Below you will find a list of the Academic Year 2026-2027 ENGL literature courses and what requirements they satisfy for the Creative Writing Majors. All of these courses will fulfill requirements for the Minor in English and Creative Writing.
Creative Writing Legacy Major Literature Requirements:
- 1 Literary Genre Course (a class focused on a student’s primary genre)
- 1 pre-1900s Course
- 1 Literary Theory Course
- 1 General Literature Elective
Creative Writing New Standard and Intensive Major Literature Requirements:
- 1 Introductory Genre Course
- 1 pre-1900s Course
- 2 General Literature Electives
Please note the courses listed below 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.
All other courses not on this list must be approved by the DUS, Professor Stephanie Soileau, before enrolling in the course.
Autumn 2026 | Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10432 Literature and the Law
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
This course explores what literature can teach us about the law, and vice-versa. Through fiction, films, statutes, and court cases drawn from the legal and literary history of the United States, students will ask questions such as: How do legal concepts rely on literary techniques such as storytelling? What laws shape literature, both in its writing and in its reception in society? And how do we interpret the language of both literary and legal texts? Course topics will be organized roughly around major practice areas of the law—such as contracts, torts, property, constitutional, and criminal law—as well as cases presently before the Supreme Court. Students interested in legal and non-legal careers alike will explore the history, context, and unfolding present of the laws and literature of the United States. Likely readings include work by authors Charles Chesnutt, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison as well as landmark court cases Plessy v. Ferguson, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Obergefell v. Hodges.
Adam Fales | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 10452 History of the Book and Reading
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
What is the history of the book? This course serves as an introduction to methods, practices, and issues of the field for students interested in the materiality of information. Topics include book production from papyrus to e-books; oral and manuscript cultures; the development of printing; copyright; censorship; the economics of book production and distribution; libraries and the organization of information; principles of bibliographical description; print in other formats (newspapers, magazines, advertisements, etc.); and reading and readership. This course is taught in University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center and in conjunction with the Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book. It is designed to be hands-on, providing students with new perspectives and skills relevant to work within and beyond the academy including in libraries, auction houses, and antiquarian bookselling.
Angela Wachowich | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 10709 Fiction
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Introductory Genre; General Literature Elective
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 isn't true, what kind of knowledge or understanding can it offer? From the printing press to generative AI, how do fiction and technology interact? 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. Students will complete five short weekly assignments and two larger projects; the assignment sequence is structured for flexibility, offering choice in topics, due dates, and formats, including creative as well as more conventionally academic options.
Emily Coit | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 11200 Intro to Literary Criticism
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (nonfiction); Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Introductory Genre; General Literature Elective
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.
Sianne Ngai | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 16505 Medieval Dream Visions
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Tarot cards, incantations, healing charms, constellations. These have in common not just their purported magic properties, but aesthetic expressiveness: their appearance and perceptible form are linked to their supernatural power. In this course, we will explore the relationship between art and magic, tracing the reciprocal pathways of influence and inspiration between the occult as a domain of oppositional religion, and cultural developments in modern poetry, fiction, visual art, and film (often spurred by occult practitioners themselves.) How has occultism functioned as an aesthetically productive source of contradiction, conflict, and questioning, even as multiple occult traditions seek to consolidate meaning in a world of changing values? We will map the myriad ways that the hidden, discredited, and rejected traditions that constitute occultism continue to exercise a powerful fascination upon modern society despite its supposed “disenchantment”; likewise, the ways that art has been used as a vehicle for contesting the disenchanted world and voicing its discontents. Readings may include work by Leonora Carrington, H.D., Robert Duncan, Dion Fortune, Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger. (Theory, Fiction, 20th/21st)
Kashaf Qureshi | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 16600 Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances
Crosslistings: FNDL 21404, TAPS 28406
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course traces Shakespeare’s poetic invention and theatrical intelligence from his earliest, highly popular efforts at tragedy (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet) to his later-career highlights (Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra). Having developed a working knowledge of Shakespeare’s tragic dramaturgy, we will turn our attention to some examples of Romance (The Winter's Tale and The Tempest), a curious genre that complicates and subverts tragedy's mood and form. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary compositions, embodied expressions, and witnesses to the tumultuous time in which Shakespeare lived. Section attendance is required.
