The Open Program in the Liberal Arts

Learn how to write literarily relevant sex scenes to develop character and plot in memoir, novel, or short story. This is not an erotica writing workshop, but rather a class dedicated to a unique and powerful craft tool.

Note

Plato in his own voice? The Seventh Letter vs. the Dialogues

The impact of the Seventh Letter on interpreting Plato's dialogues

Through groundbreaking texts we will explore this ancient and contemporary literary mode. Students will experiment with this flexible form through in-class writing exercises, discussion of professional models and critique of student writing.

Herodotus called Egypt the "gift of the Nile"; why and how this is relevant to the civilization on the Nile is the thesis of this class, which will focus on the ancient Egyptians' unique perception of the universe and their place in it.

How do we understand the art that has come out of the great art revolutions of the late 19th century and early 20th century in France? Even a viewer who is equipped with basic principles for viewing art may be at a loss in addressing modern visual work.

This discussion/lecture course will focus on the relation between the U.S. Congress and the Presidency, looking at a few different topics of historical and contemporary interest. Structurally, the Constitution separates power, and American politics is a constant struggle between the branches for policy primacy.

Through novels reflecting the diversity of "English" literature today, we'll explore the way writers of the last fifty years, taking on the cataclysmic events of mid-century, supplant images and formal methods of previous literary eras with a new aesthetic that might guide us into the future.

Where does your writing come from? How can you access the deeper realms? In this class, we will experiment with different forms of meditation and visualization, in service of our writing. This is a generative workshop for writers at all levels.

Proust's narrator explores themes of art, taste, memory, personal identity, high society, and love, set mostly in pre-war Paris. Swann's Way is the first volume of The Search for Lost Time. In summer quarter, the second and third books will be offered: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way.

This one quarter discussion course will examine the relationship between Public Religion (that is, religion that impacts law and politics) and Politics in America, in the 20th Century, from roughly the 1890s to 2020.

This three-quarter sequence will examine the history of the relation between “Techne,” (science and technology) and Sophia (wisdom). How does technology, especially “IT,” shape the ideas of our civilization?

American writers have created a body of literature great in its illumination into the deeps of the human condition and our own lives. These stories communicate through originality, masterly prose and imagination in presenting pathos, comedy and irony.

The Peony Pavilion is one of the most famous masterpieces in the history of Chinese theater. Written by Shakespeare's contemporary Tang Xianzu. Through the lens of this classic work, we will explore some key aspects of Chinese culture.

We will aim to unpack the interplay between the structural and stylistic decisions and the challenging historical topic in Morrison's classic Beloved. In Song of Solomon we will follow her hero Milkman as he reckons with his own heritage.

Which musicals changed the face of this most American of art forms? Join the Chicago Tribune's renowned theater critic and cultural columnist Chris Jones on a weekly online journey across the most fascinating Broadway musicals, from 1945 to 2016.

This course is a continuation of a close reading of the first five books of the Bible known as the Torah in Judaism and the Pentateuch in Christianity. We will read chapter by chapter, discussing its literary form and content as well as its religious significance.

How does music paint pictures and inspire emotion? Is it the power of suggestion from program notes, or is there really a musical language? This class examines the program music of Berlioz, Liszt, Strauss, Respighi, Debussy, Stravinsky,and others.

This is Part 3 of a 3-quarter series

A three-quarter online sequence presenting the basics of Homeric Greek. Via flashcards and exercises, students read real Greek early-on completing the first book of the Iliad.

Required Book:

Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners, Fourth Edition

by Clyde Pharr, John Wright & Paula Debnar

ISBN: 978-0806141640

In this course we'll investigate eight plays with political and social underpinnings that have challenged the conventional wisdom of their times including work by Clifford Odets, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Lynn Nottage and August Wilson.

This course will examine the "Technological Mindset" as the root of our ecological and how religious traditions can address it, according to: Pope Francis (Christian), Seyyed Nasir (Islamic), and Native American environmental thought.

Designed for experienced playwrights or those who have completed Intermediate Playwriting, this class will help you to fine tune your scene writing, character development, and drama in dialogue.

