2025-2026 Catalog

ENGL 10104. Reading Nonfiction Genres. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to reading literary nonfiction - or rather, to reading texts that have only sometimes been considered "literary," with literary methods. We'll read nonfiction genres while thinking about "nonfiction" as a category, one we use and read in every day and yet rarely think about: what do we use this category for? Why did it emerge, in the late 19th century in English, and did it describe something new about nonfictional genres that became part of the Western literary tradition much earlier? We will read key texts in central genres like the essay, the autobiography, history, and journalism, asking what these genres share and whether the fact that texts in these genres make a claim to being true in some way influences how we read them. We will also read examples of texts that challenge our notions about what these genres do and how we define them: from documentary poetry to commercial self-help. Readings may include: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, WEB DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston's Of Mules and Men, Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Dr. Spock's The Common Sense Manual of Baby and Childcare and Irma S. Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10110. Intro to Porn Studies. 100 Units.

This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as "obscenity," "erotica," "porn," "filth," "art," "adult," "hardcore," "softcore," "trash," and "extremity." We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of "porn studies" and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography's invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 10110, GNSE 23143

ENGL 10124. Poverty, Crime, and Character: 18th Century and Now. 100 Units.

From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society's understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity-especially relating to class, gender, and race-become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Jacob Biel     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 18124

ENGL 10134. Gertrude Stein. 100 Units.

The singular modernist writer Gertrude Stein once claimed that she invented 20th century English by reinventing the sentence, a reinvention that sounds like her famous quip "A rose is a rose is a rose." This course starts from that claim as a provocation: what kind of prose style can Stein claim to have "invented," who followed her in using these new sentences, and what kinds of political, philosophical, and literary changes revolved around the English sentence? We'll ask these questions as we read across Stein's idiosyncratic body of writing and its complex relationship to her modernist contemporaries and the later 20th century writers she influenced. Stein was neither strictly novelist nor poet nor critic, but sometimes all three, other times none of the above; she was in a long term, open-secret lesbian partnership at the turn of the 20th century, a lifelong American expat to Paris, ambivalently Jewish, a fascinated and problematic critic of race relations. She was also a prolific art collector and, more importantly, people collector. In addition to reading key works by Stein, other writers and artists we might look at include William James, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Jill Johnston, and Lydia Davis

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10142. Wordsworth's Poetry. 100 Units.

In this course we will survey the works of the poet William Wordsworth. We will read widely from his body of verse, paying close attention to questions of style, genre, and form. Throughout his poems and essays, Wordsworth addressed many questions that still matter to us today. What role might poetry play in modern life? How might we understand the relationship between the human imagination and the natural world? Can poetry help us make sense of history? We will consider these questions alongside Wordsworth's poetic explorations of childhood, memory, autobiography, and political revolution. Select secondary criticism will help us understand Wordsworth's cultural and historical context. (Poetry, 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Will Thompson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20435

ENGL 10144. Jane Austen and Literary Style. 100 Units.

Jane Austen was a master stylist. This is one of many reasons why her novels have had such a lasting cultural impact. But what specifically are we talking about when we refer to Austen's "style"? This course attempts to answer this question by exploring the development of Austen's style across three of her major novels: the early Northanger Abbey (1803), the middle-period Sense and Sensibility (1811), and the late Persuasion (1818). Throughout, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret one of her trademark formal techniques, free indirect discourse. We will also address the question of literary style alongside a host of related topics: narration, characterization, focalization, and voice. Select secondary readings may include works by narratologists, philosophers, and literary critics. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Will Thompson     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10158. The Origins of Modern Horror. 100 Units.

This course explores the origins of the genre that we would today call "horror" by examining its foundational roots in the literature of the Romantic era. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays concerned with the supernatural, with hauntings and ghosts, with ruins and lost worlds. We will consider the socioeconomic and historical conditions that helped give rise to this kind of aesthetic production. We will also consider the uses and purposes of the horror genre today.

Instructor(s): Will Thompson     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10402. Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern. 100 Units.

This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love. (Drama, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12135

ENGL 10404. Introduction to 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 10406. Eating in Early Modern England: Gender, Race, Food. 100 Units.

The relationship between the construct of idealized femininity and food consumption has a long and troubled history; this course looks at this relationship through premodern Anglophone Literature. From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, this course situates discourses about "proper" gender performance and "proper" eating habits alongside those of race, religion, sexuality, commodity trade, and colonization to reveal the messy and complicated sociopolitical history of the dinner table.(Fiction, Pre-1650)

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12136

ENGL 10408. Black American Fiction: Satire and Critique. 100 Units.

This course explores the power of satire in works of fiction written by black Americans. As we read novels and essays written under the racist regime of Jim Crow and in its aftermath, we will approach satire as a flexible expressive practice that shapes critical judgment into an artistic form. Foundational to the form of the novel, satire is one of the oldest means by which literature has tried to intervene in the world. By examining the genre of satire in general and as African American writers have used it to interrogate the relationship between racism, capitalism, and cultural production in the U.S., we will examine how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. With an attention to the political economy of racism in the US and the role of literature in anti-racist struggle, we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fictional works include George Schuyler's Black No More (1931), an incisive work of science fiction and the first great African-American satirical novel; Ishmael Reed's carnivalesque "NeoHooDoo" novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972); and Percival Everett's experimental novel Erasure (2001) along with its recent film adaptation, American Fiction (2023). Critical writers may include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, Zora Neale Hurston, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren.

Instructor(s): Christopher Gortmaker     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 10408, AMER 10408

ENGL 10410. Renaissance Insomniacs. 100 Units.

The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can't," writes French author Marie Darrieussecq in her 2023 memoir on insomnia, Sleepless. Darrieussecq exemplifies, here, a pithy grandiosity commonly born out of the debilitating state of insomnia. In this course, we will explore the broader history of literary insomnia by focusing on early modern English articulations of sleeplessness alongside their political and intellectual contexts-for instance, classical theorizations of insomnium (sometimes glossed as "nightmare"), melancholy, and the cultural politics of "biphasic sleep." Students will also be encouraged to think alongside contemporary research and depictions of insomnia, especially as the condition becomes increasingly concerning in our increasingly sleep-deprived world. What might historical and literary study offer ongoing investigations of sleeplessness? From the bewitching "incubus" in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, to Macbeth's dramatization of "murder'd sleep," to the poetic descriptions of "slumb'rous weight" and hellish restlessness in Milton's Paradise Lost, this course seeks to uncover insights yielded by various efforts to render in writing this uniquely oppressive state of restlessness. (Drama, Poetry, Pre-165)

Instructor(s): Andrés Irigoyen     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10411. Survival Guides: Apocalypse, Dystopia, and the End of the World. 100 Units.

Stories of apocalypse invite readers into worlds in ruin. Issues surrounding housing, energy, class, and race permeate these narratives as authors seek to both reflect and critique the shortcomings of our current world. But do these narratives serve as mere pessimistic takes on the future of human society, or can they be read as cautionary tales invested in a future that does not have to end in disaster? If so, what arguments do they make for different ways of societal being? Could apocalyptic narratives even be considered survival guides? These are the questions that frame this seminar, which features 20th and 21st century dystopian, apocalyptic, and end of the world stories by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and analyze speculative literary conventions, situate assigned primary and secondary works within a larger context of contemporary dystopian writing, and come up with their own arguments about how these narratives may or may not teach us how to survive--and even prevent--the end of the world.

Instructor(s): Misha McDaniel     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10412. Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future. 100 Units.

