Fall 2012
English 430: Advanced Writing Workshop
English 720: Modern Literary Theory
Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis
Feminist and Queer Psychoanalysis:
Participants look in detail at the work of two major authors who use a combination of psychoanalytic theory and queer theory: Judith Butler and Leo Bersani.
Students read two books by each of these authors, and do both close textual analysis and clinical application.
Spring 2012
English 817 Seminar in Critical Writing:
This course concentrates on revision rather than composition of first drafts. The assumption is that in revision the writer is working more on expression than on the ideas, more on the actual writing than on the thinking. Learning to revise is learning to see the difference between what you write and what you meant to write. Learning to revise is learning to read your writing as if it were written by someone else, not relying on your sense of what you meant. To that end, students will learn to comment on each other’s writing and then learn to apply those comments to their own writing.
Fall 2011
English 885 Seminar in Critical Theory:
Psychoanalysis, Gender, Sexuality
For more than a century, psychoanalysis has played a major role in theorizing gender and sexuality. This course will look at different psychoanalytic understandings of gender and sexuality, at psychoanalytic feminist theory from the 1970s and 1980s, and at the place of psychoanalysis in queer theory from the 1990s and 2000s. Beginning the course with Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, we will proceed to two influential feminist psychoanalysts (Luce Irigaray and Nancy Chodorow), and then on to two psychoanalytic queer theorists (Judith Butler and Leo Bersani). We will gain an understanding of psychoanalytic conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, grasping a major trend in feminist and queer theorizing as well as becoming familiar with the work of five widely influential theorists. As part of learning to think psychoanalytically, we will practice a mode of psychoanalytic reading, attending closely – listening -- to the dynamics and symptomatic moments -- the speaking -- in the theoretical texts we read.
English 192 Freshman Seminar:
Feminist Writing
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to feminist writing about literature, to familiarize students with the practice of “close reading,” and to work on students’ own academic writing.
Past Courses
Seminar in Academic Writing; Bourdieu; Queer Theory; Family/Photography; Sedgwick and Butler; Barthes; Kristeva and Spivak; Derrida and Spivak; Deconstruction; The Translation of Deconstruction; Pedagogy: The Question of the Personal; Freud; Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature; Contemporary French Thought in Translation; French Novel in Translation: Death and Sensuality, Detours of Desire, The Woman-Centered Novel; Feminism and the Family; Feminism and Deconstruction; Feminism
and Psychoanalysis; Feminist Literary Theory; Feminist Critical Theory; Academic Feminist Literary
Theory; Feminist Criticism and Literary Theory; French Feminist Theory; Feminism and Sexuality;
Introduction to Women's Studies; Capstone Seminar in Women's Studies