Literary Genre: LG
Literature (Theory): LT
Literature (Before 20th-C): LC
General Literature: any course listed on this page
All courses listed here are approved to count towards the Creative Writing major as general 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 2024-25, check our literature course archive. All other courses not on this list must be approved by the DUS. Contact Vu Tran about approval.
Autumn 2024 | Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10110 Intro to Porn Studies
This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “porn,” “filth,” “art,” “adult,” “hardcore,” “softcore,” “trash,” and “extremity.” We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography’s invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically. (LT)
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10402 Reading the Rom-Com: Renaissance and Modern
This course challenges the common assumption that modern romantic comedies are not worthy of academic study by examining early modern iterations of the genre--from William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1590) to Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677). In turning to these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, we will consider how this often trivialized genre encodes, theorizes, and problematizes issues of gender, sex, class, race, and desire through its familiar formula of "simply" getting some people to fall in love. (LC)
Sarah-Gray Lesley 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10405 Fantastical London: Literature, Film, Psychogeography
In a series of classic essays, Walter Benjamin describes Paris as the dreamworld of modernity, crowning it the “capital of the nineteenth century.” This course follows Benjamin’s critique of the modern city as a “phantasmagoria,” but shifts the terrain of his argument to ask: what if London were seen as the center of a distinctly dreamlike modernity? What purchase do literature and art afford in the elaboration of this thought-experiment? In this class we will approach London as a city of utopian wishes and Gothic nightmares, exploring the real social conditions and mapping the built environments that mark the Big Smoke as an enduring site of collective fantasy. We will read writings by British authors like Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, and China Miéville, alongside works of popular and avant-garde film, comics, and critical theory, to accompany our sojourn through the dream-geography of a fantastical London.
This course may also involve site-specific field visits to archetypal London locations and an experimental research/ psychogeography final project. Admission to London Program (study abroad) required. (LG-F, LT)
Cassandra B. Lerer 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10408 The African American Novel: Satire and Critique
This course will explore the centrality of satire to the African American novel. By examining the genre of satire in general and in a set of African American novels and short stories, we will attend to how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. Focusing on the relationship between racism and capitalism, we will integrate readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform our study of fictional works. Fiction writers may include Percival Everett, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Cord Jefferson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ishmael Reed. Critical writers may include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren. (LG-F, LT)
Chris Gortmaker 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10464 Narrating Neurodivergence: Autistic Rhetorics in Literature, Education, and Critical Theory
This course intends to analyze the rhetorics used by (and against) neurodivergent thinkers and writers, while simultaneously tracking the co-formation of a classroom environment that is sensitive to neurodivergence and the underexplored models of knowledge-building such an environment may produce. (LG-F)
Nate Crocker 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10460 The Paranoid 60s
This class will examine paranoid post-war American literature and cinema with a particular focus on its relationship to the revolutionary energy of the 1960s. We will read short works by Philip K. Dick, Sam Greenlee, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, and Diane Johnson. Possible films are The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and Soylent Green. Secondary texts will include Jameson, Foucault, Freud, Marx, Donna Haraway, and Eve Sedgewick. (LG-F, LT)
Josh Stadtner 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10468 The Art of Criticism
What does it mean to be a critic? And how do you write good criticism? In this class, we will study and practice criticism as an art—a medium of creative writing designed to provoke thought, offer ways of viewing the world, and leave readers entertained. Alongside pieces of criticism from various fields—literature, music, film—we’ll read reflections and manifestoes on the purpose of criticism, and reflect ourselves on the landscape of criticism today. Where in our own time is criticism practiced? Strung between rapidly changing media and academic worlds, criticism is widely seen as being endangered, and yet, with the past decade’s resurgence of small, lively intellectual and cultural magazines, others have claimed that we live in a golden age of criticism. We will try to make sense of this, while meanwhile taking ourselves seriously as critics: sharing with each other the work of critics we admire and writing our own critical essays. (LT)
