Literary Genre: LG
Literature (Theory): LT
Literature (Before 20th-C): LC
*Asterisked courses* include a creative writing component and may be of interest to students; they do not indicate an additional requirement.
All courses listed here are approved to count towards the Creative Writing major as literature courses. Course codes indicate approval specific distribution requirements. Students may register for eligible courses under any course number.
These courses are offered by other 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 the most recent available, to the best of our knowledge.
For courses taken prior to 2019-20, check our literature course archive. All other courses not on this list must be approved by the DUS.
ENGL | English Language and Literature
CMST | Cinema and Media Studies
CLAS | Classics
CMLT | Comparative Literature
EALC | East Asian Languages and Civilizations
GRMN | Germanic Studies
NELC | Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
PHIL | Philosophy
RLLT | Romance Languages and Literatures
REES | Russian and East European Studies
SALC | South Asian Languages and Civilizations
TAPS | Theatre and Performance Studies
HIST | History
BIBL | Divinity
ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
Any class offered by the Department of English Language and Literature can satisfy the general literature requirement for Creative Writing. Please see below for a selection of English classes that satisfy specific requirements in genre (LG), theory (LT), and period (LC). Browse the full English catalog here.
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, LC)
ENGL 12001 The Literature of Riot: The Red Summer of 1919 and African American Literary History (Noah Hansen) | Autumn
“The Red Summer of 1919” was a series of race riots that swept the U.S. at the end of WWI, marking a confluence of social tensions around race, labor, and migration with a wider crisis of the world imperial system. This course takes the centenary of 1919 as an opportunity to explore the Red Summer’s legacies in African American literature and political thought. Working in tandem with a series of public programs that aim to “confront the race riots,” we will examine how Black writers have responded directly and obliquely to the upheavals of 1919. Our archive, which includes selections from the early 20th century Black press, important literary treatments, and primary historical documents from http://chicago1919.org,will facilitate a geographically and temporally layered understanding of the Red Summer. Moving from Chicago to D.C. to the seaports of Britain, and from 1919 to the present, we will engage multiple scales of the Red Summer’s significance for racial capitalist modernity. At stake conceptually in the course are questions of historical interpretation and cultural memory: How does one “read” the events of 1919, both as inscriptions of social tensions in their own time, and in relation to the succeeding historical developments that have shaped their memorialization? How do we, and how can we, read 1919 in 2019? Readings include Claude McKay, Cyril Briggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing.
ENGL 12003 How to Do Things with Books in Britain, 1910-1960: Modernism, War, and After (Zachary Hope) | Autumn
This course examines the many forms and functions of the common reader in British literary history. Beginning with a look back at the early life of this reader, and especially at the purchase their literacies afford them within a burgeoning material culture, we then consider how these literacies and their material dependencies—their reading habits, spaces, and objects—are imperiled as variations of this reader live through experiences of total war, women’s suffrage, interwar anxiety, Blitzing, unhousing, reconstruction, postcolonial displacement, and other moments of profound social change. Readings will include novels, short stories, and essays by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Lamming, alongside other contemporary cultural documents–magazines, films, Mass-Observation records—and select pieces of theory and criticism. Assignments include weekly posts, reading surveys, an autoethnography of your own reading habits, and a final paper.
ENGL 12320 Critical Videogame Studies (Patrick Jagoda) | Autumn
Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world’s most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists including Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Lisa Nakamura, and Katie Salen will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. This is a 2019-20 Signature Course in the College. (LT)
*ENGL 14002 Postmodernism/Postmodernity (Zoe Hughes) | Autumn*
Postmodernism is a late-twentieth century movement in literature, art, and philosophy that insists on the difference between the objective, or scientific, and lived, or experienced, world. This course introduces students to the central tenets of postmodernism by way of its predecessor, modernism. Is postmodernism a distinct movement or just a kind of modernism? To answer this question, students will engage in comparative analyses of paradigmatic modernist and postmodernist texts. Authors include Samuel Beckett, Octavia Butler, Jeanette Winterson, and Mark Danielewski. Topics include philosophies of art; inheritances of genres/forms, worlds, and technologies; and engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexuality. For the final, students will produce a postmodernist poem or short story or an essay explaining how a text of their choosing reflects and/or deviates from postmodernist norms. (LT)
ENGL 14320 Witnessing War (Rachel Galvin) | Autumn
War is a defining phenomenon of the twentieth century, yet there is no consensus on how to represent it. How can the experience of extremity or atrocity be described? Who might provide a more trustworthy account of events—a soldier, civilian eyewitness, news reporter, or philosopher? How do political bias and propaganda complicate our understanding of the reliability of war stories? We begin by evaluating arguments about war and its representation by a range of international writers including Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, and Tim O’Brien. Next, we explore the intellectual’s role in witnessing war by reading Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved, alongside critical texts by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, and Judith Butler. In the course of the quarter, we’ll examine a range of classic writings on war by Karl von Clausewitz, Immanuel Kant, Ernst Jünger, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, and others. In the last part of the course, we consider responses to the United States’ involvement in the wars of the twenty-first century. Texts may include Nick Flynn’s memoir The Ticking Is the Bomb and contemporary poetry from writers such as Don Mee Choi, Mónica de la Torre, Philip Metres, Solmaz Sharif, Juliana Spahr, Ocean Vuong, and C.D. Wright. We conclude with a look at war as represented in painting and photography, and a discussion of Susan Sontag’s controversial New York Times article about the American use of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. (LT)
ENGL 15302 King Arthur in Legend and History (Christina von Nolcken) | Autumn
We will consider the historical origins of the Arthurian Legend and some of the ways in which it has been reshaped and used in Britain. We will consider first how the legend was treated in the Middle Ages, most importantly by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and Thomas Malory in the fifteenth. Then we will turn to the extraordinary revival of interest in the legend that started with the Victorians and which has continued almost unabated to the present. In our discussions we will consider such matters as the political uses that have been made of the legend as well as some of the reasons for its enduring popularity. We will end with a viewing of the 1975 Film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (LC)
ENGL 16600 Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances (Tim Harrison) | Autumn
This course explores mainly major plays representing the genres of tragedy and romance; most (but not all) date from the latter half of Shakespeare's career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. Section attendance is required. This course is part of the College Course Cluster, The Renaissance. (LC)
ENGL 20001 Theories of Gender and Sexuality (Lauren Berlant; Kristen Schlit) | Autumn
This is a new one-quarter, seminar-style introductory course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. Prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of the general education civilization studies courses or other course work) is strongly advised. (LT)
ENGL 20050 Narrating Diasporas (Sophia Azeb) | Autumn
This course explores how Black writers in the twentieth century variously crafted and defined the African Diaspora while actively navigating this diaspora. Alongside scholarly works in African diaspora theory, readings will include essays and novels by Black writers from the Americas, Europe, and Africa. (LT)
ENGL 20152 London Program: London’s Water Stories: Representations of the Thames in Literature, Art and Film (Josephine McDonagh) | Autumn
This course will consider representations of urban experience in 19th, 20th and 21st-century London through focusing on the river. As one of the main points of entry to Britain for people and goods throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century, the river and especially the London docks, loom large in many of the mythologies of London as an imperial center, a destination for immigrants, and, with the redevelopment of Canary Wharf in the 1980s, a center of global finance. We will think about the licit and illicit traffic of the river, the various cultures and counter cultures that have emerged along it, and the ways in which it figures in literary and other texts. Students will travel on the river, visit relevant museums and exhibitions, including the Docklands Museum and the Tates, and they may have a guided walking tour on the Isle of Sheppey. Texts may include works by Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Woolf, Conrad, and James Berry, and films by Derek Jarman and John Mackenzie. (LC)
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)
ENGL 20154 London Program: The Country and the City (James Chandler) | Autumn
Following loosely in the track of Raymond Williams’s 1973 book of the same title, this course will consider the interplay of urban and rustic life in literary productions of the early British Industrial Revolution. Writers we read will include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and possibly Charles Dickens. We will take advantage of the major exhibition of William Blake that will be on offer at London’s spectacular Tate Britain gallery (the first there in two decades), and we will probably make an excursion to Chawton, about 40 miles outside of London, to see Jane Austen’s village, including the 16th-century country house where her brother Edward presided (LC).
ENGL 20155 London Program: Surveilling London: Sexuality, Race, and Power (Madison Chapman) | Autumn
This course investigates the experience of watching and being watched in London while giving students the opportunity to pursue a quarter-long individual research project. Through texts ranging in genre, medium and period, we will explore explicit and implicit surveillance in London: the formal modes of observing and regulating people in public (government CCTV, private security technology), and informal instances of overseeing and overhearing. How has London's literature, history, and culture registered its status as a site of particularly intense surveillance? We begin the quarter with theoretical (Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, Jeremy Bentham) and imaginative texts (Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde) alongside film and television (Francis Ford Coppola, Bodyguard) which illuminate the key paradox of how surveillance blatantly regulates public identities while, paradoxically, encouraging voyeurism of bodies labeled other or perverse. Fieldtrips to related historical and cultural sites will contextualize student research aims as we shift to independent projects in the second half of the course. Students will pursue archival and fieldwork opportunities in London with freedom to select topics under the umbrella of surveillance. Through rigorous engagement with course texts and individual research, students will strengthen textual analysis skills, become better acquainted with the city, and develop a reflexive relationship to their embodied and intellectual journeys through London. (LT)
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)
ENGL 21221 Realism, or Illusions of the Real (Amanda Shubert) | Autumn
How do texts create illusions of reality, and what kinds of techniques are involved in making something feel real to the reader? What kinds of reality does realism show? We will explore answers to these questions through readings of a range of literary works from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist tradition, from Jane Austen’s Emma and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as well as through analysis of photography and early film. Our assumption will be that the literary texts and visual media we look at contain within them theories of realism and representation for us to uncover. The written assignments for this course will ask you todevelop some of the analytic skills used by literary scholars, namely: close textual analysis of a literary text; arguing an interpretation; and summarizing and evaluating works of literary criticism and theory. (LC)
ENGL 22903 Literature and Architecture: Between Utopia and Dystopia, Design and Occupation (Jennifer Scappettone) | Autumn
This seminar to be taught in conjunction with the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial will allow students to explore the material repercussions of built, neglected, and mythologized environments on those who imagine and inhabit them, and to consider the way the literary arts not only respond to, but contribute to their shape. We will place the literature of the metropolis into dialogue with the writings and plans of architects and urbanists on the one hand, occupant-activists on the other. We will study the creation (and sporadic dismantling) of the city from the perspective of its builders and inhabitants—moving from the nineteenth-century flaneur through Situationism, to the utopian schemes and conceptual architectures of the ‘60s and 70s, and contemporary protest movements. A range of cities, visible and invisible, will be under consideration, with Chicago as our immediate case study. In lieu of a standard research paper, students will be given the opportunity to produce a collaborative atlas of Chicago. They must make time for field trips to the Biennial and to select monuments around the city. This is a featured Makers Seminar for English majors, but is open to all students. (LT, LC)
ENGL 23123 Cybernetics and Trans Identities (Alexander Wolfson) | Autumn
This course is an examination into the ways in which theorizations of trans identity have been bound to discourses concerning cyborgs and cybernetics. On one hand, we will look into the ways in which medico-technological discourses have inscribed and produced the limits for conceptualizing trans-ness. On the other, we will examine how trans self-narratives have mobilized cybernetic language to parasitically produce autonomous discourses. The over-arching questions of this class will be: how should we engage concepts, such as the cybernetic and the prosthetic, that have been used towards the disenfranchisement of trans identities, while simultaneously have been re-inscribed as emancipatory concepts? How should we tell the histories of these discourses? How do they affect, produce, contain, and enliven contemporary worlds of trans identities and existences? This course will, from its onset, be interdisciplinary in nature, both in terms of the academic disciplines from which we choose our texts (trans theory, queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, new media theory, literary criticism, etc.) and also through an engagement with various genres and media, engaging fiction, film and visual art, as ways to further expand and develop our critical investigations. Readings will include works by figures such as Karen Barad, Jean Baudrillard, Mel Chen, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Beatriz Preciado, Jasbir Puar, Gayle Salamon, Sandy Stone, Alexander Weheliye (LT).
