Department of English Language and Literature

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 30228. William Blake: Poet, Painter, and Prophet. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 30230. Iconology East and West. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 30304. James Beyond the Novel. 100 Units.

Henry James is perhaps the single most acclaimed American novelist. And yet some of his most extraordinary writing sits outside his novels, in his shorter fiction and critical prose. Focusing on those shorter forms, this course examines James's theory of fiction, his vexed relations with the marketplace, and his relentlessly ambitious formal experimentation. We'll also consider the scholarly conversation about his work. Observing remarkable change over the course of a career that extends from the Victorian period into the era of modernism, we'll read texts in a range of genres, taking up early ghost stories, landmark critical essays, travel writing, autobiographical writing, and late masterworks of short fiction. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 30420. Autofiction. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Joshua Kates     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20420

ENGL 30422. Black Girlhood. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Danielle Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 20400, ENGL 20422, GNSE 23167, RDIN 30400, GNSE 33167

ENGL 30430. American Fiction of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to fiction from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the US. We'll ask how short stories and novels intervene in the period's debates about US imperialism, immigration, corporate capitalism, eugenics, racism, and democracy; we'll also examine fiction's role in writing the history of the Civil War, sectional reconcilation, and the racial violence attending Reconstruction and its aftermath. Paying close attention to how and where our texts were first published and read, we'll consider the usefulness of the categories that have described them (such as regionalism, realism, and naturalism). Authors may include: Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 30660. Minds, Brains, and the Contemporary Novel. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Jennifer Fleissner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20660

ENGL 31101. Romantic Poetry. 100 Units.

In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, and still in the early days of the worlds first Industrial Revolution, two British poets-William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge--set out to produce another kind of revolution that they hoped could save their readers from a harsh new world of culture and sensibility brought on by "causes unknown to former times." Their experiments in poetry were informed by a likewise unprecedented analysis of the problems that they saw besetting their own moment. It was an extraordinary exercise in critical media theory very much avant la lettre. Both the experiments and the analysis had far-reaching on poets of their moment-especially Shelley and Keats-and poets beyond it, and have mattered much to the modern understanding of literature and criticism well into the twentieth century and into our own time. This course will take up the challenge of coming to terms with the Romantic "revolution in taste" in close engagements with both familiar and unfamiliar works. We will read other poets of the period, including Blake, Byron, Charlotte Smith, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld-and also come to terms with the massive legacy of Romantic poetry and poetics ever since, not least in the formation of modern practical criticism. There will be a short paper (3-4 pp.) and a longer one (15 pp.). (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 31285. Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 31285

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 21300, ENGL 21302, RDIN 31300

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 32270. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. 100 Units.

It has been nearly fifteen years since Isabel Hofmeyr urged thinking across geographies in her essay "The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean." The Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean are not newly connected, but rather have been connected through the circulation of labor and goods since antiquity. How does our understanding of regimes like slavery and contract labor, and concepts like diaspora and migration, change when we think betwixt and between? This interdisciplinary seminar takes up this mantle, looking to literature, art, theory, and history that provide new accounts and imaginaries of the Caribbean, Southern and East Africa, and the Indian subcontinent-and the waters that reach their shores. Readings may include Andrew Liu and Anna Arabindan-Kesson on goods like tea and cotton, Jazmin Graves on the African Indian Sidi community, Neelofer Qadir on narratives of South Asian labor migration to East Africa, among others. Writers and artists may include Gaiutra Bahadur, Amitav Ghosh, Andil Gosine, and Sharlene Khan. In addition, we may look to scholarship that conceptually crosses these ocean worlds, such as Durba Mitra and Jordache Ellapen on South-South and Afro-Asian feminisms. While this course will be conducted in English, participants are encouraged to bring materials and expertise that move beyond an Anglophone frame. (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 32312. Virtual Theaters. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22312, TAPS 32312, MADD 12312

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: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu
Note(s): Note(s): English majors: this course fulfills the Theory (H) distribution requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20700, MADD 20700, CMST 25954, TAPS 28466, CMST 35954, ENGL 25970, ARTV 30700, BPRO 28700

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): CMST 22350, MADD 12350, RDIN 32350, CMST 32350, CDIN 32350, RDIN 22350, ENGL 22352

ENGL 32444. Arts of Life. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Timothy Campbell     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22444

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
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22505, ISLM 37555, RDIN 22500, CMST 32500, RLST 27555, ARTV 20667, RDIN 32500, CMST 22500

ENGL 32704. Writing Persuasion: Health and Environment. 100 Units.

