Spring

This course examines the diverse ways in which love, sex, and desire are represented in Middle Eastern literatures from the seventh century through the modern period. With a focus on primary source readings (in English translation), we will explore love as a concept, affect, and practice as it pertains to all kinds of relationships: familial, romantic, pederastic, political—even the relationship between believers and God. We will pay special attention to how literary representations of love and sex are informed not only by genre conventions but also medical, legal, and philosophical discourses and consider the ways in which these texts can—and cannot—shed light on actual social practices and lived realities. Throughout our investigations, we will remain cognizant of how the Orient has been erotically fantasized in the Euro-American imaginary, while also noting how widespread modern notions of love and sex often fail to fully account for the modes of eroticism portrayed in the works that we will study.

This course explores the origins and evolution of the Italian American community in Chicago, examining its local presence and artistic, cinematic, and literary representations in the context of a global history of the twentieth century. For example, we will compare the current absence of Christopher Columbus statues in Little Italy to the permanence of the Balbo monument, an ancient column gifted to the city by the Italian fascist regime in 1933. These case studies will allow us to engage with broader issues, such as local and national Italian-American identity and how it is represented artistically. The course will be structured in three units: Past, Present, and Fiction. Past: Where did Italian Americans come from? What are the racial implications of this migrant community's existence in the United States? How does the local history of Chicago’s Italian Americans intertwine with the global history of the 20th century? Present: How does the city show traces of Italian American history? When and how have Italians assimilated? What does it mean for a migrant group to be assimilated? Fiction: What role have fictional representations of Italian Americans played in their assimilation? In what ways do representations of the home-country and of the migrant experience differ in texts by Italian authors and ones by Italian American authors? As a Chicago Studies class, we will also engage deeply with Chicago's urban landscape and local heritage sites.

Weird fiction is a form of (mostly) short fiction that emerged as a distinctive kind of writing in the late nineteenth century: strange landscapes, uncanny presences, historical beings encountered where they ought not to be. We will read representative works by some of the major figures: Algernon Blackwood, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Harriet Spofford. To frame our guiding question — what is so weird about weird fiction? — we will also read short fiction by significant precursors in European and American Romanticism: Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The course will explore continuities of thought between the German language tradition of the Robinsonade and Anglo-American postapocalyptic fiction. At present, our syllabus proposes beginning with Robinson Crusoe itself, with the following weeks dedicated to Arno Schimdt’s Dark Mirrors, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, and Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene. We will also dedicate a week to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, viewed in the Romantic period as an ancient precursor of Defoe’s work, and to the video game The Alters, possibly in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, or Octavia Butler’s Parable books. We will explore how the theme of recovered human capabilities interacts in these texts with ideas of mortalism, finitude, and attachment to place. All readings will be in English.

What happens when your "mother tongue" is a language you were never taught to speak or write? In the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), language is not just a tool of communication, but a contested territory. It is a space where French, Classical Arabic, Amazigh (Berber), and Darija (colloquial dialect) collide—and where identity is often shaped in the gaps between them. This course explores how North African writers and filmmakers navigate the tension between mother tongues and colonial languages, the body as a site of resistance, and the search for belonging. Through selections of memoir, short stories, and film, we will examine questions of language, identity, and displacement—from colonial history to contemporary diaspora in France. Readings include Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Mohamed Choukri; films range from The Battle of Algiers to recent works by Nabil Ayouch, Leyla Bouzid, and Mounia Meddour.

Note: Taught in English. Students registered for French credit will complete all primary source readings and written assignments in French.

In this course, we will read a selection of European crime fiction not only to be in a better position to judge Poe’s protestations, but more importantly, to familiarize ourselves with a selection of canonical writers as well as with the history and the characteristics of the genre. Why is crime fiction one of the most popular literary genres today? What is the relationship between the genre and society? We will consider – among other questions – the figure of the detective, the history of policing, different concepts of justice and guilt, the status of clues, indices, evidence. Materials will include Poe, Foucault, Ginzburg, Droste-Hülshoff, Christie, Doyle, Kleist, Eco among others as well as a selection of films. Readings and discussions in English.

“Frenemies” since the Middle Ages, the literary traditions of Italy and France illustrate the productive tensions that can arise from cultural and geographic proximity. This course explores practices of rewriting and adaptation across the Alps through the lens of gender and sexuality. We will focus on two periods of literary flourishing: the early modern age, when Italy led Europe into the era we now call the Renaissance, and the dawn of literary modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when France stood out for its innovations. We will address topics such as: how do female authors adapt works originally written by men? how do treatments of masculinity change when they move from one cultural setting to another? what role does sexuality play in realist genres? how does the post-modern representation of love and femininity change across French and Italian works in the twenieth century? Authors and works may include fabliaux, chansons de geste, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Orlando furioso, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau. Theory readings will include Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and others.    

Class will be conducted in English. Those taking the class for ITAL or FREN credit will read works and complete assignments in French and/or Italian, as relevant. Counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.

This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes in the study of literary texts and traditions from comparative perspectives. Topics covered will include literary history, textual criticism, translation (theory and practice), book history, genre theory (e.g. the novel), narratology, literature and colonialism, “world literature” and new philologies. We will discuss these different approaches against the intellectual historical background from which they have emerged but also with reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects, and literary texts from any language, time and geography are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with ‘texts’.

These two philosopher-teachers, Mengzi (Mencius) in 4th century BCE China and Epictetus in the 2nd century CE Greco-Roman world, both foregrounded an embodied ethics, and both were concerned with questions of living in harmony with nature, achieving freedom from external constraints, and dealing with the disruptive turbulence of passionate emotions. This course is a literary and philosophical comparative study of Mengzi’s writings alongside the Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek language or philosophy is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original language.