Department of English Language and Literature

ENGL 30030. Short Russian Novels. 100 Units.

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the "spiteful man," the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the "accursed questions" at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 30030, REES 30030, ENGL 20030, CMLT 20030, FNDL 20030, REES 20030

ENGL 30100. Introduction to Religion and Literature. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): R. Rosengarten, S. Hammerschlag     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28210, RLIT 30000

ENGL 30148. 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): FREN 24240, GNSE 20148, GNSE 30148, TAPS 34240, TAPS 24240, ENGL 24240

ENGL 30201. Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units.

Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the "new social movements" of the 60s and 70s, this seminar questions critically examines the theoretical histories that have determined how we think about gender and sex, as alternately something imposed on us externally, as 'structure,' and something identity-based, subjective, and internal. Since the 1990s, developments in queer, trans, feminist theory and Black studies have turned away from imagining politics and identity as structures in favor of thinking in terms of disruption, performativity, and fluid models of social construction and political action against it -- even as the movements they emerged out of relied heavily on critiques of Freud and Marx, refusing as well as using their theoretical imaginaries of politics as (materialist or psychic) structure. We will ask: what is a structural analysis? What is not a structural analysis, what is it opposed to? What do we mean when we enjoin ourselves to pay attention to structural conditions? How does thinking structure predispose us to think concepts like "sex," "sexuality," "race," and "gender" together or apart, as converging aspects of experience or as different epiphenomena of a single system? Starting from Afropessimism and the queer antisocial turn, readings will move backward in time to ask how notions of structure have informed theories of identity.

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Undergraduates by Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21401, GNSE 21400, CCCT 21400, PLSC 21410, CCCT 31400, GNSE 31400, PLSC 31410

ENGL 30306. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20201, REES 20205, REES 30205, ENGL 20306

ENGL 31302. 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): RDIN 31300, ENGL 21302, RDIN 21300

ENGL 31700. 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, GNSE 21706, ENGL 21701, RDIN 31700, RDIN 21700

ENGL 32104. Hymns. 100 Units.

The course will track hymns from the early modern period through the late eighteenth century. We'll examine the evolution of the hymn as a literary form, focusing on obsolescence and adaptation in literary transmission. We'll start with the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, and analyze psalters (such as the one produced by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her brother, Sir Philip Sidney) and the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins that were used in Anglican services. We'll then take up the development of congregational hymns, hymns sung by everyone in a congregation, to track the way that literary adaptation among Dissenters became both common and controversial. We'll look at Isaac Watts's multiple hymns for each of the Psalms, his later Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and his Divine Songs for children to get at the importance he and other Dissenters (such as Anna Letitia Barbauld) attached to supplying words to all who could sing or say them. We'll end with a discussion of "Amazing Grace" and its use in the British abolition movement, and with a discussion of the movement of the literary hymn away from religion altogether in literary hymns, Shelley's and Keats's odes. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Frances Ferguson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 32104

ENGL 32314. 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): CMST 35954, MADD 20700, ARTV 20700, BPRO 28700, TAPS 28466, CMST 25954, ARTV 30700, ENGL 25970

ENGL 32352. 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, RDIN 32350, CMST 22350, ENGL 22352, CDIN 32350, MADD 12350, CMST 32350

ENGL 32505. 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): GNSE 32511, RLST 27555, ARTV 20667, RDIN 22500, RDIN 32500, ISLM 37555, ENGL 22505, CMST 32500, GNSE 22511, CMST 22500

ENGL 32705. Composing Composition: Writing Pedagogy. 100 Units.

Composing Composition is a course for graduate students who plan to work as teachers or who are entering the academic job market. This course provides a scholarly context and practical exercises that will prepare graduate students for the challenges of writing-related jobs in institutional contexts ranging from large research universities to small liberal arts schools. The course will prepare you to discuss the teaching of writing in applications to and interviews for academic jobs and fellowships.

Instructor(s): Tracy Weiner, Linda Smith-Brecheisen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): None
Note(s): Graduate students ONLY - limit 12.

ENGL 33000. 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): WRIT 13000, ENGL 13000, WRIT 33000

ENGL 33101. 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 23100, RDIN 33100, ENGL 23101, GNSE 20152, GNSE 30152

ENGL 33550. Sorry, Not Sorry: The Literary and Political History of Apologies, Confessions and Defense Speeches. 100 Units.

This course examines the genre of the apology and, asks-but does not necessarily answer-the question of what a good apology is. We will read a broad historical arc of classical Greek apologia and defense speeches, works and practices of Christan confessionals, Sir Philip Sidney's Elizabethan "Apology for Poetry", as well as criticism and theory about regret and forgiveness in the "Age of Apology" after WWI. We will end by reading a number of contemporary political apologies (as well as the archive of apologies offered by celebrities and YouTube confessionals) as well as a collection of alter-apologetic literature that re-works or responds to the terms of the apologies and offers antagonistic forms of relation to the ongoing present of settler-colonialism, structural racism, and patriarchal violence. In particular, we will read works by Eve Ensler, Layli Long Soldier, Jordan Abel, and Tanya Lukin Linklater, and the queer performance collaboration between Adrian Stimson and settler artist AA Bronson, works which explore how apologetic genres open unique ways to address a national politics whose power comes about through instruments that are bureaucratic, archival, and issued on paper.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 23550, RDIN 23500, RDIN 33500, SCTH 26101, SCTH 36101

ENGL 33602. Documentary Literature in the 20th and 21st Century. 100 Units.

In this course we will read works of literature from the 20th and 21st centuries that present, subvert, challenge and question the stories of "what happened" through a variety of literary, filmic, and documentary techniques. We will read works of nonfiction journalism as well as novels, examine how the development of photographic technologies and the circulation of "the news" change the perception of time and history, read experimental and poetic utopian re-tellings of historical violences towards activist ends of social change, consider the function of monuments and performances that attempt to preserve or change our memories of the past, and watch performance works and embodied movements that all engage the documentary. We will examine the play between the subjective perspective and presentational form of historical events and the people that documentary literature portrays through the work of artists and authors such as Dorothea Lange, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Joshua Oppenheimer, Mark Nowak, and Divya Victor.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 33600, RDIN 23600, ENGL 23600

ENGL 33809. Muses and Saints: Poetry and the Christian Imagination. 100 Units.

This course provides an introduction to the poetic traditions of early Christians and the intersection between poetic literature, theology, and biblical interpretation. Students will gain familiarity with the literary context of the formative centuries of Christianity with a special emphasis on Greek and Syriac Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth through the sixth centuries. While theology is often taught through analytical prose, theological reflection in late antiquity and early Byzantium was frequently done in poetic genres. This course introduces students to the major composers and genres of these works as well as the various recurrent themes that occur within this literature. Through reading poetry from liturgical and monastic contexts, students will explore how the biblical imaginations of Christians were formed beyond the confines of canonical scripture. How is poetry a mode of "doing" theology? What habits of biblical interpretation and narration does one encounter in this poetry? This course exposes students to a variety of disciplinary frameworks for studying early Christian texts including history, religious studies, feminist and literary critique, as well as theology. Students will also analyze medieval and modern poetry with religious themes in light of earlier traditions to reflect on the poetry and the religious imagination more broadly.

