Arts Core Courses

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

Instructor: Jake Fournier

In this Arts Core class, students will read some of the major literary innovators of mid-nineteenth-century America alongside their twentieth-century and contemporary inheritors. The course combines historical, critical, and craft emphases, asking questions like: What made the decade before the U.S. Civil War one of the greatest periods of literary experimentation in the nation’s history? What were the lasting consequences of this experimentation on American and world literatures? And, finally, what lessons can we glean from these historical writers for our own contemporary creative praxis?  Students should expect to encounter the central authors of the traditional American Renaissance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson) alongside both their defenders and detractors, including writers highly critical of the sort of literary canon formation that produced the American Renaissance itself and imagined it as an almost exclusively white and mostly male affair. For example, they will read Thoreau alongside both N+1 co-founder Mark Greif and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis, whose “Inhabitants and Visitors” reimagines the historical Black communities around Walden Pond. Other pairings include Dickinson with Susan Howe; Whitman with June Jordan, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and Bernadette Mayer; and Herman Melville with Paul Beatty and Marlon James. In the process, students will do weekly writing exercises in multiple genres and give one class presentation. 

How does writing enact grief? What words address the dead? Can an elegy convey the complexity of a person, resisting hagiography? We’ll begin this investigation of the elegy by looking briefly at some Classical examples before turning our attention toward a range of modern and contemporary elegies in poetry and prose. As we read, we’ll pay particular attention to literary structures and devices writers use to manifest absence and incarnate the dead in the body of a text. Writers studied may include Catullus, Sappho, M. NourbeSe Phillip, Rick Barot, Raúl Zurita, David Wojnarowicz, Solmaz Sharif, W.S. Merwin, Brandon Shimoda, Sarah Schulman, and Aracelis Girmay. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write critical and creative responses for group discussion.

In this core course, students will investigate connections between truth, art and beauty, by reading, watching, and writing works adapted from an historical record or "based on a true story." Weekly reading assignments include fiction, poetry, memoir, a graphic novel, and a film; students will be asked to write both critical essays and creative exercises that explore overlaps anddivergences between journalistic and artistic truth. Readings include works by Aristotle, Baldwin, Bechdel, Carson, Keats, Northup, and Rankine.

In this course, we’ll study the subgenre of immigrant literature, and through the examination of novel excerpts, short stories, poetry, plays, biographies, and memoirs, we’ll discuss the politics and aesthetics of canonized writers such as Amy Tan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Emma Lazarus, as well as lesser-known writers. From the outset, we’ll discern the characteristics that define immigrants, refugees, exiles, expatriates, and how they, therefore, might show up differently on the page. We’ll consider how authors create engaging characters, by articulating their characters’ evolving sense of identity in the face of conflicting notions of “otherness,” assimilation, and acculturation. To gain a better understanding of how authors shape compelling, and moreover, believable plots, we’ll examine the push and pull factors that situate immigrants differently in the new land, and how their host societies regard them. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the trends, features, and conventions of the subgenre, and in short exercises, you’ll write a story, poem, essay, or play about immigrants, informed by research, that utilizes the catalogue of questions, techniques, and practices that we identify. 

This course will consider brevity as an artistic mode curiously capable of articulating the unspeakable, the abyssal, the endless. Reading very brief works from a long list of writers, we will ask: when is less more? When is less less? What is minimalism? What is the impact of the fragment? Can a sentence be a narrative? Can a word comprise a poem? Our readings will include short poems, short essays, and short short stories by Yannis Ritsos, francine j. harris, Aram Saroyan, Richard Wright, Cecilia Vicuña, Kobayashi Issa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Franz Kafka, Joy Williams, Jenny Xie, Venita Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Valentine, Samuel Beckett, and others. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write critical and creative responses for group discussion.

This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We’ll track the sensual life of words—what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another—and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we’ll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our reading will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Case studies may include poetry and prose by Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Homer, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Ai, Elaine Scarry, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Hai-Dang Phan, Nathaniel Mackey, Durga Chew-Bose, Justin Torres, and Jenny Zhang. These writers will provide inspiration for your own creative experiments on the page. Students will be asked to lead one presentation during the quarter and to write short weekly pieces to extend the group discussion.

This course invites readers to reconsider Chicago as collage constructed through literary, journeyed, and virtual navigation.  We’ll examine work by writers and artists including Claude Dangerfield, Thomas Dyja, Eve Ewing, Bradley Garrett, Aleksandar Hemon, Richard Nickel, Mike Shea, and Chris Ware.  At what points does Chicago’s necropolis “peek out?”  Versus Walt Whitman, how does the artist’s eye retain defining power in the twenty-first century?  Is there such a thing as a “Chicago flâneuse or flâneur?”  In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the world’s second most closely observed city.” 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

Beginning with a notation of a “false Chicago” on Marquette’s map, this course works with texts as maps (and maps as texts) to explore the imagined, walked, and disappearing city. In particular, we’ll explore fictionalized versions of the city (i.e., Frank Baum’s Oz, the “White City” of the 1893 World’s Fair, the city as one stop along Sun Ra’s space of cosmic flight, etc.). Participants will examine area maps (i.e., Marquette's mapping of Lake Michigan, CTA maps, Richard J. Daley's proposed Aquaport, etc.), then build parallels within work by writers including Baum, Daniel Borzutzky, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Kenneth Rexroth, Salima Rivera, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, and William Sites. What serious geographic play echoes in Chicago’s architecture and urban blues? What points of transit mark the fictive Chicagos that emerge in the course’s maps and texts? How are poems, stories, and autobiography also markers of (dis)placement? In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the Paris of the Midwest.”

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

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 examine the radical potential of revision, drawing case studies from a range of writers such as Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Bishop, Dionne Brand, Li-Young Lee, Janet Malcolm, Lydia Davis, Terrance Hayes, Yiyun Li, francine j. harris, Bhanu Kapil, Shane McCrae, and Chase Berggrun. We’ll 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.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:00-4:50pm