This course explores novels about climate change alongside works of critical theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. We will investigate how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its development and/or collapse. In particular, we will attend to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to "make it new." Thus, at the same time as we study the ways in which climate fiction can render the consequences of climate change intelligible-telling stories that range from the despairing to the hopeful, the surreal to the realistic-we will also debate modernism's aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction may include Virginia Woolf, Kim Stanley Robinson, H.G. Wells, Jeff VanderMeer, E.M. Forster, Ben Lerner, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory may include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Amitav Ghosh.(Fiction, Poetry, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Christopher Gortmaker     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 20412

ENGL 10415. The Arts of Enchantment: Occultism and Modern Culture. 100 Units.

Tarot cards, incantations, healing charms, constellations. These have in common not just their purported magic properties, but aesthetic expressiveness: their appearance and perceptible form are linked to their supernatural power. In this course, we will explore the relationship between art and magic, tracing the reciprocal pathways of influence and inspiration between the occult as a domain of oppositional religion, and cultural developments in modern poetry, fiction, visual art, and film (often spurred by occult practitioners themselves.) How has occultism functioned as an aesthetically productive source of contradiction, conflict, and questioning, even as multiple occult traditions seek to consolidate meaning in a world of changing values? We will map the myriad ways that the hidden, discredited, and rejected traditions that constitute occultism continue to exercise a powerful fascination upon modern society despite its supposed "disenchantment"; likewise, the ways that art has been used as a vehicle for contesting the disenchanted world and voicing its discontents. Readings may include work by Leonora Carrington, H.D., Robert Duncan, Dion Fortune, Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger.

Instructor(s): Cassandra Lerer     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10418. The Invention of Lesbian Literature. 100 Units.

What is lesbian literature? Should any text produced by a self-identified lesbian be considered part of its canon, or are there identifiable lesbian styles, forms, conventions, or other parameters through which we might define it? What is the relationship between modernism and the explosion of literary works taking up lesbian themes in the 20th century? In this course, we will tackle these questions and more while reading lesbian literature across the 20th century, beginning with queer(ed) works from writers of modernist period-Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Nella Larsen, before moving on to think about lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s, radical feminist science-fiction of the 1970s, and Leslie Feinberg's 1993 transgender novel Stone Butch Blues, among others.

Instructor(s): R.L. Willis     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10420. Ecological Performance. 100 Units.

We are scavengers," reports the anonymous narrator of a 1990 manuscript written by theater maker Rachel Rosenthal. "The land doesn't nourish us because the deserts are everywhere." Environmental dread has loomed large over the past few decades, and practitioners working in a range of media have increasingly foregrounded the ecological as a primary aesthetic concern. This course will investigate how recent performances have sought to understand, address, and redress climate catastrophe. We will look to a range of material-possibly including work by Rosenthal, performance collective The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, playwrights Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, choreographers Jerome Bel, Radouan Mriziga, and Lara Kramer, artists Rebecca Belmore and Olafur Elliason, and many others-in order to examine what tactics performance offers for reckoning with environmental collapse. (Drama, Theory)

Instructor(s): Fabien Maltais-Bayda     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10422. Body Problems: Theorizing Fat and Thin in Early Modern English Literature. 100 Units.

Whether in the doctor's office or in our TikTok algorithm, messages about body weight, size, and shape are ubiquitous in our current moment. This class tracks the history of this phenomenon through early modern English literary representations of fatness, thinness, and everything in between. Thinking with critical race, trans, and queer theory, we will read widely from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales through William Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor to Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World to unpack how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England theorized fatness and thinness through and with theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Instructor(s): Sarah-Gray Lesley     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10425. Bad Weather and the Empire. 100 Units.

Shape-shifting spirits, time-traveling algae, and secret islands: these are some of the climate objects we will encounter in this course that surveys representations of storms (and other really bad weather) in popular Anglophone literature from Shakespeare's comedy The Tempest (1611) to Rita Indiana's experimental climate novella Tentacle (2015). We will question: how did early colonizers attempt to use thunder and rain (pathetic fallacy) in their various writings to justify the expulsion of Indigenous peoples? What prompted 20th-century Haitian poets to liken the devastation of hurricane season to the political upheaval brought on by U.S military presence? Questions of the cultural and political will be at the forefront of our literary endeavors. With help from scholars including Christina Sharpe, Kim Hall, and Richard Grove, we will develop an (eco)critical reading practice that interrogates what "makes" the weather in narratives and counternarratives of imperialism.

Instructor(s): Lourdes Taylor      Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10426. Literature vs. AI. 100 Units.

This course explores how works of fiction and film from the late-nineteenth century to the present have engaged with and anticipated ideas about art, mindedness, emotion, and agency that are at the heart of contemporary debates about the cultural impact of generative AI. If generative AI poses a challenge to literature and art, what is this challenge? What are literature and art that AI-generated text and images are not? Moving from modernist explorations of automatic writing and the unconscious to sci-fi speculations about robots and mind-uploading, we will analyze how aesthetically ambitious works of narrative fiction and film reflect on what sets their meaning apart from the products of machines, and what sets their artistry apart from mere algorithms and marketing. Readings in literary theory and social history will attune us to the relationship between abstract questions like "what is meaning?" and concrete processes like capitalist automation-machines replacing human labor, for profit. Fictional authors and directors may include Bertrand Bonello, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Ted Chiang, Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Egan, William Gibson, Henry James, and Fritz Lang. Critical writers may include Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benn Michaels, Robert Pippin, Matteo Pasquinelli, Hito Steyerl, Lisa Siraganian, and Vauhini Vara.

Instructor(s): Chris Gortmaker     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10430. Experimental British Poetics 1960-Now. 100 Units.

This class offers a survey of the Late-Modernist British poetry movement The British Poetry Revival and its afterlives. After WWII, in resistance to a perceived stagnancy in British verse, and inspired by many of the young U.S. poets collected in Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology (1960), young British poets collected around England and renewed British Modernism. Initially clustered around London, Cambridge, and some Northumbrian cities, the movement (dubbed "The British Poetry Revival") has since grown to include the most innovative and vital poetic work written throughout the British Isles. Dense, loud, bombastic, aggressive: this vast corpus of work will offer students a view into recent British culture, economy, and politics, its world after the putative terminal decline of the empire, and its claimed "special relationship" with the United States. Its poets are now not just British, include among their number more women and queers, and are dispersed throughout the British Isles. This course will offer a survey of this movement from the 1960s to the present; reading will include its writing: from poetry to performance, correspondence to hallucinatory prose. Students will be asked to consider that poetry does not always look or feel the way we want it to, or the way we think it should. (Poetry, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): James Cole     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10455. Madwomen. 100 Units.

What is madness? What does it mean to go crazy? What does it mean to be driven crazy? This course examines different forms of madness, probes the relationship between race, gender, and disability, and explores the potential wisdom found in madness by looking to madwomen in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. We will both consider madness as an object within literary studies and the lived experience of the madwomen characters and authors through the lens of Mad studies and activism. Tentative readings include The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970), Freshwater (Emezi, 2018), excerpts from The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang, 2019), and others. Students will also be asked to engage spaces that center the Mad such as the Center for Mad Culture and Project LETS. This course will include writing components that ask students to read literary texts and/or cultural moments through mad methodology and a final essay in lieu of an exam.

Instructor(s): Rhya Moffitt     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10600. Intro to Drama. 100 Units.

This course explores the unique challenges of experiencing performance through the page. Students will read plays and performances closely, taking into account not only form, character, plot, and genre, but also theatrical considerations like staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. We will also consider how various agents-playwrights, readers, directors, actors, and audiences-generate plays and give them meaning. While the course is not intended as a survey of dramatic literature or theater history, students will be introduced to a variety of essential plays from across the dramatic tradition. The course culminates in a scene project assignment that allows students put their skills of interpretation and adaptation into practice. No experience with theater is expected. (Gateway, Drama)

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 19300, CMLT 20601

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): Heather Glenny     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20620, HLTH 26020

ENGL 10628. The Prison and the Laboratory: Carcerality and American Medicine. 100 Units.

