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"The City vs. the Country: Literature of Nature and Urban Spaces" Taught at the Newberry Library, Chicago. At least since Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1779) reinvented "nature" and denounced urbanism in the 18th century, there has been no shortage of literary texts that advocated "getting back to nature" - cities are crowded, dangerous, dirty, and kill the soul. Yet despite Rousseau and his aftermath, literature that celebrates urbanism has also flourished - cities are engaging, exciting, and inspire humans toward their greatest endeavors in art and science. We will engage this conflict through the examination of works from authors such as Rousseau, Wordsworth, Arthur Schnitzler, Rimbaud, Charles Beaudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and others. We will also analyze literature specifically focused on Chicago, including Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003). Our classroom will be in the New Newberry Library and students will draw on the vast resources of the library to write their own research papers focusing on our topic of city vs. nature in literature since Rousseau. At the same time the city of Chicago will act as our alternate classroom with multiple field trips and assignments that require us to explore, engage, and analyze America's "second city," one of the most dynamic and compelling urban spaces in the world.

Beginning with the US-Mexican War (1846-1848) and moving into the 21st century, this class takes a historical approach to studying the genres, mediums, and themes that Mexican American writers and artists have advanced and complicated over more than a century. In particular, we will focus on the way that political spaces (land, institutions, identity) are contested and affirmed through folklore, myth, and popular culture in addition to more “official” venues such as law and history. We will also read scholarly articles and studies that provide well-researched perspectives on the most pressing concerns that emerge from the texts we study including race, sexuality, and gender; the politics of artistic representation; and cultural preservation.

This course analyzes poetry from Africa and all reaches of the diaspora (the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia), at the intersection of politics and aesthetics, history and the present, in the figure of the black poet. Selections include include ancient epics, slam poetry/spoken word, hip-hop, griot/griotte performance, sonnets, prose poetry, and selections from the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power, and Black Consciousness eras.

In CO200 Discovering the Unconscious, students take a look at some of the major psychoanalytic perspectives of the late 19th and 20th centuries on the concept of the unconscious in theory, case studies, and fiction. An emphasis is placed on unconscious processes as they relate to the formation of identity. Students will read the works of such renowned authors as Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut and Yalom. Several films, such As Ordinary People and Lars and the Real Girl will be watched.

As oral traditional poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey are preservers of Bronze Age and archaic lore, and the locus of the creation of classical Greek culture and predecessors of European epic. Reading the Old Masters is one pleasure of the class, but Professor Cramer’s class will take the oral epic much further--looking into the poetics, sociology, psychology, the formula, themes, type-scenes of the genre, and come to understand the various receptions of Homer throughout history. Originally written in ancient Greek, students will be reading in English with attention to the formal Greek diction and the problems of translation. However, students who know Greek will read parts of the original text. Finally students will study what has made the Homeric epic such classic texts in the modern world, with sharp thought about the implications of war poetry—war and homecoming.