ENGL 24002 Joyce’s Ulysses: An Introduction (Maud Ellmann) | Autumn
This course consists of a chapter-by-chapter introduction to Ulysses. We will focus on such themes as the city, aesthetics, politics, sex, food, religion, and the family, while paying close attention to Joyce’s use of multiple narrators and styles. Students are strongly encouraged to read Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Homer’s Odyssey as preparation for this course. Assignments will consist of bi-weekly quizzes, collaborative class presentations, regular contributions to the class blog, and 2-3 papers. (Fiction, 1830-1940)
ENGL 24408 Before and After Beckett: Theater and Theory (Loren Kruger) | Autumn
Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleaksness but his experiments with theatre and film echo the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and screen eg Chaplin and Keaton) as well as experimental Theatre and modern philosophy, even when there are no direct lines of influence. This course will juxtapose these points of reference with Beckett’s plays and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Genet and others in French, Pinter in English. It will then explore more recent plays that suggest the influence of Beckett by Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane in English, Michel Vinaver in French, as well as the relevance of theorists and philosophers include Barthes, Wittgenstein, and critics writing on specific plays. (LT)
ENGL 25601 Nineteenth Century American Gothic William Veeder | Autumn
This course will trace the “Gothic” tradition in America from its initial manifestations in Brown and Irving through its first great flowering in the “American Renaissance” era of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and on to the end of the century with James and Gilman. We will emphasize questions of methodology as well as practicing close analysis and defining a literary tradition. (LC)
ENGL 25805 Popol Vuh, Epic of the Americas (Edgar Garcia) | Autumn
As one of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the indigenous Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called “the Bible of America.” It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical transformations, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we will read this work fully and closely (in multiple translations, with some account of its original K’iche’ Mayan language as well), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we will examine its mirroring in Genesis, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Diné Bahane’ to consider how and why epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this point of tension between cosmos and politics, we will examine adaptations of the Popol Vuh in contemporary political contexts by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock and Andrés Xiloj Peruch, Humberto Ak’ab’al, Xpetra Ernandex, Ambar Past, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, Arturo Arias, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan-born Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with extensive North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the United States today. As a capstone to our class, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking carefully about how this Mayan story of world creation implicates us to this day. (LC)
ENGL 25999 Secret Histories, Inside Jobs: Paranoia and Conspiracy in American Literature (Nell Pach) | Autumn
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” runs the famous line – repeated everywhere from bumper stickers to Nirvana lyrics – from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the story, in Heller’s words, of a “sane man in an insane world.” American fascination with conspiracies – real and imagined – runs through the country’s history from eighteenth-century Illuminati paranoia to today’s truthers and birthers, and finds plenty to satisfy it in fiction, film, television, and even sensationalist news coverage. Conspiracy theories and their defenders frequently invoke American ideals of democracy, justice, and free thought but also often reflect the nation’s ugliest legacies of nativism, racism, and cynical self-interest.The texts we will examine in this course entertain, to differing degrees, the possibility that American historical events and sociopolitical power dynamics are the products of unseen and unknown forces, sinister machinations, carefully arranged nets that are pulled tight at the right moment. Examining a range of fiction from around 1800 to the present, we will explore conspiracy narratives from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Thomas Pynchon. Why does the notion of one’s own manipulation in the hands of shadowy puppet-masters hold such enduring appeal and sway in the American imagination? (LC)
ENGL 29101 Archive [Yellow] Fever (Sarah Johnson) | Autumn
This course examines slavery in the 18th and 19th-century Caribbean through the lens of maladies within and of the archive. The course also provides an introduction in methods of working in historical and contemporary archives. We will read fictional, archival, methodological and theoretical texts to examine fears of contagion and disease on the Middle Passage and plantations of the Caribbean, as well as scholarship on the difficulty of working in archives, especially those of slavery. The class will make 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 (relevant to their own research interests) that will provide the topic of their final paper. Texts in this course include the work of Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, Christina Sharpe, Simone Browne, Michel Foucault; Richard Ligon, Mary Seacole, Thomas Thistlewood, William Earle. This course is offered as part of the Migrations Research Sequence. This is a research and criticism seminar intended for third- and fourth-year English majors. (LC, LT)
ENGL 29103 Representations of Islam in Early Modern England (Noémie Ndiaye) | Autumn
This seminar explores the representation of Islam and Islamic cultures in early modern English literature, from the 1580s to the 1650s with a primary but not exclusive focus on drama. What enduring fantasies about the Islamic world does early modern English literature express? How do religion, race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the formation of those fantasies? How do specific English social, political, and cultural issues inform literary representations of Islam? Ultimately, what do texts about Islam tell us about early modern England? This is a research and criticism seminar intended for third- and fourth-year English majors. (LC)
ENGL 25008/35008 Changing Worlds: J.G. Ballard’s Apocalyptic Quartet (Andrei Pop) | Autumn
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, in 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 compliments and completes Ballard’s cycle.
ENGL 21360/41360 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation (Tristan Schweiger) | Autumn
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 two hundred 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. 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 Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. (LC, LT)
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 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 15620 Imagining Pagans in the Middle Ages (Julie Orlemanski; Joe Stadolnik) | Winter
This undergraduate course investigates what became of classical paganism during the Christian Middle Ages. How did medieval writers portray Greek and Roman practices of worship and its pantheon of gods? For medieval literate culture, classical myths were both an index of historical difference – 'we no longer believe what they believed' – and an ongoing source of poetic, narrative, and symbolic potency. Through the close-reading of a variety of source texts, the course examines what classical myths and pagan belief means to late-medieval poets and thinkers. In particular, we’ll look to how ‘imagining pagans’ incited the medieval historical imagination; inspired cosmological or proto-scientific thought experiments; disrupted orthodox theology; and finally, worked to establish fiction as a domain of literature. The poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer will be at the heart of the class, but we will also read widely across medieval culture. No previous experience with Middle English is necessary. (LC)
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 16500 Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies (Richard Strier) | Winter
An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and (English) histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. A shorter and a longer paper will be required. (LC)
ENGL 17440 August and After: Contemporary Black Drama and Performance (Tina Post) | Winter
The American stage has seen an explosion of black playwrights since the 1990s. From the verbatim theater of Anna Deavere Smith to the cagey narrators of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, these playwrights have reimagined and reworked American drama’s conventions of form and mood. Performers like Ralph Lemon and Jennifer Kidwell are devising work at theater's intersection with dance, media, and visual art, and playwright Adrienne Kennedy has returned after a decade-long hiatus. This course surveys the landscape of contemporary back theater-makers and performance artists (and includes, where relevant, the historical predecessors they explicitly invoke or work against). What forces animate works of contemporary black theater and performance? What tropes or conventions do they jettison, and which do they keep? Is there enough uniting these works that an underlying coherence prevails, or does studying them alongside one another instead reveal the dissolution of a racial center?
ENGL 19880 Inhabiting the Borderlands: Latinx Embodiment in Literature, Art, and Popular Culture (Carmen Merport) | Winter
How does a Latinx cultural identity become legible? What are the conditions of its recognition? What kinds of embodied practices and performances serve to point to the particular intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender that can be termed “Latinx”? To approach these questions, this course will explore critical texts by Diana Taylor, Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia Alvarez, Coco Fusco, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, among others, as well as performances, artwork, and literature by La Lupe, Walter Mercado, Yalitza Aparicio, Cherríe Moraga, Judith Baca, Carmen Maria Machado, and more. (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)
ENGL 26206 Race and Space (Adrienne Brown) | Winter
This course will look at the way that race is as much a product of space as it is of blood, skin, vision, or law. How does space determine the way we perceive race and how does race color the ways we experience and relate to space? Starting with post-antebellum rewritings of slavery’s spaces, moving through the hysteria surrounding passing and urbanization in the 1920’s, the role of the mid-century suburbs in reorganizing racial categories, the post-Civil Rights post-industrial city and the shoring up of the ghetto, to the current intersections between ideas of the post-racial and the post-spatial, this course will explore the novel as a key site for mediating the changing linked experience of race and space.
ENGL 26249 Literature and the Financial Crisis of 2008 (Kenneth Warren) | Winter
In this course we will look at 2008 stock market crash as an event within literary fiction among writers in the US, the UK, and South Asia.
