Jose Moctezuma

This course considers the history of lyric poetry and its reawakened significance in the wake of A.I. How does the recent paradigmatic shift toward artificial intelligence place pressure on the contemporary poet¿s notion of authenticity and originality? Together we¿ll explore whether an ¿A.I. Poetics¿ is a possible (or even coherent) modality and work to define what such a poetics might look like in our respective aesthetic practices, beyond just writing alone. We¿ll actively use free and available A.I. interfaces like ChatGPT to generate, interrogate, and complicate what ¿authenticity¿ means in our own practice, and we¿ll experiment with forms and models like erasure, the cento, cleromancy, and other chance-based operations to activate an inquiry into what constitutes our own thought process as distinct from the sources that feed into it. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, a research-oriented group project, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

In this course, we will explore the history and nature of landscape in literature, but especially as a practice of description, catalogue, attention, and scale. With a specific attention to ekphrasis (the description or reproduction of a visual work in a literary format), we will practice 'decolonizing' landscape from its problematic entanglements with the enclosure movement and the history of colonialism, and seek out ways of redefining landscape within urban and bucolic environments, at once gaining a new understanding of what Donna Haraway called 'natureculture,' the entangled multispecies aspects of environment that thrive in hybridity and codependence. We will experiment with different forms of writing, incorporating, and deconstructing landscape within our writing and creative practices. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, 2 workshop slots, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

What is the poetics of the city and the metropole? In what ways has the architectural emergence of the modernist city (not merely as a constructed place or lived experience, but as an archetypal signifer) informed and 'inscaped' the aesthetic practices of poets and artists in their time? In this course, we will examine three historical case studies -- New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles -- and read broadly across various critical theory texts (e.g., Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Mike Davis, etc.). and literature and art sourced from and magnetized by the figure and frenzy of the metropole. We will read broadly and transhistorically, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Ed Roberson¿s City Eclogue, but we¿ll also engage with artists who have worked in different mediums (primarily literary, but also in music, sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, and film). In thinking through the city and its many representations, we¿ll work to incorporate the in-situ energy of Chicago itself to inform and hybridize our own art practice and medium, with a view toward cultivating writing practices that engender new ways of seeing and exploring. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, a research-oriented group project, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

In this course, we will think across the different disciplinary modes of translation: between languages, between aesthetic mediums, and between forms of thought. It is not required nor essential that students be multilingual, but we will play with the act of translation as a form of re-creation, whether as a 'sacralization' or 'desecration' of aesthetic and textual signification. In thinking through translation, we will also approach and think through alterity ('otherness') as a contrapuntal force that allows for creative rhythms to occur and resonate between difference and repetition. We will read broadly (from John Dryden to Anne Carson) and experiment with the different approaches and theories that have defined translation over the years, especially in writing and literature, and we'll work on translating other works into the language of our own medium. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, a research-oriented group project, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.