CMLT

Animals that sometimes prey on humans occupy critical niches in individual imaginations, global culture, and natural ecosystems. While our interactions with these creatures have shifted drastically over the millennia, only recently—thanks to factors such as ecological collapse and urbanization—has the majority of the world’s population come to live without the threat of predation. This class draws on a variety of disciplines to interrogate the relationship between people and the mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish that sometimes eat us. We will read epic literature from the Middle East and Europe; examine news reports from 18th-century France and 21st-century Florida; explore the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of tiger-hunting in India; and navigate ways in which ecology, paleontology, and other scientific disciplines can inform humanistic inquiry.

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.

Apocalyptic fantasies are alive and well today – in beach reads and blue-chip fiction; in comic books and YA novels; in streaming TV shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and ironic arthouse cinema. These apocalyptic fantasies follow well-established scripts that often date back millennia. Apocalypse scripts allow their users to make sense of the current crisis and prepare for an uncertain future. The course will be divided into two parts. The first half will be devoted to texts, art, and movies that dwell on the expectation of the end and narratively measure out the time that remains. We will begin with examining the biblical ur-scripts of an apocalyptic imaginary, the Book of Daniel in the Old and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, as well as Saint Paul’s messianism in the Letter to the Romans; and then move on to medieval apocalyptic fantasies of the Joachim of Fiore and others; and end with the apocalypticism underlying the religious reforms of Girolamo Savonarola and Martin Luther. The second half will focus on life after the apocalypse — the new freedoms, and new forms of political life and sociality that the apocalyptic event affords its survivors. Readings will include the political theory of marronage, capabilities, and neoprimitivism; literary theory of speculative fiction; and post-apocalyptic narratives by Octavia Butler, Jean Hegland, Richard Jefferies, Cormac McCarthy, and Colson Whitehead. Readings and discussions in English.

Designed for graduate students in the humanities, this course begins with fundamental texts on ideology and the critique of capitalist culture by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, Wilhelm Reich, and Raymond Williams, before moving to Marxist aesthetics, from the orthodox Lukács to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin) to the heterodox (Brecht), and concludes with contemporary debates around Marxism and imperialism (Lenin, Fanon, and others), and Marxism and media, including the internet.

MA and PhD students in humanities disciplines only. Not suitable for the MAPSS program or for Social Science PhDs.

This course provides an introduction to queer theology by examining, most broadly, the relationship between theology, theory, literature, and art. We will explore the foundations of queer theology in queer theory, especially queer of color critique, in order to identify and analyze some of the controversies that have arisen in queer theology and queer religions. In particular, we will pursue a sustained interrogation of the intersection of race, capitalism, and cultural production and encounter theological and literary texts, including but not limited to speculative fiction, poetry, film, and photography, so as to imagine the theological potential of literary and artistic production.

Graduate Students interested in this course should email Prof. Kris Trujillo (kjtrujillo@uchicago.edu) copying 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 instructor & administrator for a spot in the class or on the waiting list.

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it,” wrote Heidegger. In the year 2020, the year of COVID-19 and mass physical lockdown, this statement is more valid than ever. Keeping current events in mind, in this course we will pose anew the question concerning technology and go back to the First and Second Industrial Revolutions when humans first came into intense contact with machines and restructured life and literature around them. We will trace the ecological, economical, and emotional footprints of various machines and technological devices (automata, trains, phonographs, cameras) in major European literary works from Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Zola's La bête humaine (1890) to Luigi Pirandello's The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1925), while inquiring into the nature of technology and what it means to be human through key philosophical texts from Plato to N. Katherine Hayles.

This course provides students with an opportunity to think race both within a psychoanalytic framework and alongside rituals of loss, grief, and mourning. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic formulations of mourning and melancholia have shaped theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Turning to Asian American, African American, and Latinx theoretical and literary archives, we will interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how, if understood as themselves rituals of grief, might psychoanalysis and the writing of literature assume the role of religious devotion in the face of loss and trauma?

During these uncertain times, this course explores the uncertain boundaries between illusion and reality, dream and waking, form and emptiness, and self and other. We will traverse these paired themes of Buddhist significance as they arise in Chinese literary works from another epoch of uncertainty: the twilight of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Our starting point will be the Heart Sutra’s famous assertion that “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Accepting the uncertainty this statement inspires, we will investigate this and other distinctive indistinctions through works of fiction, drama, autobiography, and poetry. Along the way, we will examine (and call into question) the distinction between Buddhist and literary concerns: What makes literature suitable for reflecting on Buddhist ideas about being? What insights does Buddhist philosophy grant into how we engage with literature and other forms of mediated experience? No prior knowledge of Chinese language or history is necessary. All materials will be provided by the instructor and read in translation (with Chinese available upon request).