Arts Core Courses

This course will examine this genre from its beginnings in ancient and medieval literature (eg in epic, chivalric, and pilgrimage lit), to the modern road novel, travelogue, and buddy film. We will explore why this form is so essential to the storytelling imagination, and the ways we might adapt it to our own needs today.

This studio course introduces students to essential graphic design skills and concepts. Through a series of hands-on assignments, we’ll explore how graphic information—type, image, composition, and layout—shapes the way we communicate and understand the world. Students will experiment with accessible tools like photocopiers and laser printers, and work through the phases of the design process: from research, conception and ideation, to sketching, evaluation and the development of form, to final execution and production.

“It’s very boring to talk about winners,” Umberto Ecco once said. “The real literature always talks about losers.” In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely central characters around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as selected poems, films, and an illustrated novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories driven by shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of “loser lit,” to be workshopped by the class. All are welcome. Expectations will be very low.

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” The short story label, however, often feels imperfect, since it covers such a broad swath of literary forms. While micro- and flash-fiction renditions can resemble poems, longer prose narratives often press into murkier territories such as that of the novella or the connected collection. Through readings and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters alongside newer literary voices, breaking down their work not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of narrative craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which any story can be conveyed with economy, precision, and power.

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.

From 19th century penny dreadfuls to the more recent explosion of podcasts and documentaries, true crime has long endured as a popular narrative genre. Yet, despite the genre’s popularity, there is contention around its potential exploitation of victims, romanticization of violence, and lurid positioning as “entertainment.” This course aims to critically examine the narrative tropes, appeals, and language of the true crime genre by engaging with works of true crime fiction, including both works of fiction based on “true” events (such as Underneath by Lily Hoang, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and My Men by Victoria Kielland) and entirely fictionalized works that develop themselves as convincing True Crime facsimiles (such as Defiance by Carole Maso, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh). The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and a project wherein students compare and contrast two alternate “versions” of a true crime story.

In this course, we will study the range of aesthetic possibilities in concept-driven, procedural, aleatory, constrained, and avant-garde poetry. Questions of authorship, emotion, creativity, politics, imitation, and craft will be shifted by readings from Diderot and Mallarmé, the Oulipians, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, ritual-based poetics, and postconceptual/digital poetics, among others.