uchicago creative writing catalog

Department of English Language and Literature, The University of Chicago

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)

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Contacts | Minor Program in English and Creative Writing | Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program | Program Structure | Courses

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

Students at the University of Chicago pursue creative writing within the larger context of academic study. While the purpose of the program is, above all, 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, it differs from the free-standing creative writing programs at other universities in seeing itself as an integral part of the intellectual life of the University of Chicago, and most particularly in providing opportunities for interdisciplinary work. A playwright working through University Theater under the auspices of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities may take writing workshops in fiction or poetry as part of the process of developing scripts. Students in the visual arts may join forces with writers in work on graphic novels. And students in non-English languages and literatures may find themselves taking not only literature courses but also poetry or fiction writing workshops as part of developing translation projects. It is this commitment to interdisciplinary work, coupled with the program's insistence on teaching the elements of creative writing that underlie all genres, that accounts for the program's vitality and explains why creative writing at Chicago is currently the largest initiative in the humanities for the College.

Students can pursue their creative writing interests within the formal requirements of the two interdisciplinary majors below; within the formal requirements of the minor program in English and Creative Writing described below; in other programs of study, with approval to count writing courses toward requirements; or among the eight to eighteen electives available to students across the range of other programs of study.

Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities

Students wishing to engage the dialogues between creative writing and other studies in the humanities, including artistic media (e.g., dance, film, theater, visual arts), may apply to explore writing opportunities through one of the options in the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.

English Language and Literature

Students majoring in English Language and Literature may choose to produce a creative writing thesis to satisfy part of the requirement for honors. Prior to the end of their third year, students must complete at least two creative writing courses in the genre (poetry, fiction, or nonfiction) of their BA project. At least one must be an advanced course, in which the student has earned a B+ or higher. In Winter Quarter of their fourth year, students will work intensively on their projects in the context of a designated creative writing thesis seminar.

To do a creative writing BA project, students must fill out a declaration form available at the English undergraduate office by the spring of their third year. On this form they declare their intent to write a creative writing BA project in a specific genre and list the two creative writing courses in the relevant genre that they have taken as prerequisites for doing the BA project.

Students work on their project over three quarters. Early in Autumn Quarter of their fourth year, students will be assigned a graduate student preceptor. In Autumn Quarter, students will attend a series of colloquia led by their graduate preceptor. In Winter Quarter, students will continue meeting with their graduate preceptor. In addition, students must enroll in one of the creative BA project workshops in their genre. Students are not automatically enrolled in a workshop; they must receive the consent of the workshop instructor, who will also serve as their faculty adviser for their creative BA project. These workshops are advanced courses limited to eight students and will include not only students majoring in English but also those in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (ISHU) and the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) who are producing creative theses. Students will work closely with their faculty adviser and with their peers in the workshops and will receive course credit as well as a final grade for the workshop. Students should be aware that because of the high number of students wishing to write fiction for their BA projects, students will not necessarily get their first choice of workshop instructor and faculty adviser.

In consultation with their faculty adviser and graduate preceptor, students revise and resubmit a near final draft of their creative BA projects by the beginning of the third week of Spring Quarter. Students submit the final version of their creative BA project to their preceptor, faculty adviser, and the undergraduate program assistant by the beginning of the fifth week of Spring Quarter. The project will then be evaluated by the faculty adviser, graduate preceptor, and director of undergraduate studies to determine whether the student will be recommended.

Minor Program in English and Creative Writing

Students who are not English majors may complete a minor in English and Creative Writing. Such a minor requires six courses plus a portfolio of creative work. At least two of the required courses must be Creative Writing (CRWR) courses, with at least one at the intermediate or advanced level. The remaining required courses must be taken in the English department (ENGL). In addition, students must submit a portfolio of their work (e.g., 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 nonfiction pieces) to the undergraduate program assistant in the English department by the end of the fifth week in the quarter in which they plan to graduate.

Students who elect the minor program in English and Creative Writing must meet with the undergraduate program assistant in the English department 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 undergraduate program assistant. The undergraduate program assistant's approval for the minor program should be submitted to a student's College adviser by the deadline above on a form obtained from the adviser. NOTE: Students completing this minor will not be given enrollment preference for CRWR courses, and they must follow all relevant admission procedures described at the Creative Writing website.

Courses in the minor (1) may not be doubly 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 P/F), and at least half of the requirements for the minor must be met by registering for courses bearing University of Chicago course numbers.

Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program

Two sample plans of study, program structure.

Creative Writing courses are cross-listed to enable students to apply to courses based on their level of preparation rather than on their level in the degree program. Classes are organized in the following way:

Core courses are multigenre introductions to creative writing that satisfy the general education requirement for the arts. The courses fall into two categories, Introduction to Genres and Reading as a Writer, though each may be pitched with a unique focus, such as science fiction or crime and story. Admission is by open bid. Enrollment in each class is limited to fifteen students.

Beginning courses are intended for students who wish to gain experience in a particular genre. Admission is by open bid. Enrollment in each class is limited to twelve students.

Intermediate

Intermediate courses are intended for students with some writing experience in a particular genre. Admission requires completion of a beginning class in the same genre and/or consent of instructor based on submission of a writing sample. For specific submission requirements, see course descriptions. The submission process must be completed online in advance of the term by the deadline. Enrollment in each class is limited to twelve students.

Advanced courses are intended for students with substantive writing experience in a particular genre. Admission requires completion of an intermediate class in the same genre and/or consent of instructor based on submission of a writing sample. For specific submission requirements, see course descriptions. The submission process must be completed online in advance of the term by the deadline. Enrollment in each class is limited to ten students.

Thesis/Major Projects Seminar

This course is required for students who are working on their BA or MA theses in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. If space permits, these seminars may also be open to advanced students who are interested in writing or revising a substantial project. Students must obtain the consent of the instructor in advance by submission of a writing sample. Enrollment in each class typically is limited to eight students.

Special Topics

Several special topics courses are offered each year. These courses vary in terms of subject matter, requirements for the submission of writing samples, and enrollment limitations.

Cross-Listed Courses

Courses originated by other departments that include creative writing components are cross listed by Creative Writing (CRWR).

Required Writing Samples

Consent of instructor is typically required to enroll in Creative Writing courses, based on faculty review of student writing samples. For specific sample submission requirements, see course descriptions. Submission deadlines are:

Autumn Quarter, September 15
Winter Quarter, November 21
Spring Quarter, February 23

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

Faculty and Visiting Lecturers

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

Creative Writing Courses

CRWR 10200. Beginning Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.

This beginning-level fiction writing class uses a wide range of exercises and activities to help students discover their oral and written voices. Point of view, seeing-in-the-mind, gesture, audience, and other aspects of story are emphasized so that students can attempt to incorporate basic storytelling principles, forms, and techniques into their own writing. The major goals of the class are to guide students to discover and use the power of their individual voices, heighten their imaginative seeing and sense of imaginative options, and develop their overall sense for story structure and movement. Students select at least one of the assignments undertaken, rewrite it extensively, and attempt a complete story movement (short story or novel excerpt) of publishable quality.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. If course is full, sign up for wait list at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/waiting-list. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30200

CRWR 10300. Beginning Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.

Based on the premise that successful experimentation stems from a deep understanding of tradition, this course will help students gain a foundation in poetic constructions while encouraging risk-taking in expression and craft. It will expose students to ways that poets have both employed and resisted patterns in meter, line, and rhyme, and it will ask students to experiment with constraints as a way of playing with formal limitations in their own poems. Students will also explore innovations in diction, syntax, and voice, and apply what they learn from these investigations in workshop discussions. While delving into work by both canonical and emerging poets, students will draft and revise a significant portfolio of their own poems.

CRWR 10400. Beginning Creative Nonfiction. 100 Units.

In this workshop you are free to write about anything at all as long as you do so in an intimate and personal, rather than academic, voice. To that end you will try your hand at a true story—be it a memoir, travelogue, anecdote, character study, essay or argument—and submit it to your classmates, who will edit and critique it. Together we will refine our narratives and our prose, primarily by insisting on rigorous reflection and total honesty. Finding your voice takes time, but we have only ten weeks. So come to the first day of class with ideas and work already underway and ready to share. Be prepared to finish three total rewrites of your work in progress. We will also read and discuss published exemplars of the form. You will leave this class with a polished work sample to use for admission to more advanced courses.

CRWR 12000. Intermediate Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.

