From Gutenberg to Google Books, from the public sphere to the “proto-book” dissertation, the diverse legacies and uncertain futures of print culture touch all of us. This course serves as a graduate-level introduction to the study of print culture – a.k.a. “the history of the book” – in a comparative, cross-historical, and interdisciplinary frame. Beginning with the field’s origins in Anglo-American bibliography and European cultural history, we will move through the foundational accounts of print-modernity in works by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Jurgen Habermas, and Benedict Anderson to the revisionist, capacious print cultures of historians such as Adrian Johns, literary and media scholars such as Lisa Gitelman, and ethnographers such as Janice Radway. Topics of interest will include the materiality of the book and its shaping effects on literature and language; the historical “revolutions” of the hand press, the industrial press, and digital text technology; national and transnational print networks; periodicals and ephemera; authorship, intellectual property, and piracy; and academic publishing in a post-book age. This class will double as a primer on archival research methods and will incorporate guidance on funding opportunities through libraries and archives. In this winter’s offering, students will have the chance to interact with three distinguished scholars in the field who are visiting UW as part of the Histories and Futures of Reading speaker series co-sponsored by the Simpson Center and the Textual Studies Program: Christina Lupton (Warwick), author of Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Jerome McGann (Virginia), author most recently of The New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, and Priya Joshi (Temple), author of In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India.

Co-taught by Jeffrey Todd Knight (English) and Geoffrey Turnovsky (French & Italian). Course credit will count towards the Textual Studies degree track and the Textual and Digital Studies certificate now in the proposal stages.

This course will present a compendious overview of the major transition that took place in the 60s and 70s from “humanist” to “structuralist” and “contextualist” approaches of various sorts. Humanism, in the loose, large sense intended here, refers to the notion that individual consciousness is the prime source of agency. By contrast, structuralism and contextualism analyze agency in terms of forces and structures that give form to individual consciousness itself, and are therefore in crucial ways behind its intendings. There are many very difficult conceptual issues that arise around the dichotomy between these two approaches, and in this class we will work through these issues in rigorous detail. All of this will be brought to bear on the fundamental issues of reading and interpretation, and particularly on the question of what constitutes valid interpretation.
We will be reading some standard theoretical texts that you might well have encountered before, but we will read them at a depth that you might well not have previously experienced.

Tentative reading list:
Volosinov, Ch. 3 of Marxist Philosophy of Language
Foucault, “What is an Author”
Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” selections from Of Grammatology
Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”
Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”
Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value”
Staten, “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice”

The course draws on psychoanalytical, Marxian, and cultural studies writing to ask, How has the figure of the child been constructed since the 1970s? The course is divided into three sections: The Child, Parents, The School. It pays special attention to the narrative and intersectional construction of these figures and institutions. Students will sharpen their knowledge of influential theoretical approaches in the humanities, and also develop accounts of how such approaches guide analysis and argument about childhood. Authors read include: Ariès, Berlant, Butler, Freud, Foucault, Edelman, Lacan, Phillips, Rose, Sahlberg, Zipes.

This is an introductory course which addresses the earliest forms of written texts in the English language (up to c. 1100). Knowledge of Old English adds depth to the study of both prominent and noncanonical literary works (and other texts) from all phases of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Emphasis is placed on the study of poetry and poetics, popular and marginalized texts, and early narrative theory (including theory of orality and literacy). Concepts introduced in the course will help participants acquire an understanding of many features of modern English, both elegant and idiosyncratic, and will provide skills useful for future study of other languages. The locus of Old English literary culture is fundamental to the study of the history of the English Language and the cultural history of Britain, supporting much recent work in the areas of feminist criticism (and gender studies generally); theories of alterity, the body, voicing, and marginalization; hermeneutic criticism; historicist approaches and postcolonial theory; and theoretical treatments of popular culture. The course is also especially well-suited to many areas of textual studies, including manuscript study and theory of textual criticism and bibliography.

How does the idea of the Anthropocene affect the way we read, think, and write about literature and history? A new geologic age defined by the impact of human action, the Anthropocene has been dated to the late-18th century, when James Watt invented the condensing steam engine and concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise. It thus provides a backdrop against which to re-evaluate many of the developments in literature, culture, technology, and ideas of nature in the long-19th century. In this course, we will explore the “nature” of the 19th-century novel as an art form, a technology, and a cultural institution that crossed national borders. The novels we will read range from the United States to Britain, France, South Africa and the Belgian Congo. Melville travelled widely, and Moby Dick first appeared in London. George Eliot was a translator before she became a novelist. Conrad (born in Poland) wrote in his third language. Zola’s Germinal was first translated into English by the Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis. Olive Schreiner re-wrote The Story of an African Farm in London, and later returned to South Africa as an activist for racial and gender equality. We will trace the ways in which novels participated in debates about the changing relations between humans and nature in the period, including ideas of progress, evolution, race, empire, gender, sexuality, and the status of animals and machines. We will also attempt to think rigorously about what it means to read these novels not in their age but in our own, and look to the ways in which the afterlives of the 19th-century novel continue to emerge. In addition to a series of canonical 19th century novels, the supplemental readings will offer an introduction to key concepts in ecocriticism, science studies, and related fields.

