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. (Theory)

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): GNSE 23143, MADD 10110

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. (Fiction, 1830-1990, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Spring

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: Winter

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, Medieval/Early Modern)

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. (Poetry)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     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 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: Spring
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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

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

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. (Pre-1650, Medieval/Early Modern)

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. (Fiction, 1830-1990, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Chris Gortmaker     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10432. Literature and the Law. 100 Units.

This course explores what literature can teach us about the law, and vice-versa. Through fiction, films, statutes, and court cases drawn from the legal and literary history of the United States, students will ask questions such as: How do legal concepts rely on literary techniques such as storytelling? What laws shape literature, both in its writing and in its reception in society? And how do we interpret the language of both literary and legal texts? Course topics will be organized roughly around major practice areas of the law-such as contracts, torts, property, constitutional, and criminal law-as well as cases presently before the Supreme Court. Students interested in legal and non-legal careers alike will explore the history, context, and unfolding present of the laws and literature of the United States. Likely readings include work by authors Charles Chesnutt, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison as well as landmark court cases Plessy v. Ferguson, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Obergefell v. Hodges.

Instructor(s): Adam Fales      Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10434. Moby-Dick. 100 Units.

In this course, students will read Herman Melville's 1851 Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Through this text, we will explore a variety of issues still relevant to our contemporary moment, including questions of racial prejudice, environmental destruction, violence against both human and nonhuman beings, and threats to democracy. Students will engage with a variety of critical perspectives, including those from queer theory, Black studies, ecocriticism, Marxism, feminism, and book history. In addition to a thorough understanding of this one text, students will gain a deeper understanding of Melville's career, his historical context, and creative adaptations of his work since its nineteenth-century publication.

Instructor(s): Adam Fales     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10438. Lies, Mess, Gossip. 100 Units.

What happens when we take seriously stories that can't be vedrified? In this course, we'll explore how bodies and the stories told about them are often assumed to track truth. Rooted in Black Studies and Trans and Queer Studies, we'll examine how bodies-through rumor, gossip, and even lies-become sites where power and identity are made and unmade. Rather than dismissing these untidy truths, we'll learn to read them as responsive disruptions to the historical moments in which they took place, as approaches to reconsider belonging, power, and knowledge. Drawing on the work of scholars like Stephen Best, we'll explore how rumor and gossip function as strategies of self-making, challenging dominant narratives and revealing the messy realities that shape the world around us. We will engage with the works of scholars such as C. Riley Snorton, Jayna Brown, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Édouard Glissant as well as the autobiographical writings of Harriet Jacobs. This course encourages a collaborative approach, where students will be invited to bring in their own "messy" objects of study that reflect their engagement with specific conscriptions of race, gender, sexuality, and body politics. Central to our study will be genealogies of refusal-how Black feminist thought, queer critique, and minoritarian theory not only confront but actively reimagine dominant structures of power.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Williams     Terms Offered: Winter

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): HLTH 26020, GNSE 20620

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. (Fiction, Theory, 1830-1990, 18th/19th, 20th/21st)

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 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, MADD 12320, SIGN 26038, CMST 27916

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. (Fiction)

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. (Theory, 20th/21st)

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

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): 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

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): GLST 25009, TAPS 20059, GNSE 15009

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, Medieval/Early Modern, 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. (Medieval/Early Modern, 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): RLST 26400, FNDL 17504

ENGL 17950. The Declaration of Independence. 100 Units.

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

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

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. (Drama, Theory)

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): ENGL 38860, TAPS 20040, 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 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): SIGN 20000, LING 21500, MDVL 20000, LLSO 20000

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): ARTH 20035, HMRT 20035, 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 20144. London Program: Institution and Revolution in Romantic Arts. 100 Units.

In the first part of the course, focusing on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's monumental poetic work Lyrical Ballads (1798), we will consider the implications of revolutions abroad and of institutionalizations of arts and culture at home for the rise of modern literary culture in Romantic-era Britain. Wordsworth famously envisioned a new role for the poet as that of a "man speaking to men" who could make "incidents and situations from common life" the proper matter of literature. As he did so, Wordsworth was confronting both the disappointed hope of the "blissful dawn" of the French Revolution and a cultural milieu reshaped by the emergence of institutions like the British Museum (1753), the Royal Academy of Art (1768), and the National Gallery (1824)-all of which continue to define British national culture. In the second part of the course, we will consider analogous developments of the present moment, including the institutionalization of new arts like fashion, to consider where (in what scenes, and in what forms of writing and media) we might look for Lyrical Ballads of our own time. (C, F)

Instructor(s): T. Campbell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Program (study abroad) required.