This course examines the relationship between incarceration and medical experimentation in America, exploring how carceral spaces-prisons, asylums, detention centers, plantations-have been made into medical laboratories. Students will think about physical modes of confinement as well as symbolic and systemic strategies that have been used to enlist minoritarian and disenfranchised bodies in the production of medical knowledge. Readings will focus on literary fiction (novels, short stories, comics) and critical theory (critical race studies, disability studies) centering issues of bodily autonomy, informed consent, and racialization in the prison and the laboratory.

Instructor(s): Heather Glenny     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10709. Intro to 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): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring

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): CMST 10100, ARTV 20300

ENGL 11004. History of the Novel. 100 Units.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of the novel by examining at least one novel from each of the last four centuries, including our own 21st, and from all parts of the world (some in translation). We will think about various novel forms that develop over time, including, for instance, epistolary novels, the gothic, bildungsromans and the picaresque. We will also consider the afterlife of these novels in other media, especially in film, and discuss how and why they have proved so adaptable to cultural change. Additional material (fiction, theory, and criticism) will be assigned to complement discussion of the set texts. The novels may include Dangerous Liaisons, Pride and Prejudice, Rajmohan's Wife, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Blackouts. (Fiction, Theory, 18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Jo McDonagh     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 11200. Intro to 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. (Introductory Genre, Theory)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Autumn

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 12131. The Gay Men's Novel. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the history, concerns, aesthetics, movements, and culture of the gay men's novel, without the boundaries of time period, nation, or original language. The goal for students is to think in-depth about the relationship between sexual identity and narrative form, to learn about gay men's literary lineages and movements, and to think through queer theoretical concepts through fiction authored by gay men.

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12131

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 Summer
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22320, CMST 27916, MADD 12320, SIGN 26038

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): ENGL 32704, CEGU 22704, ENST 12704

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 13404. From Serving to Sex Work: Fictions of Unproductive Labor. 100 Units.

In this course, we will look at fictional representations of ways of life that don't fit neatly into accounts of productive labor (or work that is understood to create economic value) from the eighteenth century to the present. Moving across economic theory, poetry, drama, novels, and film, we will examine how depictions of so-called unproductive labor-from butlers and nurses to beggars and sex workers-challenge orthodox understandings of what it means to participate in the economy and contribute to society. Readings may include literary texts by Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, George Bernard Shaw, John Osborne, Margaret Atwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro; films from The Full Monty to Nomadland; and writings by economists and sociologists from the eighteenth century to the present.

Instructor(s): Jacob Biel     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 13512. The Future. 100 Units.

How did American science fiction imagine the future? While paying some attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged, we will work above all to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. The course will provide different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to explore 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 Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work across different media.

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's America is In the Heart, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer. (Fiction)

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

ENGL 13582. Crime in 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. Through a focused query into the relationship between narrative form and content, we will work our way through a syllabus that takes its point of departure from the conventions of the crime fiction genre but migrate outside of it. Some of the assigned authors/filmmakers include, but are not limited to, Foucault's I, Pierre, Young Ha Kim's Diaries of a Murderer, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Park Chan Wook's Decision to Leave. (Fiction)

Instructor(s): Mee-Ju Ro     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 33582

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 15009. Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III - Queer Capitals: Cities, Literature, Performance Arts. 100 Units.

This course explores the vibrant queer cultures of major global cities from the 19th century to the present. Each week delves into the distinctive histories and cultural dynamics of a different city, including Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, New York, Chicago, and Manila. Our study will encompass a range of topics such as drag culture, gay cruising, the history of medicine and forensic science, queer spaces, police power, homophobia and transphobia, racism, multiculturalism, AIDS activism, and the politics of same-sex desire. We will examine how these themes are depicted and interrogated through literature, cinema, and performance arts, offering insights into the lived experiences and social challenges of queer communities in urban settings. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with a comprehensive knowledge of global urban histories, an appreciation for the cultural innovations and political involvement of queer communities to cities, and a critical perspective on the representations of queer living. Fiction by Christopher Isherwood, Klaus Mann, Jean Genet, Adolfo Caminha, Mikhail Kuzmin, Patricia Highsmith, and Otto Miguel Cione. Films include My Beautiful Laundrette (UK, 1985), Paris is Burning (USA, 1990), How to Survive a Plague (USA, 2012), and Dance of the 41 (Mexico, 2020), among others.

Instructor(s): Carlos Halaburda     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Priority given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003.
Note(s): This course counts as the third quarter of Civ for students who have completed the first two quarters of the sequence (GNSE 15002 and 15003). Preregistration priority will be given to students who enrolled in GNSE 15002 and 15003. If there is space, the course will be open to any student during add/drop.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 15009, GLST 25009, TAPS 20059

ENGL 15109. Thinking with Melville. 100 Units.

In recent years, Herman Melville's work has received considerable attention, and not simply within literary studies; anthologies devoted to "Melville and philosophy" and "Melville and political theory" have appeared, and in 2025-26 his writings will be central to a conference on law and literature at the UChicago Law School. What is it about Melville's corpus that has made it amenable to so many different kinds of conversations, and what about it sparks particular interest during our present moment? Students in this class will have a chance to think across the disciplines with Melville by reading some of his most important work-from the exhilarating, epic ride that is Moby-Dick to shorter pieces from Benito Cereno, a tale of mysterious events aboard a slave ship, to "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." We'll read these remarkable narratives in the company of critical materials situating them in relation to questions of democracy, religion, colonialism, capitalism, the natural world, the speculative, and more.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Fleissner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 15109

ENGL 15600. Medieval English Literature. 100 Units.

A course on experimental poetry of the late 14th century, with special attention to how formal techniques of disorientation and discontinuity are related to the philosophical, ethical, and political ambitions of poetry. (Poetry, Pre-1650)

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

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. (Medieval/Early Modern, Drama)

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Spring
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): TAPS 28406, FNDL 21404

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: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 17504, RLST 26400

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): SIGN 26039, HMRT 17950, FNDL 27950, LLSO 27950, HIST 17604

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 18660. The World's a Stage: Performance in Politics, Culture, and Everyday Life. 100 Units.

This course traces the history of the idea that the world might resemble a stage from its ancient roots to its current relevance in politics, social media, and gender expression, among other areas. We will explore these questions by reading performance texts and performance theory from classical to contemporary, by attending plays and watching films, and by considering non-theatrical events as occasions for performance. Students will gain a grounding in performance studies as a discipline and will learn how that critical lens can fundamentally alter how we understand social life and identity.

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20060, SIGN 26049

ENGL 18860. Black Shakespeare. 100 Units.

This course explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about Blackness, in long-term processes of racial formation, and in global racial struggles from the early modern period to the present. Students will read Shakespearean plays portraying Black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American, Caribbean, and Post-colonial rewritings of those plays by playwrights Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Bernard Jackson, Djanet Sears, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Lolita Chakrabarti, and film-makers Max Julien and Jordan Peele. This course is open to MAPH students and to PhD students upon request. (Drama, Medieval/Early Modern)

Instructor(s): Noémie Ndiaye     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 18860, TAPS 20040, ENGL 38860, TAPS 30040

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, CRES 19960, GNSE 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
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 20000, LLSO 20000, SIGN 20000, LING 21500

ENGL 20035. Graphic Design and Social Movements. 100 Units.

Posters, publications, social media graphics, handbills, and other graphic materials have long played a role in sustaining and shaping social movements. In this course, which is part studio class and part discussion, we will discuss the role of graphic design in building collective identity for social movements, with a particular focus on the labor movement. Students will identify artifacts from contemporary or past social movements and use them as the basis for writing and designing a small publication.