Instructor(s): Erin Galgay Walsh     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to undergraduate and graduate students; Graduate students may choose to attend weekly translation group
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 26119, GNSE 24104, RLST 23000, BIBL 33000, CLAS 36119, MDVL 23000, RLVC 33000, HCHR 33000, GNSE 34104

ENGL 34100. Foundations of Interpretive Theory. 100 Units.

The MAPH Core Course, Foundations of Interpretive Theory, begins two weeks before regular University classes and covers seminal works by thinkers such as Freud, Lacan, and Marx. It is taught by the MAPH Director and Preceptors and may include guest lectures by distinguished faculty members from different disciplines. The course is designed to give MAPH students a shared base for their further study.

Instructor(s): Strang, Hilary Bayne, Rowan Carloy, Chris Chia, Darrel Hutchison, Bill Kunjummen, Sarah Malinowska, Agnes Schweiger, Tristan Tusler, Megan
Note(s): Required for MAPH students. Others by consent only. Register by Preceptor Section.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 30100

ENGL 34526. 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): GNSE 24526, GNSE 34526, ENGL 24526

ENGL 34550. 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 24550

ENGL 34770. Digital Media Aesthetics: Interaction, Connection, and Improvisation. 100 Units.

This course investigates the ways that digital and networked media have changed contemporary aesthetics, forms, storytelling practices, and cultures. Along the way, we will analyze electronic literature, Twine games, interactive dramas, video games, transmedia narratives, and more. Formally, we will explore concepts such as multilinear narrative, immersive and navigable worlds, network aesthetics, interactive difficulty, aleatory poetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational media aesthetics will be haunted by matters of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other ghosts in the machine. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in new media cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37870, GNSE 34770, CMST 67870, TAPS 34770

ENGL 35008. Changing Worlds: J.G. Ballard's Apocalyptic Quartet. 100 Units.

Between 1961 and 1966, the English novelist and short story writer J.G. Ballard produced four novels (THE WIND FROM NOWHERE, THE DROWNED WORLD, THE BURNING WORLD, and THE CRYSTAL WORLD) that depict, poetically and concretely, global changes to the earth and its human inhabitants, n particular their imaginations. The relation of these lyrical apocalypses to science fiction, visual art, ecology and the philosophy of time, as well as their awkward coordination into a cycle, will concern us. We will conclude the course by reading Anna Kavan's 1967 ICE, which in a way complements and completes Ballard's cycle.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 25008, SCTH 35008

ENGL 35700. 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 25700, GNSE 20159, GNSE 35700

ENGL 35902. Virgil, The Aeneid. 100 Units.

A close literary analysis of one of the most celebrated works of European literature. While the text, in its many dimensions, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, attention will also be directed to the extraordinary reception of this epic, from Virgil's times to ours.

Instructor(s): G. Most
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 44512, CMLT 35902, SCTH 35902

ENGL 36012. 19th Century French Poetry in Translation: Tradition and Revolution. 100 Units.

A study of modern French lyric poetry: Tradition and Revolution, Poetry and Politics, the seedbed of Modernism. Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. Texts will be read in English with reference to the French originals. Close reading, references to poetry in English, and focus on problems in translation. Students with French should read the poems in the original. Class discussion to be conducted in English; critical essays to be written in English. An extra weekly session will be scheduled for discussion in French, for French-speakers.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 26019, FREN 36019, SCTH 26012, CMLT 36012, SCTH 36012

ENGL 36018. Poetry and Trauma: Hayden, Lowell, Plath. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 36018, ENGL 26018

ENGL 36077. 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 26017

ENGL 36222. 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 26223, SCTH 36002

ENGL 36230. 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, ENGL 26230, ARTV 20018, HIPS 26230

ENGL 36401. 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 26411, FNDL 25307, RLVC 36401

ENGL 36680. 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, FREN 36680, ENGL 26680, FREN 26680, CMLT 26680

ENGL 36710. 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 26710

ENGL 36855. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 37001. Shakespeare's Sonnets. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 17001, GNSE 17800

ENGL 37326. Politics and the Novel. 100 Units.

As a form, the novel seems ill-suited to political messaging. The very act of reading a novel stagnates political action insofar as it demands isolation and a retreat from collective life. Then there are the pitfalls of misinterpretation. Conventionally, novels include a variety of characters with differing perspectives: how to ensure that the reader understands which is the right one? Finally, how can a novel, after it has enabled its readers to withdraw into a fictional world, successfully motivate them to get up and intervene in society? Yet despite these challenges, the novel has also been the chosen genre for many writers, both reactionary and revolutionary, who aim to convince the public of their cause. In this course, we will read political novels and their theories from the twentieth century to today, paying special attention to how writers adapt narrative forms to try to control the inherent ambiguity of literary discourse. Readings will include theoretical texts by Benjamin, Lukács, Sartre, Adorno, Jameson, and Rancière; novels by Seghers, Grass, and Houellebecq, among others.

Instructor(s): Sophie Salvo     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 37326, FNDL 27326, GRMN 27326, ENGL 24326

ENGL 37660. Animals and Jewish Literature. 100 Units.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 27660, CMLT 37660, RLVC 37660, RLST 27660, CMLT 27660, ENGL 27660, HIJD 37660

ENGL 37803. The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CMST 47803, CMST 27803

ENGL 38005. Arabfuturism: Other Worlds and Worlding Otherwise. 100 Units.

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister projects of Afrofuturism/s, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These projects function as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only "write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come" (Parikka, 55). Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Tunisian Jasmine Revolution that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Graduate consent only
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 38005, CMLT 28005, NEHC 28005, CMLT 38005, ENGL 28005, RLST 27885, AASR 37885, ISLM 37885

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

ENGL 38619. 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): GNSE 24520, RDIN 38619, KNOW 38618, GNSE 34520, ENGL 28619, HMRT 34520, RDIN 28619, MAPH 34520

ENGL 38860. 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): TAPS 30040, TAPS 20040, RDIN 18860, RDIN 38860, ENGL 18860

ENGL 38926. The Romantic Fragment. 100 Units.

A central experimental genre of Early Romanticism, the fragment was defined by Friedrich Schlegel in Athenäums-Fragment 206 as: "entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog." This seminar will consider fragments both conceptually and as isolated texts that are, however, gathered together materially in medial collections such as encyclopedias and albums. What is the relationship of the fragment to totality or coherence? What kinds of knowledge and reading practices does the fragment presuppose? What is the relationship between the literary fragment and other kinds of fragmentary artifacts such as ruins, torsos, and cut-outs? Readings will include fragments and fragmentary works by, among others, Winckelmann, Lichtenberg, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Karoline von Günderrode.

Instructor(s): Catriona MacLeod     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 28926, ARTH 28926, ENGL 28926, GRMN 38926, ARTH 38926

ENGL 38995. Queer Love Poetry. 100 Units.

This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 38995, RLST 28995, GNSE 20155, CMLT 28995, ENGL 28995, JWSC 28995, GNSE 30155, RLVC 38995

ENGL 40001. 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 22021

ENGL 40141. 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 20242

ENGL 40203. Biopolitics & Posthumanism. 100 Units.

Much has been written about the possibility (or impossibility) of creating an integrated political schema that incorporates living status, not species boundary, as the salient distinction between person and thing. In this course, we will explore how biopolitical and posthumanistic scholars like Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Jane Bennett, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway have acknowledged (and advocated transcending) the anthropocentric ümwelt, to borrow Jakob von Üexküll's influential term. In parallel with our theoretical readings, we will explore how actual legal systems have incorporated the nonhuman, with a particular focus on Anglo-American and transnational law. Our goal is to develop our own sense of an applied biopolitics-whether to our own research, to future legislation and jurisprudence, or both.