This intermediate fiction workshop will build on the fundamental elements of craft laid out in Beginning Fiction Writing and encourage you to begin cultivating your own aesthetic—not merely your own writing style, but more importantly your unique perspective on the world that necessarily informs and is informed by that style. We will read a selection of writers (like Raymond Carver, Paul Bowles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, Lorrie Moore) who have very unique and identifiable voices, and then complement those readings with writing exercises that will help you contextualize, refine, and expand your emerging voice. As always, there will be an emphasis on the workshop process so that you are actively engaging with your own work and the work of your peers. For the course, you will complete one full-length story, which you will present for class critique, and then write a significant revision of that story, which you will either present for a second workshop or turn into me at the end of the quarter. Please come to class prepared to share your work, your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your honesty.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring Prerequisite(s): To apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 32000

CRWR 12101. Reading as a Writer: Chicago Stories. 100 Units.

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago’s public and private spaces on genre and artistic form. How does one tell a “Chicago story”? Is the “City on the Re-Make” best told in prose or poem? Is there a “Chicago epic”? Working through these questions, students analyze and explore the technical vocabularies of other writers’ responses in a variety of literary genres. Examples here include how political or social conflicts have shaped fiction writers’ definition of characters and point of view in Chicago writing. Similarly, how have the city’s historical geographies of South Side, the Great Migration, and the suburb influenced form in poetry and creative nonfiction? What theoretical approaches have been particularly influential in understanding “place” among Chicago writers? Using workshop format, students develop their own creative responses, building connections to their adopted critical approaches. To these ends, we examine work by writers including Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Conroy, Aleksandar Hemon, and Sterling Plumpp, as well as the city’s rich legacies in drama, the visual arts, and music.

Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. Sign up for wait list by contacting instructor if class is full. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement for dramatic, musical, and visual arts.

CRWR 12104. Introduction to Genres: Four Western Myths. 100 Units.

Consider the proposition that myths inform the fabric of our thought, from its structures to its particularities. If this is so, how do we understand the power these myths exert on our imaginations? Is this power always benign? Is there a malevolent shadow these myths can cast on our collective soul? Let’s examine four myths that arise out of the Western tradition. Two of them are old: the story of King Oedipus and the myth of the Holy Grail. The other two are newer: the story of the Wizard of Oz, the first complete American myth, and the story of Star Wars, as much a commentary on myth as a myth itself. Both of these newer myths have insinuated themselves into the popular imagination, in ways that the earlier myths are so ingrained they have the ability to be continually made novel. In this course, you will read texts that transmit these myths (Sophocles, Chrétien de Troyes, and L. Frank Baum), you will consider films that depict these myths ( Edipe Re by Pasolini, The Da Vinci Code by Howard, The Wizard of Oz by Fleming, and Star Wars by Lucas), you will examine theories that interpret these myths (Freud, Weston, Lévi-Strauss, and Campbell, respectively), and, finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will generate your own versions of these myths in various creative forms: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, screenplays, and drama.

Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. If course is full, sign up for wait list at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/waiting-list. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement for dramatic, musical, and visual arts.

CRWR 13000. Intermediate Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.

Poets often turn to the constraints and conventions of lyric forms (sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, etc.) as a way to generate material and experiment within a poetic tradition. The history of poetry, however, is as rich in genres as it is in forms. How is genre different from form? How do the two intersect? How have different genres evolved over time? In this course we will study various traditional genres (the elegy, the epistle, the dramatic monologue, for example) alongside such "non-poetic" genres as the essay, the obituary, and the travelogue, in the hopes of expanding and refining our encounter with the art.

CRWR 13006. Investigations through Rhyme. 100 Units.

Rhyme, and its almost necessary companion, meter, have found their way into almost every form of expressive language, low and high: from sonnets to limericks, quatrains to playground insults, plays to songs, mnemonic devices for school children to didactic sermons, raps to jingles—even the occasional novel. Though it may be something of a mystery as to why, that rhyme can be pleasing to the reader (and listener) is established. What practical use, however, might it be to the writer? This course—welcoming writers of any stamp—will explore how composing in rhyme uncovers previously unsuspected pathways in a writer's imagination and is a powerful editing tool as well. Rhymed poetic, dramatic, and rhetorical writings and basic verse structures (the Onegin stanza, sonnet, quatrain, etc.) will be introduced and analyzed. The focus, however, will be on the "translation" of works of prose—some selected, but mostly pieces original with the student—into rhymed verse, with the aim of exploding/unfolding those works out in fresh directions. Possible texts/authors/artists: Shakespeare, Pope, William Blake, Chuck D, Emily Dickinson, Yip Harburg, Cole Porter, Magnetic Fields, Ogden Nash.

Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): PQ: Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing sample online at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 33006

CRWR 14000. Intermediate Creative Nonfiction. 100 Units.

In this course we will examine what is creative about so-called creative nonfiction. What makes a personal essay or literary journalism different from straight journalism or editorial opinion? By what alchemy do we transmute facts into art? Through daily and weekly reading, writing, and editing you will learn to combine the facts of the matter at hand with your own retrospection and reflection. Your grade will be based on the artistry you display in balancing the factual with the personal and in recognizing how they can both complement and contradict one another. This is a workshop, so come to the first day of class with work underway and ready to share. Be prepared to write every day of the week and to finish two complete rewrites of an essay of fifteen or so pages. We will also read and discuss published exemplars of the form.

CRWR 22100. Advanced Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.

This advanced fiction workshop is for students who have taken Beginning or Intermediate Fiction Writing and produced a body of work, large or small, that reflects their developing aesthetic and style. In our workshops, we will focus on the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, but with an eye also on expanding our perspective on our subject matter and the form we use to write about it. To that end, we will read a selection of writers (like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Tim O’Brien) who experiment with form, who unravel the rules of a well-made story and reconstitute it in order to tell their own particular narratives in a more meaningful way. Our goal in this class is to create a constructive, critical atmosphere that facilitates and demands the process of revision, and that expands the horizon of expression for each student while also refining their emerging voice. For the course, you will complete one full-length story, which you will present for class critique, and then write a significant revision of that story, which you will either present for a second workshop or turn into me at the end of the quarter. Please come to class prepared to share your work, your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your honesty.

CRWR 23100. Advanced Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.

In this course, we will examine various formal, theoretical, and sociological currents in contemporary American poetry as a means of provoking and informing our own creative work in the lyric field. While the class will be a “writing workshop” first and foremost, we will also study recent books of poetry from a variety of contemporary “schools” at work in the fertile, sectarian, and maddeningly complex landscape of today’s lyric writing. We will also attend poetry readings by some of these authors here at the University in order to explore the world of contemporary verse as fully as possible. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this is ultimately a course about your work as a poet. Throughout the semester, we will read one another’s writing within the broad context of contemporary American poetics, and yet we will respect the solitary and idiosyncratic nature of the lyric enterprise as well.

CRWR 24100. Advanced Creative Nonfiction Workshop. 100 Units.

The goal of this workshop is to attempt the kind of nonfiction published by magazines aimed at the smart, general reader: the New Yorker , Harper's , and the Atlantic Monthly , as well as smaller journals. You may write a personal essay, argument, memoir, character study or travelogue, as well as a more journalistic profile of a person, place, or culture. We also welcome reportorial, researched, and investigative pieces. No matter what rubric your nonfiction falls under, we will help you to distinguish between what Vivian Gornick has called The Situation—that is, the plot, or facts at hand—and The Story, the larger, more universal meaning that arises naturally from these facts. By developing the two and by tying them more artfully you will make your piece as appealing as it can be to editors and a discerning audience. Come to the first day of class with ideas and work underway and ready to share. Be prepared to write every day and to finish three full revisions of your work in progress. We will also read and discuss successful published work. You will leave this class with a polished sample of your best work.

CRWR 28200. Journalism: Arts Reviewing. 100 Units.

In this course we will study and practice the craft of arts reviewing for newspapers, magazines, and online publications. We will strive to write fair, effective reviews of several art forms, including but not limited to movies, books, theater, music, cuisine, and visual arts. We will examine and adhere to the legal and ethical standards of the profession of journalistic arts reviewing. As much as possible we will emulate the pace of the job, completing weekly reviews for a specific audience.

Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): To apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 48200

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

This advanced fiction course is for BA and MA students writing a creative thesis or any advanced student working on a major fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, a novella, etc.), 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. To supplement our workshops, we will read and discuss published fiction relevant and hopefully informative to your specific projects, while also exploring the potential avenues towards publication.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Required for students working on BA or MA thesis in fiction; for others to apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49200

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

This course is an advanced seminar intended primarily for seniors and MAPH students writing honors theses in creative writing as well as advanced students who are working on major projects. 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): Required for students working on BA or MA thesis in poetry; for others to apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49300

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

This course is for BA and MA thesis students and those writing a long piece of nonfiction. It can be an extended essay, a memoir or travelogue, literary journalism, or an interrelated collection thereof. It is a workshop, so come to the first day of class with your work underway and ready to submit. You are required to 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 will 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.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Required for students working on BA or MA thesis in creative nonfiction;for others to apply, submit writing through online form at creativewriting.uchicago.edu/courses/creative-writing-submission-form. Note(s): Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49400

Undergraduate Primary Contact

Committee Chair John Wilkinson Taft House 301 Email

Administrative Contact

Committee Coordinator Anne Janush Taft House 103 773.834.8524

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Creative Writing, The University of Chicago

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

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)

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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)

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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)

Creative Writing

A haven for writers of all genres and ambitions

*Flexible payment available

ENROLL NOW TO RECEIVE A 5% 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

Flexible payment options available.

