. 100 Units.

In conjunction with the Court Theatre's production of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 play A Raisin the Sun, this course will place Hansberry's play in its literary and historical context to understand more thoroughly the play's success in its historical moment and its ongoing importance. We will also discuss subsequent theatrical and cinematic productions and adaptations. Among the other works we will consider are: James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Gwendolyn Brooks's The Bean Eaters, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ann Petry's The Street. Students will be expected to attend the play.

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 26411. Milton and Blake: Conceptions of the Christian Epic. 100 Units.

Milton wrote Paradise Lost to capture in epic form the essence of Christianity; Blake wrote Jerusalem to correct Milton's mistakes. We'll read them together to get in on the debate.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26401, ENGL 36401, RLVC 36401, FNDL 25307

ENGL 26614. T.S. Eliot. 100 Units.

With the major new edition of Eliot's poems by Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks, the new volumes of Eliot's letters, and two separate new editions of Eliot's complete prose, we are in a position to rethink the meanings and force of Eliot's life work. The class will be devoted to careful reading of his poems, essays, plays, and correspondence, with attention to his literary, cultural, and political contexts.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Spring. Course will be taught spring 2021
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 26614, ENGL 34850, SCTH 36014

ENGL 26710. Eccentric Moderns. 100 Units.

An examination of six idiosyncratic poets who invented new forms of language on the peripheries of High Modernism: David Jones, Laura Riding, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, and Anne Carson. Close formal analysis of the poems in the wider social and political contexts of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to advanced undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36710, SCTH 36710

ENGL 26855. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory's relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory's secularity.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36855, RLST 26885, CMLT 26855, CMLT 36855, RLVC 36855, GNSE 20130, GNSE 36855

ENGL 27012. Reading the Known World: Medieval Travel Genres. 100 Units.

This course will consider how medieval English readers came to knowledge of their world, and imagined a place within it, through genres of travel narrative such as the pilgrim's itinerary, the merchant manual, and the saint's life. We will reflect on genre as concept en route: how did generic conventions and strategies organize this knowledge of unknown lands, other peoples, and distant marvels? We will read medieval texts like Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville's Travels, and the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, along with medieval and modern literary theory, to survey how vernacular literature presented a picture of the world and charted paths across it. Students will leave the class proficient in reading Middle English (the precursor of modern English). No previous experience with the language is required, and an optional weekly reading group will meet to work through passages in this half-new language.

Instructor(s): Joe Stadolnik     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 27012, HIPS 27012

ENGL 27013. Being Corporate. 100 Units.

Corporations suffuse our lives. We study with them, work with them, consume their products-even become part of them through the purchase of stock. But what, exactly, is a corporation? In this course, we will trace the evolution of the US corporation from its historical roots through the present day. Our focus will be twofold: the evolving rights and responsibilities of the corporate person in law, and the ways that individual humans both inside and outside the corporate structure have imagined that person in a wider social context. Texts will include US court cases, legal treatises, historical analyses, novels, and cultural ephemera. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the persistent and evolving problems of corporate personhood and corporate social responsibility, both from a business and a consumer perspective.

Instructor(s): Nicolette I. Bruner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 27006, KNOW 27013

ENGL 27015. Graphic Medicine: Comic Creation as Knowledge Formation. 100 Units.

What does the medium of comics contribute to our knowledge and understanding of illness, disability, caregiving, and disease? How can making comics help us form individual and community knowledge about our bodies and health? This is a course designed to introduce students to the basic concepts and practices of the field of graphic medicine. To do this, we will closely engage with the elements and process of making comics as applied to the goals, principles, and applications of graphic medicine in particular, but also in relation to the health humanities. Broadly defined as the "intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare," graphic medicine allows for unique explorations of health, disease, and illness through the use of sequential images and textual elements within a narrative structure. Students will learn about conceptual and practical aspects of the field. Through critical analysis and discussion of key works, they will also be exposed to a variety of styles, genres, and applications that capture the breadth and diversity of graphic medicine. An important component of the class will be exercises through which students will create their own graphic medicine works as a way to explore knowledge formation about health, illness, and one's body through comics-making. Taught by a nurse cartoonist (and a founding figure in the field) and a physician.

Instructor(s): Brian Callender, MK Czerwiec     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): No prior knowledge or experience of graphic novels, comics, drawing, or medicine required.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 27015, HLTH 27015, HIPS 27015, KNOW 37015, CHSS 37015

ENGL 27017. Passing. 100 Units.

In this course, we examine how people move within and between categories of identity, with particular attention to boundary crossings of race and gender in U.S. law and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Law provides a venue and a language through which forces of authority police categories of identity that, at Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado observe, "society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient." Readings will include theoretical texts as well as court rulings, cultural ephemera, and literary texts.