From revolutionary actions to the Presidency of John Adams, this course will consider the influence. Strategies, writings and impacts of four founders of the New Nation- including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine.

This class utilizes the basic toolkit acquired in previous classes in order to focus on 20th century art. We will follow three main themes in parallel fashion; by the end of the class, we will be able to see how these themes interact and inform each other.

Good dialogue is more than what people say. It can reveal past events, develop character, use non-communication to make it look like communication, and concisely reflect a relationship in a moment in time.

This course introduces various forms of Buddhism from the premodern through the contemporary period. While topics covered include early developments and doctrinal perspectives, attention will also be given to the place of Buddhism in today's world.

What is “terrorism” and why is it considered so hateful? The course looks at the history of modern anxieties about religion and violence. How have the European Enlightenment, colonialism, and legal and social change shaped our politics and concerns?

Few of Plato's Socratic dialogues pertain to the present moment of American political life as much as Gorgias, where Socrates contrasts political activity of the deepest integrity to a self-serving kind focused on seizing power by any means

Four composers, born at the outset of the 19th century, will lead us through a dramatic era of musical change; the grandiose, eccentric Berlioz; the poignantly intimate Schumann; the subtle and perfect Chopin; and the superhumanly energetic Liszt.

This three-part course examines art and architecture in Italy ca. 1300 to ca. 1600, a period noteworthy for celebrated artists including Giotto, Duccio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Spring quarter is Part III of the sequence.

Modern Confucianism is a living tradition, rooted in the selective use of religious ideas for more secular ends. We'll read selections from Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, exploring their philosophy and their continuing impact on East Asian society.

Growing up as a 'hyphenated American' can be an immensely rewarding, challenging and complicated journey. We will explore the immigrant and first-generation experiences of growing up Indian in America along with various approaches in forging a hybridized multicultural identity.

Publishers and agents require a synopsis before you submit the manuscript. The synopsis is your most powerful, in fact your only, selling tool. We'll learn the do's and don'ts of synopses writing and provide a strong critique of yours.

This course is designed for advanced fiction writers working to develop and hone their prose, whether that be novels, flash fiction, short stories, or hybrid work. Writers will have the opportunity to learn from a wide range of styles, techniques, and voices, as well as workshop their writing.

Medieval and Renaissance maps are fascinating windows into early modern culture. In this course we will learn about how early modern European maps the maps were commissioned and the sources that the cartographers used, both textual and pictorial.

A daylong seminar covering genre-changing works from 1642 to 1925 -- from Monteverdi's Poppea to Berg's Lulu.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to craft scenes that contain all the elements that move your story forward. We'll discuss how richly drawn characters, strong sense of place, and effective dialogue can be amplified to create dramatic arc.

In this workshop, we'll look at different examples of how writers manage transitions between back story and present action, whether through space breaks, interior monologue, or jump cuts. In-class exercises will help students develop these skills.

This course will examine the contested meaning of the Scopes Trial in American culture context with Darwinism, through the trial transcripts, Clarence Darrow's and William Jennings Bryan's aims in order to consider how to interpret its meaning.

Writers of all genres will benefit from lecture, discussion, brief readings, and in-class prompts as we focus on specific, effective tools to navigate flashbacks, flash forwards, as well as shifts of scene within a linear narrative.

A giant of modernist English poetry, Stevens grappled deeply and protractedly in both his poetry and prose with the particular character and problems of what he called 'modern reality'. We will read widely from Stevens' poems, essays and aphorisms.

In this course we will examine the essay as a genre, reading some of the best examples covering a range of topics and time periods, from Madison to Baldwin, and Swift to Schopenhauer.

The significance of ancient Egypt in the development of western culture has been long overshadowed by biblical narrative, romantic novels, and overly produced Hollywood films. This course will focus on the popular and scientific history of Egypt.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to craft scenes that contain all the elements that move your story forward. We'll discuss how richly drawn characters, strong sense of place, and effective dialogue can be amplified to create dramatic arc.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Vol. 2 of The Search for Lost Time. Here, Proust weaves together the storylines from Swann's Way of Marcel's family and the Swann family, treating the theme of love in its several varieties.