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

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

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): ENGL 13000

ENGL 33434. Exile and Émigré Literature. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Ahmad Qabaha     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 34305, ENGL 23434, CMLT 34305, RDIN 34305, CMLT 24305, RDIN 24305, NEHC 24305

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): MDVL 23000, GNSE 24104, HCHR 33000, CLAS 36119, GNSE 34104, CLCV 26119, BIBL 33000, RLVC 33000, RLST 23000

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 34220. New York, Capital of the Twentieth Century. 100 Units.

From the late 1950s New York became aworld center for innovative poetry, painting, jazz and dance. This course explores the networks that linked uptown and downtown, black and white, queer and straight and other scenes, with the tensions both productive and destructive these created. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): John Wilkinson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 34221, ARCH 34220

ENGL 34255. America's Literary Scientists. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to 3rd and 4th years in the College and MA students
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24255, MAPH 34255

ENGL 34500. Postcolonial Poetics. 100 Units.

Does postcolonial literature have a distinctive 'poetics'? We will begin with an inquiry into the nature and extent of the 'difference' that marks postcolonial literature, while at the same time remaining open to finding similarities, connections, influences, dialogue and dispute among the many literatures of the modern world. The tension between the two aspects -sameness and difference-will enable us to explore postcolonial poetics in terms of a dialectic (rather than attempt to arrive at a definition of it). This will also mean sidestepping the framing of the question of a postcolonial poetics exclusively in terms of a debate between aesthetics and politics. We will adopt a comparative methodology in discussing theoretical issues relating to form, genre, periodization, and language, selectively focusing on the postcolonial novel and tragedy (as genres), realism (as narrative form), and modernism (as internationalist movement). We will also examine the genealogy of aesthetic terms that have been specifically associated with postcolonial writing (or identified as specifically postcolonial), like magical realism, hybridity, creolism, and negritude. Finally, we will explore the terms in which postcolonial themes and ideologies like nationalism, reform and modernity, history and Marxism have been invoked in the literature. Our readings will address a range of theoretical writings from the Caribbean, South Asia, Latin America and Africa.

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

ENGL 34526. Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 34528. Seeing Ourselves: Photography and Literary Non-Fiction. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Christine Fournaies     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24528

ENGL 34540. Islands and Otherness. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34540, ENGL 24540

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 67870, TAPS 34770, CMST 37870, GNSE 34770

ENGL 34800. Poetics. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study poetry 'in the abstract'. We will study various efforts on the part of philosophers, literary critics, and poets themselves to formulate theories of poetic discourse. We will examine a range of historical attempts to conceptualize poetry as a particular kind of language practice, from Greek, Chinese, and Indic antiquity to the present. (18th/19th, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): TBD     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34800, CMLT 34801

ENGL 34850. T.S. Eliot. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 34960. California Fictions: Literature and Cinema 1945-2018. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students: 3rd and 4th years in the College email 2-3 sentences about why you want to take the course for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 34960, ENGL 24960

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): SCTH 35008, FNDL 25008

ENGL 35270. Strange Worlds. 100 Units.

Medieval Literature often conjures worlds of almost science-fictional strangeness. We will focus on the fantastic spaces of romance and visionary religious literature to explore the affective, conceptual, and ideological experiments enabled by medieval forms of estrangement. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 35417. Utopia and Perfection in Late Medieval England. 100 Units.

