2026-2027 Catalog

ENGL 10124. Poverty, Crime, and Character: 18th Century and Now. 100 Units.

From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society's understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity-especially relating to class, gender, and race-become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Jacob Biel     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 18124

ENGL 10144. Jane Austen and Literary Style. 100 Units.

Jane Austen was a master stylist. This is one of many reasons why her novels have had such a lasting cultural impact. But what specifically are we talking about when we refer to Austen's "style"? This course attempts to answer this question by exploring the development of Austen's style across three of her major novels: the early Northanger Abbey (1803), the middle-period Sense and Sensibility (1811), and the late Persuasion (1818). Throughout, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret one of her trademark formal techniques, free indirect discourse. We will also address the question of literary style alongside a host of related topics: narration, characterization, focalization, and voice. Select secondary readings may include works by narratologists, philosophers, and literary critics. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

Instructor(s): Will Thompson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 10144, FNDL 20144

ENGL 10404. Poetry. 100 Units.

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. (Poetry)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 10432. Literature and the Law. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Adam Fales      Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): LLSO 10432

ENGL 10434. Moby-Dick. 100 Units.

In this course, students will read Herman Melville's 1851 Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Through this text, we will explore a variety of issues still relevant to our contemporary moment, including questions of racial prejudice, environmental destruction, violence against both human and nonhuman beings, and threats to democracy. Students will engage with a variety of critical perspectives, including those from queer theory, Black studies, ecocriticism, Marxism, feminism, and book history. In addition to a thorough understanding of this one text, students will gain a deeper understanding of Melville's career, his historical context, and creative adaptations of his work since its nineteenth-century publication.

Instructor(s): Adam Fales     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 10452. History of the Book and Reading. 100 Units.

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. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Angela Wachowich

ENGL 10455. Madwomen. 100 Units.

What is madness? What does it mean to go crazy? What does it mean to be driven crazy? This course examines different forms of madness, probes the relationship between race, gender, and disability, and explores the potential wisdom found in madness by looking to madwomen in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. We will both consider madness as an object within literary studies and the lived experience of the madwomen characters and authors through the lens of Mad studies and activism. Tentative readings include The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970), Freshwater (Emezi, 2018), excerpts from The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang, 2019), and others. Students will also be asked to engage spaces that center the Mad such as the Center for Mad Culture and Project LETS. This course will include writing components that ask students to read literary texts and/or cultural moments through mad methodology and a final essay in lieu of an exam.

Instructor(s): Rhya Moffitt     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): COGS 26501, GNSE 10455

ENGL 10709. Fiction. 100 Units.

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. (Genre Fundamentals, Fiction)

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 10800. Introduction to Film Analysis. 100 Units.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which are explored through must-see works from a variety of genres, periods, and national contexts. We analyze film techniques: staging, cinematography, editing, and sound, and discuss major film modes: classical and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. The course is required for cinema-and-media majors but is open to anyone interested in taking a deep dive into how filmmakers think and design their works. M. Belodubrovskaya Autumn 2026, Winter and Spring 2027 instructors TBD.

Instructor(s): Belodubrovskaya, Maria     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20300, CMST 10100

ENGL 11004. History of the Novel. 100 Units.

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, bildungsromans 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 will include Dangerous Liaisons, Pride and Prejudice, Rajmohan's Wife, Wuthering Heights, Caryl Phillips' The Lost Child, and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song.

Instructor(s): Jo McDonagh     Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 11200. Literary Criticism. 100 Units.

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. (Introductory Genre, Theory)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 11200

ENGL 12125. Living Queer: Experiences, Encounter, Affinities. 100 Units.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore representations and expressions of queer and trans lives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Assembling a diverse archive of artistic works and cultural artifacts (fiction, memoir, film, lyric poetry, anthology, activist ephemera) together with foundational works in the study of sexuality and gender, we will ask: How do hegemonic institutions, discourses, and definitions - from medical models of pathology to hostile bureaucratic infrastructure - shape the expressive forms available to queer and trans people? And how does the literary, artistic, and activist work of queer and trans people work in turn to reshape those very expressive possibilities? How can individual experiences of isolation and marginalization form the basis of a community or subculture? How are erotic creativity, imaginative life, and political action linked? Our readings will introduce a range of critical and creative methods - such as oral history, ethnography, autobiography, performance - that scholars and artists have used to theorize and represent queer life. Through short "micro-assignments," we will try out these methods for ourselves. By interweaving the creative work of queer and trans people and communities with practical experiments in research and making, we will aim to broaden our collective understanding of what it might mean to "live queer." (Previous experience in gender and sexuality studies is not required for this course.)

Instructor(s): Sarah McDaniel     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12125

ENGL 12143. Trans Literature in the United States. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the American history and aesthetics of trans literature. How has American literature changed through the innovations of trans writers? How has trans identity been shaped by literary narrative and form? And how has trans literature responded to or been shaped by American politics and culture, up to and including the executive declaration against the category of "gender" entirely? In this class, we will read together through major works by trans authors to gain a sense of the relationship between transgender life, narrative/poetic form, and the culture of the United States. Our syllabus thinks comparatively about trans literature across time periods, genres, and genders, including taking other forms of difference like sexuality, race, and ability as active analytical questions which modify and are modified by gender.

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12143, RDIN 12143

ENGL 12320. Critical Videogame Studies. 100 Units.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Autumn Summer
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 12320, SIGN 26038, CMST 27916, GNSE 22320

ENGL 13000. Academic and Professional Writing (The Little Red Schoolhouse) 100 Units.

Academic and Professional Writing, a.k.a. "The Little Red Schoolhouse"or "LRS" (English 13000/33000) is an advanced writing course for third- and fourth-year undergraduates who are taking courses in their majors or concentrations, as well as graduate students in all of the divisions and university professional programs. LRS helps writers communicate complex and difficult material clearly to a wide variety of expert and non-expert readers. It is designed to prepare students for the demands of academic writing at various levels, from the B.A. thesis to the academic article or book--and for the tasks of writing in professional contexts.

Instructor(s): L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner     Terms Offered: Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Note(s): This course does not count towards the ISHU program requirements. May be taken for P/F grading by students who are not majoring in English. Materials fee $20.
Equivalent Course(s): WRIT 13000, ENGL 33000, WRIT 33000

ENGL 16500. Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies. 100 Units.

This course explores of some of Shakespeare's hits from the first half of his professional career, when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and histories. Plays to be studied are likely to include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VI Part 1. Together, we will read Shakespeare's queerest and and quaintest comedies in conversation with darker, more troubling plays that revolve around sexual violence, racism, nationalism, and political theory, to see how he puts generic boundaries to the test. In the process, we will consider what it means to take comedy and history seriously.

Instructor(s): Ellen MacKay     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28405, FNDL 21403

ENGL 16505. Medieval Dream Visions. 100 Units.

Do dreams mean anything? The dream vision was one of the most experimental, provocative, and richly imaginative genres of the Middle Ages. Like real dreams, these literary texts were wrought with interpretive potential yet bewilderingly ambiguous. In this course, we will study how medieval writers used the surreal dream- vision framework to explore complex philosophical issues around love, grief, fortune, consolation, imagination, and belief. We will learn about medieval and modern theories of dream interpretation, from Macrobius to Freud, as we test out different ways of reading dream-vision literature. Texts will include the noisy dreamscape of Chaucer's The House of Fame, the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of Pearl, and the disorienting dream-within-a-dream of Piers Plowman. (Medieval/Early Modern, Poetry)

Instructor(s): Kashaf Qureshi     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 16600. Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances. 100 Units.

