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Contacts | Major in Creative Writing | Program Requirements | Optional BA Thesis | Program Honors | Summary of Requirements | Advising | Courses Outside the Department Taken for Program Credit | Double Majors in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing | Grading | Sample Plan of Study for the Major | Minor in English and Creative Writing | Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program in English and Creative Writing | Minor to Major | Sample Plan of Study for the Minor | Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses | Faculty and Visiting Lecturers | Creative Writing Courses

Department Website: http://creativewriting.uchicago.edu

The Program in Creative Writing takes a comprehensive approach to the study of contemporary literature, criticism, and theory from a writer’s perspective. In our courses, students work with established poets and prose writers to explore the fundamental practices of creative writing. The program is committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, academic rigor, and study of the elements of creative writing that underlie all genres.

The Program in Creative Writing offers workshops and seminars in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as a number of translation workshops. The major seminars—including technical seminars and fundamentals in creative writing—are designed to build a critical and aesthetic foundation for students working in each genre. Students can pursue their creative writing interests within the formal requirements of the major or through a minor in English and Creative Writing. (The minor is open to undergraduate students not majoring in English language and literature.) Students who do not wish to pursue a formal degree plan in creative writing will have access to courses that satisfy the general education requirement in the arts and open-entry "beginning" workshops. Our workshops and technical seminars are cross-listed with graduate numbers and are open to students in the graduate and professional schools.

Major in Creative Writing

Students who graduate with a bachelor of arts in creative writing will be skilled writers in a major literary genre and have a theoretically informed understanding of the aesthetic, historical, social, and political context of a range of contemporary writing. Students in the major will focus their studies in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.

The organization of the major recognizes the value of workshop courses but incorporates that model into a comprehensive educational architecture. The creative writing major furthers students’ knowledge of historical and contemporary literary practice, introduces them to aesthetic and literary theory, sharpens their critical attention, and fosters their creative enthusiasm. Students are prepared to succeed in a range of fields within the public and private sectors through a multi-faceted, forward-thinking pedagogy centered on peer critique and craft.

Program Requirements

The Program in Creative Writing requires a total of 12 courses (1200 units) as described below. Students planning to complete the major must meet with the director of undergraduate studies or the student affairs administrator to file a major worksheet by the end of Autumn Quarter of their third year.

Students contemplating a major or minor in creative writing may choose to take one or two creative writing courses toward the general education requirement in the arts. These courses will not count toward major requirements, but they offer an opportunity for students to consider the program while satisfying a general education requirement. See  Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses  for additional details.

Primary Genre

Students are asked to declare a primary genre track either when they first declare the major or immediately following completion of the Fundamentals course. The primary genre track options include Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Students should complete a beginning workshop, two technical seminars, an advanced workshop, and one literary genre course. Students may also complete an optional thesis workshop within the primary genre. Students may change the genre track at any time by notifying the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

One (1) Fundamentals in Creative Writing Course  CRWR 17000 to CRWR 17999

Fundamentals in Creative Writing is a cross-genre, one-quarter seminar taken by all students in the major and minor. Every section of the course focuses on a current debate relevant to all forms of literary practice, such as mimesis, empathy, and testimony. This course introduces students to a group of core texts from each major literary genre. Fundamentals courses are restricted to students who have declared the major or minor, as they aim to develop cohort solidarity, promote a culture of articulate exchange, and induct students into a reflection on practice that will serve their artistic and professional development. Majors should take Fundamentals in Creative Writing and Beginning Workshop before enrolling in an Advanced Workshop. 

One (1) Beginning Workshop Fiction: CRWR 10206; Poetry: CRWR 10306; Nonfiction: CRWR 10406

Students in the major must complete one beginning workshop in the student’s primary genre. Successful completion of a beginning workshop is a prerequisite for enrollment in an advanced workshop in the same genre. Students may enroll in more than one beginning workshop. However, students who complete a beginning workshop in one genre and then complete a beginning workshop in another genre may count only the beginning workshop in their primary genre towards the major. Beginning workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing.

Two (2) Technical Seminars Fiction: CRWR 20200 to CRWR 20299; Poetry: CRWR 20301 to CRWR 20399; Nonfiction: CRWR 20400 to CRWR 20499; Hybrid: CRWR 20701 to CRWR 20799

Students in the major must take two technical seminars in their primary genre (fiction, poetry, or nonfiction); during some quarters, the program may also offer hybrid technical seminars. Majors may petition to substitute one technical seminar in their primary genre with a technical seminar in a different genre, or with a hybrid technical seminar. Students should reach out to the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator with questions on this petition process or hybrid technical seminars. 

The aim of technical seminars is to expand students’ technical resources through analysis of contemporary literature and practice-based training in elements of craft. Students submit papers that address technical questions, chiefly with reference to contemporary texts. For example, poetry students may write on “the line,” where fiction students write on “point of view.” Technical seminars may also count as electives in the minor.

Two (2) Advanced Workshops Fiction: CRWR 22100 to CRWR 22299; Poetry: CRWR 23100 to CRWR 23299; Nonfiction: CRWR 24001 to CRWR 24199; Hybrid: CRWR 27300 to 27499

Students in the major must complete two advanced workshops, at least one of which must be in the student’s primary genre. Majors may petition to substitute one advanced workshop in their primary genre with a hybrid advanced workshop when applicable. Students should reach out to the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator with questions on this petition process or hybrid advanced workshops.

The advanced workshop is a critical pedagogical instrument of creative writing as an academic discipline. Workshop practice relies on a mutual exchange and understanding dedicated to improving students’ writing, rather than unconditional approval. Critique is the core value and activity of the workshop, and students will practice it under the guidance of the workshop instructor. Although advanced workshops begin with attention to exemplary texts, they typically focus on original student work. 

Four (4) Literature Requirements

Creative writing majors are required to take four literature courses offered by other departments. These courses can be focused on the literature of any language, but one must focus on the student’s primary genre; one must center on literary theory; one must involve the study of literature written before the twentieth century; and the final one can be any general literature course. 

The literary genre course should serve as an introduction to key texts and debates in the history of the student’s chosen genre. This requirement can be met by an English language and literature course or a comparable course in another department. Courses such as  ENGL 10403  Genre Fundamentals: Poetry: Rhythm and Myth,  CMST 27207 Film Criticism , or  ENGL 11004  History of the Novel may be eligible. 

The director of undergraduate studies will offer guidance and approve all qualifying courses. Specific courses that satisfy the distribution element of this requirement will be listed at  creativewriting.uchicago.edu . A literature course can potentially satisfy more than one requirement, e.g., both theory and literary genre, but a student can only use the course to fulfill one of the requirements.

Two (2) Background Electives

Students should take two courses outside of the Program in Creative Writing to support their creative projects or theses. Depending on a student's interests, elective courses can be offered by programs ranging from cinema and media studies to biological sciences. One creative writing translation workshop may also be approved as a background elective. Students may not use the same course to fulfill a background elective and a literature requirement. 

Optional BA Thesis

Students have the option to complete a BA thesis/project in their fourth year and should declare intent by the end of Winter Quarter of their third year. Majors who complete a BA thesis/project and meet GPA requirements are eligible for consideration for honors. In Spring Quarter of the third year, students who opt into the BA thesis/project will be assigned a writing and research advisor who will mentor student reading and research throughout the completion of the creative writing thesis. Students, in conversation with the writing and research advisors, will complete a preliminary project proposal during the Spring Quarter of their third year. The preliminary proposal will then be submitted to the student affairs administrator.

Over the Summer Quarter students will craft a reading journal centered on a field list of readings; chosen texts will be based upon work, conversations, etc., students will have begun with their writing and research advisors. In Autumn Quarter, students and writing and research advisors will work together to adapt the reading journal into an annotated bibliography, a focus reading list, and a précis/project plan (summary of student writing plan and goals for the BA thesis/project).

In Winter Quarter, students will continue meeting with their writing and research advisor and must also enroll in the appropriate thesis/major projects workshop in their primary genre ( CRWR 29200 Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction ,  CRWR 29300 Thesis/Major Projects: Poetry , CRWR 29400 Thesis/Major Projects: Nonfiction , or CRWR 29500 Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction/Nonfiction ). The thesis/major projects workshop is only offered during Winter Quarter. Students must complete the thesis/major projects workshop to submit a thesis project for consideration for honors.

The instructor for the thesis/major projects workshop will also serve as the faculty advisor for the BA thesis.

Students writing a BA thesis/project will work closely with their faculty advisor and peers in their thesis/major projects workshop and will receive course credit as well as a final grade for the course. In consultation with their faculty advisor and writing and research advisor, students will revise and submit a near-final draft of the BA thesis by the end of the second week of Spring Quarter. Students will submit the final version of their BA thesis to their writing and research advisor, faculty advisor, student affairs administrator, and the director of undergraduate studies by the beginning of the fifth week of Spring Quarter. 

Students graduating in other quarters must consult with the director of undergraduate studies about an appropriate timeline before the end of Autumn Quarter of their third year. 

Program Honors

The faculty in the program will award program honors based on their assessment of BA theses and the assessment of writing and research advisors. Students must complete all assignments set by writing and research advisors to be considered for honors. To be eligible, students must have a major GPA of at least 3.6 and overall GPA of 3.25. Honors will be awarded only to exceptional projects from a given cohort.

Summary of Requirements

Students considering the major should email the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator as early as possible to discuss program requirements and individual plans of study. To declare the major and receive priority in application-based CRWR courses, students must confer with the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator to file a major worksheet with the Program in Creative Writing. Declaration of the major will then be formalized through  my.uchicago.edu . To join the major, students must officially declare via a worksheet on file with the program before the end of Autumn Quarter of the third year of study. Students will need to regularly provide documentation of any approvals for the major to their academic advisors.

Courses Outside the Department Taken for Program Credit

Students double majoring in creative writing and another major (with the exception of English language and literature) can count a maximum of three courses towards both majors (pending approval from both departments). Ordinarily, two of these courses will be background electives. Substitutions for a further course will be subject to approval, but students may not substitute non-literature courses to meet a literature requirement. 

Double Majors in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing

Students who pursue a double major in creative writing and English language and literature, may count up to four courses towards both majors. These four courses typically include the four literature requirements, but in some cases one of the slots might be filled by a creative writing course (with director of undergraduate studies approval). However, the two required background electives should be taken outside of the Department of English Language and Literature. 

English language and literature majors may count up to four creative writing courses towards the major in English as electives without a petition. However, when students are pursuing a double major in English language and literature and creative writing, they must observe the shared four-course maximum. Double majors must then count any eligible creative writing courses beyond the four-course cap towards their English language and literature major.

Students in the program must receive quality grades (not pass/fail) in all courses counting toward the major or minor. Non-majors and non-minors may take creative writing courses for pass/fail grading with consent of the instructor. Students must request this consent by the end of week three of the quarter; otherwise pass/fail must be approved by the program director. 

Sample Plan of Study for the Major

Minor in English and Creative Writing

Students who are not English language and literature or creative writing majors may complete a minor in English and Creative Writing. The minor requires six courses (600 units). At least three of the required courses must be creative writing courses, with at least one being a beginning workshop, at least one being an advanced workshop, and at least one being a fundamentals course. Three of the remaining required courses may be taken in either the Department of English Language and Literature or the Program in Creative Writing; these courses may include technical seminars or arts general education courses. General education courses cannot be used for the minor if they are already counted toward the general education requirement in the arts. In some cases, literature courses outside of English language and literature and creative writing may count towards the minor, subject to the director of undergraduate studies’ approval. 

Students who elect the minor program in English and Creative Writing must meet with the student affairs administrator for creative writing before the end of Spring Quarter of their third year to declare their intention to complete the minor. Students choose courses in consultation with the administrator. The administrator's approval for the minor program should be submitted to a student's academic advisor on the Consent to Complete a Minor Program form, available from the College adviser or online, by the deadline above.

Students completing the minor will be given enrollment preference for advanced workshops and some priority for technical seminars. They must follow all relevant admission procedures described at the  Creative Writing  website. For details, see  Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses .

Courses in the minor (1) may not be double counted with the student's major(s) or with other minors and (2) may not be counted toward general education requirements. Courses in the minor must be taken for quality grades (not pass/fail) and bear University of Chicago course numbers.

Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program in English and Creative Writing

Minor to Major

Student circumstances change, and a transfer between the major and minor programs may be desirable to students who begin a course of study in either program. Workshop courses and a fundamentals course may count toward the minor. Students should consult with their academic advisor if considering such a transfer and must update their planned program of study with the student affairs administrator or director of undergraduate studies in creative writing.

Sample Plan of Study for the Minor

Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses

General education courses and beginning workshops are open to all students via the standard pre-registration process. Our consent-based courses prioritize students in the major, the minor, and the Creative Writing Option of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH). Note: Students who have not yet met with the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator to begin a worksheet are not considered formally declared and therefore are not guaranteed priority in course enrollment.

For more information on creative writing courses and opportunities, visit the  Creative Writing  website.

Creative Writing Courses for the General Education Requirement in the Arts

These multi-genre courses are introductions to topics in creative writing and satisfy the general education requirement in the arts in the College. General education courses are generally taught under two headings—"Reading as a Writer" and "Intro to Genres"—and will feature class critiques of students’ creative work. They are open to all undergraduate students during pre-registration. These courses do not count towards the major in creative writing, but students may use these courses to satisfy the creative writing minor’s elective requirements if they are not already counted toward the students' general education requirement in the arts.

Fundamentals in Creative Writing Courses

These courses focus on a current debate relevant to all forms of literary practice and aim to develop cohort solidarity, promote a culture of exchange, and induct students into a reflection on practice that will service their artistic and professional development. They are open to declared majors only, except in circumstances approved by the director of undergraduate studies. Majors should take a Fundamentals course and a Beginning Workshop before enrolling in Advanced Workshops. 

Beginning Workshops

These courses are intended for students who may or may not have writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. Courses will focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. Open to all undergraduate students during pre-registration.

Technical Seminars

The aim of the technical seminars is to expand students’ technical resources through analysis of contemporary literature and practice-based training in elements of craft. 

Advanced Workshops

These workshops are intended for students with experience in a particular genre. Advanced workshops will focus on class critiques of student writing with accompanying readings from exemplary literary texts. Priority is given to students in the major, minor, or the MAPH Creative Writing Option . 

Optional Thesis/Major Projects

The thesis/major projects course is optional for minors. While it is not required to complete the minor, students are welcome to opt in to the course. This course will revolve around workshops of student writing and concentrate on the larger form students have chosen for their creative thesis. Priority is given to students in the major, minor, or the MAPH Creative Writing Option .

Faculty and Visiting Lecturers

For a current listing of Creative Writing faculty, visit the  Creative Writing  website.

Creative Writing Courses

CRWR 10206. Beginning Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30206

CRWR 10306. Beginning Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30306

CRWR 10406. Beginning Nonfiction Workshop. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30406

CRWR 10606. Beginning Translation Workshop. 100 Units.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous experience, but are interested in gaining experience in translation. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Instructor(s): Anne Janusch     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Please email the professor to be added to the waitlist during add/drop. To participate in this class, students should have intermediate proficiency in a foreign language. Note(s): Beginning Translation Workshop: Writing What's Been Written This workshop will explore literary translation as a mode of embodied reading and creative writing. Through comparative and iterative readings across multiple translations of both poetry and fiction, we will examine the interpretive decisions that translators routinely encounter when assigning an English to a work of literature first written in another language, as well as the range of creative strategies available to translators when devising a treatment for a literary text in English. Students will complete weekly writing exercises in retranslation and English-to-English translation, building to the retranslation of either a short piece of fiction or selection of poems. Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 30606, SALC 30706, GRMN 10606, CRWR 30606, SALC 10606

CRWR 12124. Reading as a Writer: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. 100 Units.

In this core course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between truth and art by reading and writing works "based on a true story." In poetry and prose, we will explore the lines between fiction and nonfiction, beauty and horror, as well as utterance and silence. Writers will develop critical responses to course readings, then explore those perspectives through creative work of their own. Readings include work by Jeffery Renard Allen, Ari Banias, Scott Blackwood, Brenda Hillman, Harold Pinter, and Claudia Rankine.

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12133. Intro to Genres: Writing and Social Change. 100 Units.

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter-and will be asked to produce short works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Works studied will include the poetry of Percy Shelley, the short stories of John Keene, the essays of Anne Boyer, the graphic novels of Nick Drnaso, and the document-based poetry of Layli Long Soldier.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.UChicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Satisfies the College Arts Core requirement.

CRWR 12138. Intro to Genres: Evil Incarnate. 100 Units.

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genre deal with, and often feature, deeply problematic central adversarial characters without which the poem, story, or essay would have no forward motion, and no cause to exist. From Capote's In Cold Blood to Milton's Paradise Lost, from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita to Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Sabato's The Tunnel, literature returns again and again to the question of evil and the concept of opposition. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who have devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature, its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three section, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one brief analysis paper will be due. One creative piece, in any of the three major genres, exploring the said topic will be due at the end of the course.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): Satisfies the College Arts/Music/Drama Core requirement.

CRWR 12141. Intro to Genres: Drawing on Graphic Novels. 100 Units.

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 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.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): MADD 22141

CRWR 12143. Reading as a Writer: Embodied Language. 100 Units.

Embodied Language. 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 weekly readings 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? Texts will include poetry and prose by Sei Shōnagon, Francis Ponge, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wanda Coleman, Vasko Popa, Lorine Niedecker, Ai, Durga Chew-Bose, Shane McCrae, Jenny Zhang, Justin Torres, James Baldwin, Deborah Eisenberg, and many others. Each member of the class will be asked to write weekly critical and creative responses, to give one presentation, and to produce a final project at the end of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross      Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12145. Reading as a Writer: Re-Vision. 100 Units.

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 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.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross      Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12146. London vs. Nature: Writing Utopia and Dystopia in the Urban Landscape [Creative Writing Arts Core: R. 100 Units.

In this Arts Core course, students will be introduced to a range of the utopian and dystopian fantasies that writers have produced in response to the metropolis of London as the imperial epicenter of manufactured ecologies, from the late nineteenth century through the present day. They will study early responses to modernism and modernization in the city by figures like William Blake, Frederick Engels, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf before moving on to contemporary writers such as R. Murray Schafer, who apprehends the city through "earwitnessing" of noise pollution, and Bhanu Kapil, who recalls the race riots of the 1970s against the backdrop of the Nestle factory on the site of King Henry VIII's hunting grounds. Students will be exposed first-hand to how London is read by writers confronting planetary and political crisis through meetings with living publishers, authors, and art collectives like the Museum of Walking, grappling with the continual metamorphosis of the landscape-and through a sequence of on-site visits and psychogeographical experiments, they will have the opportunity to respond to the city in their own writing across a range of genres. (Arts Core)

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Acceptance to the London Study Abroad Program. Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 14146

CRWR 12147. Intro to Genres: The River's Running Course. 100 Units.

Rivers move--over land, through history, among peoples--and they make: landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will be the topic and inspiration for our own creative writing, too. The goal for this course is to further your understanding of creative writing genres and the techniques that creative writers employ to produce meaningful work in each of those genres. You will also practice those techniques yourselves as write your own creative work in each genre. Our weekly sessions will involve a mixture of discussions, brief lectures, student presentations, mini-workshops and in-class exercises. Most weeks, you will be responsible for a creative and/or critical response (300-500 words) to the reading, and the quarter will culminate in a final project (7-10 pages) in the genre of your choice, inspired by the Chicago River.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): ENST 22147, CHST 12147

CRWR 12148. Intro to Genres: Speculative Women. 100 Units.

Intro to Genres: Speculative Women Despite common misconceptions, women have been at the forefront of the speculative genre from its earliest inceptions. They have not merely defied the limitations and restraints of literature as defined by their contemporary society, but invented whole worlds and genres which continue to influence writers and writing as a whole today-from Mary Shelley's 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" to Virginia Woolf's 1928 publication of "Orlando," and even Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel, "The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World." This course will be a brief foray into the strange and yet familiar worlds of various women across the history of speculative writing, ranging from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Leguin, from Lady Cavendish to Margaret Atwood, from Alice Walker to Octavia E. Butler.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): Satisfies the College Arts/Music/Drama Core requirement. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22148

CRWR 12150. Intro to Genres: Writing for TV: The Writers' Room. 100 Units.

In this course, you'll learn the craft of writing for television by collaboratively developing a pilot script for an original television series set in the South Side of Chicago. Modeled on the "writers' room," we'll research and develop the concept, characters, the outline, and create a plan for the series. In addition to being introduced to the fundamentals of storytelling through lectures, discussions, screenings, and script analysis, you'll also learn to work collaboratively with a team, constructing a daily agenda, brainstorming, researching, pitching, discussing ideas, and composing in screenwriting format. By the end of this hands-on course, you will be armed with a set of techniques and skills that will support your professional development as a writer.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Summer TBD. September Term 2022

CRWR 12151. Intro to Genres: The Gothic Lens. 100 Units.

