2019-2020

The Short Story

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” Through readings of published stories and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Carver, and Joy Williams as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Over the course of the quarter, students will submit full-length stories for consideration in workshop, as well as other experimental efforts in short-short and micro fiction. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of story craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which a narrative can be conveyed with economy, precision, and ultimately, power.

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

A peculiar kind of psychic ache comes from living in a home-place that has undergone an irreversible transformation. It is both homesickness for the place that was and detachment from the place that is. This distress is so particular and, in an age of global climate change, epidemic that environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the word “solastalgia” -- a portmanteau of “solace” and “nostalgia” -- to describe it. Albrecht writes, “Solastalgia exists when there is the lived experience of the physical desolation of home” and “a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.” In this course, we will encounter creative work about contexts where solastalgia is in evidence, including environmentally devastated places like the Louisiana coast, the Niger Delta, and the Aral Sea, as well as the rapidly gentrifying or economically collapsing urban neighborhoods of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Through poetry (Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Rebecca Gayle Howell), fiction (Helon Habila, Paul Beattie), nonfiction (Tom Bissell, Arlie Hochschild), and film (Sharon Linezo Hong), we will consider what it means to be attached to a home-place, how self and community are altered when the home-place itself is altered, and how artists contend with these issues through advocacy and representation. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative and critical responses for class discussion.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20

Afro-futurism has enjoyed a surge in popularity since the release of the film Black Panther, although the genre has been around for much longer and is just one example of a broader tradition of Africana speculative writing. In this course, we’ll read and analyze novels, film, music, and visual art that posit alternative histories, surrealistic dream states, and fantastical futures in the context of the black imaginary. We’ll attempt to navigate the many routes of the imagination—folklores, mythologies and cosmologies; histories and futures; politics, theories, and philosophies; and the material reality. You’ll be asked to read and analyze Africana speculative fiction in short papers. Then, using these works as models, you will write your own speculative fiction that engages both your imagination and material reality.  

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30-12:20
 

Writers have long been fascinated, inspired, and puzzled by the visual arts. In this course, we will focus on two genres of writing—poetry and the essay—that have enjoyed long and productive relationships with painting, photography, sculpture, and other visual arts. What attracts writers to art? How might language render visual experience? How do verbal representations diverge from visual representations? How might writing help us see art in new ways? How might art objects compel our writing into new forms? With these questions in mind, we will read poems and essays by a variety of writers, visit several of Chicago’s excellent museums, and conduct regular writing experiments. Writers studied may include Berger, Williams, Auden, Barthes, Schuyler, Guest, O’Hara, Waldrop, Swensen, Gander, Young, and Cole. Artists studied may include Breughel, Magritte, Cornell, Twombly, Mann, Kentridge, and Basquiat.

Wednesday, 10:30-1:20 PM

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

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