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20036

ENGL 20072. Frankenstein. 100 Units.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions-at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek to control nature? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power? What are the effects of social marginalization and isolation?-are more relevant today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (including Plutarch's Lives, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. We will consider some of the many afterlives of Frankenstein (including James Whale's classic films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Ahmed Saadawi's absurdist war novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Victor LaValle's comic book series, The Destroyer, and Rachel Ingalls's suburban fairy tale, Mrs. Caliban) as a test case for better understanding processes of literary adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality more generally. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20072

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): AMER 40161, CRES 22161, MAPH 40161, ENGL 40161, CRES 40161

ENGL 20163. 9 Walks: Romantic London on Foot. 100 Units.

Students in this course will be invited to reflect on their journeys to and around the city of London alongside representations of walking from the Romantic literary tradition. For the Romantics-William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and others-walking was a powerful source of creative inspiration as well as a means of self-fashioning, contemplation, and learning about the world. Our primary texts will be poems and essays that explore the confluence of walking, thinking, and writing, in London or its environs. Each of our meetings will be organized around a particular walk, route, or trajectory and the set of concerns it suggests: the relation of country to city, urbanization and industrialization, mobility and embodiment, cosmopolitanism, sociability and solitude, and aesthetics.

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     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): MAPH 40171, MADD 25171, ENGL 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): MAPH 40180, ENGL 40180, GNSE 25180, GNSE 45180

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): GNSE 22182, ENGL 40182, GNSE 42182, MAPH 40182

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): AMER 40190, MAPH 40190, ENGL 40190, GNSE 25150, GNSE 45150

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 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): MAPH 40141, GNSE 45141, CRES 22141, CRES 40141, GNSE 25141, ENGL 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
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 20250

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 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 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): ENGL 40304, GNSE 41304, GNSE 21304

ENGL 20305. The Form of the Book. 100 Units.

The book format has been shaped by developments in technology, materials, distribution, and reading habits. This course will focus on the form of printed books through the lens of graphic design. Students will develop the practical skills necessary to typeset, print, and bind a modest book. We'll discuss developments in printing technology (letterpress, offset), access to tools (movable type, paste up, desktop publishing), mass reproduction, distribution methods, and reading habits that have shaped the book form. No prior design/typesetting experience required.

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20305

ENGL 20306. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. 100 Units.

A murder mystery where the riddle is not "Who?" but "Why?"---Why did the expelled student murder a pawnbroker? Why were innocents punished and exploiters vindicated? Why is justice out of reach, compassion rare, and even communication difficult? And, given these disappointments, why have readers and writers around the world been obsessed with Crime and Punishment since its publication over 150 years ago? Dostoevsky's novels "claw their way into us" (Iser), "we are drawn in, whirled around, suffocated…" (Woolf). Although he was "a messenger" to James Baldwin, "more human, better than human" in Akira Kurosawa's estimation, and "the only psychologist" worth learning from according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the real-life Dostoevsky was a desperate gambler, cheater, and chauvinist, not unlike some of the worst characters in his novels. He was recently heralded as both an example of Russian humanism (by Pope Francis) and the "father of Russian fascism" (by a Russian intellectual). Reading Crime and Punishment, we will endeavor to make sense of Dostoevsky's--and the novel's--failures and triumphs. Topics we explore will include historical events and the reception of the novel; religion, race, class and gender; and questions of politics and ethics.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20201, REES 30205, ENGL 30306, REES 20205

ENGL 20308. Advanced Typography. 100 Units.

Typography generally refers to the arrangement of type on a surface. It often goes unnoticed, because the way words look - their shape and typographic form - is secondary to the meaning they carry. Within graphic design practice, typography is one of the richest areas for formal exploration. This intermediate course will cover fundamentals of typography and look closely at the visual properties of text. Students will work digitally and use handwork to experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text for print, screen, and other media. Typographic history and theory will be discussed in relation to course projects. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40308

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: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40360, TAPS 20360, GNSE 20126

ENGL 20420. Autofiction. 100 Units.

The last twenty years in American letters has exhibited a turn toward autofiction: works of literature at least in part fictitious in which the protagonist and narrator bear the same name as the author (and some of the latter's history). This course investigates this turn by way of a number of exemplary literary texts (those of John Edgar Wideman, Philip Roth, and Sheila Heti, among others) while investigating the workings of the parts of speech on which it seemingly turns: "I." (1880-1990, Fiction; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Joshua Kates     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 30420

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 30400, GNSE 33167, RDIN 20400, GNSE 23167, ENGL 30422

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: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40464, MAPH 40464

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 20660. Minds, Brains, and the Contemporary Novel. 100 Units.

Around the turn into the twenty-first century, psychology "went neurological": human struggles that had long been viewed as expressions of complex inner conflicts and interpersonal dynamics began more and more to be described, and treated, as forms of brain disease. A 2009 essay, "The Rise of the Neuro-Novel," worried about ways this shift might wreak havoc on the fiction-writer's art. More recently, however, theories of neurodivergence have pushed back against some of the pathologizing language of abnormal psychiatry, while pop-Freudian stories of trauma seem omnipresent in novels, TV, and film.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Fleissner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 30660

ENGL 20707. Dramaturgy: Theory & Practice. 100 Units.

This course is a deep investigation into the possibility of dramaturgy as intrepid and curious storytelling and the role of the dramaturg in building worlds with playwrights, inhabiting worlds with productions, and cultivating worlds with audiences and institutions. We will think across discipline about the methodologies that make dramaturgy a heuristic knowledge practice. We will think critically about existing genealogies, best practices, and innovations in the theatre industry. Most importantly, we will engage in our own civic-minded dramaturgical practice and how engaged, thoughtful storytelling might have impacts beyond the walls of the classroom and the theatre. This course can fulfill the Drama requirement in the English major.

Instructor(s): G. Randle-Bent     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20705, TAPS 30705

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 are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain? 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 none 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" as 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. 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? Fiction by, among others, Jane Austen, Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain, and Graham Greene. Films by, among others, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, and Patricia Rozema.

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 20818. Female Complaint from Sappho to Aphra Behn. 100 Units.

Beginning with influential classical texts, including the poetry of Sappho and Ovid's Heroides, this class explores early modern articulations of female complaint, both in women's writing of the period and as depicted by male writers. The course takes up some works in the mode of gender apologetic and polemic, including excerpts from Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies, Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women" and Rachel Speght's "A Mouzell for Melastomus." It also tracks poetic complaint in the works of such writers as Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne ("Sappho to Philaenis"), Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, and excerpts of women's life-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. (Medieval/Early Modern)

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40818, ENGL 40818

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): GNSE 21211, FNDL 21210

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): ENGL 40202, MAPH 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 21285. Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy. 100 Units.

How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison's novels that pose the house and household as a "site of memory" in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison's literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, "language" teaches us "how to see without pictures" and that "language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names," we will aim to hold language close as we consider "what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company." (1830-1990, Fiction)

Instructor(s): SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 31285, RDIN 31285, GNSE 31285, GNSE 21285, RDIN 21285

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 21302. Aftermath: Literature of Reparation, Redress, Refusal, and Change. 100 Units.

What does it mean to address oneself to, or attempt to repair, legacies of violence and harm? What theories, resources, and models of personal, psychoanalytic, legal, political repair are available, and what kinds of possibilities do they enable? Is repair even a possibility, or a useful framework, for change? This course tracks the question of repair through contemporary conversations and historical case studies. Reading works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Eve Ensler, Saidiya Hartman, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, we will track how the concept of repair and reparation has motivated political action, activism, economic decision-making, artistic creativity and interpersonal ritual. We will read poems, engage performances, and consider other rituals of repair, breaking, and re-making. In addition, we will read literary and activist material pertinent to historical movements for reparations, including works from the Redress Movement for Japanese Internment in Canada and the United States and ongoing projects of the repatriation of Indigenous archival and cultural materials.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 31302, RDIN 31300, RDIN 21300

ENGL 21312. Research Methods. 100 Units.