Instructor(s): Nicolette I. Bruner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 27017, KNOW 27017, CRES 27017

ENGL 27102. Dissident Lit. 100 Units.

This seminar will explore the literature and history of "the dissident," a central figure of late 20th-century and 21st-century human rights politics. Through our readings of novels, essays, and criticism drawn from a range of traditions (from the US and Latin America to Russia and East-Central Europe) we will consider both the possibilities and dilemmas of literary dissidence.

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 47102, HMRT 37102, HMRT 27102

ENGL 27533. Fugitive Poetics: Slaves, Runaways, Exiles, and Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. 100 Units.

This course considers late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American poetry from the perspective of the disprized. One central point of discussion will be how slavery and indentured servitude-and the attendant urge for escape and freedom from these and other carceral institutions-shaped the American poetic imaginary. We will take up both the poetry and poetic theory written by fugitives and explore poetry itself as a form of fugitivity for the enslaved, politically exiled, or ideologically confined. Central figures in the traditional canon of nineteenth-century U.S. poetry-Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson-will be considered from this vantage alongside figures like Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, José María Heredia y Heredia, and José Martí, among others. In the process, we will explore the potential connections and collisions between these nineteenth-century literary texts and contemporary lyric and critical race theory. This course is as interested in the nineteenth-century construction of a national American poetics as it is in American poetry itself; equal weight will be given to poetry and prose. Topics will include the poetic imaginary in early American statecraft, prosody and the carceral condition (what Max Cavitch calls "Slavery and its Metrics"), blackface lyrics and class mobility, abolitionism, and inter-American literary exchange.

Instructor(s): Jake Fournier     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 27533

ENGL 27537. Poetry for the People": Global Black Politics and Culture in the Age of Marcus Garvey. 100 Units.

When Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he at once catalyzed a global mass movement for racial equality, projected a new Black diasporic identity, and redrew the fault-lines of modern racial politics. He also created the organizational and ideological framework for a global Black literature. Poets, workers, and political organizers from across the Black Diaspora sent both poetic and prosaic expressions of race-consciousness to the pages of Garvey's newspaper Negro World. These writers and activists challenged the legitimacy of world white supremacy, developed new modes of transnational racial affiliation, and enshrined Africa as the normative symbolic center of global Black politics. Despite its historical importance, however, Garveyism occupies an ambiguous place in African American studies. Controversies that trace back to the inception of UNIA, in addition to the loss of the organization's records, have impeded a full reckoning with the movement's global impact. Nonetheless, the great multivolume anthology of UNIA papers edited by Robert A. Hill, in addition to recent revisionist scholarship, suggest unexplored avenues of inquiry. The history of Garveyism, it seems, remains unfinished. "Poetry for the People" will introduce students to the real and imagined worlds of Garveyist Pan-Africanism, and explore the legacies of Garvey's movement for contemporary debates on race, empire, nationalism, and the politics of culture.

Instructor(s): Noah Hansen     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 27537

ENGL 27554. Unfinished Business: Revenge and Narrative Form. 100 Units.

What does it mean for something-a concept, an object, a historical inheritance-to "return with a vengeance"? Is revenge motivated by a desire for justice-a clear if ruthless commitment to equivalence-or does it demonstrate a drive towards excess? Does revenge restore order to a system of accounting, or does it compound wrongs that could never have been righted in the first place? Whom exactly is the post-breakup "revenge body" for? As these questions suggest, revenge possesses a special knack for confusing categories of self and other, and resurrecting uncertainties when it comes to cause and effect. Its resistance to closure makes it a complex model for social relation and narrative form. Revenge also has no respect for scale. Making no pretension to being impersonal or detached, revenge is linked to more minor forms like pettiness or grudges. Yet revenge plots often address scales far beyond the personal: events or contexts unfolding at the register of the historical, the intergenerational, the global. Revenge thus undoes unsustainable dichotomies between subject and object, social and individual, and more. We will explore revenge in novels and films alongside theories of revenge: psychoanalytic theories of fixation and the refusal to mourn, queer theorists and affect theorists writing on disaffection and alien affects, and even self-help writers counseling against the self-destructive, corrosive effects of not letting something go.

Instructor(s): Shirl Yang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 27544, CRES 27554

ENGL 27555. Forms of Labor in Caribbean Literature. 100 Units.

