In 1899, Wallace Stevens published a short story in the Harvard Advocate entitled “The Revelation.” Here a young man takes a photograph of his sweetheart to be framed. Upon returning to retrieve the picture he discovers instead a framed photograph of himself. Noticed here is what a young Freud took into account—the aesthetic involves the return of desire to the self after a strategic self-alienation. The history of critical theory and literary doctrine is that of a reflection upon the framing process, what occurs in the moment of the detour, that which allows the homebound turn of desire. Adorno writes: "What guarantees the aesthetic quality of modern art? It is the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by them on the smooth surface of the immutable." The return of self-love is made possible by a violence, the timing, or the untiming of which all of critical theory is variously the study of.
To be studied in this unavoidable insight will be representative texts by Rousseau, Schlegel, Schiller, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly, Ruskin, Arnold, Mallarmé, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Freud, Hulme, the Russian Formalists, Bahktin, Adorno, Frye and Burke. As this version of 509 is to include features of the ghost of English 508, a more than casual backwards glance at the features of neoclassical doctrine will be required.

The Post-World War II European novel
Prof. Gordana Crnkovic

Course Description:

The post-World War II European novel. The course will focus on novels whose distinctive quality is their setting in a different, mostly past era. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: John Fowles’ Lieutenant’s Woman>, George Orwell’s <1984>, Kazuo Ishiguro’s , Marguerite Yourcenar’s , Meša Selimović’s (one of the very few European novels engaging the on a number of levels), Imre Kertesz’s , Milan Kundera’s , Bohumil Hrabal’s , and Danilo Kiš’s , a collection of stories which we will look at in a dialogue with the novels of this course. We will examine how and why these novels choose a non-contemporary setting, and what they achieve by invoking the ancient, late pre-modern, Victorian, early twentieth-century, or relatively recent historical periods (such as the World War II or the 1960s), or else by creating a distopian image of future. While the course briefly engages with some major theories of the novel (e.g., by Bakhtin), it will chiefly be centered on an in-depth study of the literary works.

Reading List:

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Mesa Selimovic: Death and the Dervish
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Danilo Kiš: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich: G. S. Morson and Caryl Emerson: Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being George Orwell: 1984

Doppelganger: The Phenomenon and Function of the ‘Second Self’ in Western Literature

The Double or “Doppelgänger” as a literary motif and doubling as a structural device are as old as literature. Their varied manifestations pervade myths and fairytales as well as modern film and fiction. From seeing one’s reflection, outer or inner shadow as something other, or experiencing one’s personality as a multiplicity of conflicting identities, to the belief in the soul as the higher imperishable second self, the Double has been the object of exploration in anthropology, theology, and psychology as well as in literary studies.

In this seminar we shall analyze two longer and several shorter works of fiction ranging from the late 18th to the early 20th century and representing divergent treatments of the theme in works from England, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The uncanny encounter with the Double often performs a revelatory function in giving a human, puppet or machine-like shape to repressed fantasies and fears, as in ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman. But positive character traits, such as the gradual awareness of hitherto unconscious potentialities, are also embodied in enigmatic doubles such as in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. And in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an object of art and the result of a scientific experiment, respectively, are chosen to function as the second self. In Maupassant’s short story The Horla, the horrid harbinger of death remains invisible. By drinking liquids and swallowing the hero’s mirror reflection, he represents another mysterious double: the hallucination of a disintegrating psyche -- or is he more than that?

Placing a hilarious-grotesque occurrence in a quasi-realistic environment, or amalgamating fairytale features with a highly ironic and yet serious treatment, Gogol in The Nose and Thomas Mann in The Transposed Heads add new dimensions to the challenges which the Double has in store for the artistic imagination. The depictions of traumatic social alienation or of the human search for wholeness are located by these authors in the appropriate cultural milieu, a fact also found in other works we study.

The most intricate and subtle use of the phenomenon is found in Goethe’s prototypical ‘Bildungsroman’ of the artist, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Here the hero’s self-created, opposite, and complementary doppelgangers portray the dangerous and potentially tragic, as well as the healing and integrative, potentialities of the creative individual in his experience of love, suffering and the surrounding world. Goethe’s hero and his doubles illustrate all-to-human pitfalls, stages of cognition, and the necessary detours towards mastering the imagination and thereby encapsulate the ‘poetological meta-narrative’ contained in this novel.

Expected: active class participation and a term paper developed from one oral report.

This class presents the core of HTML/XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets to students with no background in computing. It attempts to integrate Design and Coding and to develop a sense of the special qualities of multimedia hypertext writing for publication on the Web. The grading is based on exercises and short projects. The criteria for success on these projects is that they work/can be viewed as intended on Firefox, and are intelligent and good-looking. Oh yes, completed and on time. This is a very hands-on course.

--ability to use (X)HTML and CSS to make web pages and link them together as websites
--ability to analyze and critique web writing
--See for detailed syllabus:
courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/engl282

Texts:

• MacFarland, David Sawyer. CSS: The Missing Manual 2nd ed. Pogue Press/O'Reilly, 2009.

