Literature Interdisciplinary Studies | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

The current election cycle seems be bringing into stark relief some fundamental questions surrounding difference in contemporary society. One of the hallmarks of modern society is its attempt to produce a truly diverse populace through the elevation of tolerance—of neighbors who lead culturally different lives—to a primary value. As noble as the idea of tolerance may seem, it has faced and continues to face resistance in our contemporary world for a variety of reasons. This course begins with the premise that tolerance is not a simple concept, that it has a complicated origin story in the Reformation/Counter-Reformation and that, ironically, it was global Christianity in its missionizing that laid the groundwork for the proliferation of ideologies of tolerance and diversity in modernity. The course will begin its focus on missionaries, a group of people rarely identified with tolerance. We will read primary texts associated with the conquest of the New World that attempt to characterize and cultivate native populations, whose own religious patrimonies represented not only a barrier to conversion but a genuine threat to global Christian ways of understanding phenomena in the world. In this context we will examine as case studies the writings of religious scholars who encountered different religious cultures in North America and South Asia. We will see how these missionary scholars employed religious categories like “idolatry” and “superstition” to think about the different societies they encountered and to process elements of these societies that could be tolerated as "cultural" difference. This material will prepare us for a transition to Enlightenment philosophical writings about tolerance. We will closely examine Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance and John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration and consider these in light of the emerging philosophical tradition and in contrast with the missionary texts that, we will see, pave the way for some of the ideas contained within these works. Finally, we will reflect on contemporary society’s tolerance challenges and consider what scholarly works from early modernity and the Enlightenment could teach us today. (This course may count towards the History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course will explore how Lin Manuel Miranda has repurposed early American history to resonate with present-day concerns such as immigration, citizenship, and upward mobility. His musical "Hamilton" has become a national sensation, and its popularity affords us an opportunity to learn not only about our nation's founding, but also about the evolution of hip hop and the meaning of the country's demographic transformation. We will examine primary texts from Alexander Hamilton’s time, in addition to more recent musical recordings, narratives of Latina/o History, and documents related to the career of Miranda himself, including excerpts from his first musical, “In the Heights.” (This course may count towards the History, American Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course will explore the historical threads that are coming together to shape the U.S. presidential election. Some of the topics we’ll discuss might include: the history of the right to vote and voter suppression; racial conflict and the policing of non-white communities; immigration and border control; economic inequality; the politics of pandemics; populists and the establishment; climate change and environmental calamity; and the shifting role of the United States in the world. As we know, things change rapidly these days, so the syllabus will have some flexibility and we may not end up where we begin. Because the election will take place towards the end of the quarter, we’ll spend our final month together dissecting and analyzing what happened. One main take away will be that history is a vital discipline that can help us understand where we are today, and students will learn how to apply historical thinking to future political moments. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

The early twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of always-on computing, a distinctive digital media ecology defined by smartphones, social media, and the tacit assumption of life lived on the basis of ubiquitous wireless networks. This same moment has also witnessed an incredible explosion of new networked genres. These genres include animated GIFs, memes, selfies, supercuts, podcasts, vaporwave, ASMR videos, likes, comments, and much else. This seminar is devoted to studying these new forms collectively and individually as aesthetic symptoms of a rapidly changing historical present in the overdeveloped west. While not framed as an introduction to digital media studies or digital aesthetics, this seminar will be taught with the consideration that it will function most likely in this way for most students. Our approach will be to privilege artistic negotiations with new networked genres. Our guiding principle will be that artistic texts offer especially rich reflexive occasions for studying the overwhelmingly non-reflexive aesthetics of always-on computing. We will often pair theoretical texts and work in digital media studies that will grant us a working vocabulary for gaining traction on a number of feelings and ideas: from creepiness and A E S T H E T I C to ambivalence, lethargy, boredom, mindfulness, and touch, as well as things like big data, post-internet art, fake news and the decline of symbolic efficiency, and vulnerability. Authors to be read will likely include Berlant, Ngai, Butler, Richmond, Dean, Cohen, Frosh, and Hu among others. Artists will likely include Dennis Cooper, Allie Brosh, Mary Bond, Jennifer Proctor, Elisa Giardina Papa, Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, Frances Stark, Faith Holland, Miranda July, and others. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course, required of all MALIT and MALS students (but open to any interested graduate student), introduces graduate work in literary and cultural studies. The course draws from two centuries of critical writing, and will discuss critical texts by major figures, though it is not intended to be a survey of literary and cultural theory. Rather we will inquire into what kinds of knowledge literary and cultural production provides as a way to isolate the object of study itself. Related questions ensure: how is a cultural product isolated from or understood in relation to its social and historical context? What is the relationship between geopolitics and literature? How does the history of technologies of reading (and looking) relate to the texts themselves? What is the status of literature in the digital age? Readings are drawn from literary theory, philosophy, film and media studies, and the humanistic social sciences in order to derive a reading practice that allows us to see how literary texts (and other sorts of texts) offer evidence toward larger questions regarding knowledge, history, and society. The goal is to develop a sensitivity to the relationship between the text and the social as it has been variously conceived that will allow students to approach and conceive their future work in literary studies with a sense of what it can and cannot offer; where and how the object of literary study itself has been located by important thinkers; and how and when other disciplinary approaches may be useful to literary studies. As such, we will read many pinnacles of writing from literary studies and the humanistic social sciences. We will discuss a number of major theorists along the way (e.g., Marx, Freud, Mauss, Foucault, Derrida, Geertz, Said, Spivak, Moretti, Butler, Rancière) and students will develop an appreciation for the major theories of some crucial scholars, with the opportunity to dig deeper into the work of any of them. Assignments will focus on the weekly readings themselves, with paper assignments intended to allow students to think through the topics of the course, and to develop skills in some of the genres of the profession of literary studies itself. Thus we will at times interrupt our larger argument within the course by attending to questions about how the profession of literature is currently organized, and discussing some of its nuts and bolts.

This course introduces students to graduate level work in literary and cultural analysis. The course draws its materials from the last hundred years of theoretical/critical writing on literature and other forms of cultural production such as films, political tracts, sermons, comics, games, rituals, architecture, blogs, podcasts and much else. We will examine a select set of theoretical positions and how they imagine and configure their objects of study, and devise methods and protocols for interpreting those objects (literary texts and cultural practices/artifacts). Such a theoretical/critical pedagogical approach poses and explores, among other things, the following questions: How is a literary text/cultural artifact isolated from or understood in relation to its social and historical context? What is the relationship between geopolitics and literature? How does the history of technologies of reading (and looking) relate to the texts and artifacts themselves? What is the status of literature in the digital age? Readings are drawn from literary theory, philosophy, film and media studies, and the humanistic social sciences. Specifically, we will focus on the literary/cultural theory and critical practice of the following thinkers/scholars: Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Lauren Berlant, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and David Damrosch. (This course is a core requirement for MALS and MALit students. Students in the creative writing programs may also take this course to fulfill a literature or elective requirement.)

This course, required of all MALIT and MALS students (but open to any interested graduate student) offers an introduction to literary and critical theory, as well as key works of literature, poetry, and film. It considers the relation between art, culture, and society as it has been conceived, problematized and reconceived over time. Centering on the nexus of questions and problems that have converged around the concept of truth and its relation to fiction, the course asks: How do works of art and cultural productions form and challenge the foundational truths of the societies in which they emerge and intervene? Students will become familiar with various critical perspectives, considering approaches based on class, race, gender and sexuality. Drawn from philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, the readings will introduce students to key thinkers including Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Beauvoir, Fanon, Deleuze, and Rancière. The course will also prepare students for graduate work in literary and cultural studies with a focus on academic genres of writing and research methods.

How do we better understand the conjuncture of digital technologies and the humanities? What kinds of thinking, research, teaching, politics, and cultural analysis can the digital enhance? How, in turn, do the fields that constitute the humanities (history, literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, cultural anthropology, media studies, etc.) offer guidance and grounding in today's wireless world? This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. Through a blending of weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon face-to-face seminars, we address topics such as: what is the history of both the humanities and digital approaches to it as an interdisciplinary project? How can we address humanities questions today through new tactics of computational study found in informatics, statistical analysis, data visualization, and "big data" approaches? What new modes of publishing and scholarly communication do digital technologies make possible (multimedia presentation, podcasts, video, visualization, etc.)? How do we understand the ethics and politics of the digital world (surveillance, open source, net neutrality, sustainability, power)? Each week, students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion and convene in person for a seminar three times over the course of the quarter. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (graduate work, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; "distant reading" tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, Digital Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students, specializing in Digital Studies. But any interested graduate student may take the course as an elective. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on January 13, February 10, and March 17.)

Literature of Plague and Pandemic

Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with the difficulties of our present reality with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts may include Boccaccio's Decameron (1348–53); selections from the pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (early 17th century); selections from The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Wortley Montagu (1763); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826); Edgar Allan Poe's "Mask of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912, in translation); Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938); Albert Camus's La Peste (1947, in translation); José Sarmago's Blindness (1995); Yuri Herrera's The Transmigration of Bodies (2016); and Karen Walker Thompson's The Dreamers (2019). (This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Note: This course is an online, asynchronous course.

This course is an introduction to the public policy process in the United States. It focuses on developing an understanding of what "political" and "public policy" mean and how public policy is made. The course considers agenda setting, decision making theory and methods of analyzing policy outcomes. Course materials will provide students with the analytical framework to explore why some problems reach the public agenda, why some solutions are adopted and others rejected, and why some policies appear to succeed while others appear to fail. It will examine policy making primarily at the national level but will also look at examples at the state and local level.