Instructor(s): Nicolette I. Bruner     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.
Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 40203, CMLT 40203, KNOW 40203

ENGL 40305. The Archive of Early English Literature: Manuscripts, Books, and Canon. 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to early English literature through manuscript studies and book history. Throughout the course we will reflect on archival research as a critical practice: how do the material histories of early texts invite us to rethink the fundamental categories that organize literary history, like authorship or canonicity? The course will be both a practicum (teaching the basics of paleography, codicology, and textual editing) and an ongoing conversation about the archives of literary history, as sites of interpretation, memory, and erasure. We will meet in the Special Collections Research Center, and use the collections of the University of Chicago. We will first focus on the archives of Chicago's Chaucer Research Project and its principals, John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, who tried to establish an authoritative text of the Canterbury Tales in the early twentieth century. The second half of the course will focus on print culture and reading practice, with a focus on Chicago's collection of early modern commonplace books. Students will propose and pursue a research project in the U of C or Newberry Library collections, on a topic of their choosing. Students will produce a piece of scholarship that reflects both careful research in those collections and thoughtfulness about the place of that research in critical practice.

Instructor(s): J. Stadolnik     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 40305, CHSS 40305

ENGL 40308. 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. Typography is one of the richest areas for formal exploration in graphic design. This course explores major shifts in the reproduction of the written word: from type foundries and linotype to bitmap fonts, open type, and variable type. Working in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, students will experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text in multiple scripts and languages. Typographic history and theory will be discussed in relation to course projects. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 20308, ARTV 20312, ENGL 20308, ARTV 30812

ENGL 40309. Miracles, Marvels, and Mystics: Unknowing in Medieval England. 100 Units.

In this seminar we will explore how premodern literary texts imagined experiences of 'unknowing': narrating scenes of astonishment, misapprehension, and disbelief. Our primary readings will draw on a rich tradition of vernacular writing in medieval England. We will read across that tradition's genres, as writers experimented with ways to represent the wondrous, the occluded, the incomprehensible, and the horrific in a variety of forms, among them spectacular miracle plays, prose exercises in mystical negation, and the poetry of dreamworlds and alchemical secrecy.

Instructor(s): Joe Stadolnik     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 40309

ENGL 40360. Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20360, TAPS 20360, GNSE 20126, GNSE 40126, TAPS 40360

ENGL 40464. 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): MAPH 40464, ENGL 20464

ENGL 40565. 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 20565

ENGL 40818. 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): GNSE 40156, GNSE 20156, MAPH 40818, ENGL 20818

ENGL 41213. 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): ENGL 21213, PHIL 21213, MAPH 41213, PHIL 41213

ENGL 41219. Interpretation: Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

his seminar will be conducted on two tracks. On the one hand, we will study major contributions to hermeneutic theory (including positions that understand themselves as anti-hermeneutic). Contributions to be considered include works by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, E.D. Hirsch, Manfred Frank, Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. At the same time, the seminar will include a practical component in which we will collectively develop interpretations of works by Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Peter Hebel, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville. English translations of the assigned readings will be provided. (This course is restricted to students in Ph.D. programs.)

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 41219, FREN 41219, CMLT 41219, SCTH 41219

ENGL 41370. 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 21370, GNSE 41370, GNSE 21370, MAPH 41370

ENGL 41420. 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 21420

ENGL 41700. 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): GNSE 21705, MAPH 41700, GNSE 41700, ENGL 21770

ENGL 41710. 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): MAPH 41710, ENGL 21710, CEGU 21710

ENGL 41720. 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): MAPH 41720, GNSE 41720, GNSE 21720, ENGL 21720

ENGL 41730. 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): MAPH 41730, ENGL 21730

ENGL 41822. 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): ENGL 21822, MAPH 41822

ENGL 42103. Hemispheric Studies. 100 Units.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We'll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We'll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 42103, SPAN 42103, LACS 42103

ENGL 42119. Milton's Italian Music. 100 Units.

This seminar examines John Milton's encounter with Roman culture, first and foremost music, around 1640. It is built around the April 2019 performance in Logan Center of this music by the English early music group Atalanta, for which students will prepare notes and preconcert activities. Reading Milton's youthful texts, as well as literature and poesia per musica from Rome, while studying the musical genres and personalities that we know he encountered there, gives insight into this encounter between Puritan and Barbarini sensibilities, seemingly so distant, but mediated via music. In addition to preparing for the concert activities (including interacting with the singers in a workshop), students will write a research paper. Prerequisites: no music reading needed, but experience with 17th-century English or Continental literature will aid in that case.

Instructor(s): Robert L. Kendrick     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisites: no music reading needed, but experience with 17th-century English or Continental literature will aid in that case.
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 42119, ITAL 40119

ENGL 42411. Marx and His Cultural Context. 100 Units.

This course provides students with an in-depth introduction to the work of Karl Marx, situating it within the nineteenth-century literary, cultural and political contexts that helped to shape his thought and its subsequent reception by later thinkers and theorists. Readings will include important works in nineteenth-century political theory; proto-sociological studies of the industrial workplace; novels of labor and class struggle; as well as Victorian anthropological studies of culture, religion, fetishism, and the origins of the family. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Zachary Samalin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): open to advanced undergraduates and MAPSS students with the consent of the instructor

ENGL 42550. Reading Bleak House: Criticism / History. 100 Units.

Charles Dickens's great anti-law novel, Bleak House (1852-3), was formally daring and technically ambitious. Part mystery story, part comment on the age (Dickens called it his "Condition of England" novel), from its first appearance it attracted both enthusiasts and detractors among its vast, worldwide readership. In the late 20th and 21st centuries it has continued to provoke intense responses, generating a body of work that reflects the major trends in criticism and theory of the novel. In this course we will consider the novel in both its 19th-century contexts and in recent criticism. The aim is not only to read Bleak House - one of the great novels of the Victorian period - but to read readers of Bleak House, to think about the different ways the novel has been construed in different contexts, and to how it has shaped ongoing critical debates in, for example, narrative theory, historicism, formalism, and postcolonial literary criticism. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Josephine McDonagh     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 42560. 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): TAPS 20350, TAPS 40350, ENGL 22560

ENGL 42918. Exploratory Translation. 100 Units.

Translation is one of the central mechanisms of literary creativity across the world. This course will offer opportunities to think through both the theory and practice of this art form and means of cultural transmission, focusing on the problems of translation of and by poets in a variety of languages: it will emphasize precisely the genre most easily "lost in translation," as the truism goes. Topics to be discussed will include semantic and grammatical interference, loss and gain, the production of difference, pidgin, translationese, bilingualism, self-translation, code-switching, translation as metaphor, foreignization vs. nativization, and distinct histories of translation. Alongside seminar sessions for discussion of readings, workshop sessions patterned on Creative Writing pedagogy will offer students a chance to try their hands at a range of tactics of translation. We also hope to invite a few poets and translators to engage in dialogues about the art (these visits conditioned on funding that we are currently seeking). The course therefore engages with such fields as linguistics, literary study, creative writing, psychology, and anthropology. Its thematic and methodological implications reach across the humanities and social sciences.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone, Haun Saussy     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 42918, CMLT 42918, CRWR 42918, RLLT 42918, SCTH 42918

ENGL 43002. 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, DVPR 43002, ENGL 23002

ENGL 43121. Translation Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 43121, CRWR 51503, CRWR 43121

ENGL 43250. The New Criticism. 100 Units.

n examination of primary works of The New Criticism, British and American. We will consider the theoretical variety and different critical practices of these loosely allied critics, who were often not allies at all. Authors to be studied: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Kenneth Burke, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur, William Empson.

Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 36015, SCTH 36015

ENGL 43288. 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 23288

ENGL 43500. Archives of Slavery and Gender in the Americas. 100 Units.

This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival research methodologies with a focus on gender and slavery in the Americas. Students will apply their knowledge by working in historical and contemporary archives trips to special collections: to view archival texts from the period and to find an archival object of the student's choosing that will provide the topic of their final research paper.(18th/19th)

Instructor(s): SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 43500, GNSE 43500, RDIN 43500

ENGL 43708. 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 23708, FNDL 26011, SCTH 46011

ENGL 44100. T. S. Eliot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): RLIT 44600

ENGL 44606. Race and Literature. 100 Units.

Although in the mid 1920s the poet Countee Cullen deemed it a puzzle why God would "make a poet black, and bid him sing," it is arguable that from the rise of modernism, through what Mark McGurl calls The Program Era (designating the rise of creative writing programs as the dominant force shaping American literature), and into the present, it has become almost impossible to think of literature and race or identity as being at odds. To make poets and writers is to make them black, Asian, Latinx, etc. By reading a series of literary works and literary histories, we will seek to understand why making race and making identity have become co-implicated on the American scene. Texts: Walter Benn Michaels, Our America, Mark McGurl, The Program Era, William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, and Toni Morrison, A Mercy. This course will have a particular focus on guiding students through the conventions of academic writing in the Humanities. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Ken Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 44788. Getting the 90s We Deserve. 100 Units.

The aim of this seminar is to help its members recover visions, texts, sounds, concepts, moods and utopian impulses from the 1990s that can help us to see our way out of our current situation, that help us to imagine different worlds. Through a series of readings, viewings, listenings, and conversations, we will engage in an ongoing collaborative project that will culminate with a collectively composed and designed performance and publication at the end of the quarter. Two areas of thematic focus will be 1) the nature and effects of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War on political situations ranging in scale from the intimate and personal to the global and geopolitical and 2) the emergence of a new queer politics in response to the AIDS crisis and the corresponding emergence of queer theory. Our course title is inspired by a 1999 essay by Douglas Crimp, in which he argued for a return to Andy Warhol's films and art through the methods and concepts offered by cultural studies and queer theory, instead of the ones that a conservative art history had theretofore presented. Crimp's retrospective look at the gender and sexually transgressive underground film and theater scene of the 1960s in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of cultural, visual and queer studies motivates our desire to get more out of the 1990s for our troubled present.

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24788, ENGL 24788, ARTV 30478, CMLT 24788, CMLT 44788, GNSE 44788, ARTV 20478

ENGL 45264. New Directions in Postcolonial Studies. 100 Units.

Postcolonial studies emerged as an influential sub-field in English departments in the metropolitan academy in the last decades of the twentieth century. This course is an attempt to identify and map the new directions that postcolonial studies appears to be currently moving into, a few decades on. Some of these shifts are clearly signaled, while others might be less perceptible. Even as it engages with new and urgent issues, adopts methods opened up by new technologies, and identifies fresh objects of study that promise greater relevance and staying power, postcolonial studies is also encountering challenges to its historical focus and its method as critique. We will focus on six key developments in the field: 1.

Instructor(s): Rajeswari Sunder Rajan     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 45330. Affect and Theory. 100 Units.

An examination of a series of efforts, in multiple disciplines, to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion. We will consider the more recent "affective turn" in relation to a longer intellectual tradition, as we examine a range of terms and concepts including affect, emotion, structure of feeling, atmosphere, and mood, in readings by Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Eve Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant and others.

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 45433. Book History: Methods, Practices, and Issues. 100 Units.

What is the history of the book? This course considers answers from literary scholars, historians, bibliographers, sociologists, and anthropologists over the past fifty years, using case studies from a variety of times, places, and textual traditions from the fifteenth century to the present to introduce the methods, practices, and issues of the field. This hands-on course meets in the Rosenthal Seminar Room in the Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.

Instructor(s): Eric Slauter     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 46202. Performance Theory: Action, Affect, Archive. 100 Units.

This seminar offers a critical introduction to performance theory organized around three conceptual clusters: a) action, acting, and forms of production or play, in theories from classical (Aristotle) through modern (Hegel, Brecht, Artaud), to contemporary (Richard Schechner, Philip Zarilli, others); b) affect, and its intersections with emotion and feeling: in addition to contemporary theories of affect and emotion we will read earlier modern texts that anticipate recent debates (Diderot, Freud) and their current interpreters (Joseph Roach, Erin Hurley and others), as well as those writing about the absence of affect and the performance of failure (Sara Bailes etc); and c) archives and related institutions and theories of recording performance, including the formation of audiences (Susan Bennett) and evaluating print and other media recording ephemeral acts, including the work of theorists of memory (Pierre Nora) and remains (Rebecca Schneider; Mark Fleishman), theatre historians (Rose Bank, Ellen Mackay etc) and tensions between archive and repertoire (Diana Taylor).(20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Loren Kruger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Note: This course is intended only for those who have completed their undergraduate degree.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38346, TAPS 46202, CMLT 46202

ENGL 46240. Monster Fictions. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to MAPH students: 3rd and 4th years in the College email 2-3 sentences about why you want to take the course for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 26240, MAPH 46240

ENGL 46750. What Was Postcolonial Theory? 100 Units.

Postcolonial theory bears the honor of being a mode of inquiry declared dead many, many times-even by scholars associated with the theory through the early years of its development. This course will provide a critical introduction to postcolonial theory by working through the political and epistemological antagonisms that were at once constitutive of and destructive of postcolonial theory's coherence. In so doing, we will consider questions pertaining to contemporary politics and economies of institutional knowledge: Why do modes of inquiry rise and fall? If fewer and fewer scholars undertake work under the banner of postcolonial theory today, what forms of knowledge bear the trace of the postcolonial moment? Units will include "Postcolonialism and Third Worldism," "Postcolonialism and Marxism," "Postcolonialism and Globalization," Postcolonialism and World Literature," "Postcolonialism and Indigeneity," and more.

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

ENGL 46751. Of Whiteness. 100 Units.

In his essay "The Souls of White Folk," WEB Du Bois asks, "But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" This course will explore a multiethnic cultural and theoretical archive that grapples with the patterned and partial irrationality of this excessive racial desire. How does whiteness structure the racial/social field? What mechanisms regulate-or have regulated-populations' access to and desire for it? (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 46905. Performance Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a critical introduction to theories of performance and performativity across a transnational scope. We will read theories of performance that explore the relationship between text, body and audience alongside the history of performative theory and its afterlives in queer and affect theory. Drawing on comparative literary method, this course presents texts both within and beyond the Euro-American canon, across languages, and across disciplines to consider how empire and post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality shape performances and the publics that they address. We will think about the relationship between performance and politics and how performance as both an aesthetic genre and theoretical concept shapes the relationship between text, language, and embodied experience and explore the role of the spectator and their participatory function in the making of performances.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 46905, CMLT 46905, TAPS 46900

ENGL 47102. Dissident Lit. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 47700. 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, BPRO 27200, ARCH 22322, CRWR 27250, ENGL 27700, ARTV 32322, CHST 27200, ARTV 22322

ENGL 47701. 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): GNSE 24441, GNSE 44441, ENGL 27701, MAPH 47701

ENGL 47718. 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): GNSE 23188, GNSE 43188, ENGL 27718, MAPH 47718

ENGL 48000. Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.