PROGRAM FEE

Any discounts will be applied at checkout.

Pay in Full

Pay in 2 installments.

Creative Writing

Lect. Rachel DeWoskin (right) leads students in a fiction writing course at Taft House.

Making its home south of Midway Plaisance in Taft House, The Program in Creative Writing is an intersection of imagination and critical inquiry. Creative Writing offers an array of writing-workshop-based classes in a variety of genres, from fiction and poetry to creative nonfiction and translation. In addition, MAPH students focusing in creative writing have the unique opportunity to inform their creative projects with rigorous analytic research in a variety of subjects, such as Art History , Cinema and Media Studies , Comparative Literature , English Language and Literature , Gender and Sexuality , Philosophy , and Visual Arts .

Selected Faculty

Rachel DeWoskin

Srikanth Reddy

Sample Courses

There are two open spots in every Creative Writing course with a grad section; MAPH students in the Creative Writing Option get priority in these courses, and require instructor permission to register for open slots. There is no prerequisite on any grad section and all MAPH students are exempt from prerequisites. You can find the numbers for grad sections on Class Search or CIM.

If the two grad spots are already taken there is still a chance that the instructor would be interested in adding additional graduate students. In that case, students should write to the instructor, ask to be added to the waitlist and once they get the OK, plan to enroll during add/drop.

Please visit the Creative Writing page for more details on classes and registration.

CRWR 40229 - Technical Seminar in Fiction: 3D Character Builder ( Rachel DeWoskin ) This reading and writing course will acquaint students with one of the essential tools of fiction writers, characterization. We will read works by authors including Baldwin, Guo, Nabokov, Munro, Sharma and Wharton, toward exploring how some of literatures most famous characters are rendered. How do writers of fiction create contexts in which characters must struggle, and how does each character's conflicts, choices, and use of language reveal his or her nature? How do we make characters whose behaviors are complicated enough to feel real, and why are some of the worst characters the most compelling? Students in this technical seminar will complete both creative and analytical writing exercises, reading responses, and a critical paper that focuses on characterization in a work of fiction.

CRWR 40411 - Technical Seminar in Poetry: Urban Image and Poetic Play ( Garin Cycholl ) This technical seminar focuses on poems’ development of image through the work of urban writers. We will explore the lineage of urban lyric within the nineteenth century, then reflect on its development in the contemporary city. What impulse defines an “urban poetics?” What is urban lyric’s relationship with painting and photography? Do all city poems reflect one “city” in the end or is a more local impulse at work in cities as foci for writing? This course seeks to establish a solid, working basis in examining “image” and its lyric development through critical reflection and field work. To this end, we will work with a range of urban writers, including Paul Blackburn, Andrew Colarusso, Wanda Coleman, Kevin Killian, Frank O’Hara, Salima Rivera, Ed Roberson, and David Ulin.

CRWR 44021 - Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: The Trouble With Trauma ( Dina Peone ) 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 quarter's end each student will leave with a piece of writing that feels both true to their experience and imbued with possibility.

CRWR 49300 - Thesis/Major Projects in Poetry ( Margaret Ross ) 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 workshop, 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.

A more comprehensive list of courses and descriptions is available at the Creative Writing course page .

Creative Writing Courses

Creative Writing Option

Students who plan to do a creative writing thesis project in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction can choose to pursue the MAPH Creative Writing Option. Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Creative Writing notation on their MAPH transcript:

The MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory)
One creative writing course in the student's chosen genre in Fall Quarter
Creative Writing Thesis/Major Projects workshop in Winter Quarter
Three academic courses relevant to the student’s proposed thesis area
Two elective courses to be taken in any area of student interest

Two-Year Language Option for Creative Writing

MAPH's Two-Year Language Option is a great way for students to pursue advanced work in literary translation in their second year. Some possibilities might include advanced workshops on literary translation in various genres, upper-level undergraduate seminars and graduate courses in non-Anglophone literatures across a range of geographical regions and historical periods, and courses on translation theory.