This course explores mainly major plays representing the genres of tragedy and romance; most (but not all) date from the latter half of Shakespeare's career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. Section attendance is required. (Medieval/Early Modern, Drama)

Instructor(s): Timothy Harrison     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21404, TAPS 28406

ENGL 17001. Shakespeare's Sonnets. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 17800, ENGL 37001

ENGL 17768. American Literature: Fictions of National Identity. 100 Units.

This course provides an introduction to some important moments in the literary history of the United States. Rather than provide a survey of this literature from the nation's founding to the present, this course focuses on specific periods and movements-such as the American Renaissance, the literature of Reconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism-to understand the role that literature has played in the nation's history. In particular, students will understand how the meaning of the word "American" has changed over the past two and a half centuries and how literature has influenced the political, cultural, and artistic uses of that national identity. Readings may include works by Kathy Acker, Charles Chesnutt, Percival Everett, William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, John Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Instructor(s): Adam Fales      Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 18252. British and Irish Cinema Since 1930. 100 Units.

We will be screening and discussing key films from almost a century's worth of cinema on the British-Irish archipelago, including works of the early Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McKendrick, David Lean, Frank Launder, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, Joseph Losey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Neil Jordan, Amma Asante, Steve McQueen, and Lenny Abramson. Some priority will be given to films with London settings and locations, such as Frears's My Beautiful Launderette. We may also look at London-based films by non-British directors. Sylvio Narrizaon's George Girl, for example, or Antonioni's Blow-up. Possible field trips include Ealing Studios, site of British cinema for much of the twentieth century, and Hitchcock's studios in Islington, not far from our London Campus, where he worked before his departure for America.

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the London Study Abroad Program

ENGL 18600. Zizek on Film. 100 Units.

Slavoj Zizek has used film as the great expositor of his theories of ideology, perversion, sexuality, politics, nostalgia, and otherness. In this discussion-heavy course we will watch a lot of film from the directorial subjects of his main discussions (Chaplin, Rossellini, Lynch, Haneke, Kieślowski, Tarkovsky, von Trier, Hitchcock, and others) alongside Zizek's theoretical writings on their film. The course examines why for the man who has been called the "Elvis of cultural theory" film is such a perfect lens through which to examine social situatedness and intersubjective "aporia." There is no "paperwork" assigned for the course. The course is conducted seminar style and participants are expected to be vocal, prepared, and somewhat ornery.

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27201

ENGL 19205. Poetry in the Land of Childhood. 100 Units.

Cupboards and attics, nests and shells, the inside of a bush, the bottom of a rowboat: for the 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, intimate "fibred" spaces like these have a special relation to childhood-both as it is experienced and as it is remembered. Taking the lead from Bachelard this course investigates the construction, beginning in the eighteenth century, of childhood as a particular kind of place, one that might be imaginatively accessed through poetic images, rhythm, and rhyme. Our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-that is, from the birth of children's literature to its "golden age"-and will take us from the nursery rhymes and cradle songs of early children's poetry collections, through William Blake's "forests of the night," and to the wonderland of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. (Poetry, 1650-1830, 1830-1990)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 19205

ENGL 20030. Short Russian Novels. 100 Units.

In 19th century Russia, the printed book was an emergent technology offering a new form of shared intelligence, challenging the Bible (which at that time was still primarily experienced liturgically) as the authoritative Book of life. In this course we begin by thinking about the book as a new medium and read some of the best examples of the short novel in 19th and 20th century Russia, considering how they create explanatory and moral authority by reflecting reality and imagining new ways of being. We will observe traditions established at that time, reading books printed on paper and discussing them in a public forum, the classroom, as they were discussed then in coffeehouses, intellectual circles, and salons. We will consider the functions of literature and the roles played by authors, printers, critics, and readers. And we will read some of the best works in the Russian tradition, finding throughlines from the golden age of Russian literature (Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) to 20th century socialist realist and science fiction dystopias (Platonov, Solzhenitsyn, Strugatsky Brothers), and considering how Panaeva and Chukovskaya chart a distinct path for women writers and express alternative perspectives on Russian realities and potentials. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC).

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 30030, REES 30030, REES 20030, FNDL 20030, CMLT 20030, CMLT 30030

ENGL 20082. Byron, Shelley, and Keats. 100 Units.

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. (Poetry, 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): Alexis Chema     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 20161. 21st Century Ethnic American Literature. 100 Units.

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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Megan Tusler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40161, AMER 40161, ENGL 40161

ENGL 20242. Structural -isms. 100 Units.

What does it mean to designate "structure" as the operative force in discrimination against categories of person-as in appeals to structural racism or structural violence on the basis of gender? And how can we approach this question by attending to aesthetic uses of structure and form, especially as these have been understood in such paradigms as structuralism and recent literary formalisms? How do we read for structure, in reading for racism and for systemic discrimination on other bases? We'll focus on intersections of race, gender, and class (in U.S. contexts) as these categories have been reconfigured in the past half century or so. To explore appeals to structure, we'll consider definitions of literary and aesthetic form, debates about structure vs. agency, and questions of individual and collective action as mediated by institutions. Readings will balance theory with examples drawn from fiction, documentary film, built form, and other media. Throughout, we'll pay particular attention to problems of structure construed as problems of narrative, as we develop sharper terms for understanding how discrimination proceeds structurally.

Instructor(s): Rowan Bayne     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Instructor consent required for undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40141, GNSE 45141, ENGL 40141, GNSE 25141

ENGL 20306. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. 100 Units.

A murder mystery where the riddle is not "Who?" but "Why?"---Why did the expelled student murder a pawnbroker? Why were innocents punished and exploiters vindicated? Why is justice out of reach, compassion rare, and even communication difficult? And, given these disappointments, why have readers and writers around the world been obsessed with Crime and Punishment since its publication over 150 years ago? Dostoevsky's novels "claw their way into us" (Iser), "we are drawn in, whirled around, suffocated…" (Woolf). Although he was "a messenger" to James Baldwin, "more human, better than human" in Akira Kurosawa's estimation, and "the only psychologist" worth learning from according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the real-life Dostoevsky was a desperate gambler, cheater, and chauvinist, not unlike some of the worst characters in his novels. He was recently heralded as both an example of Russian humanism (by Pope Francis) and the "father of Russian fascism" (by a Russian intellectual). Reading Crime and Punishment, we will endeavor to make sense of Dostoevsky's--and the novel's--failures and triumphs. Topics we explore will include historical events and the reception of the novel; religion, race, class and gender; and questions of politics and ethics.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 30205, REES 20205, FNDL 20201, ENGL 30306

ENGL 20308. Advanced Typography. 100 Units.