Since the early years after their introduction in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, motion pictures have constituted the most popular and pervasive form of entertainment for the US general public. Even under the competitive assault of television, movies still hold the preeminent position, inasmuch as a major portion of the content of television programming, whether via the commercial networks or the plethora of cable providers, is comprised of movies - either those produced for the theater venue or specially made-for-TV/cable. From the outset, the claim has been made in various quarters that cinematic productions have significant formative influence - positive or negative - on their audiences. This course is offered on the premise that movies do, in fact, have significant influence on the formation of social and religious values, the formation of the narrative of who we are as a nation, and in informing the mode of our interaction with the public sphere. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Religious and Ethical Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were among the most influential spiritual teachers in history and were the founders of three of the world’s major religions. This course examines and compares the lives, the traditions and the legacies of these three distinctive figures. We will focus on both the sacred literature of each tradition and the interpretations of these teachers in literature generally, past and present, Western and Eastern. Questions to be considered include the search for the historical identities of these teachers, the nature of their teachings and religions, the similarities, differences and possible influences among them, and the ways that these figures have been interpreted and compared in art and literature.  (This course may count towards the American Studies, Religious and Ethical Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Comparative and World Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Marriage is in the news. We hear that it is a fundamental human right, or that it is the foundation of civilization, the bulwark of social order, ordained by God, valid between a man and a woman, for reproduction and property transmission. The current controversy over gay marriage is only one in a series of moments in United States history when marriage has been the subject of criticism and debate. Feminists of the 1970s and 80s – as well as feminists of the 1840s and 50s – saw marriage as an instrument of women’s oppression. States across the nation outlawed interracial marriage to preserve “racial purity.” Social commentators in the 1910s and 20s worried that the nation would be ruined by a divorce epidemic. Marriage, in short, has been the object of controversy and the source of anxiety, positioned both as the source and solution to the nation’s problems. This course will examine not only the controversies over marriage but also the history of marriage in the United States. What kind of institution is marriage – political, religious, social, or economic? What purpose and functions does it serve? Why does the state have an interest in marriage? How has marriage changed over time, and why? (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

In the aftermath of the World War I, many artists and filmmakers asked new questions about the relationship between realism and religion. Could one reconcile concrete reality (or realism) with faith in the other-worldly? Many of the artists under discussion in the course drew upon themes that had already been raised by Kierkegaard in the 19th century. What is the relationship between religion and modernity, faith and ethics, reality and the supernatural, observable phenomena and invisible causes? How does one make sense of death in a meaningless universe? Is the universe meaningless? Can meaning be found in realism itself? This course asks students to grapple simultaneously with philosophy and film. We will dig into the language of existential philosophy and compare it to the language of film. We will read Kierkegaard and Sartre and watch films made by Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, and Woody Allen. In so doing, we will study how mid-to-late 20th century filmmakers sought to understand and portray life's many meanings, presenting protagonists who actively take up religious life, or who consider themselves inhabiting a godless and meaningless universe. In both genres, we will think about the problem of “experience” and how to narrate it. We will discuss the relationship between realism, atheism, Christianity and modernity, as well as the role of Christian symbolism in existentialist literature and film. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Much recent fiction, film, and theory are concerned with representing the internet and online environments. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema, or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which digital interfaces appear in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and location? We will focus on literary and filmic representations of social networking, gaming, news delivery, and artificial intelligence. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be text-based with require that you develop close reading strategies, as well as revise your work. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. But any interested graduate student may take the course as an elective. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on January 13, February 10, and March 17.)

The course studies the art, architecture and urbanism of “The Age of Revolution” with heavy emphasis upon artistic and political developments in France, but the German states, England and Spain will also be discussed. The key artistic practices studied in the course are those of David, Goya, Ingres, Daumier, Géricault, Delacroix, Blake and Constable. The rise of major metropolises (London and Paris) and their public and private buildings will likewise be important points of focus. Major themes will be the rise of an art for the public, art and revolution, art and empire, the invention of Orientalism and Romanticism, caricature and the press, new image technologies (including lithography and photography), and the rise of landscape painting and portraiture. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course engages with narratives, written over roughly a seven-century time frame, beginning more than two thousand years ago, that focus on strange events, strange creatures, human and otherwise, strange places, and strange things. In order to understand texts about anomalies came to be written, what and how they might mean, and why they are significant in the long history of pre-modern Chinese literature, we will read and discuss tales about animals, monsters, ghosts, and barbarians, especially through the lens of the concept of the “foreign.” We will include selections from other contemporary and related sources, when relevant to the overall understanding of the texts under study. As we explore these fascinating materials together, uncovering their richness and complexity, we will in turn address issues such as the place of the fiction in early Chinese literature, religious and folkloric beliefs in demons and the afterlife, immortality, femininity, masculinity, sexuality and their discontents, among other things. In addition to the primary sources, representative theoretical work in the field of early Chinese literature will be incorporated as much as possible. Previous knowledge of early Chinese literature, though helpful, is not required. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as an elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

Since the age when the maritime explorers searched for a passage to India and a shorter route to the East, Asia has held a fascination for the West and the religions and cultures of Asia have influenced Western literature, philosophy and religion. This course explores some of the classic literature of the Asian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism, and also considers some of the ways that this literature has been interpreted in the modern period in both Asian and Western film and literature. Among our readings will be two of the great epics of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, as well as key writings from the Buddhist tradition, and the Chinese Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing). We shall also view examples of Asian and Western film and read modern works by authors such as Thoreau, Forster and Kerouac in order to inquire how this Asian literature and its religious themes have been interpreted and re-imagined in the modern period. (This course may count toward the American, World and Comparative literature, or Literature, film, and visual culture specializations in MALit. It may count toward the American studies, History, and Religion and ethical studies specializations in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Chicago is home to a vibrant and nationally-recognized improv comedy scene, veterans of which can be seen all across the television and movie landscape. But what are the roots of that community and what explains the importance of Chicago to its past and present success? In this course, we will trace those roots back to Roman times and the theater of Comedia dell’arte. From there, we will skip forward to the particular influence of Chicago on improv, most importantly in the figures of Neva Boyd and her protege Viola Spolin. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to participate in various improv exercises, from the most basic to the more complex. As we will find, there is no reason to limit improv to the stage, so we will also examine how improv skills and techniques might be applied to various creative endeavors, including writing and filmmaking, and also such fields as business communications and education. The course will require, as noted, participation in a number of improv exercises, along with the completion of a mid-term paper and a final creative project. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, or History specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

How do we better understand the conjuncture of digital technologies and the humanities? What kinds of thinking, research, teaching, politics, and cultural analysis can the digital enhance? How, in turn, do the fields that constitute the humanities (history, literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, cultural anthropology, media studies, etc.) offer guidance and grounding in today's wireless world? This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. Through a blending of weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon face-to-face seminars, we address topics such as: what is the history of both the humanities and digital approaches to it as an interdisciplinary project? How can we address humanities questions today through new tactics of computational study found in informatics, statistical analysis, data visualization, and "big data" approaches? What new modes of publishing and scholarly communication do digital technologies make possible (multimedia presentation, podcasts, video, visualization, etc.)? How do we understand the ethics and politics of the digital world (surveillance, open source, net neutrality, sustainability, power)? Each week, students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion and convene in person for a seminar three times over the course of the quarter. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (graduate work, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; "distant reading" tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry.

The “crisis of contemporary masculinity” is routinely discussed in both popular media and academic circles. Due to changing geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions, constructions of American manhood have been reconfigured in the past twenty years. Or have they? This course will examine American manhood and masculinity in the millennial age. Drawing heavily from examples of popular culture such as motion pictures, reality television, men’s magazines, literature and sports, issues that be considered will include body image, race and masculinity, fatherhood, labor, education, the anti-hero in popular culture, sexual fluidity and metrosexuality. Students will read contemporary gender theory and interrogate cinematic, televisual and online representations of masculinity. (This course may count toward the American literature or Literature, film, and visual culture specializations in MALit. It may count toward the American studies specialization in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs.)