A course on the drive to individual and collective perfection, and its relation to social and psychic conflict. Readings from medieval political theory, theology, mystical, hagiographical, and penitential writing, texts documenting the demographic and political upheavals of the 14th century, and poetry of the period. (Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 35500. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 100 Units.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a wildly experimental collection of narrative poetry that assembles rhetorically, conceptually, and affectively incongruous material in ways that challenge medieval and modern notions of aesthetic form. This course will explore the poetry's aesthetic strangeness in relation to its probing of medieval social forms, including polities and the hierarchies that shape them, organizations of gender, sexuality, and the human body, figures of otherness such as the Jew and the Saracen, and figures of intimate otherness such as Christ, Mary, the child, and courtly and other love objects. Those taking the course for graduate credit will also read a variety of other materials from medieval culture, scholarly work on Chaucer and the middle ages, and theoretical engagements with the course's conceptual topics. (Pre-1650; Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 35550. Feminist and Queer Literary Criticism. 100 Units.

An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism. We will also be reading works by Frank O'Hara, Tennessee Williams, Octavia Butler, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Harryette Mullen, and Maggie Nelson. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35550

ENGL 35605. Imagining the City. 100 Units.

The rise of the modern city makes possible new modes of experience, new kinds of people and personality, and new kinds of stories. Texts include Gaskell, North and South; Dickens, Hard Times; Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

Instructor(s): Lawrence Rothfield     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 35670. Modernist Poetry. 100 Units.

This introduction to modernist poetry focuses on British, Irish, and expatriate American poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, and W.B. Yeats. We will also consider some of their antecedents (such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew) and some of their contemporaries, known as the "war poets," such as Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. Assignments consist of two papers, collaborative class presentations, and regular contributions to the online discussion board. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Maud Ellmann     Terms Offered: Winter

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): 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): CMLT 35902, CLAS 44512, SCTH 35902

ENGL 35950. Beckett and Media. 100 Units.

Though best known for a single play, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, translator, and critic with a voluminous output. This course introduces students to the variety and influence of one of the central figures in twentieth-century literature and theater by considering Beckett's better-known plays-both on the page and in recorded performances-alongside select novels, criticism, film, radio, and television pieces. Among the questions we will ask are: What can Beckett's experiments across media teach us about the presumed and actual limits of form? What happens when a medium becomes the means of its own undoing? What can we learn from Beckett's career about cardinal developments in twentieth-century drama, literature, film, and television? (20th/21st, Drama)

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 35950

ENGL 36003. Wit & Wisdom in 18th-Century Literature. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 30100

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): CMLT 36012, FREN 26019, SCTH 36012, SCTH 26012, FREN 36019

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 36210. Translation Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 23120

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): SCTH 36002, ENGL 26223

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): KNOW 36230, ARTV 20018, HIPS 26230, HLTH 26230, ENGL 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): ENGL 26411, RLVC 36401, FNDL 25307, RLST 26401

ENGL 36590. The Pleasure of Hating: Satire Now and Then. 100 Units.

Satire exposes human folly to ridicule in order," as Jonathan Swift claimed, "to mend the world." This course will examine the protean mode of satire-its history, its forms, its pleasures and its politics-beginning with the origins of satire in Ancient Greece and Rome and extending through the literary satire of the 17th-19th centuries, with some consideration of these works in relation to popular contemporary forms like news satire and sketch comedy. We will supplement our reading with theoretical and critical discussions of satire by John Dryden, William Hazlitt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, and others. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Autumn

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: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open to advanced undergraduates. Students who are taking the class for French credit will complete some readings and writings in French.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 36680, ENGL 26680, FREN 36680, CMLT 26680, FREN 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): ENGL 26710, SCTH 36710

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

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

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27803, CMST 47803

ENGL 37815. Appropriations and Impostures. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Darrell Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to MAPH students and 3rd and 4th years in the College
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27815, MAPH 37815

ENGL 37920. The Slaves' Narratives. 100 Units.