Typography generally refers to the arrangement of type on a surface. It often goes unnoticed, because the way words look - their shape and typographic form - is secondary to the meaning they carry. Typography is one of the richest areas for formal exploration in graphic design. This course explores major shifts in the reproduction of the written word: from type foundries and linotype to bitmap fonts, open type, and variable type. Working in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, students will experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text in multiple scripts and languages. Typographic history and theory will be discussed in relation to course projects. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 30812, ARTV 20312, ENGL 40308, MADD 20308

ENGL 20450. Breathing Matters: Poetics and Politics of Air. 100 Units.

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. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 50430, ENGL 50430

ENGL 20464. The Lives of Others. 100 Units.

How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography).  Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or "work on the self" as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by primary readings that likely include Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishiguro, Werner Herzog, Maggie Nelson, Amitav Ghosh, and J.M. Coetzee. (Fiction, Literary/Critical theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Darrel Chia     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 40464, ENGL 40464

ENGL 20566. Performing Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space. 100 Units.

This Gray Center Fellowship course considers the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. Co-taught by Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone, the course will feature film screenings and panels on embodied style, narrative, time, and the built environment, along with skateboarding's anti-scarcity and communal structures that both subvert and reframe capitalist competition. Students will produce a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.

Instructor(s): Tina Post, Kyle Beachy, and Alexis Sablone     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 20566, TAPS 20420

ENGL 20615. Aesthetic Encounters. 100 Units.

Ever find yourself getting emotional over a painting or a song? Or staring at a piece of art and thinking, "What on earth am I looking at?" What does art do to us? Is there a "right" way to experience it? Why do we feel the need to talk about artworks we have seen? In college classes and beyond, we spend a great deal of time engaging with and responding to literary texts and artworks. This course offers a chance to step back and reflect on the nature of those encounters-how and why we respond the way we do, why those responses might matter, and how we go about sharing them with others. While we will occasionally turn to aesthetic philosophy, our main focus will be on developing our own concepts and categories for understanding these encounters-the very event of experiencing art, how those experiences linger, and how they shape our social interactions. Readings will include fiction where characters are profoundly transformed by their encounters with art, essays on paintings and museums, poems drawn from music, travelogues that chronicle sustained exposure to art, ekphrastic dialogues between visual arts and poetry, and creative literary translations. Authors may include Ben Lerner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Ciaran Carson, Natasha Trethewey, and Mary Jo Salter.

Instructor(s): Levi, Melih     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20615, CMLT 20615

ENGL 20707. Dramaturgy: Theory & Practice. 100 Units.

This course is a deep investigation into the possibility of dramaturgy as intrepid and curious storytelling and the role of the dramaturg in building worlds with playwrights, inhabiting worlds with productions, and cultivating worlds with audiences and institutions. We will think across discipline about the methodologies that make dramaturgy a heuristic knowledge practice. We will think critically about existing genealogies, best practices, and innovations in the theatre industry. Most importantly, we will engage in our own civic-minded dramaturgical practice and how engaged, thoughtful storytelling might have impacts beyond the walls of the classroom and the theatre. This course can fulfill the Drama requirement in the English major.

Instructor(s): G. Randle-Bent     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20705, TAPS 30705

ENGL 20720. Film and Fiction. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): James Chandler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Students enrolled in the course will be expected to attend screenings and participate in class discussions. There will be a written exercise at midterm (3-4 pp.) and a longer final paper (12pp.).
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25820

ENGL 20808. Introduction to Typography. 100 Units.

Typography generally refers to the arrangement of type on a surface. It often goes unnoticed, because the way words look - their shape and typographic form - is secondary to the meaning they carry. Typography is one of the richest areas for formal exploration in graphic design. In this hands-on course we will review the anatomy of letterforms, the properties of different typefaces, and learn to control and manipulate type to produce different formal results. Students will use Adobe Creative Suite to control vectors and experiment with the layout and appearance of letterforms, words, and text. No prior design/typesetting experience required.(Theory)

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert      Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 21213. Literature and Philosophy: Knowing, Being, Feeling. 100 Units.

Modern theories of the subject - theories that answer the questions of what we are, how we are, and how we relate to others - have their roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers of the era, finding themselves free to diverge from classical accounts of the human and its world, pursued anew such questions as: What is the mind and how does it come by its ideas? How do we attain a sense of self? Are we fundamentally social creatures, or does the social (at best) represent a restriction on our animal drives and passions? Literature, meanwhile, examined these questions in its own distinct manner, and in doing so witnessed what many scholars recognize as the birth of the novel - a genre for which accounts of the subject are of central importance. This interdisciplinary course will read widely in Early Modern and "Enlightenment" literature and philosophy to better understand the roots of contemporary accounts of the subject and the social. Philosophical readings will include texts by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, Thomas Reid, Marya Schechtman, and Stephen Darwall. Literary readings will include Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. (A)

Instructor(s): Andrew Pitel; Tristan Schweiger      Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to undergraduate and MA students, and all others with consent.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41213, PHIL 41213, PHIL 21213, ENGL 41213

ENGL 21215. Hamlet: Adventures of a Text. 100 Units.

After a lifetime with Hamlet, I've become increasingly interested by the fluidity of the text: not only is there much too much of it, but there are also significant differences between the 2nd Quarto and the Folio-to say nothing of the 1st quarto. Nevertheless, there is (in my mind at least) no question that we have Hamlet! I intend with this class to explore the play in quest (as it were) of the essential Hamlet, reflecting on its contradictions, shifting perspectives, puzzles. For instance: why doesn't Hamlet go back to Wittenburg-is it his ambition, his mother, his sense that he has to deal with his uncle, or is it something else? Is Hamlet mad or feigning or something in between? Is he changed by his adventure with the pirates? Etc. We will use both volumes of the Arden 3rd edition. First, we'll spend some weeks going through the Folio text scene by scene, then we'll tackle the 1st Quarto, inquiring into Shakespeare's creative process and his relation to actual production. Some attention will be given also to the history of the reception of Hamlet. Instruction by discussion; final paper preceded by required submission of a project and opportunity to submit a draft for comments.

Instructor(s): J. Redfield     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Graduate Students by Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21215

ENGL 21301. James Joyce: Ulysses. 100 Units.

This course considers themes that include the problems of exile, homelessness, and nationality; the mysteries of paternity and maternity; the meaning of the Return; Joyce's epistemology and his use of dream, fantasy, and hallucinations; and Joyce's experimentation with and use of language.

Instructor(s): S. Meredith     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21300

ENGL 21312. Research Methods. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren (Autumn)     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring

ENGL 21401. Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality. 100 Units.

Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the "new social movements" of the 60s and 70s, this seminar questions critically examines the theoretical histories that have determined how we think about gender and sex, as alternately something imposed on us externally, as 'structure,' and something identity-based, subjective, and internal. Since the 1990s, developments in queer, trans, feminist theory and Black studies have turned away from imagining politics and identity as structures in favor of thinking in terms of disruption, performativity, and fluid models of social construction and political action against it -- even as the movements they emerged out of relied heavily on critiques of Freud and Marx, refusing as well as using their theoretical imaginaries of politics as (materialist or psychic) structure. We will ask: what is a structural analysis? What is not a structural analysis, what is it opposed to? What do we mean when we enjoin ourselves to pay attention to structural conditions? How does thinking structure predispose us to think concepts like "sex," "sexuality," "race," and "gender" together or apart, as converging aspects of experience or as different epiphenomena of a single system? Starting from Afropessimism and the queer antisocial turn, readings will move backward in time to ask how notions of structure have informed theories of identity.