One comes to this course with a willingness to question the relationships between parents and children, beginning with Georgian England and continuing to those of contemporary times, in literature, art and film. While these relationships can be loving, they also can be deeply disturbing, even abusive; in Dame Iris Murdoch's work, for example, the young are often sacrificial lambs for the older generation, sacrificed even to death. Causes of discord between the generations are often more numerous than causes for agreement and harmony. To unpack these relationships and explore these themes, we will read novels, view films and works of art and photography. Some of the work we will examine point out areas of disagreement between parents and children that come with one generation's shock when a child's homosexuality is revealed, as in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun; political disagreement between generations can be equally difficult in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; looking at Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, while viewing the photographs he took of the young child he used as the model for Alice can give us another view of adults and children in Victorian England, for example. Our list will be wide-ranging. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Documentary film has been one of the most acclaimed genres of film since 2000. Numerous documentary films have made valuable political or social statements (Fahrenheit 9/11) while others have simply entertained us (March of the Penguins). What all documentary films do is constrict a vision of reality – whether it is the perspective of a president, the crimes of a serial killer, the lives of a group of penguins or the courage of cancer survivors. We will examine the impact of reality television on the genre. Through the screening of documentaries both within and outside of class, we will consider documentaries as performative acts. Their very fluidity and instability will allow us to examine the differing spectatorial reactions to these films. (This course may count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course will introduce you to Queer Theory and theories of sexuality, emphasizing the practice of reading theory from a variety of textual sources as well as conceiving of sexualities within both local and transnatinoal contexts. We will trace the development of both the term queer and the history of queer theory, beginning with foundational texts about sexuality and its regulation by Foucault and seminal essays about queer theory by Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant. We will then read canonical essays by a variety of queer theorists which will serve the basis for analyzing several books and films including Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch, Jules Rosskam’s Transparent, and the British television series, Metrosexuality. Discussions will query how queer theory formulates racial, class and national identities in relation to sexuality, and how it might offer politics beyond those based on identity. In the duration of the course, we will discuss "gay" versus "queer"; processes for conducting a “queer critique”; the historical emergence of the concept of sexuality; the emergence and trajectory of Queer Theory as a disciplinary category; techniques of normalization; the authority of experience; politics beyond identity politics; the aesthetics of self-formation, self-care, self-replication, and selfdissolution; polymorphous perversity; intersectionality and its relationship to Queer Theory; race and class as key interventions into the Queer Theory canon; trans theory as it intersects with and contributes to with Queer Theory; intergenerational sex; transnational queer theories and concerns; how queer theory formulates racial, class and national identities in relation to sexuality. Reading list to include: Michel Foucault History of Sexuality Vol 1 Laurence Chua Gold by the Inch Ed. Hall and Jagose Routlege Queer Studies Reader (2013). (This course may count towards the History and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The period 1930-1950 is considered one of the most unstable, terrifying and debated periods in French cultural history. Over the past 65 years, historians, sociologists and the French Establishment have consciously or unconsciously chosen to emphasize, de-emphasize and neglect certain aspects of this traumatic period. This course, rooted in history and textual analysis, will evaluate how key events of this era such as the Great Depression, the Popular Front, the threat of fascism, World War II, Resistance and Collaboration, and the revival of parliamentary government are “remembered” by the French people. Students will complete an in-depth topical investigation in this course that will contribute to both their knowledge and their research skills. (This course may count towards the History and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

From the building of railroads in the late Ottoman Empire, to the so-called “Facebook revolutions” of 2009-2011, the transformation of the Middle East in the last two centuries has often been linked with new technologies. This course will explore how Middle Eastern people have used such technologies to change their experience of travel, communication, fashion, prayer, childbearing, entertainment, and more. What is the relationship between technological development and cultural and political change? How have Middle Eastern societies and movements adapted modern technologies to their own purposes? This course aims to help students advance their understanding of the formation of the modern Middle East and to think critically about the role of technology in history. (This course may count towards the History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Fake news” has become one of the most discussed contemporary issues in American culture since the 2016 presidential election. But a firm description of exactly what is “fake news” is lacking. This course will examine this phenomenon. We will begin with an examination of the cultural and political polarization of the United States in the second and third decades of the 21st century. We will then attempt to define “fake news” in its various incarnations and examine how it is both a national and a global phenomenon. We will investigate how “fake news” is not a new construct and we will look at historical examples of it. We will discuss YouTube as it relates to news and cultural production, its political purposes and the rationales for downloading videos on the file sharing service and its relationship to the production of documentary films. The lines between archival material, YouTube and documentary filmmaking has become muddled in the past decade, particularly as it relates to the manipulation of original footage for reasons of political intent. We will also discuss the roles of Instagram, and Clubhouse. Students will complete the course by analyzing a full-length documentary and determine its objectivity, realism, use of archival sources, biases, purposes, and whether if extrapolates “fake news” in its construction. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on three Thursdays throughout the term: 6/23, 7/28, and 8/25.)

In this course, we will examine two parallel, though often intersecting, discourses which attempt to define Chicago: formal urban planning documents and literary representations of the city. From Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago onwards, Chicago powers-that-be have tried to transform the chaotic city into the City Beautiful (and/or the City Profitable) with formal planning documents, some aspects of which (when enacted by law) transform the cityscape itself. These documents demonstrate deep and complicated relationships between economic forces, political power, and human agency and identity. Meanwhile, Chicago’s poets and fiction writers shape our understanding of American identity in that same dynamic cityscape. In this course, we will examine planners as poets, and poets as planners to explore the evolution of Chicago from the early 20th Century to today. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This class will explore the evolution of the Buddhist tradition, and the ways that it has dealt with the dilemma of adapting an ancient tradition to the modern context. We will begin with the Buddha, his life and teachings and the foundations of Buddhism in Asia. Then the class will trace some of the modern expressions of Buddhism in both Asia and the West: such as the Beat Generation and Zen Buddhism, the Dalai Lama and socially engaged Buddhism, some of the political challenges that Buddhism has faced in Tibet, Sri Lanka and other places, and the Mindfulness movement with its Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Insight meditation. (This course may count towards the History, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Richard J. Daley shaped the city of Chicago, and its region, more than any person in its history. Monumental public-works projects from the expressway system, high-rise public housing, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and O’Hare Airport all were born or came to fruition during his 21 years in office (1955-1976). The North Side Lakefront and the Loop bloomed with high-rises, while many low-rise neighborhoods—-especially on the South and West Sides--fell into disrepair and despair. This seminar will examine the forces in Chicago culture which most shaped Daley-the-Man (the neighborhood of Bridgeport with its parks, bars, and “social and athletic clubs”; the Roman Catholic Church; the Labor movement; the Democratic Party) in order to better understand how, and why, he in turn shaped the city in ways good and bad, which still structure our experience of this place and which helped create Daley-the-Myth. The course will read two biographies of Daley, along with selections from a wide range of scholarship, journalism, poetry, fiction, and visual art depicting Daley. We will also have at least one, and perhaps as many as three, off-site meetings to directly engage with Daley’s Chicago. (This course may count toward the American Literature, Literature, Film, and Visual Culture, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

American novelists since World War II have engaged various theological currents that developed in the postwar period: the death-of-God movement, liberation theology, feminist theology, negative theology, Holocaust studies, and various poststructuralist theories of religion. One of the most interesting paradoxes during this time is that in spite of America’s steady cultural secularization, theological questions seem not to have lost but rather gained in urgency.

In other words, the frame of mind informing much of the best American fiction in the postwar period can be summed up perhaps most cogently in Paul Tillich’s phrase, “questions of ultimate concern.” These would include inquiries about the existence and nature of God, the meaning of sacrifice, the problem of evil, the possibility of justice, the relationship between violence and the sacred, and finally the exploration of gender not just as a social construction but indeed as a genuine theological problem.

Novels to be considered include Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), John Updike’s Couples (1968), Mary Gordon’s Final Payments (1978), Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise (1981), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Our readings in theology will include selections from Paul Tillich, René Girard, Mary Daly, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jacques Derrida, and Adrienne Rich. Finally, we will consider relevant film treatments of some of the questions and themes raised in the course, including most recently Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2018).

(This course may count toward the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the American Studies, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, social life, and time and space? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. We will pay close attention to the work of key media theorists, including (but not limited to) Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Donna Haraway. We will also analyze works of art, sound, film, and literature in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of how media matter. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course should cause us to seek an answer to the question of whether there is a human compulsion to connect with the divine, to suffer for or with the divine, to question whether women are more willing to accept the suffering that is oftentimes dealt them in a Christ-like way, or to accept sacrifice and suffering as part of their human condition. Through a variety of films and some short novels (the films are mostly foreign, most in English), we will have, it is hoped, lively discussion and much food for thought. The list of films include: Kristin Lavransdatter - Norway; Mariette in Ecstasy - American; Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark - Danish; Mustang - Turkish; Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce - Belgian; and others to be added. (This course may count toward the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the History, Religious and Ethical Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Black political activism in the city of Chicago has historically been a multi-varied phenomenon. Prominent and ordinary Black Chicagoans have responded to institutional or structural racism, specific racial incidents or problems impacting the African American community through organizational efforts and the power of the community. This course will explore ten historical incidents in which Black Chicagoans organized to make change. “Political activism” is loosely defined here and does not just mean running for public office. We will specifically look at Ida B. Wells’ fight against the horrors of lynching and her efforts to organize Black Chicago women, Robert Abbott’s creation and management of the Chicago Defender and his founding of Black Chicago legacy events such as the Bud Billiken parade, Carl Augustus Hansberry’s fight against restrictive covenants in the city and the impact that it had on his daughter Lorraine’s artistry, the organizational efforts of CORE (Congress of Racial Equity) and other entities to fight school segregation in the city in the early 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s work in Chicago in 1966 and the creation of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers’ work in Chicago in the late 1960s and the war against them by both the Daley Administration and the FBI, Harold Washington’s political career and his Mayorship in the 1980s, Black Chicago AIDS activism in the 1990s and current efforts to fight the disease, the careers of Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot and the role of Black women in Chicago politics, and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement and its achievements in the city of Chicago. Students will conduct an original research project this semester, using primary resources from the Vivian G. Harsh Collection at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, the collections at the main Chicago Public Library, the resources of the Chicago History Museum or the collections of the Gerber-Hart Library. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as an elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

In this seminar, we will conduct a multi-disciplinary, multi-medium, and multi-genre exploration of the significance of baseball in American culture. Baseball provides journalists, historians, writers, artists, and film-makers with a narrative structure, a playing field, on which to dramatize conflicts over dominance and marginality, inclusion and exclusion, in American culture. From the Doubleday Creation Myth to the rise of celebrity culture with Babe Ruth, from Jack Robinson breaking the color line to interned Japanese-Americans playing baseball during the Second World War, from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League to Latino players transforming the contemporary major leagues, “The National Pastime” has been a central aspect of the construction of different varieties of American identity. (This course may count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective or literature requirement for the creative writing programs.)