Ellen MacKay | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 20082 Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course will explore the literary movement known as Romanticism through a survey of three “young Romantics”: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. We will devote three weeks to reading the major works of each, which include some of the most gorgeous and idealistic poems in the English language—as well as some of the funniest. There will be three formal assignments: a dramatic poetry recitation, an ongoing "poetic criticism" journal, and a traditional literary analysis paper (complete draft due in Week 6; revised draft due on the last class)
Alexis Chema | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 20305 The Form of the Book
Crosslistings: ARTV 20305
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
The book format has been shaped by developments in technology, materials, distribution, and reading habits. This course will focus on the form of printed books through the lens of graphic design. Students will develop the practical skills necessary to typeset, print, and bind a modest book. We’ll discuss developments in printing technology (letterpress, offset), access to tools (movable type, paste up, desktop publishing), mass reproduction, distribution methods, and reading habits that have shaped the book form. No prior design/typesetting experience required.
Danielle Aubert | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 20720 Film and Fiction
Crosslistings: CMST 25820
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
This course 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 are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain? 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 none 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” as 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. What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts? Fiction by, among others, Guy de Maupassant, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Hughes, James M. Cain, and Graham Greene. Films by, among others, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Patricia Rozema, and David O. Russell.
James Chandler | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 21312 Research Methods
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
This course trains students how to conduct research in the field of literary studies. We will learn and practice techniques of archival research, theoretical writing, close reading, literary history, digital methods, and other interdisciplinary approaches. We ask how and where do we do research? – in libraries, on computers, on field trips? What is an archive? Students will have the opportunity to begin to develop a new research project of their own design. This course is required for students who intend to write a BA Thesis in pursuit of the intensive track of the English major. However, it is open to all other students as well.
Kenneth Warren | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 23580 Pleasure Reading
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
What makes reading pleasurable, and how has reading for pleasure changed over time? How does a book devoured with relish in one era become flatly boring in the next? This course examines practices of pleasure reading in Britain and the US from the eighteenth century through the present. Taking cues from the friendships, literary societies, and book clubs that have been key sites for pleasure reading in the past, the course and its assignments are structured to offer the experience of social reading in a community: students will trade transcribed verses, read out loud to each other, exchange letters, and, at the end of the term, share presentations in a convivial setting. Together, we'll test out once-popular works on our own sensibilities, taking up acclaimed favorites and also texts disparaged as vapid, addictive, or corrupting. As we sample page-turners, smut, and trash, we'll investigate how texts migrate in and out of those classifications. A visit to the Special Collections Research Center will help us to think about texts' material forms; we'll also try out audiobook formats and watch one film adaptation. We'll conclude the term by considering pleasure reading in our own moment, using historical perspective to better understand the current outcry about waning attention and reading's decline.
Emily Coit | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 25224 Severance and Contemporary Fiction
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Focusing on the first season of Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller’s 2022 dystopian television series, Severance, along with three recent novels—Vicenzo Latronico’s Perfection, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where are You?—this course will examine what happens when the idea of work as a social activity threatens to disappear from the ways in which we imagine our worlds. We will explore the political and social dimensions of work dramatized in these fictions in relation to analyses of labor by social theorists and economists, to ponder whether this disappearance (imagined or real) is a new phenomenon, and therefore something desirable, or merely an intensification of the processes of modernization, including mechanization, streamlining, outsourcing, etc. that have been going for two centuries or more within a world defined by capitalism. In addition to regular class attendance, students will be expected to attend Monday evening screenings. Episodes usually run just under an hour, and we will allow 15 minutes for discussion recap. Refreshments will be provided. Assignments: Maintain and submit a handwritten journal; complete one episode analysis (5 pages); and write a final 6-7-page essay.
Kenneth Warren | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 25890 On Coziness
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
What kind of aesthetic category is “coziness”? What makes for a cozy place, and what exactly do we hope to experience there? What are coziness’s objects, and what do they hold for us? Who is included in coziness’s “we/us,” and why? This class will explore coziness’s aesthetics and its affects. We’ll consider the appeal of locations like the cottage, the garden, the pub, and the cozy mystery to discern what coziness can teach us about domesticity, tactility gender, rurality, labor, innocence, or danger (among other possible topics).
Tina Post | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 27008 Black in the City
Crosslistings: AMER 27008, ARCH 27008, RDIN 27008, SIGN 26077
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
From the art and science of the Great Migration to hip hop’s contemporary renderings of cities now, this course will look at the ways Black artists and thinkers have staged encounters with urban life. From W.E.B Du Bois’ sociological surveys and Gwendolyn Brooks’ mid-century experiments in urban sight, to Spike Lee’s staged urban explosions and Kendrick Lamar’s Compton soundscapes, this course explores both the dreams and the despairs
yoked to being Black in the city.
