One of the four required core courses in the Graduate Textual Studies Program, this seminar offers an introduction to bibliographical resources for the study of printing as an art and as a means of textual transmission; a practical view of hand and machine press printing; introductory surveys of analytic and descriptive bibliography, of the history of the book and book production, as well as practical experience in editing printed texts. Many of the sessions are are taught by invited UW experts: Sandra Kroupa, Books Arts and Rare Book Curator, Special Collections, UW (Labs on Paper, Ink, Binding, Printing, Descriptive Bibliography, and Contemporary Book Arts); Faye Cristenberry, Reference and English Studies Librarian, UW (Lab on Bibliographical Resources);  Jeff Knight, English, UW, and Geoff Turnovsky, French, UW (History of the Book); Tom Lockwood, Professor Emertius, UW (Editing Henry Fielding); Thomas Deardorff (Copyright), and possibly others.        

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.

The “Victorian Novel” has long been a staple of narrative theory, whether in terms of the novel’s role in cultivating national or class consciousness, its relationship to science, history and other literary forms, the vexed status of realism, or the articulation of the modern subject. But what is the “Victorian novel”? What do we make of the Victorian period’s alignment with the reign of a British monarch, as opposed to the explicitly historical or aesthetic movements (Romanticism and modernism) that bracket it? How does our understanding of “Victorian” change when we realize that the majority of Victoria’s subjects were not British, but Indian? In this course, we will explore the Victorian novel as an art form, a technology, and a cultural institution bound up with industrialization and imperial expansion. We will trace the ways in which novels participated in, influenced, and were shaped by other major ideas and debates of the period—over history, progress and evolution, race and empire, gender and sexuality, and the status of humans, 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, situating our conversations within current debates in Victorian studies (and literary studies more broadly) about form and history in order to think about how the afterlives of the Victorian novel continue to emerge.

In so doing, readings will engage with a sequence of canonical novels such as: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1851); Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868); George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1886); Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883); Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900); as well as critical and theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Benedict Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Georg Lukács, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Anne McClintock, Nicholas Dames, Elaine Freedgood, Caroline Levine, Bruce Robbins and others. 

Periodization after WWII

This course will ask what it means to create a “survey” of fiction published in the United States after 1945. We will indeed read a group of texts spanning 1945 to 2012 that have been published in the United States, so this course could be construed as a survey of post-1945 U.S. literature.  A primary focus on literary texts is at the heart of this class, and all students will be expected to read closely and carefully and to become conversant in the terms used to describe their method of reading.  But as we read these texts, we will also focus on the criteria and taxonomies through which literary texts are grouped in historical, social, cultural, political, and economic terms.  Our focus will therefore also be on learning how to engage the discipline of literary studies in this period and how to create our own rationales for specific groupings of texts.

Key questions will include: How are literary and cultural movements periodized between 1945 and 2012?  Does it make any sense to teach courses focused on a single national literature in this period?  What is at stake in setting geo-political or territorial boundaries to literary production, and does the nation describe relevant boundaries and conditions?   Do there continue to be key boundaries or conditions that shape literary production or aesthetics?  If so, what are they and how can we use them to organize and explain relations between texts? What methodologies are central to critical work after 1945?  How do you situate reading methods in relation to other modes of literary periodization?  Key periodizing terms under discussion are likely to include the Cold War, postmodernism, multiculturalism, globalization, transnationalism, post-post modernism, and neoliberalism.

In the wake of the Disney Corporation’s new animated feature film Moana, which has already generated a great deal of pre-release discussion and controversy about popular representations of Hawaiian people and culture, this course will introduce students to contemporary Indigenous literatures of Oceania, in a variety of genres and media: plays, poems, stories, novels, essays, films, video, music, and so forth. This course will also introduce students to relevant ways of conceptualizing and understanding the Pacific Ocean and its Indigenous peoples. We will spend most of the quarter comparing and contrasting contemporary texts produced by Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) with contemporary texts produced by Maori from Aotearoa New Zealand and contemporary texts produced by Pacific Islanders from places such as Guam, Tonga, Samoa, Rotuma, Niue, the Cook Islands, and Fiji. In addition, we will explore one or more texts that engage Indigenous peoples living here in the Pacific Northwest.

Graduate students will follow the undergraduate syllabus for this course, but will have additional opportunities for reading, discussion, and research.

This course will focus on black female subjectivity in relation to social formations of the human, which has been conceptualized as the central subject of Western modernity, the product of discourse, the precondition for political personhood. We will engage black feminism as an intellectual project that has developed around the question of “being human”: for subjects who have been socially constituted as enslaved commodities, as objects of Western man’s knowledge—as beings and bodies dispossessed of humanity—what has being human come to mean? How have black feminist analytics contributed to the development of alternative versions of the human? Which concepts, methods, and philosophies have influenced the way black feminist thinkers engage the question of historical time, or the manner in which the past (of early Western modernity and New World slavery, or Jim Crow segregation) becomes knowable? Assigned reading in this course likely will include the work of Michel Foucault, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Uri McMillan, Christina Sharpe, Alexander Weheliye, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.  

