Undergraduate

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Larger Than Life explores the concept of the indelible—that hard-to-define quality that makes an element of fiction “jump off the page” and become instantly memorable. We’ll explore hyperbole, duality, idiosyncrasy, narrative voice, the sublime, and many other techniques, then put them into practice to make our own fiction “larger than life.” 

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. To participate in this course, students should have reading proficiency in a language other than English.

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured into different commodifications. In this course, we will look at depictions in contemporary literature of the experience of being online, of engaging with various platforms, and the mindsets that it creates. At heart in this course, we are looking at the ways in which fiction attempts to mimic, critique, mock, or even take pleasure in another medium, and what fiction is able to do by co-opting another medium. We may read works by Jaron Lanier, Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Ben Lerner. As an antidote to all of this thinking about onlineness, we will also engage in creative writing exercises, some inspired by or made possible by being online.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities while exposing them to a range of creative works spanning fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and film that engage what has come to be called the Anthropocene era of unprecedented human intervention into ecosystems (despite challenges to that terminology that we will address). We will read foundational texts in environmental perception and activism in dialogue with writing surrounding urban landscapes. We will then open onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. Students will be asked to conduct fieldwork on an environmental theme of their choosing (climate change, energy economies, watershed issues, air quality, pandemics and the management of wild animals, species extinction, etc.) that can contribute to experimentation with short creative pieces in several genres, and to produce one polished entry to a collective atlas of the natural world in Chicago. Students are encouraged to ponder possible topics of interest prior to the first class. We will do at least one field trip together to explore Chicago waterways, and will participate in a Chicago-wide exposition devoted to water in conjunction with the Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab. Artists studied may include John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ed Roberson, Lisa Robertson, Allison Cobb, Juliana Spahr, Rita Wong, Fred Wah, Brandon Som.

"I love the thingness of things," Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. By concentrating on poems that are rooted deeply in the material world, this workshop will focus beginning poets on the art of description and the importance of image-making. Poets will to attend to the intensity of the sensorium, grounding their art in the material world as a strategy, albeit a counterintuitive one, to access the emotional and abstract.

In this course, we'll design and develop a world and characters determined by a series of what if? questions or propositions based on the implications of real world events and climate crises. Students will independently compose stories and then we'll workshop them for our shared-world anthology.

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, their world, and their worldview to life. Doing that effectively requires more than imagination and knowledge of our genre and craft. It begins with cultivating a personal understanding of human beings and asking ourselves what it means, on the page as in life, to be a character and to have character. And more deeply, even when our characters are nothing like us, it involves looking inward at who we think we are as an individual and how we see the world and our place within it. In this course, we’ll examine the various lenses all of us use, for better or for worse, to define ourselves and others: like the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of desire. And in our readings in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (as well as creative writing exercises and presentations), we’ll learn how to approach characterization not only as a vehicle for storytelling and self-expression, but as an inquiry into our own humanity and the kinds of people we’re most interested in bringing to life in our work. 

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

“Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape” is how Raymond Queneau famously described the members of Oulipo, a group of international writers and mathematicians founded in France in 1960, and which still thrives today. The group’s aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. (“Oulipo” is an acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.) In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will take a hands-on approach, with students composing new drafts each week. We will experiment with a variety of methods, ranging from traditional verse forms to concrete poetry; creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; documentary and research-based poetics; site-specific and ritual poetry; incorporating film, sound, image; and a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). As we workshop students’ drafts, we will discuss topics including inspiration, authorship, form, copying and plagiarism; poetry, activism, and social justice; and the idea of “fact” in poetry. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.