Film noir defies easy characterization; but perhaps this is why, of all the genres of classical Hollywood, noir is the one that seems to speak most closely to us postmoderns. The films to be studied in this course will be divided equally among classical Hollywood noir, neo-noir, and recent examples of noir in international cinema and contemporary television. At the cultural level, the course will focus on two overarching themes: first, the ways in which noir has registered the transformations in urban space as we move from modernity to postmodernity; and second, the ways in which noir has negotiated the racial, sexual, and gendered borders inscribed within the urban fabric. Close attention will be paid to the formal construction of each film—editing, lighting and mise-en-scene, sound—so that students will develop their skills in reading cinematic texts. Likely films include Welles, Touch of Evil; Lang, The Big Heat; Aldrich, Kiss Me Deadly; Polanski, Chinatown; Scorsese, Taxi Driver; Duke, Deep Cover; and others. Readings to include Ed Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity; James Naremore, Film Noir and its Contexts; and a number of articles. (This course may count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

The early part of the 21st century has witnessed a multitude of crises—humanitarian, ecological, political, and epidemiological, to name just a few. These challenging events have, in turn, tested Americans’ commitment to freedom of speech in various venues: “infotainment” news; social media, where verified eyewitness reports and bot-generated misinformation both thrive; and political speech on college campuses. In an effort to historicize these recent First Amendment trials, this course will take as a case study the city of Chicago. It will examine the city of Chicago and various forms of cultural censorship which have taken place in the city since the 1890s. There will be a special emphasis on motion picture censorship, the role of arcades and nickelodeons in this debate, and the relationship between the police department, city politics, progressive reformers and women’s organizations in the censorship question. We will also be addressing censorship of works of art such as sculptures, Beat poetry, the collection of the Chicago Public Library and the recent controversy over book bans. Students will complete a quarter long original research project during this class that answers a historical question that helps to add to the scholarship of this rich element of Chicago history.

Retrospectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through a contemporary lens, we often view screen personalities, performances, dialogue, relationships, music, and even glances as “queer.” This course will negotiate American film and television from 1930-1990 in an attempt to “make sense” of a cultural product. We will theorize on meanings of queerness and how this concept colors our notion of gay and lesbian spectatorship. We will also theorize on whether LGBTQ+ and/or straight audiences of the past “read” queerness into a film/program that contemporary audiences might readily identify as such. We will examine the relationship of political culture to the timeframe in which films/programs were produced and the impact that this culture may have had on what was “allowed” and what was “read” into such forms of media. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Between the so-called "Victorian" and "modern" periods we find a substantial slice of literary life roughly correlating with the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910), and it is fair to say that the novels of the twentieth century's first decade do not always comfortably fit either Victorian or modern labels. Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy are often cited as the "Big Three," but other writers must also be considered, including Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901), Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1902; The Secret Agent, 1907) E. M. Forster (Howards End, 1910), and Max Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson, 1911). Suffragette writing of the period is especially intense, as consciousness of the New Woman and the violent tactics of the Pankhursts take hold in the popular imagination. As George Dangerfield so eloquently argued in his 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, the period was marked by upheaval, including labor and Irish unrest as well as feminist fury trying to stir a complacent Liberal administration to reform. If we still associate the Edwardian period with high tea on the grand estate, or a pleasure-loving king beautifully memorialized on cigar boxes, then we do well to acquaint ourselves with Edwardian writing. Counts toward the British Literature specialization. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs.)

The label of “decadence” was deployed by both detractors and champions of British literature in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Social critics of decadence associated it with degeneracy and decline. Those writers and artists who identified with the movement claimed it as a badge of distinction, and its flagship literary magazine, The Yellow Book, set the tone with its devotion to transgressive behavior. Some influence can be traced to the work of the French symbolist poets as well as Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel A rebours (“Against the Grain”), was dubbed the “breviary” of decadence. Looking further back, the mid-Victorian visual art and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood must also be considered formative. Much of the period's writing still has the power to shock. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great Victorian novelists, and a writer who never self-identified as decadent, nevertheless ceased writing novels after critics lambasted both Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as sexually immoral. One critic called the latter "Jude the Obscene.” William Butler Yeats began his career in the company of the Rhymers' Club, a group of aesthetes more remembered for their drug habits than their poetic output. Bram Stoker wrote his influential masterpiece, Dracula, in 1897, and to this day his delicious tale of pansexual vampires has been endlessly generative in popular culture, as well as influential in rethinking the terms of feminism and sexuality more generally. The New Woman was a principal theme. George Gissing's The Odd Women and George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession both appeared in 1893. Still, it was Oscar Wilde, playwright and author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), who most vividly dominates the decade. Put on trial, found guilty, and imprisoned on charges of "gross indecency," Wilde ushered in a new age when he referred to "the love that dare not speak its name." (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on specific TBA dates.)

In this seminar we will study two landmark novelists whose works still reverberate around the globe: the Irish expatriate James Joyce and the English writer and critic Virginia Woolf (each 1882-1941). Living and writing in a period of accelerating scientific, technological, social, political, and economic change as well as civil and world war, each created radically new narrative forms to register modern time and modern times from the antithetical vantage points, respectively, of colonial Dublin and the imperial London metropolis. Through a selection of each author’s major works, we’ll explore their creative interventions in literary genres (e.g., short story, autobiographical fiction, epic, elegy, the novel) in light of a host of influences; among others, theories of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life”; scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; relations among bodies, desire, gender, representational strategies; performance (studied and unconscious) and theatricality; loss and elegy; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life of comedy and humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as keys to political authority; the powers and pleasures of language in their modernist medleys of voices and styles: interior monologue, dialogue, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, non-English words, silence. We will approach these challenging, exhilarating, deeply rewarding books in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, each of us seeking singular revelations with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Requirements: Active, informed participation; short weekly analytic and interpretive exercises; oral presentation; proposal and seminar project.

(This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

British author and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch explores this intriguing question in much of her fiction, introducing it, in part in her mid-career novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, an allegorical tale of the perennial struggle between good and evil. Having begun life as a practicing Anglican, and ending it (before the onset of Alzheimer's disease) as an agnostic, Dame Iris touches upon this subject in much of her fiction, in particular posing the age-old human question, who or what is responsible for evil and suffering in the universe if there is no God? If there is no God, can you have Good? It is important to remember that she began life as a philosopher.

Many of Murdoch's characters are caught in this dilemma; some seem to be "evil", using the term rather loosely, and some too good to be true. The young are often sacrificial lambs for the older generation. This course will examine Murdoch's universal themes and her very topical writing for today's world. She is a writer who needs to be remembered and respected.

Texts will include A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Sovereignty of Good, A Severed Head, The Sea, The Sea, The Black Prince and The Book and The Brotherhood, among possible others. Course will feature some lecture, active discussion and short papers as well as one final longer paper.

(This course may count toward the British literature specialization. It may also count toward the Religion and ethical studies specialization in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs.)

Great poets, according to Coleridge, have to create the taste by which they are enjoyed; they make new readers as well as original poems. During an age of revolutions, Romantic poets tried to transform not only the world of poetry but also the world outside it. This course will explore the projects of Romantic poetry by reading poems that challenge the reader to reimagine literature and life. Through a variety of critical approaches, we will try to enter the moment when each poet sought to answer radical, personal questions: what has been done in poetry? what has been left for me to do? Those poets will include such major figures as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as many less well known, such as Charlotte Smith and John Clare. The course will begin by looking at responses of Romantic poems to earlier poetry, and it will end by looking at the presence of Romantic poems in later poetry. (This course may count toward the British literature specialization. It may also count toward the British literature specialization certificate program.)

This course considers the distinct and complementary ways in which literature and psychoanalysis have inquired into the structure and constitution of the human mind. Historically, literature and psychoanalysis have a long-standing, intimate, and sometimes fraught relationship. Beginning with its founding father Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis has founded its theories based on the observation of not only of real-life patients but also literary characters. And literary critics have drawn on the work of Freud and later psychoanalysts to afford insight into the structure, imagery, language, and characterizations of literary texts. This course will consider how literature and psychoanalysis offer alternative ways of representing the human psyche—sometimes complementarily, sometimes contradictorily. Texts will include foundational works of psychoanalytic theory by Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva; and literary texts that have been influential for, and/or influentially interpreted by, psychoanalysis. Students will gain fluency in the discourse of psychoanalysis; competency in using psychoanalytic concepts to interpret literary texts; and an appreciation for both the possibilities and the limits of such interpretative strategies.  (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This seminar will explore Victorian travel and crime fiction, looking at the interpenetration of popular and serious literature during the rise of the British Empire and the expansion of the United States. We will examine several important literary narratives that develop the concept of travel—as a form of escape, as a search for knowledge, as a source of adventure, and as an instrument in empire-building—in order to address its role in forming the identity of both individuals and nations. We will also discuss the growing importance of sensational (mystery and crime) fiction, examining its cultural and historical contexts, as well as its influence on serious writers such as Dickens, Conrad, and James. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Why is mystery fiction (aka detective or crime fiction) such a popular genre, read across social strata and generating material for film and TV? What are the ways in which mysteries have influenced serious literary fiction? To address these questions we will explore the development of Anglo-American crime fiction from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to its global expansion today. We will examine the historical and social conditions for the emergence and development of the popular genre (urbanization of Europe and America; rise of the British Empire; importance of the inter-war period; Cold War, etc.). This will allow us to discuss the structure and evolution of formula fiction and its role in popular and high culture, its reflection of the preoccupations of Western societies, and the ways in which canonical writers have used elements of mystery fiction in their own literature. Readings will include works by representative mystery writers (Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Chandler), as well as literary fiction by Pynchon, O’Brien and Atkinson. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. )

This course will consider representations of the seven deadly sins in Renaissance thought, art, and literature of the western European tradition, with a particular focus on the English canon. Texts will include both visual and textual artifacts, including paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch; narrative poetry by John Skelton and Edmund Spenser; lyric poetry by Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell; and prose sermons and essays by John Donne and Michel de Montaigne. (All texts will be provided in translation.) To complement the Renaissance texts, we will read contemporary essays about the conception and practice of the seven deadly sins in contemporary secular culture. By comparing early modern and contemporary conceptions of the sins, we will foster a larger conversation about the cultural history of western ethics and morality. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Religious and Ethical Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Forthcoming.