Will Harris 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10620 Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment
This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science. (LT)
Julie Orlemanski 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10664 Poetry and Cinema
On the surface, poetry and film may seem to have little in common. But over the course of the twentieth century, many poets took a serious interest in film and engaged with it as screenwriters and critics, as well as in their poetry. Likewise, many filmmakers looked to poetry as a model for how movies could work; for some, poetry (not fiction or drama) was film’s artistic next of kin. This course takes a broad, multi-national survey of poetry and film from the 1920s to the 1970s. How did writers and filmmakers understand the relationship between the two mediums? What kinds of resources and challenges did each medium pose to the other? Poets on the syllabus may include Gertrude Stein, H.D., Langston Hughes, César Vallejo, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Benjamin Fondane, Pierre Reverdy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Likely filmmakers include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Dudley Murphy, Kenneth Macpherson, Fernando de Fuentes, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. (All texts will be in English; films will be screened with English subtitles. The course will include weekly film screenings outside of regular class meetings.) (LG-P)
Jack Chelgren 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 12131 The Gay Men's Novel
This course focuses on the history, concerns, aesthetics, movements, and culture of the gay men's novel, without the boundaries of time period, nation, or original language. The goal for students is to think in-depth about the relationship between sexual identity and narrative form, to learn about gay men's literary lineages and movements, and to think through queer theoretical concepts through fiction authored by gay men.
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 10709 Genre Fundamentals: Fiction
This course offers an introduction to the study of prose fiction. Taking up texts from the medieval period through the present, we'll consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We'll ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures do they provide? If fiction is't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to generative AI, how do fiction and technology interract? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we'll consider fictions and theories of fiction from authors including George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison. Our discussions will take up topics including point of view, the relationship between narrative and time, the powers of realism and its contraries, and the experience of suspense. (LG-F)
Emily Coit 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 16500 Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies
An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career, when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, and Henry V. Together, we will read some of Shakespeare’s queerest and most delightful comedies in conversation with darker troubling plays that revolve around sexual violence, racism, nationalism, and political theory, and we will see how such topics put generic boundaries to the test. Valuing those classics for their timeless craft but also for the situated cultural horizon that they evidence, we will explore what it means to take comedy and history seriously. Three short papers will be required. Prerequisites General education requirement in the humanities. (LC)
Noémie Ndiaye 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 17504 John Milton's Paradise Lost
In this course, we will read Milton's Paradise Lost, paying close attention to questions of genre, style, and poetics as well as the theological, philosophical, anthropological, and political commitments that shape its verse. Although we will focus on the epic itself, we will also consider highlights from the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to the poem. (LG-P)
Timothy Harrison 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 18252 British and Irish Cinema since 1930
We will be screening and discussing key films from almost a century’s worth of cinema on the British-Irish archipelago, including works of the early Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McKendrick, David Lean, Frank Launder, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, Joseph Losey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan, Amma Asante, Steve McQueen, and Lenny Abramson. Some priority will be given to films with London settings and locations, such as Frears’s My Beautiful Launderette. We may also look at London-based films by non-British directors. Sylvio Narrizaon’s George Girl, for example, or Antonioni’s Blow-up. Possible field trips include Ealing Studios, site of British cinema for much of the twentieth century, and Hitchcock’s studios in Islington, not far from our London Campus, where he worked before his departure for America. Prerequisites: Admission to the London Study Abroad Program.