This course trains students how to conduct research in the field of literary studies. We will learn and practice techniques of archival research, theoretical writing, close reading, literary history, digital methods, and other interdisciplinary approaches. We ask how and where do we do research? - in libraries, on computers, on field trips? What is an archive? Students will have the opportunity to begin to develop a new research project of their own design. This course is required for students who intend to write a BA Thesis in pursuit of the intensive track of the English major. However, it is open to all other students as well.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Saltzman (Autumn) & Josephine McDonagh (Spring)     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring

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. 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. Note: one session will be held at the Newberry Library's maps collections.(Fiction)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Open to open to 3rd and 4th years.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41370, MAPH 41370, GNSE 21370, GNSE 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): MAPH 41400, ENGL 41420

ENGL 21560. Intro to Science Fiction. 100 Units.

An introduction to SF studies. We'll follow a roughly chronological structure, beginning with early works of scientific romance and pulp fiction and moving from there to the experiments of the 1960's and beyond. Our focus will be on SF as a mode of speculation, not so much about what the future will bring as about the worlds already being built, the estrangements they produce, and the desires and fantasies that shape them and are shaped by them.

Terms Offered: Spring

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 21701. Transformative Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist American Literature. 100 Units.

The work of description-the way that writers convey the characteristic features and significant details of people and places in language-can contain and confirm biases and anchor stale tropes of identity, but can also refuse, exceed, play with, and subverting readerly expectations. Descriptions made for the purposes of political consciousness-raising, journalistic documenting, or narrative storytelling bring into sharp relief senses of ourselves in relation to perceptions of "otherness" along lines of place, race, class, and gender. In this class, we will read literary and photographic works by authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Agee and Walker Evans and focus on how they experiment with methodologies of description and representation of people borrowed from anthropology, photography, and documentary journalism, as well as literary techniques like stream-of-consciousness narration and first-personal disclosure-to productively account for the limitations of their individual perspectives and authorial voices as a narrative and poetic tool. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality, race and racialization, and embodiment impact these accounts of social worlds, relations, and cultures, and person.

Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 31700, RDIN 21700, GNSE 31706, ENGL 31700, GNSE 21706

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 present 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, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes and more)

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

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

This course reads science fiction and other texts (including theory, essays and zines) that imagine what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, and thus beyond or against the law, the police and capitalism. We will engage with these other worlds in an attempt to formulate our own visions of other possible forms of communal life and relation. We will pay particular attention to questions of liberatory struggle; borders, policing and imprisonment; race, gender, family and social reproduction; and environment and ecological relations. We'll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including encampments, blockades, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Tade Thompson, Octavia Butler, and ME O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors may include Saidiya Hartman, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Orisanmi Burton, Joy James and David Graeber.

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

ENGL 21785. Black in Colonial America: Three Women. 100 Units.

Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, "the Indian," we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of "tellings" were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time. (18th/19th, Theory)

Instructor(s): SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26076, GNSE 21725, CRES 21785

ENGL 21810. The Werewolf in Literature and Film. 100 Units.

Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures' storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories. Students will write a final analytical paper or produce a creative project.

Instructor(s): David Delbar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21810, CMLT 21810

ENGL 21815. Strange Lit: Estrangement and Literature. 100 Units.

This course explores the genre of the strange, weird, bizarre and wonderous in literary works from around the world and across various time periods. In contrast to the voyeuristic and expected othering of the 'exotic', the course interrogates the strange as an aesthetic mode that estranges the reader and disturbs and upends our familiar and predictable worlds. Theorists have explored art's ability to unsettle our automatized perception, interrogating our relationship to reality, the way we know things, and the basis on which we make assumptions. This course will trace how specific literary forms (like magical-realism, fantasy, sci-fi, miracle literature, comedy/dark comedy, and even scripture) evoke wonder and a sense of the strange. We will explore how these genres mystify and make strange things like the individual, society, modernity, the nation-state, the secular, economy, and more to unearth the myth-making inherent in processes of world-building, as well as in narrative. We will see ghosts in court, hallucinating nation-states, dead narrators, animated-inanimate objects as we move into the world of dreams, madness, and the supernatural in literary works from Iceland, Iran, Palestine, Japan, Egypt and more.

Instructor(s): Rana Ghuloom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 21815, CMLT 31815, RLST 26815, CMLT 21815

ENGL 21822. Photography, Modern Literature, and the Archive. 100 Units.

This course, co-taught between English and Art History, considers art and social photography alongside works of prose, poetry, and fiction from the United States. We will consider: what critical methods might bridge literature, art history, and cultural studies? Why study works of art and literature together? How might captions and placards be considered critical writing? The course will include museum and archival visits to help students learn further research skills in the disciplines.

Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41822, MAPH 41822

ENGL 21854. Reading Capital. 100 Units.

Capital is frequently described as a difficult-to-categorize text: part satire, part history, part theory. Yet for all this ambiguity, there is a sense in which the subtitle makes its generic affiliation quite clear: it is a "critique of political economy." What exactly is "critique," and how, in light of recent debates in literary studies, might reading Capital sharpen our sense of what it can and cannot do? And to what extent can it be considered a creative or poetic practice, as much as one committed to truth? (Theory, 18th/19th Century)

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley & Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Winter

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 22021. Collage Poetics. 100 Units.

Within this course, American poetry of the late 20th and the 21st centuries will serve as our primary textual/material object, but our conceptual object (or optic) will be derived, in the first instance, from work in visual media and various accounts of that work. Of course, distinctions between the visual and the verbal, the graphic and the discursive, often break down within collage practices. Writers will include Brion Gysin, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Susan Howe, Robin Coste Lewis, and Tan Lin. Some of our time will be spent in the Regenstein's Special Collections, and in the Smart Museum.

Instructor(s): Bill Brown     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 50001, CCCT 50001

ENGL 22048. Girlhood. 100 Units.

This course focuses on narratives in which the category of "girl" or "girlhood" is under construction, or called into question. We'll begin with a number of foundational works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Louisa May Alcott, Harriot Jacobs), and will move into novels, films, comics, and memoirs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (likely to include texts by Zitkala-Sa, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Myriam Gurba, and films by Peter Weir, Todd Solondz, Celine Sciamma). Throughout, the course will draw on work from fields like sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory to consider changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and development, as well as the way that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape categories and narratives of "girlhood." (Fiction)

Instructor(s): Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22048, CRES 21048

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): CCCT 22212, GNSE 20134

ENGL 22312. Virtual Theaters. 100 Units.

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, drama on social media, remote online theater on platforms like Zoom, algorithmic and AI theater, mixed reality performance, and transmedia performance. One unit of the course attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 32312, ENGL 32312, MADD 12312, TAPS 20312

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): RDIN 32350, RDIN 22350, MADD 12350, CMST 22350, ENGL 32352, CDIN 32350, CMST 32350

ENGL 22360. Working 9 to 5. 100 Units.