The Gothic is arguably the most evocative of all storytelling genres. As haunting as it is seductive in its ambiguities and luridly symbolic tropes, no form more powerfully captures our encounters with the irrational and the inexplicable, whether in nature, in others, or in ourselves. In this Arts Core course, we will approach the genre through all its forbidding yet intimate qualities. As we read Gothic fiction from different eras and cultures, from both a reader's perspective and a writer's perspective (the why/how/who of the author's decisions), we'll cover concepts like the sublime, the uncanny, and abjection, examining the work's sociopolitical layers but aiming our brightest light on its psychological underpinnings. We'll ask ourselves: in what ways does the Gothic mirror the most vulnerable and obscure aspects of the self? What might these extraordinary stories of transgression, violence, or supernatural conflict reveal about the horrors of ordinary life, the vagaries of our hidden desires, anxieties, and pathologies? Our focus on the psychological and evocative nature of the genre, especially from a writer's point of view, will also help us write our Gothic Scenes, where everyone will apply their own intimate "gothic lens" to memorable encounters from their recent past. (Arts Core)

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12153. Reading as a Writer: The Walker in the City. 100 Units.

Flâneur: from French, "to stroll, loaf, saunter"; probably from Old Norse flana, "to wander aimlessly"; Norwegian flana, "to gad about. The image of the poet as flâneur -- a metropolitan artist in motion -- emerged as an archetype of romantic and modernist literature. We will consider the walking poet in interaction with race, mobility and disability, gender and queerness, class, migration, ecology, and other embodied experiences. Texts will include work by Kathy Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Walter Benjamin, William Blake, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor, June Jordan, Walt Whitman, and others. Students will lead one presentation during the quarter and keep a notebook/sketchbook.

Instructor(s): Anna Torres     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Acceptance to the London Study Abroad Program

CRWR 12154. Reading as a Writer: Brevity. 100 Units.

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, Renee Gladman, Robert Creeley, Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucille Clifton, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Yi Sang, Anne Carson, Franz Kafka, Prageeta Sharma, Venita Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and others. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write critical and creative responses for group discussion.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12156. Fundamentals: A Gathering of Flowers: The Anthology. 100 Units.

In 1925, The New Negro: An Interpretation, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays was published-it ushered a new era, what was then called the New Negro Renaissance. An artistic and literary movement with the objective to subvert what Alain Locke called the "Old Negro," by providing a corrective and aspirational image of contemporary Negro life, was borne. Around forty years later, Black Arts: An Anthology galvanized the Black Arts Movement, what Larry Neal called the "aesthetic and spiritual sister" of the Black Power Movement. The Best American Short Stories and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women are two more examples of anthologies, one to cultivate the genre and the other to recover the literature of marginalized women writers. In this course, we'll examine anthologies, a word derived from the Greek for "a gathering of flowers." As we study these "flowers," we'll discern the objectives that shape their construction, as well as what was put in and what was left out. In short essays and exercises, we'll also investigate the social, cultural, and political contexts that influenced these objectives, as well as the resultant literary and cultural implications. For your final, you'll design your own literary anthology.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12159. Reading as a Writer: The Bad Girls Club. 100 Units.

Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names-whom we'll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club-have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we'll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we'll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you'll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12159

CRWR 12160. Reading as a Writer: Exploring the Weird. 100 Units.

In 1917 the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the word 'ostranenie,'-translating roughly as 'defamiliarization'-to illustrate a concept that asks the writer or artist to see the everyday in new and unfamiliar ways. In fiction writing this means avoiding cliché while cultivating elements of surprise, the unexpected, the strange. It means the author offering a new perspective on something familiar, something surprising and, often, yes, a little weird. So what does it mean to follow the weird as a fiction or creative non-fiction writer? As a poet? How can we indulge that strange, uncanny, often suppressed side of ourselves in a way that not only serves a work of literary art but opens it up to new possibilities? This class will look at ways writers use defamiliarization and other techniques to create unexpected and sometimes jarring effects and will encourage students to take similar risks in their own writing. Students will view read various works of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, view films, and read critical and craft- oriented 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.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list.

CRWR 12163. Reading as a Writer: Obscenities. 100 Units.

Obscenity" is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as "obscene" to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible-and possible-in language and society for contemporary literary artists.

Instructor(s): Chicu Reddy     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): PARR 33000

CRWR 12164. Reading as a Writer: Good Translation. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 12165. Intro to Genres: Short Form Screenwriting. 100 Units.

This course explores short form screenwriting, as distinct from feature-length or episodic screenwriting. In addition to studying the essential elements of a screenplay, we will read, view, and discuss approaches to scripting brief documentary, poetic, and fictional time-based works. This work will prepare us for in- and out-of-class writing exercises in these modes, which students will often discuss in a workshop environment. Students will respond in creative and critical ways to the screenings and readings; present on a specific time-based work or creator; and write in the short screenwriting formats under study, culminating in a final creative project.

Instructor(s): Nick Twemlow     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12166. Reading as a Writer: The Spiritual, Psychedelic, and Visionary. 100 Units.

In this class we'll think about and try to generate literary forms capable of holding, inviting, or emitting a kind of otherworldly glow; expressing or representing access to some other mode of being. How have writers done this in the past? We'll look to a wide range of sources for models, including the visionary writings of William Blake, poems by Allen Ginsberg, narratives by early Christian mystics (Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen), Buddhist sutras, 20th century phenomenological artworks and writing about them (including films and/or writing by Joan Jonas, Michael Snow, Robert Irwin, and Peter Kubelka), poetry and narratives of channeling (Alice Notley, James Merrill), writings of and about psychedelic experience (Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna), immersive experimental poetics (M. NourbeSe Philip), and contemporary Thai experimental film (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), among others. Students will leave this class with an enhanced familiarity with an array of visionary forms and their history in Western writing and poetics, as well as hopefully new or renewed access to another mode of writing and thinking for themselves

Instructor(s): Kai (Kirsten) Ihns     Terms Offered: Winter Note(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 17003. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Truth. 100 Units.

In this class we'll study how writers define and make use of truth--whatever that is. In some cases it's the truth, singular; in others a truth, only one among many. Some writers tell it straight, others slant. Some, like Tim O'Brien, advocate story-truth, the idea that fiction tells deeper truths than facts. To get at the heart of these and other unanswerable questions we'll read writers who've written about one event in two or more modes. Nick Flynn's poems about his father, for example, which he's also set down as comic strips as well as in prose. Jeanette Winterson's first novel as well as her memoir, sixteen years later, about what she'd been too afraid to say in it. Karl Marlantes' novel about the Vietnam war, then his essays about the events he'd fictionalized. Through weekly responses, creative exercises, and longer analytic essays you'll begin to figure out your own writerly truths, as well as the differences-and intersections-between them.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): This is class is restricted to students who have declared a major in Creative Writing or a minor in English and Creative Writing. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17007. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: The Grammar of Narrative. 100 Units.

Storytelling goes nearly as far back as human consciousness, while the ways in which we tell stories has been expanding ever since. This class will look at several different forms of narrative-fiction, creative non-fiction, narrative poetry, and film-and explore the "grammar" of these different genres, what they share and where they differ and how their particular strengths influence the ways in which they most effectively communicate. How does film (a visual medium) tell a story differently than does fiction (which asks us to project our own imagined version of the story), differently than creative non-fiction, (which must always rely on facts), differently than poetry (which condenses the story to its essences)? How do these different genres and mediums influence the stories they tell and the effects they achieve? Readings will include primary texts as well as critical and fundamentals texts in each genre. Students will complete weekly reading responses, as well as creative exercises. A paper focusing on a specific element derived from the class will be due at the end of the course.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major or Minor in English and Creative Writing to enroll. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17012. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Creative Research/The Numinous Particulars. 100 Units.

According to Philip Gerard, "Creative research is both a process and a habit of mind, an alertness to the human story as it lurks in unlikely places." Creative writers may lean on research to sharpen the authenticity of their work; to liberate themselves from the confines of their personal experience; to mine existing stories and histories for details, plot, settings, characters; to generate new ideas and approaches to language, theme and story. The creative writer/researcher is on the hunt for the numinous particulars, the mysteries and human stories lurking in the finest grains of detail. In this course, we will explore the research methods used by creative writers and consider questions that range from the logistical (eg. How do I find what I need in an archive?) to the ethical (eg. How do I conscientiously write from a point of view outside my own experience?) to the aesthetic (eg. How do I incorporate all these researched details without waterlogging the poem/story/essay?). We will read poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that relies heavily on research and hear from established writers about the challenges of conducting and writing from research. Assignments will include reading responses, creative writing and research exercises, short essays and presentations.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major or Minor in English and Creative Writing to enroll. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17013. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Touchstones. 100 Units.

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major to enroll during preregistration. Contact instructor to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17014. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: A Gathering of Flowers. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major to enroll during preregistration. Contact instructor to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17015. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Sincerity (and Irony) 100 Units.

What does it mean for a piece of writing to be "sincere"? How do we know a (character, poem, "I," essay) is "sincere"? What does it mean to make that judgment, and what does it commit us to? How does that judgment change a reader's orientation to the object? We will approach these questions obliquely first, by thinking about how irony works. Are irony and sincerity opposites? We'll look at a range of contemporary and historical objects in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This will include essays by Kierkegaard, Oscar Wilde, Wayne Booth, Jonathan Swift, and R. Magill Jr., fiction by Vladimir Nabokov, Joanna Ruocco, and Kathy Acker, and poetry by Chelsey Minnis, Jenny Zhang, Amiri Baraka, and others. We'll also consider certain internet objects and think about their relationship to sincerity (and irony). This course will give students a more nuanced and historically grounded handle on these questions, and will help them develop a style of writing that's able to more intentionally (and interestingly) choose its tonal legibilities.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Ihns     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): This is class is restricted to students who have declared a major in Creative Writing or a minor in English and Creative Writing. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17016. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: The Frame Narrative. 100 Units.

In this course, students will engage in a close examination of the various permutations of the frame narrative device across time and genre. From A Thousand and One Nights, to Hamlet, to the "Call of Cthulhu" and Watchmen, the "story within a story" construction is one of the oldest and most employed literary devices-one which can either elevate or imperil the work wherein it is utilized. Students will respond to the material in both critical and creative manners, culminating in a final analytical and creative piece that employs the craft elements discussed and unpacked in class.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Spring Note(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing

CRWR 17017. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Haunted Craft, the Art of the Spectral Metaphor. 100 Units.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" to Emily Carrol's A Guest in the House, to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Octavia Butler's Fledgling, the supernatural metaphor presents a unique stage upon which to play out questions of gender autonomy, mental health, repressed sexuality, racism and more. Students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through both creative and critical work of their own.

CRWR 17018. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Desire and Longing. 100 Units.

In fiction, it is often said that an effective character must have a clear desire. Kurt Vonnegut famously advised, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." The idea is that desire is an animating, energizing, and focusing force in storytelling. In this course, we'll attempt to apply the animation, energy, and focus of desire to personal essays, poems, and fiction, and explore how writers depict desire and longing in a wide range of work. We'll also attempt to catalog different kinds of desire: crushes, obsessions, nostalgia, and farsickness, to name a few. We'll pay special attention to how we can write about strong emotional experiences without resorting to cliches or sentimentality. Potential texts will be Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, Crush by Richard Siken, The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Instructor(s): Ryan Van Meter     Terms Offered: Spring Note(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing. If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist.

CRWR 20203. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Research and World-Building. 100 Units.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing worldbuilding, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing worldbuilding is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from setting, to social systems, to character dynamics, to the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or even contemporary realism, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful worldbuilding, 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 worldbuilding, 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.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40203

CRWR 20209. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Scenes & Seeing. 100 Units.

At the core of literary storytelling is dramatization, which enables a reader to "see" the world, characters, and incidents at play and to vicariously experience their emotional and psychological consequences in the story. The primary vehicle for dramatization in a story is the scene, which consists of many crucial parts: characterization, setting and imagery, dialogue and action, tone and atmosphere, subtext and thematic development. In this course we'll break down all these parts and examine how they can function on their own as well as interact to bring a moment or event to life. Where and how should a particular scene begin and end? How should information be organized? How might we determine a scene's goals in isolation and in support of the larger narrative of a short story, novella, or novel? And ultimately, beyond characters talking, acting, and reacting, how might we expand our traditional notions of what a scene is and what it can do? We'll consider such questions as we discuss exceptionally crafted scenes from short stories, novels, plays, and even film, TV, and podcasts, with an eye also on the differences in scene craft from genre to genre and what that can teach us specifically as fiction writers. Course assignments will include reading responses, writing exercises, short essays, and student presentations.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40209

CRWR 20217. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Elements of Style. 100 Units.

What we call style is more than literary flourish. Control of a story begins with a writer's characteristic approach to the line. Style dictates and shapes immersive and impactful worlds of our creation. It's also indicative of a work's larger themes, philosophies, and aesthetic sensibility. In this class, we'll examine fiction by wordsmiths such as James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Marguerite Duras in order to contemplate the influence that elements such as diction, syntax, rhythm, and punctuation have on a writer's style.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40217

CRWR 20221. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Detail. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40221

CRWR 20224. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Narrative Tempo. 100 Units.

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 Sebald or Duras can make time melt; spritely magicians like Aira 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.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40224

CRWR 20232. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Narrative Influence. 100 Units.

T. S. Eliot once said that "good writers borrow, great writers steal." In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for original creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer's story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they've talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker; Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. Writing exercises will experiment with aspects of voice, narrative structure, point of view, tone, and use of dialog. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40232

CRWR 20233. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Who Sees and Who Speaks? 100 Units.

Who Sees and Who Speaks? What is the nature of the encounter between a narrator and a character, and how do elements of character and plot play out in narrative points of view? Drawing on the narratological work of theorists such as Gérard Genette and Monika Fludernik and of critics such as James Wood, this technical seminar considers what point of view, perspective, and focalization can do or make possible. Readings may include stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Jenny Zhang, William Faulkner, Lorrie Moore, Jamil Jan Kochai, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Wharton, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Virginia Woolf, among others, and will introduce instances of first-person-plural and second-person narrative, as well as modes of representing speech and thought such as free indirect discourse. Over the course of the quarter, students will write short analyses and creative exercises, culminating in a final project.

Instructor(s): Sophia Veltfort     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40233

CRWR 20236. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Alternative Points of View. 100 Units.

Point of view is one of our most powerful narrative tools, controlling voice, perspective, and level of access to every bit of information a reader receives. When writers are first finding their way into new fiction projects, however, it is easy to default to the two points of view we are most commonly exposed to: a traditional first person or third person that behaves predictably. In this Technical Seminar, we will mine the work of Julie Otsuka, Carmen Maria Machado, Robert Coover, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and other writers for strategic usage of alternative points of view, including second person, first person plural, free indirect discourse, and deliberate shifts from one point of view into another. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a final fiction assignment, and a final presentation.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40236

CRWR 20309. Technical Seminar in Poetry: Generative Genres. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Suzanne Buffam     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40309

CRWR 20312. Technical Seminar in Poetry: Prosody. 100 Units.

PROSODY This course will be a deep dive into prosody. What is prosody? Merriam-Webster describes it as "the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language" - we might also describe it as the way poems move, and how they move their reader. Arguably one of the most important (and least visible) aspects of poetic composition, prosody can teach you to see and write differently. We'll begin with an introduction to historical metrics (the boring but necessary part), and then move on to studying more contemporary models. Readings will include a bit of scholarly work on prosody by Rosemary Gates and Boris Maslov, but mostly we'll read poems, from the 12th century to the 21st, that foreground prosody and rhythmic structure. This will be a practice-intensive class-you will be asked to produce several exercises a week, in addition to a final paper or project.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Ihns     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40312

CRWR 20313. Technical Seminar in Poetry: Against or Onto 'The Road'" 100 Units.

This technical seminar in poetry offers writers an opportunity to examine an essential American poetic space: the road. A core question is how one reads the road's poetic surface versus its depths. Does journey itself lay out a clear narrative, admitting its forks, detours, and breakdowns? How is a basic American "compass" disrupted by poetic reconsiderations of "the road?" Does every road run "west?" How is the road itself as much about dislocation as it is about coherent journey? As an orientation to a poetics of space, participants will engage critical perspectives set up by Gaston Bachelard, CS Giscombe, and Rebecca Solnit. Then, writers will develop their own critical/creative responses, exploring models established by Gabe Gudding, William Least Heat-Moon, Ed Roberson, and Muriel Rukeyser. Inviting her readers to remap historical and mythic journeys, Rukeyser resets the road as a conduit into a reassessment of national narrative through The Book of the Dead. Taking his own road east, Gudding overturns a "beat poetics" of travel in his Rhode Island Notebook. Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) and Roberson (MPH and Other Road Poems) invite explorations of "the road" as much in time as in space or personal journey. Overall, the course remaps that road, in the words of Giscombe, itself a "scattering [where] nothing cohered."

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40313

CRWR 20404. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Forms of the Essay. 100 Units.

The essay, derived from the French term essayer meaning "to try" or "to attempt," is not only a beloved sub-genre of creative nonfiction, but a form that yields many kinds of stories, thus many kinds of structures. Araceli Arroyo writes that the essay can "reach its height in the form of a lyric, expand in digression, coil into a list, delve into memoir, or spring into the spire of the question itself all with grace and unexhausted energy." In this course, we will analyze the essay's continuum, marked by traditional, linear narratives on one end, and at the other, everything else. In our class, we will investigate the relationship between content and form. What does it mean to be scene-driven? What happens when a narrative abandons chronology and event, propelled instead by language and image? What is gained through gaps and white space? You will leave this class with a strong grasp of content's relationship to form, prepared to participate effectively in creative writing workshops. You will also create a portfolio of short writings that can be expanded into longer pieces. Readings will include: Nox by Anne Carson; A Bestiary by Lily Hoang; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli; Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Essayists on the Essay edited by Ned Stuckey-French

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40404

CRWR 20410. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Epistolary Form. 100 Units.

When does a body of writing become "literary"? What stories might be found inside the hastily scrawled lines of a postcard buried in the attic or an incomplete to-do list drifting down the sidewalk? Beginning with the modern epistle and epistolary novel, this cross-genre seminar orbits the space where non-literary documents give way to artistic compositions that a given set of experts would otherwise neatly categorize and deposit somewhere literature is supposed to belong. As we practice the interplay of research and imagination toward the realization of a final project, we'll examine how writers of nonfiction and documentary poetics have used everything from blueprints of a prison cell to vaudeville ephemera to frame, develop, and heighten true stories. We'll consider ethics of authority such as information access, authentication, and journalistic objectivity alongside rhetorical matters of credibility, emotional truth, and the serviceability of facts. Come play in the archives and observe the power of repurposed material.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40410

CRWR 20412. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: The writer as researcher. 100 Units.

Research is an essential and imaginative process for the nonfiction story, but in what ways are the writer's methods unique to literary practice? This course will explore the role of research in writing creative nonfiction. Students will develop methods that play a role in writing essays, memoir, and literary journalism. The seminar will be conducted in four sequential parts: immersion research; interview techniques; library research; translating technical jargon for a public readership. Assignments will equip students with the practical steps for completing each style of research. We will also discuss how to integrate research into the descriptions, narrative, and subtext of the writing. Students will experiment with: dramatizing research through scene-building; using reflection to respond to their findings; and inviting research to become part of the plot. Research, we will find, generates some of the most dramatic and surprising moments in the writing process. We will read texts that correspond to the areas of focus, including works by Eula Biss, Daisy Hernandez, and Sarah Viren. Students will leave the course equipped to include research into their writing process for advanced writing workshops and thesis projects.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40412

CRWR 21502. Advanced Translation Workshop. 100 Units.

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other's longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques-from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the "driving-in-the-dark" model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while preparing manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator's preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. We will also have the opportunity to have conversations via Zoom with some of the translators we'll be reading. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Instructor(s): Jason Grunebaum     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41502

CRWR 21504. Advanced Translation Workshop: Scales of Reading. 100 Units.

