2019-2020 Literary Genre Courses (LG)

All courses listed here are approved to count towards the Creative Writing major as literature genre courses. Course codes indicate approval specific distribution requirements. Students may register for eligible courses under any course number. 

For the course to count towards your literary genre requirement, you must take a course in the genre of your concentration.

These courses are offered by departments, not the Program in Creative Writing. If you have questions about course content, structure, and schedule, please contact the department offering the course. The course descriptions below are to the best of our knowledge the most recent available. Please note that we have included only those courses with an undergraduate course number or that otherwise marked as open to undergraduates.

Courses taken prior to 2018-19 or otherwise not on this list must be approved by the DUS. Contact Vu Tran (vtran@uchicago.edu) and May Huang (mayh@uchicago.edu) about approval. 

 

FICTION | POETRY | NONFICTION

 

 

FICTION

ENGL 11004 History of the Novel (Maud Ellmann) | Autumn
We will read one or more novels and novellas from each of the last four centuries and also study movie adaptations of these works. Likely novelists to be studied include Miguel de Cervantes, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Choderlos de Laclos, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Tom McCarthy, and Zadie Smith. Film screenings will be scheduled and will also be available for watching in the library. Requirements: one paper of 5-6 pages, one paper of 7-8 pages, regular postings to the online discussion board, and in-class exercises. (LG - Fiction)

ENGL 20153 London Program: Postcolonial England: Migration, Race, Nation (Sonali Thakkar) | Autumn
This course will examine how ideas of English identity and nationhood have been transformed by postwar migration and diaspora, as well as by political and cultural contestations over race, racial representation, and the legacies of the British Empire. We will ask how the decline and overthrow of Britain’s influence and rule in the colonies after WWII gave rise to not just postcolonial nation-states overseas, but also to a postcolonial England. Our focus will be on the discourses and cultural production of migrant and diasporic communities. But we will also consider the historical context in which our authors and artists worked, and the various forms of imperial amnesia and nostalgia, as well as nativist and xenophobic political currents, against which they struggled. We will examine literary texts, cultural criticism, and film, music and visual culture from the early postwar period (Windrush Generation and the Suez Crisis) up to the present. Authors we might study include Sam Selvon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Bhanu Kapil, and Kamila Shamsie, with films by Isaac Julien and Hanif Kureishi. We will also make use of London’s historical and cultural offerings, with a possible trip to the Black Cultural Archives, among other outings. (LG - Fiction)

PORT 26304/36304 Literature and Society in Brazil (Dain Borges)| Autumn
(=HIST 26304/36304, LACS 26304/36304)This course explores the relations between literature and society in Brazil, with an emphasis on the institution of the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth-century Brazilian novel, like the Russian novel, was an arena in which intellectuals debated, publicized and perhaps even discovered social questions. We will examine ways in which fiction may be used and misused as a historical document of slavery and the rise of capitalism, of race relations, of patronage and autonomy, and of marriage, sex and love. We will read works in translation by Manuel Antonio de Almeida, José de Alencar, Machado de Assis, Aluísio de Azevedo and Euclides da Cunha. Taught in English. Students taking the course for RLL credit should do readings in Portuguese, attend the (additional) Portuguese-language discussion section, and attempt some writing in Portuguese. (LG - Fiction)

*ITAL 23410 Reading and Practice of the Short Story (Maria Anna Mariani)| Autumn*
What are the specific features of the short story? How does this literary form organize different visions of time and space? Informed by these fundamental theoretical questions, this course explores the logic of the short story and investigates its position among literary genres. We will read together a selection of contemporary Italian short stories (privileging the production of Italo Calvino, Beppe Fenoglio, and Elsa Morante, but also including less visible authors, such as Goffredo Parise, Dino Buzzati, and Silvio D’Arzo). The moments of close reading and theoretical reflection will be alternated with creative writing activities, in which students will have the opportunity to enter in a deeper resonance with the encountered texts. This course is especially designed to help students improve their written Italian and literary interpretive skills. (LG - Fiction) 

