Arts Core Courses

Travel narratives remain a perennial tool for looking outward and understanding places and cultures unlike our own. We'll look at both historical and contemporary accounts of time abroad and explore how technological advances in communication and increasingly cheap and easy travel may be changing this most enduring of forms. Travel writing has often gone hand in hand with imperial and neo-imperial projects, but more and more the global "south" visits the global "north." We'll read poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by writers like Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Tayeb Salih, George Saunders, James Baldwin, and Natalia Ginzburg. We'll also consider journalistic accounts by Ted Conover, Katherine Boo, and Evan Osnos, as well as documentary films by Ai Weiwei and Joshua Oppenheimer. Students will write short responses over the quarter and synthesize our texts, along with a text of their choosing, into a culminating critical paper.  

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1–4 PM

What is love? How does it speak? To whom does it speak and how do we, let's say, begin to speak about it? "One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange," write Judith Butler, "uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their faulty vision." In this course, we will pursue this faulty vision with a vengeance, following love's many apparitions -- its voices, bodies, and forms -- through various discourses (poetry, philosophy, films, artworks, and so on) into ecstatic swirls of self-possession and apocalyptic visions of self-doubt. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion._

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_To The Reader).

"Walking is the human way of getting about." That's Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark. "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least-and it is commonly more than that-sauntering through the woods and over the hills and field, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." That's Thoreau. "In summer, I stalk... I have to seek things out." That's Annie Dillard. The textures of walking and writing are deeply woven together. In this workshop, we will walk and explore various theories and practices of walking approaching them from the angles of poetry, essay, aphorism, anthropology, architecture and hybrid writing. Including those already mentioned, we'll read Rousseau, Whitman, Lisa Robertson, Devin Johnston, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Basho, Rebecca Solnit, Bruce Chatwin, and Shawn Micallef. Though the classroom is our workshop, the environs of Chicago will be our experimental laboratory. Classwork will involve weekly walking requirements, topological writing assignments, and regular reflections, as well as occasional group expeditions and forays in which we will explore varieties of walking: sauntering, strolling, strutting, foraging, skulking.

If prostitution is the earliest profession, then crime is probably the earliest narrative engine. Crime has forever been a driving force behind story, a vehicle not only of plot but of human psychology, social exploration, philosophical investigation, and just plain old suspense. There's something about the darker side of human nature that_invites explorations of characters pushed to their extremes. Through analyzing the writing techniques and processes-such as point of view, scene, setting, voice, detail, irony, perspective, narrative structure and research methodologies-of such writers and poets as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oats, Denis Johnson, Carolyn Forche, CK Williams, Ai, Jo Ann Beard, Joan Didion, and Richard Price among others, students will examine how elements of crime in story can be transformed beyond simple genre. By examining writers' choices, students will explore how they may use these techniques to develop such mechanics of writing as point of view, poetics,_dramatic movement_and narrative structure in their own work. Students will turn in weekly reading responses and a final paper.

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Writing becomes an intertextual act of rebellion that calls into question the conventional, the canonical, and the sacred. Readings may include avant garde manifestos, erasure poetry, and poetry and fiction by Shakespeare, William Blake, Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Haruki Murakami and Georges Bataille. Students will be expected to write creative works in response to prompts, and write an academic essay. The prompts will form the basis of a final portfolio, which will be accompanied by an original essay.

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.

What is love? How does it speak? To whom does it speak and how do we, let's say, begin to speak about it? "One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange," write Judith Butler, "uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their faulty vision." In this course, we will pursue this faulty vision with a vengeance, following love's many apparitions -- its voices, bodies, and forms -- through various discourses (poetry, philosophy, films, artworks, and so on) into ecstatic swirls of self-possession and apocalyptic visions of self-doubt. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion._

Focused on the basic elements of craft, an examination of how fiction writers, poets, and journalists have explored Chicago. What defines the "voice" of a writer engaged with the city's life and hustle? Is the short story an "exhausted form" in American writing? Is there a "Chicago flaneur?" How does the city reflect the narratives of the "Rust Belt" or not? Is it even possible to be "objective" about the city? Writers for discussion here include Nelson Algren, Jeffery Renard Allen, Tina De Rosa, Stuart Dybek, Nate Marshall, and Carl Sandburg.

Do you believe in wizards? Are you a wizard? Then pack up your talismans, fetishes, and gamelans into the mysterious little satchel you carry at your side and get ready for some incantatory magic. We will investigate the figure of the wizard as an archetype, a literary symbol, a vehicle for fantasy, and as a commanding reality, while considering such things as A Wizard of Earthsea, the figure of Merlin, The Teachings of Don Juan, The Teachings of Ogotemmeli, Harry Potter, Aleister Crowley, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, Nathaniel Mackey, Jay Wright, and Ronald Johnson, as well as some other things too secret to reveal at present, including the nature of esotericism.