The purpose of this course is to offer an introduction to the kinds of thinking and the ways of writing that distinguish the humanities in general and the study of English language and literature in particular. While many of the authors, texts, and questions that we discuss might be familiar, the goal is to practice skills that will be transferable to many other contexts. We will be focusing on an intellectual lineage that will help to explain not only the popularity of questions of "social justice" in contemporary debates about English as a discipline but also the peculiar contours that those debates often take.

There are five required texts for this class, all available at the UW Bookstore on University Way:

" Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
" Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2008.
" Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1961.
" Karl Marx, Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
" Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Douglas Smith. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.

Two additional texts that will be made available as PDFs:

" Plato, Republic VII
" Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I