English 8, Narrative Journalism: Literature and Practice, at the 11 hour with Professor Jetter
This course will explore the role of print journalism in shaping the modern American literary, cultural and political landscape--from Nellie Bly’s late 19th century undercover exposure to Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the Iraq War. Students will also participate in an intensive weekly workshop on reporting and writing, with a short unit on radio commentary. Dist: LIT; WCult: W.
English 12, Introduction to Literary Study, at the 10 hour with Professor Will
Designed for prospective majors in English and for students interested in a general literature course, English 12 offers an introduction to the critical, historical, and creative study of literature. Each of the sections provides a survey of literature from different historical periods and an overview of the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading, critical analysis and creative practice. The course counts for credit in the major. Dist: LIT. No course group or CA tag designation.
Introduction to Literary Study--Methods
This section focuses on the interpretive methods, critical modes and creative practices of English Literature as a disciplinary study. Texts will be drawn from at least two genres and historical periods as well as the history of criticism and theory. Writing for the class will include both critical and creative practices.
English 16, Old and New Media, at the 10A hour with Professor Halasz
A survey of the historical, formal, and theoretical issues that arise from the materiality and technology of communication, representation, and textuality. The course will address topics in and between different media, which may include oral, scribal, print, and digital media. Readings and materials will be drawn from appropriate theorists, historians, and practitioners, and students may be asked not only to analyze old and new media, but also create with them. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 22, Medieval English Literature, at the 10 hour with Professor Otter
An introduction to the literature of the “Middle English” period (ca. 1100- ca. 1500), concentrating on the emergence of English as a literary language in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and on some of the great masterworks of the late fourteenth century. Readings will include early texts on King Arthur, the Lais of Marie de France, the satirical poem The Owl and the Nightingale, the romances Sir Orfeo, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The York Cycle. Most readings in modern English translation, with some explorations into the original language. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 34, Romantic Literature, Writing and English Society, 1780-1832, at the 10 hour with Professor McCann
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars.There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 45, Native American Literature, at the 11 hour with Professor Benson (crosslisted with NAS 35)
Published Native American writing has always incorporated a cross-cultural perspective that mediates among traditions. The novels, short stories, and essays that constitute the Native American contribution to the American literary tradition reveal the literary potential of diverse aesthetic traditions. This course will study representative authors with particular emphasis on contemporary writers. Open to all classes. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 47, American Drama, at the 12 hour with Professor Pease
A study of major American playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries including S. Glaspell, O’Neill, Hellman, Wilder, Hansberry, Guare, Williams, Wilson, Mamet, Miller, Albee, Shepard, Wasserstein. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-drama, National Traditons and Countertradtions.
English 48, Contemporary American Fiction, at the 11 hour with Professor Favor
Contemporary American fiction introduces the reader to the unexpected. Instead of conventionally structured stories, stereotypical heroes, traditional value systems, and familiar uses of language, the reader finds new and diverse narrative forms. Such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Ralph Ellison, among others, have produced a body of important, innovative fiction expressive of a modern American literary sensibility. The course requires intensive class reading of this fiction and varied critical writing on postmodernism. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 58, Introduction to PostColonial Literature, at the 11 hour with Professor Giri (crosslisted with AAAS 65)
An introduction to the themes and foundational texts of postcolonial literature in English. We will read and discuss novels by writers from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, with attention to the particularities of their diverse cultures and colonial histories. Our study of the literary texts will incorporate critical and theoretical essays, oral presentations, and brief background lectures. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V.S. Naipaul, Merle Hodge, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace, Arundhati Roy. Serves as prerequisite for FSP in Trinidad. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW. Course Group III. CA tags Genre-narrative, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 60.2, Raising the Dead: Creative Nonfiction, at the 2A hour with Professor Sharlet
How can we practice “immersion journalism,” as creative nonfiction is sometimes described, when writing about people and events of the past? In this creative nonfiction writing course, we’ll immerse ourselves in the kind of research that will allow us to recreate moments and moods for which we couldn’t be present. We’ll become witnesses at a remove; and, through careful attention to our own roles in the construction of our stories, participant-observers, as well. We’ll learn how to use archives; make creative use of documents and artifacts; engage with scholarly historical writing; and interrogate our assumptions about research and representation, all in the service of character-driven narratives as vivid, nuanced, and dramatic as writing based on contemporary fieldwork. This course is an attempt to raise the dead, to resurrect truths from dormant facts, to find stories of the present within the past. You’ll write two short nonfiction stories, of a person and a place, based on secondary sources, and one long narrative based on original research in the Rauner Library, accompanied by a short critical essay about research and documentary art. Readings will include creative writing, historiography, and theory from a number of disciplines. Instructor permission required. Dist: ART, pending faculty approval. No Course Group. CA tags Creative Writing, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.