ENGL 27500 Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Issues and Methods (Kenneth Warren) | Winter
In this course we will examine that period known as the Harlem Renaissance, partly as an exercise in literary criticism and theory, partly as an exercise in literary and intellectual history. Our objectives will be to critique the primary texts from this period and at the same time to assess the efforts of literary scholars to make sense of this moment in the history of American cultural production. (LT)
ENGL 29102 Mobile Life (Josephine McDonagh) | Winter
This is a new research-intensive course which aims to provide both theoretical frames and methods for research for exploring topics related to migration and literature in the contemporary world and in historical contexts. We will explore various aspects of the migratory experience; the ways in which literary texts shape or shed light on them; and how contemporary theories help us to understand migration and its literatures. Key terms will include migration, mobility, exile, refugees, settlement, kinship, border crossing, bureaucracy. We will ask questions such as: how do printed and other forms of information enable/regulate movement? What is an imaginative transportation? What happens when we cross a border? What is at stake in settlement? Who is a refugee? How do children function in the migratory imagination? In class we will focus mainly on anglophone texts from the nineteenth century onwards, including novels, short stories, poems and plays, journalism, propaganda, bureaucratic documents, maps, guides, and other kinds of texts. The assessment for the course will include an outline of a research project of your own devising, for which you will develop your own archive of sources. This course is offered as part of the Migrations Research Sequence. (LT)
ENGL 20228/30228 William Blake: Poet, Painter, and Prophet (W.J.T. Mitchell) | Winter
William Blake is arguably the most unusual figure in the history of English poetry and visual art. Recognized now as an essential part of the canon of Romantic poetry, he was almost completely unknown in his own time. His paintings, poems, and illuminated books were objects of fascination for a small group of admirers, but it was not until the late 19th century that his work began to be collected by William Butler Yeats, and not until the 1960s that he was recognized as a major figure in the history of art and literature. Dismissed as insane in his own time, his prophetic and visionary works are now seen as anticipating some of the most radical strands of modern thought, including Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. We will study Blake’s work from a variety of perspectives, placing his poetry in relation to the prophetic ambitions of Milton and his visual images in the European iconographic tradition of Michelangelo and Durer, Goya and Fuseli. The course will emphasize close readings of his lyric poems, and attempt to open up the mythic cosmology of his allegorical, epic, and prophetic books. (LC)
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 26312/36312 Global Speculative Fiction (Hoda El Shakry) | Winter
This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. The course reflects on how these texts and films reimagine the past and the present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. To that end, we will consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Literary and cinematic works will be paired with theoretical readings that critically frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to exploring speculative fiction as a way of reading and interpreting the universe, we will examine its generic and aesthetic qualities across a variety of subgenres (Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, steampunk, climate fiction). (LT)
SPRING 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 12004 Manifesto! Art, Politics, Utopia (Tim DeMay) | Spring
The manifesto exploded in the 20th Century, spanning aesthetic and political spectrums in order to consolidate groups, challenge dominant structures, and otherwise make claims for how the future should look. This course will examine the genre of the manifesto from Marx to cyborgs by looking at its use by writers, thinkers, and activists, asking about representation (both in how artists represent subjects, and how speakers represent their constituents), identity, the avant-garde, modernity/modernism, and the implied suggestions of utopian worlds. By examining such a specifically action-oriented genre, we will explore just what connection, if any, art and literature have to the political, real, everyday, whatever-we-call-it, shared world and our abilities to craft its future. (LT)
ENGL 13002 A Still Life: Feminists and Objects in Modernity (Katherine Nolan) | Spring
Modernity has always been fascinated by the fantasy of objects coming to life. Feminist theory, by contrast, has often been fixated on the reverse: “objectification,” or the process of human beings becoming like objects. This course puts into conversation these two different ways of imagining animate object-ness in order to assemble a critical archive on one of modernity’s foundational binaries: the “subject-object” dichotomy. We will examine a series of genres that prominently feature objects, including it-narratives, narratives about robotic women, and video games, while consider these texts in relation to prominent feminist writings about objectification. (LT, LC)
ENGL 14001 Anglophone Immigrant Literature: Narratives of Displacement, Deprivation, and Consumption (Upasana Dutta) | Spring
In anglophone immigrant literary narratives, there is a place of particular poignancy and longing reserved for meditations upon food. What is the role, the space, and the import of food in immigrant lives? What diminution accompanies the loss of your own food, and what desire attaches to the rediscovery, or the replication of it in a foreign land? What are the stakes involved in charting out a dominion of your own familiar flavors or adapting to a new palate in an unfamiliar milieu? This course charts a few of these concerns and uses food writing as a point of entry into modes of being and making in immigrant literature, considering that emigration is a displacement that is sometimes impelled and accompanied by trauma, and characterized by rapid modes of adaptation to an unfamiliar and frequently hostile environment. Readings are likely to include fiction and poetry by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amy Tan, Imtiaz Dharker, Amarjit Chandan, Monique Truong, and Cristina Henríquez. These primary texts will be supplemented by critical and analytical readings about patterns of displacement and consumption in immigrant lives and literature. (LT)
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 15320 Witnessing Medieval Evil: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Observation (Benjamin Saltzman) | Spring
Seeing hell for oneself, watching the torture of a saint, looking at illustrations of violence: these profoundly terrible experiences, narrated and drawn, shaped the way medieval readers took in the world around them, its violence, its suffering, its preponderance of evils. But how exactly does literature allow readers to witness and process such horrors? How is the observation of violence transformed by art? What is unique about the medieval experience of these artistic and literary forms of mediation? What can they teach us about our own contemporary cultural encounters with the sights and stories of atrocity? By exploring questions like these, this course will consider the didactic, religious, and epistemological functions of witnessing in a variety of early medieval texts such as illustrated copies of Prudentius’s Psychomachia (in which the Virtues engage in a gruesome battle against the Vices), the Apocalypse of Paul (in which Paul sees hell and lives to tell about it), early medieval law codes, the Life of St. Margaret, the Old English Genesis, and the heroic poem Judith. These medieval texts will be read alongside thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Susan Sontag, whose work on images of atrocity in the modern world will both inform our critical examination of the Middle Ages while opening up the possibility for rethinking literature and art in relation to contemporary experiences of violence. (LC, LT)
ENGL 16003 Ventriloquism in Literature and Culture (Marissa Fenley) | Spring
In this class we will collectively identify the conventions that have come to define theatrical tradition known as ventriloquism. While this course will be rooted in the study of performance, we will also look at instances when ventriloquism appears in literature and film as a metaphor and as a trope. By looking at ventriloquism both in its technique and its thematics we will investigate the extent to which the ventriloquist and the dummy are sexed and racialized categories. Our texts will span from the recorded performances of famous ventriloquists such as Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy, episodes of The Twilight Zone, horror films like Dead of Night and popular fiction. We will also consult several theoretical texts such as Freud on the uncanny and Winnicott on transitional objects. (LT)
*ENGL 17002 Early Modern Love: Eros in British Literature 1500-1700 (Michal Zecharia) | Spring*
This course examines an age-old problem of erotic love: how can love be a chief component of the well-lived life, when at its most celebrated it departs from reason, even to the point of madness? We will consider the challenges that love presents to human knowledge and ethics through the lens of early modern English literature, where the theme of love was at the center of aesthetic creativity, but our discussion will also draw on the philosophy of love, the history of emotions, Christian theology, and psychology. With these resources at hand, we will explore the phenomenon of erotic love, the relation of Eros to self and identity, and the reasons for love, finally leading up to the question: what does it mean to love well? Readings will include poetry, drama, and prose by prominent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton, as well as less studied voices in the period, alongside theoretical works by thinkers throughout the ages, from Plato and Augustine to Harry Frankfurt and Lauren Berlant. Students will have an opportunity to approach the topic through analytic and creative assignments. (LC)
ENGL 18108 Culture and the Police (Chris Taylor) | Spring
How do cultural products facilitate, abet, and enable the form of social ordering that we call policing? This course will explore the policing function of what modernity calls “culture” by exploring the parallel histories of policing, the emergence of modern police theory, and the rise of the novel. We will focus in particular on how both literature and the police emerge to navigate a series of linked epistemological and political problematics: the relation between particularity and abstraction, the relation between deviance and normalcy, and indeed that of authority as such. While we will focus on texts from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, students with a broader interest in policing are encouraged to enroll. Readings will include Daniel Defoe, Patrick Colquhoun, Henry Fielding, G.W.F. Hegel, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael McKeon, Mary Poovey, and Mark Neocleous.This is a research and criticism seminar intended for third-year English majors. (LC, LT)
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 19890 Portrait of the Artist as ___: Twentieth-Century Authorship in Theory and Practice (Carmen Merport) | Spring
Close your eyes and imagine an artist. What or who do you see? This course will explore the theories and representations of authorship and artistry that have shaped the way most of us imagine such figures. We will also discuss works of criticism, literature, and art that seek to counter or transform this tradition from a variety of angles and positionalities. Figures we will attend to include James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Vincent Van Gogh, and Andy Warhol. (LT)
ENGL 20046 Introduction to Caribbean Studies (Kaneesha Parsard) | Spring
Why have critics, writers, and artists described the Caribbean as “ground zero” of Western modernity? Beginning with the period before European settlement, we will study slavery and emancipation, Asian indentureship, labor and social movements, decolonization, debt and tourism, and today’s digital Caribbean. We will survey literary and visual cultures, primary source documents, and thought across the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. All readings will be available in translation. (LC, LT)
ENGL 20720 Film and Fiction (James Chandler) | Spring
This will be a wide-ranging course that addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain—the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in non more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form? Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” a far too limiting in scope? But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? What has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? What might its emergence have to do with the perceived crisis in the authority of reported facts in our time? There will screenings of adaptations and readings in the prose fiction on which they are based, both older (e.g., Austen, Shelley, and Dickens) and more recent (e.g., Ishuguro and Baldwin) as well as readings in both literary and film criticism. Possibilities for the films-based-on-fact that we might screen would include: American Hustle, Fruitvale Station, I Tanya, and BlacKkKlansman. Students enrolled in the course will be expected to complete a short written exercise at midterm (3-4 pp.) and a longer course paper (12pp.). (LT)
ENGL 25318 Literary Radicalism and the Global South: Perspectives from South Asia (Abhishek Bhattacharyya) | Spring
What does it mean to speak of literary radicalism? What are the hallmarks of a radical literature? And how does any such body of radical literature relate to the crucial question of empire, while also seeking to not be limited by that address? This course will explore the theme of literary radicalism through perspectives arising from South Asia. Over the twentieth century the subcontinent has been shaped through a wide variety of social and political movements: from anticolonial struggles to communist organising, feminist struggles, dalit mobilisation, indigenous protest and more, with their histories intertwining in different ways. We will start with a consideration of some texts on literary radicalism from other parts of the global South by authors such as Julia de Burgos and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and then move to a detailed discussion of South Asian texts in subsequent weeks. This course will work with specific texts every week to examine particular aspects of literary style and history. We will study texts from a variety of subcontinental languages (in translation, unless originally in English), and across different forms – poetry, short fiction, children’s literature, novels, a memoir, a graphic novel and a documentary film on a poet. By grappling at length with specific geopolitical and literary contexts in South Asia, and serving as an introduction to them, this course seeks to move beyond reading them reductively simply in relation to empire/colonialism or the metropolitan reader, while simultaneously looking back at the global divisions of power from their perspectives. No prior training in South Asia or literature courses is a requirement. Students aren’t required to know any languages of the global South, but are very welcome to bring any such knowledge into their contributions to and submissions for the class.
ENGL 25405 The American Classics (Eric Slauter) | Spring
This course offers an introduction to six of the greatest works of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Lectures invite you to immerse yourselves in the environments in which they were written and to explore the crucial literary, intellectual, social, religious, economic, and political contexts that shaped the production and reception of these distinctly American contributions to world literature. (LC)
ENGL 26250 Richer and Poorer: Income Inequality (Elaine Hadley) | Spring
Current political and recent academic debate has centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed. Readings will include some of the following literature, Hard Times, Le Pere Goriot, The Jungle, The Time Machine, Native Son, Landscape for a Good Woman, White Tiger, and some of the following economic and political texts Principles of Political Economy, The Acquisitive Society, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Capital (Marx and Piketty), The Price of Inequality and Inequality Re-examined. (LT, LC)
ENGL 26900 Postwar U.S. Literature (Deborah L. Nelson) | Spring
Ranging across genres and media platforms, this survey course covers the major aesthetic innovations of the late 20th century in their historical context. Beginning with the end of World War II and ending at 9/11, each week will contain one major reading and several smaller ones as well as samplings of other arts (photography, film, performance art, etc.) relevant or analogous to the readings.