This course explores the complex relationship between black national and transnational cultural flows and ‘structures of feeling’. Drawing upon the resources of African, black Atlantic, diasporic and postcolonial studies, this interdisciplinary course fuses literary criticism, cultural studies, critical theory, and intellectual history. While dominant postcolonial and transnational theories presuppose that nationalism and transnationalism are antagonistic impulses, this course interrogates such presuppositions by rigorous examination of original source materials.

This course investigates recent work in feminist, queer, and critical race theory that studies the feelings, affects, and sensations associated with the lived experience of social difference and inequality. We consider why this approach has gained popularity, especially in queer studies; we think through methodological problems in this approach; and we work through differences within this scholarship. Readings include works by Raymond Williams, Frantz Fanon, José Esteban Muñoz, Ann Cvetkovich, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Maggie Nelson.

Bridging first and second language writing scholarship, this seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach in exploring arising societal, educational, and scholarly concerns in the 21st century, such as multilingualism and multilingual education, translingual/ transcultural literacies, the ethnography of “superdiverse” language landscapes, the sociolinguistics of writing, etc. In doing so, we will be investigating specific ways in which ideologies of language underpin various tacit and/or explicit language-in-education policies as well as past and current institutional responses to and treatments of language/cultural difference in writing. In our explorations, we will be paying particular attention to the nature and repercussions of relationships between such official policies and practices, on one hand, and on another hand, on-the-ground language (and by implication literacy) practices that negotiate, appropriate, resist, and transform these.

This seminar also functions as a language professionalization and socialization course that prepares future writing teacher-scholars for the challenging yet promising task of laboring across difference through making more visible and transparent the multiplicity and contention among diverse language ideological orientations guiding the teaching and learning of writing in national and transnational contexts. In this sense, the final project encourages seminar participants to critically examine local ideas about and understandings of language, its practice and learning in their own families, communities, classrooms, programs, or campuses. Building on and expanding such local knowledge, participants are invited to develop potentially relevant and engaging instructional materials and practices.

Readings:
Canagarajah, Suresh A. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Milton Park: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Horner, Bruce. Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange. Carbondale : Southern Illinois UP, 2016.

Kroskrity, Paul. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research P, 2000. Print.

Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook, eds. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Buffalo UP, 2007. Print.

Mar-Molinero, Clare, and Patrick Stevenson. Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Prendergast, Catherine. Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2008.

English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESOL teaching. The course involves daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, a video teaching demonstration, and seminar discussion. There are weekly writing assignments and a final project. No required texts. Only open to MATESOL students.

The goal of this course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the historical developments in TESOL methodology from the current perspective of a ‘post-method’ era. This is a practical course that will include workshops and other hands-on activities to familiarize learners with a variety approaches, philosophies, techniques, and materials. The course will explore recent developments in the field, and help students to better analyze learning situations, enhance their professional skills, and increase their ability to promote learning. Students will learn to develop and adapt instructional materials based on their students’ needs, desires, learning processes, and on institutional environments.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to research methods currently employed within the field of Applied Linguistics. Students will learn about the ontological and epistemological foundations that underpin research conducted under various paradigms. They will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the methods under discussion and develop a comprehensive understanding of the types of knowledge claims that can be made when adopting different research methodologies. Students will plan, conduct, and write up an original research study and thereby gain first-hand experience of utilizing diverse research methods. They will become familiar with a variety of analytic frameworks for examining various forms of data such as discourse analysis, interview analysis and narrative analysis.

Required text: Paltridge, B., & Phakiti, A. (Eds.). (2015). Research methods in applied linguistics: A practical resource. Bloomsbury Publishing. (Additional readings will be provided.)

Longer Literary Forms

This course offers a non-theoretical, specimen-oriented study of longer
prose forms, viewing the challenges of composition from the perspective
of the writer. Are there a set of common challenges faced by all
prospective authors of book-length works of literature, whether novels
or creative nonfiction? How do those authors’ formal decisions relate to
the literary, political, and cultural contexts of their day, and to
their own thematic obsessions? How are traditional genres and techniques
adapted to fulfill individual or idiosyncratic ambitions, or to exploit
radical technological innovations? We will be reading together seven or
eight moderate-length texts. Requirements include a brief written
response (of various sorts) to each, and a final project that focuses on
a book of the student’s own choosing.

Catalog Description: Research and writing project under the close supervision of a faculty member expert and with the consultation of a second faculty reader. The field of study is chosen by the student. Work is independent and varies. The model is an article in a scholarly journal.

Catalog Description: Research and writing project under the close supervision of a faculty member expert in the field of study chosen by the student within the MAT degree orientation toward the teaching of English, and with the consultation of a second faculty reader. The model is an article in a scholarly journal.

Catalog Description: Intensive reading in literature or criticism, directed by members of doctoral supervisory committee.