James Chandler 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 20140 London: From Industrial City to Financial Center
Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two “revolutions,” the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. Some of the materials we will look at are Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Gissing’s The Netherworld, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, John Lanchester’s Capital, among other supporting texts (on urban globalization, the poverty maps of Michael Booth). Prerequisites: Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required. (LG-F)
Elaine Hadley 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 20250 The Means of Production: Contemporary Literary Publishing I (Books)
This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a manuscript of poetry 'make it' onto the list of a literary publisher, and from there to the bookshelves of the Seminary Coop? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Visits with literary editors and authors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. (LG-P)
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 23306 Writing after Windrush
“Writing After Windrush” explores the legacies of Windrush in fiction and poetry, visual arts, and social movements, interpreting “writing” as a broad range of media and discourse. Beginning with Henry Swanzy, Una Marson, and their leadership on the BBC radio show Caribbean Voices, we will engage with the creative works of Windrush migrants and their descendants: Trinidadian British novelist Samuel Selvon, Jamaican British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Guyanese British mixed-media artist Hew Locke, and others. To understand social struggle, we will study the life of activist Claudia Jones and her founding of the West Indian Gazette And Afro-Asian Caribbean News. We will consider the memory of Windrush through the moving image, in Steve McQueen’s 2020 anthology series Small Axe. Finally, we will examine the 2018 Windrush Scandal, in which at least 83 Britons were unjustly deported, in conversation with works like Hazel Carby’s account of the intertwined histories of Jamaica and Britain, Imperial Intimacies (2019). Throughout, we will travel throughout London for museum and studio visits, food, and more.
Prerequisites: Admission to the London Study Abroad Program. (LG-F)
Kaneesha Parsard 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 27700 Sensing the Anthropocene
In this co-taught three-week and in-person course between the Departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism--hearing, taste, touch, and smell--to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding our classes entirely out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city’s foundations in phenomena such as the colonization of the ancestral homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy and trade routes of many other indigenous groups; the filling in of swamp; the redirection of the river; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure--all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible and audible, providing forums for experimental documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate, and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene. Prerequisites: Third or fourth-year standing. (LG-NF)
Jennifer Scappettone 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 20458/40458 Faeries, Demons and Alchemists: Science, Magic and the Supernatural in Early Modern England
This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis.
Sarah Kunjummen 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 20464/40464/MAPH 40464 The Lives of Others
How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography). Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or “work on the self” as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by primary readings that likely include Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishiguro, Werner Herzog, Maggie Nelson, Amitav Ghosh, and J.M. Coetzee. (LT, LG-F)
Darrel Chia 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 42103 Hemispheric Studies
This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We’ll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We’ll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required.
Rachel Galvin 2024-2025 Autumn
ENGL 48230 Ways of Reading in the Long Nineteenth Century
This course introduces students to methods and debates in the history of reading by studying readers in Britain and the US during the long nineteenth century. Our discussions and readings will take up a range of questions: how did nineteenth-century readers learn to read? What practices of reading did they consider valuable, and which did they consider inept or shameful? With an eye to technological innovation and political change, we'll consider the effects of new printing techniques, railroads, and the expansion of public education. Through work at the Special Collections Research Center, students will develop hands-on familiarity with the material forms that shape and reflect the reading practices of the period. Focusing our investigation through a sequence of case studies of key works of fiction, we'll also spend a substantial portion of our time reading scholarship: we'll learn from current research on marginalized readers, reading societies, serialization, reading out loud, professionalized academic reading, and the circulation of pirated text. (LC)
Emily Coit 2024-2025 Autumn
