Courses

This course explores the history and continued importance of public art in Chicago through the examination of a selection of notable case studies from the late 19th century to the present. Two issues will shape this course.

In this six-week course, we will discuss and workshop scenes, the stepping stones of your character’s journey. Managing the tension between where your characters think they are going vs. where they need to go is one element that makes a scene come alive.

From the time of Jane Addams and the pioneering works of Park, Burgess and Wirth of the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s and 1930s, there have been numerous attempts to analyze and explain the significance of Chicago’s diversity, its social problems and challenges facing the neighborhoods.

Beethoven's middle period works (the heroic Beethoven) comprise the single most influential repertory in the history of Western music. The "Eroica" symphony, the mighty Fifth, the "Emperor" piano concerto and other works permanently established the model of artist as hero, artist as liberator, artist as sacrifice.

“Like a poem, a genuine essay is made of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.” - Cynthia Ozick

Summer 2019: Year One Autumn Makeup Class (ONLINE): This class covers the same texts as the Year 1 Autumn Basic Program course, and is an opportunity for students who started the program in Winter or Spring quarter to make up this section of the curriculum.

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is 200 years old this year. In 1818 many were shocked to learn that this horrifying story, often credited as the first work of science fiction, was written by a 19-year-old woman. Where did she get the idea for this violent and deadly conflict between creator and detested creation?

Women’s writing in China has been perceived as inextricably bound to representations of the personal. In this course we will rethink the role of personal life experience in the works of women writers in twentieth-century China.

With its huge and varied repertory, the piano is a unique microcosm of Western music. This course offers an historical survey of the genre, from the Baroque suite to the modern étude and concerto.

In this four-week class, we will examine, discuss, and practice methods for moving forward and backward in time. We will look at writers like Stuart Dybek, Grace Paley, and Ling Ma, who effectively compress years into a mere paragraph, use imagery to signal time slippage, or open a liminal space between past and present.

This class will delve into a close reading of a number of the more important of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, to include stories from her two collections A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge.

The best stories—the ones that vibrate with emotion—are journeys of discovery for both writer and reader. Through in-class writing, impromptu exercises, deep dives into stories—exemplary published work as well as work-in-progress—we’ll exchange thoughts, ideas, and meaningful commentary while examining the approaches, craft techniques, and think

This course considers the non-urban noir. These films reflect the postwar migration from the city to the suburbs, and suggest that the dark side of humanity is scarcely limited to the urban environment.

Description forthcoming.

A brand can be the foundation of successful marketing. Often, it is the most valuable asset of a business. But what is a brand and who defines it? This course challenges you to answer these questions and think deeply about the many facets and attributes of brands.

This course examines the state of Muslim community and Islam in America. It presents a comprehensive discussion of debates, challenges, and opportunities that American Muslims have faced through centuries in America.

Nobel Prize laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee has taken the Socratic trend in his fiction to a new frontier in The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016).

In this course we will read Caesar’s own account of his conquest of Gaul, The Gallic Wars, using the new Landmark edition of Caesar’s works. Caesar used these “Commentaries” to establish himself with his contemporary readers as a model of Roman leadership for his own political advancement.

This course is intended to address some of the more persistent and sometimes daunting difficulties that attend the effort to read classic works of the Western cultural tradition.

In “How to Read a Book,” Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) writes, “The more one reads poetry the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be it in political or philosophical discourse, in history, social studies or the art of fiction.” In 1987, Brodsky was awarded a Nobel Prize "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of t