What makes something autobiography, not a novel (and not an autobiographical novel)? How are we reading when we read true writing, writing that represents historical events, or documents real lives, or analyzes actually existing social circumstances, "as literature"? This class answers those questions by exploring and comparing a set of different nonfictional genres: beginning with the genres that seem most centrally nonfictional and that have generated long critical debates about what they are and how we should define them -- autobiography, and history) to genres that challenge our genre categories (the "nonfiction novel" and the "newspaper play") to modes of writing that challenge our questions about fictionality and truth altogether (propaganda). Throughout, we read texts that exemplify these categories primarily by challenging them, asking how and why writers experiment with the limits or borders of genres, sometimes so much so that new genres emerge. Primary readings include WEB DuBois' Dusk of Dawn (an "essay toward an autobiography of a race concept"), Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Freud's case histories, Charlotte Delbo's Holocaust testimonies, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Federal Theater Project's "Living Newspaper" plays, Jenny Holzer's Truisms, and Hilton Als' essays.

American literature of the 20th century invented new idioms for depicting the real and the unreal.  This class introduces students to a broad survey of American literature and the historical conditions it responded to by pairing texts that worked, in the face of unbelievable events and uncertain futures, to get closer to the real, developing modes of writing that were evidentiary, indexical, and documentary, with texts that found new ways of departing from the real, producing fictions that were not realist but surrealist, science fictional, "weird," parodic, and fantastic. Some examples of hyper / surreal pairings that move this class across the literary, media and pop culture of the 20th century include: reading the Stephen Crane's naturalist short story about race in the reconstruction era "The Monster" alongside HP Lovecraft's pulp cycle "The Call of Cthulhu";  Robert Lowell's Life Studies, a poetic autobiography of masculinity's Cold War decline, with Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, a fantastical "critical biography" of a Lowell-like poet written by the refugee prince of a fictional post-Soviet state; Angela Y Davis' historical and theoretical look back to Black women's role in the community of slaves in Women, Race, and Class with Octavia Butler's speculative approach in Kindred.

From the iconic militant images of the Black Panthers sporting afros and slinging rifles to the street theater of the Yippies, the melodrama of bra-burning, and the parodic extremity of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, the moment of the 1960s and 1970s is as synonymous with certain kinds of style as it is with what were then called the new social movements. Often, the former to the detriment of the latter – in critical and historical imagination, style contrasts substance; the counterculture’s tuning in and dropping out depoliticized the student movement, the Black Panthers’ star power has been so often critiqued as a radical chic that compromised seriousness of their revolutionary rhetoric, radical feminists might have been taken more seriously if they eschewed the melodramatic street theater of WITCH or the absurdly literal utopianism of Shulamith Firestone’s proposal for communal childrearing. This course examines these movements from the perspective of style first, taking it seriously as a core aspect of their political actions and their political thinking. Moving from the New Left, to Black Power, to radical feminism, students read a mix of historical texts, theoretical texts, and cultural objects, and in each unit collaborating to work on discovering primary sources in archives (either digitally or in real life) and creatively reframing ideas of the past in new ways for contemporary audiences. Primary readings include plays by the radical theater groups SF Mime Troupe and street performance by The Diggers, the speeches of Malcolm X and political theorizing of Robert F. Williams, the multimedia art of Faith Ringgold and Sun Ra's music and film, the feminist diagrams of Ti-Grace Atkinson and Valerie Solanas' absurdist play "Up Your Ass."

This is a two-quarter sequence designed to introduce students writing Honors Theses in Gender and Sexuality Studies to feminist, queer, and trans research methods across a variety or projects in the social sciences and humanities.

The Humanities Core at University of Chicago offers a generalist approach to great texts students and humanistic methods. My approach to the Reading Cultures Sequence highlighted introducing approaches to close reading through narratological questions (with attention to how meaning is produced by stories within stories and narrative versions) and to different forms and approaches to political criticism. The sequence is also designed to introduce students to college-level writing.