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, and through discussions of your own and your fellow students’ written work.
How do we enhance our work into polished, powerful prose? In this 8-week course, we'll combine writing workshops with reading assignments that illustrate a variety of creative nonfiction techniques. We'll focus on structure, revision, and adding depth to your work.
What makes a story pop with excitement? Strong characters with competing agendas, bold in their desires, who know what they want and will stop at nothing to get it. In this workshop, we will focus on giving your characters the dialogue they deserve as they drive your story forward, questing to achieve their goals.
Music in film, both specially composed and/or appropriated, often determines the character and emotional gravity of the greatest films. Some films, such as Taxi Driver, Vertigo, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are literally unthinkable without their scores.
"Those places from which we come and those to which we’ve moved provide the ground against which the figures of our lives themselves move, change, depart. Poetry is forever looking to discover and then describe what we mean by a sense of ‘home.'" - David St. John, "Ain't Got No Home in this World Anymore"
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was fond of repeating a line from Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Imitation, copying, can be a path to developing your capacity for creative theft and transformation in your own work. Faulkner, for instance, imitated other writers for two decades in order to find his own voice and style.
If you’re thinking about writing a children's book, either fiction or nonfiction, this three-session seminar will both ground you in today’s children’s book world and help you move forward in readying your book for readers.
Central to all storytelling, whether you write fiction, drama, or creative nonfiction, is the need to build and sustain narrative tension so that your readers feel drawn into your writing. Learn the key elements of telling a compelling story: how to pace unfolding events, heighten conflict, and construct scenes.
In the Phaedo, Plato presents his friend and teacher Socrates on the cusp of death, waiting to fulfill – by hemlock – the sentence imposed upon him by the people of Athens. Socrates, with friends & acquaintances, ruminates on the soul, its possible immortality, as well as on the nature of what can be known and how we can know it.
“Season 2” of our Iliad seminar picks up near the end of book 4 with battle proper - between the Greeks and Trojans - (re-)engaged. Though Achilles remains withdrawn, other heroes & heroines, gods & goddesses vie with one another to shape events at Troy.
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, and through discussions of your own and your fellow students’ written work.
How do we understand the art that has come out of the great art revolutions of the late 19th and 20th centuries? Even a viewer who is equipped with basic principles for viewing art may be at a loss in addressing modern visual work.
Whether you've been struggling to write or you are simply ready to start something new, this two-day class is designed to get creative writers of all genres moving with writing activities, games, and prompts. Come ready to try new things, freewrite, and discover new ways to begin.
With China’s phenomenal economic and social transformations in recent decades, leading ethic Chinese filmmakers have arrived on the global stage and a few Chinese films have become internationally acclaimed. This course will focus on major films created by ethnic Chinese filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
The heritage of ancient Egypt has left the modern world with the impression of a culture obsessed with death. The Egyptian relationship with death was neither entirely pervasive nor was it static; as in any society, ideas evolved over time as did their manifestation in art, sculpture, and architecture.
Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. As The New Yorker has pointed out, “Trollope [is] Trending.” Trollope’s brand of High Victorian Liberalism made him both representative of his era and an often astute commentator on its excesses.
This first course in a three-quarter sequence will examine the History of Western Civilization, focusing on the relation between technology and “wisdom.” Instead of a political framework, this year’s sequence will examine how changes in technology, primarily information technology, impacted the philosophical and spiritual ideas of a particular
Bard, solitary wanderer, nationalist hero, mad genius, Prometheus, Faust- the Romantic era was awash in idealizations of the artist. Using Chopin and Schumann, as well as various contemporaries, as the basis for an examination of the Romantic generation, this class seeks to bring this most fascinating and unruly epoch into focus. Beyond the hi
Story-driving scenes leap off the page or screen with color and drama. In this workshop, we will fine-tune the process of writing the well-made scene that delights and spellbinds while also moving the story forward.
European culture has been dramatically altered by the dual impact of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following Martin Luther’s “nailing” of the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door, “all hell broke loose” on the continent. Men and women of the Renaissance era helped fuel a fire that resulted in crusades, inquisitions, and political turmoil.
In this course, we will take late imperial China (15-19th century), with its complex relations with foreigners, as our case study to critically analyze its historical shifts from a special, transnational perspective.
This course studies the binary of Islam and the West. In this course, we will study different historical perspectives of how Islamic traditions and the “West” have been related to and distinguished from each other. We begin with Islamic origins and how the new faith altered the late-antique world that succeeded the Roman Empire.
This three-quarter course covers the history of American politics, emphasizing the major controversies and crises that have shaped our Republic from its origins to the present.
This three-quarter course covers the history of American politics, emphasizing the major controversies and crises that have shaped our Republic from its origins to the present.
In this course we will examine how diverse parties and ideologies competed with each other and contributed to the China we know today.
How do we understand the art that has come out of the great art revolutions of the late 19th and 20th centuries? Even a viewer who is equipped with basic principles for viewing art may be at a loss in addressing modern visual work.
Want to find a way to make writing for business and the professions even more effective? Simple: tell your story. In this eight-week class, you will learn to create an authentic, compelling story that clarifies your mission, vision, and value proposition.
Pioneering a style of unparalleled versatility and expressiveness, Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven created a musical repertory of elegance, wit, optimism, and logic that remains the benchmark of Western musical culture to this day.
What makes a piece of art great? What makes it deep, interesting, and meaningful? Just as we learn how to read fiction, we must learn the basic principles of visual art in order for the interaction to be worthwhile.
What makes a piece of art great? What makes it deep, interesting, and meaningful? Just as we learn how to read fiction, we must learn the basic principles of visual art in order for the interaction to be worthwhile.
The Writer's Studio Monthly Writing Group is designed for students working in creative nonfiction or fiction. Focused on monthly workshops, the group also provides writers a sense of community as well as an outlet for discussion of both practice and form.
This course looks at China today with the perspective of recent history. The calamities of the end of the Qing Empire in the mid-19th century to the reinvention of the idea of Chinese civilization in the years after set the stage for a century of revolutions of different kinds.
Stay motivated while writing your novel! This online class will offer craft discussions, intensive study of a mentor text, instructor feedback on a synopsis and eighty pages of work, and opportunities for revision.
In this introductory course, we will explore the art and craft of writing memoir. Students will draw upon their life experiences to create works that will explore both individual lives and the human condition in general. In-class writing exercises will be aimed at beginning larger pieces of writing.
Do you need structure, deadlines, insight, and a creative community to produce your best work? This eight-week, multi-genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry) online writing group is designed to provide that and more.
This course will introduce the history of treaty ports in China from late Qing dynasty to Republican era from both Chinese and foreign perspectives. We will explore trade and economic development, policy making, changes of urban space, religious affairs, and interracial interactions.
There is no finer way to bind readers to your story than through characters readers admire, understand, and root for, even with all their flaws. Compelling characters in all types of media help put the writer on the map.
The Beethoven symphonies and concertos form the central core of Western Classical music; each of the nine symphonies and seven concertos comprise a separate world, from the heroism and tragedy of the Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies, the pantheism of the “Pastoral” to the sublimity of the violin concerto and the brilliance and elan of the “Empe
Joan Didion’s essays have been absorbed, dissected, and studied by generations of writers. For good reason. Few writers better illustrate the power of the “I," of the importance of crafting that “right” first-person narrator who can excavate a private personal truth to illuminate a shared universal one.
This seminar takes us on a journey across the various areas of Edo (the former name of Tokyo), from the shogun’s residence to the entertainment district, to explore the roots and hidden meaning of the different segments of Japanese culture, such as kabuki theater and woodblock print making, among others.
Forget the dry, boring grammar lessons of your youth. Take this class and enter an enchanting world of punctuation unlike any you have ever considered. Do commas trip you up? Unsure about semi-colons? Come explore their usage and untapped power.
Have work but unsure how to get it out there? In this class we will study and demystify the ever-changing landscape of online and print publications. You will learn how to evaluate and characterize journals, and you will research one or two literary markets.
Improve your writing for greater clarity, organization, and persuasiveness. The University of Chicago’s Writer’s Studio invites you to take our Effective Writing for Business and the Professions course for better communication in business and beyond.