Japanese culture offers many examples where the spiritual and the material are considered as intersecting: from sacred mountains and android-Buddhas, to rituals for the disposal of used working tools and toys.

This course is a special extended edition of the Basic Program methods course offered as part of our celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the program. One of the foundational premises of the Basic Program is that reading is a skill. And that like many skills, one can get better at reading through theoretically-informed practice.

This discussion/lecture course will focus on the whole history of Chicago, from its origins to the present, emphasizing the major events, politics, and peoples that make up one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.

This course places the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons in conversation with theological concepts in Western Christianity (such as the divine, the human, creation, morality, and others) to learn the basics and nuances of the latter.

Each session in this course examines one crucial musical masterpiece that transformed western music. Pieces include Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Beethoven's Third and Ninth Symphonies, and Chopin'sPreludes.

This summer we will study films by experts in the craft of "cinematic creation" which look both backwards and forwards in their attempts to revolutionize how we integrate film "experiences" and expand our own sense of identity and creative potential.

In this class we will do a close reading of the essential writings of 19th century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, including "On Liberty," "Utilitarianism," and "On the Subjection of Women."

Virginia Woolf's October 1928 Orlando: A Biography is at once a bubbling jeu d'esprit of playfulness, humor and imagination, a keen critique of women's disinheritance and critics' cruelty, and a paean to Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West.

This visual anthropology course offers an immersion into anthropological media for students interested in visual anthropology and documentary film. It will provide a substantial understanding of anthropological media through film, sound, and texts.

In this class, we read two texts by the Roman Historian Sallust that deal with the turbulent period in the late Republic that set the stage for the civil wars that ultimately resulted in the end of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.

Ralph Ellison writes with a vital, incisive, discerning motile voice, and his protagonist, the young unnamed narrator, IS such qualities – in his person, his thoughts, his interactions, his utterances.

Paradise Lost is one of the most important literary works in the English language. Based on the account in Genesis, it tells a complex story of God, Satan, angels, man and woman. Its purpose, Milton said, was to "justify the ways of God to men." 

This class will focus on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, (1835,1840), to understand how democratic culture shapes the American character. It will be primarily a close reading of books I and II, on bright and 'dark' sides of democracy.

In this workshop we'll apply techniques to weave together thematic, plot and character elements to expand the second act of your tale, do justice to your premise, attract your audience, and tell the story you feel compelled to tell.

Do you like Proust? Kafka? Polish painter and writer of Jewish descent, Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), is next of kin. Brutally shot in 1942 by a Gestapo officer, Schulz did not finish his novel, The Messiah. Its manuscript and Schulz’s stories written under Nazi occupation, have been lost.

In this course we will focus on the innovative and subversive films of the Coen Brothers. 

Join us in a summer reading course in the poetry of the Bible. The Poetry of the Bible offers ample literature for analysis, reflection and even meditation.

In the tradition of writers whose work has been transformed by walking, we will mindfully stroll through our environments, from urban to rural, as we move from our interiority to the to the world around us and observe how it enriches our writing. There is a long and varied history of the writer as flanuer - the passionate wanderer.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the most authoritative Hindu text on yoga, explains the meditative discipline required to attain absolute freedom from suffering. This text’s mental rather than physical focus is in contrast to contemporary yoga culture.

James Madison was an architect for the New American Nation. He was a principle author of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and a US President. We will examine his writings that shaped a nation.

Aeschylus is a powerful and poetic writer who was known for his creative and dramatic staging. This class will delve into Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, taking up the plays included in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus 1.

This course will explore some of the classics of political philosophy. 

This course constitutes a cultural, historical, and artistic journey to Mexico--country that some consider to be the "distant neighbor" of the United States. By exploring narrative, art, and film, we define the contours of twentieth-century Mexico.

The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe mark a period of philosophical revolution, where the debates focused largely on the nature and limits of human knowledge. We shall be reading representative writings from some of the major thinkers of this period.

This second course on Flannery O'Connor will cover a combination of stories and essays, together with her  novel, Wise Blood.

