Arts Core: Introduction to Genres: Writing and Social Change
An undergraduate College Core course designed and taught in Winter 2020 by Jennifer Scappettone
In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even to spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter—and will be asked to produce works in a range of genres in relation to that issue.
Books for Purchase at Seminary Co-Op:
*Nick Drnaso, Sabrina (graphic novel)
*John Keene, Counternarratives (short story)
*Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (poetry)
*Anne Boyer, The Undying (memoir)
Course blog: https://voices.uchicago.edu/writingsocialchange/
DRAFT OF WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS: Please check Canvas weekly for updates! https://canvas.uchicago.edu/courses/25118
*Asterisked items require you to plan ahead to buy or borrow an edition of the book.
Highlighted items indicate events by our authors that you must attend, or else come up with a viable substitute. When an author is giving both a lecture and a reading, you can attend either one, though attending both is encouraged.
All materials not otherwise linked or noted are accessible via the Canvas Library Reserves tab.
This syllabus draws on volatile archives. If a link is dead or texts are missing, please let me know as soon as possible, so that I can amend the problem.
Week 1: 1/8 The Manifesto
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry
F.T. Marinetti and Futurists, “The Futurist Manifesto”; animated here: https://vimeo.com/43067397
Carla Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel”: http://blogue.nt2.uqam.ca/hit/files/2012/12/Lets-Spit-on-Hegel-Carla-Lonzi.pdf
In-class assignment: the manifesto: Write your own manifesto!
Week 2: 1/15 Truth, Exactitude, and the News
Walter Lippman, “Liberty and the News”
Italo Calvino, “Exactitude,” from Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)
William Carlos Williams, “The Crimson Cyclamen”—elegy for Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth, painting of a cyclamen: https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/53890.html?mulR=42416900%7C4
Marianne Moore, “The Pangolin”: https://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/marianne-moore-pangolin_9.html (warning: illustrated by depressing photos)
Italo Calvino, “The Forest on the Superhighway,” from Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City (1963): http://indbooks.in/mirror1/?p=363323
Italo Calvino, selected sections from Mr. Palomar (1983): https://www.faludi.com/classes/noticing13/undercurrent/Mr_Palomar-Calvino.pdf
"Culture" and "Democracy" from Raymond Williams, Keywords: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uchicago/detail.action?docID=679632&query=Raymond+Williams
"Attention" through "Betweenness," one page from the collaboratively written book Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Files tab of Canvas)
Writing assignment: the act of description: Choose an object that relates to the issue you want to tackle this quarter and describe it as exactly as possible, heeding Italo Calvino's words about the "plague afflicting language" and the three principles of addressing inexactitude that he lays out on pages 67-68 of the Geoffrey Brock translation (55-56 of the Vintage edition) of Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Set your description aside. Look at it, alongside that aspect of the object, later. “Save as” a new document and take out all the vague words, replacing them with exacting words. Take out all the adjectives and adverbs you see every day and replace them with other words. Look at the object a third time. Has it changed? Redescribe in this new light without looking at your first description. Post both descriptions, the first revision and then the rewritten version.
Note: in general your writing assignments should be about 250-450 words, 550 at most. Less, well written, is more!
Week 3: 1/22 Fiction vs. Fake News
*Nick Drnaso, Sabrina
Help reading comics: The Chicago School of Media Theory's page on "graphic novel": https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/graphic-novel/
Dedmon Student Event with Nick Drnaso
Wednesday, January 22, 12:30 pm
Logan Center, 801
Dedmon Lecture with Nick Drnaso
Wednesday, January 22, 6:00 pm
Logan Center, Penthouse (901)
Writing assignment: narrative of narrative: Find a viral video, an image, a gif, a comment in a comment thread, a Facebook post, an Instagram post, or a meme surrounding the issue that concerns you from the internet, and imagine it as the crux of a narrative (fictional or non). Write a short 1-page narrative, illustrated or not, which is not about your issue itself, but which surrounds this representation of the issue. Please share the original meme/etc when you post to the blog.