Instructor(s): Dana Glaser     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Undergraduates by Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 21410, GNSE 21400, PLSC 31410, GNSE 31400, CCCT 21400, CCCT 31400, ENGL 30201

ENGL 21420. Futures Other Than Ours: Science Fiction and Utopia. 100 Units.

Science fiction is often mistaken for a variety of futurism, extrapolating what lies ahead. This class will consider what kind of relationship science fiction might have to the future other than prediction, anticipation, optimism or pessimism. How might science fiction enable thinking or imaging futures in modes other than those available to liberalism (progress, reproduction, generation) or neoliberalism (speculation, anticipation, investment)? This class asks how science fiction constitutes its horizons, where and how difference emerges in utopias, and what it might be to live in a future that isn't ours. Readings may include SF works by Delany, Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Robinson, Banks, Ryman, Jones; theoretical and critical readings by Bloch, Jameson, Suvin, Munoz, Murphy, and others.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Email the instructor directly for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41400, ENGL 41420

ENGL 21710. Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the more-than-human. 100 Units.

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the present could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, and more)

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 21710, ENGL 41710, MAPH 41710

ENGL 21720. Science fiction against the state. 100 Units.

This course reads science fiction and other texts (including theory, essays and zines) that imagine what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, and thus beyond or against the law, the police and capitalism. We will engage with these other worlds in an attempt to formulate our own visions of other possible forms of communal life and relation. We will pay particular attention to questions of liberatory struggle; borders, policing and imprisonment; race, gender, family and social reproduction; and environment and ecological relations. We'll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including encampments, blockades, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Tade Thompson, Octavia Butler, and ME O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors may include Saidiya Hartman, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Orisanmi Burton, Joy James and David Graeber.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 41720, GNSE 21720, ENGL 41720, GNSE 41720

ENGL 21730. Rewild, repair, restore! Science fictions of life-making in the aftermath. 100 Units.

Science fiction has long imagined human relations persisting and transforming on the ruined earth. Indeed, science fiction imaginaries offered horizons for human, and more-than-human, environmental and social restoration long before most cultural forms began to grapple with what we sometimes still call "climate change." This class reads science fiction (mostly American, from the 1960s-2020s), alongside environmental and social theory to begin to ask what it might take to live toward and in conditions of repair, and what repair and restoration seem to mean in our current moment. We will be particularly interested in where and how environmental restoration intersects with conceptions of social repair, collective life-building and liberation. What might repair require in scenes not only of environmental devastation, but of state violence, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the uneven distribution of dispossession and loss? If restoration is a process and not a destination, what might the daily life under conditions of repair be? What possibilities for transformed collective life and relations might be opened up by processes of repair? What might not be reparable, or when and where might repair need to stop? We'll engage these questions and more by thinking and imagining with environmental theory, theories of settler colonialism and racial capital, feminist theories of reproduction, communization theory and science fiction.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 41730, MAPH 41730, CEGU 21730, ENGL 41730

ENGL 21770. Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction. 100 Units.

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis's account of "uterine geographies" and Michelle Murphy's work on chemical latency and "distributed reproduction" stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see 'biological reproduction' in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone's call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others.

Instructor(s): Hilary Strang     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Email the instructor directly for consent.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 41700, MAPH 41700, GNSE 21705, ENGL 41700

ENGL 21882. Virginia Woolf: Love, Life, Writing. 100 Units.

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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Christine Fouirnaies     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21882, FNDL 21882

ENGL 22048. Girlhood. 100 Units.

This course focuses on narratives in which the category of "girl" or "girlhood" is under construction, or called into question. We'll begin with a number of foundational works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Louisa May Alcott, Harriot Jacobs), and will move into novels, films, comics, and memoirs from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (likely to include texts by Zitkala-Sa, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Myriam Gurba, and films by Peter Weir, Todd Solondz, Celine Sciamma). Throughout, the course will draw on work from fields like sociology, history, and feminist and queer theory to consider changing conceptions of childhood, adolescence, and development, as well as the way that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape categories and narratives of "girlhood." (Fiction)

Instructor(s): Heather Keenleyside     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20161

ENGL 22200. Special Topics in Literary Criticism: Fredric Jameson. 100 Units.

This seminar will provide students with an overview of Marxist literary criticism via the career of one of its most innovative living practitioners. (Theory, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Sianne Ngai     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 22200, CCCT 42200, ENGL 42200

ENGL 22352. Black Game Theory. 100 Units.

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream "AAA" games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 32350, RDIN 22350, MADD 12350, CMST 32350, RDIN 32350, ENGL 32352, CMST 22350

ENGL 22434. Extinction, Disaster, Dystopia: Environment and Ecology in the Indian Subcontinent. 100 Units.

This course aims to provide students an overview of key environmental and ecological issues in the Indian subcontinent. How have the unique precolonial, colonial, regional and national histories of this region shaped the peculiar nature of environmental issues? We will consider three major concepts-"extinction", "disaster" and "dystopia" to see how they can be used to frame issues of environmental and ecological concern. Each concept will act as a framing device for issues such as conservation and preservation of wildlife, erasure of adivasi (first dwellers) ways of life, environmental justice, water scarcity and climate change. The course will aim to develop students' ability to assess the specificity of these concepts in different disciplines. For example: What methods and sources will an environmental historian use to write about wildlife? How does this differ from the approach an ecologist or literary writer might take? Students will analyze various media: both literary and visual, such as autobiographies of shikaris (hunters), graphic novels, photographs, documentary films, ethnographic accounts and environmental history.

Instructor(s): Joya John     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25310, HIST 26806, SALC 25310

ENGL 22671. Orhan Pamuk. 100 Units.

What happens when postmodern fiction refuses to stay post? What if the most radical act of postmodernism is embracing history? Pamuk's novels reimagine the past in ways that refuse to settle for the fragmented, chaotic world we are told to expect. This course explores a selection of key works by Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk, including his modernist novel The New Life and his postmodern masterpieces such as The White Castle, My Name is Red, and A Strangeness in My Mind. How does Pamuk use Istanbul in his work? Does it function merely as a setting, or does it take on the role of a character, with its history, contradictions, and politics reshaping the narrative? We will also engage with selections from Pamuk's essays on literary craft and his memoir Istanbul to better understand his layered relationship with this complex city. Pamuk's works offer a nuanced exploration of East and West, confronting the legacy of Orientalism while subverting postmodern conventions. How does he reframe techniques like metafiction, unreliable narrators, or nonlinear time to explore memory, identity, and the restless nature of modernity? We will also trace the evolution of Pamuk's style and examine how his growing global audience influences his self-presentation as a writer.

Instructor(s): Levi, Melih     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 22671, CMLT 22671, NEHC 22671

ENGL 22680. Queering the American Family Drama. 100 Units.

This course will examine what happens to the American Family Drama on stage when the 'family' is queer. Working in dialogue with a current production at Court Theatre, we will move beyond describing surface representations into an exploration of how queering the family implicates narrative, plot, character, formal conventions, aesthetics and production conditions (e.g. casting, venues, audiences, marketing and critical reception). Texts will include theatrical plays and musicals, recorded and live productions, and queer performance theory. This course will be a combined seminar and studio, inviting students to investigate through readings, discussion, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or artistic project.

