Undergraduate

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.

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).

This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," and Mario Vargas Llosa’s "The Storyteller"; Victor Segalen’s "Stèles"; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei"; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, "Carmen," and the film adaptation "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s "The Lower Depths"; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, "The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants," and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, "The Overcoat" and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.”

This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love and sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from Asian languages as well as Asian films, geographically ranging from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity. This course is part one of a two-quarter sequence, with the second part offered in Winter Quarter 2021. Each quarter can also be taken separately. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.

This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. The course reflects on how these texts and films reimagine the past and the present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. To that end, we will consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Literary and cinematic works will be paired with theoretical readings that critically frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to exploring speculative fiction as a way of reading and interpreting the universe, we will examine its generic and aesthetic qualities across a variety of subgenres (Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, steampunk, climate fiction).

The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJV) set off a series of events and texts dedicated to the great influence of this literary classic—a vernacular English Bible from 1611. What is it about the KJV that has so obsessed readers and writers? How has it become part of and affected world literature? Are there competing ways of conceiving the biblical text in English literature? In this course, we will trace some of the KJV’s thematic and stylistic influences in global Anglophone literature; sometimes we will deal with direct allusion and rewriting, and other times we will study the possibilities of more tenuous links. In parallel to this work, we will problematize the KJV’s astounding centrality by: examining some pre-KJV literature and alternative early-modern and 20th century translations (particularly as these intersect with Jewish tradition); attending to subversive and postcolonial literary uses of the translation; and close-reading the political and ideological motivations behind certain forms of critical adulation. Texts examined may include works by authors such as George Peele, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.