Technical Seminars

Some of the most compelling works of fiction are built around moral, social, and psychological dilemmas. Characters are set loose in a dark woods of ambiguity and conflicting values, where they reveal themselves (and their/our humanity) through the decisions they make, the actions they undertake. Such stories present a dramatized prism of arguments and resist easy "lessons." Rather, they end with a question mark that invites conversation between reader and narrative long after the story has ended. The challenge for writers, of course, is to avoid polemic, instead exploring this moral, social, and psychological terrain in a way that is even-handed and flows organically out of character. In this technical seminar, we will read fiction (by writers like James Alan McPherson, Graham Greene, Tayari Jones, and Cynthia Ozick, among others) that centers on an uneasy choice between moral positions. We will examine how the dilemma shapes conflict and plot, and, perhaps most important, how the writer invites the reader to get lost in a dark woods alongside the story's characters. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction. 

Tuesday 12:30pm-3:20pm

"At certain moments," writes Italo Calvino of his early literary efforts, "I felt that the entire world was turning into stone." Slowness and speed govern not just the experience of writing but also the texture of our fictional worlds. And this is something we can control. Sublimely slow writers like Faulkner or Duras can make time melt; spritely magicians like Bulgakov and Rushdie seem to shuffle planes of reality with a snap of their fingers. This seminar gathers fictions that pulse on eclectic wavelengths, asking in each case how narrative tempo embodies a fiction's character. Our exercises will play with the dial of compositional speed, testing writing quick and slow; alternately, we'll try to recreate the effects of signature texts. Weekly creative and critical responses will culminate in a final project.

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

The question of which point of view to use is central to any fiction writer beginning a story or a novel, but what does it mean to choose one point of view over another? Who is narrating the story and how does she present herself? Is the narrator speaking directly to the reader, as a character in the story itself? Is she hiding in the shadows, trying to be as invisible as possible? Does she have a god-like omniscience, narrating from on high? Or does she exist in a liminal state, narrating through both a character and herself simultaneously through “free indirect discourse"? How does a writer's choice of POV and narrative distance affect such things as voice, rate of revelation, and even worldbuilding? How does it affect the reader's experience? And how can a writer maximize their choice of POV to best serve the story they want to tell? Students will read various works of long and short fiction in different POVs to study their effects, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write weekly reading responses as well as creative exercises. Each student will also be expected to give a presentation and write a final creative / analytical paper for the class.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:00am-1:50pm

John Gardner said that the writer’s task is to create “a vivid and continuous fictional dream.” This technical seminar will focus on the role of detail in maintaining this dream. In this course we will deconstruct and rebuild our understanding of concepts like simile, showing vs. telling, and symbolism, asking what these tools do and what purpose they serve. Drawing from fiction and essays from Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Comyns, Zadie Smith, and others, students will practice noticing, seeing anew, and finding fresh and unexpected ways of describing. We will also examine what is worthy of detail in the first place, how detail functions outside of traditional scene, and the merits and limits of specificity, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Finally we will consider what it means to travel across a landscape of vagueness and euphemism as we search for the quality of “thisness” that James Wood claims all great details possess. In addition to assigned readings, students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises and peer critiques applying these lessons.

Day/Time: Thursday, 11:00am-1:50pm

This reading and writing seminar will focus on works of literature that have found shape and substance via documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, legal documents, medical records, and more. Students will analyze the causes and effects of the archival impulse on various craft elements, including: dramatic pacing, narrative persona, structure, and theme. Students will conduct independent research according to the genre of their choosing (from memoirs to novels and poems) and write short critical reading reports throughout the quarter. All the while, students will compose and/or compile their own archival materials for creative experiments that test the limits and possibilities of the craft.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 11:00am-1:50pm

"Do you like sentences?" Such is the litmus test posed to would-be writers in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. In order to understand narrative, we often go abstract—we summarize, we speak of structure, we read between the lines—yet everything that happens in fiction still happens in sentences. Some writers therefore make the sentence the cynosure of all effort: they dazzle. Others forge a rough music out of odd locutions and interrupted sense. In this course we'll study (and appreciate) such limit cases, as well as sentences of quieter grace, while reserving the most of our effort for sentences of our own, testing them against the manifold requirements of narrative: pace, logic, voice, and flow. In exercises and communal editing sessions we'll trim, paste, lard, complicate, rewrite, recast, and sometimes simply delete sentences by ourselves and others. And the more we relish what might seem like tedium, the more we'll prove that we do like sentences.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

Whether a memoir operates in the past or present tense, its narrator must reckon with some kind of unfinished business. While memory is the raw material of an autobiographical story, the drama exists inside the act of remembering, of reckoning with the “why” or “how” a narrator’s previous character or worldview has been transformed. In this class, we will study the structural, tonal, and representational possibilities of the "privileged perspective”: the vantage point from which a narrator writes across time and emotional distance from an experience, usually with the goal of resolution, revelation, or the conveyance of something that can only be approximated. We will close-read a number of contemporary memoirists that teach us how the privileged perspective works to drive forward a narrator’s agenda while upholding the reader’s stake in a story, exploring a multitude of interpretations through student-led presentations. Authors may include Jean-Dominique Bauby, Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian Gornick, Hisham Matar, Darin Strauss, and Joan Didion. In addition to one group presentation, students will be expected to track and analyze the functions of the privileged perspective via critical reading reports and technical writing prompts.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:20-12:20 PM

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft 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. He class will also be linked with the History Department’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab:

https://history.uchicago.edu/sites/history.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/ExoTerraImaginationLab-StudentAnnouncement.pdf  

(Participation in ExoTerra will be for extra credit and optional.) 

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40-12:40

What must an ending do? Tragic endings define the story that comes before; epiphany transcends it.  Some endings hardly matter at all—and that's okay.  Why do different stories demand different endings and how should we conceive of endings as we write towards them?  Our own stories go unfinished when we don't know how to end them—but what exactly is the nature of that failure?  Is the story like an equation that the ending has to solve?  Or might the tyranny of the perfect ending invite us to reconsider the nature of storytelling?  In this technical seminar we'll study fictions that end triumphantly (Austin), damningly (James), surprisingly (detective novels), and not at all (as in Kafka's unfinished novels).  We'll weigh the problems and politics of endings—the unexamined need for closure, the too-easy sacrifice of the heroine—and consider critical views from Aristotle, Benjamin, and Shklovsky. Creative exercises, such as writing new endings for set texts, will complement weekly critical responses and—in the end—a final paper.

Day/Time: Friday, 9:10-11:10