REES 24420  Russian Short Fiction: Experiments in Form (Kaitlyn Sorenson) | Autumn
Russian literature is known for the sweeping epics that Henry James once dubbed the "loose baggy monsters." However, in addition to the famed 'doorstop novels,' the Russian literary canon also has a long tradition of innovative short fiction-of short stories and novellas that experiment with forms of storytelling and narration. This course focuses on such works, as well as the narrative strategies and formal devices that allow these short stories and novellas to be both effective and economical. Throughout the quarter, we will read short fiction from a variety of Russian authors and examine the texts that establish the tradition of Russian short fiction as well as those that push its boundaries. We will attend to the formal characteristics of these texts, analyze their approach to storytelling, and ultimately question what these texts reveal about our appetite for narrative. Authors sampled include: Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Platonov, Nabokov, Tolstaya, and many others! No prior knowledge of Russian language or literature is required. (LG - Fiction)

HIST 26304  Literature and Society in Brazil  (D. Borges) | Autumn
This course surveys the relations between literature and society in Brazil, with an emphasis on the institution of the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth-century Brazilian novel, like the Russian novel, was an arena in which intellectuals debated, publicized, and perhaps even discovered social questions. We will examine ways in which fiction has been used and misused as a historical document of slavery and the rise of capitalism, of race relations, of patronage and autonomy, and of marriage, sex, and love. We will read works in translation by Manuel Antonio de Almeida, José de Alencar, Machado de Assis, Aluísio de Azevedo, and others. Assignments: Quizzes, class presentations, short papers, and a final paper. (LG - Fiction)

FREN 23320    Short Stories of the Black Atlantic: A Francophone Perspective(Bastien Craipain) | Winter
(=CRES 23320, CLAS 23320) Since the late-eighteenth century, French writers have relied on the brevity and evocative powers of the short story to inform, shock, and impassion their readers with the realities of slavery, colonialism, and racial violence in the Atlantic World. From Germaine de Staël to Claire de Duras to Prosper Mérimée, the experiences of Africans and people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic—enslaved or free—have served to shape the contours of a literary genre rooted in a set of romantic sentiments, exotic expectations, and sensationalistic ends. Soon enough, however, the subjects of these lived experiences took the pen to write their own (short) stories, thus cannibalizing the genre in order to fit the necessities of their own cultural settings and political agendas. In this course, we will trace the evolution of the short story as it traveled along the shores, around the themes, and across the traditions of the Francophone Black Atlantic. We will explore the ways in which writers from France, the Caribbean, and West Africa have dialogued with one another to further hybridize a literary genre often defined by its very indefinability. Along with canonical texts by Staël, Duras, and Mérimée, we will read nineteenth- and twentieth-century short stories by Victor Séjour (Louisiana), Frédéric Marcelin (Haiti), Paul Morand (France), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe)—among others. PQ: FREN 20500 or 20503 for French majors/minors. Class discussions will be in English. All texts will be available in both French and English. (LG - Fiction)

ENGL 13512 The Future (Bill Brown) | Winter
This course focuses on the future as imagined by American science fiction of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will pay attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged; on the other, we will work to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. We will deploy different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to apprehend the stakes and the strategies for imagining future worlds. After some initial attention to the magazine and pulp culture that helped to establish the genre, we will spotlight major SF movements (Afro Futurism, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, etc.) and major authors (including Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work in different media (e.g., film, radio, graphic narrative). (LT, LG - Fiction)

ENGL 16013 The Arts of Detection (Javier Ibanez) | Winter | (Note: this course is replacing "Genealogies of the Early Novel")
Blithely disregarding the distinction between high and low culture, at once nostalgic and iconoclastic with respect to the legacies of Enlightenment rationality, detective fiction is also uniquely self-reflexive in the explicit thematization of its formal concerns with the principles of narrative construction, the mechanics of semiosis and interpretation, and the logic of emplotment. In this course, we will trace the history of the genre, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its more recent incarnations, and think about how it stages questions concerning such issues as the cultural and institutional practices of discipline and surveillance; the epistemologies of secrecy and disclosure; the aesthetics of the detail, the mystery, and the puzzle; the relationship between inquiry and desire; the overdetermined legibility of urban spaces; and the porous boundaries between self and other. Our primary texts will include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, Jorge Luis Borges, Patricia Highsmith, and Agatha Christie, among others, as well as examples from television and film. In addition, we will also consider the sustained interest detective fiction has generated within a number of different theoretical traditions. (LC, LG - Fiction, LT)