Freedom" under capital, Marx wrote, contains a fundamental contradiction. The worker is free to sell their labor because they have escaped medieval serfdom - but they are also "free" of land, property, tools, or machinery to create their own wealth: "And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." Since at least the eighteenth century, British and American literature has explored, and is often structured by, this conflict. On the one hand, the novel tells the story of the sovereign individual, guiding their own fortunes and producing order out of a fantasy "state of nature." On the other hand, radical and proletarian writers have deployed the novel - and later, the screen - as a genre of class struggle, critiquing the violence of capital and how that violence intersects with the violences of racism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This course will read widely in literary and filmic representations of work and workers from the co-emergence of the novel and modern capital in the early eighteenth century through the present. Primary readings/viewings include Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Attaway, Tomás Rivera, Jamaica Kincaid, Colin Higgins, Mike Judge, and Barbara Kopple. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, Marxist and feminist theory, and histories of race, organizing, and solidarity. Open to graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergrads. (18/19/20th)

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22360, MAPH 42360, GNSE 42360, 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): GLST 25310, SALC 25310, CRES 25310, HIST 26806

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. Seeing Islam and the Politics of Visual Culture. 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 use these 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 and 21st century.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Undergrad students register for Section 1; Grad students register for section 2
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 32500, GNSE 22511, GNSE 32511, ISLM 37555, RDIN 22500, ARTV 20667, RDIN 32500, RLST 27555, ENGL 32505, CMST 22500

ENGL 22515. Reading and Writing Ecological Obsessions. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we will read short stories, ethnography, philosophy, and cultural/art criticism that obsesses over one ecological thing e.g., petroleum, axolotl, pecans, palm trees, or fungi. We will study how a seemingly simple living or non-living object can be a guide, source, muse, and catalyst for social, political, and cultural knowledge. How do thinkers mix scholarly critique with creative/generative practices like autobiography, ancestral storytelling, and speculative fiction to express the politics of the earth? In a final research paper intersecting literary art, activism, and critique, students will reflect on this question to frame their own ecological obsessions. The course literature will focus on themes like deep time, extractivism, futurity, the nature-culture divide, and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. We will close-read representative modern and contemporary works of ecological obsessions from Julio Cortazar's "Axolotl" to Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.

Instructor(s): Natalie Cortez Klossner     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 22515, CEGU 22515, CMLT 32515

ENGL 22560. Staging the University. 100 Units.

This course will cover the rich representation of university life in non-professional Renaissance drama (including student-written plays, hazing plays, moralities, and satirical pamphlets, as well as intriguing fragments from lost plays), and the tantalizing glimpses this subject that the public stage offer. Plays include Love's Labour's Lost, The Parnassus Plays, Michaelmas Term, The Marriage of Wit & Science, and several neo-Latin plays in English translation. It will also provide a deep dive into the student scrapbooks of the late 16th / early 17th centuries; students will assemble their own album amicorum based on this curious and compelling form of self-documentation. Half of the course meetings will be taking place in the Regenstein Library's Special Collections.

Instructor(s): Ellen Mackay     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 42560

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): AMER 22680, SIGN 26080, GNSE 20116, TAPS 22680

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): FNDL 25311, GNSE 39610, REES 20020, GNSE 29610, REES 30020

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 23002. Technê and Technique. 100 Units.

In European thought, the relationship between technê (craft or art) and epistêmê (knowledge) has long been a fraught one. Crucially, the practical knowledge associated with skill or art in making is often subordinated to more abstract forms of knowledge production such as mathematics or philosophy itself; and in the sphere of art, poets and critics often make a distinction between 'mere' technique and higher or unmediated forms of artistic expression. In this course, we will examine philosophical and artistic assumptions and arguments about technê, technics, and technique by staging a broad conversation between poets and philosophers; and we will consider recent discussions of technê and the impact that modern scientific technology has on the nature of thinking and artistic making. Readings will be drawn from philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger, and from poetic works ranging from ancient epics to Wallace Stevens and beyond. Final projects may include critical essays, creative projects, or creative/critical works.

Instructor(s): Ryan Coyne and Srikanth Reddy     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): DVPR 43002, RLST 23002, ENGL 43002

ENGL 23101. Indigenous Feminisms. 100 Units.

Indigenous women, queers, trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people have been at the forefront of Indigenous resistance struggles, most recently at Standing Rock, at Mauna Kea, and in protests against Line 3 and Line 6 pipelines in the upper midwest and Canada. Their voices, along with Indigenous queer and feminist scholars in academia, have been working to understand the interrelatedness of gendered violences, land dispossession, and cultural appropriation. This class will consider how Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two Spirit scholars have theorized gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism alongside queer and feminist of color critiques toward accountable visions of resistance. We will read works by Indigenous feminist scholars, writers, poets, and activists from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first to consider how Indigeneity challenges how gender and sexuality are experienced in the context of ongoing settler colonialism.

Instructor(s): Jodi Byrd     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 30152, RDIN 23100, RDIN 33100, GNSE 20152, ENGL 33101

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 23288. Black and White and Red in the City. 100 Units.

This course traces the labor of Black and Native people in relation to Hyde Park, Chicago, beginning with the 1893 World's Fair through Nuclear Development in the 20th century. We will study the afterlives of slavery and native dispossession by visiting local sites and archives. Using methodologies from the fields of Anthropology, Literary Studies and Native Studies, we will foreground the importance of being in place, to situate ourselves as students and teachers in the neighborhood. Students will theorize themselves in place and in relation to those past as they work towards a public facing final assignment. (20th/21st, Theory)

Instructor(s): Teresa Montoya & SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 43288

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): GRMN 23421, CMLT 23421

ENGL 23434. Exile and Émigré Literature. 100 Units.

This course navigates the global refugee, exilic, expatriate and émigré crises and experiences as modes of displacement that permeate modern and contemporary literature. Using a comparative approach, this course offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the notion of displacement in most of its forms as represented by many canonical literary works produced by writers of various nations. This course compares the historical, socio-political, economic, cultural and national motives behind the experiences of displacement discussed throughout the course. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gestures, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity, Abjection and Assimilation, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Acculturation, The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging, Biopolitics and Zoopolitics, The American Dream and Otherness.

Instructor(s): Ahmad Qabaha     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 34305, NEHC 24305, NEHC 34305, ENGL 33434, CMLT 34305, RDIN 24305, CMLT 24305

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 24024. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Reading. 100 Units.

There are many creative ways to write of, about, from, and because of reading. In this class, serious readers will have the chance to practice forms they love and may not often get chances to write: the incisive review, the long-form reading memoir, the biographical sketch of a writer in history, the interview, the essay about translation, diaristic fragments. In this course, we'll develop individual approaches, styles and regular practices. We'll make use of both creative (and traditional) research, analysis, and criticism, and explore the wide terrain available to creative writers. We'll go back to foundational essayists including Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, study contemporary writers of reading such as Jazmina Berrera, Claire Messud, Niela Orr, Ruth Franklin, Emily Bernard, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Parul Sehgal. Students will keep a reading/writing notebook, conduct an interview, and write and revise a longer essay for workshop.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44024, CRWR 24024

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): MAPH 40110, ENGL 40110

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

This course will introduce you to early modern women playwrights from England (Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn) and from continental Europe (the French Marguerite de Navarre and Madame de Villedieu, the Italian Antonia Pulci and Margherita Costa, the Spanish Ana Caro and-beyond Europe- the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). We will analyze the complex works, ideas, and lives of those brilliant playwrights through the lenses of intersectional trans inclusive feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. Throughout, we will remain alert to the sense of possibility that suffuses these plays' political imagination. This course is open to MAPH students and to PhD students upon request (Drama, Medieval/Early Modern)

Instructor(s): Noémie Ndiaye     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24240, GNSE 20148, FREN 24240, ENGL 30148

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): RDIN 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): ARTH 25885, TAPS 20110

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, EALC 24520, MADD 14510, CMLT 24510

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: Autumn
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 24550. The Symbolic in the Age of Computation. 100 Units.

We will examine the notion of the symbolic from three perspectives: the phenomenological/philosophical, the computational, and the psychoanalytic. First we will look at modernity's relation to the symbolic as treated in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, and Panofsky. Next, we explore the symbolic in Turing's theorization of a universal computing machine and Claude Shannon's invention of information entropy. Secondary sources and Benjamín Labutut's "novel," The Maniac will also be read. Finally we will take up Lacan's work in reference to the foregoing contexts, including essays by Friedrich Kittler, Barbara Johnson, and Lydia Liu.

Instructor(s): Joshua Kates     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 34550

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 24788. Literature and Politics. 100 Units.