Required texts:

These editions will be ordered to the University Bookstore. However, you are welcome to use any other editions you may possess.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Oxford. 9780199535729

George Eliot, Middlemarch. Oxford. 9780199536757

Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm. Oxford. 9780199538010

Émile Zola, Germinal. Oxford. 9780199536894

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Oxford. 9780199536016

"The BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the 'middlebrow'. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like." --Punch, 23 December 1925.

We are well after the Great Divide and it is impossible to account for modernism as an elite or hermetically sealed institution: it includes realms called and contested as middlebrow, and the popular. With its eye to the middlebrow, this research-intensive course focuses primarily on the novel, but also includes plays and periodicals, engaging British and American modernism and modernity in a variety of forms and locales. The student will be exposed to the burgeoning field of modernist periodical studies as well as lively current critical conversations in modernist studies, for what middlebrow means continues to be debated. (N. B. Some previous acquaintance with modernism would be useful.)

We will orient ourselves in the primary texts that gave rise to the "battle of the brows," employ the British-based Middlebrow Network, and then turn to novels: mysteries, domestic fictions/"the woman's novel", and satires—always page-turnable. (In many ways this course looks beyond Richard Poirier's eminently quotable 1978 account that "modernism happened when reading got to be grim.") The marketing of culture, class/class anxiety, questions of taste (good and bad) and sophistication recur, alongside recurrent motifs involving domesticity, the relation of the urban to the non-urban, and the uneasy status of the female writer/producer/taste-maker.

Texts/authors may include: E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, Nancy Mitford, Stella Gibbons, Cold Country Farm, Michael Arlen, The Green Hat, Dorothy Parker's poetry, short stories, and reviews; one of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels or some of her/his stories, Noël Coward's Design for Living (in play and hopefully cinematic form), perhaps Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and some engagement with middlebrow magazines from the period—such as The New Yorker, Smart Set, Vanity Fair, Time and Tide —and therefore a brush with periodical studies. We will also use the wonderful work of the online Modernist Journals Project, perhaps to look at what was going on in magazines when Virginia Woolf—who published in Vogue and Good Housekeeping, and wrote but didn't send a letter to a magazine ending "If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half–crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead"--made her pronouncement that on or about 1910 human character changed.

That's to say you'll spend some time figuring out how to use the wealth available in archives in order to produce a critically valuable statement, or as it is known in the world of the dissertation, a thesis. Therefore, in addition to exploring the realms of the middlebrow and spaces exceeding those of so-called high modernism, the point of this course is to teach students to conduct historical research that is sensitive to form, negotiating archives as well as working with an eye toward concrete results, and to acquaint students with some modernist resources and texts in excess of the realms of the canonical.

Students will be responsible for class presentations, producing a response to a CFP (Call for Papers), a final 10 page conference paper that they will present to our course's culminating "Middlebrow Modernism" conference, and an oral response to another student's paper presentation.

New Directions in Black Literary and Cultural Studies: Space, Sex and Media.

At the intersections of multiple forms of media critique—sound, visual and performance studies—there now emerges new forms of theoretical, public and public analysis predicated on the increasingly fragile spaces of identity, solidarity and cross-cultural diversification. Indeed, the very notion of space—transnational, diasporic, gendered, intimate—has become where this interdisciplinary work stages its various interventions, whether it be about music, technology, geography or sexuality. This class dives into this new work, places it in historical context and attempts to make sense of Where We Are Now in terms of black theory and criticism and Where We Are Going in terms of general cultural reflection.

This course is an introduction to and survey of the basics of language analysis beyond the sentence level, covering approaches both to discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. It is also a survey of the various ways in which discourse analysis is theoretically grounded, with a special focus on critical discourse analysis (CDA) in its two major presentations, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian. Students in ENGL 562 will also study the social theorists–Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Giddens–so that they will be able to ground their work in theory.

Required Texts:
Meyerhoff, Introducing Sociolinguistics, 2nd ed. (2011)
Mills, Discourse, 2nd ed. (2004)
Wetherell, et al., Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis
Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. (2009)

Course Pack

Recommended Text:
A good linguistics dictionary

Catalog Description: Covers various issues in composition studies including the history of composition study, contemporary composition theory, basic writing, service-learning pedagogy, engaged scholarship, new media and digital studies, writing assessment, writing across the curriculum, and writing program administration.

