Arts Core Courses

This course will explore a range of literary responses to the anthropocene period, understood as the geological age in which the prevailing economic and social paradigms of humans have conditioned changes in climate and the environment. We will begin with foundational texts in environmental perception and activism (John Ruskin's "Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century") and modernist works engaging with urban landscapes (William Carlos Williams's Paterson), opening onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. We will encounter poetry by authors such as Cecilia Vicu-a, Andrea Zanzotto, Robert Grenier, Ed Roberson, Kamau Brathwaite, Juliana Spahr, Marcella Durand, Rodrigo Toscano, and Evelyn Reilly; prose by Jonathan Skinner, Jed Rasula, David Buuck, and Dee Morris; and art by Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, and Mierle Ukeles, among others. Students will be asked, week by week, to produce short creative pieces in response to an environmental issue or debate that interests them.

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 The Reader).

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic form. 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 Michael Anania, Daniel Borzutzky, Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Philip Roth, and Erik Larson, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

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.

In this course we ask: How is historical material made-figured/disfigured by loss, desire, violence, suffering, exhaustion, death; by restlessness and the unbearable, abyssal, vertigo of living inside time? Where is the aperture of experience? The apparitions, which partition night, its many voices, bodies which are forgotten, and then remembered, why? What is the time of writing, of reading? This course goes a little back and a little forward between the two world wars, hoping to track an itinerary of history material, its incandescence, between situations of mourning and mystical experience. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion

What if we think of writing as waste management? "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now," said Samuel Beckett then, famously, but: What does this mean? In this course, we will explore the many ways in which writers have tried to answer this question. Alongside our readings, students will be asked to keep a notebook, with the instruction to keep everything that is for them a signature of thought. In this way, a pinecone or a piece of garbage is as much "writing" as anything else. Together, we will create an archive for the quarter, of everything that is produced and/or consumed under this aegis of making. This class is designed to pose questions about form and the activity of writing, in turn, the modes and methods of production not only as writers, but as persons.

Critical and Creative Work in Fact-based Narrative Forms

In this core course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between truth and art, by reading, watching, and writing works adapted from an historical record or "based on a true story." Weekly reading assignments will include fiction, poetry, memoir, and film, and students will write both critical essays and creative exercises that explore the overlaps and divergences between journalistic and artistic truth. Readings: Aristotle, Bechdel, Carson, Keats, Northup, and Zucker.

We often say of film adaptations: it’s not as good as the book. But what can we, as readers and writers, learn from that unsuccessful transition to the screen? And more intriguingly, what can we learn from the successful ones, the films that are just as good if not better than the original written work—or so vastly different that they become their own entity? In this class, we will be reading works of short fiction and also “reading” their film adaptations, focusing on this relationship between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen and what is both lost and gained in that transition. If filmmaking requires a different language than fiction writing, a different approach to things like character, plot, atmosphere, even thematic development, what can we learn from that approach that we can apply to our own fiction, even if we have no interest in making films? We’ll investigate this question in the work of writers like James Joyce, Andre Dubus, and Stephen King, and filmmakers like Hitchcock, Huston, and Wilder.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50 

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 García 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.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:30-4:20 PM

This course explores literary responses to Chicago's boundaries and sites of contention through fiction, drama, poetry, and literary journalism. We'll examine work by writers and artists including Saul Bellow, Lorraine Hansberry, Nate Marshall, Bruce Norris, and Studs Terkel. How does one map the city's conflicts along zoning ordinances, street corners, playgrounds, and rumors? What histories undergird the city's racelines? In exploring these aspects of the city, where does a writer draw the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, between verse and prose? Engaging these larger questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to "the city in a garden."

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