ENGL 27017 Passing (Nicolette Bruner) | Spring
In this course, we examine how people move within and between categories of identity, with particular attention to boundary crossings of race and gender in U.S. law and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Law provides a venue and a language through which forces of authority police categories of identity that, at Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado observe, “society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.” Readings will include theoretical texts as well as court rulings, cultural ephemera, and literary texts. (LT)
ENGL 27529 Intoxication and Dispossession in Colonialism (Matt Boulette) | Spring
Manhattan, according to one folk etymology, means “the place at which we were drunk.” Supposedly the Lenape (Delaware) people named the island after their “general intoxication,” in 1609, on wine and aqua vitae offered by the English explorer Henry Hudson. That derivation, though false, nonetheless puts drunkenness intriguingly close to the center of an originary colonial encounter. In this course, students will examine how such scenes were reiterated, transformed, and exploited throughout the 19th century. As we move along these historical itineraries, we will ask how toxic ideology distills and reinforces logics of racial dispossession. But we will also ask how intoxication opens onto altered states, draws out chronic conditions, and expands repertoires of conviviality. Our readings will weave between multiple genres in pursuit of these questions. Juxtaposing antiquarian files and execution sermons, medical inquiries and autobiographies, bureaucratic reports and romantic episodes, we will retrace scenes of intoxication through the texts, images, and institutions that configured them over time. (LC)
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 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)
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)
ENGL 20806 / 30806 British Drama, 1660-1830 (Timothy Campbell) | Spring
This survey of British drama during the long eighteenth century ranges from Restoration sexual comedy and civic drama of political virtue and self-sacrifice to popular spectacles of criminal justice and early Gothic theater of passionate hatred. Alongside the plays, we will consider theatrical history (including Shakespearean legacies and significant actors of the period like David Garrick, Mary Robinson, and Sarah Siddons) together with criticism and theory, past and present. (LC)
ENGL 29120/39120 Renaissance Christian Epic: Tasso, Vida, Milton (Joshua Scodel) | Spring
This course will focus upon the two most important Renaissance Christian epics, Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem Delivered (first pub. 1581) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (first pub. 1667), and two brief Biblical epics, Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad (1535) and Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671). We will examine these four Renaissance epics as ambitious efforts to revive an ancient and pagan form in order to depict Christian and self-consciously modern visions. We will consider how Renaissance epic poets imitate and emulate both their classical models (primarily Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Judeo-Christian sources (primarily the Bible); seek to forge an elevated and appropriate language for epic in Latin, Italian, and English; espouse new visions of the human, the heroic, and gender relations; and adumbrate distinctively modern national, imperial, and global ambitions. All non-English texts will be read in translation, but students who can read Latin or Italian will be encouraged to read the originals. (LC)
CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES
*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)
CLASSICS
CLCV 15019. Ancient Drama, Modern Theory. (S. Nooter) | Autumn
(=SIGN 26055, TAPS 17019) This course will travel through the great dramas of ancient Greece, including works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Moreover, it will show how the history of contemporary thought has been shaped by reflection on Greek tragedy, starting from the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the feminist critiques of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, works of structuralism and poststructuralism, and finally the recent material and affective turns in scholarship. Along the way, we will draw insights on modern movements of the performance arts from adaptations, including those in dance (Martha Graham), in film (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars von Trier), and in drama itself (Anne Carson). As this course will demonstrate, there is hardly an intellectual or artistic movement of recent history that has not taken its cue from Greek drama. All reading will be in English. (LC, LT)
CLCV 24319. The Idea of Freedom in Antiquity. (A. Horne) | Autumn
(=CLAS 34319, LLSO 24319, HIST 2/30507) Freedom may be the greatest of American values. But it also has a long history, a dizzying variety of meanings, and a huge literature. This course will be an introduction to critical thinking on freedom (primarily political freedom) with an emphasis on Greco-Roman texts. The first half of the class will focus on Greek authors, including Herodotus, Euripides, and Aristotle. The second half will focus on Roman authors, from Cicero to Livy to Tacitus. The ancient texts will be supplemented by modern literature on freedom, such as John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin. (LC, LT)
CLCV 24519. Dreams in the Ancient World. (S. Torallas. A. Maravela) | Autumn
(=CLAS 34519, NEHC 20613/30613, ANCM 44519, RLST 24503). Dreams belong to the universals of human existence as human beings have always dreamt and will continue to dream across time and cultures. The questions where do dreams come from and how to unravel a dream have always preoccupied the human mind. In this course we will focus on dreams in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultural environments. We will cover dreams from three complementary perspectives: dreams as experience, dream interpretation and dream theory. The reading materials will include: (a) a selection of dream narratives from different sources, literary texts as well as documentary accounts of dreams; (b) texts which document the forms and contexts of dream interpretation in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultures and (c) texts which represent attempts to approach dreams from a more general perspective by among others explaining their genesis and defining dream-types. (LC, LT)
CLCV 22519. The Life and Afterlife of Cleopatra (J. Johansen) | Winter
(=GNSE 23124) Cleopatra is one of the most notorious women in history. The quintessential femme fatale, she has permeated Western cultural imagination for more than 2,000 years. Born of a bastard king, she rose to power in one of the most turbulent times in human history – Rome was waging bloody civil war, the empires of Alexander the Great’s legacy were falling, and Egypt was in revolt and uprising. Her story is one of political intrigue, sex, power, murder, war, and suicide. But her story was never her story alone. Once the asp took its fatal bite, Cleopatra’s story was coopted by her enemies and her legacy was built at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race over the last two millennia. This course has two main objectives: 1. to strip back the Western, male gaze of Cleopatra’s legacy and evaluate Cleopatra’s reign within its own context; and 2. to interrogate Cleopatra’s constructed identities and the role they have played and still play in society. In this course, students will take a critical look at the life and legacy of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, through a wide-array of primary source materials and a selection of her vast reception, including Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; Afrocentric art, literature, and pop culture; film; comedy; advertising; and popular music. (LC)
CLCV 23608. Aristophanes’ Athens (J. Hall) | Winter
(=CLAS 33608, ANCM 33900, =HIST 30803, HIST 20803) The comedies of Aristophanes are as uproarious, biting, and ribald today as they were more than 2,400 years ago. But they also offer a unique window onto the societal norms, expectations, and concerns as well as the more mundane experiences of Athenians in the fifth century BCE. This course will examine closely all eleven of Aristophanes’ extant plays (in translation) in order to address topics such as the performative, ritual, and political contexts of Attic comedy, the constituency of audiences, the relationship of comedy to satire, the use of dramatic stereotypes, freedom of speech, and the limits of dissent. Please note that this course is rated MA for adult themes and language. (LC)
CLCV 28319. Ephron Seminar. "Imagining Nature among the Greeks"? (L. Wash) | Winter
The goal of this course is to gain an understanding of the historical roots of the concept of nature (Greek physis), while being attentive to the diversity of ancient Greek thought about nature even in its early history. In the texts we will read, numerous notions of “nature” can be discerned: for instance, nature as the physical form of an individual, nature as an underlying reality of someone or something, nature as an autonomous thing distinct from human art and from the supernatural, nature as the all-encompassing natural order, or nature as the natural environment. The conceptual and ideological work done by these conceptions also varies wildly. Furthermore, the images associated with the concepts are similarly diverse, ranging from human bodies to magical plants and cosmic spheres, and with a comparable repertory of conceptual and ideological purposes. Yet discussions of the concept of nature typically deal almost exclusively in abstractions: this is true, for instance, of the standard study of physis written over a century ago as a U of C dissertation, which we will read in excerpt. Throughout this class, we will consider not only the explicit and abstract conceptualization of nature, but also a number of related images—especially in the form of metaphors, analogies and personifications—that ultimately fed into the literary and philosophical depictions of nature in the long traditions that have followed. (LC, LT)
GREK 24519/34519. Lucan (A. Horne) | Winter
Lucian’s sparkling dialogues and essays are among the best of Greek humorous writing. Conscious of his long tradition, Lucian explores such topics as moral philosophy, literary history, and issues of fantasy, escapism, and belief—all while maintaining a light touch. We will read several works of Lucian in the original Greek. Translation will be supplemented by thematic discussions of Lucian’s comic technique and intellectual concerns. (LC)
CLCV 12900 Civil War Literature (M. Lowrie) | Spring
(=SIGN 26052) The Romans did not invent political strife, far from it, but they named the concept. Civil war (bellum civile) is technically formal war among citizens. Since antiquity, the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, which brought the Roman Republic to the point of collapse, have been paradigmatic not only for the modern conceptualization of political discord, but for its narration. As Marx said of various stages of the French Revolution, it was fought in Roman garb, first of the Roman Republic, then of the Roman Empire. Despite the formal definition, ancient and modern tales of civil war typically turn on discord within the family, among the sexes, and in the cosmic order. Civil war comes to stand for pervasive social collapse. Beginning with Thucydides’ famous description of stasis on Corcyra, readings will encompass selections from Roman history (Caesar, Sallust, Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus), biography (Plutarch, Suetonius), Latin poetry (Horace, Propertius, Vergil, Seneca, Lucan), modern novels on civil war with Roman resonances (Victor Hugo, Michel Houellebecq), and articles on civil war from political science and conceptual history. Central questions will be repetition in history, whether civil war can ever come to an end, and whether its ghastly horror is constitutive of the political order and, if so, of what kind. (LC)
CLCV 24219. Troy and Its Legacy. (M. Andrews) | Spring
(=HIST 20404/230404 CLAS 34219) This course will explore the Trojan War through the archaeology, art, and mythology of the Greeks and Romans, as well as through the popular imaginings of it in later cultures. The first half will focus on the actual events of the "Trojan War" at the end of the second millennium BCE. We will study the site of Troy, the cities of the opposing Greeks, and the evidence for contact, cooperation, and conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. Students will get an introduction to the history of archaeology and the development of archaeological fieldwork. The second half will trace how the narrative and mythology of Homer's Iliad and the "Trojan War" were adapted and used by later civilizations, from classical Greece to twenty-first-century America, to justify their rises to political and cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean and the West, respectively. (LC)
CLCV 25219. Art of Rhetoric from Aristotle-Cicero. (P. White) | Spring
(=CLAS 35219, LLSO 25219). Rhetoric was the supreme technology of the Greco-Roman world, and the principal focus of formal schooling up to the end of antiquity and beyond. The readings for the course show how the psychology of persuasion was reduced to a system, how the system was adapted to political structures of the very different societies in which it flourished, and how orators put it into practice: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s On the Orator and Brutus, and selected speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, and others. (LC)
GREK 21116/31116. Herodotus. (D. Martinez) | Autumn
(=FNDL 21116, NEHC 2/31116, RLST 21116, BIBL 31116) “I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that what has been done may not fade in time from the memory of man, and great and remarkable achievements, whether of Greeks or foreign (barbaroi) peoples, may not lack the honor of remembrance” (I 1.1). “I am going to give an extended account of Egypt, because it has a greater number of remarkable things in it, and presents us with a greater number of extraordinary works, than any other country. For that reason I shall say more about it” (II 35.1). With those two sentences Herodotus expresses the over-all vision of his great History and his particular fascination with Egypt as a special case study of human civilization and man’s “great and remarkable achievements.” We will read Book II this quarter, with attention to Herodotus’ language and his unrivalled status as master of the older Ionic prose style. We will also focus on his historical method, his relish for narrative detail and diversion, and his interpretatio Graeca of Egyptian culture, civilization, and religion. (LC)
GREK 25116/35116. Reading Greek Literature in the papyri (S. Torallas) | Autumn
(=BIBL 36916 HCHR 36916, ANCM 45116).