This class will be an introduction to thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. At least since Plato had Socrates argued that poets should be banned from the ideal republic, the relationship between literature and politics has been a contested one. Some have argued that all literature is political, whereas others have proposed that literature is valuable to the precise degree that it offers an escape from politics. We will examine these arguments, starting with Plato and Aristotle and moving into the 20th and 21st Centuries, and read literary works that directly sought to affect political beliefs and emotions (including poetry, fiction and manifestoes), as well as ones that many have valued because they offer reading experiences that seem to be distant from the world of politics. Readings from authors such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ursula K Leguin, Valerie Solanas, and Douglas Crimp.

Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Jonathan Flatley

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): ENGL 34960, MAPH 34960

ENGL 25204. Queer Theories/Queer Practices. 100 Units.

An introduction to key texts in queer theory (Foucault, Crimp, Sedgwick, Butler, Wittig, Bersani, Edelman, Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Heather Love), with attention to the AIDS crisis as key context for the emergence of queer theory. Alongside these works, we will examine a range of queer aesthetic practices (Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Zoe Leonard, Alison Bechdel) and some of the political practices in and around the Gay Liberation Movement and ACT UP. (Fiction, Poetry, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20150

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, SALC 25320, KNOW 25320, GLST 25132, GNSE 25320, CRES 25320

ENGL 25540. New Caribbean Writing. 100 Units.

Caribbean literature is having a moment. NPR reported in 2023 that "this region has long been punching above its weight on the international literary scene." We will read Safiya Sinclair's (Jamaica/U.S.) How to Say Babylon, a memoir of self-discovery after being raised by an authoritarian father; a new translation of Mayra Santos Febres' (Puerto Rico) collection of migration poems, Boat People; Myriam Chancy's novel What Storm, What Thunder (Haiti/Canada/U.S.), set after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and poems from Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad & Tobago) and Dionne Brand (Canada/T&T). Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

Instructor(s): Kaneesha Prasard     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 25630. Family Sagas: Women's Writing from Africa and the African Disaspora. 100 Units.

This seminar focuses on family sagas: multigenerational stories of intimacy, friction, and survival in women's writing of Africa and the African diaspora. We will focus on three recent, acclaimed novels: Yaa Gyasi's (US/Ghana) Homegoing (2016), Tiphanie Yanique's (U.S. Virgin Islands) The Land of Love and Drowning (2014), and Namwali Serpell's (US/Zambia) Old Drift (2019). We will both study the techniques that these writers use to craft their stories and test them out in short stories or novel excerpts of our own. Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya & Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 25700. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. 100 Units.

The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing.

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35700, ENGL 35700

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): MADD 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: Not offered in 2025-2026
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): MADD 20700, TAPS 28466, ENGL 32314, ARTV 30700, CMST 35954, CMST 25954, BPRO 28700, ARTV 20700

ENGL 25988. James Baldwin. 100 Units.

In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an "artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian" who must "make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." All in all, his artistic mission was to express "what it is like to be alive." Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin's concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination.

Instructor(s): Korey Williams     Terms Offered: Autumn

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): SCTH 26002, RLST 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): AMER 40150, ENGL 45150, MAPH 40150, AMER 25150

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): ENGL 36230, HLTH 26230, ARTV 20018, KNOW 36230, HIPS 26230

ENGL 26240. Monster Fictions. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to major works in 20th and 21st century North American monster fiction and cinema through the lens of critical race studies. The class will study and interrogate monster categories like zombies, werewolves, and vampires. Authors include Stephen Graham Jones and Octavia Butler; filmmakers include Guillermo del Toro and George Romero.

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(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): ENGL 46240, MAPH 46240

ENGL 26249. Literary Lessons for Economists? 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): SIGN 26064, LLSO 26249

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
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20752, RDIN 26252

ENGL 26284. The Problem of Huckleberry Finn. 100 Units.

From the moment of its first publication in 1884 through its recent re-imagining by Percival Everett in his 2024 novel, James, which retells the story of Huck from the perspective of Jim, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has elicited intense adulation and condemnation. In this course, we will take up Twain's novel in its historical moment and across the long history of its reception, seeking to understand what the novel has meant for its many readers and whether it should continue to merit our attention and admiration in the present. Our goal is not merely to understand Twain's novel, but also to see what it tells us about American literature as a whole. In addition to Twain's novel and Everett's retelling, we will read commentary by Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison and various other writers and critics. (Fiction, 18th/19th)

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): RLVC 36401, RLST 26401, ENGL 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): ENGL 34850, SCTH 36014, FNDL 26614

ENGL 26680. Literary Games: Oulipo and Onward. 100 Units.

Does constraint foster creativity? Can wordplay carry political meaning? Is formal innovation divorced from lyrical expression? How do experimental literary movements respond to their sociopolitical moments and local contexts, and how do they transform when they travel across geographical and linguistic borders? We will consider these questions via the work of the longest-lived French literary group, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), examining its origins as a quasi-secret society in 1960 and its expansion into an internationally visible and multilingual collective (with members from Italy, Spain, Argentina, and the US). We will investigate debates about inspiration and authorship, copying and plagiarism, collective creation, multilingualism, constraint and translation, and the viability of the lyric subject. While considering antecedents (Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel), our readings will explore several generations of Oulipians (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail, Anne Garréta, Frédéric Forte), and conclude with some very contemporary Oulipo-inspired writing from around the world (Christian Bök, Urayoán Noel, Mónica de la Torre, K. Silem Mohammed). Alongside critical essays, students will carry out short experiments with constraint and procedure, as well as translation exercises; and they will have the opportunity for dialogue with acclaimed writers and scholars who will visit our seminar.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin and Alison James     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open to advanced undergraduates. Students who are taking the class for French credit will complete some readings and writings in French.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 26680, FREN 36680, ENGL 36680, CMLT 36680, CMLT 26680

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): GNSE 36855, CMLT 26855, ENGL 36855, CMLT 36855, GNSE 20130, RLVC 36855, RLST 26885

ENGL 26994. Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought. 100 Units.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 36994, GNSE 36994, CMLT 26994, HMRT 26994, CMLT 36994, NEHC 26994, REES 26994, GNSE 26994, RDIN 26994

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): KNOW 27013, HIPS 27006

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, CHSS 37015, HLTH 27015, KNOW 37015, HIPS 27015

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): HMRT 37102, HMRT 27102, ENGL 47102

ENGL 27505. Revivals: Colonial, Gothic, and Craft. 100 Units.

This course will examine so-called stylistic revivals in the history of modern decorative arts and design. Through an examination of "revival" objects, the philosophies informing their facture, and the critical discourse surrounding their function and reception, the course will consider questions such as: What constitutes a "revival"? How are decorative art and designed objects marshalled for different ideological ends/purposes/narratives? What values appear to be imbued in certain materials and aesthetics? How have such associations been made/become naturalized? What assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and power are embedded in these associations and narratives?

Instructor(s): E. Warren     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 37705, ENGL 37505, ARTH 27705

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): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at the first class session is mandatory. Questions: contact vwalden@uchicago.edu.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20120, AMER 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): CMST 24201, CMST 34201, GNSE 28602, GNSE 48602, CMLT 22900, RDIN 37600, ENGL 47600, CMLT 42900, RDIN 27600

ENGL 27620. Appropriation and Adaptation of Shakespeare in Colonial/Postcolonial Contexts. 100 Units.

This course examines ways in which various works of Shakespeare have been appropriated and adapted in colonial/postcolonial contexts, with a special focus on Arabic and Palestinian literary and cultural productions. Students will be encouraged to examine the appropriation and adaptation of the works of Shakespeare through a close reading of the selected texts or excerpts. Students will have the opportunity to engage with important concepts such as intertextuality and influence while commenting on the author's admiration of Shakespeare's work or his or her challenge to him. All readings will be in English, although there might be an opportunity to discuss some of the texts in the original language (Arabic).