Winter 2025 | Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10404 Genre Fundamentals: Poetry
This course is an introduction to poetry by way of attention to poetry’s arts of condensation, its techniques for producing complexities of meaning in small spaces. While our readings are drawn from a wide historical range, they do not aim to provide a representative survey of English-language poetry. Rather, they serve as a series of explorations of the ways poetic signification works. We will practice slowing down our attention, noticing where things get dense or strange, engaging with the play of poetic language and form, and articulating the questions provoked by that engagement. Our aim is to become better at thinking through poetry: that is, both thinking through the questions we articulate as we grapple with poetic language and form, and thinking about the topics poetry grapples with by way of its peculiar modes of encounter with those problems. To give some focus to our explorations, we will turn throughout the course to questions of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and ask how poetry functions as a distinctive medium for exploring the intersections of subjectivity, desire, power, and social form. (LG-P)
Mark Miller 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 10412 Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future
This course will explore novels about climate change alongside works of critical theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. We will investigate how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its future persistence or supersession. In particular, we will attend to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to “make it new.” Thus, at the same time as we study the ways in which science fiction can render intelligible the causes and consequences of climate change, we will also debate modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction may include Kim Stanley Robinson, Jeff VanderMeer, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory may include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Amitav Ghosh, McKenzie Wark, and Darko Suvin. (LG-F, LT)
Chris Gortmaker 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 10428 Medieval Desire
In medieval literature, various modes of desire intersect in surprising ways: spiritual devotion unfolds through sensual longing, and personal pleasure intertwines with sacrificial love, producing structures of desire that are conflicting, disorienting, and not so dissimilar from our own. In this course, we will survey a range of late medieval genres to unpack the richly imaginative and experimental discourses of desire housed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Readings will include dream-vision poems like Pearl, where we will consider the overlaying of economic, domestic, and apocalyptic fantasies; to the hagiographical Book of Margery Kempe, where we will think through the entanglement of gender, embodied spirituality, and erotic encounter. We will interrogate how medieval texts trouble modernity's construction of "sacred" and "secular" desire as constitutive opposites, coming up with our own terms to better describe the interplay between these categories. How do medieval texts blend seemingly different modes of desire—holy and profane, specific and ambiguous, linear and asynchronic—to construct, obscure, and defamiliarize their objects of desire? What claims to selfhood, language, and knowledge are made by these hybrid models of desire and the multiple meanings they allow? Familiarity with medieval literature or Middle English is neither required nor expected. (LG-P, LC)
Kashaf Qureshi 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 11200 Fundamentals of Literary Criticism
An introduction to the practice of literary and cultural criticism over the centuries, with a particular emphasis on theoretical debates about meaning and interpretation in the late 20th century and present. (LT, LG-NF)
Sianne Ngai 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 12106/CHST 12106/GNSE 12106 Women of the Avant-Garde
This course provides an introduction to the written materials of women artists who belonged to various twentieth-century avant-garde movements and circles. The institutions of “woman art” and “the avant-garde” will come under scrutiny as we consider the literary and archival miscellany of pan- & non-sexual, cross-generational, inter-aesthetic, multilingual, and transnational works by such makers as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo, and Yoko Ono. How do these artists conceive of their work and process as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view of those realities provide an account of the identificatory powers of their gender and sexuality? We will examine the ways in which abstraction in writing becomes useful for commenting on issues raised by feminist and queer theory, periodization, canonization, and institution.
Taking to the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center, we will also open up the criticism, diaries, and letters of these artists to gain a new perspective on their creative processes. In addition to learning how to constellate these materials with the course readings, students will acquire hands-on experience in archival research, annotation, and curation as they make an archival project of their own. Students’ final projects will serve as the basis for a prospective library exhibition in concert with Special Collections.
