Master's in Literature Program Specializations, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch

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.

Scott Durham

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.

Corey Byrnes

“New wave” is a ubiquitous but imprecise term that has been applied to various trends in cinema that emerged around the world beginning in the mid-1950s. As an historical term it is used to delineate shared styles, themes, and techniques that define certain national and international film movements. As a kind of descriptive shorthand, it has been applied more broadly to movements that abandoned conventional narrative techniques in favor of experimentation with the cinematic medium, while also confronting social and political problems specific to the context of production. Thus, the inaugural French New Wave has lent its title to film trends in Britain, Iran, Japan, Hong Kong, and many other locations around the world. This course offers a critical and historical introduction to one of these latter-day new waves, the “New Taiwan Cinema,” which emerged in the early 1980s as a reaction against contemporaneous commercial cinema. Through a careful investigation of the work of the three most important representatives of this “new” cinema—Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Edward Yang —this course will consider not only the experimental form and social consciousness of the Taiwanese New Wave but also the specific economic, social, and institutional structures—national and transnational—that shaped it. We will also study critical and theoretical writings on this cinema to better understand both the Taiwanese cultural milieu that produced it, and the broader global film culture of which it has become such an important part. Whenever possible, we will place individual Taiwanese films in dialogue with the Asian and European film cultures that influenced them as well as the films and filmmakers that they have influenced. No previous knowledge of Chinese or Taiwanese literature, culture, language, or history is required. All readings are presented in English and all films are subtitled.

Domietta Torlasco

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.

Ivy Wilson

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.

Kasey Evans

The ghost was a familiar figure on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Hamlet's father, whose spectral appearances set both the plot and his more pensive son in motion, is only the most famous. In other plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ghosts materialize to give warnings, to reveal secrets, or to redirect the emotions of living characters. The revenant from beyond the grave was such a fixture in the plays of this time that some writers and actors began to make fun of it, suggesting that to evoke the supernatural in such a manner was simply weak theater or childish superstition. But in their parodies of ghostly agents, players and playwrights also conjured up phantoms of the plays that had preceded theirs, recalling their plots, gestures, and words and replaying them in memory. Shakespeare's fellow playwright Ben Jonson sneered at one such company devoted to exhuming mouldy plays from their deserved graves, "they say, the umbræ, or Ghosts of some three or four Plays, departed a dozen years since, have been seen walking on your Stage here." Such memory-or ghosting of past performance-could be productive as well, when it allowed a play to draw on the memories of its spectators. Shakespeare's theater was multiply haunted. In this course we will look at several early modern plays that represent ghosts and ghosting, including Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; Marston's Antonio's Revenge; Tourneur's Revengers Tragedy; and Shakespeare's Richard III, Macbeth, and in particular Hamlet; selections from plays by Ben Jonson and dialogues by Henry Chettle; and secondary materials by Marvin Carlson, Margreta de Grazia, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Greenblatt, and Alice Raynor; and we will study several performances of Hamlet to see what ghosts from earlier productions remain in play.

Kasey Evans

This seminar will bring together literary texts from the English Renaissance, ancient and Renaissance theories of spectatorship and catharsis, and academic criticism and theory on contemporary horror fiction and film. Through these juxtapositions, we will interrogate the con- and divergences between contemporary horror fiction and film and horror-adjacent examples of early modern writing, including revenge tragedies, treatises on witchcraft and histories of its punishment, and fantastical and “real” accounts of monsters. Building on Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, we will ask: what psychological, cultural, or civic functions are served by the publication and performance of horror, in the early modern period and in our own? What sorts of events, language, and ethical crises characterize early modern horror, and how do they compare to the preoccupations of contemporary horror? What was the allure of horror literature in early modern England, and what is its allure now? Texts may include: Aristotle, Poetics; Henricus Institor, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches); Marie de France, Bisclavret (English translation); Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror; William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus;Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; James I, Daemonologie; Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster; Ambroise Paré, excerpts from On Monsters and Marvels (English translation); Fortunio Liceti, On Monsters: Their Causes, Nature, and Differences (English translation).