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 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): GNSE 45141, GNSE 25141, MAPH 40141, 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 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): ENGL 30306, REES 30205, REES 20205, FNDL 20201

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): TAPS 20360, ENGL 40360, GNSE 20126

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): TAPS 20420, AMER 20566

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 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. The class turns to contemporary critical frameworks including affect and trauma studies in order to explore the dynamics of how these texts stage questions of suffering, sympathy and representability. (Medieval/Early Modern)

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

ENGL 21213. Literature and Philosophy: Knowing, Being, Feeling. 100 Units.

Modern theories of the subject - theories that answer the questions of what we are, how we are, and how we relate to others - have their roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers of the era, finding themselves free to diverge from classical accounts of the human and its world, pursued anew such questions as: What is the mind and how does it come by its ideas? How do we attain a sense of self? Are we fundamentally social creatures, or does the social (at best) represent a restriction on our animal drives and passions? Literature, meanwhile, examined these questions in its own distinct manner, and in doing so witnessed what many scholars recognize as the birth of the novel - a genre for which accounts of the subject are of central importance. This interdisciplinary course will read widely in Early Modern and "Enlightenment" literature and philosophy to better understand the roots of contemporary accounts of the subject and the social. Philosophical readings will include texts by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, Thomas Reid, Marya Schechtman, and Stephen Darwall. Literary readings will include Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. (A)

Instructor(s): Andrew Pitel; Tristan Schweiger      Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to undergraduate and MA students, and all others with consent.
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 21213, ENGL 41213, PHIL 41213, MAPH 41213

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

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

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

ENGL 21301. James Joyce: Ulysses. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 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 21300, RDIN 31300

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 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, 18/19)

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 21701. The Power and Politics of Description: Ethnography, Documentary and Modernist 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): GNSE 31706, RDIN 21700, RDIN 31700, GNSE 21706, ENGL 31700

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): ENGL 41710, MAPH 41710, CEGU 21710

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, MAPH 41720, ENGL 41720

ENGL 21730. Rewild, repair, restore! Science fictions of life-making in the aftermath. 100 Units.

Science fiction has long imagined human relations persisting and transforming on the ruined earth. Indeed, science fiction imaginaries offered horizons for human, and more-than-human, environmental and social restoration long before most cultural forms began to grapple with what we sometimes still call "climate change." This class reads science fiction (mostly American, from the 1960s-2020s), alongside environmental and social theory to begin to ask what it might take to live toward and in conditions of repair, and what repair and restoration seem to mean in our current moment. We will be particularly interested in where and how environmental restoration intersects with conceptions of social repair, collective life-building and liberation. What might repair require in scenes not only of environmental devastation, but of state violence, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the uneven distribution of dispossession and loss? If restoration is a process and not a destination, what might the daily life under conditions of repair be? What possibilities for transformed collective life and relations might be opened up by processes of repair? What might not be reparable, or when and where might repair need to stop? We'll engage these questions and more by thinking and imagining with environmental theory, theories of settler colonialism and racial capital, feminist theories of reproduction, communization theory and science fiction.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Email the instructor directly for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41730, MAPH 41730

ENGL 21770. Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction. 100 Units.

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis's account of "uterine geographies" and Michelle Murphy's work on chemical latency and "distributed reproduction" stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see 'biological reproduction' in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone's call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Email the instructor directly for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41700, GNSE 21705, GNSE 41700, ENGL 41700

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

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): CMLT 21810, GNSE 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, RLST 26815, CMLT 21815, CMLT 31815

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.

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41822, ENGL 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, 1830-1990, 18th/19th Century)

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

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): CCCT 50001, ENGL 40001

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

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

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): GNSE 20133, RDIN 20408

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

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

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

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 22500, ENGL 32505, GNSE 32511, RLST 27555, CMST 32500, ISLM 37555, RDIN 22500, RDIN 32500, ARTV 20667, GNSE 22511

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): CEGU 22515, CMLT 32515, CMLT 22515

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. (Medieval/Early Modern)

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, TAPS 22680, GNSE 20116

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, REES 20020, GNSE 29610, GNSE 39610, 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): 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): RLST 23002, ENGL 43002, DVPR 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): RDIN 33100, GNSE 30152, RDIN 23100, ENGL 33101, GNSE 20152

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 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): CMLT 34305, NEHC 24305, RDIN 34305, CMLT 24305, NEHC 34305, RDIN 24305, ENGL 33434

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): ENGL 43708, FNDL 26011, SCTH 46011

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 24024, CRWR 44024

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, ENGL 30148, FREN 24240, GNSE 20148

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 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): EALC 24520, MADD 14510, GNSE 24511, CMLT 24510

ENGL 24526. Forms of Autobiography. 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): ENGL 34526, GNSE 34526, GNSE 24526

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 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 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 Parsard     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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

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): ENGL 35700, GNSE 35700

ENGL 25805. Popol Vuh, Epic of the Americas. 100 Units.