ENGL 21926 People, Places, Things: Victorian Novel Survey (Elaine Hadley) | Winter
Quarter Systems and the Victorian novel do not mix well, which is only to say that this course cannot aspire to a comprehensive accounting of the Victorian novel, or the myriad forms of the novel that emerged during Victoria’s reign (1837-1901). What it does seek to do, however, is give you some little sense of the Victorian novel’s formal and thematic range in a few of the uncharacteristically shorter novels of the period, and—in the bargain—give you a few critical tools and concepts to better figure out what these novels are and what they might be doing. Critical approaches to the Victorian novel are as varied as the novels themselves, perhaps, but I’ve tried to give you access to some of the more recent interventions that centrally query character and characterization (people), things and the circulation of things, and location and spatialization (places). Jane Eyre, Hard Times, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Warden, Jude the Obscure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. (LC, LG - Fiction)

ENGL 23506 Diets and Other Body Horror: Modifying, Mortifying, and Masticating the Fictional Flesh (Nell Pach) | Winter
Physical bodies remain a cultural preoccupation – their maintenance is debated and obsessed over in every news cycle, food and diet bloggers meticulously photograph everything they put in their mouths, and body-modifying surgeries and “lifestyle” protocols constitute a multibillion-dollar industry. This course examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary responses to the persistent, problematic fantasy of remaking human bodies to bring them into alignment with standards of beauty, health – or something else entirely. Readings will take us from speculative fiction to dirty realism, Netflix shows to biopolitical and fat acceptance theory. Authors may include H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Mary Gordon, and Roxane Gay. What do these narratives make of the gore and violence beneath the peaceful façade of bodily care and feeding, from the banal to the alien? (LG - Fiction)

EALC 15100/35100Beginning the Chinese Novel (A. Fox) | Winter
(=FNDL 20301) This course will look at the four great novels of sixteenth-century China: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Plum in the Golden Vase. Deeply self-conscious about the process of their own creation and their place within the larger literary canon, these novels deploy multiple frames, philosophical disquisitions, invented histories, and false starts before the story can properly begin. By focusing on the first twelve chapters of each novel, this course will serve as both an introduction to the masterworks of Chinese vernacular literature and an exploration of the fraught beginnings of a new genre.  Open to MAPH students. (LC, LG - Fiction)

NORW 24919/GRMN 24919 Nordic noir (Kim Kenny) | Winter
Described as a dark subset of the popular crime fiction genre, Scandinavian Crime or Nordic noir has come to command particular attention, not least because of its strong focus on setting, the Nordic landscape and nature.  Beyond the exotic setting, Scandinavian crime fiction provides a window into the welfare state, offering an unsparing critique of the current social and political model. In addition, this genre often features female protagonists, who occupy positions of power.  Still, while these elements explain the attraction to this fiction, there is something else. How do we explain the strange dissonance between the brutality of this crime fiction and the mild-mannered countries from which it derives?  In this course, we will examine a selection of Scandinavian crime fiction including novels from Larsson, Nesbø, Holt, Horst, Mankell and Sjöwall/Wahlöö, as well as secondary readings. (LG - Fiction)

ENGL 10709 Genre Fundamentals: Fiction (Sianne Ngai) | Spring 
What are basics of complex storytelling? What are its conventions and deviations? This course explores fiction by focusing on specific narrative strategies and how they change over time. Authors will most likely include Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Ali Smith, among others. (LG - Fiction)

ENGL 15001 Secrets and Spies: Espionage Fiction in the 20th Century (Jennifer Pan) | Spring
Following a few decades of low interest after the end of the Cold War, spy fiction experienced a resurgence after 9/11 with popular shows like Homeland, The Americans, and Archer. It would seem that we find espionage most interesting in times when we can envision a concrete enemy. This course will explore how tensions between the ethos and the practice of espionage produce changing and often contradictory views of nationhood. Who is included or excluded in national identity is inextricably bound to sites of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and religion. How does espionage, which is premised both on closeness to the enemy and immaculate patriotism, show up in the way the nation constructs itself and its others? Spies and spying offer unique lenses through which to examine how nations grapple with the project of distinguishing the us from the them. We will begin with the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, and then move on to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928), Helen MacInnes’s While Still We Live (1944), Odell Bennett Lee’s The Formative Years of an African-American Spy: A Memoir (2012), as well as movies The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Lives of Others (2006), and Casino Royale (2006). (LT, LG - Fiction)