Instructor(s): S. Skvirsky     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 33000, CMST 40000, ARTH 39900

ENGL 48230. Ways of Reading in the Long Nineteenth Century. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to methods and debates in the history of reading by studying readers in Britain and the US during the long nineteenth century. Our discussions and readings will take up a range of questions: how did nineteenth-century readers learn to read? What practices of reading did they consider valuable, and which did they consider inept or shameful? With an eye to technological innovation and political change, we'll consider the effects new printing techniques, railroads, and the expansion of public education. Through work at the Special Collections Research Center, students will develop hands-on familiarity with the material forms that shape and reflect the reading practices of the period. Focusing our investigation through a sequence of case studies of key works of fiction, we'll also spend a substantial portion of our time reading scholarship: we'll learn from current research on marginalized readers, reading societies, serialization, reading out loud, professionalized academic reading, and the circulation of pirated text. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 48421. Stifter's Modernity. 100 Units.

Probably no other author has been written off as boring as frequently as Adalbert Stifter (1805-68); yet Thomas Mann recognized in this boredom a compelling "sensationalism" and Stifter was admired by writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Benjamin, Handke, and Sebald. His work rewards closer attention today for readers interested in his extreme description, but also for its treatment of ecocritical themes and diagnosis of violence and modernity. In this seminar we will focus on reading his monumental Bildungsroman Der Nachsommer (1857). We will also consider shorter prose works ranging from his Viennese feuilleton essays to later stories from the collection Bunte Steine, as well as his output as a painter.

ENGL 48602. Black Queer Media (makers) 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20201, ENGL 28602, CMST 20201, CMST 40201, GNSE 40201

ENGL 48603. Cinema & the Queer Avant-Garde, 1920-1950. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20902, CMST 40902, ENGL 28603, GNSE 40902, CMST 20902

ENGL 48613. Poetry of the Americas. 100 Units.

In what tangled ways does poetry transform through dialogue across linguistic and geographical distances, and through performance, translation, and collaboration? This seminar takes a comparative, hemispheric approach to 20th- and 21st-century poetries from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to Canada, with significant attention to Latinx poets. We will examine developments in poetic form, especially transformations of the epic and the lyric, in conjunction with questions of modernization, globalization, and colonialism, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. This course is held in tandem with Fall quarter events including Chicago's Lit & Luz Festival, which stages Mexican-U.S. artistic collaborations. Seminar members will have the opportunity for dialogue with poets and translators who visit our seminar and/or give poetry readings on campus. (No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required.) (Poetry, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 58613, ENGL 26813, SPAN 48613

ENGL 48647. Trauma and Narrative. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar invites students to engage with literary trauma studies, a field that first emerged in the 1990s, and that has more recently been undergoing decolonization processes. Following calls by scholars such as Stef Craps in Postcolonial Witnessing (2013), we will examine foundational and current literary theory by questioning its validity and applicability across different cultural contexts and languages. We will read select fictional trauma narratives, in English translation or in the original language when possible. Readings will include select psychological and psychoanalytical theoretical literature from Judith L. Herman and Cathy Caruth to Bessel van der Kolk; (literary) theory by Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant and Stef Craps, as well as fictional texts, largely from non-Euro-Anglo-American contexts. Students working on trauma-related literary projects are welcome to contribute materials in their respective research languages. We will end the course by bridging discussions of literary trauma studies with recent debates around a pedagogy of trauma, especially as applicable the context of higher education. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 48647

ENGL 48700-48900. 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 48902. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): REES 30018, REES 20018, FNDL 27101, ENGL 28902, CMLT 29300, CMLT 39300

ENGL 49705. 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 29705

ENGL 49710. 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 29710

ENGL 50000. Pedagogies of Writing. 100 Units.

Pedagogies of Writing is a training course and practicum for graduate students hired to teach for the Writing Program. The course combines instruction in principles for effective academic writing and workshops focused on written commentary, instruction techniques, and small-group seminar design.

ENGL 50101. Literary theories for comparatists. 100 Units.

This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes in the study of literary texts and traditions from comparative perspectives. Topics covered will include literary history, textual criticism, translation (theory and practice), book history, genre theory (e.g. the novel), narratology, literature and colonialism, "world literature" and new philologies. We will discuss these different approaches against the intellectual historical background from which they have emerged but also with reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects, and literary texts from any language, time and geography are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with 'texts'.

Instructor(s): Sascha Ebeling     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the 501 core requirement for Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 50101, GNSE 50102

ENGL 50201. Pre-modern Critical Theory: Theory, Critique, and the Making of the Past. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern literary theory and to modern engagements with these theoretical interventions. We will explore how communities in the past imagined their practices of reading, writing, and interpretation-with especial emphasis on scriptural exegesis-but also what constituted a text, in the first place. How, indeed, were these practices foundational to the formation of communities and, in turn, to alterity? And what role do these literary theories and practices play in longer histories of "theory" and "critique." Staging dialogues between the past and the present, this course will ask what the political implications of designating an archive as "ancient," "archaic," "medieval," or "premodern" are in order to understand how and why the past is continually made and remade.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the winter core requirement for first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 50201, RLVC 50201

ENGL 50250. Moving and Being Moved. 100 Units.

This course considers the significance of mobility, migration and migrancy in the context of concepts of 18th- and 19th century-modernity, and explores some of their legacies especially in relation to literature.  We will focus on migration in and from Britain mainly in the nineteenth century, and consider, inter alia, how literary and other printed texts intersect with the practices and fantasies of moving and staying still.    Key terms are mobility and stability or stagnancy, emigration and settlement, colonization and decolonization, empire, eviction, dispossession, hospitality, refuge and asylum, and 'being moved' in all its senses. (18th/19th, 20/21st)

Instructor(s): Josephine McDonagh     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 50300. Principles of Teaching Writing. 100 Units.

Principles of Teaching Writing (offered in Autumn only) is for graduate students who have been hired to teach Academic and Professional Writing (The Little Red Schoolhouse).

ENGL 50400. Teaching Undergraduate English (Pedagogy) 100 Units.

*Only open to PhD students in English.* This course seeks to provide a setting in which PhD students in English, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching. With the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, the course is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy to help students reflect on and talk about their practice. Students will have significant opportunities to practice conceiving, designing, and running a college-level course in English, e.g., the opportunity to construct a sample syllabus, to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to grade a common paper.

