Autumn

This course is a combined research seminar and curatorial practicum with students co-curating an exhibition of artists’ books. 

Following World War II, visual artists took up the book as an artistic medium, experimenting with and expanding the essential components of a medium that had remained unchanged for centuries. The results defied all expectations about traditional understandings of what constitutes a book, including the primacy of text and the use of paper, pages, and binding. This class will consider how books became visual and material objects to be viewed rather than read; made from modern materials such as plastics, concrete, or newspaper and in sizes as small as a square inch or as large as an over-life-sized wood construction; featuring unusual objects such as a sack of flour, a display shelf, or a comic book with stenciled holes; or prompting readers to actions with urban performance instructions or do-it-yourself watercolor kits. 

Drawing on (U)Chicago collections and a recently gifted private collection, students will work on a fall 2027 exhibition in the Regenstein Library’s gallery, including researching artists, visiting local collections, selecting artists’ books, assessing conservation needs, writing object and section labels, and designing layout.

“Romanticism” refers to a broad movement in European thought and culture from the late-18th to the mid-19th century, a period of intense political, intellectual, and religious upheaval. Romantic writers are often portrayed as responding to the emerging “rationalization” of society by celebrating intuition, imagination, and nature. This image obscures a more interesting reality: Romantic writers drew from Enlightenment ideas, saw poetry and natural science as closely related, and held diverse views on issues of religion, reason, and art. They approached these topics rationally, as well as through dream visions, opium-eating, self-mythologizing, fragmentary texts, and pastoral lyrics.

In this survey course, we will read English and German Romantic writers to see how they grappled with these issues, and to pose our own questions. What is “nature,” and how should we relate to it? What roles do intuition, feeling, and imagination play in our understanding of ourselves, and the divine? Are secularization and rationalization forces to contend with, or preconditions for a new spiritual freedom? How do atheists, pantheists, Christian radicals, and orthodox believers fall under the same label, and to what extent did they really share artistic and spiritual aims? How did Romantics engage with non-European religious ideas? We will read, among others, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, de Quincey, and Novalis.

This course is a proseminar in critical theory for first and second year PhD students in Comparative Literature, offering in depth study of key areas in theoretical research on a rotating basis. This year the focus areas are poetics of cruelty, affect theory, and critical future studies.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses.

We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

This course examines well-being and illness from transnational, decolonial and intersectional perspectives. Together, we will explore the various ways in which fiction and film can help challenge and expand our notions of what it means to be sick or healthy in complex circumstances. Some guiding threads: To what extent is illness an intensely personal experience, and to what extent does it draw in those around us - family members, friends, partners, medical practitioners, legal counsel? What renewed valences do concepts of autonomy, care and responsibility take when overshadowed by the spectre of disease? How might we ethically and productively relate the medical humanities to broader entangled concerns such as migration (both legal and clandestine), gender, class, race, community, queerness and neocolonialism? Beyond the justified responses of fear and anger, what are other ways to relate to death and mortality - ways that are infused with creativity and resilience? How does human "health" relate to planetary and interspecies well-being?

While journalists and historians work to uncover facts and present accurate accounts, the public imagination is captured by compelling stories, regardless of their accuracy. Where the first course in this sequence, Media and Power, focused on how media impact the spread of information, here we will consider how stories attract audiences and shape understanding, and thus inform the political arena and shape history. As in Media and Power, we will examine recent and current Russian and American events. Each week we will focus on a set of critical opposing narratives that are motivating political orientation and action, asking how they inflected by political and ethical perspectives, how they capture attention, how they are being used to legitimate authority, and how they are incorporated into larger frameworks of historical and political interpretation.

Class members will participate in creating the list of topics for discussion, which will include at least one topic that emerges during the quarter so that we can observe as the story takes shape in real time. The list of possible topics will include: 1) Trump vs. campus protesters. What happened at the encampments at UChicago and elsewhere? We were right here—so what do we know? What stories were told at the time, and what stories are being told now? 2) The Ukraine War: How has Russia used the story of the Great Patriotic War (WW2) to explain its actions in Ukraine? How have terms like genocide and war crime been used throughout the conflict? 3) 1619 vs 1620: How is the master narrative of American history being revised, and how is the counterattack on this effort being justified? 4) Public Economics: What are the current stories of the national economy, and how are they affecting policy and public behavior (consumer confidence, etc.)?

Arabic poetry has been a major force in Middle Eastern societies since the seventh century when it became the elite culture of the Arabo-Islamic empire until today. This course focuses on poetry from the "Golden Age of Islam" during the Abbasid period and especially on three famous poets: Abu Nuwas (d. 814), al-Mutanabbi (d. 965), and al-Maʿarri (d. 1057). While the emphasis will be on close reading of their poems (in Arabic), we will also discuss broader questions: How does this poetry reflect the world of the vast and quickly evolving world of the Islamic empire? How does it relate to its societies, political structures, and religious institutions?

What happens when postmodern fiction refuses to stay post? What if the most radical act of postmodernism is embracing history? Pamuk's novels reimagine the past in ways that refuse to settle for the fragmented, chaotic world we are told to expect. This course explores a selection of key works by Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk, including his modernist novel The New Life and his postmodern masterpieces such as The White Castle, My Name is Red, and A Strangeness in My Mind. How does Pamuk use Istanbul in his work? Does it function merely as a setting, or does it take on the role of a character, with its history, contradictions, and politics reshaping the narrative? We will also engage with selections from Pamuk's essays on literary craft and his memoir Istanbul to better understand his layered relationship with this complex city. Pamuk's works offer a nuanced exploration of East and West, confronting the legacy of Orientalism while subverting postmodern conventions. How does he reframe techniques like metafiction, unreliable narrators, or nonlinear time to explore memory, identity, and the restless nature of modernity? We will also trace the evolution of Pamuk's style and examine how his growing global audience influences his self-presentation as a writer.

Ever find yourself getting emotional over a painting or a song? Or staring at a piece of art and thinking, "What on earth am I looking at?" What does art do to us? Is there a "right" way to experience it? Why do we feel the need to talk about artworks we have seen? In college classes and beyond, we spend a great deal of time engaging with and responding to literary texts and artworks. This course offers a chance to step back and reflect on the nature of those encounters-how and why we respond the way we do, why those responses might matter, and how we go about sharing them with others. While we will occasionally turn to aesthetic philosophy, our main focus will be on developing our own concepts and categories for understanding these encounters-the very event of experiencing art, how those experiences linger, and how they shape our social interactions. Readings will include fiction where characters are profoundly transformed by their encounters with art, essays on paintings and museums, poems drawn from music, travelogues that chronicle sustained exposure to art, ekphrastic dialogues between visual arts and poetry, and creative literary translations. Authors may include Ben Lerner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Ciaran Carson, Natasha Trethewey, and Mary Jo Salter.

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the “spiteful man,” the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the “accursed questions” at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.