Adrienne Brown | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 28855 The Brontës
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course examines a selection of fiction, poetry and juvenilia by nineteenth-century British writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Publishing under un-gendered pseudonyms as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the sisters produced some of the most powerful and impassioned works of their time, works which continue to have a hold on readers’ imaginations even today. Collectively (with brother, Branwell) they also produced a huge corpus of juvenile writings in which they invented entire fictional worlds located in Africa. In this course we will consider them as a family of writers. What does it mean to think about them as collaborators, or co-conspirators, within a shared domestic environment? How did their childhood experience – their education, their reading, and their play - shape their work? As mature writers, all three wrote about childhood and education, servants and servitude, power and tyranny, anger and rage. Their works astonished contemporary readers for their representations of intense emotional states. On their deaths (three of the siblings died under the age of 31 – only Charlotte lived until 38), an industry emerged that sought to turn the Brontës into cultural icons – but icons of what? This course follows the Brontës and their works from childhood to death and considers their afterlives and the afterlives of their works. The works we will read may include Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Villette, as well as their poetry, and juvenilia; some writings by their father, the Rev Patrick Brontë; and some adaptations, biographies and critical responses. What does this phenomenal family tell us about nineteenth-century literature, and about ongoing conceptions of childhood and creativity?
Josephine McDonagh | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 26960 Beckett and Media
Crosslistings: TAPS 25950
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Though best known for a single play, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, translator, and critic with a voluminous output. This course introduces students to the variety and influence of one of the central figures in twentieth-century literature and theater by considering Beckett’s better-known plays—both on the page and in recorded performances—alongside select novels, criticism, film, radio, and television pieces. Among the questions we will ask are: What can Beckett’s experiments across media teach us about the presumed and actual limits of form? What happens when a medium becomes the means of its own undoing? What can we learn from Beckett’s career about cardinal developments in twentieth-century drama, literature, film, and television?
John Muse | 2025-2026 Autumn
ENGL 20161/40161 21st Century Ethnic American Literature
Crosslistings: AMER 40161
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
The question of “race” and racial others in US fiction has troubled the form since its emergence, but in the 21st century fiction has tackled particularly thorny issues. The debates in contemporary critical race theory have both criticized and maintained the categories of race and ethnicity in novels and short fiction, and longstanding debates in canonization have demanded rethinking what ethnic fiction is capable of achieving. This class will read US novels and short stories by African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty-five years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in cultural race studies. In this class, you will learn to produce readings on the current moment in a way that accounts for historical events; how to read fiction through a series of generic lenses; and how to work with established and emerging methodologies in critical race studies and literature.
Megan Tusler | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 20458 Faeries, Demons, and Alchemists: Science, Magic, and the Supernatural in Early Modern England
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
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 | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 22200 Special Topics in Literary Criticism: Fredric Jameson
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
This seminar will provide students with an overview of Marxist literary criticism via the career of one of its most innovative practitioners.
Sianne Ngai | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 27752 The Radical 1790s
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Pre-1900s; Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
Across the Atlantic world, the 1790s were a decade of massive transformation and political possibility. Grounded in material conditions and material struggle, guided by emergent and often quite radical political theory, revolutions in Europe and North America took on monarchy, slavery, and inequality broadly defined. At the same time, the 1790s were a decade of reaction -- when extant hierarchies fought against those transformations with increasing anxiety, and empire and imperial capital continued to rapidly expand. This course will read widely in literature and political theory from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that attempted to represent, and to produce, these transformations, as well as modern theory and criticism in anti-racism/postcolonialism, feminism/gender theory, carceral studies, and Marxist analysis to better understand the legacies of this remarkable political moment.
Tristan Schweiger | 2026-2027 Autumn
ENGL 20450/50430 Breathing Matters: Politics and Poetics of Air
Crosslistings: CMLT 50430
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
The participants in this seminar will be asked to re-examine the notion of “inspiration” in its aesthetic and historical senses, revisiting age-old textual and arts practices based on tropes of channeling, as well as contemporary practices based on embodied, performative and geopoetic notions of interconnection, circulation, receptivity and transmutation—including practices that reflect and refute the denial of the innate interconnectivity of beings. We will delve into the workings of air as an animating element that bridges and binds individuals to both internal and external forces—controllable and uncontrollable, state-sponsored and ambient, or what we would call “natural” under anthropocene conditions. We will examine the modern and contemporary politicization of air as a commons, and will apply our research to the analysis and critique of industrial and post-industrial landscapes. The imagination of air itself becomes central to thinking about utopian or dystopian collectivities in a time of respiratory crisis. Authors to be studied will include Coleridge, Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mira Holzbachová, Ant Farm, Meredith Monk, M. NourbeSe Philip, Mladen Dolar, Cecila Vicuña, Adriana Cavarero, Jordan Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Achille Mbembe, and more.
Jennifer Scappettone | 2026-2027 Autumn
Winter 2027 | Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 10125 Gothic Poetry
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course surveys Gothic poetry from its beginnings with the graveyard poets of the eighteenth century to Edgar Allan Poe and his Victorian inheritors. We will focus on how the thematic hallmarks of the Gothic such as supernatural horror, medieval romance, and extreme emotion allowed Romantic poets to interrogate conventional ideas of beauty and literary value. A major aim of this course is to develop our critical language for discussing aesthetics and genre, both to enrich our sense of literary history and to understand how the Gothic continues to shape how we talk about genre today: from horror movies to goth and emo music. Poets include John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Poe, and Christina Rossetti. Secondary readings include aesthetic theory by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Ann Radcliffe, and Thomas De Quincy.
Jacob Biel | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 10144 Jane Austen
Crosslistings: FNDL 20144, GNSE 10144
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
In this course, we’ll read three or four major novels by Jane Austen, alongside selections from her unfinished works and recent film adaptations. We’ll explore the world in which Austen was writing, and ask why her fiction continues to captivate audiences. From her time to ours, Austen has been notoriously difficult to pin down. Is her vision essentially conservative -- valuing tradition and hierarchy, nostalgic for a passing way of life? Or is it democratic, progressive, perhaps even radical? Is Austen a hopeless romantic, a ruthless enforcer of the conjugal imperative (everyone married off in the end!), or a scathing feminist critic of existing institutions (from property laws to marriage)? We’ll think together about the techniques of narrative voice, point of view, and irony that make possible such wildly different readings. Throughout the course, we’ll work to do justice to the complexity of Austen’s writing and thinking on its own terms, and in its own context. We’ll also follow her fiction to our present, and consider what we still want from her characters, plots, and style.
Heather Keenleyside | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 10404 Poetry
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Introductory Genre; General Literature Elective
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.
Mark Miller | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 10454 Literature and Science
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
At 12:30pm, a train departs Chicago heading due West. Where does it end up two minutes later: in a mathematics problem set? a scientific thought experiment? a literary fiction? This course explores how and why literary tropes, genres, and narrative tendencies find their way into structures of scientific thinking--hand vice-versa. We examine what happens when scientific ideas serve as literary premises in the hands of writers like J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Samuel Delany, and Ted Chiang. Reading these authors alongside works of criticism and fiction penned by practicing scientists---including a comparative study of Monet and Relativity by UChicago physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as well as short stories by his colleague Leo Szilard--helps us investigate how aesthetic forms inflect scientific thought and practice in turn.
Tyler Lutz | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 11004 History of the Novel
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective[SS1] [SS2] [MH3]
This course will provide an introduction to the history of the novel by examining novels from the last four centuries, including our own 21st, and from all parts of the world (some in translation). We will think about various novel forms that develop over time, including, for instance, epistolary novels, the gothic, bildungsroman and the picaresque. We will also consider the afterlife of these novels in other media, especially in film, and discuss how and why they have proved so adaptable to cultural change. Additional material (fiction, theory, and criticism) will be assigned to complement discussion of the set texts. Discussions sections will take place in Special Collections in the Regenstein Library. The novels may include Dangerous Liaisons, Pride and Prejudice, Rajmohan's Wife, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song.
Josephine McDonagh | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 12025 Memoir
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (literary nonfiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Introductory Genre; General Literature Elective
How do big forces—a tsunami, authoritarian regimes, illness and death—imprint themselves on a single life? In this course, we will read contemporary memoirs to understand how writers convey the self, share personal truths, and narrate lives in a specific place and moment in time while also offering universal lessons to readers. Toni Morrison’s thinking about life writing will guide our reading. And memoirs, both literary and graphic, may include those of Joan Didion, David Wojnarowicz, Edwidge Danticat, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Kiese Laymon, and Sonali Deraniyagala. Throughout the quarter, we may have special guests or visit book events.
Kaneesha Parsard | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 16510 Anxious Middle Ages
Crosslistings: COGS 26505, MDVL 16510
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
Anxiety has many shapes—dread, fear, shame, despair, uncertainty, stress, paranoia. How were these feelings conceptualized differently in the past than they are today? In this course, we will explore anxiety as both a visceral feeling and an ambiguous experience that unfolds at the intersections of the body, mind, and social world in the Middle Ages. We will interrogate how medieval literature responds to historical anxieties around gender normativity, reproduction, religious/racial difference, ethical ambiguity, and death. Reading medieval texts alongside psychoanalysis, affect theory, and existential philosophy, we will explore a range of topics, from body dysphoria in The Romance of Silence, to the grotesque afterlife in The Dispute Between the Body and Worms, to madness and social alienation in Thomas Hoccleve’s My Complaint. We will also discuss the foundational literary studies concepts of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” and “paranoid reading,” where anxiety becomes an indispensable feature of how we read and interpret literature.
Kashaf Qureshi | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 17769 Early American Fiction
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course introduces students to the foundations of American literary fiction. Beginning with the historical, political, and religious contexts of the nation, we will read work across fictional genres, including the romance, the gothic, realism, local color fiction, sentimentality, and the novel. Students will read work by authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as criticism of these works.
Adam Fales | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 20315 Love, War, and Pagans in the Medieval Imagination
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course considers the love of violence, the violence of love, and the idea of the pagan past in the literature of the later Middle Ages. We'll spend the largest part of our time on Geoffrey Chaucer's epic romance Troilus and Criseyde. No previous experience with medieval literature is required.
Julie Orlemanski | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 21882 Virginia Woolf: Love, Life, Writing
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
How to write a life? Virginia Woolf grappled with this question, and so will we in this course. How, indeed, does one write, not only one’s own life, but the life of others, particularly when strong feelings are involved? We will study Woolf’s reflections on how to capture a life along with her attempts to do so, delving into her essays, novels, and life-writing (letters, diaries, and auto/biographical works). With the different literary genres, along with Woolf’s various engagements with other arts, we will see different approaches to re/creating personalities and inter-personal relationships emerge. To help us understand Woolf, we will examine her Victorian background, her Bloomsbury circle, and the Modernism with which she is associated. We will also engage with relevant theories of selfhood, sexuality, and auto/biography. At stake in our investigations is the role and critical potential of the personal in literary production. We will discuss this while taking up subjects such as familial relationships, the meaning of friendship, and the complexities of love. Throughout, we will consider Woolf’s relevance for today, and we will conclude with how Woolf’s own life has been taken up by others.
Christine Fouirnaies | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 24250 Race, Performance, Performativity
Crosslistings: GNSE 24250, TAPS 25850
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
What does it mean to feel raced, and how does performance work with or against such feelings? Why and how does a performance of racial identity come to be perceived as “authentic?” What is at stake in performances that that cross real or imagined racial lines? This upper-level class delves into the topic of performativity as it intersects with race in the American context. Some historical background is studied, but we will mostly explore performativity’s intersection with race in contemporary America. Course assignments are a mix of the theoretical, dramatic, and performative. (In other words, some of our readings theorize performativity while others put theory into play.)
Tina Post | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 25790 Declaring Independence: A Global History
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Theory; Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
This course will explore the emergence and diffusion of a distinctly US American genre: the declaration of independence. In the first half of this course, we will explore the textual and cultural history of the American Declaration. In the second, we will explore the global diffusion of this genre through sites of anti-colonial antagonism and national formation, possibly including revolutionary France, Haiti, and India. Readings will include George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Olympe de Gouges, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simón Bolívar, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and more.
Christopher Taylor | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 25810 Writing Dreams
Crosslistings: COGS 26503
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (poetry); Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
In this course students will study poetry, literature, and art written with dreams and dream practices to better understand the relation between dreaming and writing; and to gain some creative practice in connecting their own writing to their dreaming. We will read literature from a broad range of cultural and historical locales to gain an expanded sense of oneiric writing. And we will intensify that reading with regular writing exercises meant to elicit poetics from the subconscious. In doing so we will trouble simplistic accounts of the subconscious as merely suppressed or hidden consciousness, considering instead how the psychology of nightly visions relates to social, political, historical, and anthropological worlds. Students will be expected to maintain daily/nightly writing journals with weekly prompts to facilitate creative works. Final projects will consist of a polished portfolio or some equivalent.
Edgar Garcia | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 26249 Literary Lessons for Economists: The Financial Crisis of 2008
Crosslistings: LLSO 26249. SIGN 26064
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Many political observers argue that the challenges of our current political moment stem from the causes and responses to the financial crisis of 2008. In this course we will examine literary fiction, films, and television from the US, the UK, and Asia to understand how the challenges of representing the 2008 reflected and contributed to the crisis. In doing so we will also seek a better understanding of neoliberalism as a theory and a politics. Among the texts we will take up are several novels, Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger: A Novel; Rachel Cusk, Transit; Ben Lerner, 10:04: A Novel; and John Lanchester, Capital: A Novel; two films, The Big Short (Adam McKay) and Parasite (Bong Joon Ho); and the first season of the television series, Severance.
Kenneth Warren | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 21285 Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy
Crosslistings: GNSE 21285, RDIN 21285
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Our class will read two of Toni Morrison’s novels, Beloved and A Mercy, 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 these novels together through supplementary materials such as essays, films, and poetry of various scholars, as well as 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.
SJ Zhang | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 24065 Back to the Future: Modernity and Antimodernity Around 1900
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
Is modernity a blessing or a curse? Do visions of simpler forms of life bear lessons for the future, or are they idealistic—even dangerous—dreams? How have city life and mass media changed the way we interact with one another? Have we damaged our humanity in the name of technological progress? Questions of this kind are familiar today, at a time when the very foundations of modernity have once again come under critical scrutiny. This class will introduce students to a number of these writers from the rapidly modernizing U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century, as they asked about the dangers and possibilities of both utopian and critical takes on the modern world; likely candidates include Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Sui Sin Far, Frank Norris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Kate Chopin. To wit: Norris portrays a recent college graduate reduced to an animalistic state; Jewett records a dreamlike encounter with a rural world rapidly passing out of existence; Twain sends a modern engineer back in time to King Arthur’s Court; Chesnutt fictionalizes a real-life attempt by white supremacists to turn back time in the American South; Gilman imagines an all-female world in the wilderness; in James, a former New Yorker returns to his native city after decades to find it utterly transformed by the advent of the skyscraper.
Jennifer Fleissner | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 24528 Seeing Ourselves: Photography and Literary Nonfiction
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (nonfiction); Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Introductory Genre;[SS4] General Literature Elective
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.
Christine Fouirnaies | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 24119 Literature and Citizenship
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – Pre-1900s; General Literature Elective[SS5]
What we think of as modernity can be said to begin with the birth (or rebirth) of the citizen. During the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions in Britain, France, and North America sought to recast political society as a structure built upon social contracts and natural rights of the people rather than the divine right of kings. But this same era also saw the rise of transoceanic empires and chattel slavery. Its new republican governments generally excluded all but white men (and often all but white men who owned property) from the vote or from most spheres of political agency and authority. Indeed, the category of citizen was (and remains) exclusionary as well as inclusive, frequently deployed to mark those outside its boundaries and protections. During the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the constructions of race, gender, and nation continued to shift into new forms, and many literatures of these centuries focus on how “the citizen” is conceived and reinvented into the present. This course will discuss how these tensions and debates influence literature and political discourse over four centuries, a breadth that will allow us to trace the concepts and critiques of citizenship as they have come to shape our contemporary world.
Tristan Schweiger, Megan Tusler | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 24412 Theater about Theater
Crosslistings: TAPS 28431
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
What happens when plays know they’re plays? All theater frames time, space, and action, selecting a slice of life and asking us to look at it closely. The plays we’ll study in this course—which range from early modern to contemporary, from comic to tragic—make that framing impossible to ignore. Plays about theater push us to ask fundamental questions: How do we know what is real? How are identity, revenge, race, and power performed? Who is allowed to perform and who is forced to perform for others? Is theatrical spectatorship complicit in cultural violence? And why do artists keep returning to these questions at moments of cultural change?
John Muse | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 27716
Crosslistings: GNSE 23179
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); Literary Theory; General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.
Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities.
Agnes Malinowska | 2026-2027 Winter
ENGL 28617 Fictions of Personhood
Crosslistings: TAPS 28431
Requirements this course satisfies:
Legacy Major – Literary Genre (fiction); General Literature Elective
New Standard and Intensive Majors – General Literature Elective
We consider how literary works reflect and shape historically shifting cultural and legal conceptions of personhood in the 20th century. What does literary character look like within a longer history of the novel, and what does it make of notions of free will, responsibility, and synthetic personhood. We read selections from Locke, Charles Taylor, Marya Schechtman, Galen Strawson, Joseph Slaughter, and Nihad Farooq, alongside novels by Laclos, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, HG Wells, Vita Sackville-West, Ralph Ellison, and Han Kang.
Darrel Chia | 2026-2027 Winter