"Elitist"; "obscurantist"; "formalist"; "autonomous" with respect to its surrounding social worlds: what's wrong with this picture? Against the outdated view that a "formalist" modernism, "autonomous" in respect to social reality, superseded and opposed "realist" modes of aesthetic representation, we'll begin with the premise that modernist realisms bear witness to historical actualities and human experience in the rapidly shrinking world of the early twentieth century. In an era of accelerating technological change, racialized imperialism, machine warfare, and tremendous social upheaval across national borders, all fueled and/or provoked by capitalist expansion, there emerged worldly, engaged, groundbreaking modernist artworks by such boundary-crossing international artists as the Norwegian Ibsen, the Anglo-Indian Kipling, the Polish Conrad witnessing the depredation of Congo by Belgium's King Leopold; the "semicolonial" or postcolonial Irish Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, Caribbean Jean Rhys, New Zealander Katherine Mansfield; Americans expatriates Pound and Eliot; and English-born travelers D. H, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf--both critical "outsiders within" their native Britain.

We'll begin with Ibsen's influential play A Doll's House, which helped to launch modernism's critical struggle against the nineteenth-century imperative that art offer "moral uplift" to confirm the existing social order. Then, depending on class members' background and interests, we'll study later instances of that critical struggle, choosing from works such as Kipling's Kim, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mansfield's "An Indiscreet Journey," Yeats's "The Second Coming," Joyce's "The Dead" and Ulysses's "Penelope" episode, Eliot's Waste Land, Lawrence's "Odor of Chrysanthemums," Woolf's Between the Acts, Pound's Cathay or passages of The Pisan Cantos, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs.)

This blended online/face-to-face course will survey a range of ideas, attitudes, and ideologies about the human body as represented in literary texts of the western European Renaissance, with a concentration on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Topics of particular attention will include the four humors, medical dissection, sex and gender, race, the grotesque body, the body in pain, the Eucharist, and the animal body. To learn about these diverse topics, we will read and analyze a wide variety of materials, including Renaissance poetry, plays, medical texts, and works of visual art; contemporary works of literary criticism; and contemporary literary theory. In addition to reading assignments, students will contribute to online discussion boards and submit videos, recording their responses to the readings in both written and oral form. The culmination of the course will take the form of a mini-conference at which students will present their final papers and entertain questions about their original research.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature program. It may count towards the Digital Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in graduate writing programs. Additionally, it may count towards certificates of graduate studies. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on April 6, May 11, and June 8).

Our culture privileges originality. We laud biologists who innovate with new pharmaceuticals; we praise books for their imagination; and we ask students to develop “original” arguments. Shakespeare’s culture had no such qualms. His plots were largely adapted from extant sources; he held no copyright on his written work; and he earned his living not from the composition of plays but from acting in and producing those plays in London. This course takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a case study in adaptation to interrogate ideas of intellectual property, artistic innovation, and originality. We will read Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (one source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the play itself (in both the first and second quartos), and multiple rewritings of the play by contemporary authors. Texts may include Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, David Wrobleski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and several film adaptations. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. NOTE: This course will be taught remotely on Zoom each week during the time designated.)

This course will trace the development of the English novel from travel narrative, Gothic and sentimental fiction to the realism of Jane Austen. We will read selections from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), usually considered the first English novel, and from 18th-C. Gothic and sentimental fiction to compare these to Austen’s realistic comedies of manners. The course will focus on Austen’s novels, from her parody of Gothic and sentimental romances in Northanger Abbey to her satire of British society in Persuasion. We will also look at the enduring popularity and afterlife of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and current “Austenmania” with its plethora of film adaptations, sequels, and parodies, including a more serious treatment of Austen’s fictional world in Jo Baker’s 2013 novel Longbourn, the story of Pride and Prejudice told from the perspective of the servants. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course will examine the central role played by the city in inventing the forms for representing modern life, beginning with Paris (sometimes called the "capital of the 19th century" because of its central place in the elaboration of the new narrative and cultural forms of industrial civilization) and then focusing on New York and Los Angeles as privileged spaces where a "culture industry" then becomes both the producer and the subject matter of literature and film. Students examine the tensions between realist and mythic representations of the modern city in such writers as Balzac and Baudelaire, as well as the city as a site for the invention of "modern myths" expressing the utopian and dystopian aspects of modern life in the work of surrealists such as Aragon. Students will also explore how these approaches are taken up by classic Hollywood cinema in the 1930s (notably in such popular genres as the musical and the gangster film) and how these same problems are ultimately reinvented, in the second half of the 20th century, in a postmodern culture dominated by media images and global cultural flows, which will give rise to new social spaces and new utopias but will consequently also give rise to new forms of mythic and realist narrative. Authors read will include such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. We will also discuss films by such directors as Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, Jim Jarmusch, and Michael Haneke. Counts toward the American Literature and the Comparative & World Literature specializations. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on three Saturdays throughout the term: June 30, July 28, and September 1.)

This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries. (This course may count towards the Comparative and World Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies.)

This course will explore the place of film in postmodern culture. We will examine how the aesthetic and narrative forms of film have been reinvented by postmodern film makers, as well as the ways in which the most important of these recent films have (from a variety of ideological and aesthetic perspectives) contested the dominant culture of postmodernity. The course will begin by providing the conceptual and historical background for an understanding of postmodernism, through an analysis of a number of key films of the ’60s and ‘70s. Some of the interrelated themes of these films (including works by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Jacques Tati, Ridley Scott, and Chris Marker) are the new experiences of urban space characteristic of postmodern culture; the new cultural forms associated with the triumph of consumerism; and the emergence of a new global culture of the image. We will then explore a number of problems central to current debates about the nature and limits of postmodernism—such as the place of dystopian and utopian fantasy in postmodernity; the possibilities of and alternatives to realist representation of postmodern experience; the representation of new forms of sexual and ethnic identity and the intertwining individual and collective histories in an age of globalization—through discussions of cinematic works by directors from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, including such film makers as Alain Resnais, Gianni Amelio, Patricio Guzmàn, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Abderrahmane Sissako, Agnès Varda, Todd Haynes, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Quentin Tarantino, Raoul Ruiz and Tsai Ming-Liang. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. NOTE: This course will be taught remotely on Zoom each week during the time designated.)

What beckons people to the metropolis? What draws crowds to the cinema? Why should we think "cinema" in tandem with "the city"? Departing from these questions, we will analyze relations between cinema and the city, using Germany as our geopolitical launching pad. Drawing on a range of classic and lesser-known (but mesmerizing) films from the Weimar period onward, we will visit the real and imagined cities of Germany, evaluating how space and social relationships are imagined in the German metropolis and, in some cases, between a German and an “extra-territorial” city. Our travels will take us to the cities of Hamburg and Istanbul, Frankfurt and Jakarta, and Berlin and New York, among other locations. Critical questions steering our cosmopolitan navigations include: how does urban space influence how we think about forms of national, gendered, ethnic, sexual, and class identity? How does the historical network of social relationships in the urban setting--and in cinematic form--organize our view of political and social networks we now inhabit? How should we analyze urban economies in the context of cinema? Approaches to these questions will include: formal and aesthetic analysis of film and the historical background and cultural context of the films under consideration (including, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927); Fritz Lang's M (1931); Eduard von Borsody's Wunschkonzert (1940), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Fatih Akin's Head-On (2004), and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010). These films will be considered in tandem with a selection of classical texts on modernity, mass society, and theories of space. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