Please remember to post your reading response to the blog as well, to jumpstart discussion. Commentary and/or a probing question about Drnaso's treatment of the comics form and medium as well as his treatment of the subject matter--news fake and non in the world of the Web 2.0--are welcome. They need not be more than 250 words.
Fictions and Forms Reading with Rebecca Makkai
Tuesday, January 28, 6:00 pm
Logan Center, 801
Week 4: 1/29 Fiction vs. History: Critical Fabulation
*John Keene, “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows,” from Counternarratives (2015)
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
Rebecca Makkai, “The Singing Women,” from Music for Wartime: http://www.ninthletter.com/makkai (short!)
For enrichment: Rebecca Makkai, “The November Story”: read and if you want, listen at https://www.thisamericanlife.org/444/gossip
Fictions and Forms Student Craft Talk with Rebecca Makkai
Wednesday, January 29, 12:00 pm
Logan Center, 801
Writing assignment: fiction as historical supplement: Locate an inscription from a monument, a dictionary definition, or a published history surrounding the topic you’ve chosen to work on. Write what is missing through the lens of a character left out. Construct an inscription, definition, or capsule history of 1-2 pages from the perspective of this character (250-450 words)—that is to say, write a short short story.
Think hard about crafting the tone of your story, noticing how John Keene adopts the tone and airs of plantation owners bequeathed to him by official histories of France, the US, and the French colonies in the Caribbean (here focused on Saint-Domingue, or Haiti)—jumpstarted by the history named in the story’s title—to impart a seemingly objective, brutal inferiority to his characters, conditioned by the race relations of the day. Note how this story would not have worked were the irony of its narration overdone. The story walks a razor’s edge between contemporary awareness and the violence of the archive.
In your reading response, I invite you to reflect upon how Keene grapples with the problem presented by Saidiya Hartman, of filling the silence in the archive surrounding enslaved people (and women in particular), without reproducing the violent ideology of official history. Beyond the plotline he imagines for Carmel, think about tone and how it derives from narrative style: how do you think he went about crafting the style of his prose? What is he borrowing from and where does his prose vocabulary depart from it?
*I would like for you to prepare to briefly present the work of one of your peers during Wednesday's class*:
What I mean by "presentation" is extremely simple:
-In a few minutes, describe the challenge that your partner faced in narrating a hole in history—what type of absence it was, and how your partner chose to imagine that absence.
-Say something about the tone of their prose—the attitude toward its object that it takes, and how it constructs that through language.
-Underline a piece of language that particularly struck you in the piece and be prepared to say why.
-Finally, think of a question about history that this piece is trying to ask, or to answer.
Week 5: 2/5 Trials in Perception: Modernist Documentary and the Problem of Description
James Agee (writer) and Walker Evans (photographer), Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), through p. 106: Files tab of Canvas
Etel Adnan, “Introduction,” and “To Be in a Time of War” from In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) (First on reserves, the latter is here: http://www.eteladnan.com/in_the_heart/in_the_heart_excerpt.pdf )
Wreading response: on poetic perception and photography, truth and ethics: James Agee's collaboration with the photographer Walker Evans on profiles of poor white sharecroppers (originally slated to be published in Fortune magazine) is a canonical example of the interrelations and tensions between written and photographic documents. The book opens with page spreads of Evans's photographs that are completely lacking captions (I included some just so you could consult them in the Library of Congress archive if you wanted, but these are markedly absent in the published book), unprefaced by any form of writing. How does Agee's writing complicate your viewing retroactively, and nuance your perception of the "truth" of these images? What sense does this collaboration leave you with, regarding the ethics of traveling into a community as an outsider to document deplorable circumstances? Does it help you rethink the strategies of Keene and Hartman to leave something unperceived and potentially unknowable in the lives of Carmel and Venus, respectively?