The earliest—and often the only—witnesses for Greek literary works are the papyri. This makes their testimony of great importance for literary history and interpretation, but that testimony does not come without problems. In this course we will cover some of the concepts and techniques needed to recover the literary treasure contained in this highly complex material: from the history of book forms, the textual tradition of literary works, and the creation of the canons to more philological aspects such as editorial practice, Textkritik and paleography. Our literary corpus will include biblical texts, paraliterary (school and magical) texts, and translations of Egyptian texts into Greek. We will work with photographs of the papyri, and every part of the course will be based on practice. As appropriate we will also work with the University of Chicago’s collections of papyri. Requirements: at least two years of Greek. (LC)
GREK 21300/31300. Greek Tragedy (C. Faraone) | Spring
This course is an introduction to Aeschylean drama in general, seen through the special problems posed by one play. Lectures and discussions are concerned with the play, the development and early form of Attic drama, and philosophical material. Modern Aeschylean scholars are also read and discussed. (LC)
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)
LATN 25200/35200. Medieval Latin (M. Allen) | Autumn
(=HIST 23207/33207, HCHR 35200) The Practice of Carolingian Saints’ Tales. Spoken “Lingua Romana rustica” departed from canonical Ancient Latin long before the late eighth century. But at this time the renewed study of the Classics and grammar soon prompted scholars and poets to update the stories of their favorite saints, and to inscribe some for the first time. We shall examine examples of ninth-century Carolingian “réécriture” and of tandem new hagiography in both prose and verse by authors such as Lupus of Ferrières, Marcward of Prüm, Wandalbert of Prüm, Hildegar of Meaux and Heiric of Auxerre. All source readings in Classical Latin adapted to new Carolingian purposes, which we shall also explore historically in their own right. (LC)
LATN 21219/31219. “Philosophical Prose: Cicero, Tusculan Disputations” (P. White) | Winter
(=FNDL 21219) Several months after the death of his beloved daughter and just two years before his own death, Cicero composed a dialog with an imaginary interlocutor arguing that death, pain, grief, and other perturbations were an unimportant part of the big picture. A reading of this famous contribution—all of it in English, selections in Latin—to the genre of consolation literature affords an opportunity to weigh his many examples and his arguments for ourselves. (LC)
LATN 21300/31300. Vergil. (M. Lowrie) | Spring
(=FNDL 21301) Vergil’s ten Eclogues are some of Latin literature’s most enigmatic poems. In addition to reading this collection carefully in Latin, we will sample some of Theocritus’ pastoral in translation, Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues in Latin, and Milton’s Lycidas. Class time will focus on translation, interpretation, and discussion of secondary readings. (LC)
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
CMLT 20109 Comparative Methods in the Humanities (Olga Solovieva) | Autumn
(=ENGL 28918) Course Description: This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller; Victor Segalen’sStèles; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, Carmen, and the film adaptation U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha(South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, The Village Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants, and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, The Overcoat, and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.” (LT)
CMLT 24111/34111 The Soviet Empire (Leah Feldman) | Autumn
(=NEHC 24110/34110, REES 24110/34110) What kind of empire was the Soviet Union? Focusing on the central idea of Eurasia, we will explore how discourses of gender, sexuality and ethnicity operated under the multinational empire. How did communism shape the state's regulation of the bodies of its citizens? How did genres from the realist novel to experimental film challenge a cohesive patriarchal, Russophone vision of Soviet Eurasia? We will examine how writers and filmmakers in the Caucasus and Central Asia answered Soviet Orientalist imaginaries, working through an interdisciplinary archive drawing literature and film from the Soviet colonial 'periphery' in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as writings about the hybrid conception of Eurasia across linguistics, anthropology, and geography. (LT)
*CMLT 25025/35025 Bilingual Bodies: Gender and Translation (Anna Elena Torres) | Winter*
The course will consider translation -- both theory and practice -- in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project. (LT)
CMLT 24272/34272 The Ancestral (Mark Payne) | Winter
(=SCTH 34272) Recent work in history and anthropology has stressed the need for deeper models of origins and relations, perhaps even dispensing with “prehistory” as an alternative to more familiar forms of historical self-understanding. This class will look at how the ancestral in literature imagines such deep forms of historical belonging, staging modes of revenance whose cryptic vitalism challenges the phenomenological basis of new materialism. Readings will include Martin Heidegger, Ronald Hutton, Ethan Kleinberg, Quentin Meillassoux, Hans Ruin, and Anna Tsing, poetry by Li He and Osip Mandelstam, weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and futurology by Cicely Hamilton, Jean Hegland, Sarah Moss, and Will Self. (LT)
CMLT 50205 Contemporary Critical Theory 1920-Present (Haun Saussy) | Winter
This course (the second half of the required Comparative Literature introductory sequence) roams the cultural landscape transformed by Freud, Saussure, Shklovsky, the First World War, and the Russian Revolution. Readings from psychoanalytic, formalist and Marxist criticism, from the corresponding heresies, and their successors. The aim throughout is to locate theoretical texts in the polemical situations to which they originally were addressed, and others in which they subsequently were invoked. (LT)
CMLT 27512/37512 Dream of the Red Chamber: Forgetting About the Author (Haun Saussy) | Spring
(=EALC 27512/37512) The great Chinese-Manchu novel _Honglou meng_ (ca. 1750) has been assigned one major author, Cao Xueqin, whose life has been the subject of much investigation. But before 1922 little was known about Cao, and interpreters of the novel were forced to make headway solely on the basis of textual clues. The so-called “Three Commentators” edition (_Sanjia ping Shitou ji_) shows these readers at their creative, polemical, and far-fetched best. We will be reading the first 80 chapters of the novel and discussing its reception in the first 130 years of its published existence (1792-1922), with special attention to hermeneutical strategies and claims of authorial purpose. (LT, LC)
CMLT 29120/39120 Renaissance Christian Epic: Tasso, Vida, Milton (Joshua Scodel) | Spring
(=ENGL 29120/39120) This course will focus upon the two most important Renaissance Christian epics, Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem Delivered(first pub. 1581) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost(first pub. 1667), and two brief Biblical epics, Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad(1535) and Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671). We will examine these four Renaissance epics as ambitious efforts to revive an ancient and pagan form in order to depict Christian and self-consciously modern visions. We will consider how Renaissance epic poets imitate and emulate both their classical models (primarily Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Judeo-Christian sources (primarily the Bible); seek to forge an elevated and appropriate language for epic in Latin, Italian, and English; espouse new visions of the human, the heroic, and gender relations; and adumbrate distinctively modern national, imperial, and global ambitions. All non-English texts will be read in translation, but students who can read Latin or Italian will be encouraged to read the originals. (LC)
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS
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 24812 Women Writing Women in Modern Japanese Literature (M. Mazza-Hilway) | Autumn
This course surveys the literary works by women writers of Japan through the modern period from late Meiji (early 1900s) through mid-Shōwa (1970s). Throughout this period, Japanese writers and critics have been preoccupied with questions related to self-expression: How does one know and represent one’s self in writing? Can a true self be expressed through the artifice of literature? What is the relationship between writing and self-consciousness? Yet literature written by women has largely been left out of this conversation, and often chronically consigned to the margins as mere ‘women’s writing’, a pale imitation of pure (male-authored) literature. Aiming to address this unevenness, this course engages with groundbreaking works of literature authored by women. Furthermore, in order to transcend insubstantial and limiting categories such as “women’s writing”, students’ analysis will be focused using the dynamic lense of women writing women: that is, women’s self-representation in literature. Readings for the course are grouped by larger themes which are key not only to students’ analysis of literary works, but in relation to the larger social, political and cultural contexts in which the works were produced. All works will be read in English translation.
EALC 25415 Early Daoist Literature and Thought (D. Lebovitz) | Autumn
According to the Laozi, “The Way (Dao) that can be told of (dao-ed) is not the eternal Way.” Like “the Way,” “Daoism” as a religion, philosophy, or school of thought, is a fundamentally elusive and contested category in Chinese studies. Exploring its texts and controversies, however, makes for a stimulating introduction to some of the core values and concerns of Chinese civilization. In this course, we will read a variety of literature regarded as belonging to “Daoism” in one sense or another. We will approach texts such as the Laozi (Daodejing; Classic of the Way and Virtue) and Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) as literary expressions of Chinese thought, but also as resources for later cultural and religious developments. The primary work of the course will engage us in careful reading and discussion. We will explore both commentarial interpretations of the texts and will think creatively about how to understand and interpret the texts today. Students will be expected to conduct an independent research project at the end of the term. Knowledge of Chinese is not required. Open to MAPH students, equivalent course EALC 35415 (LC, LT)
EALC 25709/35709 Picturing Moral Autonomy in China and Elsewhere (M. Powers) | Autumn
(=ARTH 25709/35709) This course examines how intellectuals in Preindustrial China maintained their independence, as well as their moral compass, in times of inordinate social and political pressure. Systematic thinking on this topic appears early in China, beginning with Confucius and Mencius, but was by no means limited to the Confucian tradition. Zhuangzi (late 4th c. BCE) devoted an entire chapter to the problem. This course will survey some important meditations on the topic from the Classical period, but will focus on the Song dynasty (960-1278) with its rich body of essays, poems, and paintings touching upon the problem of moral autonomy. To supplement our study of primary sources we’ll read secondary sources on Song law, society, and government, as well as relevant secondary studies of European art. Later in the course we will read reflections on Song period Chinese essays by English radicals of the 18th century, and will wrap up with American classics by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Wendell Berry. Along the way we will learn how to conduct “close readings” of both written and visual materials for clues to the deep, humanistic themes underlying artistic choice. (LC)
EALC 27016/37016 Comparative Metahistory (H. Saussy, U. Timme Kragh) | Autumn
(=KNOW 27016/37016, CMLT 27016) The seminar will focus on classical, medieval, and modern historiography from China, India, and Tibet seeking answers to three general questions: (1) How are senses of historical time created in Asian historiographies by means of rhetorical figures of repetition, parallelism, dramatic emplotment, frame stories, and interweaving storylines? (2) How are historical persons and events given meaning through use of poetic devices, such as comparison, simile, and metaphor? And (3) How do Asian histories impose themselves as realistic accounts of the past by means of authoritative devices using citation of temporal-spatial facts, quotation of authority, and/or reliance on established historical genres? The methods employed to answer these questions are here adapted from pre-modern Asian knowledge systems of literary theory, poetics, dramaturgy, and epistemology, and thus permit looking at other knowledge formations from within the discourse of the traditions themselves. (LC, LT)
EALC 27515/37515Beijing: Past and Present (N. Feng) | Autumn
This class explores the history and cultural life of Beijing from the Yuan dynasty to the present. First, in what ways did the city develop over the course of the past millennium and how did the material space of the city impact people’s daily life? Using materials from archaeology and architecture, we will track the permutation of the city plan, the process of construction and destruction, and the social and cultural life of urban residents. Second, how was Beijing experienced, understood, and represented in varied literary and art forms from the imperial period to today? Through literature (Lao She, Lin Yutang), art (Xu Bing, Song Dong.), and film (directed by Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Guan Hu) that features Beijing and its people, we will study the city not only as an imagined site of remembrance and nostalgia, but also a political site constructing cultural identities and reflecting social conflicts. This class has a Language across the Curriculum section, and we will read selected novels and poems on Beijing. Open to MAPH students but not PhD students. (LC)
EALC 10701Topics in EALC: Poets/Teachers/Fighters:Writing Women in China and Beyond (P. Iovene) | Winter
A survey of essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. No previous knowledge of Chinese is required. (LC)
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)
EALC 44622 Keywords in Chinese Literary and Cultural Criticism (P. Iovene) | Winter
An investigation of the key concepts in 20th Century Chinese literary and cultural criticism, and of the ways in which they have been transformed over time. Concepts to be discussed may include "science," "world," "modern," in their various Chinese renditions. Some course readings will be in Chinese. (LT)
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)
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)
EALC 29410/39410Sound and Silence in Chinese Literature (Y. Zheng) | Spring
Rather than a silent medium, a text is a literary phonograph where sounds, voices, and noises come to life. By studying the representation of sounds within literary texts from the eras predating the advent of electric sound reproduction technology, we will explore how attention to these sounds enrich our experience as modern listeners. In particular, we will rethink the relationship between sound and silence in order to develop new perspectives on understanding literary texts. By destabilizing the opposition between sound and silence, we will study literary sound to examine unconventional understandings of the nature of expression and representation. For example, the stringless zither owned by the 4th-century Chinese poet Tao Yuanming reflects a key idea in pre-modern Chinese poetics that the best sound is inaudible. How does silence convey things that cannot be expressed in sound and language? In this course, we will explore a selection of major works in Chinese literature from the antiquity (4th-century BC) to the 20th century that present a variety of relationships between sound and silence. We will also read foundational theoretical texts on sound developed in pre-modern China in conjunction with major theories of sound, voice, music, and noise developed in media studies, including works by Murray Schafer, Michel Chion, Friedrich Kittler, and Jacques Attali. This course is open to MAPH students. (LC, LT)
GERMANIC STUDIES
GRMN 34819/24819 “Maniacs, Specters, Automata:” The Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ingrid Christian) | Autumn
In this course we will read stories by one of the most prominent representatives of Romanticism, the German writer, composer, and painter E.T.A. Hoffmann who wrote “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” on which Tchaikovsky would later base his ballet. His stories of bizarre yet psychologically compelling characters will introduce us to the “dark side” of Romanticism as well as to its fantastical aspects. Students will read Hoffmann’s extraordinary stories, develop skills of literary analysis, and engage in historical inquiry by tracing the way in which Hoffmann’s texts engage with the context of their time, in particular with the history of medicine (mesmerism, early psychiatry) and law (Hoffmann worked as a legal official). Those with reading knowledge of German can read the texts in the original, otherwise readings and discussions will be in English. (LC)
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)
GRMN 24419 Kafka: Acrobatics of Reading (Florian Klinger) | Autumn
In a universe determined by power such as Kafka's – patriarchal, legal, governmental, colonial power, but also physical constraints such as gravity and entropy – everything depends on one's ability or inability to perform. Against such determination, Kafka's texts work as exercises in self-empowerment, acts that constitute their power to perform through their very performance. Taking Kafka’s short prose as a test case, the course investigates the relationship between two things: First, the acrobatics performed in and by the texts that not only feature a cast of tightrope walkers, hunger artists, bucket riders, and other performers, but can more generally be read as a series of kinetic experiments involving plot, description, imagery, sound, or grammar. Second, the acrobatics it takes us, the audience, to engage these texts—demanding a similar artistry of performance that includes casting highly flexible, improbable, and often risky readerly strategies in response. From the short prose, the course broadens its focus to include the longer texts and the diary, as well as excerpts from the fragments Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. Readings and discussion in English.