Instructor(s): Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course is restricted to second- and third-year English Ph.D. students only;

ENGL 50408. Poetics Lab. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study poetry in the abstract, and in its historical particulars. In addition to reading widely across the spectrum of contemporary poetry, we will study the long history of poetic theory from Plato to Hegel to Adorno and beyond. We will examine a range of historical attempts by philosophers, literary critics, and poets to conceptualize poetry as a particular kind of linguistic and historical practice, including Russian Formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, historical poetics, and translation theory. University of Chicago Poetics faculty will visit the class to share their work in progress; and students are encouraged to explore creative, critical, and creative/critical hybrid final projects. (20th/21st)

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

ENGL 50622. Creations: the Popol Vuh and Paradise Lost. 100 Units.

While apparently worlds apart, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and the K'iche' Maya story of creation the Popol Vuh (1702) are historically adjacent works of world creation that remind us that world creations happen in historical circumstances, that creation itself is nothing if not historically, socially, and critically tensioned. This class thinks with and between these works to ask conceptual questions about creation and its relationship to myth and history. What are creations for? What kinds of thinking and feeling do they enable? And how should we understand the framework of comparability itself? At the same time, we will rethink the global historical currents within which the texts were written: the early modern anglophone, hispanophone, and indigenous worlds whose interconnections bind together the creation stories told by Milton and the anonymous K'iche' Maya authors. Listening closely for shared engagements with colonialism, race, religion, political power, historical experience, pedagogy, intellection, imagination, critique, and social crisis, we will look for through-lines between these works but also for distinct points of departure and incommensurability.

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia & Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This is a Ph.D.-level course, but spaces may be made available for MA or BA students who provide a note describing their interest and readiness for the course.
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 50622, SCTH 50306

ENGL 51000. PhD Colloquium. 100 Units.

This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to advanced literary studies. Readings are drawn from various foundational modes of inquiry that helped to produce our discipline and that continue to animate scholarship in the present. In addition, participants will complete several short assignments meant to familiarize them with common skills and practices of literary studies.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): This course is intended for first-year English PhD students only; other interested students need consent of instructor.

ENGL 51023. Narrative in the Time of Queer and Crip. 100 Units.

This course focuses on Crip and Queer theories of time as ways to get at varied understandings of temporality that destabilize the wobbly formation of "normal" and produce non-linear forms of life as narratable. By focusing on narrative unfolding, circling back, slowing down, and the precarity of the future, the course proceeds by putting two distinct strands of Queer and Crip Theory in conversation. We begin with what theorists have conceptualized as a distinct queer temporality (e.g. Halberstam, Freeman) alongside its complement, crip time (McRuer). We then turn to questions about queer futurity alongside critiques within Crip Theory that fully embrace the future as a way of embracing the present. Following these two strands, we see the productive dynamism and the tension between crip and queer temporalities in envisioning non-normative, non-heterosexual life.

Instructor(s): Sarah Pierce Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 51000, GNSE 51000

ENGL 51225. Sources of Critical Theory. 100 Units.

This course is designed to give students a broad and rapid introduction to the philosophical and other sources that inform contemporary literary and critical theory. We will cover a lot of ground very quickly. The variety of humanism at issue in our work will be the sort that informs common sense or, as one of our authors might put it, ordinary understanding of the things that strike many of us as obvious about ourselves and other people. The critique will not make anything stop seeming obvious. But it will provide some tools for thinking differently about contemporary commonsense understandings of human life. We will conclude by seeing the way this material shapes work by two prominent recent critics, Slavoj Žižek and Lauren Berlant.

Instructor(s): C. Vogler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): PHIL 51225

ENGL 51310. Images and Science. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 51310, ARTH 41310

ENGL 51588. Milton and Hobbes. 100 Units.

This course will examine two of the most important works to come out of the English civil wars: Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Both works deal, in radically different ways, with fundamental questions about the nature of human life and human politics. Throughout, we will contextualize each of these works with other texts written by Hobbes, Milton, and their contemporaries, as well as recent work by historians of philosophy, political theorists, and literary critics.

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): DVPR 51588, SCTH 42450

ENGL 52000. Research Paper Proseminar. 100 Units.

Required for students in their 2nd year of the English Ph.D. program. In this class, we will perform substantial revisions of a previous seminar paper.

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): English Ph.D. students only.

ENGL 52022. The Contemporary Novel and the Ethical. 100 Units.

This course takes its impetus from two important recent studies of the contemporary novel, Dorothy Hale's The Novel and the New Ethics (2020) and Timothy Bewes's Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022). Although they foreground some of the same texts-such as J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Zadie Smith's On Beauty(2005)-these books' arguments diverge radically. Hale argues for twentieth and twenty-first-century conceptions of the novel as a privileged site for the encounter with alterity, while Bewes refuses such accounts as inadequate to the post-subjective specificity of contemporary fiction. The present course is meant to serve as a simultaneous survey of a range of primarily twenty-first-century novels and of the development of these critical debates, which have drawn in a number of philosophers as well as literary critics, across the same roughly twenty-year period. Along with Coetzee and Smith, likely authors will include Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom McCarthy, Richard Powers, Paul Beatty, Julie Otsuka, and Joy Williams.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Fleissner     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 52123. Ecopoetics: Literature and Ecology. 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities and simultaneously to a range of creative interventions across fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and the visual arts spurred by the effects of what has come to be named the Anthropocene epoch (despite substantive challenges to the term that we will address)-in a moment of perceived grave environmental crisis. We will consider the differences between, and the potential imbrication of, critical/theoretical and imaginative responses to seemingly insurmountable challenges to the biosphere and their outsized effects on underserved communities. Students will, in turn, be asked to respond critically to the works at hand, but also to conduct their own experimental research and on-site fieldwork in Chicago on an environmental issue of their choosing. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 52690. Racial Ecologies. 100 Units.

This course highlights theories of race that emphasize space, entanglement, and networks and poses questions like, how does race animate the anthropocene? How does race inflect climate change? What is the relationship between the turn to ontology and ecocriticism? (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Riley Snorton     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 53000. Dissertation Proposal Proseminar. 100 Units.

Required for students in their 4th year of the English Ph.D. program and all English Ph.D. students who have not yet entered candidacy.

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): English Ph.D. students only.

ENGL 53103. The Uses of Fiction: Poetry and Philosophy in Early Modernity. 100 Units.

This course attempts to unpack the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy by examining how each discourse draws on the power of poiesis in different ways. We will approach this topic by examining four discourses: first, formal treatments of poetry and poetics from antiquity (Plato, Aristotle) through the late Renaissance (Sidney, Tasso, Milton); second, explicitly fictional thought experiments employed by philosophers (Avicenna, Ibn Tufayl, Descartes, Locke, Condillac); third, poetry explicitly invested in the making of fictional worlds (Spenser, Milton, Cavendish); and fourth, recent scholarship on poetry's relationship to philosophy (Stanley Rosen, Victoria Kahn, Ayesha Ramachandran, Russ Leo, Guido Mazzoni, and others).

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 53103

ENGL 53450. Enlightenments and Romanticisms. 100 Units.

This seminar will develop research projects around the topics of Enlightenment(s), nationalisms, and transnationalisms in the Romantic era. Some of the categories for the course will come from traditional faculty psychology (reason, memory, imagination). Some will come from criticism and theory that are sometimes tinged with aesthetic and philosophical ambitions. Our primary emphasis will be on literature, but questions about romanticism in music, the visual arts, and the historical disciplines will be in play. The main focus will fall on English-language literary materials produced in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, but the course may also engage texts by non-British writers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and the Saint Simonians. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 53570. Slavery, Law, and Literature. 100 Units.