ENGL 28113 The American Novel in History and the Historical Novel (Adam Rowe) | Spring
We will read several American novels—some canonical, others largely forgotten—to explore the relationship between literature and history from the early Republic to the present. A novel such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a historical artifact, a rich and suggestive reflection of the world in which it was written, and a profound meditation on history itself, on the narratives by which a culture acknowledges and denies its inheritance from the past. Indeed, many novelists have explored dimensions of our collective past that historians, tethered to the surface of recorded fact, cannot reach and should not ignore. From the creation of the American republic to the unraveling of the American working class, from the experience of slavery to the experience of industrialized warfare, we will examine some of the most significant issues in American history through the art of some of the nation's most gifted novelists. (LC, LG - Fiction)

HIST 28103  The American Novel in History and the Historical Novel  Republic  (A. Rowe, Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences)  | Spring 
We will read several American novels—some canonical, others largely forgotten—to explore the relationship between literature and history from the early Republic to the present. A novel like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is both a historical artifact, a rich and suggestive reflection of the world in which it was written, and a profound meditation on history itself, on the narratives by which a culture acknowledges and denies its inheritance from the past. Indeed, many novelists have explored dimensions of our collective past that historians, tethered to the surface of recorded fact, cannot reach and should not ignore. From the creation of the American republic to the unraveling of the American working class, from the experience of slavery to the experience of industrialized warfare, we will examine some of the most significant issues in American history through the art of some of the nation's most gifted novelists. (LG - Fiction)

EALC 22027/32027 The Modern Japanese Novel (H. Long) | Spring
This course introduces students to modern Japanese literature through the form of the novel. We begin in the late-nineteenth century, when a new generation of writers sought to come to terms with this world historical form, and end in the twenty-first, with writers trying to sustain the form through graphic art and digital media. Along the way, we will consider some of the key debates that have structured the novel's evolution: between elite and mass forms, truth and fiction, art and politics, self and other, native and foreign. The course also looks at how the form has evolved in response to shifting modes of cultural production and shifting patterns of literary consumption. Authors covered will include Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Oe Kenzaburo, Tawada Yoko, Murakami Haruki, and Mizumura Minae. All works will be read in English. (LG - Fiction)

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POETRY

LATN 21100/31100. Roman Elegy (D. Wray) | Autumn 
This course examines the development of the Latin elegy from Catullus to Ovid. Our major themes are the use of motifs and topics and their relationship to the problem of poetic persona. (LC, LG - Poetry)

Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik: Poetry and Crisis  (Sophie Salvo) | Autumn
What is the place of poetry in our modern world? Is it an outdated form? Or can poetry uncover truths that other literary genres cannot? In this course, we will examine German poetry from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, with special attention to works written in times of crisis and destabilization (such as the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, World War I, World War II and the Holocaust, the division of Germany, and the fall of the Berlin Wall). How do authors use poetry to respond to disaster and trauma, both personal and political? How do they understand the relationship between poetry and politics? Is our current era a “schlechte Zeit für Lyrik,” as one of Bertolt Brecht’s poems puts it? Readings from: Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Brecht, Celan, Eich, Bachmann, Braun, H. Müller, and others. Readings and discussions in German. (LG - Poetry) 

FREN 26019/36019/  19th-Century French Poetry in Translation: Tradition and Revolution (Rosanna Warren) | Autumn 
(=SCTH 36012)A study of modern French lyric poetry: Tradition and Revolution, Poetry and Politics, the seedbed of Modernism. For graduate students and advanced undergraduates: Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, 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. PQ for advanced undergrads seeking French credit: FREN 20500 or 20503 and at least one literature course taught in French. Students with French should read the poems in the original. Class discussion to be conducted in English; critical essays to be written in English. (LG - Poetry)

ENGL 26708/34620 Modernist Poetry: Yeats, Eliot, Pound (Maud Ellmann) | Winter

We will study selected works by Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Auden, Stevens, Williams, Loy, and others. Some 19th C authors, such as Browning, Tennyson, and Whitman, will also be addressed. (LG - Poetry)