Rivky Mondal 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 12722 The Poetry and Prose of John Donne
This course will examine the life and career of John Donne, one of the most important and influential early modern poets and thinkers writing in English. We will read Donne’s love poetry, his religious poetry, his satirical poems, and his progress poems. We will also read some of his prose works: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions along with selections from his sermons and polemical treatises. Throughout, we will engage with the history of criticism and scholarship dedicated to Donne and his writings. (LG-P, LC)
Timothy Harrison 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 20252 The Means of Production: Contemporary Literary Publishing II (Magazines)
How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review, or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. We will begin with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry and poetry in translation as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the production of literary magazines in the second half of the term. Visits with magazine editors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include researching and soliciting work from contemporary poets for The Paris Review. Note, "Means of Production I: Books" is not a prerequisite for this course. (LG-P)
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 24240 Drama Queens: Women Playwrights in the Renaissance
This course introduces students to early modern female playwrights from England--including Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish--and from Continental Europe when their work is available in translation--including the French Marguerite de Navarre (Comedy of Mont-de-Marsan), the Italian Margherita Costa (The Buffoons), the Spanish Ana Caro (The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs) and the Mexican Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Narcissus). In this course, we will analyze the complex work and lives of those brilliant playwrights through various critical lenses including intersectional feminism, transnationalism, and premodern critical race studies. (LC)
Noémie Ndiaye 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 26250 Richer and Poorer: Income Inequality
Current political and recent academic debate have 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. Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, HG Wells, will be among the writers explored. (LG-F)
Elaine Hadley 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 26252 The Moment of Raisin
In conjunction with the Court Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin the Sun, this course will place Hansberry’s play in its literary and historical context to understand more thoroughly the play’s success in its historical moment and its ongoing importance. We will also discuss subsequent theatrical and cinematic productions and adaptations. Among the other works we will consider are: James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Bean Eaters, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. (LG-F, LG-P)
Kenneth Warren 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 24528/34528 Seeing Ourselves: Photography and Literary Non-Fiction
What knowledge about ourselves can photographs provide? Can photographs change the way we see ourselves--collectively, individually? Photography has been around for almost 200 years, yet its dominance in our lives seems only to increase. This course examines photography’s influence on our everyday lives, particularly on conceptions and portrayals of the self. We will see how theorists have grappled with the phenomenon of photography, engaging the written word to address its conundrums, dangers, and attractions. With the help of these theorists, we will question the promises that photographs seem to make about representing the world. The purpose of this course is also, however, to take seriously the affective, documentary power of photography. We will thus analyze the creative use of photographs in the non-fiction (or nearly non-fiction) of major 20th- and 21st-century writers (philosophers, critics, journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, activists). Photography will emerge as a productive medium for navigating issues of memory, identity, race, gender, authenticity, agency, publicity, and art. With keen attention to the different capabilities of writing and photography, we will explore the dynamics of self-expression, the ethics of representing others, and the politics of image-text depictions. (LT, LG-NF)
Christine Fouirnaies 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 28230/38230/GNSE 38230 Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion
This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory and history, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with the problem of cultural change—the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion’s inner workings, but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask whether and how we might also do the same. (LT)
Timothy Campbell 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 28619/38619/CRES 28619/GNSE 24520/34520/HMRT 34520/MAPH 34520 Postcolonial Openings
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie). (LT)
Darrel Chia 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 20450/40450 In a Queer Time and Place
This course investigates queer and trans engagements with temporality, history, and phenomenology in literature, film, the visual arts, and theory. (LG-F, LT)
Agnes Malinowska 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 20460/40460 Renaissance Now
This class will think about the reception of the Renaissance, in scholarship and popular culture, or from Burkhardt to Beyonce. What is at stake in the term? What does it mean to periodize a Western cultural past in this way, or to be founding a Renaissance in the present? Readings will include seminal accounts of the Renaissance by thinkers such as Jacob Burkhardt, Aby Warburg, Paul Oscar Kristeller and Joan Kelly, as well as contemporary cultural objects ranging from the film Shakespeare in Love to the fiction of Hilary Mantel and work in the visual arts by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales. (LT)
Sarah Kunjummen 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 21360/41360 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the 200 years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.
Prerequisites: Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads
Tristan Schweiger 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 32352/CDIN 32350/CMST 22350/CMST 32350 42352 Black Game Theory
This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream “AAA” games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.