While science fiction has often been thought of as an English-language genre, in fact Latin America has its own rich history of science fiction writing. This course offers an introduction to science fiction literature and film in Latin America. Beginning with a critical definition of the genre (and the ways in which it differs from “magical realism” and the fantastic), we will examine some early examples of science fiction in Spanish language literature by writers such as Eduardo Holmberg and Eduardo Urzaiz. We will then read some now-classic texts that can be considered science fiction, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Urqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and the absurdist short stories of Mexican writer Juan José Arreola. Finally, we will trace the regional shift from science fiction to cyberpunk through texts like Cuban writer Yoss’s Planet for Rent and films such as Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, looking at the ways in which recent Latin American and Latina/o writers and directors have expanded on and experimented with this sub-genre. As we read, we will seek to understand how science fiction navigates the divide between "popular" and "elite" literature, its function as a form of social criticism, and the ways in which writers and filmmakers have used science fiction to interrogate social categories such as race, class, and gender. We will also ask what might make science fiction from this region different from science fiction produced elsewhere. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This seminar is about slums, as much about their socio-cultural dynamics as about their cinematic representations. Slums are proliferating across the globe at an extraordinarily rapid rate. Today more than one billion people live in slums and that number is expected to double by 2030. By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities and a vast majority of them in slums or slum-like-conditions. We do, in fact, as Mike Davis puts it, live on a planet of slums. Life in the slums as described and analyzed both in scholarly studies and in popular media is one of the most dynamic points of intersection of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The material conditions of life, especially sanitary conditions that severely compromise public health, are palpably “ugly.” The “bad” is pervasive in slums: crime and corruption, violence and intimidation, sheer poverty, inequality and injustice point to the general abuse of human beings by the members of the same species. On the other hand, there is also much that is “good” in slums: resilience in the face of adversity, community spirit, creative and economic use of scarce resources etc. Without celebrating the slums, there is much to learn from slums for the society at large. This seminar is not just about films about slums. Slum Cinema is also not a film course as such. We will be using the cinematic representations of all sorts (feature films, documentaries, TV mini-series etc.) to examine the slum as a space of life and work of billions of people across the globe. This seminar will focus on the fact that a significant part of creative cultural production (films, TV series, music, novels, comics etc) takes place against backdrop of slums or slum life. Films to include: City of God (Brazil, 2002), Slumdog Millionaire (India, 2008), District 9 (South Africa location, 2009), Ali Zaoua (Morocco, 2000), Tsotsi (South Africa 2005), Gangs of New York (USA, 2002) and La Haine (France, 1995). The seminar has a very explicit global focus as it seeks to juxtapose cinematic representations from varied national/cultural terrains, from both from the advanced countries and from the developing countries of the global south. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The course is devoted to the exciting efflorescence of women’s writing in French that began in the postwar period with a veritable bursting forth of novels by women--existentialist novels, working class novels, novels of interethnic love and loss, novels responding to psychoanalytic and materialist feminist theories, including novels exploring (or questing) a feminine relation to desire and sexuality, writings of/on the body, writings of revolution, and literary engagements with the linguistic, racial, and sexual complexities of living or writing in diaspora. Our work will span the period from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, her groundbreaking 1949 attempt to understand what it means to be(come) a woman, to the second wave feminisms of the late 1960s and ‘70s, to our contemporary era. We will read short theoretical pieces by psychoanalytic feminists and by lesbian materialists to develop an understanding of the intellectual context in which creative writers worked, but the vast majority of our readings will be literary. These will include works by some the most talented and critically esteemed women writing in French, such as Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, Linda Lê, Anne Garréta, Marie Darrieussecq, Nina Bourouai, and Chloê Delaume. We will complete our work with a films by female filmmakers working in the last half century. (This course may count towards the Comparative and World Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The 1960s and 1970s produced a wealth of new literature, usually labeled "postmodernist," that is innovative, challenging, and fun to read. In this class we will discuss novels and short stories of this period from the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, in order to explore the characteristics of postmodern fiction—fabulation, playfulness, parody, and self-consciousness—and the cultural and social conditions that produced it. Participants will learn the basic concepts and examples of literary postmodernism and will have the opportunity to research and present their findings on other literature and fields of culture of the period (such as art and architecture). Students will hone research and critical skills in discussing these forms of experimental fiction in the context of their times.

Readings may include: John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.

(This course may count towards the Comparative and World Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies.)

This seminar explores the writings and the visual work of women artists associated with the European and American Avant-Garde movements in the early 20th century. We explore how in the arts and major genres of writing, women artists helped develop these movements' radical poetics and critical outlooks on societal normativity. By focusing on this production, we bring under scrutiny both the destabilization of the category "woman" as a primary site of retrospective emphasis and the gender biases in the constitution of the modernist canon, in order to explore the entanglement among socialist, anarchists and anti-colonial groups rather than the singular. How do these artists conceive of their written work and artistic processes as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view those realities provide an account of the determinations of their gender and sexuality? We will examine avant-garde's experimental forms of writing and visual culture in their fractures, collaged, or inhuman representations of modern personhood as their offered a new feminist and anarchic language. Readings and topics will include: Suffragettes' Manifestos; Valentine de Saint Point's Manifesto of The Futurist Woman and Futurist Manifesto of Lust; Mina Loy, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Nancy Cunard's poetry and chronicles; Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Norah Lange and Silvina Ocampos' surrealist short stories and visual art; Nella Larsen's Passing and Josephine Baker's performances; Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes' experimental prose and Sophie Taeuber-Arp's abstract painting; Bauhaus women photography and experimental autobiography.

In this course, students will read a selection of poetry, criticism, comics, film and fiction dealing with a central concern for American writers of the 1920s: the nature of art. The focusing lens will be depictions of parallels between artistic creation and romantic love/sexual procreation (as the term "jazz" refers to both, the musical art form and sex), and how these depictions grapple with the sense of cultural crisis that informs so much of modernism. Our texts will include Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and several short stories; Kay Boyle's short fiction; Dos Passos', Manhattan Transfer; poetry by Pound, Cummings, Stein, Eliot, and others; as well as pop-culture texts like Harriman's Krazy Kat and Disney's Mickey Mouse. We will pay special attention to how various sorts of subject position (including, but not limited to, race, class, and gender) influence how writers portray their own creative projects.  (This course may count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Throughout the twentieth century, the terms "urban" and "black America" became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production. Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the "push and pull" factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; visual artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music will include hip hop artists by a range of performers from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clair Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Patillo. This course may count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

From the very outset of the nation with Phillis Wheatley to the contemporary moment with figures like Elizabeth Alexander, African American writers have been fascinated with the play and sound of words. This course seeks to explore the significance of poetics as it resonates in African American letters as well as culture more broadly. While we read poetry, we will be principally engaged with how poetry comes to bear upon, if not shape and reshape, oral forms (such as sermons, speeches, and hip hop, among others) and written forms (such as short stories and novels, for example). Works under consideration may include Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha, W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's Selected Poems, Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton, and Jean Toomer's Cane; speeches by Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama; and music by hip hop, jazz, and R&B artists. (This course may count toward the American literature specialization in MALit and the American studies specialization in MALS.)

Chicago is still the most segregated big city in America, and it has a long history of writers who represented its racial and ethnic conflicts. In this course, we will read and discuss the canon of Chicago’s African-American literary tradition, along with other writers who represent how American identity is shaped by the Chicago, by issues of access to space, and the freedom (or lack thereof) to move through the urban landscape.

Our texts will include: Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Richard Wright, Native Son; James T. Farrell, Chicago Stories; Bill Granger, Time for Frankie Coolin; and Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park.

(This course may count towards the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. )

Courses in literature-to-film adaptation often emphasize canonical and historically distant works by such authors as Shakespeare, Austen, or the Victorians. This course instead centers on contemporary novels and short stories as well as their film adaptations, mostly but not exclusively produced in Hollywood. Beyond simply comparing these texts in terms of story or style, we will ask how literary fiction has itself changed in a 21st-century media environment where film rights are often sold before novels get finished, and where financing, production, media circulation, and creative processes constantly change. We will read American stories that have been adapted differently by U.S. and international filmmakers, and we will contemplate the politics that appear to motivate which texts get adapted -- and which themes are considered "literary," "prestigious," or globally marketable in an era when comic books, video games, and prior movies inspire more adaptations than do recent novels or plays. Along the way, we will master key skills of formal analysis and thematic argument regarding both literature and film. Key texts are likely to include "Brokeback Mountain" (Proulx), Children of Men (James), No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), "So Much Water So Close to Home" (Carver), Oil! (Sinclair), Atonement (McEwan), "Lust, Caution" (Zhang), The Reader (Schlink), and Persepolis (Satrapi), as well as the movies derived from these texts.  (This course may count towards the American literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course looks at the way in which U.S. writers imagined both the domestic scene and the greater world in the wake of the rising status of the United States as a global power. In the post-WWII period, writers rethought many of the presumptions about America’s place in the world and revised earlier narratives about Americans abroad and internationalism. In the twenty-first century, those presumptions changed again, both because of the changing geopolitical status of the U.S. and the impact of the digital age. This course will take a look at two extended moments: the early cold war of the late 1940s and 1950s; and the first decade of the 21st century. Authors will include writers such as: Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, Paul Bowles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dave Eggers, Claire Messud, Junot Díaz, Craig Thompson, Jennifer Egan. (This course may count towards the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. )

From the Civil War to the Lost Generation, and from the Vietnam conflict to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, there has long been an intimate relationship between war and American literature. In the past decade, a number of returning US veterans have published novels and short stories set in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them ambitious and sophisticated. Works set in and around war have frequently been places where questions about national identity and the changing status of the United States in the world have been played out in rich ways. In the past century, new technologies of warfare and the ever changing media used to report war has had a profound impact on the way these conflicts have been experienced and translated to a distant public. This course explores the relationship between literature (and some film) representing war, the historical understanding of the opposing side (the enemy), and narrative techniques developed to make sense of what is an inherently confusing situation. We will focus especially on World War II, Vietnam, and the 21st century conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, with comparative attention to representations of the war from the “other side.” Close readings of literature will be enhanced with some theoretical writings on cinema frontier narratives, war and postmodernism, empire and imperialism, and postcolonial studies; we will attend to questions of gender, race, disability, nation, subalternity. Texts: Works by writers such as Gertrude Stein, John Hersey, Miné Okubo, Hisaye Yamamoto, Norman Mailer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, Tim O’Brien, Michael Herr, Siobhan Fallon, Ben Fountain, Phil Klay, Michael Pitre, Elliott Ackerman, Hassan Blassim, Sinan Antoon, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Theoretical and critical writings by authors including Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Richard Slotkin Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said. (This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

