Undergraduate

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey toward a lost land.” So wrote Janet Frame, a singularly talented author who was institutionalized at the age of 21, then saved from a lobotomy only because she won a literary prize. In keeping with Frame’s reflection, this craft-based course will focus on strategies for saving our lives through fiction writing: how to cultivate a convincing voice; how to extract strength from our writerly weaknesses; and, ultimately, how to forge a home for ourselves in our own words. Through a combination of creative exercises, we will explore and examine the craft components of strong, original fictions, including character development, descriptive detail, compelling dialogue, and rich sentences. We’ll also learn how to read the works of published writers for creative inspiration, mining texts by masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, Julio Cortazar, Sofia Samatar, and Yasunari Kawabata. Primarily, we will workshop original student writing throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers.

This workshop is for any student with a novel in progress or an interest in starting one. Our focus will be the opening chapter, arguably the most consequential one—for the reader naturally, but most importantly for us the writer. How might it introduce the people and world of the story, its premise or central conflict, its narrative tone and style? How might it intrigue, orient, or even challenge the reader and begin teaching them how to read the book? And if the opening chapter is our very starting point as the writer, how might it help us figure out the dramatic shape of our novel, its thematic concerns, its conceptual design? We’ll apply such questions to the opening chapters of an exemplary mix of novels—The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Vegetarian, Normal People, etc.—and examine what they are expected to do as well as what they can unexpectedly do. And as everyone workshops the first chapter (or prologue) of their own novel, we’ll consider ways of adjusting or rethinking them so that the author can better understand their project overall and build on all the promise of the material they have.

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue to research and respond to for the quarter—and will be asked to produce short works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Works studied will include the essays of John Ruskin, the poetry and prose of Fred Moten, the short stories of John Keene, the poetry and essays of Anne Boyer, the graphic novels of Nick Drnaso, the performative/visual poetry of Douglas Kearney and Cecilia Vicuña, and the translational poetry of Rosa Alcalà. A field trip will be planned in conjunction with our environmental writing, and students will be asked to make every effort to attend.

Note on enrollment: If you have a particular interest in or need for this course, please write Professor Scappettone directly at jscape@uchicago.edu with a brief statement of interest (including your major and year) so as to be added to the wait list.

This course will examine what is transfigured-tonally and imagistically, but also thematically and philosophically-when one approaches writing fiction through a Gothic lens. We'll treat the Gothic not merely as a pastiche or set of genre tropes, but as a specific mode of seeing and translating the world-of more accurately capturing the cultural, aesthetic, and personal vision of the author. Our readings will include some familiar classical texts as well as more contemporary and lesser-known works centered around London and its environs. We'll get a foundation in Romantic notions of the Gothic and follow these literary roots to how writers are employing it now, and then we will write and workshop our own "Gothic" scenes and narratives.

This technical seminar focuses on poems’ development of image through the work of urban writers. We will explore the lineage of urban lyric within the nineteenth century, then reflect on its development in the contemporary city. What impulse defines an “urban poetics?” What is urban lyric’s relationship with painting and photography? Do all city poems reflect one “city” in the end or is a more local impulse at work in cities as foci for writing? This course seeks to establish a solid, working basis in examining “image” and its lyric development through critical reflection and field work. To this end, we will work with a range of urban writers, including Paul Blackburn, Andrew Colarusso, Wanda Coleman, Kevin Killian, Frank O’Hara, Salima Rivera, Ed Roberson, and David Ulin. 

These days, the words inoculation and vaccination are used interchangeably, despite the fact that the English word inoculation predates Western vaccination practices by nearly a century. In this class, students will explore the concept of inoculation as a kind of alchemy, a melding of science and zeitgeist. We will study the perspectives of writers across various cultures, genres, and academic specialties as we examine the ideological roots and ever-shifting cultural significance of inoculation. We’ll look closely at selections from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Satius’s The Achilleid, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Richard Rodriguez’s Darling, Jamaica Kinkaid’s My Brother, and Eula Biss’s On Immunity, among others. Through class discussion, reading responses, academic papers, and creative writing assignments, we will discuss the relationship between concepts of protection and concepts of vulnerability, alongside the ways inoculation—of various sorts—has served as a hallmark of self-governance, a shoring up of community, and, of course, a medical mandate.

In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a wider range of Chicago communities. We will work to understand the method and politics of Oral History, and to gain facility in practice and written presentation. Oral History, the poetry of the everyday, the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. Learning to question, to interrogate, to experiment, to wonder and wander, to pay full attention, to construct and create—this is the foundation upon which to build an Oral History project of purpose and importance. We look for what happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened.

Wallace Stevens suggests that “The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used.” How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or “unformed” (l’informe). We’ll explore traditional and contemporary takes on a variety of forms, such as sonnets, odes, aphorisms, serial poems, and poetic collage. Students should expect to write exercises, submit new poems, contribute feedback on peer work, write short response papers, and submit a final portfolio.

Friday 12:30pm-3:20pm

“Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

Thursday 12:30pm-3:20pm 

The personal is political – that slogan of Women’s Liberation – has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics.

In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer.

Monday 2:30pm-5:20pm