Spring 2009 English MA Course Guide

Spring 2009 English MA Course Guide - Chicago Campus

Department of Literature and Languages

408 Shakespeare & Film

Regina Buccola

(Th 2:00 – 4:29 pm )

Working from the premise that every production of a Shakespeare text – whether it be on stage or film – is an act of adaptation and interpretation, we will consider the myriad meanings that Shakespeare’s 400+ year-old texts can be made to convey. Given the fact that several actors and directors (such as Ikira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh) have adapted Shakespearean texts repeatedly, we will have occasion to discuss auteur theory as well, and the unique stamp of the individual director. Students will screen films independently, outside of class time; all assigned titles are available on campus in the Educational Technology Resource Center, as well as at commercial video rental locations and area libraries.

414 The Rise of the Novel

Bonnie Gunzenhauser

(M 2:00 – 4:29 pm)

The novel has been described as “a loose, baggy monster”—as a genre that can include almost any kind of character, setting, or event, no matter how outlandish. This description is certainly true of British fiction’s first century, which includes stories of love, the supernatural, childhood, society—sometimes all rolled into one. In this course, we’ll read history, criticism, and a representative sampling of British fiction written between 1700 and 1850 to discover where the kinds of fiction that we read today came from. We’ll look at how the novel evolved as a genre, at the socio-cultural issues the novel addressed, and how writers tried to capture the diversity of human experience during that time period. Likely authors include Defoe, Fielding, Burney, Walpole, Austen, and more.

453 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Literature

Gary Wolfe

(W 6:00 – 8:30 pm)

Fantasy is among the oldest of all narrative modes, and science fiction (according to most historians) is less than two centuries old. Yet they have a good deal in common: both celebrate the fantastic, both evolved as counter-traditions to the dominance of the realistic novel, both developed as popular genres with a significant overlap among writers and readers. In the past few years, the boundaries of these genres, like the boundaries between popular and literary fiction, have grown increasingly fluid. This class will focus on the current state of fantastic fiction during the last two decades, touching upon such writers as Neil Gaiman, Robert Charles Wilson, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Connie Willis, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Following introductory historical lectures, the course will develop through detailed discussions of specific stories and novels.

WGS 404 Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture

Ann Brigham

(M 3:00 – 5:30 pm)

This course is about pleasure and the politics of pleasure. It focuses on the ways that various forms of popular culture represent and define pleasure, especially in relation to larger cultural ideas about gender and sexuality. Examining a wide range of popular cultural forms, we will examine how they interrupt, challenge and/or reinscribe normative ideas about gender and sexuality. In addition, we will look at the ways that these forms both shape and are shaped by cultural definitions of gendered and sexual identities. Thinking carefully about the particular historical moment in which these texts were produced, we will analyze how popular cultural forms dramatize larger cultural conflicts. The course will focus largely, though not exclusively, on 20th-century popular cultural forms in the United States. It will also include the study of several different theoretical approaches to our subject matter. For their final projects, students may either develop a scholarly analysis of a pop culture issue or topic, or they may produce their own pop cultural text or event. NOTE: This is a graduate student-only seminar and may be counted as a literature elective.