The emphasis of the course will be on critical theory and cultural studies approaches to Black games. This combination of topics may seem counterintuitive insofar as games are sometimes approached as a lightweight cultural medium whereas Blackness is a serious cultural, sociopolitical, and historical concept. Resisting this frame, we approach games as a form that enables experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media, telecommunication networks, and racial capitalism. This is not a course for the craven. (LG-F)
Patrick Jagoda 2024-2025 Winter
Spring 2025 | Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10128/GNSE 18128 Enigmas of the Novel: Fiction after 1900
This course examines the centrality of opaque figures, happenings, and details to the workings of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel. To what degree are obscure elements in a work of fiction methodical in their appearance? Are enigmas necessarily code for something else? Where does the figure of the narrator live, exactly? Are characters more easily visualized, or less, when markers of race, class, and/or gender are invoked? Our first aim will be to identify the formal strategies and styles of opacity in modern and contemporary novels; our second will be to craft literary-critical arguments about the political and historical attitudes that seem to underlie these decisions. We’ll examine the assumptions and paradoxes of novel form brought to the fore by its blurry parts, and consider how these parts offer frameworks for analyzing the wayward activities of perception, belonging, and power. Through discussion and writing assignments, students will hone their skills of close reading, argumentation with concepts, and critical practice. Prospective reading list includes Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and recent novels by Raven Leilani and Weike Wang. (LG-F, LT)
Rivky Mondal 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 10406 Eating in Early Modern England: Gender, Race, Food
The relationship between the construct of idealized femininity and food consumption has a long and troubled history; this course looks at this relationship through premodern Anglophone Literature. From Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, this course situates discourses about "proper" gender performance and "proper" eating habits alongside those of race, religion, sexuality, commodity trade, and colonization to reveal the messy and complicated sociopolitical history of the dinner table.(LG-F, LC)
Sarah-Gray Lesley 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 10410 Renaissance Insomniacs
“The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t,” writes French author Marie Darrieussecq in her 2023 memoir on insomnia, Sleepless. This statement emblematizes a totalizing breviloquence curiously common to literature on insomnia. This condition's relevance to our increasingly sleep-deprived world is, indeed, increasingly clear. However, to what extent, and in what ways, should we consider its prevalence, and concern thereof, a new phenomenon? How might the history of sleeplessness illuminate the ideological contours of our contemporary sleep crisis? What, in particular, can analyzing various literatures of insomnia and sleep offer to this line of inquiry? Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) contains one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of insomnia, reflecting the period’s rising concern for the profound necessity and vulnerability of sleep and sleeplessness. From Macbeth’s "murder'd sleep" to the "slumb'rous weight" of Miltonic rest in Paradise Lost, this course takes a cross-genre approach to examining the literature of insomnia, seeking to uncover the insights yielded by literary efforts to process this uniquely debilitating state of restlessness and exhaustion. (LC)
Andrés Irigoyen 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 10420 Ecological Performance
“We are scavengers,” reports the anonymous narrator of a 1990 manuscript written by theater maker Rachel Rosenthal. “The land doesn’t nourish us because the deserts are everywhere.” Environmental dread has loomed large over the past few decades, and practitioners working in a range of media have increasingly foregrounded the ecological as a primary aesthetic concern. This course will investigate how recent performances have sought to understand, address, and redress climate catastrophe. We will look to a range of material—possibly including work by Rosenthal, performance collective The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, playwrights Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, choreographers Jerome Bel, Radouan Mriziga, and Lara Kramer, artists Rebecca Belmore and Olafur Elliason, and many others—in order to examine what tactics performance offers for reckoning with environmental collapse. (LT)
Fabien Maltais-Bayda 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 10709 Genre Fundamentals: Fiction
This course offers an introduction to narrative fiction. Taking up texts from a range of historical moments, we will consider the various genres and material forms through which fiction has found audiences. We will ask: what have those audiences wanted from fiction? What functions has fiction served? What work can stories do, and what pleasures can they offer? Focusing on the short story and the novel, we will explore key elements of narrative and try out different ways of interpreting fiction. Our discussions will take up topics including point of view, characterization, the relationship between narrative and time, the role of narrative in shaping identities, the powers of realism and its contraries, and the experience of suspense. (LG-F)
Sianne Ngai 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 15107 Some Versions of the Apocalypse
From prophetic texts of the ancient world to more recent fascinations with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, nuclear winter, and other forms of systemic collapse, the genre of apocalypse has given extraordinarily fertile expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. Readings will include novels by Daniel DeFoe, Max Brooks, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin, as well as the Book of Revelation from the Christian New Testament, and excerpts from the medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland. The course will conclude with two 1968 US films, Planet of the Apes and Night of the Living Dead. (LG-F)
Mark Miller 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 15109 Thinking with Melville
In recent years, Herman Melville's work has received considerable attention, and not simply within literary studies; anthologies devoted to "Melville and philosophy" and "Melville and political theory" have appeared, and in 2025-26 his writings will be central to a conference on law and literature at the UChicago Law School. What is it about Melville's corpus that has made it amenable to so many different kinds of conversations, and what about it sparks particular interest during our present moment?