Peer review of translations-in-progress can often take the form of line edits: we discuss word choices that call attention to themselves rather than talking through the larger compositional units in which those choices are made. While a fine-grained reading is vital to revision, it can also run the risk of minimizing our critical engagement with translated texts merely on the basis of "awkward" or " stilted" language. This workshop will explore the different scales of reading employed in reviewing drafts: Yes, those instances that make us pause or take us out of the text are worth marking for the translator, but ultimately, they're only useful to the translator if we can synthesize them into a larger, coherent reading of the work as a whole. By treating translations-in-progress as literary works deserving of close readings (rather than merely manuscript pages to be edited), we'll seek to provide our peers with a critical account of our experience as the primary readers of their translations. Specifically, we'll practice grounding our accounts in aspects of craft and structure, form and content, in order to move beyond our subjectivities as readers and our idiolects as writers - and better understand how a translated work's larger concerns are enacted in the language itself. Students with translations-in-progress, as well as students who will be starting new projects, are welcome to participate in this workshop.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41504

CRWR 21505. Advanced Translation Workshop: Prose Style. 100 Units.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, elliptical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41505

CRWR 22117. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Beginning a Novel. 100 Units.

This workshop is for any student with a novel in progress or an interest in starting one. Our focus will be the opening chapter, arguably the most consequential one-for the reader naturally, but most importantly for us the writer. How might it introduce the people and world of the story, its premise or central conflict, its narrative tone and style? How might it intrigue, orient, or even challenge the reader and begin teaching them how to read the book? And if the first chapter is our actual starting point as the writer, how might it help us figure out the dramatic shape of our novel, its thematic concerns, its conceptual design? We'll apply such questions to the opening chapters of an exemplary mix of novels-The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Vegetarian, Normal People, etc.- and examine what they are expected to do as well as what they can unexpectedly do. And as everyone workshops the first chapter (or prologue) of their own novel, we'll consider ways of adjusting or rethinking them so that the author can better understand their project overall and build on all the promise of the material they have.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Autumn Note(s): Students must have taken Fundamentals + a Beginning Workshop in the same genre as the Advanced Workshop you want to register for. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42117

CRWR 22128. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Novel Writing, The First Chapters. 100 Units.

In this workshop-focused class we will focus on the early stages of both developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding the themes of book, etc. As a class we will read, break down and discuss the architecture of the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the course.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42128

CRWR 22130. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Inner Logic. 100 Units.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the 'rules' for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we'll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all students' fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Instructor(s): Baird Harper     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42130

CRWR 22132. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Strange Magic in Short Fiction. 100 Units.

In this workshop based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll read stories by authors like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alice Sola Kim, examining how these writers portray the fantastical and impossible. We'll explore concepts like defamiliarization, versimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and workshop one story that utilizes magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42132

CRWR 22133. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing the Uncanny. 100 Units.

Sigmund Freud defines "the uncanny" ("unheimlich") as something that unnerves us because it is both familiar and alien at the same time, the result of hidden anxieties and desires coming to the surface. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will explore how fiction writers use the uncanny to create suspense, lend their characters psychological depth, thrill and terrify their readers, and lay bare the darkest and most difficult human impulses. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Lavalle, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing the uncanny. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises and "mini-workshops" throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length "uncanny" short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length short story by the end of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42133

CRWR 22134. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Cultivating Trouble and Conflict. 100 Units.

If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned." --Charles Baxter While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yiyun Li, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven, and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42134

CRWR 22135. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Narrative Time. 100 Units.

The Long and the Short of it: Narrative Time A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42135

CRWR 22140. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Killing Cliché 100 Units.

It's long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance-between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable-in order to maximize a story's effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Instructor(s): Baird Harper     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42140

CRWR 22146. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Disruption and Disorder. 100 Units.

This workshop-based course proceeds from the premise that disorder and disruption are fruitful aesthetics that might be applied to numerous elements of fiction to unlock new possibilities in our work. Students will seek to identify typical narrative conventions and lyrical patterns and then write away from them-or write over them, toward subversion, surprise, and perhaps even a productive anarchy. Students will search for hidden structures in work by Taeko Kono, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Diane Williams, Garielle Lutz, and others, examining the methods these writers use to lead readers to unexpected, original, and transgressive places. Students will complete several short creative exercises in which they practice disruption and disorder in plot, pace, dialogue, and syntax. In the second half of the course, students will workshop one story or excerpt and write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Revision is also a crucial component of this class, as it is an opportunity to radically warp and deviate from our prior visions. Throughout the quarter, we will attempt to interrupt and shake up our own inclinations as artists.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42146

CRWR 22149. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Long Stories. 100 Units.

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist," writes Henry James, "is that there is no limit to what he may attempt." Writers interested in these torments and luxuries can begin to experiment with long form in this workshop. Each student will compose a single long story of about forty pages. We'll attend to the freshness of beginnings, the satisfactions (and compromises) of endings and, most acutely, to the crises of middles. A scaffolding of workshops, outlines, and conferences will support and structure your efforts. Along the way we'll explore the opportunities of long-form structure with examples from the likes of David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Ted Chiang, and Toni Morrison. Most of our class time will be devoted to workshopping long stories by students.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42149

CRWR 22150. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Radical Revision. 100 Units.

Like so many essential and life-sustaining processes-relationship maintenance, money management, digestion-revision is something we often talk about without "really" talking about it (to use the words of writer Matthew Salesses). Yet by refusing (or failing) to "really" talk about revision, writers deny themselves the opportunity to actively engage with the potentialities of their work: the different shapes, forms, and shifts it might take. In this class, we will demystify the revision process by analyzing the works of writers-such as Anna Kavan, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzanne Scanlon-who have pursued radical revisions to their projects, including expansions (short stories developed into novels), compressions (longer works condensed into shorter pieces), point of view changes, and dramatic stylistic transformations. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also work toward our own radical revisions.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42150

CRWR 22152. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Finding and Refining Voice. 100 Units.

As writers, your "voice" is you imposing who you are on the truthfulness of your sentences. Finding your voice, then, is the process-whether you're describing a character, an image, or an idea-of constantly asking yourself, Do I absolutely believe this?, of rewriting and rewriting your sentences until you absolutely do believe it, and finally of refining all the technical aspects you brought to bear to assure that level of individual truth. Out of that, naturally and inevitably, comes your voice-at least for the time being. In this workshop, we'll examine this crucial stage in the development of your own aesthetic, which is not merely a writing style, but more importantly a personal perspective on the world that informs and is informed by that style. We will read a selection of writers with distinctive worldviews and thus distinctive literary voices (Paul Bowles, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ocean Vuong, Garth Greenwell, etc.), and we'll complement those readings with writing exercises and workshops of your own fiction, where you will actively interrogate, cultivate, and refine your emerging voice.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42152

CRWR 22153. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Rants and Rambles. 100 Units.

The unshackled narrators that dominate many of our most exciting novels-from Dostoevsky's underground man to the uber-relatable mother of 2019's Ducks, Newburyport-take their bearings not from the scenic method of theater or the omniscient narration of history but from the essay form and from oral storytelling. This workshop plumbs those resources to better understand this alternative tradition, studying the craft that can make unruly narrative both highly entertaining and intellectually satisfying, exploring rhetoric, repetition, leitwortstil, logical nesting, suspense, digression, irony, and humor. While executing creative exercises in voice, we'll read books of furious energy by Thomas Bernhard and Jamaica Kincaid alongside cooler, essayistic meanders by W. G. Sebald and Claire-Louise Bennett. Students will compose and workshop a substantial work that takes its cues from these examples.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42153

CRWR 22154. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Unlikeable Characters. 100 Units.

From "unreliable" to "unlikeable," certain characters--and character qualities--are often measured against popular understandings of who is "good," who is "relatable," and who gets to decide. As Ottessa Moshfegh quips in a Guardian interview, "We live in a world in which mass murderers are re-elected, yet it's an unlikeable female character that is found to be offensive." In this technical seminar, we will critically investigate cultural dialogues around "unlikeability," and discuss the shared qualities and compelling narrative capabilities of "unlikeable" characters. Assignments will include reading responses, short craft analyses, and a presentation.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42154

CRWR 22155. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing About Work. 100 Units.

Writing about work, jobs, and vocational experiences may seem contradictory- or even antithetical-to our goals in fiction. After all, if we aim to inspire, to invigorate, to otherwise wield a narrative "axe for the frozen sea within us" (as Kafka wrote), why write about the very day-to-day tasks so often charged with numbing and blurring our sensation of life? In this workshop, we will explore and answer this question with our own work-focused fictions, developing strategies for defamiliarizing the mundane, and using routines to build dramatic tension. Utilizing a combination of creative workshops and exercises-and drawing upon models from the job-focused fiction of Eugene Martin, Dorothy Allison, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers-we will also deepen and develop our characters through precise depictions of their work environments.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42155

CRWR 22156. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Narrator as Personality. 100 Units.

While aspiring writers usually grasp quickly how to write direct dialog-we hear it all around us, in public and private spaces-narration is a trickier enterprise. In this writing workshop, we will look at the narrator as personality, a voice that exists to tell the story, but not always to enter it. The narrator can be a constant, like an elbow in the side, or effaced, touching down to only give us the basics of time and place. They can be all knowing, summarizing scenes, people and events from a distant, God-like vantage, or reportorial, speaking in present tense as events unfurl. Some narrators make us laugh but are conning us with their charm; others explain the psychology of events like a great therapist or moralize like a member of the clergy. We will read a wide range of examples from writers like Edward P. Jones, Anton Chekhov, Salman Rushdie, Amy Hempel, Yiyun Li, and Louise Erdrich. Students will be encouraged to experiment in both writing exercises and story revisions. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story, which you will revise for the final.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42156

CRWR 22157. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Tiny Chapters. 100 Units.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will have the opportunity to assemble a long narrative out of short fragments. Composing with small units reframes the art of narrative. We'll study the diverse affordances of working with fragments-collage, aporia, essayistic interpolation-always keeping an eye on the totality of our narratives. We'll discuss the art of brevity-including related forms like the aphorism, the note, and the joke. We'll begin in experiment and end with substantial compositions. Our readings will be drawn from the numerous contemporary novelists who use this method (Jenny Offill, Olga Ravn, Dorthe Nors) as well as the older generation of authors who, in their different ways, may be said to have pioneered the form (Marguerite Duras, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Gass, Renata Adler). But most of our class time will be devoted to workshopping original student work.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42157

CRWR 22158. Advanced Fiction Workshop: From the Ground Up. 100 Units.

In a craft talk, writer Stephen Dobyns once described an exercise he used for generating stories inspired by Raymond Carver, who said about his process, "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next." Apparently, Dobyns was frustrated by that answer, but later challenged himself to write 50 first sentences of potential stories. Then, he picked half of them and wrote 25 first paragraphs. From those, he eventually completed about a half dozen stories. (I learned this from an article by the great short story writer Kelly Link.) In this generative workshop, we will proceed in this fashion. During the first week, we'll study the first sentences of stories and each write our own 50 first sentences. During the second week, we'll study the first paragraphs of stories and each write 25 first paragraphs, and so on until all students have a few complete drafts of stories, one of which will be submitted to our in-class workshop. Along the way, we'll read and discuss well-made stories by writers such as Kelly Link, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Edward P. Jones, Justin Torres, Mary Gaitskill, and many others. To be successful, students will read and write actively and share their well-informed opinions with enthusiasm, especially in our workshop discussions.

Instructor(s): Ryan Van Meter     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42158

CRWR 22159. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Family Life, Family Strife. 100 Units.

If, as the opening lines of Anna Karenina suggests, it is true that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," then the unique character of family is largely determined by its distinct manner and type of conflict. In this advanced fiction workshop, we'll examine fiction about family friction with an eye for observing the strategies that authors have used to construct dramas that revolve around how families love, cope, or crumple in the midst of crisis. As we identify tropes of family dysfunction, we'll also consider the ways authors use narrative devices like point-of-view, setting, plot, and scene to investigate how we define family (and how those definitions have evolved); its bonds and intergenerational inheritances; how families-like institutions- are bonded by their distinctive habits, manners, mores, and laws; and how kinship might magnify, subvert, or critique larger society. Above all, we'll debate what family life and family strife teach us about storytelling. Over the course of the term, we will write and workshop your own fiction inspired by model texts.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42159

CRWR 23113. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Waste, Surplus, Reuse. 100 Units.

What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the "useless"? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess, and we'll examine diverse types of waste and things that "waste", including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media). Readings and media may include work by Georges Perec, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Wallschlaeger, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Schwitters, and Agnes Varda. Students should plan to complete various prompts, lead discussion on readings, and complete a final project.

Instructor(s): Nate Hoks     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43113

CRWR 23123. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Form & Formlessness. 100 Units.

Wallace Stevens suggests that "The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used." How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or "unformed" (l'informe). We'll explore traditional and contemporary takes on a variety of forms, such as sonnets, odes, aphorisms, serial poems, and poetic collage. Students should expect to write exercises, submit new poems, contribute feedback on peer work, write short response papers, and submit a final portfolio.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43123

CRWR 23126. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry and the Present Moment. 100 Units.

In this workshop we will tackle the problem of writing poetry in the present moment at a range of scales, thinking critically about our world's obsession with the "contemporary." At the grandest scale, we will ask what it means to write into the contemporary moment, one in which we seem to feel time fading with every status update and tweet, and one that demands embodied engagement-reading works that have been written recently, in dialogue with living authors. At the most intimate scale, we will consider how poetry can cultivate critical awareness of the present moment amidst forces that pull us with dopamine-induced promises and regrets into the future and past. How does poetry, with its odd ability to punctuate, syncopate, fragment, and suspend time, intervene in daily life and in the historical record? Authors for consideration will include Issa, Basho, Gertrude Stein, F.T. Marinetti, David Harvey, Cecilia Vicuna, Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Patton, CA Conrad, Julian T. Brolaski, and Bhanu Kapil. Students will have the chance to experiment with different forms of attunement to the present, and will produce a daybook in tandem with a final "book" project that may take a range of forms.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43126

CRWR 23132. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poets' Prose. 100 Units.

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?" This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. "Flash Fiction," "Short Shorts," the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

Instructor(s): Suzanne Buffam     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43132

CRWR 23133. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poets in Archives. 100 Units.

This course will examine how the historical archive can be a source for poetry writing, seeking to develop frameworks for interpreting the experiences that poets enact through archives. Deeper questions to be examined involve the relation between poetic form and historical knowledge; the relation between imagination and memory; between material histories and their inscription; between poets and their historical and biographical pasts; and between the critical and creative, the historical and biographical, and the exteriors and interiors of literature, history, myth, and politics. Because this is an advanced workshop, we will rely on mutual exchange dedicated to improving writing. Critique will therefore be our core activity, guided by our readings and professor instruction, but driven primarily by original student work and discussion.

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43133

CRWR 23134. Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Book as Form. 100 Units.

What is a book? This supposedly obsolete medium has undergone vital metamorphosis over the course of the past century, migrating from text into the visual and performing arts, as well as online. As contemporary writers we will consider what it means to contribute to its evolution, thinking about new forms that the "poetry collection" can take, as well as more emergent forms of the book as project-or process. Authors to be studied include Sappho, Basho, Mina Loy, Bruno Munari, Bread and Puppet Theater, Susan Howe, Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Buzz Spector, Bhanu Kapil, Don Mee Choi, Jen Bervin, Mei-Mei Burssenbrugge, Stephanie Strickland, Tan Lin, Edwin Torres, Nanni Balestrini, Douglas Kearney, and Amaranth Borsuk. Be prepared to think about poetry from the scale of the syllable to the scale of the entire bound (or unbound) work.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43134

CRWR 23135. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Weird Science. 100 Units.

This class invites students to explore various relationships between science and poetry, two domains that, perhaps counter-intuitively, often draw from each other to revitalize themselves. As poets, we'll use, misuse, and borrow from science in our poems. We'll approach poems like science experiments and aim to enter an "experimental attitude." From a practical point of view, we'll try to write poems that incorporate the language of science to freshen their own language or to expand the realm of poetic diction. Furthermore, we'll work with tropes and procedural experiments that may result in revelation, discovery, and surprise. Readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Roberson, Dean Young, Joyelle Mcsweeney, and Will Alexander. Students can expect to write several poems, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers' work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43135

CRWR 23136. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry as Parasite. 100 Units.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We'll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers' work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43136

CRWR 23137. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry, Archives, and History. 100 Units.

This course introduces fundamental ideas about poetic form and approaches to poetic writing through close reading and discussion of poetry (modern and contemporary but not exclusively). We will consider poetic elements from the ground-up-reading closely for sound, image, syntax, and meaning-in order to enliven those elements in student writing. Likewise, we will consider how poems appear at a crossroads between history and experience (the past and present) in order to inspire students to write not only about themselves but about real and imagined social, cultural, historical, and intellectual locations and horizons (considering such aspects of poetry writing as geography, history, mythology, anthropology, kinship, science, visual media, audio media, etc). We will do so in conversation with our peers by way of regular presentations and workshops, in which students will give feedback to one another's works, learning thus how to read critically while generously, and how to respond collegially while also constructively. At the end of the quarter students will revise drafts based on class writing exercises and workshop conversations, to produce a portfolio prefaced by a critical reflection. The arc of the class also involves the making of a collaborative syllabus (with a wide range of texts offered and guided by the instructor but available to the creative configuration of the students themselves), to strengthen our grasp of archival and curatorial aspects of poetry writing.

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43137

CRWR 23138. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetics of Procedure and Restraint. 100 Units.

Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape" is how Raymond Queneau famously described the members of Oulipo, a group of international writers and mathematicians founded in France in 1960, and which still thrives today. The group's aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. ("Oulipo" is an acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.) In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will take a hands-on approach, with students composing new drafts each week. We will experiment with a variety of methods, ranging from traditional verse forms to concrete poetry; creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; documentary and research-based poetics; site-specific and ritual poetry; incorporating film, sound, image; and a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). As we workshop students' drafts, we will discuss topics including inspiration, authorship, form, copying and plagiarism; poetry, activism, and social justice; and the idea of "fact" in poetry. At the end of the quarter, you'll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43138

CRWR 23139. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Ekphrastic Poetry. 100 Units.

In this generative advanced poetry workshop we will find inspiration for our own poetry by engaging with the visual arts. We will read poems that respond to, reflect, and refract the arts, and exercises will be based on our own encounters in museums, at the movies, in the realms of fashion, architecture, landscape, and elsewhere. We will ask ourselves about artifice and making, the materiality of the written word, the relationship between observation and expression, the emotive qualities of the image, and the sonic qualities of words. Most of our course reading will be contemporary poetry, but we will also explore a range of exciting earlier examples. Each class meeting will include workshops of student poems, discussions of assigned literature, and conversations about art practice and art community. In addition to reading deeply, looking closely, and writing wildly, students are expected to be lively participants in the arts community on campus, and will attend exhibitions, concerts, readings, screenings, and other events and experiences that bring us into contact with various modes of expression. Texts may include poems by, Harryette Mullen, James Schuyler, Brenda Shaughnessy, David Trinidad, and Virgil.

Instructor(s): Robyn Schiff     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43139, CHST 23139

CRWR 23140. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry and Crisis. 100 Units.

Since Homer's narratives of war and exile, and Hesiod's accounts of cyclical degeneration and the uncertain future of humankind, poetry has dealt with crisis and liminality. Our own present moment is defined by a convergence of climate and ecological crises, refugee crisis, food crisis, war, and epidemic. In this workshop, we will examine poetic writing arising out of crises, whether political, artistic, or existential, and craft poems that attempt to deal with crisis - both in the form of a concrete Event, and as a literary trope - through critical creative engagement, experimentation, and intertextual dialogue. Readings may include work by Peter Balakian, Jericho Brown, Don Mee Choi, Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, as well as classical sources. Students can expect to workshop their poems in class; to engage, critically and supportively, with peers' work; and to develop a final portfolio.

Instructor(s): Oksana Maksymchuk     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43140

CRWR 23141. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Visitations. 100 Units.

This class will explore how visitations, hauntings, suspense, uncertainty, grotesquerie, uncanny repetitions, unholy resurrections, phenomenal midnight meetings, and other gothic manipulations of matter, time, and space figure in a range of poems and texts. Because hesitance, fragment, the ever- presence of history, and notions of closure come into play whenever ghosts and others returning from beyond make visitations, our conversation will inevitably turn to the question of the openness of text, and in addition to gothic themes, we will examine form and strategy to wonder together how language turns and returns upon itself like the vampire that rises again and again in various shape-shifting guises. What is natural? What is unnatural? What is supernatural? How do the inexplicable and the explicable meet in poems? And how do poems vex the unstable categories of the past and the present?

Instructor(s): Robyn Schiff     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43141

CRWR 23142. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetic Forms of Brevity. 100 Units.

Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetic Forms of Brevity Brevity is the soul of wit, and in some definitions, it's also an essential characteristic of lyric poetry. In this course, we'll read diverse examples of relatively brief poetic forms, such as epigrams, aphorisms, haikus, tankas, prose poems, and sonnets, to generate our own writing. Finally, we'll also practice revising poems for economy: that is, cutting as many words as possible from every draft. Students can expect to complete weekly prompts, give a presentation, participate in workshops, and turn in a final portfolio.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43142

CRWR 23143. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Mask, Persona, and Translation in Twenty-First Century Poetry. 100 Units.