What thoughts about the good life, the just society, beauty, truth, and knowledge take distinctively Asian forms but are recognizable to others? The course examines such traditions as Confucianism, Buddhism, and others, in history and the present.

In The Idiot, Dostoevsky takes up the question of how a "Christ-like" man would survive (or not) in this world. Demons is a 3-part novel inspired by the true story of a political murder, a masterpiece which still feels perfectly fresh and modern.

Buddhism is often presented as an unusually rational or science-friendly religion, or even as "a philosophy, not a religion". In this course we'll put that common wisdom to the test.

Although Claude Debussy despised the term Impressionism, he is regarded as its greatest musical exponent. The radically structured and kaleidoscopically colorful nature of his music represents as extreme a departure from tradition as any in music.

The third great scripture of the Abrahamic tradition and the foundation of Islam, we will discuss the Qur'an from a secular, literary perspective to gain an initial understanding of it and its relationship to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates combines philosophical analysis of the basic moral problem (telling right from wrong) with a portrait of the sophist, Protagoras, and his famous dictum of relativism: Man is the measure of all things.

We will read and discuss Boethius' medieval philosophical work The Consolation of Philosophy.

In this course, we will read some of the most important modern and contemporary Italian authors: Verga, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sciascia, Maraini, and Camilleri. We will accompany the readings with movies inspired by their books.

This is Cather's epic creation on the efforts of historically-based Bishop Jean-Marie Latour and Vicar Joseph Vaillant to establish and "gird up" the nascent Diocese of New Mexico, recently acquired by the U.S.'s winning the Mexican-American War.

A close encounter with the lush poetic visions and unaffected mindfulness of the poet Derek Walcott. We will select a small number of Walcott's most powerful poems and will take as much time as necessary to savor each of them fully.

Although largely ignored by critics in their own time, literary women were central to the Harlem Renaissance. Writers covered in this course will include Jessie Fauset, Nella Larson, and Zora Neale Hurston.

This course will explore eight of Arthur Miller's pivotal works including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy and The Price.

We'll discuss strategies for creating more vivid, informative, and compelling dialogue that moves your story forward. We'll examine dialect, tag lines, and how to achieve speedy characterization through in-class exercises.

The Beethoven symphonies and concertos form the central core of Western Classical music. This course uses both archival and contemporary performances to explore these works, offering historical and social perspectives on this fascinating repertory.

Getting your novel off the ground in chapter 1 can be a daunting task. First chapters are often written again and again. We'll critique your chapter 1, as well as analyze excellent opening chapters and discuss why they work.

What are we aiming at when we read or produce criticism? Are we seeking knowledge about texts or knowledge about ourselves, or both? We will explore these questions through readings of texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marxist literary criticism.

In this workshop, we'll look at online resources that will help you to organize your work strategize submissions. We'll review Duotrope, Submittable, and other submissions-organizing sites that make the regular, organized submissions easier.

This course will examine Galileo's work and thought in his own words, from his early discoveries, his famous Letter to the Duchess Christina, and his inquisition trial, in order to discuss the question of how to interpret Galileo's meaning today.

This course is an introduction to the method of close reading encouraged in the Basic Program, starting from Adler's How to Read a Book.

We read Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Milton's Lycidas, and Bellow's "Seize the Day," which features the earlier works as part of the liberal education of the protagonist.

Through a careful reading and discussion of Shakespeare’s play, this course will explore Shakespeare’s exaltation of “graceful Christianity” in both the major and minor plot threads of one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays.

We will engage in a close reading of Euthyphro against the backdrop of Socrates’ own trial in the Apology.

Like its counterpart How to Read Classic Texts, this course aims to help students improve their reading skills as they approach reading religious texts as literature. 

An in-depth discussion of "The Judgement" (1912), "A Country Doctor" (1917) and "A Hunger Artist" (1922).

We read three Greek tragedies that feature the Iphigenia myth: Agamemnon by Aeschylus, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. The myth of the House of Atreus, and the movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, may also be discussed.

Silas Marner is the story of a sincerely religious young man who is betrayed by a friend who frames him for a crime he did not commit, alienating is fiancé and ruining his life.