Instructor(s): L. Buxbaum     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 32680, TAPS 22680, GNSE 20116, SIGN 26080, AMER 22680

ENGL 22817. Pale Fire. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20020, REES 30020, GNSE 39610, GNSE 29610, FNDL 25311

ENGL 23002. Technê and Technique. 100 Units.

In European thought, the relationship between technê (craft or art) and epistêmê (knowledge) has long been a fraught one. Crucially, the practical knowledge associated with skill or art in making is often subordinated to more abstract forms of knowledge production such as mathematics or philosophy itself; and in the sphere of art, poets and critics often make a distinction between 'mere' technique and higher or unmediated forms of artistic expression. In this course, we will examine philosophical and artistic assumptions and arguments about technê, technics, and technique by staging a broad conversation between poets and philosophers; and we will consider recent discussions of technê and the impact that modern scientific technology has on the nature of thinking and artistic making. Readings will be drawn from philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger, and from poetic works ranging from ancient epics to Wallace Stevens and beyond. Final projects may include critical essays, creative projects, or creative/critical works.

Instructor(s): Ryan Coyne and Srikanth Reddy     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): DVPR 43002, ENGL 43002, RLST 23002

ENGL 23120. Translation Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how "world histories" may be hidden within "word histories," as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will regularly carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 33120, CMLT 23120, ENGL 36210

ENGL 23288. Tracing Black and Native Relations in South Chicago. 100 Units.

This course traces the labor of Black and Native people in relation to Hyde Park, Chicago, beginning with the 1893 World's Fair through Nuclear Development in the 20th century. We will study the afterlives of slavery and native dispossession by visiting local sites and archives. Using methodologies from the fields of Anthropology, Literary Studies and Native Studies, we will foreground the importance of being in place, to situate ourselves as students and teachers in the neighborhood. Students will theorize themselves in place and in relation to those past as they work towards a public facing final assignment. (20th/21st, Theory)

Instructor(s): Teresa Montoya & SJ Zhang     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 43288, CHST 23288, ANTH 23288, RDIN 23288, ENGL 43288, ANTH 43288

ENGL 23421. Transcontinental Romanticism. 100 Units.

In 1836, at the age of 26, Margaret Fuller began teaching the great works of German Romanticism to students at Amos Alcott's radically progressive Temple School in Boston. Fuller's passion for the German Romantics and their propagation in America is representative of the profound importance that the "American Transcendentalists" (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) attributed to German literature and its potential to shape American culture and values. In this course, we will explore the elective affinities between German Romanticism and its American counterpart, tracing the ways in which the two traditions mutually illuminate each other. Each unit will pair one major German and one major American text or artwork. Themes / pairings include: gender and mythology in Novalis' fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Fuller's fairy tales; spiritual landscapes in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School; slavery and abolition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience;" exemplarity and individualism in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Nietzsche's "Schopenhauer as Educator."

Instructor(s): Simon Friedland     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 23421

ENGL 23550. Sorry, Not Sorry: The Literary and Political History of Apologies, Confessions and Defense Speeches. 100 Units.

This course examines the genre of the apology and, asks-but does not necessarily answer-the question of what a good apology is. We will read a broad historical arc of classical Greek apologia and defense speeches, works and practices of Christan confessionals, Sir Philip Sidney's Elizabethan "Apology for Poetry", as well as criticism and theory about regret and forgiveness in the "Age of Apology" after WWI. We will end by reading a number of contemporary political apologies (as well as the archive of apologies offered by celebrities and YouTube confessionals) as well as a collection of alter-apologetic literature that re-works or responds to the terms of the apologies and offers antagonistic forms of relation to the ongoing present of settler-colonialism, structural racism, and patriarchal violence. In particular, we will read works by Eve Ensler, Layli Long Soldier, Jordan Abel, and Tanya Lukin Linklater, and the queer performance collaboration between Adrian Stimson and settler artist AA Bronson, works which explore how apologetic genres open unique ways to address a national politics whose power comes about through instruments that are bureaucratic, archival, and issued on paper.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 26101, RDIN 23500, SCTH 36101, ENGL 33550, RDIN 33500

ENGL 23580. Reading for Pleasure. 100 Units.

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? What makes a text easy or enthralling? This course examines practices of pleasure reading in Britain and the US from the eighteenth century through the present. We'll take up acclaimed favorites and also texts disparaged as vapid, addictive, or corrupting. Testing out on our own sensibilities works savored eagerly by readers in the past, we'll observe how changes in technology and access to education shape reception. As we sample page-turners, smut, and trash, we'll examine how texts migrate in and out of those classifications. We'll conclude the term by considering pleasure reading in our own moment, bringing historical perspective to the current outcry about waning attention and reading's decline.

Instructor(s): Emily Coit     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 23600. Documentary Literature in the 20th and 21st Century. 100 Units.

In this course we will read works of literature from the 20th and 21st centuries that present, subvert, challenge and question the stories of "what happened" through a variety of literary, filmic, and documentary techniques. We will read works of nonfiction journalism as well as novels, examine how the development of photographic technologies and the circulation of "the news" change the perception of time and history, read experimental and poetic utopian re-tellings of historical violences towards activist ends of social change, consider the function of monuments and performances that attempt to preserve or change our memories of the past, and watch performance works and embodied movements that all engage the documentary. We will examine the play between the subjective perspective and presentational form of historical events and the people that documentary literature portrays through the work of artists and authors such as Dorothea Lange, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Joshua Oppenheimer, Mark Nowak, and Divya Victor.

Instructor(s): Bellamy Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 33600, ENGL 33602, RDIN 23600

ENGL 23708. The Poetry and Prose of Thomas Hardy. 100 Units.

A Victorian and a Modernist, a rare master of the arts of fiction and poetry, Thomas Hardy outraged Victorian proprieties and helped to make 20th century literature in English possible. Close reading of four novels and selected early middle, and late poems by Hardy, with attention to the contexts of Victorian and Modern literary culture and society.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Winter. Not offered 21-22.
Note(s): For graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 46011, ENGL 43708, FNDL 26011

ENGL 24225. Black Environmentalism before Emancipation. 100 Units.

What is "environmentalism," and to whom? How or why would environmentalism matter to one enslaved? By the year 1610, European genocide in the "New World" had caused what scientists now call the "Orbis" (Latin: "world") spike- a plummet in planet earth's atmospheric CO2 levels that changed the composition of Arctic sea ice. For some scientists and scholars, this drop marks the beginning of "the Anthropocene" and the environmental devastation of globalized capitalism in the modern era. In broad strokes, however, Western environmentalism has often struggled or refused to foreground Indigenous genocide and plantation slavery as the early origins of climate change. In turn, this course introduces students to a mix of enslaved, self-emancipated, and free Black authors who comment on or theorize "the environment" between the late 18th-century and the dawn of the American civil war. We will pair popular 18th/19th century writers and artists Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Olaudah Equiano, and J.P Ball with contemporary scholars including Christina Sharpe, Richard Grove, and Paul Gilroy to explore "the environment" as a racial, political, and cultural concept. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and interpret common environmental aesthetics in anglophone literature and develop a working familiarity with the fields of literary ecocriticism and Black Studies.