Students in this class will have a chance to think across the disciplines with Melville by reading some of his most important work—from the exhilarating, epic ride that is Moby-Dick to shorter pieces from Benito Cereno, a tale of mysterious events aboard a slave ship, to "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street." We'll read these remarkable narratives in the company of critical materials situating them in relation to questions of democracy, religion, colonialism, capitalism, the natural world, the speculative, and more.
Jennifer Fleissner 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 19205/GNSE 19205 Poetry in the Land of Childhood
Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate “fibred” spaces like these have a special relation to childhood—both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, from the birth of children’s literature to its “golden age”—and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children’s poetry collections, through William Blake’s “forests of the night,” and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. (LC, LG-P)
Alexis Chema 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 20000 History of the English Language
If you have ever wondered why we say, “one mouse” and “two mice,” but not “one house” and “two hice,” this course will offer some answers. We will study the historical development of the English language, from its Proto-Indo-European roots through its earliest recorded forms (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English) up to its current status as a world language. Now spoken by more than 1.5 billion people, English is a language that is constantly evolving, and students will gain basic linguistic skills necessary for analyzing the features of its evolution. We will study variations in the language (including variations in morphology, phonology, syntax, grammar, and vocabulary) and its development over time and across regions. We will also examine sociological, political, and literary phenomena that accompany and shape these changes in the language. (LC)
Benjamin A. Saltzman 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 10430 Experimental British Poetics 1960–Now
This class offers a survey of the Late-Modernist British poetry movement The British Poetry Revival and its afterlives. After WWII, in resistance to a perceived stagnancy in British verse, and inspired by many of the young U.S. poets collected in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology (1960), young British poets collected around England and renewed British Modernism. Initially clustered around London, Cambridge, and some Northumbrian cities, the movement (dubbed “The British Poetry Revival”) has since grown to include the most innovative and vital poetic work written throughout the British Isles.
Dense, loud, bombastic, aggressive: this vast corpus of work will offer students a view into recent British culture, economy, and politics, its world after the putative terminal decline of the empire, and its claimed “special relationship” with the United States. Its poets are now not just British, include among their number more women and queers, and are dispersed throughout the British Isles. This course will offer a survey of this movement from the 1960s to the present; reading will include its writing: from poetry to performance, correspondence to hallucinatory prose. Students will be asked to consider that poetry does not always look or feel the way we want it to, or the way we think it should. (LG-P)
James Garwood-Cole 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 31285 Toni Morrison, beloved and a mercy
“How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together." Beginning with Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture, this class will read (for many reread) two of Toni Morrison’s novels that pose the house and household as a “site of memory” in which to dramatize gendered histories of race in North America. Our class will annotate together Beloved and A Mercy with the essays, films, poetry of various scholars, in addition to some of Morrison’s literary critical and historical writings. Our in-depth reading of these two works will provide a foundation for engaging in ongoing debates about race and writing in literary studies, black feminists critiques of the classroom, and histories of race-based slavery in North America. If, as Morrison contends, “language” teaches us “how to see without pictures” and that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” we will aim to hold language close as we consider “what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” (LG-F)
SJ Zhang 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 20420/30420 Autofiction
The last twenty years in American letters has exhibited a turn toward autofiction: works of literature at least in part fictitious in which the protagonist and narrator bear the same name as the author (and some of the latter’s history). This course investigates this turn by way of a number of exemplary literary texts (those of John Edgar Wideman, Philip Roth, and Sheila Heti, among others) while investigating the workings of the parts of speech on which it seemingly turns: “I.” (LG-F)
Joshua Kates 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 20660/30660 Minds, Brains, and the Contemporary Novel
Around the turn into the twenty-first century, psychology "went neurological": human struggles that had long been viewed as expressions of complex inner conflicts and interpersonal dynamics began more and more to be described, and treated, as forms of brain disease. A 2009 essay, "The Rise of the Neuro-Novel," worried about ways this shift might wreak havoc on the fiction-writer's art. More recently, however, theories of neurodivergence have pushed back against some of the pathologizing language of abnormal psychiatry, while pop-Freudian stories of trauma seem omnipresent in novels, TV, and film.