This advanced workshop engages the play of mask and persona in contemporary poetry, including how these have been utilized in poets' theater, dramatic monologue, confessional writing, autobiographical play, and translation of poems. Participants will be invited to experiment with voice and persona in writing and consider questions such as: How does the mask offer a means of engaging core aspects of self, society, and language? Writers for discussion include John Canaday, Denise Duhamel, Duriel Harris, Ilya Kaminsky, Yang Lian, Ed Pavlic, Fernando Pessoa, and Evie Shockley.

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43143

CRWR 23144. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Voice. 100 Units.

This course will focus on poetry's rich histories of poetic voicings, building multiple definitions of what voice "sounds" like, how it is constructed, how it says, and how to quiet and amplify one's own poetic voice. We will use our readings and findings to generate our own poetic voicings for student-led workshops.

Instructor(s): Nicholas Twemlow     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43144

CRWR 24002. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing About the Arts. 100 Units.

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We'll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms. The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24002, ARTH 34002, CRWR 44002

CRWR 24012. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Narrative Nonfiction Feature. 100 Units.

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories through drafts and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

Instructor(s): Ben Austen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44012

CRWR 24019. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Experimental Essay. 100 Units.

Most introductions to creative nonfiction include one sections devoted to the strange and unwieldy-Ander Monson's "I've Been Thinking About Snow" or a page or two of Anne Carson's Nox. A brief foray into the metaphysical essay, the interactive essay, the performance essay and then back into the mainstream of creative nonfiction. This course, however, will be ignoring the mainstream entirely and, rather, will be devoted to the fringe, the strange and almost undefinable. From the performance essay to the video game essay, from the illustrated essay to the found essay and everything in between. This course will consist of experimental readings with accompanying writing prompts and in-class discussions, as well as dedicated workshops to each student's own experimental creative nonfiction project.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44019

CRWR 24020. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Eco-memoir. 100 Units.

We live in an era marked by human-driven environmental change, an epoch distinguished not only by the reality of anthropogenic impacts, but of human witness. Never before, writes Elizabeth Rush, have humans been here to tell the story of collapse, extinction, adaptation, and memory. In this workshop, we will read and write eco-memoir, a hybrid form of literary nonfiction that blends the work of ecology, history, and personal narrative to understand more fully how memory is bound to ecosystems. Some might simply call this memoir, following J. Drew Lanham's view that the writing of memoir is also the writing of environment. This course will ask how the memoirist looks at place, taking up W.G. Sebald's thinking that places seem to "have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them." Students will practice using the tenets of literary memoir-writing to engage with the theoretical frameworks of such environmental thinkers as Donna Haraway and Jedidiah Purdy. We will ask: to what extent is remembering a collective act? How might the eco-memoir represent the uneven consequences of ecological disruption? What narrative structures does the story of an ecosystem take? Students will write two-full length essays or memoir chapters. Readings will include texts by Kendra Atleework, Elizabeth Bush, Linda Hogan, J. Drew Lanham, W.G. Sebald, and visiting writers.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44020

CRWR 24021. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: The Trouble with Trauma. 100 Units.

In "The Body Keeps the Score" Bessel van der Kolk writes, "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves." Many trauma survivors begin writing reluctantly, even repulsed by the impulse to query their woundedness. The process is inhibited by stigma surrounding the notion of victimhood, entities that would prefer a survivor's silence, plus our tendency to dismiss and devalue ones suffering in relation to others. Students in this class will shed some of these constricting patterns of thinking about trauma so they may freely explore their stories with confidence, compassion, curiosity, and intention. We'll read authors who have found surprise, nuance, and yes, healing through art, honoring the heart-work that happens behind the scenes. Half of class-time will include student-led workshops of original works in progress. Paramount to our success will be an atmosphere of safety, supportiveness, respect, and confidentiality. By the quarters end each student will leave with a piece of writing that feels both true to their experience and imbued with possibility.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44021

CRWR 24022. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Beyond the Event. 100 Units.

Much of the tradition of Western storytelling relies on scene-driven narratives propelled by rising action toward an inevitable apex. Often natural disasters are illustrated the same way: hurricanes, invasion of new species, infectious disease, and oil spills are cast as singular events with a beginning, middle and end. This advanced workshop will explore how to push beyond the event. We will examine how forms of nonfiction, from investigative journalism to lyric essays, push against the hegemony of the "event" to tell a longer, slower story of disruption across the nexus of time and space. Following Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence, readings will focus on places and communities whose narratives do not fit tidily into beginning-middle-end story structures. Workshop will ask students to consider how their work might recognize the contexts of extraction, commodity flow, climate change, and borders surrounding the "events" driving our stories.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44022

CRWR 24023. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Coming of Age Memoir. 100 Units.

Where does childhood end and adulthood begin? For Wordsworth growth happens in reverse. "The Child is the father of the Man," he wrote in 1802, yearning to recall the fundamental joy of a rainbow. Proust was eager to forget his schooldays: "We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us." In this class, students will search their lives for events and lessons which they may consider formative, together evaluating the standards they use to qualify rites of passage, in order to isolate unique patterns of growth that students can call their own. Half the quarter will be dedicated to discussing original student work. A multitude of possibilities will be offered by readings of contemporary memoirists from all walks of life. By quarters end, each student will have laid down the groundwork for a dexterous memoir about surviving the challenges of their youth, and in doing so perhaps even imagine a future that is less prescribed and more personally fulfilling.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Submit writing sample via www.creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44023

CRWR 24024. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Reading. 100 Units.

There are many creative ways to write of, about, from, and because of reading. In this class, serious readers will have the chance to practice forms they love and may not often get chances to write: the incisive review, the long-form reading memoir, the biographical sketch of a writer in history, the interview, the essay about translation, diaristic fragments. In this course, we'll develop individual approaches, styles and regular practices. We'll make use of both creative (and traditional) research, analysis, and criticism, and explore the wide terrain available to creative writers. We'll go back to foundational essayists including Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, study contemporary writers of reading such as Jazmina Berrera, Claire Messud, Niela Orr, Ruth Franklin, Emily Bernard, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Parul Sehgal. Students will keep a reading/writing notebook, conduct an interview, and write and revise a longer essay for workshop.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44024

CRWR 24025. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay. 100 Units.

In Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay, we'll approach the essay as a vehicle for queer narratives, as a marker of both individual and collective memory, and as a necessary compliment to the journalism and scholarship that have shaped queer writing. Through readings and in-class exercises, we'll explore tenets of the personal essay, like narrative structure and pacing, alongside considerations of voice and vulnerability. After a brief historical survey, we'll look to contemporary essayists as our guides--writers like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Melissa Faliveno, Saeed Jones, Richard Rodriguez, and T. Fleischmann-- alongside more familiar writers like Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson. And through student-led workshops, we'll wrestle with concerns that often trouble narratives of otherness: What does it mean to write a personal narrative that has a potential social impact? How can we write trauma without playing into harmful stereotypes? How can our writing work as--or make demands toward--advocacy, rather than voyeurism?

Instructor(s): Victoria Flanagan     Terms Offered: Winter Note(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24205, GNSE 44205, CRWR 44025

CRWR 24026. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Feminist Biography. 100 Units.

The personal is political - that slogan of Women's Liberation - has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer.

Instructor(s): Avi Steinberg     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 44026, GNSE 24026, CRWR 44026

CRWR 24027. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Environmental Writing, Editing, and Publication. 100 Units.

Environmental writing is a quickly-expanding field in the literary and publishing community. It encompasses nonfiction sub-genres of traditional journalism, personal essay, and hybrid forms. This course is designed for students in creative writing with an interest in environmental reportage; it is also intended for students in environmental sciences (broadly speaking) with some writing experience who wish to practice presenting complex information to a non-expert audience. Reading contemporary environmental and science writing, students will develop nonfiction techniques relevant to writing environmental stories, like how to find and contact field experts, how to engage readers in complex topics, how to integrate research into narrative, how to use dialogue from interviews, how to weave the personal together with research material, and how to pitch environmental stories. The course will also cover the practical aspects* of the field by including a workshop with the Careers in Creative Writing Journalism program, guest lectures from editors and journalists in the field, and assignments that familiarize students with current environmental literary magazines. Readings will include Kerri Arsenault's Mill Town and selections from The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44027

CRWR 24028. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: World-building in Long-form Nonfiction. 100 Units.

A writer setting out to write a long piece of nonfiction prose may assume that the world of the piece is given, but in fact the nonfiction writer has significant work to do to create a space where a reader can live. In writing creative biography, history, memoir, literary criticism, art writing, and narrative journalism, there are wonderful possibilities for archival research, visiting places and spaces, making first hand observations, interviewing, finding settings and characters, and atmospheric research, whether reading old magazines, listening to radio shows, or studying weather patterns. In this course, advanced writers will immerse themselves in one longer project, developing it in notebooks and weekly postings and exercises. The first half of the course will focus more on practicing and reading (writers including Elizabeth Rush, Zbigniew Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and James Baldwin), the second half will focus on workshopping as the longer pieces develop. Students will finish the course with a sustained piece of prose.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44028

CRWR 24029. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Sports. 100 Units.

As live performance, public ritual, and sheer melodrama, sports give lavish expression to some of our most deeply held cultural attitudes. As sports-related industries have grown exponentially in the past decades, and as the material and political fortunes at stake in these games has also grown, so too has the need for serious writing about sports. The world's stadiums and arenas have become theaters of very real battles over race and gender, class and religion, colonialism and social justice. At the same time, the games themselves have also changed in fascinating and telling ways. This workshop invites writers who are curious about sports as a subject for literary exploration. We examine the subject through various genres of nonfiction, from longform journalism to personal essay to audio storytelling. Our readings will include both canonical and contemporary voices in sports writing. Workshop writers can choose to build a portfolio of three pieces of original nonfiction, or one long piece in three parts. No previous knowledge of sports is required.

Instructor(s): Avi Steinberg     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44029

CRWR 24030. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Narrative Nonfiction Feature. 100 Units.

Apart from it being nonfiction, a nonfiction feature is like a short story-in terms of length and scenes and characters and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write pitches. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

Instructor(s): Ben Austen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44030, CHST 24030

CRWR 29200. Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49200

CRWR 29300. Thesis/Major Projects: Poetry. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in poetry, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis seminar, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic "projects." We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic "projects," considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students' work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in poetry and CW minors completing minor portfolios in poetry. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49300

CRWR 29400. Thesis/Major Projects: Nonfiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in nonfiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Student work can be an extended essay, memoir, travelogue, literary journalism, or an interrelated collection thereof. It's a workshop, so come to the first day of class with your work underway and ready to submit. You'll edit your classmates' writing as diligently as you edit your own. I focus on editing because writing is, in essence, rewriting. Only by learning to edit other people's work will you gradually acquire the objectivity you need to skillfully edit your own. You'll profit not only from the advice you receive, but from the advice you learn to give. I will teach you to teach each other and thus yourselves, preparing you for the real life of the writer outside the academy.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn; Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in nonfiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in nonfiction. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49400

CRWR 29500. Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction/Nonfiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis or minor portfolio in either fiction or nonfiction--or both. In other words, your project may take a number of forms: fiction only, nonfiction only, a short story and an essay, a novel chapter and a piece of narrative journalism, and so on. This course might be of special interest to those working on highly autobiographical pieces or incorporating substantial research into their creative process--fiction that hews close to fact, say, or nonfiction that leans heavily into storytelling. And/or it might be useful for those who want to pursue hybrid or between-genres projects or simply want to continue working in more than one form. We'll be open to many possibilities. It's not a prerequisite that you've taken both a fiction and creative nonfiction course previously, but it will nonetheless be quite helpful to have done so. Note, too, that this is the cumulative course in Creative Writing. There will still be room to explore and rethink (sometimes radically) the pieces you've drafted in previous classes, but please do come to our first session with a clear sense of what you want to work on over the quarter. Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction or nonfiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction or nonfiction.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (in application please indicate experience in fiction & nonfiction and how this thesis workshop informs your own writing practice). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49500

Faculty Director

Director of the Program in Creative Writing Robyn Schiff Email

Undergraduate Primary Contact

Director of Undergraduate Studies Rachel Galvin Walker 511 Email

Administrative Contacts

Program Manager Michael Fischer Taft House 103 773.834.8524 Email

Student Affairs Administrator Denise Dooley Taft House 104 773.702.0355 Email

[email protected]

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Creative Writing

A haven for writers of all genres and ambitions

December 3, 2024

*Flexible payment available

Enroll this week to receive a 10% tuition reduction

Imbue your writing with imagination and range.

Craft writing that is distinct and well-developed..

Stories are timeless and eternal. They are touchstones, formed by time and place, which reflect upon the human experience. Creative writing is an asset in all professional fields throughout diverse positions. The ability to craft intriguing, memorable prose remains one of the most enduring forms of human expression. Learn to conceive and develop integral elements of a story, including plotline, characters, symbolism, setting, and atmosphere.

Our Approach to Online Learning

Optimize your time with a mode of study that allows you to explore content and complete tasks at your own pace.

Interactive

Our interactive content includes videos from instructors at the University of Chicago as well as materials that enable you to learn through real-world examples.

Personalized

Throughout the program, the teaching assistant will serve as a valuable resource to clarify any questions and provide feedback on your work.

Meet Your Instructor

Sarah Terez Rosenblum, MFA

Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Normal School, Prairie Schooner (shortlisted for the publication’s Summer 2020 Creative Nonfiction Prize), Diagram , Brevity, Third Coast , and Carve. In 2022, Rosenblum was shortlisted for StoryQuarterly ’s annual fiction contest. She has written for sites that include Salon, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Satirist, and Pop Matters .

Pushcart Prize-nominated, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rosenblum is a creative coach and developmental editor. She also teaches creative writing at Story Studio, where she was voted 2022 Teacher of the Year, and at the University of Chicago Writer’s Studio. Rosenblum’s novel, Herself When She’s Missing , was called “poetic and heartrending” by Booklist . 

Unique Program Features

Live sessions and workshops.

Engage in live sessions and workshops that provide the opportunity to pose questions and exchange ideas.

Practical application

Practice specific craft points and explore the drafting process through weekly writing exercises.

Personalized guidance

Receive feedback from your instructors about the development of your writing.

Learning Outcomes

• Reveal character through action.
• Establish setting through characters’ physicality.
• Write dynamic scenes.
• Create dialogue that reveals character and furthers plot.
• Recognize and use imagery and symbolic language.

After completing the course, you will be able to:

Create a strategy for your organization that makes use of AI to accomplish business goals

Build a team for success in an AI world

Choose the best areas for early-stage development and understand how to scale AI solutions

Earn a certificate of completion from the University of Chicago and become part of the UChicago network

Course Modules

Introduction to writing and crafting character.

• Things to Consider Before Writing
• Introduction to Character
• Description
• Internal Response

Point of View

• Introduction to Point of View
• First Person
• Third Person
• Less Common Points of View: Second Person
• Less Common Points of View: First Person Plural
• Focalization
• Writing Practice

Setting and Mood

• Starting with Setting
• Creating Setting
• Analysis of Setting in The Road
• Introduction to Workshop
• Introduction to Plot
• Basic Plot Arcs
• Denouement and Resolution
• Conflict and Tension
• Change and Imagery
• The Hero’s Journey
• Introduction to Dialogue
• Dialogue and Action
• Creating Tension with Dialogue
• Dialogue and Subtext
• Issues in Dialogue

Voice and Tone

• Introduction to Tone and Voice
• Authorial Voice and Character Voice
• Finding Your Voice
• Strong Story Starts
• Writing Practice: Drafting

Imagery, Symbolism, and Theme

• Introduction to Imagery and Theme
• Figurative Language
• Systems of Imagery: “In the White Night”
• Building Your Own Systems of Imagery
• Writing Practicen

Time Movement and Literary Magazines

• Simple Scene Movement
• Introduction to Flashbacks
• The Mechanics of Flashbacks
• Writing Practice: Submitting Your Work
• Writing Practice: Beyond this Course

This course is designed for:

Individuals with diverse aspirations, backgrounds, and skills interested in exploring writing in an easily accessible way

Learners from all walks of life with curiosity and enthusiasm toward writing, communication, literature, and the art of crafting a story

Experienced writers looking to hone their skills and elevate their expression.

Participant Experiences

Enroll now to receive a 10% tuition reduction

Flexible Payment Options Available

PROGRAM FEE

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Pay in Full

Pay in 2 installments

Creative Writing

Two programs within the umbrella of the Department of English focus on particular aspects or genres of literary endeavor.

The purpose of the Creative Writing program is to give students a rigorous background in the fundamentals of creative work by providing them with the opportunity to study with established poets and prose writers. The program is committed to interdisciplinary work while also teaching the elements of creative writing that underlie all genres. Creative Writing sponsors events , workshops , and lectures and also schedules many undergraduate and graduate classes in writing. Visiting writers each quarter provide a dynamic component to the curriculum, with authors ranging from George Saunders to Susan Howe. English faculty member John Wilkinson is currently the Director of the Program in Creative Writing and the Program in Poetry & Poetics, and several English faculty members, including Rachel Cohen, Edgar Garcia, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, and Vu Tran, regularly teach both creative and critical classes.

• Creative Writing Website
• Upcoming Creative Writing Events

Minor in English and Creative Writing

Undergraduate students who are not majoring in English may enter a minor program in English and Creative Writing. These students should declare their intention to enter the minor program by the end of Spring Quarter of their third year. Students choose courses in consultation with the Program Manager in Creative Writing and must submit a minor program consent form to their College Adviser in order to declare the minor. Students completing this minor must follow all relevant admission procedures described in the  Creative Writing  website. Courses in the minor may not be double counted with the student's major(s) or with other minors and may not be counted toward general education requirements. Courses in the minor must be taken for quality letter grades, and all of the requirements for the minor must be met by registering for courses bearing University of Chicago course numbers.

Requirements for the minor program:

• 2 Creative Writing courses (at least one at the Special Topics or advanced level)
• 3 Creative Writing or English electives
• 1 portfolio/projects workshop (or advanced workshop depending on genre) to be taken in the Winter Quarter of the students' fourth year
• A portfolio of the student's work to be submitted to the Director of Undergraduate Studies by the end of the fifth week in the quarter in which the student plans to graduate. The portfolio might consist of a selection of poems, one or two short stories or chapters from a novel, a substantial part or the whole of a play, two or three non-fiction pieces, and so forth.

There is no minor solely in English. The Minor in English and Creative Writing for Non-English Majors is the only minor available through the Department of English.

Poetry and Poetics

This program aims to coordinate the University's various curricular approaches to the creative and critical practice of poetics. The Program supports the History and Forms of Lyric series, an ongoing series of lectures by prominent scholars, and a graduate workshop that focuses on work in progressfrom students, faculty, and visitors. The discussions enabled by the Program are intended to help students at all levels to pursue work that crosses disciplines and discourses. The Program also supports collaboration among faculty members in the form, forexample, of team-taught courses, conferences, and lectures. The Program is overseen by an ad-hoc committee of faculty from various departments, including the Department of English.

The Program in Poetry and Poetics

Affiliated Departments

The University of Chicago in general, and the Department of English in particular, are known for the interdisciplinary and theoretically driven work of their faculty and students. Many English faculty members have joint appointment in other programs at the University, including Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS), and the Divinity School, among others. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged in the Department of English--both graduate and undergraduate students take classes in a variety of University departments and programs. Students in these programs, in turn, enliven English classes with their perspectives. Listed below are links to some of the departments with which the Department of English works closely.

• Cinema and Media Studies
• Department of Art History
• Department of Comparative Literature
• Department of Philosophy
• Divinity School
• Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS)

WRIT51800 - Basic Creative Writing

Course description.

This course will introduce you to creative writing, from generating ideas to revising drafts. Find your voice and develop your craft through in-class and at-home writing exercises, as well as discussions of your own and your fellow students’ written work. You will also study canonical and contemporary models drawn from fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, and will be encouraged to try your hand at each of these genres. Class sessions will consist of discussion of readings, in-class writing exercises, and workshop discussion of writing done outside of class. Once per term, each student has the opportunity to receive feedback from the group on a piece of writing, in the form of a workshop.

Course Outline

Course Syllabus

Online registration deadline: Thursday, Dec 29 at 5 pm CT

Remote courses require you to login to Canvas to access the Zoom Classroom. You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before your course begins. Please visit the Liberal Arts Student Resources page to find step by step instructions for Canvas and Zoom: Online Learning Resources

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The Graham School reserves the right to change this policy at any time. Changes will be posted to this site and effective immediately.

If you have questions regarding this policy, please contact us at [email protected] .