Angelo Restivo

This course will take as its primary focus films which are explicitly about the filmmaking process (and in one case, about video and television). On the one hand, these films give us a historical record of how the cinema has thought about itself: as art form, as social-cultural force, and as industrial practice. In addition, though, these films provide us with a perfect entrée to explore the key issues of film theory. The films to be studied are Keaton, Sherlock Jr.; Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera; Wilder, Sunset Blvd; Fellini, 8-1/2; Godard, Contempt; Minelli, 2 Weeks in Another Town; Fassbinder, Veronica Voss; Clarke, Portrait of Jason; Cronenberg, Videodrome; and Lynch, Mulholland Drive. The issues in film theory that will be paired with the appropriate films include spectatorship (including gendered and queer spectatorship); modernity / montage / Frankfurt School; the formal system and Fordist practices of classical Hollywood; realism and aesthetics of the art cinema; Brecht and counter-cinema; psychoanalysis and apparatus theory; theories of melodrama; decolonization and cinema; and postmodern aesthetics.

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch

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.

Ivy Wilson

With attention to some of the most important American writers, this course focuses on different forms of aesthetic experimentation that authors use to invent and reinvent the novel. In addition to analyzing the ways writers blur and reframe the boundaries of the novel by engaging other sub-genres of literature (including, for example, visual art, drama, and non-fiction prose), the course will investigate how themes of desire, history, and science are not only represented within narrative fiction but how they transform and render metamorphic the novel’s very form. Writers may include Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Samuel R. Delany, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo, Philip Roth, Mark Danielewski, and Alison Bechdel.

Scott Durham

We 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 expanding our focus to include New York and Los Angeles as privileged spaces where a "culture industry" becomes both the producer and the subject matter of literature and film. We will begin by examining 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 Breton and Aragon. We will then go on to 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). But we will also see 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, giving rise to new social spaces and new forms of mythic and realist narrative. Authors read will include such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, André Gide, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. We will also discuss films by such directors as Raoul Walsh, Mark Sandrich, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, and Michael Haneke.

Jane Winston

In this course, we will immerse ourselves in Climate Fiction, a relatively new literary genre that takes up the challenge of climate change in the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which human beings significantly impact the geological and ecological systems of the planet. Climate fiction asks: how might climate change transform the world in which we live? How might we intervene today to mitigate its effects? What will the world be like in the future, and what will it mean to the human beings who will live in it? The alternative visions of the future elaborated in Climate Fiction literature often combine characteristics of science fiction with elements of other genres, including the romance, the thriller, and the adventure tale. In addition to inquiring into the issue of how and with what literary means these novels attempt to imagine the future, we will also seek to understand: if and how literature imagines a process as widely taken to be “unimaginable” as is climate change, whether fiction might further human knowledge or awareness or if it might modify human actions in the world. We will engage in close and detailed reading of some of the most compelling contemporary Climate Fiction novels and learn to write critically about them. Our readings will be chosen from: Richard Powers, Overstory or Bewilderment, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake or The Year of the Flood, Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl or The Water Knife, Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140, or 2312, or The Ministry for the Future.

Nasrin Qader

How do we read a rich, ancient, and worldly work such as A Thousand and One Nights today? With the translation of A Thousand and One Nights also called in English Arabian Nights, from Arabic into French by the Orientalist Antoine Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, something of a revolution occurred in storytelling technique and theories of literary writing. Story upon story, without author or place of origin, these tales were told night after night by a cultured and courageous young woman named Shahrazad to a king bent on killing her in the morning. The cosmopolitan context of the stories together with the innovative strategies devised by its singular narrator not only suggested new directions for literary conception and writing in the West, the translation and the acclaim it received drew the attention of the literary establishments in the Arab and Islamic world as well. The Moroccan writer, Abdelfattah Kilito tells us that until the event of this translation and its subsequent success, this work had received little attention in the Islamic world because it was considered a popular genre and thus not worthy of literary consideration. This class is dedicated to the legacy of this remarkable work not only as a technique of storytelling and a source of cultural and literary reference for so many writers, but also as a site of critique by contemporary readers.

Domietta Torlasco

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).