Spring

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing one to two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice._ Works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other's longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques-from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the "driving-in-the-dark" model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator's preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

This class will explore the intermarriage of the poem with the essay or book-length work of nonfiction. We'll explore a range of works that share with the poetic an attention to and innovative use of form, highly imagistic language, and the use of white space or occasional line breaks. At times such works employ elevated diction; at other times vernacular prosity. Some of these works leave off narrative, others care deeply about the telling of a story. In each case, we'll think about the intersection of form and content. Why this form for this story (or non-story)? What has been gained? What seems intentionally lost? Writers studied may include Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Patricia Hampl, Eve L. Ewing, Maggie Nelson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Lia Purpura.

This course aims to investigate, through a range of readings and writing exercises, various units of composition and the ways that they interact with each other in poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, caesuras, sprung rhythm, rhymed stanzas, and refrains. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary "units," such as the word (approached, for example, etymologically or connotatively), the free verse line, the variable foot, vers libre, serial form, the sentence (the "new" sentence, but also modulations of basic syntax), the paragraph, the page, and forms of call and response. This reading intensive course will draw from a selection of mostly modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and criticism. Students will be expected to submit weekly technical exercises, complete several short critical responses, write a longer essay, and submit a final portfolio of revised material.

This seminar looks primarily at fiction that blurs the line between imagination and experience. We'll look at highly memoiristic "autofiction" by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Renata Adler, Annie Ernaux, and Hitomi Kanehara. Authors who have addressed the same subjects in both works of fiction and nonfiction, including Kathryn Harrison and James Baldwin, will also be of interest to us. As will nonfiction novels and/or highly novelistic journalism by George Orwell and Truman Capote. This course is primarily intended for fiction writing students interested in exploring different approaches to autobiography or curious about the possibilities opened up by such genre bending works. But it will also appeal to any student interested in contemporary and 20th-century literature. The emphasis will be on critical writing, but there will also be opportunities for creative exercises and responses.

In conversations on literary craft, plot and structure are often used interchangeably. Yet, while plot refers to a causal sequence of events, structure is a broader term concerned with narrative patterning. This includes thematic layering, pacing, the order of scenes, perspective shifting, and more. In this course, we will examine structural arrangements in both canonical and contemporary works of fiction by Franz Kafka, Rachel Ingalls, Jenny Zhang, and others. We'll look at scene, repetition, listings, disruptive elements, digressive voice, seemingly shapeless storylines, and how these variables factor in creating structure. In every instance, we will look at how structure accommodates and naturally derives from the story, rather than impose itself upon it like some alien force. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and casually share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

In this class we'll study how writers define and make use of truth--whatever that is. In some cases it's the truth, singular; in others a truth, only one among many. Some writers tell it straight, others slant. Some, like Tim O'Brien, advocate story-truth, the idea that fiction tells deeper truths than facts. To get at the heart of these and other unanswerable questions we'll read writers who've written about one event in two or more modes. Nick Flynn's poems about his father, for example, which he's also set down as comic strips as well as in prose. Jeanette Winterson's first novel as well as her memoir, sixteen years later, about what she'd been too afraid to say in it. Karl Marlantes' novel about the Vietnam war, then his essays about the events he'd fictionalized. Through weekly responses, creative exercises, and longer analytic essays you'll begin to figure out your own writerly truths, as well as the differences-and intersections-between them.

What is love? How does it speak? To whom does it speak and how do we, let's say, begin to speak about it? "One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange," write Judith Butler, "uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their faulty vision." In this course, we will pursue this faulty vision with a vengeance, following love's many apparitions -- its voices, bodies, and forms -- through various discourses (poetry, philosophy, films, artworks, and so on) into ecstatic swirls of self-possession and apocalyptic visions of self-doubt. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion._

What is the temporality of the sea? Its consciousness? Where does it begin? Or end? In this course, we will consider the sea both as a figure in our literary, critical, visual, political, historical, and ecological imaginations, as well as a body in itself, iridescent and gleaming at the end of the world. We will look at practices of burial at sea, the infamous "wine dark sea" of Homer, the Middle Passage, the hold and wake of the ship, necropolitics, the concept of sovereignty and bare life, stowaway and asylum seekers, piracy and floating armories, eco-materialism, the post-human and alien worlds of our oceanic origins, the moon . . . and so on. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion. "And as you read /the sea is turning /its dark pages /turning /its dark pages" (Denise Levertov, from_To The Reader).

"Walking is the human way of getting about." That's Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark. "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least-and it is commonly more than that-sauntering through the woods and over the hills and field, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." That's Thoreau. "In summer, I stalk... I have to seek things out." That's Annie Dillard. The textures of walking and writing are deeply woven together. In this workshop, we will walk and explore various theories and practices of walking approaching them from the angles of poetry, essay, aphorism, anthropology, architecture and hybrid writing. Including those already mentioned, we'll read Rousseau, Whitman, Lisa Robertson, Devin Johnston, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Basho, Rebecca Solnit, Bruce Chatwin, and Shawn Micallef. Though the classroom is our workshop, the environs of Chicago will be our experimental laboratory. Classwork will involve weekly walking requirements, topological writing assignments, and regular reflections, as well as occasional group expeditions and forays in which we will explore varieties of walking: sauntering, strolling, strutting, foraging, skulking.