The Global City often evokes the imperial metropolis: New York, London, Paris. This course examines how the Global City, in the North and South alike, has been largely forged in the crucible of a colonial modernity which continues to shape and constrain the possibilities for contemporary urban experience. Reading some of the foundational theorists of urban space including Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, and Abdou Malik Simone, our primary focus will be on how various narrative forms - the novel, poetry, film, photography, digital mappings - can illuminate aesthetic itineraries, deviant mobilities, and urban imaginaries as they navigate, confront, or deftly avoid capture in economies of neoliberal development and necropolitical practices of securitization and counterinsurgency. Readings may include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the films of Yasujirō Ozu, as well as the circulations of graffiti, social media, and other insurgent narrative infrastructures on the streets of Cairo and the broader Middle East during the “Arab Spring.” No prerequisites. 1 unit.

Introduction to Middle English and close reading of selections from The Canterbury Tales Prerequisite: English 221 or 250 or consent of instructor.

Built on the histories of colonialism, slavery and indentureship, the Caribbean region has been at the heart of global movements of people, ideas and commodities for centuries now. This course will introduce students to the remarkable history of the region through close engagement with literary-cultural productions. In engaging with works by authors and artists of African, Indian and Chinese-Caribbean descent, we will think expansively about the very idea of Caribbean voices. What might we learn about the shared histories and legacies of both colonialism and anticolonial thought when we consider these voices together? Our discussion will be organized around themes of empire, neocolonialism, labor migration, racial intimacies and creolization. In addition to seminal works by Stuart Hall, Edward Brathwaite and George Lamming, over the course of this block we will have the opportunity to discuss texts such as The History of Mary Prince, The Last English Plantation (Janice Shinebourne), The Lonely Londoners (Samuel Selvon), A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid) and short stories by Edwidge Danticat and Ramabai Espinet. We will also watch documentary films such as Life and Debt (dir. Stephanie Black) and Dal Puri Diaspora (dir. Richard Fung) and discuss works by contemporary Caribbean artists in North America and Britain.

This course examines Chicanx/Latinx literature, including fiction, poetry, and critical essays through a comparative, regional, and interdisciplinary approach. Through our study of Chicanx/Latinx literature, we will underscore the relationship between place and identity for Chicanx/Latinx peoples of the Southwest, West, and Midwest; and we will consider how written texts reflect social, political, and historical contexts. We will read literature that crosses a wide temporal sequence to discuss how Chicanx/Latinx authors have, and continue to address, issues of colonialism, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course, we will also examine how the increasing U.S. presence of Chicanx/Latinx peoples is radically reshaping the American literary canon.

This course aims to explore how contemporary literature and culture help us understand the underpinnings and dynamics of activism and resistance in the contemporary world. Students will examine how literature has become a powerful tool for social change in the twenty-first century by engaging with various perspectives from multicultural contexts and by focusing on the Middle East and North Africa as a relevant example. As a region shaped by colonial encounters, recent civil unrest, displacement and religious violence, the Middle East and North Africa present complex forms of resistance and revolt. Contemporary Middle Eastern literature in Arabic and English highlights the shifting configurations of revolt and activism in a way that disrupts fixed paradigms and binary structures of scholarship. Close attention will be paid to the transnational and transformative nature of literary writing as a global form of change in the 21st century. The objective of this FYE course is to increase students’ understanding of literature as a medium of change in conjunction with contentious questions about identity, culture and belonging in the global present.

This course is an introduction to the study of the genre of romantic comedy, making visible its strong roots in the ancient world. We will read the stage plays of Menander, Plautus, Terence, and Shakespeare as we study the major film cycles of Hollywood romantic comedy of twentieth century-Screwball Comedy, Sex Comedy, Radical Romantic Comedy, The Nervous Romance, and New Romance. The course is designed to promote sophisticated textual work, more refined perception of critical issues, and clarity in writing about them.

This course will focus on how and what the material body can signify in medieval culture. We’ll consider a complex spectrum of medieval gender identities revealed to us through a variety of literary genres. We’ll explore medieval conversations about how narratives that focus on the body’s parameters, from essentialist to performative, might support representing sex, gender, and sexuality in different ways. In the course of our reading and discussions, we’ll encounter bodies torn between the demands of the physical and the devotional. We’ll consider monstrous, hybrid, comic, political, social bodies. We’ll ask ourselves what roles cross-dressing, mimicry, gender-ambiguation, and woundedness play in the creation of narrative selves. Ultimately, we want to consider how the dynamic variety of bodies represented in these literary works can give us access to medieval conversations about the forces underlying theological, political, social, and textual power. Texts will include: Marie de France, Lais (selections); Heldris de Cornuälle , Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance; Dante, Inferno (selections); Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (selections); The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Julian of Norwich, Showings (selections); Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (selections).

What does it mean to “call for change”? How does the relationship between “words and deeds,” “literature and activism,” and “social movements and action” challenge our understanding of art as an agent of change in the global present? Drawing on a diverse constellation of activist and social mobilizations from the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Nation of Islam in Chicago, to the Civil Rights Movement and Hashtag Black Lives Matter in the US, and other reform movements from the Middle East and North Africa, this course explores the understudied relationship between literary writing and social movements that have exposed multiple systems of oppression and discrimination. Using a comparative lens of analysis, the course investigates how reform literature from various transcultural traditions illuminate the global incentives and underpinnings of contemporary social movements, and the reasons behind their global rise or regional demise. Students will be exploring how literature operates as a form of civic engagement in response to inequities of race, gender, class and ethnicity. This course has a fieldwork component in Chicago as it will draw on the Newberry Library’s vast holdings on social reforms, activist organizations, literary manuscripts, and the library’s own history and involvement with social groups and activist writers in the Chicago area. Tentative Fieldwork: The fieldwork component of this course is still tentative and may not be part of this class due to the challenges posed by COVID-19. The Center for Global Education & Field Study will provide more details and advice about the possibility of this fieldwork in winter 2022.