As rare first-person accounts of an institution that claimed the lives of millions, slave narratives occupy an important, almost sacred position in the history of American letters. In part, this course will offer a literary history of this genre of writing. We will consider the relationship of the slave narrative to other available genres of life writing: spiritual autobiography, captivity narratives, gallows narratives, and so on. We will consider a host of political problems that the slave narrative raises, such as: What levels of autonomy or agency could black writers hope to achieve in relation to white editors, sponsors, and abolitionist organizations? What is the evidentiary value of these narratives? How do the generic conventions of the slave narrative conscript black subjects into just giving "the facts" to white "philosophers," as Frederick Douglass would critique, instead of enabling black subjects to theorize slavery and freedom in their own names? At the same time, we will explore print media not typically considered under the rubric of the "slave narrative" to thicken our understanding of black life-making in the shadow of slavery: legal petitions, court testimony, letters, and early novels. (1650-1830, 1830-1990, Theory)

Instructor(s): Chris Taylor     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 17920

ENGL 38230. Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion. 100 Units.

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

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

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

ENGL 38619. Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 38661. Contemporary Palestinian Life Writing. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Ahmad Qabaha     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 38660, NEHC 38660, CMLT 38660, NEHC 28660, CMLT 28660, ENGL 28661, RDIN 28660

ENGL 38710. On Fear and Loathing: Negative Affect and the American Novel. 100 Units.

Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40120, ENGL 28710

ENGL 39100. Black Studies Research Methods. 100 Units.

This course will introduce and examine some of the concepts, methodological approaches, and ethical commitments and challenges relevant for pursuing research and teaching in Black studies. This methods class will study these frameworks alongside the history of the field and its many contemporary iterations in order to explore how different configurations of research process and theoretical innovation continue to shape scholarly work in this field. In addition to readings by Barbara Christian, Sylvia Wynter, St. Clair Drake, Roderick Ferguson, and others, students will "try on" certain methodological approaches in practical assignments throughout the quarter. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Sophia Azeb     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 39203. Bad Readers. 100 Units.

By the end of the eighteenth century more women and working class readers existed than ever before, and as the ranks of readers grew, so did cultural fears about the dangerous effects of popular, untrained, promiscuous, escapist, or otherwise bad, reading. This course will investigate the democratization of the "reading public," the debates about the dangers of reading that it provoked, and the ways that these arguments inflect, underlie, or diverge from contemporary anxieties about what constitutes bad reading, from Eve Sedgwick's critique of paranoid reading to the now daily warnings about fake news. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 39203

ENGL 39960. Comedy from the Margins. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 40110. Literature and Citizenship. 100 Units.

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

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24119, MAPH 40110

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): ENGL 20242, CRES 40141, GNSE 45141, GNSE 25141, CRES 22141, MAPH 40141

ENGL 40161. 21st Century Ethnic American Literature. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22161, CRES 40161, ENGL 20161, AMER 40161, MAPH 40161

ENGL 40170. Experiments in Kinship and Care. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): William Hutchison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40170, ENGL 20170, GNSE 21170, GNSE 41170

ENGL 40171. Robots, animals, technologies: Science fiction and the more-than-human. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): William Hutchison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20171, MAPH 40171, MADD 25171

ENGL 40180. Women Writing God. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Instructor consent required for first and second year undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40180, GNSE 25180, GNSE 45180, ENGL 20180

ENGL 40182. Early Modern Loss and Longing. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22182, MAPH 40182, GNSE 42182, ENGL 20182

ENGL 40190. The Gender of Modernity. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40190, ENGL 20190, GNSE 45150, AMER 40190, GNSE 25150

ENGL 40202. Postcolonial Bildungsroman. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21212, MAPH 40202

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): KNOW 40203, CHSS 40203, CMLT 40203

ENGL 40250. Housekeeping: Domestic Drama and Material Culture. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20362, TAPS 30362, ENGL 20260, GNSE 40250, GNSE 22260

ENGL 40304. Medieval Romance. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Mark Miller     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41304, ENGL 20304, GNSE 21304

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): CHSS 40305, KNOW 40305

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 40458. Faeries, Demons and Alchemists: Science, Magic and the Supernatural in Early Modern England. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20458, MAPH 40458

ENGL 40460. Renaissance Now. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40460, ENGL 20460

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: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20464, MAPH 40464

ENGL 40562. Renaissance Freedoms. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20562, MAPH 40562

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): ENGL 20565, MAPH 40565

ENGL 40812. Freedom and the Black Counterenlightenment. 100 Units.