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Our noncredit course registration and all application forms require users to provide us with contact information such as name, email address, mailing address, and similar identifiers. Sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, is not stored after purchase. Social security numbers are requested in our credit application forms, and are stored in protected University servers.

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You may also email [email protected] .

Cookie Policy

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Creative Writing

The Program in Creative Writing takes a comprehensive approach to the study of contemporary literature, criticism, and theory from a writer’s perspective, and provides rigorous training in the fundamental practices of creative writing. In our courses, students work with established poets and prose writers towards these pursuits, and both the major and minor in Creative Writing provide ample opportunities for interdisciplinary work across University departments. The program’s commitment to interdisciplinary work and academic rigor, coupled with an emphasis on teaching the elements of creative writing that underlie all genres, accounts for the program's vitality and explains why Creative Writing at Chicago is currently the largest initiative in the humanities for the College. The Program in Creative Writing offers workshops and seminars in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as an increasing number of translation workshops.

Students who graduate with the bachelor of arts in Creative Writing will both be skilled in writing in a major literary genre and have a theoretically informed understanding of the aesthetic, historical, social, and political context of a range of contemporary writing. Students who are not English Language and Literature or Creative Writing majors may complete a minor in English and Creative Writing.

• Creative Writing in the College Catalog
• Minor in Creative Writing in the College Catalog
• Creative Writing Home Page

• Start Your Application
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• UChicago Undergrads
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Creative Writing

Program(s): immersion.

This course is currently at capacity for students applying in the Extended round. We are admitting students to the waitlist only, and students who currently are on the waitlist will be given priority if places become available.

"What is education?" asks the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: "I suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself."  When we speak of "finding your voice" or "writing your story" or "mining your material," we speak of things you already possess but that take work to realize. Creative Writing is that work. 

In pushing you to write more originally and persuasively than ever before, this course asks you to slow down, to pay attention to words, sentences, logic, gaps, and also to race ahead, to test new techniques and experiments and to be receptive to new sources of inspiration.  Exercises will range from making simple lists to devising plots, from describing a random piece of grass to inventing an original creature.  Categories like fiction, poetry, and memoir will overlap and intermingle.  In this rigorous, writing- and reading-intensive course, you will be asked to write daily, both in directed exercises and personally-driven compositions, to conference one-on-one with instructors, to read widely, to edit your peers, and to compose longer submissions for the same peer edits.  After three weeks, you will know your own writing better. Students write in and out of class-time hours and complete nightly reading assignments.  Active class participation is required.

See sample syllabus here.

Remote or Residential

Course considerations, course overview, current grade / education level, class details, course code, class day(s), class duration (cst), course length, hs orientation date, primary instructor, academic interest.

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• by Melissa Hammam
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Hands up if you’re ready to be dazzled! From a ceremony structure designed to float on water to a jaw-dropping reception room with flowers blooming from every service, we’re swooning over every bit of this wedding. If you can believe it, that’s just the beginning. Julia Kaptelova artfully shot every detail, like the ballet performance guests were treated to and snow falling from the ceiling for the first dance! Prepare to be amazed and take a visit to the full gallery .

From About You Decor … Our design is a symbol of dawn and a distant endless horizon. Ahead is a long, happy life without any borders. An international couple, Pavel and Cherry, met in London and have been walking together for many years.

From the Bride, Cherry… My husband and I we decided to have our summer wedding in Moscow because the city is where his roots are. As we knew we were going to have the other wedding ceremony in China, we wanted our Moscow one to be very personal and intimate. We’ve known each other since we were fourteen, together with many of our friends whom we’ve also known for a decade.

I didn’t want to walk down the aisle twice so the plausibility of my request quickly came into discussion. The open pontoon stage was constructed in order to facilitate the bridal entrance on water, although there were concerns about safety as the last thing we wanted was probably a drowned bride before she could get on stage, picture that! I have to say on that day it wasn’t easy to get on the pontoon stage from the boat, in my long gown and high heels. Luckily my bridesmaids still noticed even though they stood the furthest from me on the stage, and helped me out without prior rehearsal. My girls could just tell whenever I needed a hand or maybe they were just so used to my clumsiness. Who knows 😂

We all love our photographer Julia! She’s so talented and her style is so unique. Our beloved host Alex is exceptional who made everyone laugh and cry. It was truly a blessing to have so many kind and beautiful souls on our big day. Thank you all!

[iframe https://player.vimeo.com/video/384992271 600 338]

Photography: Julia Kaptelova Photography | Wedding Planner: Caramel | Cake: Any Cake | Invitations: Inviteria | Rings: Harry Winston | Band: Menhouzen | Grooms attire: Ermenegildo Zegna | Wedding Venue: Elizaveta Panichkina | Bridesmaids’ dresses: Marchesa | Bridesmaids’ dresses: Alice McCall | Bride’s gown : Jaton Couture | Bride’s shoes: Manolo Blahnik | Decor : About you decor | Earrings: Damiani | Muah: Khvanaco Studio | Video: Artem Korchagin

More Princess-Worthy Ballgowns

I’m still not convinced this Moscow wedding, captured to perfection by  Sonya Khegay , isn’t actually an inspiration session—it’s just  that breathtaking. From the beautiful Bride’s gorgeous lace wedding dress and flawless hair and makeup to the pretty pastel color palette and stunning ceremony and reception spaces, this wedding is almost too good to be true. Do yourself a favor and see it all in The Vault now!

From Sonya Khegay … It was the last day of April and still very cold in the morning. The weather forecast wasn’t pleasing and no one expected that the sun would come out, but miracles happen and light rain gave way to the warm rays.

I love how all the details went together, you could feel the harmony in everything throughout the entire wedding day from the morning until the fireworks.

A gentle look of the bride, elegant but so airy and unique decor, the fresh and light atmosphere of early spring and, of course, true happiness in the eyes. My heart becomes so warm from these memories, it is always a pleasure to see the birth of a new family of two loving hearts.

Photography: Sonya Khegay | Event Design: Latte Decor | Event Planning: Ajur Wedding | Floral Design: Blush Petals | Wedding Dress: La Sposa | Stationery: Special Invite | Bride's Shoes: Gianvito Rossi | Hair + Makeup: Natalie Yastrebova | Venue: Rodniki Hotel

• by Elizabeth Greene

You really can’t go wrong with simple: a beautiful Bride , perfectly pretty petals , loved ones all around. But add in an amazing firework show  to cap off the night and simple just became downright extraordinary. Captured by Lena Elisseva , with assistance by  Katya Butenko , this rustic Russian celebration is simply fantastic. See it all in the Vault right here !

From Lena Eliseeva Photo …  This cozy and warm summer wedding of gorgeous Natalia and Anton was in the middle of June. The young couple decided to organize their wedding themselves, and the day was very personal and touching. I am absolutely in love with rustic outdoor weddings, and this one is my favourite because of the free and easy atmosphere.

All the decor excluding the bride’s bouquet was made by a team of ten friends of the bride and groom. And it was charming – a light and beautiful arch, eco-style polygraphy and succulents, candy-bar with caramel apples and berries – sweet joys of summer.

At the end of ceremony the guests tossed up white handkerchiefs embroidered by Natalia’s own hands.

The most touching moment was the happy eyes of the groom’s grandmother, the most estimable person on the wedding. And the fireworks were a bright end to that beautiful day.

Photography: LENA ELISEEVA PHOTO | Floral Design: Katerina Kazakova | Hair And Makeup: Svetlana Fischeva | Photography - Assistance: Katya Butenko

These photos from Lena Kozhina are so stunningly beautiful – as in you can’t help but stop and stare – it’s hard to believe it’s real life. But these pics are proof of this gorgeous Bride and her handsome Groom’s celebration at Moscow’s Fox Lodge , surrounded by vibrant colors and breathtaking blooms . Oh, and the idea of prepping for your Big Day outside in the sun ? Brilliant. See more bright ideas right here !

From Lena Kozhina … When we met with the couple for the first time, we immediately paid attention to Dima’s behavior towards Julia. There was a feeling of tenderness and awe, and we immediately wanted to recreate this atmosphere of love, care and warmth on their Big Day.

Later, when we had chosen a green meadow and an uncovered pavilion overlooking a lake as the project site, it only highlighted a light summer mood with colorful florals and a great number of natural woods. The name of the site is Fox Lodge and peach-orange color, as one of the Bride’s favorites, set the tone for the whole design – from the invitations, in which we used images of fox cubs to elements of serving guest tables and other decorative elements with the corresponding bright accents.

Photography: Lena Kozhina | Event Planning: Ajur Wedding | Wedding Dress: Rosa Clara | Shoes: Marc Jacobs | Catering: Fox Lodge | Makeup Artist: Elena Otrembskaya | Wedding Venue: Fox Lodge | Cake and Desserts: Yumbaker | Decor: Latte Decor

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Literature Courses 2020-21

Literary genre: lg   literature (theory): lt literature (before 20th-c): lc general literature: any course listed on this page, *asterisked courses* include a creative writing component and may be of interest to students; they do not indicate an additional requirement., literature course archive.

For Literature courses offered in previous academic years, browse our  Literature course archive .

All courses listed here are approved to count towards the Creative Writing major as general literature courses. Course codes indicate approval specific distribution requirements. Students may register for eligible courses under any course number. 

These courses are offered by other departments, not the Program in Creative Writing. If you have questions about course content, structure, and schedule, please contact the department offering the course. The course descriptions below are the most recent available, to the best of our knowledge.

Please note that we have included only those courses with an undergraduate course number or that are otherwise marked as open to undergraduates.

For courses taken prior to 2020-21, check our literature course archive. All other courses not on this list must be approved by the DUS.  

SPRING 2021

ENGL | English Language and Literature CMST | Cinema and Media Studies CLAS | Classics CMLT | Comparative Literature BIBL | Divinity EALC | East Asian Languages and Civilizations GRMN | Germanic Studies HIST | History NELC | Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations PHIL | Philosophy RLLT | Romance Languages and Literatures  REES | Russian and East European Studies SALC | South Asian Languages and Civilizations TAPS | Theatre and Performance Studies

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

Any class offered by the Department of English Language and Literature can satisfy the general literature requirement for Creative Writing. Please see below for a selection of English classes that satisfy specific requirements in genre (LG), theory (LT), and period (LC). Browse the full English catalog here .

  ENGL 10709 Genre Fundamentals: Fiction (Sianne Ngai)  This course explores the various strategies and techniques that authors have used to tell stories that claim in one way or another to be realistic. As we take up how storytellers "make it real" we will address key elements of narrative, including point of view, characterization, voice, tone, diction, syntax, setting, symbolism, pacing, modes of mediation, intertextuality, motifs, and figuration. We will focus primarily on novels and short stories, with a nod to the graphic novel at the conclusion of the course.  (LG – Fiction)

ENGL 12720 Inventing Consciousness: Literature, Philosophy, Psychology (Timothy Harrison) What is consciousness? What is it like to be conscious? This course answers these questions by examining the emergence and development of consciousness as a concept. As a phenomenon, consciousness probably came into being deep in evolutionary time. Yet as a concept consciousness is relatively new: the European notion of consciousness emerges in the late seventeenth century. This course draws on literature, history, philosophy, and psychology to examine how the concept of consciousness came to possess its explanatory dominance. We will start by acquiring a sense of what consciousness now means in philosophy, biology, neuroscience, and fiction, paying particular attention to how the concept differs from similar ideas in ancient Indian philosophy. We will then turn to two important historical moments. First, we will examine the interplay between philosophy and literature in the late seventeenth century, reading texts by René Descartes, John Milton, Thomas Traherne, and John Locke. Second, we will focus on how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the psychology of William James relates to the “stream of consciousness” techniques in the work of Virginia Woolf. This course stresses historical contingency—consciousness has a birthdate—in order to explore a consequence that follows from this fact: the extent to which current uses of this concept are still shaped by the historical circumstances that conditioned its emergence.  (LC)

ENGL 13512 The Future (Bill Brown)  This course focuses on the future as imagined by American science fiction of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will pay attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged; on the other, we will work to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. We will deploy different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to apprehend the stakes and the strategies for imagining future worlds. After some initial attention to the magazine and pulp culture that helped to establish the genre, we will spotlight major SF movements (Afro Futurism, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, etc.) and major authors (including Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work in different media (e.g., film, radio, graphic narrative).  (LG – Fiction, LT)

ENGL 15220 Unrequited Love in Fiction and Film (Madison Chapman)  Unrequited love stories are some of the most beloved romances in literature and film. Why do readers and audiences find unique pleasure in the agonizing tragedy of feelings not returned? And what does “unrequited” really mean anyway? This class focuses on unrequited love from the perspective of mostly British women fiction writers and film writer/directors, toggling between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and contemporary romances on screen. From Jane Austen to Céline Sciamma, Eliza Haywood to Sofia Coppola, we will consider how women tell stories of attractions plagued by lack of reciprocity, misunderstandings, persistent longing and social obstacles. Moving across centuries, genre and media, we will consider what changes and what remains consistent in how these women illustrate yearning and dissatisfaction. We will read theories of desire in literature and film by Lauren Berlant, Laura Mulvey, Renata Salecl and others in order to work towards a definition of “unrequited love.” Our class will examine unrequitedness across registers, including as a source of dark humor in The Favourite and Austen, and as an occasion for psychological and real violence in Mary Wollstonecraft and The Riot Club. Throughout the course, we will ask ourselves as readers and viewers to interrogate our own investment in the resolution (or, more importantly, the lack thereof) of unrequitedness.  (LC, LT)

ENGL 15240 Medieval Death (Jack Dragu)  This course will examine late medieval representations of death and dying, considering it in terms of both a conceptual problematic and a practice, especially as it appears in the literature and art of fourteenth and fifteenth century England. In addition to reading poetic, theological, and philosophical texts from the medieval period, students will examine visual art, architecture, and other media to the end of asking questions about how people and cultures understand and prepare themselves for death. ( LC)

ENGL 17501 Milton ( Joshua Scodel)  The course studies Milton’s major poetry with an emphasis upon his sense of history—poetic, national, and cosmic.  (LC)

ENGL 18860 Black Shakespeare (Noémie Ndiaye)  This course explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about blackness, in processes of racial formation, and racial struggle from the early modern period to the present. Students will read Shakespearean plays portraying black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American and post-colonial rewritings of those plays (by Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Keith Hamilton Cobb, and Aimé Césaire, among others).  (LC)

ENGL 18950 Nineties Feminisms (Caroline Heller HTF)  This course will survey feminist literatures of the 1790s, 1890s, and 1990s. We will cover works by authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Grand, and Greta Gaard as well as feminist movements from New Woman ideal in the 1890s to ecofeminism and material feminisms in the 1990s.  (LC, LT)

ENGL 19500 Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley ( Alexis Chema)  This course examines the major works—novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays—of two of Romanticism’s most influential women writers. We will attend to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft’s stylistic theories, and Shelley’s scenes of imaginative sympathy.  (LC)

ENGL 19860 Ladies Nite: Women Beatniks in Literary Counterculture (Carrie Taylor)  “Three writers do not a generation make." Often relegated to status of wife or muse in the writings and history of the Beat Generation, women's literary contributions to this experimental zeitgeist remain largely unknown and unread. This course explores the dynamic body of work produced by female Beatniks from the 1950s-1970s. We first trace the Beat Generation's aesthetic roots within the experimental poetics of Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and then shift our focus to post-war Greenwich Village, Mexico, and the American West. We will delve into works from authors like Elise Cowen, Diane diPrima, Denise Levertov and Lucia Berlin, to investigate how women's authorship across place and form--chapbooks, poetry, memoirs, travel journals and films-- gave voice to a vibrant, complex feminism awash with psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation and the metaphysical exploration deeply inherent to Beat counterculture. (LG-Poetry, LT)

ENGL 20360 Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England (Ellen MacKay) This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam. (LC)

ENGL 20620 Film Noir (Joseph Bitney)  This course examines the phenomenon known as film noir, a style or genre—created retrospectively by critics—that continues to exert widespread influence and appeal. Spanning noir’s progenitors in the early 20th century to the canonical films of the 1940s and 50s to more recent neo-noir, the course introduces students to the principles of film analysis while also looking at the crucial role that noir has played in discussions of film style and aesthetics, gender and sexuality, and the relations between modernism and popular culture. (LT)

ENGL 21770 Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction (Hilary Strang)  Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ as far more than simply biological. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key. This kind of investigation has a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. (LT, LG)

ENGL 26614 T.S. Eliot (Rosanna Warren)  With the major new edition of Eliot's poems by Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks, the new volumes of Eliot's letters, and two separate new editions of Eliot's complete prose, we are in a position to rethink the meanings and force of Eliot's life work. The class will be devoted to careful reading of his poems, essays, plays, and correspondence, with attention to his literary, cultural, and political contexts.

ENGL 26703 How to Read Difficult Poems (John Wilkinson)  Different kinds of difficulty will be identified in English-language poems of different periods, and appropriate reading strategies developed. The aim is an education in the pleasures and rigors of difficulty, and subsequently in the art of making difficulties out of apparent simplicity and in attuning to the “possibles of joy” beyond difficulty.  (LG – Poetry, LT)

ENGL 27008 Black in the City ( Adrienne Brown)  Moving from literature written during the early Jim Crow era to contemporary hip hop, this course will look at the ways black artists have staged encounters with urban space. We will pay close attention to not just how black artists have represented the city but the methodologies they have experimented with in studying and surviving it. From the juxtaposition of Southern and Northern cities in pre and post-Great Migration literature, to Gwendolyn Brooks’ mid-century experiments in urban seeing, Spike Lee’s staged urban explosions and Kendrick Lamar’s Compton soundscapes, this course complicates both the dreams and the despairs yoked to being black in the city.  (LT)

ENGL 27330 History That Never Was: The Counterfactual Novel (Lauren Schachter)  In this course, we will consider counterfactuality in fiction from the 19th century to the 21st. Following critic Catherine Gallagher, we will ask, what if things had happened otherwise? and wonder—along with a range of authors—abut the literary, generic, historical, and ethical stakes of the answers. Readings will focus on the counterfactual from the scale of the sentence to the scale of the (alternate) world. Readings will be drawn from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip Roth, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kingsley Amis, and Abdourahman A. Waberi, among others.  (LG – Fiction)

Return to top of English Language & Literature Spring 2021

CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

*CLCV 22216 Italian Renaissance (Ada Palmer)  Florence, Rome, and the Italian city-states in the age of plagues and cathedrals, Petrarch and Machiavelli, Medici and Borgia (1250-1600), with a focus on literature, philosophy, primary sources, the revival of antiquity, and the papacy's entanglement with pan-European politics. We will examine humanism, patronage, politics, corruption, assassination, feuds, art, music, magic, censorship, education, science, heresy, and the roots of the Reformation. Writing assignments focus on higher level writing skills, with a creative writing component linked to our in-class role-played reenactment of a Renaissance papal election (LARP).

*This is a History Department Gateway course. First-year students and non-History majors welcome.  (LC)

CLCV 26119 Muses and Saints: Poetry and the Christian Imagination (Erin Galgay Walsh)  This course provides an introduction to the poetic traditions of early Christians and the intersection between poetic literature, theology, and biblical interpretation. Students will gain familiarity with the literary context of the formative centuries of Christianity with a special emphasis on Greek and Syriac Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth through the sixth centuries. While theology is often taught through analytical prose, theological reflection in late antiquity and early Byzantium was frequently done in poetic genres. This course introduces students to the major composers and genres of these works as well as the various recurrent themes that occur within this literature. Through reading poetry from liturgical and monastic contexts, students will explore how the biblical imaginations of Christians were formed beyond the confines of canonical scripture. How is poetry a mode of "doing" theology? What habits of biblical interpretation and narration does one encounter in this poetry? This course exposes students to a variety of disciplinary frameworks for studying early Christian texts including history, religious studies, feminist and literary critique, as well as theology. Students will also analyze medieval and modern poetry with religious themes in light of earlier traditions to reflect on the poetry and the religious imagination more broadly.  (LC, LT, LG – Poetry)

GREK 22417/32417 (FNDL 22417) Greek Comedy (Sofia Torallas Tovar)  We will read in Greek Menander's Dyskolos, with an eye to understanding "New Comedy" and its robust afterlife in Renaissance Europe and modern sitcoms. We will also devote some time to reading and assessing fragments from Menander's contemporaries. Coursework will include translation as well as secondary readings. Prerequisite(s): GREK 20300. (LC)

Return to top of Spring 2021

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

CMLT 21667 Poetics of Space in Travel: Performance and Place in Japan and Beyond (Anthony Stott)  How is space imagined and evoked across different media? How might attention to this question lead us to rethink the way that space mediates our experiences of our surroundings? In examining how spatial imaginings travel across time and medium, we will explore questions of space as they are bound up with problems of gender, exile, aesthetics, and performativity. While Japan will be our primary geographic topos, we will interrogate an understanding of these spatialities as ‘Japanese’ by surveying the role they come to play in discourses of both ‘Japanese-ness’ and Western modernism. We will pay special attention to performance (namely, noh drama); however, we will also take up short stories, novels, film and more. Centering our investigations on modern and contemporary cultural production, we will also deal with premodern texts to trace the multiple axes along which our diverse array of objects circulate. Figures considered include: Murata Sayaka, Hori Tatsuo, Miyazawa Kenji, Mishima Yukio, Ôe Kenzaburô, Virginia Woolf, and Zeami. No prior background required.