Genealogies of Feminist Theory

This course is intended as in-depth introduction to feminist theoretical inquiries that have informed and continue to inform feminist scholarship in the humanities. A primary aspiration of the course is to situate contemporary feminist scholarship within broader intellectual histories that have tended to congeal into ready-made, foreshortened narratives of past errors and present atonement. Consequently, this course seeks to (re)engage these histories as a series of complex, variegated, contradictory, and ultimately unsettled conversations, whose animating preoccupations and theoretical impasses persist, for worse and for better, into the contemporary moment. Course materials will collate around three critical topoi, Capital and labor (internal colonization; standpoint, the traffic in women), family and kinship (property, propriety, and the patronymic; oedipal subjectivity/at the margins; domesticity and nation), and representation (representation?s ?two scenes;? polity, collectivity, and coalition) ? with the parenthetical additions intended to signpost a few of the issues and methods central to each of these (complexly articulated) topoi. The syllabus remains under construction and highly provisional, but work by Michele Barrett, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Angela Davis, Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Wahneema Lubiano, Catherine MacKinnon, Anne McClintock, Saba Mahmood, Maria Mies, Juliet Mitchell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Chela Sandoval, Joan Scott, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Iris Marion Young will most likely be included on the syllabus. Interested students are welcome to contact me for more specifics towards the end of winter quarter.

English 556A: Introduction to Cultural Studies
Spring 2010 course description
Tom Foster

In the contemporary academy, cultural studies is often confusingly used as an umbrella term encompassing at least three distinct knowledge projects, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory to one another: a specific constellation of theoretical interests (the relation of post-structuralism to ideology critique or Marxism to multiculturalism, for instance); an object-driven approach, especially the study of popular or “mass” cultural forms, including their methodological and cross-disciplinary implications; and, finally, a focus on the cultural politics of the “new” social movements (feminism, queer theory, critical race, and/or post-colonial studies). This course will try to provide a map of these varied terrains by offering a historical introduction to the interdisciplinary cultural studies movement, grounded in the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham school at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but also concerned with the generalization of this school and its reception elsewhere, especially in the U.S. The Birmingham school takes as its starting point changing definitions of “culture” (a concept which has its origin in ideologies of nationalism and national character), especially challenges to hierarchies of cultural value, of “high” and “low,” which result from the increasing importance of popular media and from anthropological work on everyday life as symbolically significant. We will begin by reading some reflections on the problem of definition faced by cultural studies, and from there we will jump to Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg’s attempt to synthesize a methodology in the face of these problems, under the heading of “articulation theory.” We will then trace back the theoretical foundations and intellectual traditions that feed into this methodology, such as Marxist theories of hegemony and ideology critique, structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and discourse analysis, ethnography and subculture studies, and the challenges to Marxism posed by “new” social movements. We will do some readings in the relation between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, to consider the effects of different disciplinary starting points (literary studies and methods of textual or rhetorical analysis, communications and media studies, anthropology) on cultural studies projects and the kinds of exchanges across disciplines that cultural studies has developed (reception studies, for instance). As time permits, we will probably end the course by considering how cultural studies has responded to the emergence of new objects of study and new conditions for knowledge production, with some readings in technoculture studies; posthumanisms; globalization and the changing status of the nation-state; and governmentality, empire, and societies of control (perhaps with specific reference to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath).
Assignments will probably include 2 essays as well as class presentations (though it may be possible for students to work on longer projects).
I have not yet made final decisions about the books we will use, but they will probably be drawn from this list (note that we may only read selections from some of these works):

David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern
Culture
Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Dick Hebdige, Subculture
Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, eds., New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory

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:
Mills, Discourse, 2nd ed.
Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis

Course Pack

Recommended Texts:
Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis
Yates, et al., Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis (2001)
A good linguistics dictionary

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 regular observations of ESOL classes, daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, microteaching, seminar discussion, and written projects. No required texts. This Practicum is only open to MAT(ESOL) students; the Fall Practicum is only open to TAs.

This course is an overview of language testing with an emphasis on teacher-prepared classroom tests. The major goals of the course are:

1. to provide students practice in developing, analyzing, and refining tests.

2. to introduce students to key concepts and major debates in language testing

3. to provide students some experience with commercially available assessment tools.

4. to familiarize students with basic test statistics so that they can test their own tests and understand the claims made about commercially available exams.

*English 581: “Show-and-Tell”*

(Imitation and analysis of prose fictional forms and styles.)

This course offers a non-theoretical, specimen-oriented study of
narrative forms and prose styles, ancient to postmodern, with a high
ratio of writing to reading. The design of the assignments will be
"writing in response" to selected readings, both imitatively and
analytically -- emphasis on _both_ -- but not parodically. The readings
will include credos, manifestoes, and opinionated interviews or reviews
by literary artists, whose fiction we will also study. The ultimate
ambitions here are, first, to provide you with a broader vocabulary of
formal choices as fiction writers and so a deeper understanding of
fiction's expressive possibilities; and also to foster the development
of a "bifocal" reading intelligence -- intuitively apt and analytically
sharp, hands-on and heads up -- so that the artist and the critic might
cohabit fruitfully in the same mind.

Prerequisite: MFA student or permission of the instructor: David Bosworth

Enrollment limit: 12.

Emphasis in this workshop is on self-critique, editing, and revision as well as editing and improving the work of other students in the class.

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 necessary for the group overall. Special attention will be paid to the art of revision and the discoveries of poetic structure. 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.

Catalog Description: Introduction to paleography, codicology, analytical and descriptive bibliography; examination of the major contributions to textual theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; practice in applying textual theory in editing literary works.