Writing assignment: poetic perception: Both of our writings for the week are by people who took the relation between the image and writing seriously; both of them use the self as a means through which to refract sociopolitical trauma. Choose one of Etel Adnan’s techniques to write a poem or prose poem: of using several headings repeatedly as prompts for short paragraphs on microtopics—something she borrowed from William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968); or, as an alternative write your own “To Be in a Time of War” poem based on the things you do this week. (Alternatively, you can write a “To Be in a Time of Climate Change”; “...of Police Violence”; “...of White Supremacy”; “...of Mounting Fascism”—you name it. It goes without saying that the art of this option consists in choosing actions to list that are in tension with the conditions in the title, without hammering the reader over the head with their irony—or doing so in an artful way that will keep them reading.)
*Remember to post process notes.*
*I would like for you to prepare to briefly present the work of one of your peers during tomorrow's class*:
What I mean by "presentation" is extremely simple: first, read your partner's writing assignment carefully. Then prepare to do this:
-Underline a piece of language that particularly struck you in the piece and be prepared to say why.
-Say something about the tone of their prose—how it constructs a legible attitude toward its subject even through repeated infinitive verbs, or seemingly straightforward description.
-In a couple of minutes, describe the challenge that your partner faced in narrating how everyday (inter)actions refract an overweening social condition—what type of issue it was, and how your partner chose to imagine that condition through the mundane facts surrounding it. What was the principle of selection, which we might call curation, of these facts?
Week 6: 2/12 Poetry and the Decolonization of Political Discourse
*Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017)
Prehistory: Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok” (1860-1881): https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/26
For reference: S. J. RES. 14, “To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States”: https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/14/text
Excerpts from Solmaz Sharif, LOOK: https://www.dickinson.edu/download/downloads/id/8020/sharif_selections_from_look.pdf
For reference: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms: https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/dictionary.pdf
Writing assignment: decolonizing documents: Find an official document (a legal case, EPA report, manual, resolution, glossary, etc.) surrounding the issue you’ve chosen to work on, and manipulate or otherwise hack into it to form a new poetic text.
I would like you to think about how the author drew on, exaggerated, overturned, twisted or otherwise deformed the following aspects of the original document:
-its lexicon (vocabulary)
-its logic and/or rhetoric (using rhetorical devices such as chiasmus, or if-then statements, or key transition words such as "so-called" or "whereas")
-its tone (something we've been thinking about quite a lot)
Finally: how does this work try to intervene in telling "the truth" of its chosen subject?
Offen Poetry Reading with Jennifer Nelson
Thursday, February 13, 6:00 pm
Rosenwald 405
Poem Present Lecture with Layli Long Soldier
Wednesday, February 19, 12:00 pm
Logan 801
Week 7: 2/19 The Lecture and the Letter: Polemic and Liberatory Possibility between Public and Private
John Ruskin, “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884): pp. 1-8 of https://wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/27636_Vict_U08_Ruskin.pdf
John Ruskin, letters from Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1872) (Files tab of Canvas); for reference, see the image files of mounted horsemen at Whitehall and the Dream of St. Ursula painting by Vittore Carpaccio uploaded to Files, and Ruskin's daguerrotypes of Venice
James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers” (1963): https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/Baldwin%2C%20J.%2C%20A%20Talk%20to%20Teachers%2C%20pp.%20678-686.pdf
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation” (1963)
Milton Friedman, "Power of the Market: Lesson of the Pencil" (brief version): Power of the Market - The Pencil
Wreading response: letter and lecture: prompts in bold, with context:
John Ruskin's "Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" is, as the footnotes make clear, the result of his careful recorded observations of the shape, color, and progress of storms and sunsets over the course of 50 years. It was delivered as a lecture to the students of the London Institution, which made education available to people adhering to non-orthodox beliefs who had been barred from being educated at Oxford or Cambridge. His "Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain" is a collection of open letters to members of the working class, whom he hopes to educate in aesthetics as means of teaching them about the ills of industrializing England, and of promoting his utopian "St. George's Company" mentioned in this excerpt—an antidote to industrial capitalism that he founded emphasizing arts education, craft work and the rural economy (it was soon after renamed "The Guild of St. George"). When he mentions "the Third Fors," he is referring to a concept derived from Shakespeare that inspired him as he prepared to write a more formal book on political economy opposing capitalism (which inspired later activists such as William Morris and Gandhi, and the Green Movement): "There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune"—that is, to strike out at the right moment to influence social change. You will notice how seemingly arbitrary, even whimsical, the connections are as he writes the letters of Fors Clavigera. What does the seemingly intimate space of the "open letter" provide that the lecture does not? Is there anything to be gained from the capriciousness of connections and the registration of seemingly random details in this work, such as the details about what's happening in Venice as he tries to craft his argument? Does this work remind you of Agee?