English 62.2, Immigrant Women Writing in America, at the 2 hour with Professor Zeiger (crosslisted with WGST 47)
In responding to the obstacles facing America's immigrants -- problems of dislocation, split identity, family disunity and claustrophobia, culture shock, language barriers, xenophobia, economic marginality, and racial and national oppression -- women often assume special burdens and find themselves having to invent new roles. They often bring powerful bicultural perspectives to their tasks of survival and opportunity seeking, however, and are increasingly active in struggles for cultural expression and social and economic justice. We will examine the different conditions for women in a variety of immigrant groups in America, reading in several histories, anthologies of feminist criticism, interdisciplinary surveys, and relevant texts in critical theory, but ultimately focusing on the words, in autobiography and fiction, of women writers. We will read such works as Akemi Kikimura's Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior; Bharati Mukerjee's Darkness; Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street; Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy; and Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House.Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group III, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualities.
English 63.2, Cosmopolitanism, at the 12 hour with Professor Will
Cosmopolitanism has been described as a way of thinking and working outside the boundaries of the local and the national, a way of living ethically "in a world of strangers." In recent years, in the work of writers as diverse as Jacques Derrida and Anthony Appiah, "cosmopolitanism" has emerged as a way of pushing forward, or even transcending, some of the theoretical impasses of postmodernism and some of the political impasses of multiculturalism. This course will focus on the idea of cosmopolitanism as it has been used (and perhaps abused) in contemporary theory, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV, CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 63.3, Colonial and PostColonial Masculinities, at the 2A hour with Professor Coly (crosslisted with AAAS 67/COLT 67/WGST 52.1)
In this course, we will develop an understanding of masculinity as a construct which varies in time and space, and is constantly (re)shaped by such factors as race, class, and sexuality. The contexts of the colonial encounter and its postcolonial aftermath will set the stage for our examination of the ways in which social, political, economic, and cultural factors foster the production of specific masculinities. Texts include Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lafferiere's How to Make Love to a Negro, and additional writings by Irish, Indian, and Australian authors. Our study will be organized around the questions of the production of hegemonic and subaltern masculinities, the representation of the colonial and postcolonial male body, the militarization of masculinity, and the relation between masculinity and nationalism. Theoretical material on masculinities will frame our readings. Dist: LIT. Course Group IV. CA tags Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies.
English 66.2, Jane Austen, at the 10A hour with Professor McKee
As novels, and translated into film and television, Jane Austen's fiction has recently achieved extraordinary popularity, much greater than she experienced in her lifetime. In this course we will consider Austen's place in the history of the novel and read her works in light of the fiction of some of her contemporaries. Discussions will focus on Austen's reactions against Romanticism; her continuing exploration of the moral and emotional dynamics of domestic life; her concern with the freedom of middle-class women within their families and class; her use of history; and her innovations in fictional narrative. We will read Northanger Abbey (written 1797, published 1818), Austen's response to the popular genre of Gothic fiction, together with Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791). Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) continue Austen's reaction against Romanticism, and we will read these works together with Sir Walter Scott's wildly popular Waverley (1814). Reading Mansfield Park (1814), we will pay particular attention to the moral complications caused by social class and empire. We will read the comic Emma (1816) together with Mary Shelley's tragic Frankenstein (1818), two novels with parallel concerns about individual freedom, and then Persuasion, (written 1816, published 1818), in which Austen examines again the limits domestic life sets on female independence. Dist: LIT; WCult: W, pending faculty approval. Course Group II; Concentrations: Genre:narrative, National Traditions and Counter-Traditions, Genders and Sexualities
English 67.4, Science Fiction Studies, at the 10A hour with Professor Evens
This class will examine the development of science fiction as literature, considering the distinctive characteristics of the genre. We will read critical perspectives on scifi that connect it to both modern and postmodern themes; we will think through the politics of scifi, focusing especially on its utopian and dystopian elements; we will articulate the many subgenres of scifi; we will investigate the unusually strong influence of the community of readers on the published texts in scifi. But primarily we will read representative examples, novels, stories, and even some films, from well-known classics to little-known and marginal texts. Authors may include John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur Clark, Philip Dick, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, James Tiptree, Jr., Stanislaw Lem, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Samuel Delaney, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, and still others. The class will have an opportunity to shape the syllabus somewhat according to the preferences of enrolled students. Dist: LIT, pending faculty approval. Course Group III. CA tags Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, Literary Theory and Criticism.
English 67.5, Gender and Sexuality in Asian America, at the 2A hour with Professor Bahng
Focusing on contemporary Asian American literature, film, and popular culture, this course emphasizes a diverse range of engagements with gender and sexuality that disrupts binary thinking on the topic. Through close analysis of cultural texts, students will examine the formation of Asian American genders and sexualities alongside histories of racialization, migration, and labor. Some questions we will address include: How do historical contexts (i.e. the Cold War, 9/11, Japanese internment) affect Asian American gender formations? What does the local (Orientalist depictions of Asian women such as the Tiger Mom) have to do with the global (U.S. foreign relations with Asia)? How might an Asian American queer politics reveal the limitations of the model minority myth? Texts may include: Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly, R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's, Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow, as well as episodes of Battlestar Galactica and 24. We will also read critical essays by Gayatri Gopinath, David Eng, Yen Le Espiritu, Karen Tongson, Lisa Nakamura, and Martin Manalansan. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval. Course Group III; CA tags: Genders and Sexualities, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 70.2, John Milton, at the 10A hour with Professor Luxon
Members of this seminar should be prepared to settle on a project of research designed to produce new and interesting readings of Milton’s poetry and/or prose within the first week of class meetings. The group readings, both in Milton and in the secondary literature, will then be determined by what topics the members have selected. Though no prerequisite has been specified, those who have completed English 26, 27, 28, or a Special Topics course will be best prepared for this seminar. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. Course Group I. CA tags Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities. Luxon.
English 71.1, Bohemia and the 19th Century Novel, at the 12 hour with Professor McCann
Bohemia - an urban underworld of social outcasts, struggling artists, and political conspirators - is one of the most enduring fantasies to emerge out of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, the figure of the Bohemian had become central to a cosmopolitan literary culture eager to assert its autonomy from the marketplace and a restrictive notion of Englishness. It had also become bound up with a range of late nineteenth-century anxieties fixated on cultural decadence, racial degeneration, transgressive sexuality and the occult. This course will study a series of novels that foreground these issues, including Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan, George Gissing's New Grub Street, George Du Maurier's Trilby and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Dist: LIT, WCult: W. Course Group II. CA tags Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions.
English 72.5, Jews in American Culture and Theory: The New York Intellectuals, at the 10A hour with Professor Milich (crosslisted with JWST 22.2)
No other group of Jewish critics has been so influential in American literary and cultural politics as the New York Intellectuals, who came to prominence with the foundation of the Partisan Review (1937-2003). While some scholars interpret their political transformation from Marxist criticism to “liberal imagination” as a move from the periphery to the center of cultural critique, others consider this reconciliation with America as a depoliticization. Taking the New York Jewish Intellectuals as a paradigmatic segment of American criticism since the 1930s, this course shall focus on their political debates in the 1940s and 1950s (Marxism, the Rosenberg trials, McCarthyism), their alienation from European high culture after Fascism and Stalinism in the 1950s, their literary and cultural debates about the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s (the Beat Generation, Pop art, counterculture, the student movement), and finally their political separation since the 1980s. Starting from the assumption of what Russel Jacoby has identified as a Jewish-gentile split among the NYI, special emphasis will be laid on how the political and cultural debates informed notions of Jewish-American identity, particularly in respect to other minority groups such as African Americans.
Dist: LIT: WCult: W. Course Group III. CA tags National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
English 72.6, Modern American Women Poets, at the 11 hour with Professor Zeiger (crosslisted with WGST 47)
This course focuses on the emerging counter-tradition, within American modernism and within the larger tradition of poetry in English, of American women poets in the twentieth century. Taking our cue from Adrienne Rich, who ambiguously entitles one book of essays On Lies, Secrets and Silences (is she for or against?), we will follow debates about what makes it possible to break previous silences--and to what degree and in what ways it is useful or satisfying to do so. Topics within this discussion will include sexuality, race, illness, literary modes, female literary succession, and relations with the literary tradition. We will read in the work of eight or nine poets and recent critical and theoretical writings, with some attention in the first weeks to important female and male precursors. The syllabus will include such writers as Edna St.Vincent Millay, HD, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Louise Gluck, Rita Dove. Dist: LIT; WCult: W. CA tags Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualitiies.
English 80.1, Creative Writing, at the 2A hour with Professor O'Malley
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.2, Creative Writing, at the 10A hour with Professor Sharlet
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 80.3, Creative Writing, at the 2A hour with Professor Tudish
This course offers a workshop in fiction and poetry. Seminar-sized classes meet twice a week and include individual conferences. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students who have completed Writing 5 (or have exemption status). Students who wish to enroll in 80 must submit their applications to the administrative assistant in the English Office by the last day of the term preceding the term for which they wish to enroll. Students do not submit work for entry into the course. A brief application form is available in the English Office. English 80 is the prerequisite to all other Creative Writing courses. Dist: ART.
English 82.1, Creative Writing-Fiction, at the 10A hour with Professor Tudish
Continued work in the writing of fiction, focusing on short stories, although students may experiment with the novel. The class proceeds by means of group workshops on student writing, individual conferences with the instructor, and analysis of short stories by contemporary writers. Constant revision is required.
Prerequisite: English 80 and permission of the instructor. Please pick up the "How To Apply to English 81, 82 or 83" form from the English Department and answer all of the questions asked in a cover letter. Students should submit a five-eight page writing sample of their fiction to the administrative assistant of the English Department by the last day of classes of the term preceding the term in which they wish to enroll. Dist: ART.