ENGL 10403 Genre Fundamentals: Poetry: Rhythm and Myth (Edgar Garcia) | Winter
This course is an introduction to poetry that is focused on two core elements of poetry: rhythm and myth. We will consider how rhythm is an experience of time that the patterned language of poetry produces. And myth here refers to the persistent present of the poem, which wishes to be the event that it describes, rather than just a representation of it. With these elements in tension, a poem is a complex temporal system, simultaneously pulsing with the changing rhythms of everyday life and timeless—dynamic and resonant across histories, languages, and cultures. In this class we will read poetry from a variety of genres as well as cultures and languages (ancient and modern, western and non-western, oral and written) to better understand this lasting poetic tension. Along the way, we will take into account key theorists on poetic form and the function and meaning of myth. (LG - Poetry)

ENGL 19205 Poetry in the Land of Childhood (Alexis Chema) | Spring
Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: this course applies Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the poetic image as a way of compassing the intimate “fibred space” of childhood as it is constituted by Romantic poems. (LC, LG - Poetry)

ENGL 27533 Fugitive Poetics: Slaves, Runaways, Exiles, and Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Jake Fournier) | Spring
This course considers late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American poetry from the perspective of the disprized. One central point of discussion will be how slavery and indentured servitude—and the attendant urge for escape and freedom from these and other carceral institutions—shaped the American poetic imaginary. We will take up both the poetry and poetic theory written by fugitives and explore poetry itself as a form of fugitivity for the enslaved, politically exiled, or ideologically confined. Central figures in the traditional canon of nineteenth-century U.S. poetry—Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson—will be considered from this vantage alongside figures like Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, José María Heredia y Heredia, and José Martí, among others. In the process, we will explore the potential connections and collisions between these nineteenth-century literary texts and contemporary lyric and critical race theory. This course is as interested in the nineteenth-century construction of a national American poetics as it is in American poetry itself; equal weight will be given to poetry and prose. Topics will include the poetic imaginary in early American statecraft, prosody and the carceral condition (what Max Cavitch calls “Slavery and its Metrics”), blackface lyrics and class mobility, abolitionism, and inter-American literary exchange.(LC, LG - Poetry)

ENGL 28651 Epic Cosmologies (John Wilkinson) | Spring  
Cosmological epic poetry – how things are, and how they have come to be – challenges the human scale of lyric. In its origin story this course tracks recent English-language cosmological epics through Charles Olson as far back as the pre-Socratics and Gilgamesh, with stopping-off points including Milton, Blake and Shelley, while also encountering Victorian cosmic terror. (LC, LT, LG - Poetry)

NEHC 20766/30766 Shamans and Oral Poets of Central Asia (Kagan Arik) | Spring
This course explores the rituals, oral literature, and music associated with the nomadic cultures of Central Eurasia. (LG - Poetry)

BIBL 33000 Muses and Saints: Poetry Within the Christian Traditions (Erin Galgay Walsh) | Spring
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. Open to undergraduate and graduate students; Graduate students may choose to attend weekly translation group. ​(LC, LG - Poetry)

SALC 48602  Persian Philology and Poetry in South Asia (Thibaut d'Hubert and Muzaffar Alam) | Spring
(=NEHC 48602, PERS 48602) Prerequisites: intermediate level of Persian. This course offers an introduction to Persian philology as it developed in South Asia during the late Mughal period. Our aim is to observe how Persian was studied as a literary idiom and how poems were read taking grammar as a point of entry. The first sessions will provide an introduction to some fundamental methods and basic terminology of Indo-Persian philology. We will read the short prefaces of two traditional grammars: Anṣārī Jaunpūrī (d. 1225/1810, Murshidabad)’s Qawāʿid-i fārsīand ʿAbd al-Wāsiʿ Hānsawī (fl. 2nd half 17th)’s Risala-yi ʿAbd al-Wāsiʿ. Then, we will look at a selection of examples to see how this grammatical knowledge was used to analyze the language of classical mathnawīs by closely reading the comments made on some verses taken from Jāmī’s Yūsuf o Zulaykhā. After these introductory classes, will focus on Akbar (r. 1556-1605)’s poet laureate (malik al-shuʿarā) Faiḍī’s Nal DamanNal Damanis a mathnawīthat is part of an unfinished project of khamsa. The poem is the adaptation of a very popular story found in the Sanskrit Mahābhārataand in several South Asian vernacular versions. In class we will use a 19th-c. lithographed edition of Nal Damanthat contains a marginal commentary (ḥāshiya). We will also discuss topics related to the model, the context of the composition and afterlife of Nal Daman, the genre of the mathnawī-i ʿāshiqāna in the multilingual context of South Asia, and the style of Faiḍī’s poetry. Instructors' consent required. (LG - Poetry)