The goal of this credit/noncredit course is to broaden student/teachers’ understanding of the technical, personal, and practical
elements involved in effective language teaching. This will be accomplished through regular classroom practice scaffolded by a master teacher, observations of veteran teachers, journaling, observations of peers, reflective inquiry, self-evaluation, group support in regular seminars, videotaped microteaching, analytical lesson reports, and peer evaluation. While a solid theoretical foundation is essential for effective teaching practice, many elements of teaching practice become evident only through the actual experience of teaching. Donald Schön, in his book Educating the Reflective Practitioner, describes reflection-in-action, the kind of thinking that allows us to respond to unexpected situations and “serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it” (p. 26) as an essential component of professional competence. The central goal of this class is to support your development as a reflective practitioner as you reflect-in-action. You will be afforded ample opportunities to develop your own style and philosophy of language teaching and to refine your vision of yourself as a teacher.

This course is designed to familiarize you with key concepts and theories in the field of TESOL and their implications for classroom teaching. What is language and how is it acquired? What does it mean to learn a language? What are some of the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that shape that learning? What is the nature of bilingualism? Monolingualism? Multicompetence? Plurilingualism? These are just some of the questions that we will be exploring in this course, an introduction to the rich complexities surrounding language acquisition.

We will begin by becoming familiar with some foundational concepts within second language acquisition (SLA) theory, for instance universal grammar (UG), the monitor model, critical period hypotheses, developmental sequences, etc. We will then examine some of the key epistemological issues and theoretical tensions and debates that have emerged historically within the field, approaching our exploration from linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and critical perspectives. Later on in the course, we will examine how understandings about second language acquisition have been shaped by recent influences from disciplines other than linguistics and psychology, most notably education, sociology, and anthropology, and we will reflect critically on how we use language in teaching, in learning, and in negotiating who we are in various contexts. In all topics we discuss, we will consider how these ideas inform our beliefs about language teaching and shape our images of the teachers we want to be.

The novel is dead; long live the anti-novel, built from scraps.
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I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled.
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I'm interested in collage as--to be honest--an evolution beyond narrative.
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A great painting comes together, just barely.
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It may be that nowadays in order to move us, abstract pictures need, if not humor, then at least some admission of their own absurdity-expressed in genuine awkwardness or in an authentic disorder.
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
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Collage is the primary art form of the twenty-first century.
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Carson, "Essay on the Difference between Women and Men”; Duras, The Lover; Dillard, For the Time Being; Fusselman, The Pharmacist's Mate; Galeano, The Book of Embraces; Manguso, The Guardians; Markson, This Is Not a Novel; Michaels, "Joural"; Nelson, Bluets; Shields, Reality Hunger; Trow, Within the Context of No Context; Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's.
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Oral presentations. Response papers. 15-page collage.

An intensive poetry workshop for MFA poetry students. Xeroxes of published poems will be provided by the professor for the purposes of class discussion, often with a view toward a specific craft or thematic issue revealed by student poems submitted for that particular day, or revealed as helpful for the group overall. Special attention will be paid to the art of revision and the discoveries of thematic structure or pattern creation. Work may include but is not limited to: an ongoing reading and writing log, the production of 5-8 “finished” poems, with drafts of more. Students can expect to have their own work critiqued by the group every 2-3 weeks, and to critique the work of others every week.

After years of scholarship in recent studies featuring the "waning of affect" (in Jameson's famous phrase about postmodernism), study of affect, emotion, trauma, and "feelings" in modern and contemporary literary and cultural texts is now, again, a topic of theoretical and critical attention, with a growing number of conferences, fellowships, books, and journal articles devoted to it. This course will read essays from (mostly) contemporary theorists from a variety of disciplines with an eye toward seeing what the current debates and contexts are. We’ll ask such questions as: What are the stakes in differentiating “affect” from “emotion"? How are emotion and affect related to recent work in trauma and memory studies? What about attention to affect in photography, film and other visual arts? What constitutes “public feeling”? In addition to thinking through socio-cultural contexts, we'll consider fiction and narrative shape, the production of readerly affect, and representation as a site for theorizing emotion.

Since emotions have histories, and since various nations, classes, ethnicities, cultures, genders, and sexualities produce different affective narratives, students will be free to select a specific emotion/affect/site/visual or verbal text on which to write, and to situate this writing in a historical moment and particular culture of their choice. Students who are already focused on a text or set of texts in their graduate studies are welcome to continue that work in the theoretical contexts of the course. But new projects are also fine. The course is open both to those who have begun thinking about affect studies and to those new to the topic.