From the barrack-yard fiction of C.L.R. James to the Haitian peasant novel, Caribbean literature has been deeply preoccupied with the lives and struggles of the region's working people: Caribbean literature is, in many ways, a literature of labor. This course facilitates critical engagement with the role of labor in Caribbean literature, exploring how transformations in the conditions of work shape the development of regional literary trends from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. During this period, Caribbean writers identified the project of a national literature with the native working classes even while economic pressures led many to seek work abroad. How do Caribbean writers make sense of these contradictions? What strategies do poets and novelists employ to reconcile processes of transnational migration with narratives of national identity? This course surveys literatures produced across the Caribbean archipelago, comparing the varied forms and genres adopted by Haitian, Bajan, Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Guyanese writers to represent the working classes of their respective islands. Lectures and supplementary critical readings will situate literary texts in relation to histories of economic development in the Caribbean, with particular attention to the plantation, the peasantry, and the expansion of U.S. imperialism. Authors on the syllabus are likely to include Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Jacques Roumain, C.L.R. James, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter.

Instructor(s): Noah Hansen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 37555, CRES 27555

ENGL 27583. 21st Century American Drama. 100 Units.

This hybrid seminar focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant and commercial impact with regard to dramatic form in the past 20 years. Playwrights will include, Tracy Letts, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar, and Amy Herzog. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards staging, design, and cultural relevancies. Work for the course will include research papers, presentations, and scene work.

Instructor(s): K. Walsh     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Attendance at the first class session is mandatory. Questions: contact vwalden@uchicago.edu.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20120

ENGL 27600. Cinema in Africa. 100 Units.

This course examines Africa in film as well as films produced in Africa. It places cinema in Sub Saharan Africa in its social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts ranging from neocolonial to postcolonial, Western to Southern Africa, documentary to fiction, art cinema to TV, and includes films that reflect on the impact of global trends in Africa and local responses, as well as changing racial and gender identifications. We will begin with La Noire de... (1966), by the "father" of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, contrasted w/ a South African film, African Jim (1960) that more closely resembles African American musical film, and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid films from Lionel Rogosin's Come Back Africa (1959) to Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye (1984), and Jean Marie Teno's Afrique, Je te Plumerai (1995). The rest of the course will examine 20th and 21st century films such as I am a not a Witch and The wound (both 2017), which show tensions between urban and rural, traditional and modern life, and the implications of these tensions for women and men, Western and Southern Africa, in fiction, documentary and fiction film. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Loren Kruger     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): One or more of the following: Intro to Film/ International Cinema AND/OR Intro to African Studies or equivalent
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 22900, GNSE 28602, GNSE 48602, CMLT 42900, CMST 24201, ENGL 47600, RDIN 37600, CMST 34201, RDIN 27600

ENGL 27700. Sensing the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

In this co-taught 3-week and in-person course between the departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism-hearing, taste, touch, and smell-to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding our classes entirely out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city's foundations in phenomena such as the colonization of the ancestral homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy and trade routes of many other indigenous groups; the filling in of swamp; the redirection of the river; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure-all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible and audible, providing forums for experimental documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene.

Instructor(s): J. Scappettone, A. Ginsburg     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 22322, ARCH 22322, ENGL 47700, ENST 27700, BPRO 27200, CHST 27200, ARTV 32322, CEGU 27700

ENGL 27703. Queer Modernism. 100 Units.

This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize the early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? Our examination will center primarily on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins-lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. Towards the end of the quarter, we will also consider how more recent cultural producers-and in particular Black filmmakers associated with the New Queer Cinema movement- have sought to imagine or in some sense recover queer lives and scenes that have been silenced or apparently lost to history. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism and cultural studies. (1830-1990; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 27703, AMER 47703, GNSE 47702, MAPH 47703, ENGL 47703, GNSE 23138

ENGL 27708. Feeling Brown, Feeling Down. 100 Units.

Taking its cue from José Esteban Muñoz's 2006 essay in Signs, this course interrogates negative affective categories as they are expressed in US ethnic literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Muñoz argues, "depression has become one of the dominant affective positions addressed within the cultural field of contemporary global capitalism"; this course explores orientations such as depression, shame, sickness, and melancholy to think critically about racial formations amidst capital and how these are posed alongside literary questions. Primary texts may include Larsen, Ozeki, Morrison, and Okada; secondary texts may include Ahmed, Freud, Muñoz, Cheng, and Spillers.

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 27708, MAPH 47708, AMER 47708, ENGL 47708, AMER 27708, RDIN 47708

ENGL 27710. Race and Governmentality in Transnational Literature. 100 Units.

In this course, we read a range of literary works that are concerned with the boundaries of nation-states and the flows between them, and with racial formations across borders. We think critically about different kinds of transnational literature, from travel narratives, to fiction dealing with migrant / refugee / diaspora experience, to "global lit," and how these articulate configurations of race and governmentality under modernity. We read essays by Julie Chu on human cargo, and David Harvey on flexible accumulation. The literary titles we look at might include: Henry James, The American Scene Thomas Mann, Death in Venice Derek Walcott, Omeros Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques Therese Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go Amitav Ghosh, The Sea of Poppies Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 47710, CRES 27710, ENGL 47710

ENGL 27711. What is Literature For?: Theories of Literary Value. 100 Units.