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NONFICTION

ENGL 20560 The Rise of Prose: Composition, Criticism, and Constitutions  (Frances Ferguson) | Autumn
This course will focus on writings of the late 18th century and early 19th century that aimed to prepare lawyers, doctors, and ministers to convey information and opinion to others. We’ll look at writings by Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Joseph Priestley to consider the challenges of persuading people in writing (instead of in public speeches and sermons) ; and we’ll conclude by considering Jeremy Bentham’s discussions of the principles that someone should take into account in preparing a constitution that would bear a meaningful relation to people’s future behavior. (LC, LT, LG - Nonfiction)

*CMST 27207/CMST 37207 Film Criticism* | Autumn
A workshop and seminar for both graduate students and undergraduates devoted to reading, writing, and (in the cases of some audiovisual essays and features) watching and listening to various forms of film criticism, including historical, journalistic, academic, and experimentally and artistically shaped examples of this practice. Weekly screenings and readings will help to focus the discussions, along with writing assignments that will be read aloud and critiqued in class. Part of the overall direction of this course will be determined by the particular interests of the students and their willingness to articulate them. A workshop and seminar for both graduate students and undergraduates devoted to reading, writing, and (in the cases of some audiovisual essays and features) watching and listening to various forms of film criticism, including historical, journalistic, academic, and experimentally and artistically shaped examples of this practice. Weekly screenings and readings will help to focus the discussions, along with writing assignments that will be read aloud and critiqued in class. Part of the overall direction of this course will be determined by the particular interests of the students and their willingness to articulate them. (LG - Nonfiction)

LACS 25123/HIST 26418  The Mexican Political Essay  (J. Silva-Herzog Márquez, Thinker Visiting Professor) | Autumn
Alfonso Reyes famously described the essay as a centaur. A hybrid form of expression, part literature and part science. This course introduces students to the rich tradition of the Mexican political essay. Students will discover the value of these open aproximations to history, institutions, culture, and identity. As a literary form, it may ellude the methodological rigours of the social sciences, but it represents a particular perspective to understand change and continuity in Mexican history, to question authority and tradition, and to offer guidelines to action. We will discuss the value of the essay form as opposed to the academic production of political science. The course will consider identity and democracy, the meaning of history and the urgency of action, and the role of intellectuals and the nature of Mexico's contradictions through the imaginative observations of Emilio Rabasa, Luis Cabrera, Jorge Cuesta, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos, Gabriel Zaid, and other Mexican essayists. (LG - Nonfiction)

EALC 24513/34513 Documentary Chinese (Guy Alitto) | Autumn
This course guides students through critical readings of primary historical documents from approximately 1800 through 1950. these documents are translated sentence by sentence, and then historiographically analyzed. Most of these documents are from the nineteenth century. Genres include public imperial edicts, secret imperial edicts, secret memorials to the throne from officials, official reports to superiors and from superiors, funerial essays, depositions ("confessions"), local gazetteers (fangzhi), newspapers, and periodicals. To provide an introduction to these genres, the first six weeks of the course will use the Fairbank and Kuhn textbook The Rebellion of Chung Jen-chieh (Harvard-Yanjing Institute). The textbook provides ten different genres of document with vocabulary glosses and grammatical explanations; all documents relate to an 1841–42 rebellion in Hubei province. Each week prior to class students electronically submit a written translation of the document or documents to be read; a day after the class they electronically submit a corrected translation of the document or documents read. A fifteen-page term paper based on original sources in documentary Chinese is also required. A reading knowledge of modern (baihua) Chinese and some familiarity with classical Chinese (wenyan) or Japanese Kanbun. Other students may take the course with permission from the instructor. (LC, LG - Nonfiction)

EALC 24305/ 34305EALC 24305/ 34305 Autobiographical Writing: Gender, and Modern Korea (K. Choi) | Spring
This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea.  The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender—on the relationship between Korean women’s life-experience, self-formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel. (LT, LG - Nonfiction)
 

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