CMLT 21984 Humans and Their Predators (Sam Lasman)   Animals that sometimes prey on humans occupy critical niches in individual imaginations, global culture, and natural ecosystems. While our interactions with these creatures have shifted drastically over the millennia, only recently—thanks to factors such as ecological collapse and urbanization—has the majority of the world’s population come to live without the threat of predation. This class draws on a variety of disciplines to interrogate relationships between people and the mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish that sometimes eat us. We will read epic literature from the Middle East and Europe; examine news reports from 18th-century France and 21st-century Florida; explore the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of big cat hunting in India and Kenya; and navigate ways in which ecology, paleontology, and other scientific disciplines can inform humanistic inquiry. (LC)

CMLT 27014 Voices from the Iron House: Lu Xun's Works (Paola lovene) An exploration of the writings of Lu Xun (1881-1936), widely considered the greatest Chinese writer of the past century. We will read short stories, essays, prose poetry, and personal letters against the backdrop of the political and cultural upheavals of early 20th century China and in dialogue with important English-language scholarly works.

RLST 24602 (NEHC 44602, BIBL 44602, GNSE 24603/44603, RLST 26250) Song of Songs (Simeon Chavel) In this text-course we will read the entire poetic composition, drawing on theory of literature in general and poetry in particular, tracing its unique forms of continuity, and analyzing its biblically distinctive forms of gender characterization. Prerequisite(s): 1 year biblical Hebrew/ BIBL 33900 and BIBL 34000 Note(s): This is the Biblical Hebrew exegesis course. (LG-P)

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS

EALC 10600 Topics in EALC: Ghosts and the Fantastic in Literature & Film (J. Zeitlin)  What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? How and why is traditional ghost lore reconfigured in the contemporary world? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) and the visualization of the invisible through art, theater, and cinema.

EALC 10710. Topics in EALC: Intertwined Literatures of Postwar Asia (N. Lambrecht)  This course explores literature that illustrates the interconnectedness of Asia in the decade following the conclusion of the Second World War. While the surrender of Japan and the onset of the Cold War contributed to the re-entrenchment of fiercely independent national literatures in Asia, national frameworks tend to obscure the ongoing links across Asia evoked in the works of many writers dealing with this period. Further, the notion of the "postwar" tends to disregard the ways in which war's effects continued to shape the Asian continent through Allied occupations and such widespread conflicts as the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War. By putting the postwar literatures of Asia in conversation with one another, we will aim to achieve a fuller understanding of these texts that have both depicted international circulation and spread through international communities themselves. Course materials include short stories, novels, plays, reportage, and autobiographical writings from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Tibet, Mongolia, Okinawa, and North and South Korea. All readings for this course are available in English; no knowledge of any Asian language is required.

EALC 21667   Poetics of Space in Travel: Performance and Place in Japan and Beyond (A. Stott) How is space imagined and evoked across different media? How might attention to this question lead us to rethink the way that space mediates our experiences of our surroundings? In examining how spatial imaginings travel across time and medium, we will explore questions of space as they are bound up with problems of gender, exile, aesthetics, and performativity. While Japan will be our primary geographic topos, we will interrogate an understanding of these spatialities as ‘Japanese’ by surveying the role they come to play in discourses of ‘Japanese-ness’ and Western modernisms. We will pay special attention to performance (namely, noh drama); however, we will also take up short stories, novels, film and more. Centering our investigations on modern and contemporary cultural production, we will also deal with premodern objects and genres to trace the multiple axes along which our diverse array of objects circulate. Figures considered include: Murata Sayaka, Hori Tatsuo, Miyazawa Kenji, Mishima Yukio, Murasaki Shikibu, Ôe Kenzaburô, Zeami, and Virginia Woolf. No prior background required.

EALC 24305/34305 (CRES 24305, GNSE 25300/35305) Autobiog Writ: Gender& Modern Korea (K. Choi)  This course explores the intersections between gender, the genre of autobiography, forms of media (written; oral; visual; audiovisual) and historical, cultural, and political contexts of modern Korea. The students read theoretical writings on autobiography and gender as well as selected Korean autobiographical writings while being introduced to Korean historical contexts especially as they relate to practice of publication in a broader sense. The focus of the course is placed on the female gender-on the relationship between Korean women's life-experience, self formation, and writing practices in particular while dealing with the gender relationship in general, although some relevant discussions on the male gender proceeds in parallel. (LG-NF)

EALC 24950/34950 Fictions of Selfhood in Modern Japanese Literature (M. Bourdaghs)  As Japanese leaders in the mid 19th century faced the threat of colonization at the hands of the Western powers, they launched a project to achieve “Civilization and Enlightenment,” quickly transforming Japan into a global power that possessed its own empire. In the process fiction became a site for both political engagement and retreat.  A civilized country, it was argued, was supposed to boast “literature” as one of its Fine Arts. This literature was charged with representing the inner life of its characters, doing so in a modern national language that was supposed to be a transparent medium of communication. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, a new language, new literary techniques, and a new set of ideologies were constructed to produce the “self” in novels and short stories. As soon as these new practices were developed, however, they became the objects of parody and ironic deconstruction. Reading key literary texts from the 1880s through the 1930s, as well as recent scholarship, this course will re-trace this historical and literary unfolding, paying special attention to the relationship between language and subjectivity. All readings will be in English. (LG-F)

EALC 26206/36206 (FNDL 26208) The Yi Jing (E. Shaugnessy)  In this course, we will survey the creation and development of the I Ching or Yi Jing, one of the most unique classics in world literature. Originally used as a divination manual, the Yi Jing came to be viewed as the paramount wisdom text in the Chinese intellectual tradition. We will pay equal attention to how the text was first created and to how it came to be interpreted over the course of Chinese history. All readings will be in English, though students taking the course for graduate credit will be encouraged to extend their readings to Chinese sources. (LC)

EALC 27014/37014 Voices from the Iron House: Lu Xun’s Works (P. Iovene)  An exploration of the writings of Lu Xun (1881-1936), widely considered as the greatest Chinese writer of the past century. We will read short stories, essays, prose poetry and personal letters against the backdrop of the political and cultural upheavals of early 20th century China and in dialogue with important English-language scholarly works.

GERMANIC STUDIES

GRMN 24921 Robert Musil: Altered (Sophie Salvo)  This course is an introduction to the work of Robert Musil, one of the major novelists of the twentieth century. We will focus on Musil’s idea of the “Other Condition” [der andere Zustand], which he once described—in contrast to our normal way of life—as a “secret rising and ebbing of our being with that of things and other people.” What is this “Other Condition”: what are its ethics and aesthetics, and how can it be expressed in literature? We will begin with readings from Musil’s critical writings and early narrative prose, then devote the majority of the quarter to his unfinished magnum opus, The Man without Qualities. Particular attention will be paid to Musil’s experimentations with narrative form and his development of the genre of “essayism.”  (LT)

GRM 25241 Babylon Berlin: Politics and Culture in the Weimar Period (Eric Santner)  This seminar will focus on the political and cultural turmoil of the Weimar Republic. Course material will include novels, poetry, political essays, philosophy, visual art, and film. Among authors and artists addressed: Ernst Jünger, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, Fritz Lang, Georg Grosz, Irmgard Keun, Hannah Höch, Bertold Brecht, Carl Schmitt.

YDDH 21721/31721 Women Who Wrote in Yiddish (Jessica Kirzane)  This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers."  Among the writers whose work may be represented in this course are Glikl, Yente Mash, Kadya Molodwsky, Chava Rosenfarb, Yente Serdatsky, Rosa Palatnik, Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, Beyle Shaechter-Gottesman, Gitl Shaechter-Viswanath,  Bella Chagall, Blume Lempel, Esther Kreitman, Debora Vogel, Rokhl Brokhes, Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, Malka Lee, Ida Maze, Roshelle Weprinski, Miriam Karpilove, Zina Rabinovitz, Rokhl Szabad, Rokhl Faygnberg, Paula Prilutsky, Shira Gorshman, Esther Shumiatsher-Hirshbein and Freydl Shtok.  Many of these writers have been underexamined in the history of Yiddish literary studies and this course will bring renewed attention to their work.  This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish.

HIST 18702  Race, Politics, and Sports in the United States  (M. Briones)   Kneeling or standing for the national anthem? Breaking the glass ceiling, coming out of the closet, or crossing the color line in sports? This course will take up the question of why sports are so central to American identity and what historic role sports and athletes have played in American political life. Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson, and Bill Russell are only a few of the athletes who fought for freedom, inclusion, and equality in sports and American life. Through close critical readings of popular and scholarly writing, memoirs, and visual culture (film and television), we will examine the seminal overlapping events in sports history and American history to understand the collision and convergence of our politics and sports culture. (LG-NF)

NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS

ARAB 20658/30658 (NEHC 20658/30658) Narrating Conflict in Modern Arabic Literature (G. Hayek)  This course is an exploration of conflict in the Arab world through literature, film and new media. In this course, we will discuss the influence of independence movements, wars, and revolts on Arabic literature: how do writers write about, or film, conflict? How does conflict affect language itself? How do these texts engage with issues of trauma and bearing witness? To answer these questions, we will look at a number of key moments of conflict in the Arab world, including the Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Algerian war of independence, the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the Lebanese and Iraq wars, and the ongoing war in Syria. Rather than follow a historical chronology of these events, we will read these texts thematically, beginning with texts that seek to present themselves as direct, sometimes eye-witness, accounts and then moving on to narratives that complicate the relationship between conflict and its narration. (LG-NF)

NEHC 29714/39714 (CMLT 29714/39714) North Africa in Literature and Film (Hoda El Shakry)  This course explores twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cinematic works from the countries of North Africa. We will focus in particular on the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb-encompassing Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the Maghreb has a layered colonial past culminating in France's brutal occupation of the region through the 1960s. Inflected by this colonial history, Maghrebi studies tends to privilege Francophone works while overlooking the region's rich Arabic and indigenous traditions. Understanding the Maghreb as both a geopolitical as well as an imagined space, our course materials reflect the region's diverse cultural histories and practices. We will consider the Maghreb's ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism in dialogue with broader questions of cultural imperialism, orientalism, decolonization, and globalization. Fictional and cinematic works will be paired with relevant historical and theoretical readings. In light of the recent 'Arab Spring' catapulted by the Tunisian uprising in January 2011, we will also touch on contemporary social and political happenings in the region. (LT)

ROMANCE LANGUAGES & LITERATURE

Russian and east european studies.

REES 20000/30000 (RLIT 32900 / RLST 28501) Tolstoy's Late Works (William Nickell)  This course examines the works written by Tolstoy after Anna Karenina, when he abandoned the novel as a form and gave up his copyright. Readings include his influential writings on non-violence and vegetarianism, his challenges to church and state authority, as well as later literary works, which some believe surpass the famous novels he had renounced. We will also explore the particularities of Tolstoy’s charisma in these years, when he came to be viewed as a second Tsar in Russia and as a moral authority throughout the world.

REES 25025/35025 (CMLT 25025/35025, GNSE 25025/35025) Gender and Translation (Ana Elena Torres)  The course will consider translation--both theory and practice--in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project.)  (LT)

REES 29023/39023 Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest (Angelina Ilieva)  Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior… Abject… Angry… Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the “West,” as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the “Rest,” as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other’s standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself—self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization—and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski. 

REES 39018 (CMLT 27701/37701) Imaginary Worlds: The Fantastic and Magic Realism in Russia and Southeastern Europe (Angelina Ilieva)  In this course, we will ask what constitutes the fantastic and magic realism as literary genres while reading some of the most interesting writings to have come out of Russia and Southeastern Europe. While considering the stylistic and narrative specificities of this narrative mode, we also think about its political functions -from subversive to escapist, to supportive of a nationalist imaginary-in different contexts and at different historic moments in the two regions. (LG-F)

SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS

SALC 25601 (RLST 24251) The Bhagavad Gita: Contested Readings of a World Classic (Dan Arnold)  Few religious classics have been as variously interpreted as the Bhagavad Gītā, which is surely among the most often-translated works in the world. A text of long-standing importance in Hindu traditions, the Bhagavad Gītā has had an especially interesting career in modernity, having been of great significance not only for M. K. Gandhi, but also for the likes of Thoreau and Eliot, not to mention the many less widely appreciated interpreters for whom the text's martial setting has been of central significance. After taking some steps to situate this great Sanskrit text in the context of its early Indian history, this course will explore a representative range of its available interpretations. Along the way, it is hoped that we will learn something not only about the Bhagavad Gītā, but also about the very ideas of interpretation and understanding.

SALC 26170 (ENST 26170, RLST 26170) Why Do Animals Talk? Beastly Worlds in South Asian Literature (Sarah Pierce Taylor)  Comprised of a diverse set of languages covering a disparate set of regions, South Asian literatures share a deep investment in the figure of the animal. Whether imagined through the genre of political advice, in narrative tellings of the past lives of the Buddha, or simply as characters in an expanded continuum of life, animals serve as important literary devices to reflect on human beings as well as autonomous subjects bound up with humans with their own distinct emotional and spiritual lives. Drawing particularly from the Sanskrit tradition among others, this course will introduce students to a broad survey of animal literature in South Asia alongside more recent scholarship in Animal Studies. By the end of the course, students can expect to have a myriad of answers to the question: why do animals talk?

SALC 26702/36702 Why comment? Early modern commentarial literature (Tyler Williams)  What is the purpose of a commentary? What do commentaries in different languages, and on different types of texts, 'do'? This course will take the example of commentarial literature from early modern South Asia-- primarily but not exclusively northern India--to explore the different contexts, projects, and intellectual milieus in which commentaries were composed, circulated, and performed. Primary readings will be in English, Sanskrit, and Hindi, and include commentaries (and their accompanying root texts;) we will also read a selection of modern scholarly writings on commentarial literature to survey different approaches to working with commentarial works.

SALC 27904 /43800 Wives, Widows, and Prostitutes: Hindi Literature and the "Women's Question" (Ulrike Stark)  From the early 19th century onward, the debate on the status of Indian women was an integral part of the discourse on the state of civilization, Hindu tradition, and social reform in colonial India. This course will explore how Indian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged with the so-called "women's question." Caught between middle-class conservatism and the urge for social reform, Hindi and Urdu writers addressed controversial issues such as female education, child marriage, widow remarriage, and prostitution in their fictional and discursive writings. We will explore the tensions of a literary and social agenda that advocated the 'uplift' of women as a necessary precondition for the progress of the nation, while also expressing patriarchal fears about women's rights and freedom. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Basic knowledge of Hindi and/or Urdu is preferable, but not required. We will read works by Nazir Ahmad, Premcand, Jainendra Kumar, Mirza Hadi Ruswa, and Mahadevi Varma in English translation, and also look at texts used in Indian female education at the time. (LT)

SALC 34300 (RLVC 34300, HREL 34300, DVPR 34300, MDVL 26250) Buddhist Poetry in India (Matthew Kapstein)  The substantial Buddhist contribution to Indian poetry is of interest for what it teaches us of both Buddhism and the broad development of Indian literature. The present course will focus upon three phases in this history, with attention to what changes of language and literary genre tell us of the transformations of Indian religious culture from the last centuries B.C.E. to about the year 1000. Readings (all in translation) will include the Therīgāthā, a collection of verses written in Pali and the most ancient Indian example of womens' literature, selections from the work of the great Sanskrit poets Aśvaghoṣa, Āryaśūra, and Mātṛceta, and the mystical songs, in the Apabhraṃśa language, of the Buddhist tantric saints. Prerequisite(s): General knowledge of Buddhism is desirable. (LG-P)

THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Winter 2021.

ENGL 10620 Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment (Julie Orlemanski)  This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science.  (LC)

ENGL 11008 Introduction to Latinx Literature (Rachel Galvin)  From the activist literature of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement to contemporary fiction and poetry, this course explores the forms, aesthetics, and political engagements of U.S. Latinx literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Theoretical readings are drawn from Chicanx Studies, Latinx Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, as we explore Latinx literature in the context of current debates about globalization, neoliberalism, and U.S. foreign policy; Latinx literature’s response to technological and socio-political changes and its engagement with race, gender, sexuality, class, and labor; and its dialogues with indigenous, Latin American, North American, and European literatures.  (LT)

ENGL 11200 Fundamentals of Literary Criticism (Sianne Ngai)  An introduction to the practice of literary and cultural criticism over the centuries, with a particular emphasis on theoretical debates about meaning and interpretation in the late 20th century and present. Critics and theorists will include Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Barbara Johnson, Raymond Williams, Saidya Hartman, Eve Sedgwick, René Girard, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Berlant, Catherine Gallagher and others.  (LT)

ENGL 12106 Women of the Avant-Garde (Rikvy Mondal)  This course provides an introduction to the written materials of women artists who belonged to various twentieth-century avant-garde movements and circles. The institutions of “woman art” and “the avant-garde” will come under scrutiny as we consider the literary and archival miscellany of pan- & non-sexual, cross-generational, inter-aesthetic, multilingual, and transnational works by such makers as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo, and Yoko Ono. How do these artists conceive of their work and process as interventions into social, political, and historical realities? How does their subjective view of those realities provide an account of the identificatory powers of their gender and sexuality? We will examine the ways in which abstraction in writing becomes useful for commenting on issues raised by feminist and queer theory, periodization, canonization, and institution. Taking to the Regenstein’s Special Collections Research Center, we will also open up the criticism, diaries, and letters of these artists to gain a new perspective on their creative processes. In addition to learning how to constellate these materials with the course readings, students will acquire hands-on experience in archival research, annotation, and curation as they make an archival project of their own. Students’ final projects will serve as the basis for a prospective library exhibition in concert with Special Collections. ( LT)

ENGL 12704/32174 Writing Persuasion: Health and Environment (Tracy Weiner)  A writing-intensive course in persuasive techniques that influence opinions and attempt to change behavior. This year our focus will be on an issue that presents a challenge for persuasion theory: the environment. People are notoriously slow to change their beliefs and behavior on environmental issues, and persuasion theory suggests reasons why this might be the case. Environmental problems ask readers to weigh costs that affect one group against benefits that might accrue to someone else. They involve time frames ranging from moments (which are easy to think and write about) to millennia (not so easy) to geological epochs, a time scale so remote from our experience as to be opaque to the imagination. Environmental problems are complex in ways that make them difficult to capture in a coherent, emotionally compelling narrative. Many individually innocuous and seemingly unrelated environmental events can converge over time to produce consequences that are counter-intuitively larger and graver than their causes. This felt disparity between actions and outcomes can violate an audience's sense of fairness, biasing the audience against a persuasive appeal.  (LT)

ENGL 15107 Some Versions of Apocalypse (Mark Miller)  From prophetic texts of the ancient world to today's fascination with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, and nuclear winter, the genre of apocalypse has given extraordinarily fertile expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. 