GRMN 27517 Metaphysics, Morbidity, and Modernity: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (David Wellbery) | Winter
(=CMLT 27517, FNDL 27517) Our main task in this course is to explore in detail one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But this novel is also a window onto the entirety of modern European thought and it provides, at the same time, a telling perspective of the crisis of European culture prior to and following on World War I. It is, in Thomas Mann’s formulation, a time-novel: a novel about its time, but also a novel about human being in time. For anyone interested in the configuration of European intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mann’s great (and challenging) novel is indispensible reading. Lectures will relate Mann’s novel to its great European counterparts (e.g., Proust, Joyce, Musil), to the traditions of European thought from Voltaire to Georg Lukacs, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger, from Marx to Max Weber. This is a LECTURE course with discussion sections. All readings in English.
GRMN 24719 Vaterfiktionen: Patriarchy and Nature in German Literature (Colin Benert) | Winter
Around 1800, the antithesis of patriarchy was not matriarchy but the modern, bureaucratic state. The “patriarchalische Idee” celebrated by Goethe’s Werther was a nostalgic idea of an “original” form of authority rooted in familiar relations, hence in Nature. In this course we explore the peculiar growth, development, crisis and critique of this idea in German literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, alternating between works of literature (drama, poetry, narrative prose) and recent films (e.g. Das dunkle Tal, Revanche) that respond to this literary tradition. Authors include G. E. Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Max Weber, Adalbert Stifter, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek. (LC)
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)
GRMN 33119/23119 Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: On “Women’s Writing” (Sophie Salvo) | Winter
This course interrogates “women’s writing” as a historical, theoretical, and literary category. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has used the category “women’s writing” to recuperate texts by historically marginalized female authors. This practice has led to a reconsideration of the role of gender in literary production, authorship, and canon formation. Focusing on the context of modern Europe, and the genre of narrative prose, this course aims to reevaluate the classification “women’s writing.” Is “women’s writing,” to borrow a phrase from Joan Scott, a “useful category of analysis” in the 21st century? Can it help us account for how gendered subjects have been constructed through narrative? To what extent do traditional generic and disciplinary divisions limit our understanding of women’s texts? Does the concept “women’s writing” allow for intersectional approaches to the study of gender and sexuality? Course readings will include literary texts from the 18th-21st centuries (works by Jane Austen, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Elfriede Jelinek, and Marjane Satrapi, among others), as well as theoretical approaches from feminist, queer, and transgender studies. Readings and discussions in English. (LT)
GRMN 36219/26219 Domestic Tragedies GRMN 36219/26219 (Christopher Wild) | Winter
(=CMLT 36219/26219; TAPS 36219/26219) From its inception in ancient Greece tragedy feeds on a transgression. The ideology and economy of kleos (glory) predicates that the male hero seeks the accumulation of excellence and prestige elsewhere, far from home on the battlefield, so that he can reap the fruits of his heroic labor in peace upon his return (nostos). Like Homer’s Odyssey, in which its eponymous hero turns his home into a battlefield when he slays his wife’s suitors, tragedy routinely violates the relegation of violence to a distant place by letting it back into the house (oikos). What makes these tragedies tragic, is then the return of violence into the home. The seminar will trace the contradictory double coding of the house/home in tragedy as a place of refuge and safety as well as a site of unthinkable, because familial violence. We will start by reading a few representative Greek tragedies alongside Aristotle’s Poetics, and will have to skip over Early Modern theater (e.g. Shakespeare and Racine) in order to arrive at Bourgeois tragedy, which conceived itself programmatically as domestic. We will examine French examples of the genre (Diderot) as well their German counterparts (Lessing, Schiller, and), and continue with its latest flowering in Scandinavia (Ibsen, Strindberg). We will conclude with the Beckett’s deconstruction of the domestic tragedy in his Endgame. (LC)
GRMN 28120/ 38120 Narratology Laboratory: Basic Concepts and Research Potential (David Wellbery) | Spring
This seminar is an introduction to the formal study of narrative. Its purpose is to provide students with a set of conceptual instruments that will be useful to them in a broad range of research contexts. Narratology, although it originated within in literary studies, is today an indispensable dimension of inquiry in the Human Sciences generally. Topics to be considered include: 1) the structure of the narrative text; 2) the logic of story construction; 3) questions of perspective and voice; 4) character and identification; 5) narrative genres; 6) narrative in non-linguistic media. After a brief consideration of Aristotle’s Poetics, we will move on to fundamental contributions by (inter alia) Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Eco, Lotman, Marin, Ricoeur, finishing with recent work in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. There will be NO papers or examinations. Rather, the course material will be introduced in lectures and subgroups of course participants will carry out circumscribed projects of narratological research. (LT)
NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS
NEHC 10666 Hell! Discussion about Hell in Middle Eastern Cultures" (Orit Bashkin) | Autumn
The class looks at images of, and narratives about, hell, from depictions of hell in the Quran to depictions of contemporary refugee camps as modern infernos. We will also study the construction of the image of Satan (Iblis) and of demons (jins) in various Islamic texts. The class will focus on reading of primary sources in translation (The Quran, Ibn 'Arabi, Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'ari, Nagib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanfani) and the text book "Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions" , edited by Christian Lange (Brill, 2015, open online access) (LC)
NEHC 20004/30004 Ancient Near Eastern Thought and Literature I: Mesopotamian Literature | Susanne Paulus | Autumn
This course gives an overview of the richness of Mesopotamian Literature (modern Iraq) written in the 3rd-1st millennium BC. We will read myths and epics written on clay tablets in the Sumerian and Akkadian language in English translation and discuss content and style, but also the religious, cultural and historic implications. Particular focus will be on the development of stories over time, the historical context of the literature and mythological figures. The texts treated cover not only the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, but also various legends of Sumerian and Akkadian kings, stories about Creation and World Order, and destruction. The topics covered range from the quest for immortality, epic heroes and monsters, sexuality and love. (LC)
NEHC 20222 Masculinities in pre-modern Middle Eastern Literature (Alexandra Hoffman) | Spring
Have you ever wondered what men looked like, how they lived and loved in the pre-modern Middle East? In this class, we will encounter cuckolded husbands, muscular heroes, angry kings, mad lovers, and chivalrous bandits – all fictional. We will analyze how masculinities are constructed in selected passages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature in translation, and evaluate normative expectations, caricatures, and anxieties about masculinities in the cultural consciousness of the pre-modern Middle East. In this course, you will become familiar with theoretical principles of the study of masculinities as well as acquire tools for literary analysis and close reading. Case studies will be drawn from a variety of literary sources, such as the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-layla), the Persian Book of Kings (Shāhnāmeh), the love story of Laylā and Majnūn, as well as other texts. (LT, LC)
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)
NEHC 25222/35222 Readings in Syriac Literature (Stuart Creason) | Spring
This course provides the student with an introduction to the major authors and various genres of Syriac literature, including chronicles and historical texts, hagiography, biblical commentary, and letters/responsa. Following this introduction, selected portions of several Syriac texts will be read in English translation and discussed in class. A brief (6-10 pages) paper and class presentation will be required (topic subject to the approval of the instructor). There will also be a final exam. (LC)
EGPT 20006 Egyptian Thought and Literature | Winter
This course employs English translations of ancient Egyptian literary texts to explore the genres, conventions and techniques of ancient Egyptian literature. Discussions of texts examine how the ancient Egyptians conceptualized and constructed their equivalent of literature, as well as the fuzzy boundaries and subtle interplay between autobiography, history, myth and fiction. (LC)
PERS 30320 Ferdowsi's Shahnameh as Introduction to Persian Poetry (Franklin Lewis) | Autumn
The Shahnameh, the Persian "Book of Kings," is generally classed as an epic or national epic. While it does not lack for battling champions and heroic saga, it also includes episodes in a variety of disparate genres and themes: creation narrative, mythology, folk tale, romance, royal chronicle, and political history. In this course we gain familiarity with the style and language of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh by slow reading and discussion of select episodes in Persian, in tandem with a reading of the whole text in English translation. We approach the work as a foundational text of Iranian identity,; compendium of pre-Islamic mythology and lore; a centrifugal axis of Persianate civilization and Iranian monarchical tradition throughout Anatolia, Central Asia and South Asia; and as an instance of "world literature." We will read with an eye toward literary structure; genre; Indo-Iranian mythology; political theory and commentary; character psychology; ideals of masculinity, femininity and heroism; the interaction of text, oral tradition, illustration, scholarship, and translation in the shaping of the literary reception of the Shahnameh; and, of course, the meaning(s) of the work. We also address wider issues of textual scholarship: the sources of the Shahnameh, the scribal transmission of Ferdowsi’s text, and the production of modern critical editions and theories of textual editing. Class discussions will be in English, though we will read together in class a limited selection of episodes in the Persian. The aim is to gain deep understanding of the language, the characters and the themes of the Shahnameh, as well as the philological skills necessary to read medieval Persian poetry. 2 years of Persian or the equivalent (LC, LT)
PHILOSOPHY
PHIL 20107 Introduction to Sartre (Raoul Moati) | Winter
(=FNDL 20107) This course will be devoted Jean-Paul Sartre as a philosopher, as a writer, as a literary essayist and as an existential psychoanalysis. Sartre exposed most of his « existentialist » philosophy, based on the discovery of the absolute freedom of the human being and of her being-thrown in an meaningless world, through philosophical dry treatises, but also in using more accessible literary forms, like novels and theaters plays. In exploring Sartre’s multiple ways of dealing with abstract philosophical thesis (contingency of being, throwness of the human being, absolute practical responsibility of individuals), we will raise with Sartre the question about the relation between the form mobilized and the metaphysical content deployed in each case and show in which way the first is never optional to the second. Another aspect of our exploration will be to make sense of Sartre's practice of the literary essay about other writers through the form of the portrait. That practice is related and works as exemplifications of what Sartre calls « Existential psychoanalysis ». The main idea of Sartre’s practice of the « portrait » is to discover « modes of phenomenalization » of the contingent thing-in-itself, specific to each individual. By that means, Sartre’s Existential psychoanalysis is supposed to lead us to the discovery of the mainspecificworld of each other writers Sartre writes about in order to make sense of the hidden meaning of their literary works. We will see in which way each of them embodies essential features of the human condition described by existentialist philosophy, especially Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert. (LT)
ROMANCE LANGUAGES & LITERATURE
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)
FREN 26618/36618 French-language African Literature in Translation (Fidèle Mpiranya) | Autumn
This course presents an overview of African literature of French expression, focusing on both the text and the context; in particular, on how the African traditions and/or the socio-cultural environment influence the literary creation. It reviews major trends of this literature, from the pre-World War II assimilationist period to the contemporary creations in Africa and France. Additionally, individual creations representative of different periods are reviewed in detail in class or for a final paper produced by the students. The course is abundantly illustrated with videos of authors and performers presenting different works, as well as videos presenting the cultural/social background of the latter. In the end, the students will be able to characterize the different trends of African literature of French expression and illustrate them with specific works. Taught in English. Students seeking French credit will need to complete readings as well as written work in French.