One of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the native Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called "the Bible of America." It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical change, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we'll read this full work closely (in multiple translations, while engaging its original K'iche' Mayan language), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we'll examine its mirroring in Genesis, Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Diné Bahane' to consider how epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this tension between cosmos and politics, we'll examine contemporary adaptations of the Popol Vuh by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock, Humberto Ak'ab'al, Xpetra Ernandex, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the U.S. today. As a capstone, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking about how this story of world creation implicates us to this day. (Poetry, Fiction)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Note: students who cross-list from RLL will read Spanish-language texts in their original Spanish
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25805, LACS 25805

ENGL 25810. Writing Dreams. 100 Units.

In this course students will study poetry, literature, and art written with dreams and dream practices to better understand the relation between dreaming and writing; and to gain some creative practice in connecting their own writing to their dreaming. We will read literature from a broad range of cultural and historical locales to gain an expanded sense of oneiric writing. And we will intensify that reading with regular writing exercises meant to elicit poetics from the subconscious. In doing so we will trouble simplistic accounts of the subconscious as merely suppressed or hidden consciousness, considering instead how the psychology of nightly visions relates to social, political, historical, and anthropological worlds. Students will be expected to maintain daily/nightly writing journals with weekly prompts to facilitate creative works. Final projects will consist of a polished portfolio or some equivalent. (Poetry, Theory)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Winter

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): CMST 25945, MADD 14945

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, CMST 25954, TAPS 28466, CMST 35954, ARTV 20700, ARTV 30700, BPRO 28700, ENGL 32314

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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

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): SCTH 36017, ENGL 36077

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): ENGL 36018, SCTH 36018

ENGL 26180. Caring for the Earth: Nature and Ecology Before Modernity. 100 Units.

What do we mean by nature, and how do humans relate to it? A recent French translation of Virgil's "Georgics" was titled anew: "Le souci de la terre" ("care for the earth") What does it mean to care? Is care disinterested, or does it serve a purpose? What logics of dominion or obligation shape it? This course traces ideas of nature and care from Antiquity to early modernity. How did humans conceive of their place in the world? How did they understand its resources and their impact? From the commons to enclosures, from caretaking to exploitation, from interpreting nature to organizing it (aménagement), we will question linear narratives of progress (humans caring more) and degradation (humans caring less). Focusing on France and French texts while engaging classical and theological sources, we will also consider exploration and exploitation beyond France. We will examine how religious ideas, canonical texts, and philosophical concepts have shaped discourses on nature, as well as the relevance of contemporary ecological terms. Attending closely to the multiple ways in which human beings variously have articulated their relationship to nature or the environment permits us to ask, instead of assume, what might be the conditions and practices of care incumbent upon human beings today.

Instructor(s): Daisy Delogu, Pauline Goul     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 26180, MDVL 26180, RLST 26180, GNSE 26180, FREN 36180, CEGU 26180, CLCV 26180

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

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

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

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

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

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

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): MAPH 46240, ENGL 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, 20th/21st)

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

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): RLST 26401, ENGL 36401, FNDL 25307, RLVC 36401

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: Course not taught in 2025-26
Prerequisite(s):
Note(s): Students who are taking the class for French credit will complete some readings and writings in French and participate in a weekly discussion section in French.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 36680, ENGL 36680, CMLT 26680, FREN 36680, FREN 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): SCTH 36710, ENGL 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): CMLT 36855, GNSE 36855, RLVC 36855, RLST 26885, CMLT 26855, ENGL 36855, GNSE 20130

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: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 36994, CMLT 36994, GNSE 26994, REES 26994, RDIN 36994, RDIN 26994, CMLT 26994, HMRT 26994, NEHC 26994

ENGL 27102. Dissident Lit. 100 Units.

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

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

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, ARTH 27705, ENGL 37505, MAPH 37705

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): AMER 20120, TAPS 20120

ENGL 27600. Cinema in Africa. 100 Units.

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

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

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): NEHC 27620, ENGL 37620, CMLT 37620, CMLT 27620, NEHC 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): CEGU 27700, ARCH 22322, ARTV 32322, ENST 27700, ARTV 22322, CHST 27200, CRWR 27250, BPRO 27200, ENGL 47700

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): ENGL 47701, MAPH 47701, GNSE 44441, GNSE 24441

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.  (Fiction, Theory, 20th/21st)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28510, ENGL 38500, RAME 38500, RLVC 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): ENGL 38619, GNSE 24520, MAPH 34520, HMRT 34520, RDIN 38619, RDIN 28619, GNSE 34520, 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): RDIN 38660, NEHC 28660, RDIN 28660, CMLT 28660, ENGL 38661, NEHC 38660, CMLT 38660

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): FNDL 28872, GRMN 28872, CMLT 28872, JWSC 28872

ENGL 28902. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

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

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 28917. Literatures of Russian and African-American Soul. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 36208, CMLT 26208, RUSS 26208

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): Na'ama Rokem     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. (18th/19th)

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