We hear about bad mothers on the news, read about them online and in news print, see them in movies, and perhaps complain about them with our friends. But what, exactly, is a Bad Mother? How do we know? Where does she come from? In this course we will read novels and watch films that help to constitute, perpetuate, and challenge normative scripts of what constitutes good mothering. This seminar will likewise provoke students to critically analyze the varied factors that shape and define contemporary motherhood as an embodied ideology. Our seminar’s key themes include the institutionalization of motherhood, motherhood as subjectivity, agency and performance, technologies of reproduction, narratives of adoption, and the politicization of motherhood. Texts and authors will include Nella Larsen, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Buchi Emecheta, Edwidge Danticat, Margaret Atwood, Tillie Olsen, Mommie Dearest, Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate, Kramer v. Kramer, Juno, The Good Wife, and The Blind Side, along with a unit on global media and iconic mothers including Angelina Jolie, Lady Di, Mother Theresa, Mother Goose, Margaret Sanger, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, MADD, Whistler’s mother, and Kate Gosselin. (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The only constant in Chicago history, and literature, is change. In this course, we will read and discuss more than a century's worth of textual explorations of fundamental shifts in Chicago's built environment, racial and ethnic identities, and literaary expressions. Who lives where? Who has power and who takes it? Who expresses the most important aspects of these transformations, and how do writers across generations agree and disagree? Our readings will include canonical and more obscure writers, from Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nelson Algren to Bill Granger, Stuart Dybek, and Dan Sinker. (This course may count towards the  American Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

The US-Mexico border has been the site of intense cultural conflict since the mid-nineteenth century. It marks both the connection and the division between two nations, and many of our most fraught conversations concern whether the border should be a bridge or a wall. As an entry point into these conversations, this course will survey literature and film centering on the US-Mexico border. Students will become familiar with the history of the border, beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and extending through NAFTA and up to the current political climate. Together we will consider how the border has become such a potent site for contemporary mythmaking, a flashpoint for anxieties about race, labor, gender, and sexuality. Literary texts will include Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994), Carlos Fuentes’s La frontera de cristal (1995), Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicans Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments (1995), and Carmen Boullosa’s Tejas (2014). (Texts originally written in Spanish will be taught in English translation.) Films will include The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), Selena (1997), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and Sin Nombre (2009). (This course may count towards the American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may count towards the American Studies, History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or an elective in the creative writing program.)

When Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States, many felt that a new era of precarity for women had begun. The defunding of Planned Parenthood, the Muslim ban, assault on pro-choice legislation, rescinding of protections for transgender students, the President’s own history of sexual assault—to name only a few—all seemed to present an unprecedented dystopia for women across the political spectrum. Indeed, this course begins by asking, how we can talk about feminism in a Trump era? Taking an historical approach to feminism this course asks how many of the issues facing American women today are familiar ones; and what might a Trump administration mean for feminism, both broadly speaking in its global iterations and on more local, micro levels of quotidian experience? How has the conception, performance, politics, embodiment and circulation of feminism been reconceived? As a research course, this class will require students to conduct original research, taking from feminism’s archive over the last thirty years an animating idea, concept, historical moment, material object, or study around which each student will frame a question in relation to Trump feminism. From this question they will devise an original argument, compose a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, outline, and then write a 10-15 page paper. Readings/texts will include but not be limited to those by Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, Patricia Williams, Hortense Spillers, Margaret Atwood, Rebecca Traister, Barbara Ehrenreich, Beyonce, Jessa Crispin, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Victoria Lomasko, and Lena Dunham. (This course may count towards the American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may count towards the American Studies, History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or an elective in the creative writing program.)

One could search through the annals of American literature without being able to find two bigger books than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, both books are long, and part of this course will consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading big books. How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, narratives of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in colossal fictional worlds? But Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick have also both been big in another sense: they are hugely influential and profoundly consequential novels. Indeed, one cannot really understand American literary, cultural, and political history if one is not familiar with them. Stowe’s novel was a watershed text for both sides in the Civil War. Upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to her, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Stowe’s novel sold 300,000 copies in the first year—an unprecedented number—and her story became the basis for countless stage adaptations, spin-offs, parodies, editorials, refutations, and re-writes. (Check out some of them here: <http://utc.iath.virginia.edu>) The reputation of Melville’s novel took longer to take shape—its early readers enjoyed the material about whaling, but didn’t quite know what to make of the story of Ahab’s obsession with the White Whale. But over the course of the twentieth century these views reversed themselves, and Ahab’s maniacal quest has come to be widely recognized as a work of unparalleled resonance and ambition. Our work will be, like Ahab, to take on these Leviathans better to understand them and the worlds they shaped—including, by no means incidentally, our own. (This course may count toward the American Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may count toward the American Studies, Religious and Ethical Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This course centers around ten commercial narrative movies of the last five years, each of which achieved substantial critical and cultural impact. We will use these films to refine our abilities to close-read cinematic texts and to situate them within relevant cultural and historical contexts. Throughout the course, we will learn terms and apply concepts related to framing, editing, sound mixing, and other film-specific crafts, employing them to illuminate and debate artistic subtleties in each assigned movie. Alongside other interpretive approaches specific to each case study, we will pay particular attention to how all of these movies challenged old ideas about gender and sexuality or innovated new ones. About half the films originated as pre-existing short stories, plays, memoirs, or essays; in those instances, we will discuss how not just the scripts but the filmmaking nuances transform the literary material. Even in cases where the films hail from original screenplays, we will read and discuss historical sources, scholarly articles, and creative art works in multiple media that can deepen our analyses of the movies in question. We will occasionally use class time to screen clips of other recent films that relate meaningfully to the ideas, stories, and styles of the assigned texts. Students in the course may write their final papers about these optional “recommended” texts or about those that are foregrounded in the syllabus.

Likely films include 12 Years a Slave (2013), Birdman (2014), The Lobster (2015), 20th Century Women (2016), Arrival (2016), Moonlight (2016), A Fantastic Woman (2017), Lady Bird (2017), The Rider (2017), and The Square (2017). Other texts include fiction by Raymond Carver and Ted Chiang; prose by Solomon Northup; poetry by Danez Smith; and essays by Hilton Als, Michael Cobb, Cáel Keegan, Robin Morgan, Wesley Morris, Viviane Namaste, and others.

(This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

This seminar takes its impetus from the hotly awaited dystopian sequel The Testaments (publication date September 10, 2019), Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale envisions a near-future American dystopia in which a dwindling population of fertile women are forced into reproductive service for the ruling cadre of men. As you are no doubt aware, we have witnessed a resurgence of interest in The Handmaid’s Tale, from the currently streaming Hulu series to real-life feminist activists wearing the Handmaid uniform of red robes and white bonnets. Why, we will ask, has Atwood’s speculative fiction—her term for her imaginative rendition of catastrophic near futurity—proved so meaningful for us? How does The Handmaid’s Tale invite us to think about the status of women, in history and today, as a critical index of societal function and dysfunction? What might Atwood’s book teach us about our own capacities as agents of acceptance and resistance? Finally, are there problems with Atwood’s portrait of dystopian America, whether in relation to our history, our present, or our profoundly embattled future?

We’ll read Atwood’s book closely, with attention to the political and cultural climate in 1985, the year of its publication. Then we’ll turn to its sequel, as well as to other dystopian visions that imagine women’s key role in social, ecological, ethical, and species catastrophe and possible regeneration. Along with The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, our reading list includes: Margaret Atwood’s later dystopia The Year of the Flood; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Naomi Alderman, The Power; Aliya Whiteley, The Beauty; Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. We will also add one or two items to the syllabus based on class consensus—another dystopian fiction, novella, or story; and/ or a dystopian feminist film (for example, “Mad Max: Fury Road”); and/ or a female-centered fantasy comic (for example, Paper Girls, Saga, or Monstress). For required writing in this class, you will have the opportunity to generate analytic essays as well as your own creative visions of near-future dystopia.

Please note: several of the assigned texts contain graphic descriptions of violence, including sexual violence.

(This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies)

This course uses an archive of films produced and/or released between 1999 and 2002 to construct a specifically cinematic and a more broadly cultural history of the shift from one millennium to another. Some of our conversations will focus on global anxieties, including apocalyptic apprehensions about Y2K, increasing proliferations and paranoias regarding networked technology, and public climates immediately before and immediately after 9/11. At other times, we will take stock of particular trends within the U.S. as reflected on silver screens, including surges of trans and nonbinary storytelling, changing debates over African American representations, and rising crescendos of white male insecurities and neofascist rhetoric. Alongside but also within those discussions, we will take stock of how film itself was evolving, with particular attention to digital advances, web-based writing, and shifting relations and rivalries with television. Participants in the course will experiment with different genres of writing and practice different research skills in relation to texts and themes that interest them most. Films screened in full or in part are likely to include American Beauty (1999), American Movie (1999), Beau travail (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Fight Club (1999), The Matrix (1999), Rosetta (1999), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Amores perros (2000), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Amélie (2001), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Kandahar (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Southern Comfort (2001), Spirited Away (2001), Training Day (2001), Y tu mamá también (2001), Waking Life (2001), and 11’09”01 (2002). (This course may count towards the Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. It may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective in the Master of Arts and Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.)