SPAN 21619 From Lorca to Lin-Manuel Miranda: Staging Latinidad (Isaias Fanlo) | Autumn
(=LACS 21619, GNSE 21619) In this course, we will delve into ten significant theater plays written in the last century by Spanish, Latin American and Latinx playwrights. We will examine how latinidad, with its multiple definitions and contradictions, emerges in these plays; and also, which questions these works pose regarding the different historic and cultural contexts in which they were written. As a discipline that aims to explore and embody social practices and identities, theater has become a place where these questions articulate themselves in a critical manner. A physical space where bodies and languages explore, sometimes through its mere unfolding on the page and the stage, unforeseen limits of class, identity, and ethnicity.Each week, we will discuss one play and one or two significant critical essays, and the discussion will be conducted through a set of questions and crossed references. To what extent does the domestic exploration and the all-women cast of Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba resonate in Fornés’ Fefu And Her Friends? How does the experience of immigration affect the characters of Marqués’ La carreta, and how do Chiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda echo this foundational fiction in In the Heights? How was the success of plays such as Valdez’s Zoot Suit or Cruz’s Anna in The Tropics received within the Latino community, and how did it affect the general reception of Latino plays? Taught in English. Readings available in both English and Spanish. Spanish majors & minors must do the readings and/or writings in Spanish.
ITAL 26000/36000 Gramsci (Rocco Rubini) | Autumn
(=FNDL 26206, CMLT 26002/36002)In this course we read selections from Antonio Gramsci's Letters and Prison Notebooks side by side with their sources. Gramsci's influential interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Risorgimento, and Fascism are reviewed testi alla mano with the aim of reassessing some major turning points in Italian intellectual history. Readings and notions introduced include, for the Renaissance, Petrarch (the cosmopolitan intellectual), Savonarola (the disarmed prophet), Machiavelli (the modern prince), and Guicciardini (the particulare; for Italy's long Risorgimento, Vico (living philology), Cuoco (passive revolution), Manzoni (questione della lingua), Gioberti (clericalism), and De Sanctis (the Man of Guicciardini); and Croce (the anti-Croce) and Pirandello (theater and national-popular literature), for Italy's twentieth century. (LC, LT)
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, LC)
ITAL 23000/33001 Machiavelli and Machiavellism(Rocco Rubini)| Autumn
This course is a comprehensive introduction to Machiavelli’s The Prince in light of his vast and varied literary corpus and European reception. The course includes discussion of Machiavelli as playwright (The Mandrake), fiction writer (Belfagor, The Golden Ass), and historian (Discourses, Florentine Histories). We will also closely investigate the emergence of myths surrounding Machiavelli (Machiavellism and anti-Machiavellism) in Italy (Guicciardini, Botero, Boccalini), France (Bodin and Gentillet), Spain (Ribadeneyra), and Northern Europe (Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza) during the Counter Reformation and beyond. Course conducted in English. Those seeking Italian credit will do all work in Italian. (LC)
*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)
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, LC)
FREN 21820 Blinding Enlightenment (Robert Morrissey) | Winter
The French Enlightenment marks a blinding explosion of moral, philosophical, and artistic creativity. The dynamics of self and other are explored as vehicles for critical thought as well as a playful, even ironic understanding of a modern self that is being defined and constructed in and through many of the works that we will read for this course. The dialectics of passion and reason are examined in this unfurling of a newly self-conscious modernity. This introductory-level course will examine some of the great works of the French Enlightenment in their specific relation to the world we have become. Works by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau, as well as Marivaux and Beaumarchais; genres: theater, novels, philosophical dialogues, and tales. This is an introductory-level course. PQ: FREN 20500 or 20503. Discussion, readings, and writing in French. (LT, LC)
ITAL 23502/33502 Boccaccio's Decameron (Justin Steinberg) | Winter
(=FNDL 21714) One of the most important and influential works of the middle ages—and a lot funnier than the Divine Comedy. Written in the midst of the social disruption caused by the Black Death (1348), the Decameron may have held readers attention for centuries because of its bawdiness, but it is also a profound exploration into the basis of faith and the meaning of death, the status of language, the construction of social hierarchy and social order, and the nature of crisis and historical change. Framed by a storytelling contest between seven young ladies and three young men who have left the city to avoid the plague, the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron form a structural masterpiece that anticipates the Renaissance epics, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the modern short story. Students will be encouraged to further explore in individual projects the many topics raised by the text, including (and in addition to the themes mentioned above) magic, the visual arts, mercantile culture, travel and discovery, and new religious practices. (LC)
ITAL 22000/32000 Dante's Divine Comedy 2: Purgatorio (Justin Steinberg)| Spring
(=FNDL 27202) This course is an intense study of the middle cantica of the Divine Comedy and its relationship with Dante’s early masterpiece, the Vita Nuova. The very middleness of the Purgatorio provides Dante the opportunity to explore a variety of problems dealing with our life here, now, on earth: contemporary politics, the relationship between body and soul, poetry and the literary canon, art and imagination, the nature of dreams, and, of course, love and desire. The Purgatorio is also Dante’s most original contribution to the imagination of the underworld, equally influenced by new conceptualizations of “merchant time” and by contemporary travel writing and fantastic voyages. (LC)
FREN 27770/37770 Existentialism and Its Literary Legacies (Alison James) | Spring
More than a school of philosophical thought, existentialism was an intellectual movement that dominated French culture in the years following World War II. This course focuses on the literary legacy of existentialism, considering postwar debates over littérature engagée, the intersections of existentialism and the nouveau roman, and the importance of feminist existentialism for women writers. Why did existentialist thinkers turn to forms of literary expression, writing plays and novels? How did they shape the reception of other writers, and how did later writers revisit existentialist concerns? Readings may include texts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, Georges Perec, and Annie Ernaux. (LT)
SPAN 24020 Para arribar a la ínsula: poéticas de la isla en el Caribe hispano del siglo XX (Juan Diego Mariátegui) | Spring
(=LACS 24020) In this course, we will examine the literary representations of the Caribbean's most notable geographic feature: the island. Many Caribbean authors throughout the twentieth century have made the figure of the island a central trope in their essays, novels, and poetry. The focal point of the course will be the many "poetics" of the island, that is, the discourses that seek to envision, mold and construct insular spaces. How does this rhetorical figure help to think about nationality and nationalism, especially in the century of North American colonial intervention? Does the island come to be thought of as a political form, and, if so, how does it relate to other forms like that of the "country"? What are the cultural, political and economic dimensions of these island "poetics"? Who gets to live on these islands, and what temporalities do they inhabit? Primary readings will range across Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and may include texts by José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Abilio Estévez, Antonio Pedreira, Francisco Matos Paoli, José Luis González, Eduardo Lalo, and Joaquín Balaguer. Theoretical readings on space, insularity and the figure of the archipelago may include Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Ottmar Ette, and Juan Carlos Quintero Rivera.
FREN 22620/32620 Paris from Les Misérables to the Liberation, c. 1830–1950 (Colin Jones) | Spring
(=HIST 22611/32611) Starting with the grim and dysfunctional city described in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the course will examine the history of Paris over the period in which it became viewed as the city par excellence of urban modernity through to the testing times of Nazi occupation and then liberation (c. 1830–1950). As well as focussing on architecture and the built environment, we will examine the political, social, and especially cultural history of the city. A particular feature of the course will be representations of the city—literary (Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola, etc.) and artistic (impressionism and postimpressionism, cubism, surrealism). We will also examine the city's own view of itself through the prism of successive world fairs (expositions universelles). PQ: Taught in English. Students taking FREN 22620/32620 must read French texts in French. (LC)
Russian and East European Studies
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, LC)
REES 29024 / 39024 States of Surveillance (Angelina Ilieva) | Autumn
(=CMLT 29024,CMLT 39024) What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).
REES 23708 / 0 Soviet History Through Literature(Eleonora Gilburd) | Winter
(=HIST 23708) This course considers the main themes of Soviet history through canonical works of fiction, with an occasional addition of excerpts from autobiographies, memories, and police files.
REES 27003 / 37003 Narratives of Assimilation (Bozena Shallcross) | Winter
(=NEHC 20223; NEHC 30223; RLST 26623) This course offers a survey into the manifold strategies of representing the Jewish community in East Central Europe beginning from the nineteenth century to the Holocaust. Engaging the concept of liminality-of a society at the threshold of radical transformation-it will analyze Jewry facing uncertainties and challenges of the modern era and its radical changes. Students will be acquainted with problems of cultural and linguistic isolation, hybrid identity, assimilation, and cultural transmission through a wide array of genres-novel, short story, epic poem, memoir, painting, illustration, film. The course draws on both Jewish and Polish-Jewish sources; all texts are read in English translation. (LC)
REES 20001 / 30001 War and Peace (William Nickell) | Spring
(=CMLT 22301; CMLT 32301; ENGL 28912; ENGL 32302; FNDL 27103; HIST 23704) Tolstoy’s novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world’s great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner. (LC)
REES 22000 / 32000 Kafka in Prague (Malynne Steinstern) | Spring
(=GRMN 29600; GRMN 39600)The goal of this course is a thorough treatment of Kafka's literary work in its Central European, more specifically Czech, context. In critical scholarship, Kafka and his work are often alienated from his Prague milieu. The course revisits the Prague of Kafka's time, with particular reference to Josefov (the Jewish ghetto), Das Prager Deutsch, and Czech/German/Jewish relations of the prewar and interwar years. We discuss most of Kafka's major prose works within this context and beyond (including The Castle, The Trial, and the stories published during his lifetime), as well as selected critical approaches to his work. (LT)
REES 29021 / 39021 The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov (Angelina Ilieva) | Spring
Angelina Ilieva (=FNDL 29020) “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people…. Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand Master and Margarita.
REES 29010 / 39010 20th Century Russian & South East European Emigre Literature(Angelina Ilieva) | Spring
(=CMLT 26912; CMLT 36912) Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.
SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS
SALC 32606. Classical Literature of South Asia: Part One (Andrew Ollett) | Autumn
(=SALC 22605). This is a broadly chronological survey of South Asia's literary traditions. In the first part of this two-part sequence, our focus will be on the first millennium CE, and we will read a wide variety of literary works in translation: lyric poetry, stage plays, courtly epics, romances and satires. We will read these texts as representing both evolving traditions of literary art and a diverse constellation of social imaginaries. Our conversations will thus range over: questions of language, genre, form and style; subcontinental traditions of poetics, which elaborated the themes and techniques of literary art; issues of sexuality and gender; the intellectual and religious traditions with which works of literature were in conversation; contexts of performance; and issues of literary history. We will sometimes read short texts in the original languages (Prakrit, Tamil and Sanskrit) to gain a better understanding of their texture and technique, but no prior knowledge of South Asian languages is required. The second part of this two-part sequence will cover South Asian literature from about 1000 to 1750. The courses may be taken in any order.(LC)
SALC 25316. Making a Home in the Colonial City: Insights from Literature, Films, and History (Sanjukta Poddar) | Autumn
(=GLST 25316). The proposed course is an invitation to students to imagine the life-worlds, experiences, and spaces of the colonized populations of South Asia, particularly, from the perspective of city-dwellers. The objective of the course is three-fold: thematic, methodological, and epistemological. First, to introduce students to debates in colonial modernity using the narrative of the rise of modern cities in colonial India. Second, to equip students to handle different kinds of primary material in order to understand the interconnections between colonialism, urban space, and indigenous responses. Finally, to open up the exciting field of colonial and postcolonial studies to anyone interested in South Asia, its literature, its films, its history, and its people. (LT)
SALC 33700 How to do things with South Asian texts? Literary Theories and South Asian Literatures (Sascha Ebeling) | Winter
(=CMLT 33700). This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes currently prevalent in the study of South Asian texts from various periods. Topics covered will include translation (theory and practice), book history, literary history, textual criticism, genre theory (the novel in South Asia), literature and colonialism, cultural mobility studies (Greenblatt) and comparative literature/new philologies (Spivak, Ette). Readings will include work by George Steiner, Sheldon Pollock, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Greenblatt, Gayatri Spivak, Ottmar Ette, and others. We will discuss these different approaches with particular reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects. Students interested in both pre-modern and modern/contemporary texts are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with "texts". The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students (no prior knowledge of literary theory or South Asian writing is assumed).(LT)
SALC 25318 Literary Radicalism And The Global South: Perspectives From South Asia (Abhishek Bhattacharyya) | Spring
What does it mean to speak of literary radicalism? What are the hallmarks of a radical literature? And how does any such body of radical literature relate to the crucial question of empire, while also seeking to not be limited by that address? This course will explore the theme of literary radicalism through perspectives arising from South Asia. Over the twentieth century the subcontinent has been shaped through a wide variety of social and political movements: from anticolonial struggles to communist organising, feminist struggles, anti-caste mobilisation, indigenous protest and more, with their histories intertwining in different ways. We will start with a consideration of some texts on literary radicalism from other parts of the global South by authors such as Julia de Burgos and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and then move through a detailed discussion of South Asian texts every week to examine particular aspects of literary style and history. We will study texts from a variety of subcontinental languages (in translation, unless originally in English), and across different forms – poetry, short fiction, children’s literature, novels, a memoir, a graphic novel and a documentary film on a poet. No prior training in South Asia or literature courses is a requirement.
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 Daman. Nal 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, LT)
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES
TAPS 17019. Ancient Drama, Modern Theory (Sarah Nooter) | Autumn
(=CLCV 15019) This course will travel through the great dramas of ancient Greece, including works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Moreover, it will show how the history of contemporary thought has been shaped by reflection on Greek tragedy, starting from the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the feminist critiques of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, works of structuralism and poststructuralism, and finally the recent material and affective turns in scholarship. Along the way, we will draw insights on modern movements of the performance arts from adaptations, including those in dance (Martha Graham), in film (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars von Trier), and in drama itself (Anne Carson). As this course will demonstrate, there is hardly an intellectual or artistic movement of recent history that has not taken its cue from Greek drama. All reading will be in translation. (LC, LT)
TAPS 28406 Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances (Tim Harrison) | Autumn
This course explores mainly major plays representing the genres of tragedy and romance; most (but not all) date from the latter half of Shakespeare's career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. Section attendance is required. This course is part of the College Course Cluster, The Renaissance. (LC)
TAPS 28438 Before and After Beckett: Theater and Theory(Loren Kruger) | Autumn
Beckett is conventionally typed as the playwright of minimalist scenes of unremitting bleakness but his experiments with theatre and film echo the irreverent play of popular culture (vaudeville on stage and screen eg Chaplin and Keaton) as well as experimental Theatre and modern philosophy, even when there are no direct lines of influence. This course will juxtapose these points of reference with Beckett’s plays and those of his contemporaries (Ionesco, Genet and others in French, Pinter in English. It will then explore more recent plays that suggest the influence of Beckett by Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane in English, Michel Vinaver in French, as well as the relevance of theorists and philosophers include Barthes, Wittgenstein, and critics writing on specific plays. PQ: HUM Core; not open to first-year College students. (LT)
TAPS 50300. Catharsis, Tedium and Other Aesthetic Responses (Loren Kruger) | Autumn
This seminar examines the ramifications of catharsis, tedium and other forms of aesthetic response, in other words the relationship between effect and affect in and in response to performance, live, mediated, and in reading literary as well as theatrical texts. Beginning with Aristotle and present day responses to catharsis, we will investigate the kinds of aesthetic response invoked by theories of tragedy (esp Hegel), sentiment (esp Diderot and Burke), realism (authority, attachment and estrangement in Lukacs, Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin), as well as theories of pleasure (Barthes, Derrida, Cixous) and tedium (Heidegger). We will also explore tedium through text and audio of The Hunchback Variations by local playwright Mickle Maher. We will conclude with, the potential and limitations of catharsis as an appropriate response to testimonial narrative in text and film during and after the dictatorship in Chile. An essential part of the discussion will be the problem of translating key theoretical terms, not only from one language to another but also from one theoretical discourse to another. (LT)
TAPS 26219/36219. Domestic Tragedies (Christopher Wild) | Winter
From its inception in ancient Greece tragedy feeds on a transgression. The ideology and economy of kleos (glory) predicates that the male hero seeks the accumulation of excellence and prestige elsewhere, far from home on the battlefield, so that he can reap the fruits of his heroic labor in peace upon his return (nostos). Like Homer’s Odyssey, in which its eponymous hero turns his home into a battlefield when he slays his wife’s suitors, tragedy routinely violates the relegation of violence to a distant place by letting it back into the house (oikos). What makes these tragedies tragic, is then the return of violence into the home. The seminar will trace the contradictory double coding of the house/home in tragedy as a place of refuge and safety as well as a site of unthinkable, because familial violence. We will start by reading a few representative Greek tragedies alongside Aristotle’s Poetics, and will have to skip over Early Modern theater (e.g. Shakespeare and Racine) in order to arrive at Bourgeois tragedy, which conceived itself programmatically as domestic. We will examine French examples of the genre (Diderot) as well their German counterparts (Lessing, Schiller, and), and continue with its latest flowering in Scandinavia (Ibsen, Strindberg). We will conclude with the Beckett’s deconstruction of the domestic tragedy in his Endgame. (LC)
TAPS 28405 Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies (Richard Strier) | Winter
An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and (English) histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. A shorter and a longer paper will be required. (LC)
TAPS 16003. Ventriloquism in Literature and Culture (Marissa Fenley) | Spring
In this class we will collectively identify the conventions that have come to define theatrical tradition known as ventriloquism. While this course will be rooted in the study of performance, we will also look at instances when ventriloquism appears in literature and film as a metaphor and as a trope. By looking at ventriloquism both in its technique and its thematics we will investigate the extent to which the ventriloquist and the dummy are sexed and racialized categories. Our texts will span from the recorded performances of famous ventriloquists such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, episodes of The Twilight Zone, horror films like Dead of Night and popular fiction. We will also consult several theoretical texts such as Freud on the uncanny and Winnicott on transitional objects. (LT)
HISTORY
CHDV 27861/HIST 24921 Darwinism and Literature (D. Maestripieri & R. Richards) | Autumn
In this course we will explore the notion that literary fiction can contribute to the generation of new knowledge of the human mind, human behavior, and human societies. Some novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided fictional portrayals of human nature that were grounded in Darwinian theory. These novelists operated within the conceptual framework of the complementarity of science and literature advanced by Goethe and the other Romantics. At a time when novels became highly introspective and psychological, these writers used their literary craftsmanship to explore and illustrate universal aspects of human nature. In this course we read the work of several novelists (George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Italo Svevo, and Elias Canetti), and discuss how these authors anticipated the discoveries made decades later by cognitive, social, and evolutionary psychology. Assignments: Short papers, a presentation, and a major paper.
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)
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)
HIST 23708 Soviet History through Literature (E. Gilburd) | Winter
This course considers the main themes of Soviet history through canonical works of fiction, with an occasional addition of excerpts from autobiographies, memories, and police files.
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)
HIST 29902 Tolkien: Medieval and Modern (R. Fulton Brown) | Spring
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is one of the most popular works of imaginative literature of the twentieth century. This course seeks to understand its appeal by situating Tolkien's creation within the context of Tolkien's own work as both artist and scholar and alongside its medieval sources and modern parallels. Themes to be addressed include the problem of genre and the uses of tradition; the nature of history and its relationship to place; the activity of creation and its relationship to language, beauty, evil, and power; the role of monsters in imagination and criticism; the twinned challenges of death and immortality, fate and free will; and the interaction between the world of "faerie" and religious belief.
DIVINITY
RLST 23880 Villains Evil in Philosophy, Religion, and Film (Russell Johnson) | Spring
"You don't really understand an antagonist," screenwriter John Rogers writes, "until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world." \nThis principle holds true of movie villains, but also raises important questions about disagreement, dehumanization, and the diabolical in the real world. Are our enemies truly malicious, or just misunderstood? How does a person become a monster, and how does a person avoid it? Why are some villains so compelling, and what does this say about the good life? Do Hollywood movies enrich or distort how we imagine and respond to real-world evil? Did Thanos do anything wrong?\nThis course combines readings from philosophical classics and religious traditions with comparative analyses of villains in films from 101 Dalmatians (1956) and Jaws (1975) to The Dark Knight (2008) and Black Panther (2018). Students will discuss antagonists' motivations, evaluate the visions of morality filmmakers are presupposing, and develop more nuanced understandings of ethics and moral psychology. No prior experience in religious studies or film criticism is required.
RLST 28705 Christian Iconography (Karin Krause) | Winter
(=ARTH 28705 / 38705) In Christian culture, visual images have for many centuries played a pivotal role in ritual, devotion, intellectual thought, and religious instruction. The most important aims of this course are that students understand images convey meaning in very unique ways and learn how to decode their visual messages. The study of iconography encompasses a variety of methods used to identify the subject matter of a pictorial image, describe its contents, and analyze its discursive strategies in view of its original cultural context. We will cover some of the most important themes visualized in the arts of Christianity by analyzing imagery spanning different periods, geographical regions, pictorial media, and artistic techniques. While special emphasis is placed on the intersections of art and literature, we will also examine pictorial themes that are independent of a specific textual basis. Alongside the study of Christian iconography, this course will address broader issues of visual inquiry, such as patronage, viewer response, emotions, and gender roles. In this course, students will acquire a 'visual literacy' that will enable them to explore all kinds of works of art fruitfully as primary sources in their own right. (LC, LT)
RLST 28881 (=ENGL 28881, GRMN 28881, CMLT 28881, JWSC 28881) Secrecy and Exemplarity: On Parables and Their Interpretation, from the Bible to Walter Benjamin (Samuel Caitlin) | Winter A parable, usually defined as “a short allusive narrative told for an ulterior purpose,” should be easy to understand, given its apparent simplicity and didacticism. So why does it turn out to be so difficult, in practice, to understand parables, as the narrator of Franz Kafka’s parable “On Parables” complains? From Jesus’s parables and Plato’s famous parable of the cave onward, parables have led reader after reader to the disturbing realization hinted at in the unfolding reversals of the brief dialogue that concludes Kafka’s enigmatic text: that it might in fact be the parables which interpret their readers, not the other way around! In this course, we’ll ask how it is that this particular literary form so deftly articulates the relations between text and reader, narrative and interpretation, literature and religion, secrecy and power, sign and meaning, concealment and revelation, fiction and history, particular and universal. The course serves as both an introduction to the history of the many ways interpreters have engaged the parabolic form in religious, literary, and philosophical contexts, on the one hand, and a chance to develop the intensity and rigor of our own close-reading practices, on the other. (LG, LC)
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)