This class asks how this turmoil in accounts of personhood has played out in fiction from the 1990s through the present, and, in particular, its effects on narrative form. What do tales of psychiatric diagnosis have to do with detective fiction? Can a trauma narrative be written without a "self"? What happens when magical realism infiltrates stories of psychic development? Or when Western and non-Western accounts of interiority collide? Authors to be read include Ian McEwan, Helen Oyeyemi, Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Raven Leilani, Tom McCarthy, and others; we'll read these together with materials from contemporary philosophy, psychology, the history of science and medicine, and literary and cultural criticism. (LT)
Jennifer Fleissner 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 32312 Virtual Theaters
This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, drama on social media, remote online theater on platforms like Zoom, algorithmic and AI theater, mixed reality performance, and transmedia performance. One unit of the course attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic. Prerequisites: Open to select undergraduate students with instructor consent.
John Muse 2024-2025 Winter
ENGL 24960/34960 California Fictions: Literature and Cinema
This course will consider works of literature and cinema from 1884-2018 that take place in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and rural California to offer a case study for everyday life and critical space theory. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and ending with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother you, we will also consider how “the west” provides an opportunity for reconsidering canon formation and genre.
Prerequisites: Open to MAPH students: 3rd and 4th years in the College email 2-3 sentences about why you want to take the course for consent. (LT)
Megan Tusler 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 35500 Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a wildly experimental collection of narrative poetry that assembles rhetorically, conceptually, and affectively incongruous material in ways that challenge medieval and modern notions of aesthetic form. This course will explore the poetry’s aesthetic strangeness in relation to its probing of medieval social forms, including polities and the hierarchies that shape them, organizations of gender, sexuality, and the human body, figures of otherness such as the Jew and the Saracen, and figures of intimate otherness such as Christ, Mary, the child, and courtly and other love objects. Those taking the course for graduate credit will also read a variety of other materials from medieval culture, scholarly work on Chaucer and the middle ages, and theoretical engagements with the course’s conceptual topics. (LC,
Mark Miller 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 22360/42360 Working 9 to 5
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space. Prerequisites: Open to MA and PhD students; 3rd- and 4th-year undergrads (LC)
Tristan Schweiger 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 43500 Archives of Slavery and Gender in the Americas
This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival research methodologies with a focus on gender and slavery in the Americas. Students will apply their knowledge by working in historical and contemporary archives via two trips to special collections: one to view archival texts from the period and another to find an archival object of the student’s choosing that will provide the topic of their final research paper. (LC)
SJ Zhang 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 45330 Affect and Theory
An examination of a series of efforts, in multiple disciplines, to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion. We will consider the more recent “affective turn” in relation to a longer intellectual tradition, as we examine a range of terms and concepts including affect, emotion, structure of feeling, atmosphere, and mood, in readings by Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Silvan Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Eve Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant and others.
Jonathan Flatley 2024-2025 Spring
ENGL 27704/47714 Reproductive citizens: gender, work, and the body
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Prerequisites: Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.
Agnes Malinowska 2024-2025 Spring