ENGL 16004 Protest Puppetry: Materializing American Publicness (Marissa Fenley)  This course will explore the structural dynamics of protests through a close examination of giant puppets. We will engage with both practices and theories of protest puppetry. You will learn how to craft insurgent objects out papier maché and other found materials. We will think through this practice alongside theories of the public sphere and ethnographies of protests, uprisings and social movements (on the left and the right) from the 1960s to the present day. Rather than maintain the division between theory and practice, we will investigate the ways in which social movements mobilize theory as liberatory practice and how the practice of “puppetganda” generates theories of publicity from the mechanical and technical demands it makes on its puppeteers, participants and spectators. We will study specific protest events, from pioneers of the artform like Bread and Puppet in the 1960s to the height of protest puppetry during the environmental and global justice movements in the 1980s-2000s. We will ask why protest puppets were especially popular during the rise of neoliberalism and ultimately examine their usefulness in today’s political climate in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and Black uprising as well as the alt-right “rally.”  (LT)

ENGL 16500 Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies (Ellen MacKay)  An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and (English) histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. A shorter and a longer paper will be required.  (LC)

ENGL 17516 Religious Poetry from Donne to Eliot (Richard Strier)  This course will study some of the greatest religious poems in our language, focusing on major poets in the 17th century (Donne & Herbert), in the 19th century (Dickinson & Hopkins), and in the 20th century, where we will study T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets in its entirety. Mid-term exercise and final paper required.  (LG – Poetry, LC) 

*Prerequisite: Must have completed HumCore & 1 other poetry course

ENGL 17950 The Declaration of Independence (Eric Slauter)  This course offers an extended investigation of the origins, meanings, and legacies of one of the most consequential documents in world history: the Declaration of Independence. Primary and secondary readings provide a series of philosophical, political, economic, social, religious, literary, and legal perspectives on the text’s sources and meanings; its drafting, circulation, and early reception in the age of the American Revolution; and its changing place in American culture and world politics over nearly 250 years.  (LC)

ENGL 19570 Text as Data: Interpretation in the Digital Humanities (Jordan Pruett)  In recent years, the digitization of large text archives has enabled new ways of researching culture and history at scale. This course gives students a conceptual, beginner-level introduction to these methods, which are sometimes referred to as the “digital humanities.” How does literary and cultural history look different when seen from the point of view of an entire nation or society rather than from the point of view of an individual reader? What can we learn about, for instance, the history of tabloids, the rise of the novel, or the political struggles of nineteenth century Black organizers? The course itself presumes no technical expertise whatsoever. Rather, we will explore tools and archives designed for beginners and non-specialists. Our focus will be on the philosophical and interpretive aspects of quantitative research in the humanities rather than on techniques. ( LT)

ENGL 20180/40180 Women Writing God (Sarah Kunjummen)  This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, we will explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity understood to be unrepresentable. What kind of authority is required to present a representation of gods or God to readers, and how do women writers, in particular, establish such authority or manage its absence? What theories of embodiment or spirituality do we find presented in these writings? Is it possible or desirable to articulate a distinctively feminine relation to the body or transcendence across such varied texts? Readings may include Julian of Norwich’s fourteenth-century Revelations of Divine Love, the philosophical writings of Anne Conway, the poems of ‘A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah, and novels by Marilynne Robinson and Leslie Marmon Silko. ( LT)

ENGL 20266 Coming of Age: Autobiography, Bildungsroman, and Memoir in Victorian Britain and its Empire (Elaine Hadley)  In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of “coming of age” stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological “invention” of adolescence.  (LC, LG - Nonfiction)

ENGL 21223 Black Speculative Fiction (Sophia Azeb)  This course familiarizes students with Black literary speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy. The objective of this course is to read Black speculative fiction alongside the historical contexts the assigned works speak to, as well as orient students to the radical re/imaginings of Black pasts, presents, and futures in the novels and short films at the center of the course. This class will pay particular attention to Black diasporic/international contributions to the genre. ( LG – Fiction, LT)

ENGL 21310/4130 (GNSE 21310, GNSE 41300, MAPH 41300) Our biopolitics, ourselves: feminist science fiction (Strang)  What could a feminist utopia be? What is it like to encounter the kind of difference in living relations that gender utopianism offers? This class enters into those urgent questions by way of a serious engagement with the feminist science fiction of the 1970s. 1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s, finds many of its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being, shared affects, new bodies, and transformed kinship relations. Readings will be from 1970s feminisms, contemporary theory (including biopolitical theory, new materialisms, gender and race theory), and as much science fiction as possible. SF authors include Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy. ( LG, LT)

ENGL 21360/41360 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation (Schweiger)  Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries - not to mention a thriving "Janeite" fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen's completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. ( LC, LT)

ENGL 24400 Brecht and Beyond (Loren Kruger)  Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory generally is also considerable. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920's to the agitprop Lehrstück and film esp Kühle Wampe) to the classical parable plays, as well as the work of his heirs in German theatre (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss) and film (RW Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge), in French film (Jean-Luc Godard) and cultural theory (the Situationists and May 68), film and theatre in Britain (Mike Leigh and Lucy Prebble), and theatre and film in Africa, from South Africa to Senegal.  (LT)

* NOTE: This is *not* a basic intro course: background in one or more of the following areas is essential: Intro to film/international cinema AND/OR TAPS AND/OR German or French. 

*This course also includes a weekly screening session. 

ENGL 24526 Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Christine Fouirnaies)  This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald. ( LG - Nonfiction)

ENGL 25260 Romanticism (Jim Chandler)  In depth study of the period literature across poetry and fiction. Poetry: not just the canonical “big six” but also selections from the expanded horizon that includes once neglected women poets, as well as Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, John Clare. Fiction might include works by Godwin, Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. Some attention will be paid as well to Romanticism as a fertile source for criticism and theory over the decades.  (LC, LT)

ENGL 25262 Gender and Sexuality in a Transnational World (Kaneesha Parsard)  This course, through attention to critical theory and expressive cultures, surveys gender and sexuality across time and place. Students will learn about theories of sex, gender, and sexuality; colonialisms and nationalisms; social movements; and war, migration, and technology.  (LT)

ENGL 27340 Battle of the Genres in Long Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Lauren Schachter) This course investigates a battle of genres—primarily of poem versus prose—that twists and turns through much eighteenth- and early nineteenth century writing. Around 1700, the traditional poetic forms such as verse satire and the ode reigned; there were no novels per se, only genre-defying prose fictions by the likes of Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn. Yet by 1800, not only was the novel a household name but poetry was undergoing an identity crisis of its own, also known as Romanticism: the expressive "I" of the lyric developed in tension with the narrative of epic, not to mention the narrative form of prose. Together, we will ask: How did the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century contend with the classical authority of poetry? How did poems and their reception change in relation to the novel's development and standardization? How did various literary genres differently revive old forms, like the gothic? We'll read works by authors including Dryden, Pope, Haywood, and Behn, as well as Richardson, Macpherson, Radcliffe, Cowper, Smith, Blake, Coleridge, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. We'll draw critical readings from Aristotle's Poetics, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, Jacques Derrida, and Gabrielle Starr, among others.  (LC, LG – Fiction, LG – Poetry)

ENGL 28405 Old English Riddles (Med. Research Sequence II) (Ben Saltzman)  In this course, we will read and translate all of the Exeter Book Riddles from Old English, attending closely to issues of language, paleography, textual cruxes, and—of course—interpretation. In an effort to understand these riddles within a broader early medieval tradition of enigmatic poetry, we will also read several Old English charms as well as Anglo-Latin riddles in translation. Emphasis will also be placed on the history of scholarship on early medieval riddles, and over the course of the term, each student will produce a piece original scholarly research that engages with a riddle or set of riddles and the critical tradition.  (LC)

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CMST 27522 Experimental Futures (Desiree Foerster) In this class students will get an outline of an emerging area of interdisciplinary research that reframes the category of the “human” in face of contemporary environmental challenges such as climate change and scarcity of resources. Students will become familiar with concepts and theories associated with post-humanism, new materialisms, and environmental humanities and use them to reflect on examples from architecture, design, and the arts. Assignments involve the reading and preparing of selected literature, written reflections on projects from architecture, design, and the arts, small lectures, and active participation in the class.  (LT)

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CMLT 21224 Against Interpretation: Philology at the Crossroads (Claudio Sansone)  Susan Sontag closed her essay “Against Interpretation” calling for “an erotics of art.” Such an “erotics” would avoid doing anything to tame the work of art—allowing its hold on the imagination to grow, without trimming down its excrescences. Eros here stands for the irreducibility of the presence of art—the finite or even infinitesimal presence that imposes itself as irrepressibly fractal in its growth. Sontag was challenging us to make a certain kind of intellectual and affective space available—and this challenge has been reprised in recent scholarship that attempts to trace the state of the Humanities and some of its more eminent toolkits. Both philology and close-reading have been exposed as disciplinarian “disciplines” of the Humanities—long having abandoned the “erotic” power reading as a strategy of unfolding in favor of what might be termed strategies of containment. But this was not always the case. This course seeks to recover what then remains, peeking into the backgrounds of these disciplines as they stand at the crossroads of relevance and retreat—hovering just short of the intimate space of textual experience described by Sontag.

CMLT 21748 Global Human Rights Literature (Nory Peters) This course surveys key human rights texts (philosophical texts, literary works, and legal documents) of the 20th and 21st centuries. By reading global literatures alongside international human rights instruments, and by treating literature as an archive of ideas that circulate among a literary public invested in human rights, this course explores the importance of art and literature to legal and political projects and provides students with the opportunity to conceptualize the role of narrative for human rights advocacy and human rights imaginaries. We will chart the rise of the global human rights movement, beginning with the 1940s up to our contemporary moment, paying close attention to key human rights issues such as genocide, citizenship, enforced disappearance, detention, apartheid, refugee crises, and mass incarceration. Readings will include works by Anna Seghers, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt,  Jacobo Timerman, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rigoberta Menchú, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Antije Krog, Dave Eggers, and Albert Woodfox.

CMLT 25301/35301 (ENGL 25301/35301, SOCI 20525/30525) The Sociology of Literature (Larry Rothfield)  This course explores the critical potential and limitations of a few key sociological approaches to literature, working with the literary scene of the 1890s as our case. We will focus on Bourdieu's theorization of the field of cultural production; Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge and discursive formations; and recent efforts by Moretti and others to import geographic, social network, and evolutionary models into literary studies.  (LT)

CMLT 26112 (GNSE 26112, SALC 26112, HMRT 26112, CRES 26112)Queer Asia(s) 2 (Nisha Kommattam)  While this course is conceptualized as a sequel to Queer Asia(s) 1 from last fall, it is nevertheless a standalone course that can be taken separately, without prerequisites. This course continues to explore representations of queerness, same-sex love and sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literature and films in both Asian languages and English. The geographic regions represented include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore. There will be a focus on the modern/contemporary period as well as queer diasporas. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. Questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity will be addressed. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week. ( LT)

CMLT 28446/38446 Apocalypse Now: Scripts of Eschatological Imagination ( Mark Payne , Chris Wild)  Apocalyptic fantasies are alive and well today – in beach reads and blue-chip fiction; in comic books and YA novels; in streaming TV shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and ironic arthouse cinema. These apocalyptic fantasies follow well-established scripts that often date back millennia. Apocalypse scripts allow their users to make sense of the current crisis and prepare for an uncertain future. The course will be divided into two parts. The first half will be devoted to texts, art, and movies that dwell on the expectation of the end and narratively measure out the time that remains. We will begin with examining the biblical ur-scripts of an apocalyptic imaginary, the Book of Daniel in the Old and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, as well as Saint Paul’s messianism in the Letter to the Romans; and then move on to medieval apocalyptic fantasies of the Joachim of Fiore and others; and end with the apocalypticism underlying the religious reforms of Girolamo Savonarola and Martin Luther. The second half will focus on life after the apocalypse — the new freedoms, and new forms of political life and sociality that the apocalyptic event affords its survivors. Readings will include the political theory of marronage, capabilities, and neoprimitivism; literary theory of speculative fiction; and post-apocalyptic narratives by Octavia Butler, Jean Hegland, Richard Jefferies, Cormac McCarthy, and Colson Whitehead. Readings and discussions in English.

RLST 28705  (ARTH 28705, MDVL 28705) Christian Iconography (Karin Krause)  In Christian culture, visual images have for many centuries played a pivotal role in ritual, devotion, intellectual thought, and religious instruction. The most important aims of this course are that students understand images convey meaning in very unique ways and learn how to decode their visual messages. The study of iconography encompasses a variety of methods used to identify the subject matter of a pictorial image, describe its contents, and analyze its discursive strategies in view of its original cultural context. We will cover some of the most important themes visualized in the arts of Christianity by analyzing imagery spanning different periods, geographical regions, pictorial media, and artistic techniques. While special emphasis is placed on the intersections of art and literature, we will also examine pictorial themes that are independent of a specific textual basis. Alongside the study of Christian iconography, this course will address broader issues of visual inquiry, such as patronage, viewer response, emotions, and gender roles. In this course, students will acquire a 'visual literacy' that will enable them to explore all kinds of works of art fruitfully as primary sources in their own right.  (LC, LT)

EALC 25301 Inventing the Chinese Short Story (A. Fox)  This class will trace the emergence of the vernacular short story as a new genre in the late Ming and early Qing. We will focus on the seveteenth-century story collections of Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu, Aina Jushi, and Li Yu, whose stories map the social whole of late imperial China—from merchant schemes to courtesan romances, from the friendships of students to the follies of emperors. Alongside close readings of selected stories, we will examine the structure, sources, and publication histories of these collections and locate them in a broader discussion of the meanings and functions of vernacular literature. All readings in English. TTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.  (LG ­– Fiction, LC)

NORW 26700 Literature of the Occupation (Kimberly Kenny)  The German Occupation of Norway, which lasted from April 9, 1940 to May 7, 1945 is indisputable the most significant event in modern Norwegian history. The aim of this course is to use literature of and about this period to characterize the Occupation experience in Norway. While our texts come primarily from Norwegians, one novel is German and two others, American. Given the context for these works, we will consider them not only as fiction, but also as history and even propaganda. Ultimately, we will address the issue of national myth-making: To what extent have Norwegians mythologized their Occupation experience and is this apparent in our texts?

PHIL 24803 Political Philosophy: Hume and Rousseau (Dan Brudney)  In this course we will look at central texts by Hume and Rousseau.  We will be trying to understand them in their own terms, not as precursors to, say, Kant.  We will connect these writers to other intellectual movements of their time, reading works of fiction along with the philosophical texts.  Writers to be read include Butler, Diderot, Hume, Rousseau and Austen.  (LC)

RLLT 24500/34500 Digital Approaches to Text Analysis: opening new paths for textual scholarship (Clovis Gladstone)  The purpose of this course is to introduce students of literature, and more generally the humanities, to digital humanities methodologies for the study of text. Among the various digital approaches which will be introduced in class are concordances (retrieving occurrences of words), semantic similarity detection (finding similar passages across texts), sentiment analysis, stylometry (analysis of literary style), and topic modeling (automatic classification of texts). The course will highlight how these approaches to text can provide new avenues of research, such as tracing intellectual influence over the longue durée, or uncovering the distinguishing stylistic features of an author, work, or literary movement. Students need no prior knowledge of such methods, and the course will aim at providing the basics of computer programming in Python to give students the necessary tooling to conduct a digital humanities project. The source material for the course will be drawn from literary sources, and students will be free (and encouraged) to use texts which are relevant to their own research interests. Students will need to bring a laptop to class.  (LT)

RLLT 28650 Migrant Words: Belonging and Displacement in Multilingual Writers (Silvia Guslandi)  How does mobility affect the writing of a migrant writer, exile, refugee or second generation immigrant? How do authors represent and negotiate national, racial and ethnic identities? How do those who experience exile or emigration conceptualize their condition in the economy of cultural loss and/or gain? Does defining an author as American rather Haitian-American influence the way we approach them? By looking at works by several immigrant or otherwise multicultural writers – John Fante, Emanuel Carnevali, Édouard Glissant, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Aimé Césaire, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Amelia Rosselli, Pietro di Donato, Edwidge Danticat, Igiaba Scego – we will examine literary expressions of transnational flows of people and ideas. We will explore linguistic issues stemming from transnational mobility and post-colonialism, such as bilingualism, code-switching, creole, and self-translation, as well as the recurring themes of longing, belonging, nostalgia and displacement. We will also question key terms in today’s cultural discourse, such as cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and marginality. Are these concepts helpful in approaching the literary works of authors writing between languages and cultures? How and to what extent is our reading affected by these ideas? Our focus will be on literature, but our investigations will draw upon scholarship from a range of interdisciplinary fields including Migration and Diaspora Studies.  (LT)

REES 25502/35502 (FNDL 25334) The Russian Novel (William Nickell)  The course will focus on three of the greatest philosophical crime novels in modern literature: Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bely’s Peterburg. Together they chart the course of development of the Russian novel, engaging literature’s essential questions, but also its “accursed” ones, as the Russians say—the ones that can never be answered, but provoke the most worthy of sort of debate.  (LG – Fiction)

REES 29010/39010 (CMLT 26912/36912) Strangers to Ourselves: Emigre Literature and Film from Russia and Southeast Europe (Angelina Ilieva)  "Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht. 

REES 29021/39021 (FNDL 29020) The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov (Angelina Ilieva)  “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. . . . Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art, and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand The Master and Margarita. 

AUTUMN 2020

ENGL 10703 20th Century Short Fiction (William Veeder)  This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov; on through the next generation, O'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver; and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan, and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender, and psychology. Writing is also an important concern of the course. There will be two papers and an individual tutorial with each student. ( LG - Fiction)

ENGL 11004 History of the Novel (Maud Ellman)  This course examines the evolution of the novel from the 18th to the 21st century, and includes an introduction to theories of narrative.  (LG – Fiction, LC, LT)

ENGL 18660 The World's a Stage: Performance in Politics, Culture, and Everyday Life (John Muse)  This course traces the history of the double-edged notion that the world might resemble a stage from its ancient roots to its current relevance in politics, social media, and gender expression, among other areas. We will explore these questions by reading performance texts and performance theory from classical to contemporary, by attending plays and watching films, and by visiting non-theatrical events in order to consider them as occasions for performance. ( LT)

ENGL 19856 Orientalisms (Jacob Harris)  Orientalism: in the 19th century, this word referred both to the disciplined study of Asian cultures in Western academia, and to a school of European painting characterized by its fanciful and exotic depictions of Asia (and the Middle East in particular). Since Edward Said’s landmark 1978 book of the same title, Orientalism has come to name a complex and historically varied Western tendency to relate to Asia on the terms of stereotyping fantasy. Surveying the development of orientalist themes from about 1890 to the present—including the craze for japonisme in late-19th century European art, and the mix-and-match approach to Eastern (and other) spiritualities that constitutes the “New Age”—this course unravels the tropes and conventions that have historically shaped how Asia is imagined, perceived, and represented in the modern West. Along the way, we will ask how and why orientalist tropes have historically framed the exploration of issues like gender, sexuality, cultural decline, and futurity. Starting with Said as a springboard, we’ll read a series of literary and cinematic texts—Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood For Love—alongside more recent theoretical accounts of orientalism by scholars such as Anne Anlin Cheng, Grace Lavery, and R John Williams. We will also look at the ways in which Asian writers and artists have adopted orientalist modes of representation for their own critical purposes. ( LC, LT)

ENGL 19920 "I, too, am America": Ethnic Minority Poetry in the US (Geronimo Sarmiento-Cruz)  This course is designed as a survey of the various minority traditions excluded from canonical understandings of the history of US poetry. Centered around the twentieth century yet bookended by earlier and later poetry, the course is divided into four sections: African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American. Among many others, we’ll read poems by Myung Mi Kim, Amiri Baraka, Simon J. Ortiz, and Claudia Rankine. ( LG – Poetry, LT)

ENGL 20001 (GNSE 20001) Theories of Sexuality and Gender (C. Riley Snorton and Allison Reed)  This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses.  (LT)

ENGL 20040 Borders, Migration, and Refugees (Brandon Truett)  This course explores the complex geopolitical issues of migration and national borders through visual and literary representations of the refugee in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Artists, writers, and theorists will include Sam Selvon, Roberto Bolaño, Mounira Al Solh, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Ocean Vuong.  (LT)

ENGL 20212 Romantic Natures (Timothy Campbell)  Our survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (especially the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will also address foundational and recent critical-theoretical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic and dangerously erotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism of the naturalist Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” and the (literal) fruits of empire and vegetarianism.  LC

ENGL 21350 Early Modern Women Writing Trauma (Beatrice Bradley)  This course examines 16th and 17th century women’s writing alongside the scholarship of trauma studies, with attention to themes of childbed suffering, loss, and geographical displacement. How did early modern authors employ a vocabulary for individual and collective encounters with death, illness, violence, and emotional disturbance prior to the modern conceptualization of trauma in the 20th century? What displaced histories are we able to access by bringing sustained focus to women’s writing? We will explore how early modern women articulate questions around suffering, personhood, and macro categories of identity (such as race, gender, class, and disability) as well as how their writing might reframe and/or disrupt the category of trauma in contemporary theory. Early modern authors of focus will include, among others, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Carey, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips; we will also read widely across genres and time periods, with a syllabus that incorporates materials ranging from early modern midwifery treatises to contemporary drama.  (LC)

ENGL 21690 Empire and the Novel (Rebeca Velasquez)  This course investigates how the rise of the nineteenth-century British novel is intimately linked to the expansion of the British Empire. Many understand that this empire was based on unfair trade relations, indigenous genocide, and the exploitative labor of millions, but it can be difficult at times to see how this atrocious history fits into the domestic and metropolitan realism of the novel. How does the practice of imperialism impact the conventions of domestic fiction? How are the novel’s constructions of gender, race, and class related to the political status of colonized peoples? Our focus will be to connect narrative form with the realities of imperialism and colonial rule, but we will also draw on other genres of nineteenth-century cultural production such as print journalism, visual art, and political essays in order to help us trace the sociopolitical conditions that made empire possible. Fictional readings may include work by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Olive Schreiner, and others. We will utilize our access to colonial archives in London with possible field trips to the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among other outings throughout the city. Assignments include weekly Canvas posts, a close-reading exercise, a 4-5-page reflection paper on an archival object, and a 6-7-page final paper. ( LG – Fiction, LC,  LT)