This course will explore the intersection of law, literature, and slavery in the United States. In part, this class will provide an introduction to the methods and animating questions of the "law and literature" mode of scholarship. More particularly, we will examine how law decisively structured the cultural imaginaries of abolitionist and pro-slavery writers, a structure that endures in many contemporary public debates on the histories of slavery and freedom. While attending to the atmospheric legalism of abolitionism, we will also consider anti-legalist and anarchist critiques of the abolitionist mainstream-critiques that put pressure upon construing slavery's antitheses in the legal genres of personhood, citizenship, and so on. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 53580. Debates and New Directions in Black Feminisms. 100 Units.

Following Jennifer Nash's charge for Black feminists to "let go" of tightly held intellectual genealogies (intersectionality) and postures (defensiveness), this doctoral seminar takes up new directions and debates in the study of Black feminisms. We'll study institutional debates and tensions between Black and transnational feminisms (where do we mean when we say Black, and who do we mean when we say transnational), the agonistic relationship between Afropessimism and Black feminisms, among others. Alongside these new works in Black feminisms, we'll consider the foundational works of Black feminist thought, literature, and art they're reimagining. Scholars, writers, and artists under consideration include Jennifer Nash, Katherine McKittrick, Jennifer Morgan, Simone Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, Patrice Douglass, Torkwase Dyson, and Canisia Lubrin. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 53580

ENGL 53590. Archival Methods: Race, Indigeneity, and Gender Before 1900. 100 Units.

This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival theory and research methodologies that attend to colonialism and slavery between 1650 and 1865. With a focus on how scholars have used the analytics of race and gender to examine this history, our class will examine foundational primary materials and the bodies of scholarship that have grown up around them. We will read the work of Olaudah Equiano, Matthew Lewis, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Samuel Occom, Venture Smith, Black Hawk, Harriet Jacobs, as well as Salem Witch Trial transcripts. In addition, the class will visit UChicago's Special Collections and the Newberry Library. Students will write on an archival object of their choosing from the period that is relevant to their individual research interests. (Med/Ren, 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 53590

ENGL 54010. The Performance of Naïve Style. 100 Units.

This PhD seminar is an investigation of guilelessness as a performed aesthetic. Drawing from the repertoires of early modern theatre and spectacle, we will try to take account of the types of non-performing performers that populate early modern England's expressive culture, including divine emissaries, allegorical abstractions, rude rustics, live animals, and inanimate objects. This scrutiny will be bolstered by a looser survey of the uneven movement of naïveté across competing aesthetic forms. The aim is to see consider whether and how the pose of unstyled address comes into sharper focus when viewed alongside the communicative energies of non-dramatic writing, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. Scenes from Shakespeare that seem to exert disproportionate influence over the conventions of unfeigned life will provide the grounding for the syllabus. Theorists and scholars will include J. L. Austin, Irving Goffman, Bert States, Jeff Dolven, Alice Rayner, Matthew Hunter, Ayanna Thompson, Alenka Zupančič, etc.

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 54104. On Man: Sociogenesis and Subjectivation. 100 Units.

In this course, students will read and engage with how "Man" has been conceptualized and critiqued in certain areas of philosophy and critical theory. The class begins with Man's emergence in colonial contexts, with readings from Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Sylvia Wynter. Students will also contend with Man's intersubjectivity with the "Subject" with readings from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jose Munoz, and Hortense Spillers. Memoirs, novels, and auto-documentary films supplement this courses' exploration of the genealogies of "Man." (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): C. Riley Snorton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 54104

ENGL 54308. Economic Humanities: 19th C British Literature and Inequality. 100 Units.

Do the humanities have a role in thinking inequality? In the nineteenth century, political economy, the precursor to economics, was largely a humanistic method focused on questions of distribution rather than efficiency as is often true today. Recent new work in various fields as well as the resuscitation of political economy itself suggests Humanities may be reinserting itself into the inequality conversation. In this class, we will explore the shift from political economy to economics in the nineteenth century, the methodological revisions it occasioned and, inspired by new multidisciplinary thinking about economics, consider if this earlier moment can still help us think about inequality. We will read the fiction of Dickens, Hardy, Wells, Eliot, the political economy and economics of Smith, Mill, Jevons, Marshall, Veblen and modern theorists Orlean, Yuran, Feher, Nussbaum, Piketty. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Elaine Hadley     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 54320. Orality / Literacy: Language, Media, and the Politics of Time. 100 Units.

This class takes as its starting point the medieval transition from orality to literacy. When, where, and how did this transition supposedly take place? What has been at stake in modern narratives of the change? With this transition as our case study, the class examines conjunctions of anthropology, linguistics, medieval studies, media history, and literary history, as these disciplines have contended over the (re)emergence of European literacy. From there, we consider broader issues in world literature and the politics of time, about the comparative study of premodern literatures, western theories of modernization, and the ongoing life of "orature" and oral transmission. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 54330. Agit-Prop Aesthetic. 100 Units.

An examination of aesthetic practices composed to serve a political function: to affect beliefs or political positions, form collectives, or direct groups toward political action. Alongside readings in aesthetic and political theory and affect studies, we will examine examples from Russian and Soviet art and literature, the historical avant-garde, the Black radical tradition, and ACT-UP. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 54332. X Before X: Historicist Method and Concepts Across Time. 100 Units.

This course explores the methodological friction between present-day concepts and the archives of the past. In particular, we look at instances when an organizing concept is arguably anachronistic to the cultural milieu in question. The class will be divided into several units, like "race before race," "lyric before lyric" "trans before trans," and "literature before literature." Readings will include both primary and secondary sources. Along the way, we will also consider different paradigms for understanding literary history, cultural history, and the history of ideas (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Quentin Skinner, Arnold Davidson, Hans Robert Jauss, Sheldon Pollock). (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Julie Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 54340. The Collectivity Question in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Theory. 100 Units.

This class will ask after the different forms taken by the collective in nineteenth-century American writing, as a way into theorizing tensions within the notion of collectivity in a broader context. When abstractions such as "the social," "the people," "the public," "humanity," "life," or "the body politic" are employed in these texts and elsewhere, what forms the referent of such terms? How are they conceived to hold together, and what is their relation as aggregates to the individuals or individual entities of which they are composed? How do they relate to other understandings of collectivity, some of which may themselves be present within a given example? What is the relation between modes of theorizing collectivity and literary mode or genre? We will explore these and other related questions as well as congruent topics such as democracy, affect, attachment, the crowd, nationhood, sociability, and so forth. Our literary examples will be derived from such authors as Stowe, Harper, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, James, Chesnutt, and Hopkins, whom we will read together with theoretical writings both from the period and from contemporary scholarship in literary criticism as well as social and political theory.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Fleissner     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 54420. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities. 100 Units.

This course critically examines the Environmental Humanities as an interdisciplinary and unruly field. We will focus our attention on some of the topics that have animated the field as it has coalesced over the past ten or fifteen years: the Anthropocene and its alternatives; environmental racism and global inequity; competing narratives of apocalypse and resilience; posthumanist accounts of species relations. We will also discuss the wide variety of methods and approaches that take place under the banner of "environmental humanities" and explore how they might be adapted to or engaged by our own writing and research. Prior to our first meeting, we will collaborate to build a reading list for the quarter that is reflective of students' areas of interest.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Morgan     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 54440. Thinking with Trees. 100 Units.