Instructor(s): Ahmad Qabaha     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 37620, NEHC 37620, NEHC 27620, CMLT 27620, ENGL 37620

ENGL 27700. Sensing the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

In this co-taught 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 the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city's foundations in phenomena such as the filling in of swamp; the river as pipeline; 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, tangible, and audible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene into a final experimental book project. Admission is by consent only: please write a short paragraph briefly sketching your academic background and naming your interest in the course. Send this submission to: jscape@uchicago.edu, amberginsburg@gmail.com

Instructor(s): J. Scappettone, A. Ginsburg     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing; room for several graduate students
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 47700, CEGU 27700, CHST 27200, CRWR 27250, BPRO 27200, ARTV 22322, ARCH 22322, ENST 27700, ARTV 32322

ENGL 27701. Lyric Intimacy in the Renaissance. 100 Units.

Lyric has often been perceived as a peculiarly intimate genre, tasked with providing access to a person's inner experience. This course will examine how sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers used lyric verse as a tool for establishing, imagining or faking intimacy, with potential lovers, employers, friends, and God. We will ask how the multiple models of intimacy available within English literary culture intersected in texts of the period, and also how that literature responds to or compares with developments elsewhere in the Renaissance Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Along the way, we will explore some of the following questions: what was the gender politics of Renaissance lyric? How did writers make space for queer or heteronormative writing and attachment within the conventions of the love poem? What looks familiar about the forms of intimacy we find in these texts? What remains profoundly strange about them? Readings will include poems by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 47701, GNSE 44441, ENGL 47701, GNSE 24441

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): MAPH 47703, AMER 47703, GNSE 23138, ENGL 47703, AMER 27703, GNSE 47702

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): AMER 47708, RDIN 47708, RDIN 27708, AMER 27708, ENGL 47708, MAPH 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): ENGL 47710, MAPH 47710, CRES 27710

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.

This class examines U.S.-based literature, film, theory, and other texts that trouble how key features of "private" or intimate life-motherhood, family, sex, love-intersect with "public" matters of citizenship and work in a capitalist society. We focus in particular on legal and political histories of race, gender, and class in America that shape the "publicity" of women's role in biological and social reproduction-like eugenics, racist immigration policy, slavery, and settler colonialism. Our readings and viewings center on ordinary people-and in particular poor and working class women-who struggle within or against oppressive reproductive structures, sometimes even discovering ways to resist or evade them. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel Le Sueur, Barbara Loden, Gayl Jones, Marge Piercy, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 47714, GNSE 23155, GNSE 47714, ENGL 47714

ENGL 27716. In a Queer Time and Place. 100 Units.

In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called "temporal turn" in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory's bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.

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): ENGL 47716, GNSE 40450, GNSE 23179

ENGL 27718. Reproducing Queerly: Sex, Race, Class, and Belonging. 100 Units.

In this class, we examine U.S.-based fiction, film, and theory from the late twentieth century through the present that centers on models of biological and social reproduction that depart from or disrupt the traditional white bourgeois nuclear family ideal. Cultural objects and theory around queer and trans reproduction will be central to our class archive, as will explorations into the radical potential of assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. However, we will be equally interested in tracing how the legacies and ongoing realities of slavery, settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and capitalist exploitation tend towards the "queering" of kinship relations for Black and Indigenous people, people of color, and poor people.

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 47718, MAPH 47718

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 27908. Tocqueville in America, from Then to Now. 100 Units.

Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States during the Jacksonian Era, his account of what he saw there, _Democracy in America_, has become a kind of latter-day founding document to which Americans turn again and again to understand themselves and their past. Although he was an aristocrat manqué and a failed politician-or perhaps because of it-Tocqueville saw into the heart of democratic society as it had advanced in North America, for better and for worse. In the decades since, generations of commentators and intellectuals have returned to his insights to develop an account of what makes democracy in America distinctive, and what ties it to the broader currents of the unfolding modern world. To explore this rich palimpsest of insight we will read Tocqueville's masterpiece along with the contemporary and subsequent responses to it that have inscribed his analysis indelibly into the American political tradition. Coursework will culminate in an independent research project on the legacy of Tocqueville in America.

Instructor(s): J. Sparrow & E. Slauter     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 27908, AMER 27908, HIST 27908, FNDL 27908, LLSO 27908, DEMS 27908

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 28230. Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion. 100 Units.

This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change-the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion's inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask whether and how we might also do the same. Open to third- and fourth-years with consent. (Literary/Critical Theory; 20th/21s

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 28230, ENGL 38230, GNSE 38230

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): RLST 28510, ENGL 38500, RLVC 38500, RAME 38500

ENGL 28619. Postcolonial Openings. 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 critiques 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, and Arundhati Roy). (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 34520, GNSE 24520, ENGL 38619, GNSE 34520, RDIN 28619, MAPH 34520, RDIN 38619, KNOW 38618

ENGL 28661. Contemporary Palestinian Life Writing. 100 Units.

This course analyzes a range of Palestinian life narratives produced by authors based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out, thereby circulating their works as a form of Palestinian testimony. This course sees these writers conversing with each other, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. This course shows that such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity and advocacy, are ideal components of contemporary Palestinian literature that position itself as future-orientated, and expresses a desire to combat the international community's failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights for justice and self-determination. This course contends that contemporary Palestinian life writing goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and solidarity at the time Palestine is still a place that is not fully recognized. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to read and discuss texts in the original language (Arabic).

Instructor(s): Ahmad Qabaha     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 38660, RDIN 28660, ENGL 38661, NEHC 28660, RDIN 38660, CMLT 38660, CMLT 28660

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

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 38710, MAPH 40120

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, GRMN 28872, CMLT 28872, FNDL 28872

ENGL 28902. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

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

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: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24900, SIGN 26027, FNDL 25300, REES 20004

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 29705. Incarcerated Life. 100 Units.

The United States today is in the midst of an incarceration crisis, one in which millions of Americans are currently warehoused within, or have passed through, carceral institutions. Many scholars locate the emergence of this punitive turn in the 1970s, and with good reason: the landscape of penality and confinement looks much different in earlier historical periods. Turning to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this course will explore literary, philosophical, and pragmatic engagements with the prison across the British Empire and in the postcolonial United States. By tracing the particular fears and fantasies that grouped around institutions of confinement, we will explore the logic by which an institution once marginal to social life has become so central to society that incarceration is now a conventional form of life. This course will involve a robust research component, culminating in a final paper; while this course is rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students will be welcome to pursue research on contemporary regimes of incarceration. Our theoretical readings will include Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Our archive of literary, philosophical, and practical texts will include the Newgate Calendar, Cesare Beccaria, Oliver Goldsmith, John Gay, Jeremy Bentham, James Williams, Harriet Jacobs, and Austin Reed. (Fiction, 1650-1830, 1830-1990, Literary/Critical Theory) This is Seminar in Research and Criticism.

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): This course is limited to 15 third- and fourth-year students who have already fulfilled the Department’s Gateway requirement and taken at least two further English courses.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 49705

ENGL 29710. Print and the Pro-Slavery International. 100 Units.

This course explores what is perhaps the most perverse ideology to emerge from the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: pro-slavery thought. This course will trace the history of pro-slavery thought from its emergence in eighteenth-century Britain through its apotheosis in the Lost Cause literature of the postbellum American South. Alongside readings of literary works (including, for instance, pro-slavery rewrites of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mitchell's Gone with the Wind), we will reconstruct the networks of print, patronage, and commerce that circulated ephemeral print material through the pro-slavery international. This course will be of particular interest to students who want to learn how to work with historical periodicals and pamphlet literature, as well as to students interested in the relationship between interest groups and popular culture.

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 49710

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