James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, in a very different key, draws upon his intimacy to condemn the society of 1962 for keeping Black Americans in a position identical to the working classes of London in Ruskin's time. How does the rhetoric of this letter (which after all was actually published in a Wisconsin journal called The Progressive) permit Baldwin to achieve in terms of social critique? "A Talk to Teachers" was delivered in October 1963 under the heading "The Negro Child—His Self Image," following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and of Medgar Evers, a prominent NAACP organizer in Mississippi, by a white supremacist, and following as well the KKK's bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church resulting in the murder of four little girls. How does Baldwin alter his rhetoric to address educators, the same educators who will be responsible for undoing the damage done to his nephew? How does he paint a picture of oppression for these teachers that does not merely proselytize, but alter their perception of the city and of the United States itself?
Writing assignment: letter and lecture: new approaches to essay: Identify and describe a single phenomenon through which the problem you’re working on can be refracted, such as the movement of a machine, a boy on the street, a cloud, an animal, in a 1-page letter to either an intimate or to an unknown person, or a person who is famous or who has passed; rewrite this letter as a 1-page microlecture, to teachers, or workers, or any other subset of the populace of your choice. Think about how this mode of address changes your approach to describing the phenomenon and attempting to persuade your ultimate audience of the need to change it.
Poem Present Reading with Layli Long Soldier
Wednesday, February 19, 6:00 pm
Swift Hall, Third Floor
Week 8: 2/26 Revolutionary Memoir
*Anne Boyer, The Undying (memoir)
Writing assignment: memoir in context: Science is profoundly political. In one or two pages, narrate a single trip to the doctor, a pharmacy, or a museum of natural history that you’ve made or an experience in an authoritative site of science such as a university laboratory, planetarium, etc.; if you haven’t done this recently, visit the Museum of Science & Industry, the Field Museum, the Lincoln Park Zoo (free), the Lincoln or Garfield Conservatory (free), or the Shedd Aquarium—and tease out its ideological implications through an analysis of the language—what it says, what it doesn’t say. If this doesn’t relate to your project well, see me and we will work out an alternative site. The point is to see the phenomenon from a STEM perspective and then see it again via a humanistic lens—and to place narration of yourself into context as the narration of a structural issue.
Week 9: Agitprop and Alienation: Protest Aesthetics
Berthold Brecht, “On Chinese Acting” (1936) (Files tab)
Peter Schumann, The Old Art of Puppetry in the New World Order: A Fiddle Lecture (1993): https://archive.org/details/oldartofpuppetry00unse
Bread and Puppet Theater, 40 How-Tos (2014): https://archive.org/details/40howtos00unse
Bread and Puppet Theater, Grasshopper Rebellion Circus (2018): first 1 hour 23 minutes of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LEmSThUsEQ
Clark Taylor and Jan Dicks, The House that Crack Built (1992), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOnLCaO4Ks&t=9s
Recommended for enrichment:
Bread and Puppet Theater, Basic ByeBye Show (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1VSk9jMfkU
Berthold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1931):
Writing assignment: performance / anthem: compose a manifesto, a song, an illustrated manual, a visual poem, a dialogue, a script for procession, a protest banner, or a political poster regarding your topic. Don’t be afraid to use sarcasm, humor, or self-reflexivity.
