Winter

"Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

Is philosophy literature? Is literature philosophy? What constitutes either of these seemingly disparate enterprises, formally and thematically, and what kinds of conjunctions can we imagine between them (philosophy in/of/as literature)? Can one translate these terms across cultures? Are they the sole prerogative of leisured elites, or can they harbor and cultivate voices of dissent? Above all, what does it mean to reflect on these categories outside the parochial context of the Western world? This course explores these questions by introducing some of the literary cultures, philosophical traditions, religious poetry, and aesthetic theories of the South Asian subcontinent. Students will encounter a variety of genres including scriptural commentary, drama and courtly poetry, and the autobiography. Readings, all in translation, will range from Sanskrit literature to Sufi romances and more.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.

This course familiarizes students with Black literary speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy. The objective of this course is to read Black speculative fiction alongside the historical contexts the assigned works speak to, as well as orient students to the radical re/imaginings of Black pasts, presents, and futures in the novels and short films at the center of the course. This class will pay particular attention to Black diasporic/international contributions to the genre. (Fiction, Theory)

From the activist literature of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement to contemporary fiction and poetry, this course explores the forms, aesthetics, and political engagements of U.S. Latinx literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Theoretical readings are drawn from Chicanx Studies, Latinx Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, as we explore Latinx literature in the context of current debates about globalization, neoliberalism, and U.S. foreign policy; Latinx literature’s response to technological and socio-political changes and its engagement with race, gender, sexuality, class, and labor; and its dialogues with indigenous, Latin American, North American, and European literatures. (Poetry, 1830-1940, Theory)

This course will examine some of the salient texts of postmodernism. Part of the question of the course will be the status and meaning of “post”-modern, post-structuralist. The course requires active and informed participation. This course fulfills the winter core requirement for first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.

The seminar will mainly read the poetry of Hopkins, but will also include theological and literary influences on him, such as Duns Scotus, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman. Requirements for the seminar include one oral presentation and a seminar length final paper.

Graduate students interested in this course should email the department administrator, Ingrid Sagor (isagor@uchicago.edu) by Thursday, November 12th  5pm with a brief note of interest, program year, and student number and will be notified of their admittance to the course by Monday, November 16th. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the administrator for a spot in the class or on the waiting list.

Susan Sontag closed her essay “Against Interpretation” calling for “an erotics of art.” Such an “erotics” would avoid doing anything to tame the work of art—allowing its hold on the imagination to grow, without trimming down its excrescences. Eros here stands for the irreducibility of the presence of art—the finite or even infinitesimal presence that imposes itself as irrepressibly fractal in its growth. Sontag was challenging us to make a certain kind of intellectual and affective space available—and this challenge has been reprised in recent scholarship that attempts to trace the state of the Humanities and some of its more eminent toolkits. Both philology and close-reading have been exposed as disciplinarian “disciplines” of the Humanities—long having abandoned the “erotic” power reading as a strategy of unfolding in favor of what might be termed strategies of containment. But this was not always the case. This course seeks to recover what then remains, peeking into the backgrounds of these disciplines as they stand at the crossroads of relevance and retreat—hovering just short of the intimate space of textual experience described by Sontag.

This course surveys key human rights texts (philosophical texts, literary works, and legal documents) of the 20th and 21st centuries. By reading global literatures alongside international human rights instruments, and by treating literature as an archive of ideas that circulate among a literary public invested in human rights, this course explores the importance of art and literature to legal and political projects and provides students with the opportunity to conceptualize the role of narrative for human rights advocacy and human rights imaginaries. We will chart the rise of the global human rights movement, beginning with the 1940s up to our contemporary moment, paying close attention to key human rights issues such as genocide, citizenship, enforced disappearance, detention, apartheid, refugee crises, and mass incarceration. Readings will include works by Anna Seghers, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt,  Jacobo Timerman, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rigoberta Menchú, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Antije Krog, Dave Eggers, and Albert Woodfox.