ENGL 21785 Black in Colonial America: Three Women (Sarah Johnson)  Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time. Simplified by history as a witch, a poet and a mistress, the details of the lives of Tituba, Phillis and Sally resists these epithets. This course will ask why and how they remain present in the written record today, and what this teaches us about the formation of literary and historical canons.  (LC)

ENGL 23127 Queer Letters and LGBTQ+ Lifeworlds (Sarah McDaniel)  This course asks after the social and aesthetic possibilities of queer literatures, with a particular interest in such life-writing forms as the personal letter and epistolary (or electronic) correspondence. What, we will ask, can attending to specifically LGBTQ+ correspondences and life-writings teach us about minoritarian lifeworlds and literary canons? And, vice versa, how does an attention to the sub- or counter-cultural spaces of queer literary production change the way we read even canonical literary texts? We will visit a variety of LGBTQ+ literary lifeworlds across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – between London, Paris, New York, San Francisco – and engage a wide range of texts and media that represent and encode queer social circuits: collected correspondences, coterie literatures, auto/biographies, memoirs, poetry, and film. In so doing, we will develop a backdrop of queer theoretical scholarship devoted to questions of community-making, subcultural space and belonging, and queer time, including the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Juana María Rodríguez, Elizabeth Freeman, and Jack Halberstam. In addition to a self-designed archival, analytical, or creative final project, we will also hone archival research strategies through two excursions to local archives and experiment with creative and collaborative strategies for reading and writing as we challenge ourselves to think from the position of correspondents. ( LT, LG - Nonfiction)

ENGL 23130 Screwing Up: Shame, Apology, and Gender Theory (Bellamy Mitchell)  What does it feel like to be wrong? How do we know when we have “erred”, and who decides what’s right? How does feeling shame change how we think of ourselves and how we might behave in the future? What does the “normative” in heteronormative mean? In this class, we will use the question of normativity—senses of wrongness and rightness and how those judgments are articulated, navigated, and enforced—to explore foundational concepts in and across theories of gender and sexuality. We will also examine the social performances of apology, guilt, regret, and remorse that occur when individuals believe they have erred. We will examine ways in which gender and bodily regimes of normativity occur in and around scenes of discomfort, uncertainty, and insecurity as well as through infrastructures of legality and policing. This course pairs our central theoretical texts from feminist, queer, critical race and disability studies with literary texts, works of poetry, and contemporary cultural objects in order to examine how these questions are enacted in a variety of lived and literary perspectives.  (LT)

ENGL 28404 Introduction to Old English (Benjamin Saltzman)  “Moððe word fræt.” These are the first words of a riddle that students will learn how to read in this course. As the first part of the Medieval Research Series, this course introduces students to the Old English language, the literary history of early medieval England, and current research tools and scholarship in the field of Old English. In studying the language, we will explore its diverse and exciting body of literature, including poems of heroic violence and lament, laws, medical recipes, and humorously obscene riddles. Successful completion of the course will give students a rich sense not only of the earliest period of English literary culture, but also of the structure of the English language as it is written and spoken today. ( LC) *This course is the first in a two quarter Medieval Research sequence. No prior experience with Old or Middle English is required. The second course in the Medieval Research sequence (Beowulf) will be offered in the Spring Quarter.

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CMST 21650 Irish Literature and Film (James Chandler)  Irish literature in English from Swift to Anna Burns (Milkman), including Thomas Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney); Irish Cinema including films by John Ford, Neil Jordan, John Huston, Ken Loach, Lenny Abramson, Jim Sheridan, Kirsten Sheridan, John Crowley. 

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CMLT 20109 Comparative Methods in the Humanities (Olga Solovieva)  This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," and Mario Vargas Llosa’s "The Storyteller"; Victor Segalen’s "Stèles"; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei"; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, "Carmen," and the film adaptation "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s "The Lower Depths"; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, "The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants," and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, "The Overcoat" and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.”  (LT)

CMLT 21200 Literature and Technology from Frankenstein to the Futurists (Ana Ilievska)  Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it,” wrote Heidegger. In the year 2020, the year of COVID-19 and mass physical lockdown, this statement is more valid than ever. Keeping current events in mind, in this course we will pose anew the question concerning technology and go back to the First and Second Industrial Revolutions when humans first came into intense contact with machines and restructured life and literature around them. We will trace the ecological, economical, and emotional footprints of various machines and technological devices (automata, trains, phonographs, cameras) in major European literary works from Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Zola's La bête humaine (1890) to Luigi Pirandello's The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1925), while inquiring into the nature of technology and what it means to be human through key philosophical texts from Plato to N. Katherine Hayles.

CMLT 21206 Buddhism and Chinese Literature (Alia Breitwieser)  This course introduces late 16th- and 17th-century works of Chinese literature whose content, form, and concerns are shaped by Buddhism. At this historical moment, which hosted the buildup to and fallout from the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), writers and their audiences privileged conceptual diversity and ethical self-cultivation and drew freely on religious and literary systems of meaning to develop creative approaches to living during a time of profound uncertainty. We will begin by grappling with the philosophical nuances of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy by reading the Heart Sutra, one of the tradition’s most influential sources. From this foundation, we will examine and critique the ethical implications of Buddhist themes as they play out in significant works of fiction and Chan poetry. The course will finish with a critical reflection on how the modern conception of “literature” as a discipline apart from religion might detract from our understanding of pre-modern, pre-disciplinary sources while concealing the religious dimensions of modern “literary” endeavors.  (LC)

CMLT 26111 Queer Asia(s) (Nisha Kommattam)  This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love and sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from Asian languages as well as Asian films, geographically ranging from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity. This course is part one of a two-quarter sequence, with the second part offered in Winter Quarter 2021. Each quarter can also be taken separately. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.  (LT)

CMLT 28775/38775 Racial Melancholia (Kris Trujillo)  This course provides students with an opportunity to think race within a psychoanalytic framework. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia have developed over the past century, especially in relationship to the theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thus, we will approach Asian America, African American, and Latinx archives, especially as they intersect with psychoanalytic formulations of race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout we will ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how can psychoanalysis retain theoretical currency, and how might the temporalities of grief, loss, and mourning even require a sustained tarrying with psychoanalytic theories of melancholia?  (LT)

EALC 10602 Topics in EALC: Past, Present, & Future of the Novel (H. Long)  This course will introduce students to the study of literature in modern East Asia. In particular, it examines the evolution of the novel in Japan, China, and Korea as a form of imaginative writing. We will examine major canonical works from each country: three from the early 20th century; three from mid-century; and three from the early 21st century. How did the novel form develop in East Asia relative to other parts of the world? How has it responded to the shifting geo-political and economic positions of Japan, China, and Korea? How has it attempted to represent social and cultural conflict? Authors to be read include Natsume Soseki, Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, Han Kang, Tawada Yoko, and Cixin Liu. All works will be read in English translation.   (LG – Fiction)

EALC 10711 Topics in EALC: Mother Tongues – Language in East Asian Literature and Film (S. Su) What does it mean to write as a native speaker? How do we hear in our mother tongue? It is often said that people have a natural affinity with their native language, one which allows creators to more freely and wholly express their thoughts and experiences, and which allows audiences to understand the full nuances of a work. But there are also many who do not have a straightforward relationship with a native language. For instance, colonized writers who are forced to write in a language that is not their own, films which depict people in multilingual environments, writers who can speak but not write in their first language. This course surveys literary and artistic works from China, Japan, and Korea that mourn, celebrate, and push the boundaries and potentials of language. Through the analysis of these works, we will explore the ways in which language relates to larger social, political, and cultural contexts including ethnic minorities, diaspora, gender, technology, and more. All works will be provided in English translation.

EALC 24616/34616 Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix Manga: Buddhism, Ethics, Science Fiction, and post-WWII Manga and Anime (A. Palmer)  How can the Buddhist axiom "All Life is Sacred" describe a universe which contains the atrocities of WWII? Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and father of modern Japanese animation, wrestled with this problem over decades in his science fiction epic Phoenix(Hi no Tori), celebrated as the philosophical masterpiece of modern manga. Through a close reading of Phoenix and related texts, this course explores the challenges genocide and other atrocities pose to traditional forms of ethics, and how we understand the human species and our role in nature. The course will also examine the flowering of manga after WWII, how manga authors bypassed censorship to help people understand the war and its causes, and the role manga and anime have played in Japan's global contributions to politics, science, medicine, technology, techno-utopianism, environmentalism, ethics, theories of war and peace, global popular culture, and contemporary Buddhism. Readings will be mainly manga, and the final paper will have a creative option including the possibility of creating graphic work.

EALC/HIST 24811/34811 Modern Chinese Satirical Novel and History (Johanna Ransmeier)  This course takes the fictional genre of satire as a unique window on Chinese history. Placing novels and novellas from Republican China, the PRC, and Taiwan alongside excerpts from classic satirical novels from world literature, we will focus not only on the literary merits and themes of these diverse texts but also on their social, political, and historical contexts. What essential elements constitute satire, and how can we understand a historical moment better if we think with this form of literature? What does literature reveal and what does it deliberately or inadvertently obscure? We will consider the ways in which satire advances -- or declines to advance -- or advocate alternative realities (utopias/dystopias), the cultural critique offered by satire and its national and supra-national contexts.  (LG - Fiction)

EALC 25200 Early Daoist Texts (E. Shaughnessy)  In this course, we will focus primarily on reading (in English) the Laozi and Zhuangzi, paying attention both to philosophical and historical issues. We'll also read several ancillary texts, such as the "Nei ye" chapter of the Guanzi and the "Yu Lao" and Jie Lao" chapter of the Han Feizi, as well as such unearthed manuscripts as the Tai Yi sheng shui and Heng xian. In all cases, we will be concerned first of all with what these texts may have meant to people in the Warring States period, and then only incidentally with how they have been understood in subsequent periods and places.  (LC)

GRMN 25621 Philosophy and the Poem of Nature (Alexander Sorenson)  Poetry and philosophy have not always been the best of friends. However, the German tradition presents a noteworthy exception to this, particularly when we look to how its epochal writers and artists came to share the same obsession by the year 1800: the natural world. In this course, we will study both philosophers who utilized poetry as well as poets who turned to philosophy in their respective quests to draw nearer to nature. Moving from Romanticism to Modernism to our current moment of ecological crisis, we will observe how all of these figures invoke an ancient conception of nature as a poem, on the one hand, and of poetic thought as a participation in the workings of nature, on the other.  (LC)

GRMN 25721 Literature as Self-Help: The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Ingrid Christian)  Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing is famous for its lyrical intensity. The pathos of his poetic language appears to “move” and “touch” readers in an unparalleled way. Soldiers going to fight in the Second World War carried volumes of Rilke’s poetry in their knapsacks and letters of fallen soldiers contained quotes from his verse (“Who talks of victory? To endure is all.”). Recent editions of his writings, such as Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties(1994), Rilke for the Stressed(1998) or Words of Consolation(2017), attest to Rilke being viewed as someone from whom readers expect insight into the value or vanity of life. In this course, we will read selections of Rilke’s poetry and correspondence alongside excerpts from his writings on art to critically examine his language’s purported ability to express our innermost feelings and to offer solace. Along the way, we will also pay attention to situating his work in the context of “modernism.” Other readings by: Paul de Man “Tropes (Rilke),” Rita Felski “Uses of Literature,” Beth Blum “Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature,” among others. Readings and discussions in English. Those who read German will read the texts in the original.  (LT)

HIST 26810 (GLST 26810, SALC 26810) A Global History of South Asia: Migration in the Age of Empire (Z. Leonard)  Departing from narratives that privilege the rise of a static, territorially bounded, Indian nation-state, this course will examine modern South Asian history (roughly 1600 to present) through the lens of migration and trans-regional encounters. Analyzing shifting perceptions of "the global" as a spatial concept, we will study labor flows in the Indian Ocean, the colonial state's myriad efforts to circumscribe the movement of its subjects, and population transfers between various colonial sites. Entering the later nineteenth century, we will chart the influence of migration, both historical and contemporary, on nationalist thought; we will also discuss the issues posed by the international circulation of political dissenters. Finally, we will engage with fictional representations of the Partition of India and accounts of the social tensions stemming from South Asian immigration into Britain proper. Featuring moral reform literature, petitions, family histories, and anti-colonial tracts, this course will equip students with the skills to interrogate a range of primary sources and familiarize them with recent trends in global and colonial history.  (LC)

HIST 27006/37006 (AMER 27006/37006, LLSO 25411) Not Just the Facts: Telling About the American South  (J. Dailey)  This course engages the various ways people have tried to make sense of the American South, past and present. Main themes of the course include the difference between historical scholarship and writing history in fictional form; the role of the author in each, and consideration of the interstitial space of autobiography; the question of authorial authenticity; and the tension between contemporary demands for truthfulness and the rejection of "facts" and "truth." We will read across several genres, including historical scholarship, biography, and fiction.  (LG – Nonfiction)

PHIL 20610/30610 Goethe: Literature, Philosophy, Science (Robert Richards)  This course will examine Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's intellectual development, from the time he wrote Sorrows of Young Werther through the final states of Faust. Along the way, we will read a selection of Goethe's plays, poetry, and travel literature. We will also examine his scientific work, especially his theory of color and his morphological theories. On the philosophical side, we will discuss Goethe's coming to terms with Kant (especially the latter's third Critique) and his adoption of Schelling's transcendental idealism. The theme uniting the exploration of the various works of Goethe will be unity of the artistic and scientific understanding of nature, especially as he exemplified that unity in "the eternal feminine." German would be helpful, but it is not required.

CATA 22350/CATA 32350 Speaking Truth to Power in Medieval Iberia (Noel Blanco Mourelle) In the multilingual and multireligious environment of the Iberian middle ages, poetry can express many things. And while literary history has granted a prestigious space to some of these things, such as love or spirituality, it has consistently neglected others, such as socio-political satire or vulgarity. This class will be paying attention to that other less talked-about poetry that gets into the political struggles of the period, that talks in profanities about profane things. In other words, the poetry that does not speak to the eternity of existence, but that gets its hands dirty with earthly matters. The poetry that savagely mocks and cuts through social conventions in a way that makes seem contemporary Twitter trolls benevolent in comparison. For this class we will be reading authors who wrote in Galician-Portuguese such as Joao Soares de Paiva or King Alfonso X, authors who wrote in Catalan such as Guillem de Bergueda or Ramon Vidal de Besalu, and authors who wrote in Spanish such as Juan Ruiz or Juan de Mena. Translations to Spanish will be provided or worked though class discussion.   (LC, LG – Poetry)

SPAN 22520 Slavery as Metaphor in Latin America (Isabela Fraga)  This course will examine the long-lived trope of slavery as a metaphor—for love, sex, god, and imperial domination—in the Iberian Atlantic from the seventeenth to the late-nineteenth centuries. Focusing on literary, spiritual, and political texts, we will explore the ways in which slavery as a metaphor has informed understandings and conceptions of actual slavery in Ibero-America. What happens when a captive writes a poem about being enslaved to their lover? What does it mean for a slave master to define their relationship to Europe in terms of bondage? How must we read spiritual writings and religious sermons depicting God as a “true master” in slave-holding territories? In addition to these questions, we will analyze the presence of enslaved people in literary texts written by white Creole authors in order to explore how they shape modern conceptions of freedom and whiteness. Readings will include literary texts by Cuban and Brazilian authors, religious sermons, literature written by slaves and former slaves, as well as independentist letters and pamphlets. In addressing the ubiquity of slavery both as a trope and as a concrete system of labor exploitation and capital accumulation, students will be able to better recognize the material implications of cultural artifacts, and to build connections between the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian empires.  (LC)

REES 24423 Russian Encounters with Blackness: History, Literature, Politics (Christy Monet)  This course provides a historical, literary, and political survey of Russia’s encounters with black peoples, from the reign of Peter the Great to the administration of Vladimir Putin. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels, autobiographies, film, media reports, and contemporary scholarly research, the course explores the concepts of race, belonging, and otherness/duality as they evolved in the varying historical contexts of Russia’s encounters with “blackness.” Particular attention is paid to comparisons of racialization and racial injustice in America and in Russia, as gleaned from the biographies of black “Russophiles” such as Frederick Bruce Thomas and Paul Robeson, as well as from the memoirs and writings of figures such as Alexander Pushkin, Langston Hughes, and Yelena Khanga. From classic Russian literature, to Soviet propaganda, to contemporary geopolitics, the course asks: How has “blackness” been historically understood and/or used by Russians, and what cultural and political legacies has that left in Russia’s post-imperial and post-Soviet space? 

REES 25603 /35603 (SIGN 26029) Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump (William Nickell) Over the past 200 years, various political and cultural regimes of Russia have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds--from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geopolitical advantage. During this same period state control of media has been used to seclude Russia from the advancement of liberalism, market economics, individual rights, modernist art, Freud, Existentialism, and, more recently, Western discourses of inclusion, sustainability, and identity. Examining this history, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the architects of Russian culture have been hopelessly backward or shrewd phenomenologists, keenly aware of the relativity of experience and of their ability to shape it. This course will explore the worlds that these practices produce, with an emphasis on Russia's recent confrontations with Western culture and power, and including various practices of subversion of media control, such as illegal printing and circulation. Texts for the course will draw from print, sound, and visual media, and fields of analysis will include aesthetics, cultural history, and media theory. (LT, LG – Nonfiction) 

REES 29009 /39009 (ANTH 25908/35908, CMLT 23301/33301, NEHC 2056830568) Balkan Folklore  (Angelina Ilieva)  Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments and a living epic tradition.This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political and anthropological, perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition first-hand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, “Balkan Dance.”

REES 29024 /39024 States of Surveilance (Angelina Ilieva)  What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance--the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare). 

SALC 25320 Debate, Dissent, Deviate: Literary Modernities in South Asia (Supurna Dasgupta)  This class introduces students to the modernist movement in 20th century South Asia. Modernism will be understood here as a radical experimental movement in literature, film, photography and other arts, primarily aimed at critiquing mainstream narratives of history and culture, especially with reference to identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste. The texts reveal the ways in which structures of knowledge and aesthetics circulated between the various parts of the globe, especially under the conditions of colonialism and decolonization. We will analyze a variety of texts over the ten-week duration of the class. These include novels, short stories, manifestos, essays, photographs, and films. The chronological span of the class is from the 1930s to the 1970s. Our aim will be to understand the diverse meanings of modernism as we go through our weekly readings. Was it a global phenomenon that was adopted blindly by postcolonial artists? Or were there specifically South Asian innovations that enable us to think about the local story as formative of a global consciousness? What bearings do such speculations have on genre, gender, and medium, as well as on politics? What effect does sexual politics have on aesthetic innovations? How do these non-mainstream aesthetic traditions contribute towards the formation of knowledge in modern South Asia? I will help situate the readings of each week in their specific literary and political contexts. Students will be able to evaluate, experiment with, and analyze various forms of modernist literary expressions emerging out of South Asia. This class will provide them with critical tools to interpret, assess, compare, and contrast cultural histories of non-Western locations and peoples, with an eye for literary radicalism.  No prior knowledge of any South Asian language or history is necessary.

SALC 22604 /32605 “A Poem in Every House”: Persian, Arabic, and Vernacular Poetry in North India and the Deccan (Thibaut d'Hubert)

gehe gehe kalau kāvyaṃ … In the Kali age, there is a poem in every house … Vidyāpati (ca. 1370-1460, Mithila), Kīrtilatā The Indian subcontinent is home to some of the most vibrant literary traditions in world history. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the main trends in the premodern (/pre-nineteenth century) literature of South Asia through a selection of poetic and theoretical texts translated from a variety of languages (Arabic, Bengali, Dakani, Hindi, Maithili, Marathi, Persian, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu, etc.) . We will discuss issues of literary historiography, the relations between orality and writing, and the shared aesthetic world of poetry, music, and visual arts. Over two quarters, we will review the basic principles of Perso-Arabic and vernacular poetics through a selection of representative theoretical treatises and poems. We will also explore the linguistic ecology of the Subcontinent, the formation of vernacular literary traditions, multilingual literacy, and the role of literature in social interactions and community building in premodern South Asia. Every week the first half of the class will be devoted to the historical context and conceptual background of the texts we will read in the second half. Attention will be given to the original languages in which those texts were composed as well as the modes of performance of the poems and songs we will read together.  (LT, LG – Poetry)