Arts Core Courses

According to Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It isn’t easy to argue with Brooks, yet there exist numerous wildly successful marriages between violence and comedy for which his maxim doesn’t fully account. In this class, we will explore such marriages—works by Helen Garner, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Laura Vasquez, Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, and more—and we’ll attempt to better understand their success. In the process, we’ll seek to develop a clearer sense of the twisting border that separates comedic from tragic violence. Students will read the assigned works closely, discuss them with rigor, and write violent and comic fiction of their own.

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.

Rivers move--over land, through history, among peoples--and they make: landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will be the topic and inspiration for our own creative writing, too. The goal for this course is to further your understanding of creative writing genres and the techniques that creative writers employ to produce meaningful work in each of those genres. You will also practice those techniques yourselves as write your own creative work in each genre.  Our weekly sessions will involve a mixture of discussions, brief lectures, student presentations, mini-workshops and in-class exercises. Most weeks, you will be responsible for a creative and/or critical response (300-500 words) to the reading, and the quarter will culminate in a final project (7-10 pages) in the genre of your choice, inspired by the Chicago River.

Beginning writers are often told to imitate ‘great authors’ to discover their voices. One way to reconcile imitation with originality is to copy works from literary history with a comic touch. In this course, students will satirize poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the history of Western literature to learn how art works. Parodying Stein’s portraiture illuminates the workings of literary mimesis; satirizing Lispector’s proliferating points of view adumbrates perspectival horizons in narrative; satirizing Tanizaki’s praise of shadows illustrates the mechanics of nonfiction polemic. Students will write imitations of literary works and a final mock-academic essay on parody and mimesis.

This course explores the characteristics and features of non-democratic regimes and tyrannies as they are reflected in literature and film: how and why they come about, what sustains them, why some resist them and others do not, and how/why they fall. Analyzing films, novels, and articles left in the wake of dictatorships like those of Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Rafael Trujillo, we will investigate the effects of absolute authority, how ordinary people react to repression, and the shaky transition from despotism to freedom. We will consider a diverse range of writers including Suetonius, Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a final creative piece. 

Ever since humans were drawing on cave walls, the ways in which we communicate meaning through stories has been evolving. This class will look at three forms of narrative—fiction, narrative poetry, and film—and explore their “grammars” (i.e. the modes, tools, elements of craft, etc. that a particular genre uses to convey meaning or achieve certain effects). How does film (a visual medium that offers a voyeuristic experience) tell a story differently than does fiction (which invites the reader to participate more in an act of shared imagination), differently than poetry (which condenses a story to its essences)? How is meaning or emotion conveyed differently through each? How do different grammars influence the effects they achieve? Students will look at and discuss various works of fiction, poetry, and film, read critical and craft-oriented texts, complete weekly reading responses, and write creative exercises. A hybrid creative/analytical paper will be due at the end of the course. 

The main goal of this course will be to understand the reasons, traditions and methods behind the practice of literary adaptations. From Joyce Carol Oates's "Blue Bearded Lover," to Anne Sexton's "Cinderella", to Angela Carter's "Wolf-Alice" and Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats," there are stories that continue to resonate through the centuries, and others that are made to resonate through the labor of new story tellers. Each text will be explored both independently and within the context of its adaptive genealogy. Students will be expected to read each text carefully, come prepared to actively participate in class discussion and respond to both academic and creative writing prompts based on assigned texts and class lecture.

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 to spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter—and will be asked to produce works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Authors to be encountered will include Percy Shelley, John Ruskin, Upton Sinclair, Audre Lorde, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Nick Drnaso, and more.

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured and become more commodified than ever before. 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 being online, and what fiction is able to do in dialogue with another medium. We may read works by Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, 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 invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic impulse.  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 degradation 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 Daniel Borzutzky, Barry Pearce, Sterling Plumpp, Ed Roberson, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.