Instructor(s): Lourdes Taylor     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 24200

ENGL 24252. Black Quietude. 100 Units.

This course considers modes of quietude as they intersect experiences of blackness. What can be conveyed or contained in moments of stillness or quiet? Is black quietude a moment of universalism that transcends the determinations of race? Or do black subjects carry or project the experience of racialization into their spaces of quiet? Do we define quiet for the black subject on the same terms as for other racial categories? (Theory)

Instructor(s): Tina Post     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 24252, TAPS 24252

ENGL 24503. 20th Century American Drama. 100 Units.

Beginning with O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night' through the American avant-garde to the most recent production on Broadway, this course focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant impact with regard to dramatic form in context to specific decade as well as cumulatively through the twentieth century. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards production possibilities, both historically and hypothetically. ATTENDANCE AT FIRST CLASS SESSION IS MANDATORY.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25885, TAPS 20110

ENGL 24510. Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world. 100 Units.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 14510, GNSE 24511, CMLT 24510, EALC 24520

ENGL 24951. Animals, Ethics and Religion. 100 Units.

Why are some animals considered food and others objects of religious devotion? Why do we treat dogs like family and kill flies without a second thought? Why do animals appear so frequently as metaphors in our everyday speech? In this course, students will explore these questions by reading texts featuring animals in literature, scripture, and theory, ranging from the Bible, Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor and J.M. Coetzee. We will bring these diverse texts together in order to investigate how animals illuminate religious questions about the relationship among humans, animals, and the divine.

Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28020

ENGL 25224. Severance and Contemporary Fiction. 100 Units.

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. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 35224

ENGL 25318. Literary Radicalism and the Global South: Perspectives from South Asia. 100 Units.

What does it mean to speak of literary radicalism? What are the hallmarks of a radical literature? And how does any such body of radical literature relate to the crucial question of empire, while also seeking to not be limited by that address? This course will explore the theme of literary radicalism through perspectives arising from South Asia. Over the twentieth century the subcontinent has been shaped through a wide variety of social and political movements: from anticolonial struggles to communist organising, feminist struggles, anti-caste mobilisation, indigenous protest and more, with their histories intertwining in different ways. We will start with a consideration of some texts on literary radicalism from other parts of the global South by authors such as Julia de Burgos and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, and then move through a detailed discussion of South Asian texts every week to examine particular aspects of literary style and history. We will study texts from a variety of subcontinental languages (in translation, unless originally in English), and across different forms - poetry, short fiction, children's literature, novels, a memoir, a graphic novel and a documentary film on a poet.

Instructor(s): Abhishek Bhattacharyya     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): No prior training in South Asia or literature courses is a requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 25318

ENGL 25505. Public Thinkers in Profile: Susan Sontag. 100 Units.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century. She was and remains known for her extensive, stylistically dazzling essays on art, politics, and culture. This course examines Sontag's major essays, as well as her personal writing, her fiction, and her public appearances. We will also examine Sontag as a model of the "serious" thinker, who refuses to have their public contributions disciplined by the needs of any larger political or social group. While working out Sontag's particular stances and contributions to literature, art, and cultural criticism, we will use her as a lens to consider the changing role of the public intellectual during her lifetime.

Instructor(s): Michael Lipkin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): PUBT 25000, FNDL 24999

ENGL 25605. Memoir. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 25630. Family Sagas: Women's Writing from Africa and the African Diaspora. 100 Units.

When asked why she writes, Jamaica Kincaid once said, "I liked to talk about my mother, her family, my life, what happened to me…and I could only get to them in this way." This English and Creative Writing seminar focuses on family sagas: multigenerational stories of intimacy, friction, and survival in women's writing of Africa and the African diaspora. Reading novels and poetry, we will come to understand how Black women writers have remembered or imagined family. The works we will read take place against the backdrops of slavery, colonialism, war, intimate violence, nationalism, and migration. Yet, they also portray the rhythms and joys of everyday life. Throughout the quarter, we will explore the imaginative techniques these authors use to engage the senses, both the mundane and the fantastical. This body of work will also be a guide for our own creative writing, in which we will mine our own family stories, meditating on family heirlooms, portraits, and more. In addition to our classroom work, we will engage the study and craft of family sagas in the city of Chicago: activities may include visiting libraries, bookstores, and theatres, and special visits from writers. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya & Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 17020, GNSE 20160, RDIN 25630, SIGN 25630

ENGL 25810. Writing Dreams. 100 Units.

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. (Poetry, Theory)

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): COGS 26503

ENGL 25890. On Coziness. 100 Units.

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).

Instructor(s): Tina Post     Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 25945. Digital Storytelling. 100 Units.

New media have changed the way that we tell and process stories. Over the last few decades, writers and designers have experimented with text, video, audio, design, animation, and interactivity in unprecedented ways, producing new types of narratives about a world transformed by computers and communications networks. These artists have explored the cultural dimensions of information culture, the creative possibilities of digital media technologies, and the parameters of human identity in the network era. This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25945, MADD 14945

ENGL 25970. Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production. 100 Units.

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2026-2027
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28466, CMST 25954, ARTV 30700, CMST 35954, ARTV 20700, MADD 20700, ENGL 32314, BPRO 28700

ENGL 25988. James Baldwin. 100 Units.

In our contemporary moment of rising inequality, James Baldwin has gained much purchase as a kind of prophet. But in his own time, Baldwin consistently called himself a witness, holding to his belief that an "artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian" who must "make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." All in all, his artistic mission was to express "what it is like to be alive." Reading across both his fiction and nonfiction, we will consider Baldwin's concept of the artist, exploring the affective life of inequality through what we might call his moral imagination. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Korey Williams     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25988, FNDL 25988, RDIN 25988

ENGL 26002. Literature and Hunger. 100 Units.

This course pursues themes of hunger the consumption of food, the formation of community, and relation to the sacred, through a sequence of readings in the Western tradition. By reading classic works (The Odyssey, selections from the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures, selections from The Divine Comedy, the Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, Paradise Lost), and modern works by Kafka, Simone Weil, and Louise Gluck, we will examine how different philosophies have imagined the acceptance or rejection of love, life, and the sacred in terms of the symbolism of food. Class work will involve close analysis of literary works, even those in translation; intensive critical writing; and secondary readings in literary criticism, anthropology, theology, and psychology.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn. Not offered in 2021-2022.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 26002, RLST 26002

ENGL 26017. Literary Biography. 100 Units.

Literary Biography: A Workshop. We will study four major literary biographies: Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), Walter Jackson Bate's John Keats (1964), and Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (1996). While analyzing the arts of literary biography, students will compose a biographical sketch of their own (20 pages), using primary materials from the Special Collections in the Regenstein Library and elsewhere, as appropriate. The course combines literary criticism and creative writing.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn. Course will be taught Autumn 2021.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 36017, ENGL 36077

ENGL 26018. Poetry and Trauma: Hayden, Lowell, Plath. 100 Units.

We will read the poems of three 20th century American poets, Robert Hayden, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, with an eye to the historical and psychological wounds suffered by the poets and the transformation of wounds into art. By close attention to both text and context, we will try to feel our way into the mysteries of poetic creation and human resilience.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36018, SCTH 36018

ENGL 26223. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. 100 Units.

