2017-2018

How to Read Like a Writer: When someone says that a piece of writing is "beautiful" what does that mean? Why do you sometimes sigh with pleasure after reading a short story? In this discussion class, we'll be analyzing short stories (including your own) to discover the many different ways writers are able to create beautiful, moving works of art. We will be using craft analysis, the historical basis for learning to be a writer and in the process, we'll read some playful writers such as Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, George Saunders and Kelly Link. We will also be reading about the philosophy of writing, as described by Cixous, Barthes, Bachelard and Wood. And best of all, you'll be presenting your own manuscripts for critique in this workshop-based class. By the end of the quarter, we will have honed our skills as attentive readers, developed as writers of clear, sophisticated prose, and read some fiction that will linger in our imaginations, hopefully for life.

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 The Reader).

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic form. In particular this quarter, we will examine aspects and depictions of a "fantastic Chicago." If Chicago is a city that dreams itself, what do its spaces of violence and environmental devastation say about that dream? Students will analyze and explore Chicago writers' work in prose and poetry, then develop their own creative responses, building connections to adopted critical approaches. To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Michael Anania, Daniel Borzutzky, Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Philip Roth, and Erik Larson, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

In this course, we'll work to write about people and communities who are in crisis, on the verge of crisis, or looking back at crisis. We'll discuss reporting, interviewing, oral history, historical research, working from photography and video, and the ethical situation of the writer. We'll read works by writers such as Liu Xiaobo, Elena Poniatowska, Claudia Rankine, Rebecca Solnit, Edwidge Danticat, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Philip Gourevitch, Arundathi Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rachel Carson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, on subjects including migration, exile, prison, totalitarian regimes, dissidence, questions of reparation and reconciliation after systematic violence, and environmental activism. Students will undertake significant research and produce a substantial essay to be workshopped in class.

If, as claims the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, "the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers," then how vast must be the space of poetry, which contains, after all, among its many streams, the verse novel? In this course we will explore some of the major and minor lyric tributaries that feed the sea of poetry, following such currents as the elegy, the ekphrastic poem, the dramatic monologue, and the eclogue, while considering the many branchings where they meet and overlap. We will read lists, letters, essays, and travelogues, and examine the endless ways generic conventions, in addition to formal ones, play a generative role in poetic innovation. Primary texts for this course will include weekly writing assignments alongside readings from a wide range of literary precursors.

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. While we won't ignore such fundamental elements of fiction writing as POV and narrative distance, characterization, setting, and dialogue, the class will pay special attention to the relationship between character arc and narrative structure, as well as the various kinds of conflict that act as engines for a story or novel. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

This advanced fiction workshop is for students who wish to continue to refine and develop their understanding of the art form. In our outside readings, we'll consider fiction writers who've written about music and musicians, including James Baldwin, Geoff Dyer, Thomas Bernhard, and Dana Spiotta. And we'll read works written by musicians, like Charles Mingus'_ Beneath the Underdog_and Rafi Zabor's_The Bear Comes Home._However, we won't limit ourselves to music as subject matter. We'll examine T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Ralph Ellison's_Invisible Man_as works profoundly influenced by jazz and improvisatory methods of composition, and we'll look at stories like "Rondo," by Susan Neville, which uses musical form as its structural principle. Finally, we'll consider experiments in what we might call verbal music by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ben Marcus. In our workshops, you are absolutely not required to write_about_music. Rather, the course will allow us to consider new methods of composition, both on the narrative and sentence level.

This class is for any student who has taken at least one other fiction workshop at the University and is interested in or already working on a novel. In the first few weeks of the course, we will read and discuss a selection of first chapters from some exemplary and diverse novels (like The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Age of Innocence, Lolita, and The Virgin Suicides) and discuss what a first chapter can-even should-do and the different ways that it can do these things. How do certain novels introduce its characters, its plot, its setting, its principle concerns and philosophies? How do they dive into the narrative in ways that intrigue or even challenge us? How do certain opening chapters teach us how to read the rest of the novel? These and other crucial questions will be addressed throughout the course, particularly during our workshops, where everyone will present the first chapter or two of their novel-in-progress. Along with the fundamentals of craft like language, characterization, plotting, and structure, etc., we will look at how we can adjust or rethink our opening chapters so that we can move forward more effectively with the larger project.

This course is an introduction to the linked practices of reading and writing poetry. We will begin with major stylistic experiments of the last century-finding common ground in familiar idioms. We will discuss significant topics, movements ,and styles of the period while identifying formal strategies. As we practice these strategies in our writing, we will move backward in time, to less familiar terrain-expanding our sense of context while increasing our technical repertoire and defamiliarizing ourselves with our assumptions about what poetry is, what it should do, and how it should do it. Weekly reading and writing assignments will challenge students to expand their technical repertoire. And the historical breadth of the course will give students an opportunity to explore the expansive field of poetry as a historically dynamic phenomenon. But the true educational experience will come in uniting these activities, when the student begins to read as a writer and write as a reader. This creative relation to the world of symbols will open them to the world as such and the world as such to their writerly minds. Ultimately, this is a course in inventive perception.