Even as people like and value trees and forests, we have been unable to stop the ongoing and potentially catastrophic deforestation of the planet. With the contemporary ecological crisis in mind, this class will explore the long and varied history of human entanglement with trees, sampling from a broad historical span and moving between literature, philosophy and art (e.g. Ovid, Ruisdael, John Clare, Brothers Grimm, Marx, Pissaro, Cezanne, Varlam Shalamov, John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Carl Philips, Mary Siisip Geniusz, Annie Proulx, Richard Powers, Michael Marder, Charles Gaines, and Zoe Leonard). Topics will include settler colonialism and capitalism as drivers of deforestation; the art history of trees; the recurring impulse to imitate or find kinship with trees; indigenous writing about forests and plants; various efforts to apprehend the specificity of arboreal being without fetishizing it. We will include at least one trip to the University of Chicago's Warren Woods Ecological Field Station.

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 54777. The Print Revolution and New Readers: Women, Workers, Children. 100 Units.

In this course we will examine the expansion of print during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its relationship to the social history of reading. One of the most striking features of this so-called "Print Revolution" was the extension of reading material to new groups of readers: by the end of the nineteenth century, more women, working-class, and child readers existed than ever before. In what distinctive ways did these groups participate in print and manuscript culture? What did they read and to what ends? How did literary texts represent, herald, instruct, or proscribe new readers, and how did new readers comply with, subvert, misunderstand, adapt, or otherwise interact with the texts they read? How did the extension of the "reading habit" to new groups of readers impact the political revolutions, intellectual paradigms, and social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And finally, what kinds of evidence can literary scholars draw upon to make what kinds of claims about reading and readers in the past? We will approach these questions through the lenses of popular literature (especially ballads, chapbooks, satire, and romance) and with the help of literary, historical, and sociological scholarship. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 54777

ENGL 55000. Advanced Writing for Publication Proseminar. 100 Units.

Required for students in the 5th year of the English Ph.D. program or above, this course will be a venue for converting a chapter of the dissertation into article form.

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course is restricted to English Ph.D. students only; other students need consent of instructor.

ENGL 55105. Theories of Racial Perception. 100 Units.

We tend to talk about racial perception as a singular and instantaneous act, but it is perhaps better understood as a complex series of procedures involving judgment, reading, rationalization, instinct, and conjecture that normally go undescribed. In this course we will read theory, criticism, and literature considering the varying combinations of techniques, processes, structures, and convictions that allow a subject to believe they are having an experience of race. How have writers variously learned to describe and call into question the mechanics of racial perception? And is imagining the end of racial perception the same as imagining the end of race? Exploring works from a variety of traditions, eras, and genres, we will trace investigations into race's perception as a color, a lack, a sense, a sound, a shape, a pathology, a habit, a surface, a depth, and a spell.

Instructor(s): Adrienne Brown     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 55405. Multidisciplinary Study of American Culture. 100 Units.

This proseminar surveys the advanced study of American culture as it is currently practiced at the University of Chicago. Seminar members read and discuss recent work by and then meet with faculty specialists from departments and programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as from the the Divinity School, the Law School, and the Booth School of Business. Though interested in how different disciplines frame questions and problems, we will be attuned to convergences in themes, approaches, and methods. During the last half of our seminar meetings our authors will join us for a focused discussion of their work. Many of our guests will also deliver public lectures the day before visiting the seminar.

Instructor(s): Eric Slauter     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): This is a Scherer Center Seminar that is open to MA, PhD, and JD students.
Equivalent Course(s): HCHR 48801, AMER 50001, RAME 48801, RLVC 48801, HIST 62304

ENGL 56000. Job Market Proseminar. 100 Units.

Required for students in their 6th year of the program and open to all English Ph.D. students on or preparing for the academic job market.

Instructor(s): Josephine McDonagh     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): English Ph.D. students only.

ENGL 56200. Early Modern Critical Race Studies. 100 Units.

This course explores the historyand developments of Early Modern Critical Race Studies (pre-1700) from the inception of the field in the early 1990s to the present. Students will read classics and new classics on early modern racial formations (including monographs by Kim F. Hall, Ania Loomba, Geraldine Heng, and Patricia Akhimie, among others), while learning about the theoretical and political roots of the field, the stages and controversies that have marked its history, and its major subfields-including presence studies (Imtiaz Habib), performance studies (Ayanna Thompson), and visual culture (Peter Erickson). Students will also learn about the newest directions in which the field is headed, namely, whiteness studies (Arthur Little, David Sterling Brown) and transnational critical race studies (Noémie Ndiaye). (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Noémie Ndiaye     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 56240. Mapping Black Studies. 100 Units.

This course contextualizes various schools of thought in the field of Black Studies, including Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, Afronihilism, black optimism, and Afrorealism. Students will read texts by key figures, who might include Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Kara Keeling, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, Katherine McKittrick, and Jared Sexton. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Tina Post     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 56500. Anthropological Poetics. 100 Units.

This course explores the problematics that congeal when the disciplinary norms of anthropology and literary studies intersect. Since the 1970s, such anthropologists as James Clifford, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Paul Rabinow, and Donna Haraway have coordinated cultural analyses through concepts of representation, narrative, poetic form, and voice. Subsequently, poets and writers of the language school, indigenous background, and the ethnopoetics movement, among others, picked up on this anthropological mode to animate those concepts through anthropological concerns with reflexivity, textual thickness, interdiscursivity, metapragmatics, the posthuman, kinship, and intercultural semiotics. These intersections have overlaid literary objects with a kind of interdisciplinary noise, challenging what a literary object is and, as well, what objects we elect to think of as literature. This course will amplify that noise to trouble disciplinary norms of literary studies--especially the study of poetry and poetics--while also tuning into that trouble as a strategy of interpretation. Final papers will be methodological position pieces, orientating analyses of literary objects within this transdisciplinary flashpoint. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to MA students.

ENGL 56700. Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. 100 Units.

A seminar devoted entirely to Adorno's last written, infamously dense, and willfully stylized work about art, society, and the very tension between "art" and "theory." This course is for Ph.D students only. Some familiarity with Kant's Critique of Judgment will be useful but not necessary.

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 59900. Reading and Research: English. 100 Units.

This course is intended for graduate students in the English doctoral program who can best meet program requirements by study under a faculty member's individual supervision. The subject, course of study, and requirements are arranged with the instructor.

ENGL 65008. Materiality and Media. 100 Units.

How does materiality matter to our understanding of media, new and old? While several distinct mediums (photography, film, digital media) have been charged with "dematerializing" the physical world, so too have they been celebrated for granting us unanticipated access to it. And by now the "materiality of media" has become a familiar phrase, however unevenly deployed. We ourselves will focus, during the first half of this course, on distinct apprehensions of materialism (from Aristotle to Marx to Karen Barad and Giuliana Bruno); thereafter, we will engage artistic practices (print, filmic, musical, digital) to sharpen the way we might talk about the material dimensions of our media environment. We will spend some time in Special Collections and in the Smart Museum.

Instructor(s): Bill Brown     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 65008

ENGL 65202. From Sentiment to Trauma. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 65200

ENGL 70000. Advanced Study: English Language & Literature. 300.00 Units.

Advanced Study: English Language & Literature

ENGL 75000. Advanced Research. 300.00 Units.

TBD

Terms Offered: Autumn