Two-Year Language Option

Lawrence Grauman Jr. Fellowship Fund

The Grauman Fellowship , made possible by a generous legacy gift from Lawrence Grauman Jr. (AM '63), supports MAPH students studying English and/or Creative Writing, with a strong preference whenever possible for students who focus their studies on nonfiction writing or literary journalism.

MAPH applicants who plan to work on creative nonfiction or literary journalism can indicate an interest in the Grauman Fellowship on their application.

Grauman Fellowship

Recent Creative Writing Thesis Projects

"Wonders of Unsung Black Life: A Poetic Interpretation on Living in Blackness" Tia White, MAPH '21 Advisor: Margaret Ross

" Once and Future Gardens " Sarah Hobin, MAPH '21 Advisor: Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

" Love Me, Love Me Not, Love Me Again: Stories for Bibliotherapy " Casey Glynn, MAPH '20 Advisor: Rachel DeWoskin

" From the Well That Washes Itself: A Novel (Excerpt)" Hajrije Kolimja, MAPH '20 Advisor: Rachel DeWoskin

" The Confrontation Exercises: Essays " Jiaying Liang, MAPH '19 Advisor: Daniel Raeburn

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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IMAGES

UChicago Program in Creative Writing
UChicago Creative 2023
PME Brand Launch
PME Brand Launch
Creative Writing & Poetry and Poetics
Big Brains Rebrand

VIDEO

Offen Poetry Prize Reading: Erika L. Sánchez, Winter 2023
C. K. Williams Reading 4/20/06
Offen Poetry Prize Student Reading: Kirsten Ihns, Winter 2018
Fictions and Forms Reading: Danielle Dutton, Spring 2022
Fictions and Forms Reading: Anthony Marra, Winter 2017
Poem Present Reading: Tan Lin, Spring 2016

COMMENTS

Course Catalog
Course Catalog. All Creative Writing courses are now open bid. Pre-registration for all course types is available through my.uchicago.edu . Pre-registration for Fundamentals in Creative Writing, Technical Seminars, and Advanced Workshops prioritizes students who have officially declared the Creative Writing major, minor, or MAPH Creative ...
Creative Writing & Poetry and Poetics
The Program in Creative Writing is part of the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. Students at UChicago pursue creative writing within the larger context of academic study. While the purpose of the program is, above all, to give students a rigorous background in the fundamentals of creative work by providing them with the opportunity to study with ...
Creative Writing
Creative Writing. 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 ...
Major in Creative Writing
Students who graduate with the 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 on a primary genre: fiction, poetry ...
Creative Writing < University of Chicago Catalog
Creative Writing courses are cross-listed to enable students to apply to courses based on their level of preparation rather than on their level in the degree program. Classes are organized in the following way: Core. Core courses are multigenre introductions to creative writing that satisfy the general education requirement for the arts.
Literature Courses 2021-22
This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (LT) ENGL 15430 The Origins of Utopia and Utopian Literature (Ryan Campagna) This course examines the foundations of utopian literature and its cultural footprint over time, including Thomas More's classic text, Utopia, and other early modern responses to it.
Literature Courses 2020-21
SPRING 2021. 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.
Creative Writing Online Course
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.
Writer's Studio
The Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago is home to a community of writers and instructors passionate about the written word. Through classes, events, and workshops, the Studio connects writers of all genres and ability levels in creative writing. Creative writing courses include fiction, memoir, playwriting, poetry, short story ...
Creative Writing
Creative Writing offers an array of writing-workshop-based classes in a variety of genres, from fiction and poetry to creative nonfiction and translation. In addition, MAPH students focusing in creative writing have the unique opportunity to inform their creative projects with rigorous analytic research in a variety of subjects, such as Art ...
English Language and Literature < University of Chicago Catalog
Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment. 100 Units. 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.
WRIT51800
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 ...
Basic Creative Writing
Basic Creative Writing. Cost. 625.00. About the program. Basic Program Courses. This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Open Enrollment curriculum. 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 ...
The Curriculum < University of Chicago Catalog
The University of Chicago College curriculum has three components: general education requirements (1500 units), a major (900-1900 units), and electives (800-1800 units). A minimum of 4200 units of credit (forty-two 100-unit courses) is required for the undergraduate degree. Of all credits earned, at least 3800 must be earned via course ...