An undergraduate Arts Core course designed and taught by Jennifer Scappettone at the University of Chicago, Winter 2013 and Winter 2014

Websites associated with student projects:

http://neighborhoodschools.wordpress.com/

http://uofcmelancholia.wordpress.com/

Writing Across the Genres: Radical Documentary

This workshop offers students curious about writing the chance to expand their individual horizons by working with documentary forms across prose, poetry, fiction, and performance, learning to incorporate research into generative and aesthetically compelling pieces. We will ask to what extent research and "the news" can participate actively in history, how the documentation of what is present or passing alters the future, and how art blurs these temporalities. We will grapple throughout the quarter with the mediation of real phenomena captured by technology and text, asking whether our transcribing and framing gestures can be more than acts of preservation—whether they can contribute to the emergence and development of their objects of study, whether these be cities, endangered communities, political movements, or works of art.

Books for purchase:

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Patrik Ouredník, Europeana

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Recommended: Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot

Also recommended: Chain Magazine issues on Documentary (2) and Facts (12): https://jacket2.org/reissues/chain#chain12

PLUS various e-reserves, Chalk documents, and films on reserve at the Regenstein and at the Film Studies Center