This course will explore Black writers' improvisations with the concept of freedom alongside key political-philosophical of the 18th and 19th centuries. Readings will include Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Robert Wedderburn, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and more. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Christopher Taylor     Terms Offered: Winter

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): FREN 41219, SCTH 41219, GRMN 41219, CMLT 41219

ENGL 41360. Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41303, GNSE 21303, MAPH 40130, ENGL 21360

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

Instructor(s): Tristan Schweiger     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to open to 3rd and 4th years.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21370, GNSE 21370, GNSE 41370, 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): ENGL 21420, MAPH 41400

ENGL 41644. American Muckrakers: The Literature of Exposé, 1900/2000. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 21644, MAPH 41600

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): ENGL 21710, MAPH 41710, 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): ENGL 21720, GNSE 21720, GNSE 41720, MAPH 41720

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, LACS 42103, SPAN 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 42350. George Eliot's Fiction and Nonfiction. 100 Units.

This course will examine the works of George Eliot in their intellectual and print contexts. We will look at selected works from across her oeuvre including some of her translations from German, her journalism, short fiction, poetry and novels, as well as letters and journals. During the course we will emphasize her immersion in contemporary debates by considering her exchanges with friends and associates, people like, for example the writer, George Henry Lewes, the evolutionary philosopher and biologist, Herbert Spencer, feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Edith Simcox, and legal theorist, Henry Sumner Maine. (18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Jo McDonagh     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Open to advanced undergraduates with consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 42350

ENGL 42360. Working 9 to 5. 100 Units.

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

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

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 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): ENGL 23002, RLST 23002, DVPR 43002

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): CRWR 51503, CRWR 43121, CMLT 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): SCTH 36015, CMLT 36015

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 via two trips to special collections: one to view archival texts from the period and another 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

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 44202. Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. 100 Units.

We will read major works by Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and Slavoj Žižek, among other psychoanalytic theorists, in conjunction with literary works such as Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Postgate." The course will conclude with one or more of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Topics include the unconscious, dreams, childhood, the uncanny, desire, subjects and objects, mourning, and the death drive. Requirements: one paper 10-12 pages, joint presentations in class, and regular postings to the online discussion board.

Instructor(s): Maud Ellmann     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 44202

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
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 44606

ENGL 45150. American Literature and Photography. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Instructor consent required for undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 25150, AMER 40150, ENGL 26150, MAPH 40150

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
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 45264

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): CMLT 46202, TAPS 46202, CMST 38346

ENGL 46240. North American Horror Fictions. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to major works in 20th and 21st century North American horror through the lens of critical race studies.

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

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
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 46751

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): TAPS 46900, GNSE 46905, CMLT 46905

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 37102, HMRT 27102, ENGL 27102

ENGL 47600. Cinema in Africa. 100 Units.

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

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

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: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27700, BPRO 27200, CHST 27200, ARTV 22322, ARCH 22322, ARTV 32322, CEGU 27700, ENST 27700

ENGL 47703. Queer Modernism. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 47708. Feeling Brown, Feeling Down. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 47710. Race and Governmentality in Transnational Literature. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 47711. What is Literature For?: Theories of Literary Value. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sarah Kunjummen     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27711, MAPH 47711

ENGL 47714. Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment. 100 Units.

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

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

ENGL 47716. In a Queer Time and Place. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Agnes Malinowska     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 27716, GNSE 40450, GNSE 23179

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): ARTH 39900, CMST 40000, MAPH 33000

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 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): ENGL 28902, REES 30018, CMLT 39300, REES 20018, FNDL 27101, CMLT 29300

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 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 50001. Collage. 100 Units.

Within an overarching frame that stretches between Moby Dick and the present, this course will focus foremost on 20th c. literary collage, both poetry and prose fiction, with particular attention to Williams, Rukeyser, Burroughs, Ashbery, Reed, Howe, Acker. (20th/21st)

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

ENGL 50101. The Problem with Theory. 100 Units.

