CMLT

Taking the astonishing fiction of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) as a starting point this course asks: how have realist fictions in general and socialist realism in particular been used to transform material and ideological realities? Can realism be revolutionary? Can it be dictated by the state? Grounded in historical context, our reading will venture into the afterlife and future of socialist realism. As philosophers across the world reinterpreted Platonov and other Soviet and socialist authors, what appeared to be gaps in intellectual and literary history now seem to be continuities of influence across borders. Reading Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Timofeeva, Malabou and others, this course traces the new and transnational socialist realism. Topics include ideology, gender, community, colonialism and decolonization.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We’ll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We’ll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required. (20th/21st)

This course investigates the shifting relations between Hebrew/Israeli literature and culture and Zionism as a political project, ideology, myth, and power structure. We will investigate multiple forms of cultural articulation, from built environment, to popular culture, to culture as a set of practices that govern everyday life, while devoting special attention to poetry – an institution valorized by classical secularist Zionism yet one often seen as standing in tension with Zionism’s contemporary religious-nationalist forms. What role has Hebrew culture played within the Zionist project, as bearer, expression, reflection, or refraction of nationalist ideology or myth? What are the relationships between culture’s putative forms of autonomy and forms of dissent, resistance, or alternative political vision in Israel and Palestine? How might this connect to Mizrachi and other ‘minority’ identities, and the roles of Palestinians as cultural producers within Israeli frames? What is to be learned about secular nationalism, Jewish secularism, post-secularism, religiosity, and political theology particularly in an era of what seems to be the rising hegemony of expressly religious Zionism.

This course offers space to consider in-depth one of the most fundamental, yet tricky aspects of stories: the imagined person, or fictional character. Some of the questions we will ask and try to answer together include: how do characters “work”—what makes successful characterization? How do authors depict characters changing over time yet remaining recognizably who they are? How are characters shaped not only by events in a plot but by the other characters that they interact with? We will investigate these questions across a range of textual genres and media, with a few major themes as our focus: the stability of characters across time or multiple texts (from figures in legend to Sherlock Holmes); character as moral progression or formation; and character relationality. We’ll consider the question of “relatability” and why it might (or might not!) matter and examine characters’ hierarchical relationships within the plot (e.g., major vs. minor characters, protagonist and sidekick, etc.) and how these intersect with the social hierarchies of these character’ worlds. By taking one key aspect of narrative and thinking about it together in sustained, serious, and playful ways, our goal will be to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of how stories meditate on personhood in all its complexity.

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?

This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of Jewish culture and society through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. We will ask: how do Jewish graphic novelists use the conventions and the grammar of this medium? How do they grapple with the proximity between caricature and comics, and with the legacy of racist caricatures? And what is the relationship between graphic narrative and memory culture? A central concept or figure we will keep returning to is the face, which is a central element in the aesthetics of comics and graphic narrative, and a key to its meaning-making.

South Indian author Arundhati Roy’s fascinating Booker-prize winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) catapulted her to unexpected world fame, leading to the book’s inclusion in many liberal arts curricula centered around postcolonial writing or so-called “world lit”. Written in English, the novel appears to be easily accessible to a global audience, but in fact the narrative contains dense layers of micro-regional, specific nuances that can easily escape readers and that warrant closer examination. In this course, we will read the novel closely with fresh eyes, pairing the fictional text with select secondary sources on gender, caste, class, history, communism, regionalism, vernacularity, migration, diaspora and trauma. No prior knowledge of India/South Asia is required. Students who wish to take this class need to be present from week 1 of the quarter.

This course examines the literature, history, and theory of global anarchist movements, as well as “proto-anarchist” writers and stateless movements with anarchist resonances. Theorists and historians will include Mohamed Abdou, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, Maia Ramnath, and Dean Spade. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature. The course will include field trips on Chicago anarchist history. 

This course introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern literary theory and to modern engagements with these theoretical interventions. We will explore how communities in the past imagined their practices of reading, writing, and interpretation—with especial emphasis on scriptural exegesis—but also what constituted a text, in the first place. How, indeed, were these practices foundational to the formation of communities and, in turn, to alterity? And what role do these literary theories and practices play in longer histories of "theory" and "critique." Staging dialogues between the past and the present, this course will ask what the political implications of designating an archive as "ancient," "archaic," "medieval," or "premodern" are in order to understand how and why the past is continually made and remade.

In this seminar, we will read short stories, ethnography, philosophy, and cultural/art criticism that obsesses over one ecological thing e.g., petroleum, axolotl, pecans, palm trees, or fungi. We will study how a seemingly simple living or non-living object can be a guide, source, muse, and catalyst for social, political, and cultural knowledge. How do thinkers mix scholarly critique with creative/generative practices like autobiography, ancestral storytelling, and speculative fiction to express the politics of the earth? In a final research paper intersecting literary art, activism, and critique, students will reflect on this question to frame their own ecological obsessions. The course literature will focus on themes like deep time, extractivism, futurity, the nature-culture divide, and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. We will close-read representative modern and contemporary works of ecological obsessions from Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.