There is virtually no critical dispute that the Russian master dramatist and short story writer, Anton Chekhov, was and is a key figure in the modernist movement in literature. That modernism is marked by a fierce objectivity, strict avoidance of doctrinaire or dogmatic convictions and beliefs, close attention toward people and things, no matter what their status or place in the world might be. Plot should never be imposed upon a story but rather arise from questions of character and close observation, and an absolute democratic attitude toward the simple, often ignored, objects and things in the world. Above all, stories must be as brief as possible, daring and original, written in a style both cryptic and highly suggestive, that which is omitted as rich and powerful (maybe more so) than what is included. No extravagant overblown or romanticized endings, but rather Chekhov believed in a world full of irresolvable mysteries which may be 'represented' but never fully understood, for what they are and not what we wish them to be. James Joyce proclaimed, perhaps speciously, in an interview with critic Herbert Gorman that before writing his very 'Chekhovian' collection of stories, DUBLINERS, he had chosen not to read Chekhov's because he feared the master's extraordinary influence. It was Joyce's purpose to write in a style of 'scrupulous meanness'. not actually unlike Chekhov's dedication to 'scrupulous' objectivity in his writing. The Joycean artist sits, a deus absconditus, in a corner, silently 'paring his fingernails' while his stories came to life, seemingly without any subjective agency. This is of course the very essence of the Chekhovian genius, the sense that these stories emerge from the world they belong to without the breathy presence of the artist looming over them demanding to be heard, to be recognized. Chekhov the realist genius sits like Joyce paring his fingernails, not preening his feathers. This indeed is one of the miracles of the objectivist strain of modernism practiced by Chekhov and Joyce (and later Ernest Hemingway in his early stories). It is the intention of this class to read these two great story writers both individually and in tandem with each other. Joyce may have (fecklessly) resisted Chekhov, but modern critics will have none of it, choosing to place these two geniuses in close proximity to each other, arguing both directly and indirectly for Chekhov's influence over Joyce, and for Joyce's influence over our readings of Chekhov. Few doubt Chekhov's reputation as the greatest of all short story writers, and few doubt as well the remarkable contribution James Joyce has made to the Chekhovian tradition. Close attention will also be paid to the worlds in which Chekhov and Joyce lived, the world of the czars and their repressions of freedom, and the presence of the English crown looming the impoverished captive nation of Ireland. Finally, these are short stories as great and powerful as any novel. Chekhov perhaps best c

A substantial amount of ancient Greek literature reveals an intense concern with the natural environment and our relationship to it. In this class, we will study the environments of contemporary Greece through the myths and literature of antiquity and how those enduring landscapes and seascapes continue to form the economic and cultural center of the country. The environments of the ancient Greeks were considered sacred, and the rugged mountains, explosive volcanoes, dazzling marble quarries, lush vineyards, and wild seas, gave rise to the myths and literature that characterize the culture. In this literature course, on the stunning island of Naxos, students will explore the intersections and interpenetration of myths with natural and built environments, with field trips to nearby Delos, Paros, and the breath-taking island of Santorini.

Introduction to debates on the Anthropocene—understood as the post-1760s era in which humans have become a geological force—and climate change in the environmental humanities. How has literary criticism engaged with the concept of climate, especially with the earth’s ‘deep time’ in which climate-patterns are legible? What are the limits and capacities of forms like the modern novel in this regard; what can literary sensibilities, and critical attentions to race and dispossession, bring to our understanding of climate reports and science writing? Includes field trips; the emphasis is on collaboration, critical thinking, and reflective writing. No prerequisites; all texts will be in English translation.

An introductory course to the rich literary heritage produced by Arab authors writing in English from the nineteenth century to the present, what is now called Anglophone-Arab literature. The course will trace the developments, achievements and trajectories of this emergent literature by examining the works of Arab authors residing in the United States and Britain.

Described by The New York Times as a “writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything,” novelist, short-story writer, and essayist David Foster Wallace dramatically changed the face of contemporary fiction. In this course, we will explore Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction, focusing both on his use of language and on the philosophical ideas that inform his writing. We will also critically examine Wallace’s often problematic depictions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in his works.

Dante Alighieri is the author of poems in the “Dolce Stil Novo” style, political essays, and reflections on the use of the vernacular. He is mostly known for The Divine Comedy, the story of a journey through the budello of the Inferno, the enormous mountain of the Purgatorio, and the infinity of Paradiso. Through vivid images and memorable verses, the vicissitudes of the pilgrim Dante offer endless insight, and severe critiques, on virtually every aspect of Medieval culture (politics, religion, theology, love, philosophy, geography, medicine, and more). Some parts of this extraordinary work remain valuable even in today’s world. What makes Dante a literary giant, still worth reading? What did he read, which themes interested him, and why? How did he discuss them? What is the system of punishment and reward he created in The Comedy? And what would Dante write about today? Through a mix of seminar and brief lectures, we will discuss these and many more questions, relatively to The Comedy, as well as to some of Dante other works. Together, we will also look for contemporary references to Dante, in Italy and beyond, for instance in novels, comic books, music, theater-dance, and documentaries. Class is in English but discussion in Italian is possible and encouraged.