Arts Core Courses

To revise a piece of writing isn’t merely to polish it. Revision is transformation and yields an alternate reality. A new view, a re-vision. This course will start by tracking compositional process, looking at brilliant and disastrous drafts to compare the aesthetic and political consequences of different choices on the page. We’ll then study poems, essays, and stories that refute themselves and self-revise as they unfold, dramatizing mixed feelings and changing minds. We’ll end by considering erasure poetry as a form of critical revision. Our conversations will inspire weekly writing exercises and invite you to experiment with various creative revision strategies. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to share their writing for group discussion.

In 1917 the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the word 'ostranenie,'—translating roughly as 'defamiliarization'—to illustrate a concept that asks the writer or artist to see the everyday in new and unfamiliar ways. In fiction writing this means avoiding cliché while cultivating elements of surprise, the unexpected, the strange. It means the author offering a new perspective on something familiar, something surprising and, often, yes, a little weird. So what does it mean to follow the weird as a fiction or creative non-fiction writer? As a poet? How can we indulge that strange, uncanny, often suppressed side of ourselves in a way that not only serves a work of literary art but opens it up to new possibilities? This class will look at ways writers use defamiliarization and other techniques to create unexpected and sometimes jarring effects and will encourage students to take similar risks in their own writing. Students will view read various works of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, view films, and read critical and craft- oriented texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

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. 

Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names—whom we’ll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club—have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we’ll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you’ll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.

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 spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue to research and respond to for the quarter—and will be asked to produce short works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Works studied will include the essays of John Ruskin, the poetry and prose of Fred Moten, the short stories of John Keene, the poetry and essays of Anne Boyer, the graphic novels of Nick Drnaso, the performative/visual poetry of Douglas Kearney and Cecilia Vicuña, and the translational poetry of Rosa Alcalà. A field trip will be planned in conjunction with our environmental writing, and students will be asked to make every effort to attend.

Note on enrollment: If you have a particular interest in or need for this course, please write Professor Scappettone directly at jscape@uchicago.edu with a brief statement of interest (including your major and year) so as to be added to the wait list.

This course will examine what is transfigured-tonally and imagistically, but also thematically and philosophically-when one approaches writing fiction through a Gothic lens. We'll treat the Gothic not merely as a pastiche or set of genre tropes, but as a specific mode of seeing and translating the world-of more accurately capturing the cultural, aesthetic, and personal vision of the author. Our readings will include some familiar classical texts as well as more contemporary and lesser-known works centered around London and its environs. We'll get a foundation in Romantic notions of the Gothic and follow these literary roots to how writers are employing it now, and then we will write and workshop our own "Gothic" scenes and narratives.

These days, the words inoculation and vaccination are used interchangeably, despite the fact that the English word inoculation predates Western vaccination practices by nearly a century. In this class, students will explore the concept of inoculation as a kind of alchemy, a melding of science and zeitgeist. We will study the perspectives of writers across various cultures, genres, and academic specialties as we examine the ideological roots and ever-shifting cultural significance of inoculation. We’ll look closely at selections from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Satius’s The Achilleid, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Richard Rodriguez’s Darling, Jamaica Kinkaid’s My Brother, and Eula Biss’s On Immunity, among others. Through class discussion, reading responses, academic papers, and creative writing assignments, we will discuss the relationship between concepts of protection and concepts of vulnerability, alongside the ways inoculation—of various sorts—has served as a hallmark of self-governance, a shoring up of community, and, of course, a medical mandate.

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 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 Jeffery Renard Allen, Daniel Borzutzky, Bette Howland, Erik Larson, Bayo Ojikutu, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city’s rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts. 

Thursday 12:30pm-3:20pm

Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survives childhood has enough material to last a lifetime; 2020 Nobel Prize Winner Louise Glück wrote, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” In this course we will study portrayals of childhood in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. We will read work from Justin Torres, Barry Lopez, Mavis Gallant, ZZ Packer, Sandra Cisneros, James Agee, Tobias Wolff, and others, seeking to explore how these artists push past common tropes and oversimplified representations to convey the actual subtlety, pain, wonder, and intelligence of childhood perception. Through this framework we will consider narrative and cultural conceptions of innocence, agency, epiphany, and perspective. We will interrogate what artists mean to say when they write about childhood, what meanings are found or created—about childhood but also about adulthood, and about what has—or has not—been left behind. Finally we will consider the enmeshed roles of memory, imagination, and experience in the creation of art. Students will be responsible for short creative and critical writing exercises, a presentation, and a final project, and will be expected to participate vigorously in class.

Tuesday 9:30am-12:20pm 

Like film, comics are a language, and there's much to be learned from studying them, even if we have no intention of 'writing' them. Comics tell two or more stories simultaneously, one via image, the other via text, and these parallel stories can not only complement but also contradict one another, creating subtexts and effects that words alone can’t. Or can they? Our goal will be to draw, both literally and metaphorically, on the structures and techniques of the form. While it’s aimed at the aspiring graphic novelist (or graphic essayist, or poet), it’s equally appropriate for those of us who work strictly with words (or with images.) What comics techniques can any artist emulate, approximate, or otherwise aspire to, and how can these lead us to a deeper understanding of the possibilities of point of view, tone, structure and style? We’ll learn the basics of the medium via Ivan Brunetti’s book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, as well as Syllabus, by Lynda Barry. Readings include the scholar David Kunzle on the origins of the form, the first avant-garde of George Herriman, Frank King, and Lyonel Feininger, finishing with contemporaries like Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, and Alison Bechdel. Assignments include weekly creative and critical assignments, culminating in a final portfolio and paper.

Monday 9:30am-12:20pm