Week 10: 3/11 Conclusions and Workshop of Final projects in progress:
For this week, your writing assignment is to write a preface to your final project in the spirit of Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry”—that is to say, you should write a defense of your chosen genre and its utility in social life.
Week 11: Monday 3/16 Final project final revisions due
CLASS REQUIREMENTS:
Final project surrounding an issue of your choice, to be distributed as you see fit, either electronically or as hard copy, to be presented on the last day of the course. 20%
Over the course of the term, you should perform research on a local and/or global topic that concerns you in order to assemble a final project of your choosing, which can be based on the weekly assignments: a cycle of poems, a researched piece of nonfiction, an essay, a short story, a micromemoir, or any of the other forms on offer. Note: this research would benefit from being anchored in a local site that you can visit, live, to perform fieldwork, though this is not a requirement. Examples would be: gun control on the South Side; specific phenomena of climate change; extinction or endangerment of a certain species; specific instances and locations of police violence; the war in Iran; pollution in Lake Michigan and the larger Great Lakes watershed; the legacy of US Steel Gary Works; environmental justice issues on the South Side; transphobia and fights for equity; elections and representation; the rise or fall of socialism; etc. Feel free to draw on your own individual area of expertise. Please see me if you’re stumped and we can work something out together. If you begin with one issue and change your mind, that’s all right; but by week 4 you must have settled on a topic so that you can have enough time to engage with it before the final comes around.
Weekly assignments and process notes: due at noon to the blog 24 hours before class begins and in hard copy at the beginning of Wednesday’s class. 30%
Consider yourself an apprentice to the authors presented and freely mimic—or depart from—the constraints and procedures on display. Each week’s assignment is in our syllabus, and I invite you to use each weekly assignment to explore a single issue (see above) in a different way. You will craft 6 pieces, with the opportunity to substantially revise as many as will be useful toward your final project.
Include brief working notes, outlining your goals and how the outside reading influenced your approach to the assignment. Respond to questions such as the following: What method did you use to generate this poem? What did you find easy or difficult about working in this medium? What surprised you? What do you think you did well / less well? What did you learn about language from this project?
Weekly “wreading” responses, due at 11 am Wednesdays to the blog: 30%
You are responsible for producing a response to the course blog for each week of reading. You may choose to focus on a specific work or to address the group of texts for that week as a whole, and your response may take either the form of ‘apprenticeship’ (imitation/translation) or of prose (250-300 words). These can be creative and interactive pieces surrounding the works encountered for that day, or they can be commentary or questions about the material—you can write a paragraph about a few lines that strike your attention and/or confuse you, honing your skills of close reading. Please consider yourself to be in conversation with anyone who has posted first (thus, you get a pass if you’re the first to post!).
Class “citizenship”: discussion of weekly reading, discussion of peers’ work. 20%
This is a discussion-based course. Please see me early on if you have trouble speaking up in class. Failing to come prepared will negatively affect your grade.
We will spend a critical amount of time each meeting discussing the outside reading, learning what it means to read as writers. You must come in with the reading, or you will lose points. (I have tried to be sensitive about costs, but if purchasing books presents a financial hardship for you, we will make suitable arrangements.)
You are also asked to read your peers’ work as posted to the blog, as it will help give you ideas and make you better interlocutors for one another. We will be discussing our experience in tackling the writing assignments for at least one hour of each class session.
Attendance at outside readings and events: incalculable.
Notes on grading: Attendance, participation, evidence of having read and processed the published work and the work of your peers at hand, and effort trump “talent.” Your grade will not be a reflection of the excellence of your artistic skills but of your “citizenship” in the course, underscoring the fact that being an artist is the outcome of will, labor, and devotion, and not simply the result of being touched by inspiration.