This class will examine different theories about the meaning and social role of literature over a historical long durée. Why do we find literature valuable? What do we ask from it, and what is it able to provide? Is art's very uselessness the key to its role in the lives of readers? Or can we expect literature to effect changes in the world we live in? Does literature serve a therapeutic function? An expressive one? To what or whom is a writer responsible? Students will develop their own answers to these questions, and also examine how attitudes about the function of literary text have changed over the last few centuries- centuries that have seen a staggering transformation in the growth of literacy and the volume of print and digital culture. Readings will range from the Renaissance to the 21st century, and may include texts by Philip Sidney, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Jaques Ranciere, and Gayatri Spivak

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 47711, MAPH 47711

ENGL 27714. Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment. 100 Units.

In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present-and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker's rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign. (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 27714, ENGL 47714, GNSE 23155, GNSE 47714, MAPH 47714

ENGL 27815. Appropriations and Impostures. 100 Units.

What are the different aesthetic and literary uses of appropriation? The editor of a Canadian magazine who set up the Appropriation Prize in 2017, defended the practice of cultural appropriation by insisting that "anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." This case underscores the continuing tension between narrative as a vehicle for imagining and empathizing with distant others, and notions of cultural property. In this course, we look at a selection of literary works that speak to these themes including Diderot, Ern Malley, Patricia Highsmith, Peter Carey, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Sherman Alexie, with particular attention to the work of appropriation in postcolonial contexts. We also touch on appropriation in other media, such as for instance, Richard Prince's "New Portraits," Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans", and Ni Haifeng's installations.

Instructor(s): Darrell Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 37815, ENGL 37815

ENGL 28211. Intro to Religion and Literature: Dramatic Encounters. 100 Units.

This course will explore some of the major statements from the Western intellectual tradition on religion and literature as categories of thought, forms of human expression and communication, and sources of personal and social meaning. We will pay close attention to the various ways that the relationship between these two concepts has been understood and constructed by artists, philosophers, and theologians alike. Students from all concentrations are welcome; no prior knowledge or foreign language competency is required for enrollment.

Instructor(s): Matthew Creighton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28211

ENGL 28510. Mythologies of America: 19th Century Novels. 100 Units.

Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Alcott, and Twain wrote fiction that, in individual novels and also read comparatively, offers a civic template of mythologies of America: its genesis, its composition, its deities, its ritual life. The course considers this writing as both distinctively American, and as engaging central themes of modern novels, e.g. time, history, and memory, the relation of private to civic life, and the shifting role of religious authority.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 38500, RAME 38500, RLVC 38500, RLST 28510

ENGL 28619. Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955. 100 Units.

This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie). (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 38619, HMRT 34520, GNSE 34520, MAPH 34520, GNSE 24520, CRES 28619

ENGL 28710. On Fear and Loathing: Negative Affect and the American Novel. 100 Units.

Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40120, ENGL 38710

ENGL 28872. Jews in Nazi Germany: Lion Feuchtwanger's novel The Oppermanns in historical context. 100 Units.

Recently republished in 2022, Lion Feuchtwanger's 1933 best-seller The Oppermanns depicts a Jewish family who grapple with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Like many at the time, the Oppemanns think that the regime will be short-lived, but Feuchtwanger's prescient novel anticipates the entrenchment of Nazi power and the creeping curtailment of Jewish life in Germany with uncanny accuracy-from the thugs attacking individuals to the Ministry of Propaganda's demonization of Jewish Germans in mass media, via the enforced "Aryanization" of businesses required to employ non-Jewish managers. Discussion will focus on Feuchtwanger's nuanced portrayal of the distinct ways in which family members react to these assaults, supplemented by historical texts, including the analysis of Nazi language (1946) by Victor Klemperer, a Jewish-German survivor, and documents in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook.

Instructor(s): Loren Kruger     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Required: Complete HUM core
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 28872, FNDL 28872, CMLT 28872, GRMN 28872

ENGL 28902. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 29300, REES 20018, FNDL 27101, REES 30018, CMLT 39300, ENGL 48902

ENGL 28916. Nabokov: Lolita. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25300, REES 20004, SIGN 26027, GNSE 24900

ENGL 28918. Comparative Literature - Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course introduces methods of study in Comparative Literature. We will take up interdisciplinary approaches, including translation and critical theory. Students will develop and deepen their skills in close reading and the comparative analysis of text and art forms.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: Completed Humanities, or Civilization Core requirement. The course is designed for the second-year students and above.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 20109

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. 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 may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies

ENGL 29900. Independent BA Paper Preparation. 100 Units.

Senior students completing a Critical BA Project may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the faculty BA advisor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar. This course may not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the major, but it may be counted as a departmental elective.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies