CRWR

This course explores the characteristics and features of non-democratic regimes and tyrannies as they are reflected in literature and film: how and why they come about, what sustains them, why some resist them and others do not, and how/why they fall. Analyzing films, novels, and articles left in the wake of dictatorships like those of Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Rafael Trujillo, we will investigate the effects of absolute authority, how ordinary people react to repression, and the shaky transition from despotism to freedom. We will consider a diverse range of writers including Suetonius, Shakespeare, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a presentation.

In this course, we’ll treat Africana Speculative Fiction as a critical case study, reading and analyzing novels, short stories, film, music, and visual art that posits alternative histories, surrealistic dream states, and fantastical futures in the context of the Black imaginary. We’ll navigate the many routes of the imagination—folklores, mythologies and cosmologies; histories and futures; politics, theories, and philosophies; and the material reality. You’ll be asked to read and analyze Africana speculative fiction in short papers. Then, using these works as models, Hyde Park will be our springboard for inquiry and investigation, and you will write your own speculative fiction that engages both your imagination and the material reality.

This course invites writers to reconsider the narration of Chicago’s shared and public spaces, but in a city re-imagined within the force of climate change. Borrowing from Kim Stanley Robinson’s title, how does one tell the story of “Chicago 2140?” Where does one narratively remap the boundaries between water and wetland in this redrawn city? Is there a “Chicago epic” of the city’s natural boundaries and constructed spaces? To these ends, we will examine work by writers utilizing impulses from journalistic account to the fictional energies of Africanfuturism and post-apocalyptic storytelling. These writers include Dan Egan, Eric Klinenberg, Ed Roberson, Ava Tomasula y Garcia and Fernanda Trias. Building on editing skills and critical approaches in a workshop environment, participants will develop their own creative responses to this “prairied Paris” in poem, fiction, and nonfiction.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter.  Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor. In particular, we will explore the construction and sounding of image within poems, including the Imagists’ legacies, concrete poems, and ekphrastic impulses in writing. Poets and writers whose work will be discussed include H.D., Jamaal May, William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright, James Wright, Pedro Xisto, and poets visiting the UChicago campus.

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

Popular notions of “the fairytale” are often synonymous with childhood: bedtime stories, adventuring children, and cautionary tales warning young people away from wayward behaviors (“Never go into the woods at night”; “You must be wary of strangers”). In many ways, however, fairytales serve as a vital link between historic and contemporary storytelling traditions: In the words of Angela Carter, “[…] the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.” In this course, we will explore how authors such as Sabrina Orah Mark, Helen Oyeyemi, Lily Hoang, Kiik Araki Kawaguchi, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum have used fairytales as foundations for their own stories, gleaning inspiration from—and finding creative freedom within—pre-existing narratives, tropes, and characters. Each student will also write their own fairytale revision and receive critical oral and written workshop feedback. 
 

Secret knowledge, withheld or discovered, has explosive power in literature. Deft management and containment of secrets has dramaturgical consequences for a story’s architecture. This course will examine narratives that skillfully deploy the strategies listed by Roland Barthes in his description of the hermeneutic code: snares, equivocations, partial answers, suspended answers, and jammings. 

In the course of our close study of these strategies, we will also investigate their generative potential. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Miranda July, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ken Liu, and Tom McCarthy.

What does plot need to sustain itself, to make itself, as Aristotle wrote, “a whole action”? For John Barth, a story’s middle “performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and delaying our approach thereto.” 

This workshop will explore the successive complications of conflict (its incremental perturbations, in Barth’s words). It will examine how writers arrive at or invent or otherwise architect their ‘middles.’ Our investigative focus will be on how accretion and cumulation are created through sequence. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges.

Beginning Poetry Workshop: Imaginary Music

The poet Aimé Césaire suggests that “The only acceptable music comes from somewhere deeper than sound. The search for music is a crime against the music of poetry which can only be the beating of the mind’s wave against the rock of the world.” What is this music “deeper than sound”? How is it related to the more obvious “audible” sounds of poetry? This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of major awards for works of contemporary world literature that have been translated into English (among them the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle Book in Translation Prize). While such awards certainly elevate translation as a mode of writing comparable to that of other literary arts, they also raise important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of translated literature in the Anglosphere. In this course, we will read a number of recent award-winning books in English translation (both poetry and prose), considering how these books traveled from origin to translation, and how we as readers engage with them – as translations and as literary texts. How are translations made? How do we evaluate books that have two writers: author and translator? What larger forces (social, aesthetic, commercial, political) are at work when deciding which translated books will hold value for Anglophone readers? We’ll explore these questions through weekly readings and discussions, student presentations, critical analyses and creative responses. As a final project, students will develop their own evaluative rubrics from which to award a prize to one of the translations we’ve read.