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