This graduate course offers a critical introduction to comparative theoretical methods by attending to theory's political and epistemological antagonisms and how they have shaped the ways in which we read literature and art. The seminar begins by tracing critical theory's historical contours-from the high theory boom of the 70s and 80s and the rise of postcolonial, performance, and queer theory in the 90s and 2000s to contemporary critical theory in a comparative context. The course thus attends to problems in thinking about critical theory's scope, boundaries, and canons, as not only as a mode of doing thought but as a site for disciplinary and institutional critique. The seminar explores how theory has both emerged from and animates the worldliness of literature and art as textured imprints of historicity, imagination, and experience across social, cultural and political contexts.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course fulfills the fall core requirement for first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 50101, CRES 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): RLVC 50201, CMLT 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.

This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate 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; other students need consent of instructor.

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): Timothy Campbell     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 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): Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): English Ph.D. students only.

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): Noémie Ndiaye     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): CRES 54104, 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: Winter

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 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

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): AMER 50001, HCHR 48801, 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): Benjamin Morgan     Terms Offered: 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.

We will spend the quarter reading this complex, dense, and posthumously published work on the work of art as a "social fact," supplemented by addition readings from Kant, Bourdieu, Jameson, Felski, and others. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 56800. Philosophical Literary Criticism. 100 Units.

What is the relationship between literature and philosophy? This class attempts to answer this question by reading two philosophically rich literary texts (Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Austen's Persuasion) in relation to a variety of thinkers--from Aristotle to Robert Pippin---who have developed their own, often conflicting accounts of this relationship. (18th/19th, Med/Ren)

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison; Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): DVPR 56800, SCTH 56800

ENGL 57750. Race and Literature in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. 100 Units.

In this course we will explore the thesis that literary fiction published in the years of the 2010s participates in and signals the end of embedded neoliberalism as a governing consensus. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Ken Warren     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 58613. 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.) (20th/21st)

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

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 60220. Philosophy and Anarchy. 100 Units.

In contemporary Western philosophy, thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, Schürmann, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière have proposed "anarchic" ways of thinking, thus opening new perspectives in ontology, ethics, and politics. Surprisingly however, philosophical concepts of anarchy have always been strictly distinguished from those of political anarchism. On their end, thinkers and activists such as Proudhon, Bakunin or Kropotkin never acknowledged themselves as philosophers. The course examines the reasons why philosophers advocate for an anarchy without anarchism and anarchists advocate for an anarchism without philosophy. (Catherine Malabou is this year's Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor.)

Instructor(s): Catherine Malabou     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Hank Scotch, cisubmissions@gmail.com.
Note(s): The course meets twice a week Feb 1 to Mar 3.

ENGL 65007. The Assemblage Mode. 100 Units.

Assemblage names a compositional practice in the material, visual, and literary arts. It also names a way of conceptualizing non-aesthetic forms (markets, cities, nation states). This course begins by focusing on the different semantic and pragmatic values of assemblage (in anthropology, urban geography, and social theory); turns its attention to two art exhibitions, The Art of Assemblage (MoMA, 1961), and 66 Signs of Neon (1966), led by Noah Purifoy and consisting of assemblage work made from the detritus of the Watts riots (Aug. 1965); and ultimately concentrates on a history of how and why African American writers and visual artists (such as Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Romare Bearden, Ntozake Shange, and Betye Saar) have deployed the assemblage mode. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Bill Brown     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 65007

ENGL 65008. Materialities. 100 Units.

In the first instance, this course surveys a range of thinking (by Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others) that has gone under the banner of 'new materialism,' emphasizing the vitality of matter and working to reject anthropocentrism. In the second instance, the course focuses on textual materialism within literary studies (both Susan Howe and Derrida, for instance), ultimately asking how we might begin to understand material texts within a new materialist frame. The widest frame for the course, though, will be provided by the question of how the materialisms of our moment (across fields and disciplines) can be understood through the analytics provided by historical materialism. We will read literary texts from different periods, and we will conduct at least two sessions in Special Collections. (20th/21st)

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

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