Spring 2027 Graduate Courses
NOTE: All students who wish to take graduate courses must pre-register with Dr. Ian Cornelius, Graduate Programs Director at icornelius@luc.edu or (773) 508-2332.
Section: 001 #4248
Instructor: Knapp, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
Th 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
This course will explore the theory and practice of textual criticism through the example of early modern drama. Focusing on what it means to establish a scholarly “text,” we will study competing rationales for the basis of textual authority, the range of material evidence available to the textual scholar, and new challenges raised by the prospect of digital texts and the preparation of digital editions. The course will cover a broad range of work done under the umbrella of “textual studies”—from descriptive bibliography to book history and electronic publishing. The primary aim of the course is to convey the importance of textual scholarship to the interpretation of literary texts. The workload for the course will include readings in textual and editorial theory and criticism as well as hands on project-based work with texts. For the term project students will be asked to demonstrate how a textual approach to a particular work can resolve or complicate a critical interpretive problem.
Topics in Literary Studies (ENGL 430)
Section: 001 #4247
Instructor: Kerkering, J.
3.0 credit hours lecture
W 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
Character, Identity, Persona
This course examines how notions of character, identity, and persona variously inform US fiction and poetry produced during the long nineteenth century. Secondary readings may include Marjorie Garber’s Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession, Susan Manning’s Poetics of Character: 1700-1900, K. Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity, Gerald Izenberg’s Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Identity, Robert C. Elliot’s The Literary Persona, and Sharon Cameron’s Impersonality: Seven Essays. Primary authors addressed may include Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Foster, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, John W. DeForest, Henry James, Mark Twain, Ellen Frances Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Theodore Dreiser, Ezra Pound, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen.
17th-Century Literature (ENGL 457)
Section: 001 #4808
Instructor: Lecky, K.
3.0 credit hours lecture
T 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
“Basic Training: How Endless War Forged the Early Modern Canon”
The English seventeenth century was marked by incessant conflict, as civil wars joined with England’s dynastic campaigns in Europe and colonial hostilities in Africa and the Americas to pull people and resources into an industrial military complex that at times seemed all consuming. Consequently, the authors now considered essential reading in early modern literature (many of whom participated in and were abused by these conflicts) used war as the lens through which to examine the true nature of a human society capable of the most inhumane atrocities. This course will survey the canonical texts produced and read by soldiers of fortune, medical practitioners, and victims of this endless war. We will explore how writers such as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Cary, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, and Aphra Behn translated their personal experiences of widespread conflict into meditations on the limits of humanity and the vagaries of fate, in an era when war preyed upon individual bodies and bodies politic alike.
Section: 001 #4809
Instructor: Bradshaw, M.
3.0 credit hours lecture
M 07:00 p.m. – 09:30 p.m., LSC
Modern Poetry and the “Little” Magazines
Most of the modernist American poetry we now read in anthologies first appeared in experimental “little magazines” published in Chicago, New York, and London. These magazines were the vanguard of modernist literature and art. Where mass produced commercial publications like Scribners and Good Housekeeping reached for a broad audience, relying more on ad revenue pitched at readers than the readers themselves, and where storied literary magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review acted as arbiters of good taste, appealing to a genteel readership, the little magazines prided themselves on challenging and upsetting readers. Mostly free from commercial pressures, they featured controversial forms, such as free verse and stream of consciousness narrative, and controversial topics, such as free love, suffrage, birth control, workers’ rights, and pacifism. This seminar will take a periodical and material studies approach to modernist poetry, using The Modernist Journals Project, a digital archive, to explore poetry in little magazines between 1912 and 1926, focusing in particular on Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, The Little Review, The Egoist, The Crisis, and The Dial. How did modernist poems appear to the readers who first encountered them there? What do the advertisements and editorials, for instance, tell us about the magazine’s intended readership? How did some of the poets who appeared in these magazines become canonized and others not? We will use Digital Humanities tools and methodologies alongside more traditional bibliographies, histories, and contemporary criticism of British and American periodical culture to explore these magazines and contextualize them in aesthetic and political networks. Students may produce a traditional seminar paper, a digital project, or an archival project, drawing on local resources such as the Poetry Foundation, the Newberry Library, the University of Chicago Special Collections, and the Chicago Public Library’s Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature.
Post-Colonial Literature (ENGL 487)
Section: 001 #3744
Instructor: Mann, H.
3.0 credit hours lecture
TTh 04:15 p.m. – 05:30 p.m., LSC
From the Classics to “Terror” Texts
This course will take a dual approach to the field of Postcolonial Studies. The first half of the term will focus on the origins and key developments of postcolonial literature, with a view to investigating three of its major emphases: texts that have come to be regarded as classics in the field (for example, the works of Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, and Nadine Gordimer); issues of Orientalism, gender and subalternity, hybridity, and nationalism, raised by theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, and Arjun Appadurai; and challenges to postcolonial studies on the grounds of its multiple definitions, its interdisciplinary reach, and the politics of its institutional location, among others.
The second part of the term will examine the portrayal of modern global (ethono) nationalist politics and of the concurrent rise and proliferation of terrorism in texts by non-western/diasporic writers to foreground the perspective of the western Other(s). The topics we will study in this segment will include the following, among others:
(a) how the historical experiences of mid-twentieth century and twenty-first century post-colonialisms, nationalisms, diasporas, immigration, and globalization intersect with the contemporary geopolitics of terror
(b) how postcolonial/global writers have created new narrative forms, literary frames, and alternate realisms that respond to and embody the multiple meanings of contemporary (alternate) South Asianness, Britishness, and Americanness, as well
as diaspora, nationalism, globalization, immigration, and terror, and
(c) how non-western/diasporic/immigrant writings both narrativize/theorize and function as alternative spaces of belonging
In doing so, we will examine the links between the centuries-old history of colonialism and imperialism and twenty-first century ethno-nationalisms and terror; the parallels between Self and Other, between the perpetrators and targets of terror; and the connections between global migration and global capitalism on the one hand, and the proliferation of nationalisms and fundamentalisms—both in the west and abroad—on the other.
Notice: The information provided here, including course descriptions, instructor assignments, and meeting times, is for planning purposes only and is subject to revision at any time. Students should consult LOCUS for the official and most current course schedule.