An intensive study of these two poets, whose work differs radically, but whose friendship nourished some of the most enduring and original poetry of the American 20th century. Close attention to the poems, in the light of recent biographical work and new editions.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 36002, ENGL 36222

ENGL 26230. Death Panels: Exploring dying and death through comics. 100 Units.

What do comics add to the discourse on dying and death? What insights do comics provide about the experience of dying, death, caregiving, grieving, and memorialization? Can comics help us better understand our own wishes about the end of life? This is an interactive course designed to introduce students to the field of graphic medicine and explore how comics can be used as a mode of scholarly investigation into issues related to dying, death, and the end of life. The framework for this course intends to balance readings and discussion with creative drawing and comics-making assignments. The work will provoke personal inquiry and self-reflection and promote understanding of a range of topics relating to the end of life, including examining how we die, defining death, euthanasia, rituals around dying and death, and grieving. The readings will primarily be drawn from a wide variety of graphic memoirs and comics, but will be supplemented with materials from a variety of multimedia sources including the biomedical literature, philosophy, cinema, podcasts, and the visual arts. Guest participants in the course may include a funeral director, chaplain, hospice and palliative care specialists, cartoonists, and authors. The course will be taught by a nurse cartoonist and a physician, both of whom are active in the graphic medicine community and scholars of the health humanities.

Instructor(s): Brian Callendar     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 26230, HIPS 26230, ENGL 36230, ARTV 20018, KNOW 36230

ENGL 26249. Literary Lessons for Economists? The Financial Crisis of 2008. 100 Units.

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. (Fiction, Theory, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Kenneth Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26064, LLSO 26249

ENGL 26411. Milton and Blake: Conceptions of the Christian Epic. 100 Units.

Milton wrote Paradise Lost to capture in epic form the essence of Christianity; Blake wrote Jerusalem to correct Milton's mistakes. We'll read them together to get in on the debate.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36401, FNDL 25307, RLST 26401, RLVC 36401

ENGL 26680. Literary Games: Oulipo and Onward. 100 Units.

Does constraint foster creativity? Can wordplay carry political meaning? Is formal innovation divorced from lyrical expression? How do experimental literary movements respond to their sociopolitical moments and local contexts, and how do they transform when they travel across geographical and linguistic borders? We will consider these questions via the work of the longest-lived French literary group, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), examining its origins as a quasi-secret society in 1960 and its expansion into an internationally visible and multilingual collective (with members from Italy, Spain, Argentina, and the US). We will investigate debates about inspiration and authorship, copying and plagiarism, collective creation, multilingualism, constraint and translation, and the viability of the lyric subject. While considering antecedents (Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel), our readings will explore several generations of Oulipians (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail, Anne Garréta, Frédéric Forte), and conclude with some very contemporary Oulipo-inspired writing from around the world (Christian Bök, Urayoán Noel, Mónica de la Torre, K. Silem Mohammed). Alongside critical essays, students will carry out short experiments with constraint and procedure, as well as translation exercises; and they will have the opportunity for dialogue with acclaimed writers and scholars who will visit our seminar.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin and Alison James     Terms Offered: Not offered this academic year
Prerequisite(s):
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 36680, CMLT 26680, FREN 26680, FREN 36680, ENGL 36680

ENGL 26710. Eccentric Moderns. 100 Units.

An examination of six idiosyncratic poets who invented new forms of language on the peripheries of High Modernism: David Jones, Laura Riding, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, and Anne Carson. Close formal analysis of the poems in the wider social and political contexts of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to advanced undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 36710, ENGL 36710

ENGL 26855. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis and later developments in the twenty-first century, especially the emergence of queer and trans of color critique. The course aims to place these theoretical texts within the context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic and literary communities out of which they emerged. Major topics to discuss will include queer grief and melancholia; coalition and community; desire, devotion, and affective attachment; queer theory's ritual conventions; modes of queer critique; assumptions about queer theory's secularity; and the significance, challenge, and critiques of queer and trans joy.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26855, GNSE 36855, ENGL 36855, GNSE 20130, RLVC 36855, CMLT 36855, RLST 26885

ENGL 26960. Beckett and Media. 100 Units.

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? (20th/21st, Drama)

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 35950, TAPS 25950, TAPS 35950

ENGL 26994. Anticolonial Worlding: Literature, Film, Thought. 100 Units.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 26994, REES 26994, CMLT 26994, NEHC 26994, RDIN 26994, GNSE 26994

ENGL 27008. Black in the City. 100 Units.

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. ((Fiction, 20th/21st, Theory)

Instructor(s): Adrienne Brown     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 27008, RDIN 27008, ARCH 27708, SIGN 26077, AMER 27008

ENGL 27102. Dissident Lit. 100 Units.

This seminar will explore the literature and history of "the dissident," a central figure of late 20th-century and 21st-century human rights politics. Through our readings of novels, essays, and criticism drawn from a range of traditions (from the US and Latin America to Russia and East-Central Europe) we will consider both the possibilities and dilemmas of literary dissidence.

Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 27102, HMRT 37102, ENGL 47102

ENGL 27583. 21st Century American Drama. 100 Units.

This hybrid seminar focuses on American contemporary playwrights who have made a significant and commercial impact with regard to dramatic form in the past 20 years. Playwrights will include, Tracy Letts, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar, and Amy Herzog. Textual analysis is consistently oriented towards staging, design, and cultural relevancies. Work for the course will include research papers, presentations, and scene work.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at the first class session is mandatory. Questions: contact vwalden@uchicago.edu.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20120, AMER 20120

ENGL 27660. Animality and Jewish Literature. 100 Units.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 27660, RLST 27660, CMLT 37660, RLVC 37660, JWSC 27660, ENGL 37660, HIJD 37660

ENGL 28005. Arabfuturism: Other Worlds and Worlding Otherwise. 100 Units.

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst existential, territorial, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister project of Afrofuturism/s-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. It is a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to envision entirely new archeologies of futurity. Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Arab Spring. This seminar explores representations of apocalypse, dystopia, science fiction, speculative history, (non)futurity, and fantasy across works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame imagination and futurity in relation to the extractive economies of war, colonialism, and capital. Foregrounding the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project, we consider how speculative acts of world-building can not only chart possible paths forward but also reveal the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Graduate students by consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 38005, NEHC 28005, CMLT 28005, ISLM 37885, RLST 27885, AASR 37885, CMLT 38005, NEHC 38005

ENGL 28145. Greetings from Tralfamadore: Scientific and Religious Satire in the Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. 100 Units.

This course will consist of the reading and discussion of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, with special attention to the role of the unconstrained imaginary powers of science fiction in the rethinking the nature of science and of religion, or more broadly of knowledge and meaning, and of the possible relations between them. Works to be read will include some or all of the following: The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Galapagos, Timequake.

Instructor(s): Brook Ziporyn     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 28145, RLST 28145

ENGL 28211. Intro to Religion and Literature: Dramatic Encounters. 100 Units.

This course will explore some of the major statements from the Western intellectual tradition on religion and literature as categories of thought, forms of human expression and communication, and sources of personal and social meaning. We will pay close attention to the various ways that the relationship between these two concepts has been understood and constructed by artists, philosophers, and theologians alike. Students from all concentrations are welcome; no prior knowledge or foreign language competency is required for enrollment.