Nineteenth-century American poetry has frequently been reduced to the study of two poets--Whitman and Dickinson--who stand apart from the rest by virtue of their eccentricity and extraordinary ambition. This selective account of poetic inheritance has produced the unusual circumstance of a canon that needs to be opened not only to culturally marginal but also to culturally dominant poets and poetic forms. This course integrates the study of Whitman and Dickinson with the study of a vastly expanded canon of American poetry. The course also reads theoretical and critical texts that raise questions about canonization and the formation of literary historical narratives. (This course may count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program.)

How do we reimagine the world we live in? How can we envision it in radically new ways and not just as a better version of the present one? Since Thomas More’s inaugural text, Utopia (1516), this endeavor of the imagination has developed together with and as a response to the changes that have defined modernity (from colonialism to industrialization) and affirmed the question of the future as one that is indissolubly aesthetic and political. While tapping into this longer tradition, this course will explore the ways in which contemporary writers and filmmakers in the West have employed the science fiction genre to challenge notions of historical progress, individualism, and humanism. In these works, more often than not, utopian and dystopian visions find themselves intertwined, upsetting the boundaries between hope and despair, violence and redemption. Together with key essays by Ernst Bloch, Donna Haraway, and Fredric Jameson, we will read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and China Miéville’s The City & the City. We will also watch Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Throughout the course, we will foreground questions relating to technology and daily life, climate change, and social justice. (This course may count towards the American Studies, History, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. This course may count towards the American Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)

Alfred Hitchcock, in his long career, arguably brought cinematic language to its most sophisticated level; and not coincidentally, he was greatly influenced by both surrealism and psychoanalysis. As I wrote in my book on Breaking Bad, “ Alfred Hitchcock . . .orchestrates the system of looks (via framing, editing, camera movement) in such a way as to produce an uneven distribution of knowledge among the various characters and the spectator. Not only does this create Hitchcock’s trademark suspense, but it also produces a cinematic world in which every action is potentially deceptive or revelatory and thus must always be interpreted. This move toward infinite interpretation (“terminable or interminable”) is what aligns Hitchcock’s work so neatly with psychoanalysis . . .” In this course, each week we will explore one basic psychoanalytic concept in conjunction with one Hitchcock film for which that concept provides an exemplary point of entry to understanding. The weekly readings will be a mix of psychoanalytic essays, and film scholarship on the works, especially focusing on the queer theoretical approaches to Hitchcock’s work. Weekly topics and films will include: 1. The unconscious / Shadow of a Doubt; 2. The symptom / Rope; 3. Identification / Fantasy: Rear Window; 4/ The Imaginary / Rebecca; 5/ The Symbolic / North by Northwest; 6/ The real / Psycho; 7/ The death drive / Vertigo; 8/ Jouissance / The Birds; 9/ The sexual relation / Marnie.

(This course may count towards the Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Literature and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may count towards the American Studies, Digital Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies and Advanced Graduate Study Certificate programs. This course may also count as an elective or for literature credit in the Master of Arts in Writing and Fine Arts Prose and Poetry programs.)

Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as perversity, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and vampirism!  (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Melodrama has shaped American mass culture since the nineteenth century. With its penchant for stark oppositions, heightened emotions, and hyperdramatization, the melodramatic mode has played out across disparate media, from literature and theatre to film and television, leaving no genre untouched. This course will explore the longstanding alliance between Hollywood cinema and melodrama, focusing on how it has influenced the way we make sense of gender and race relations and envision their intersectionality. We will begin by analyzing D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation (1915) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), a bold response to Griffith and the first existent feature by a Black director, and then focus on key films across the decades, including Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), Tod Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), and Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016). While reading texts from film and visual studies, feminist/queer theory, and critical race theory, we will ask questions of representation, ideology, affect, social justice and change. Last but not least, we will consider films that have problematized the Hollywood model, from John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) to Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993). (This course may count towards the American Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies.)

Why do people not recycle, even when offered monetary incentives? Why has the 'War on Drugs' failed? Why don't people enroll in 401(k) savings plans? Why is the market for knock-off brand-name goods and pirated DVDs/software so large? This class will use behavioral economics to investigate questions related to policy formulation, implementation, framing and failure. With readings from current experts in the field including Ariely, Thaler, Kahneman and Frank, this class will discuss both behavioral economic theory and its application in policy areas such as immigration, the environment, health care, international relations and (of course) the national economy. Counts toward all specializations.

Why do people not recycle, even when offered monetary incentives? Why has the 'War on Drugs' failed? Why don't people enroll in 401(k) savings plans? Why is the market for knock-off brand-name goods and pirated DVDs/software so large? This class will use behavioral economics to investigate questions related to policy formulation, implementation, framing and failure. With readings from current experts in the field including Ariely, Thaler, Kahneman and Frank, this class will discuss both behavioral economic theory and its application in policy areas such as immigration, the environment, health care, international relations and (of course) the national economy. Counts toward all specializations.

This class examines several prominent international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. The course will focus on both policy controversies and broader theoretical analysis. Students will address why each organization was created, its institutional structure, and current problems confronting each organization. The effects of international organizations on world politics will also be examined. Some of the key questions that will be addressed are: How do IOs foster interstate cooperation and state compliance? How do IOs shape state interests and identities? Why do IOs often fail? How should we think about the pathologies of IOs as global bureaucracies? How do IOs influence NGOs and their strategies? Particular emphasis will be placed on students' ability to think critically, both about the nature of problems that face states as well as development of global governance mechanisms.

Counts toward the Global Policy specialization for students admitted fall 2012 and after. Online students admitted prior to fall 2012 may take this elective in lieu of 411, 419, or 452. All on-campus students admitted prior to fall 2012 may take this elective.

This class examines several prominent international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. The course will focus on both policy controversies and broader theoretical analysis. Students will address why each organization was created, its institutional structure, and current problems confronting each organization. The effects of international organizations on world politics will also be examined. Some of the key questions that will be addressed are: How do IOs foster interstate cooperation and state compliance? How do IOs shape state interests and identities? Why do IOs often fail? How should we think about the pathologies of IOs as global bureaucracies? How do IOs influence NGOs and their strategies? Particular emphasis will be placed on students' ability to think critically, both about the nature of problems that face states as well as development of global governance mechanisms.

Counts toward the Global Policy specialization for students admitted fall 2012 and after. Online students admitted prior to fall 2012 may take this elective in lieu of 411, 419, or 452. All on-campus students admitted prior to fall 2012 may take this elective.

The goal of this course is to give students the knowledge, tools, and confidence to understand, craft, and advocate for incentives and economic policies. Students will be able to apply macroeconomic principles, draw conclusions about the relevance of economic incentives, and explain in substantial detail the current debates covering such topics as economic systems, international trade, monetary policy, global resource allocation, and development economics. While a working understanding of undergraduate-level microeconomics is helpful, and it is recommended students take 404 Microeconomics first, the content of this course will cover these areas in sufficient detail for students without any background. Counts toward the Global Policy specialization. Previously titled International Macroeconomic Policy

The Fall 2017 section starts at 6:30pm and runs until 9:30. The class will not meet Oct. 5 and Oct. 12.

The goal of this course is to give students the knowledge, tools, and confidence to understand, craft, and advocate for incentives and economic policies. Students will be able to apply macroeconomic principles, draw conclusions about the relevance of economic incentives, and explain in substantial detail the current debates covering such topics as economic systems, international trade, monetary policy, global resource allocation, and development economics. While a working understanding of undergraduate-level microeconomics is helpful, and it is recommended students take 404 Microeconomics first, the content of this course will cover these areas in sufficient detail for students without any background. Counts toward the Global Policy specialization. Previously titled International Macroeconomic Policy

The Fall 2017 section starts at 6:30pm and runs until 9:30. The class will not meet Oct. 5 and Oct. 12.

Why do cities persist? The last decade has seen a resurgence in the economies of some major cities -- especially the global cities of this course's title -- while other post-industrial cities continue a long decline. Cities are now being transformed by the information revolution much as cities were transformed by the industrial revolution two centuries ago. In this course, students will develop an understanding of urbanization, including how city form differs depending on when a city experiences its greatest growth, and how globalization produces increasing disparity (in many ways) between rich and poor. The course will cover concepts in economic geography, transportation, environment, governance, development, poverty and inequality, and limits to growth. Readings will include recent studies on the effect of globalization on cities, including Saskia Sassen's Cities in a World Economy.

Elective for on-campus students. Core course for the MPPA distance learning program for students admitted before fall 2012. Elective course for students admitted fall 2012 and after.

Effective instructional design begins with an understanding of the learning process. In this course, students will learn behaviorist, cognitive, constructivist, and social learning theories, and their relationship to instructional practices and course design. Factors that influence learning, such as learning styles, motivation, and engagement, are also explored.

This course is an introduction to the ideas, principles, and techniques used in educational media or systems, focusing on both the theoretical and practical aspects of design. The process of design will be guided by various design frameworks, and informed by current research on the design and study of learning environments. Students will learn how to assess interactive learning models and solutions. They will also learn how various technologies can affect the behavioral, cognitive, and social dimensions of learning.