Instructor(s): Matthew Creighton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28211

ENGL 28380. Psychoanalysis: Freud and Beyond. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and Freud's readers. We will pay particular attention to the way that Freud's theories of the mind translate into theories of the social world and of history. Taking its cue from the "beyond" of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the course will pay especial attention to the development of the death drive and explore its relationship to a constellation of psychoanalytic terms including but not limited to instincts and the drive, narcissism, melancholia, masochism, and religion/illusion. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions-especially conditions marked by political, ecological, economic, and public health crises?

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 38830, COGS 26504, GNSE 28830, ENGL 38830, GNSE 38830, RLVC 38830, RLST 28830, CMLT 28830

ENGL 28510. Mythologies of America: 19th Century Novels. 100 Units.

Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Alcott, and Twain wrote fiction that, in individual novels and also read comparatively, offers a civic template of mythologies of America: its genesis, its composition, its deities, its ritual life. The course considers this writing as both distinctively American, and as engaging central themes of modern novels, e.g. time, history, and memory, the relation of private to civic life, and the shifting role of religious authority.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28510, RLVC 38500, RAME 38500, ENGL 38500

ENGL 28602. Black Queer Media (makers) 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 48602, CMST 40201, GNSE 40201, GNSE 20201, CMST 20201

ENGL 28603. Cinema & the Queer Avant-Garde, 1920-1950. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 40902, ENGL 48603, CMST 20902, CMST 40902, GNSE 20902

ENGL 28760. Playable Theater and Transmedia Games. 100 Units.

Over the 21st century, the internet has shifted from an information exchange platform to a performance medium. Especially following the pandemic, the landscape of live performance and interactive art has also changed. This course invites directors, designers, performers, and writers to explore theater experiments in digital and networked environments. The term "playable theater" highlights a new constellation of participatory, interactive, immersive, site-specific, and technologically-augmented performance events in which audiences have substantial agency and can actively influence elements or outcomes of a performance. Together, we will examine the transition from traditional stage performance to interactive online experiences, highlighting the potential of various forms such as netprov, alternate reality games (ARGs), online live-action role-playing (LARPs), live-streaming performance, interactive theater, and even video games. By integrating popular social media platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, students will push the boundaries of storytelling and audience engagement. Students will engage in a series of hands-on workshops, lectures, and design sprints as well conversations with guest artists. Work will involve short-form, interactive original works shifting between in-person and online platforms. No prior experience with coding or video production is required, making this course accessible to all creative and collaborative minds.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24460, BPRO 28750, MADD 20750, ARTV 30875, ARTV 20875, TAPS 34460, ENGL 48760

ENGL 28826. Print, Media Transformation and the Beginnings of Mass Communication. 100 Units.

Printing is one of the truly transformative communication technologies, but in the fifteenth century it was by no means certain it would succeed or even survive. One thing that we will learn in this course, is that new media are always accompanied by a deluge of optimistic prophecy, and this was the case with printing just as much as with the internet. New technologies do not destroy what went before: instead they take their place in an ever-richer communication nexus. This course will examine all aspects of this fragile trade, authors and readers, booksellers, printers and publishers, along with the numerous strategies pursued by members of the book trade to find their audience. It will engage with how the new tools at the disposal of book historians are transforming our understanding of the early modern print world. It takes the story through to the new technologies of the last two centuries, and how the knowledge revolution made possible through new technology and the provision of universal educational transformed the book world. This course will be taught in Special Collections.

Instructor(s): Andrew Pettegree     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 38826, CMLT 38826, SIGN 28826, ENGL 38826, CMLT 28826, HIST 25428, HIST 35428, GRMN 28826

ENGL 28855. The Brontës. 100 Units.

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. What does this phenomenal family tell us about nineteenth-century literature, and about ongoing conceptions of childhood and creativity?

Terms Offered: Autumn

ENGL 28912. War and Peace. 100 Units.

Tolstoy's novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world's great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner. For this iteration of the course, we will also include material on the writing of the novel and consider its place in the field of genetic criticism, so that we could perhaps rename the course, Reading and Writing War and Peace. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC).

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 23704, CMLT 22301, ENGL 32302, FNDL 27103, CMLT 32301, REES 20001, REES 30001

ENGL 28916. Nabokov: Lolita. 100 Units.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita." Nabokov's "great American novel" is often misread. Vanity Fair, for example, made the grand pronouncement that it was the 'most convincing love story' of the 20th century. And in the 21st century, the name Lolita is invoked, with a calculated slyness, as shorthand for a cunning debauchery, the sexual tutelage of prepubescents and adolescents, the girl as seducer. In this text-centered and discussion-based course, we look into the psychosexual profile of the ostensible first person narrator in order to overrule his graphomania and to better contemplate the work of the novel as art beyond his grasp, concerning ourselves with the novel's language in all its complexities: as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24900, SIGN 26027, REES 20004, FNDL 25300

ENGL 28918. Introduction to Literary Theory. 100 Units.

This course introduces the methods and practices that form the field of Comparative Literature. Students will read major critical texts from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, gain theoretical literacy, and hone their skills of close reading, contextual framing, and comparative analysis of texts and other art forms. Broad themes to be explored include: world literature, translation, Structuralism/Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis and literature.

Instructor(s): Gabriela Lomba Guzman     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: Completed Humanities, or Civilization Core requirement. The course is designed for the second-year students and above.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 20109, CMLT 30109

ENGL 29300-29600. History of International Cinema I-II.

This sequence is required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.

ENGL 29700. Reading Course. 100 Units.

An instructor within ENGL agrees to supervise the course and then determines the kind and amount of work to be done. These reading courses must include a final paper assignment to meet requirements for the ENGL major, and students must receive a quality grade. Students may not petition to receive credit for more than two ENGL 29700 courses. Students may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies

ENGL 29780. Lab Research. 100 Units.

Students participating in one of the Undergraduate Research Labs (Black Studies, Contemporary Literary Publishing, and Environmental Humanities) can register for this course to receive credit as an ENGL elective for their participation. While students will register for the 100 unit course in just one quarter of the year of their participation, the course is meant to reflect their engagement with the Lab throughout the academic year. Final Grades and credit will be given in Spring quarter by the faculty supervisor. Additionally, students who take on a leadership role in the Lab will receive an official transcript notation as the "English Department Research Lab Leader." To register, students should first submit to the Student Affairs Administrator a 1-2 paragraph statement briefly outlining their interest in a specific lab, mentioning specific projects within the lab and ideas to implement into research projects, events, or other endeavors. The final grade will be based on cumulative participation and a portfolio of the year's work. For more information on requirements and expectations, please consult the English Department website.

ENGL 29830. BA Thesis Seminar. 100 Units.

Seminar for students writing BA theses.

Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): WRIT 29830

ENGL 29900. Independent BA Paper Preparation. 100 Units.

Senior students completing a Critical BA Project may register for this course using the College Reading and Research Form, available in the College Advising offices. This form must be signed by the faculty BA advisor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies and then submitted to the Office of the Registrar. This course may not be counted toward the distribution requirements for the major, but it may be counted as a departmental elective.

Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies