This course is the first in a series of survey courses on the history of literary criticism and theory in the West. It will concentrate on ancient literary theory from Plato to Augustine by way of Aristotle, ancient rhetoricians, Horace, Plutarch, Longinus and Plotinus. In addition to these core readings, students will be asked to give oral presentations based on modern commentaries on ancient texts (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Ricoeur, etc.)

This course fulfills the Ph.D. Program in Theory and Criticism requirements.

This is a course about the representation of social class, from early modern forms (Shakespeare’s “mechanicals,” or the “lower orders”) to politically self-conscious categories like “working class.” We will survey a broad range of texts illustrating social class and class discourse, from lowlife to high, with emphasis on drama (e.g. Restoration comedy, The Beggar’s Opera, Goldsmith, Sheridan) and the novel, including examples in whole or part from Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Dickens, as well as other material and reading in nonliterary, historical, and theoretical sources. The seminar should be of interest to students working, or thinking of working, in British eighteenth or nineteenth century periods, or on drama, the history of the novel, or critical problems related to the concept of class. In-class presentations and seminar paper; no previous experience assumed. Questions? Write me at tlock@uw.edu

This course is intended to do a couple of (hopefully related) things. First, it will serve as an introduction to theories of the Everyday. (I hope the capitalization of the word gives it an appropriately allegorical aura.) That there actually are theories of everyday life may only be final proof to skeptics that academicians indeed chew more than they bite off. For me, however, there is nothing more serious (and nothing more entertaining) than coming to understand the ideologies, practices, and narratives that constitute daily life. Second, the course will offer different ways to think about the Everyday within the specific parameters of 19th century American culture. There is indeed a history to the Everyday in America, a history I hope to begin to explore by presenting several literary and cultural texts from the 19th century. Literary texts will include Caroline Kirkland, A New Home—Who’ll Follow, Henry Thoreau, Walden, Louisa May Alcott, Work, Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, Frank Norris, McTeague, and Abraham Cahan, Yekl. Theoretical Texts will include Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and essays by Henri Levebvre, Lori Merish, Bill Brown, and others.

As Judith Butler states in Undoing Gender, “When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life” (39). In a sense, radical “second wave” feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had taken up the question of what constitutes a livable life—in social space, in public institutions, in family formations—in order to produce analytics about the operations of power within social and cultural arrangements. This seminar will examine challenges to personhood at the end of the twentieth century through a genealogy of feminist thought. We will read work by Judith Butler, Lisa Cacho, Lisa Duggan, Sharon Holland, Karla Holloway, and fictional work by Jewelle Gomez and Alice Walker. We will explore the relationship between public and private space through considerations of bioethical claims to the body, the status of legal illegitimacy and social death, the private (and psychic) life of racism, and the role public policy plays in determining kinship.

The course is devoted to the greatest American novels by Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire. We will also read some of his stories of this period, as well as his autobiographical writings. All readings, discussions, and papers are in English.

The course will focus on novels whose distinctive quality is their setting in a different, mostly past era. Readings will include a selection from the following group of texts: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, George Orwell’s 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Meša Selimovi?’s Death and the Dervish (one of the very few European novels engaging the Quran on a number of levels), Imre Kertesz’s Kadish for a Child Not Born, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, and Danilo Kis’s The Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a collection of stories which we will look at in adialogue 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 premodern, Victorian, early twentieth-century, or relatively recent historical periods (such as the World War II or the 1960s), or else by creating adystopian image of future. While the course engages with some major theories of the novel (e.g., by Frye or Bakhtin, from McKeon’s edited volume), it will chiefly be centered on an in-depth study of the literary works.

This seminar will address two interconnected questions: the role of poetry in the shaping of what Kant calls the "sensus communis", and a concentrated study of modern poetry, with primary emphasis on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. There will be in addition to major works by these three poets a short course reader / anthology that will include poetry by French, Latin American, and German poets, along with theoretical and critical texts.

The seminar is open to graduate students in any humanities department (with course registration handled both by English and Comparative Literature). Other students my enroll with permission of the instructor.

TEXTS:

Walt Whitman, Library of America
William Carlos Williams, Collected Earlier and Collected Later Poems
In the American Grain & selected essays, Paterson
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, Opus Posthumous, The Necessary Angel
Poems by Baudelaire, Valery, Rilke, Neruda, Paz and others
Selections from Kant, Taine, and contemporary critical studies of the poets on the syllabus.

The goal of this course is to provide students with an advanced education in the history and evolution of lyric poetry in English, from its Old English origins up to the extraordinary variety of contemporary poetic practices. We will study the formal principles which have traditionally distinguished poetry from prose (meter, rhyme, stanza and form), poetic conventions such as courtly love, anti-Petrachanism, and Romantic nature worship, and poetic genres such as the epic, the pastoral elegy and the greater Romantic lyric, and we will study how these forms, conventions and genres have changed from one historical period to another. In order to fully understand these changes we will study several of the important texts, written by poets, philosophers and critics, which have provided the theoretical foundations for each period’s dominant poetics, and we will examine how aesthetic judgments have been and are made about individual poets and poetic schools and styles.

This course focuses on two fundamental questions in the areas of Visual Rhetoric and Visual Semiotics, namely, how language-like are 'visuals' and how do certain images acquire exceptional power to rouse our feelings and even convey our cultural identity(ies)? We wil begin with Roland Barthes' famous claim that photographs communicate without a code and question whether that claim still holds in this age of ever increasing digital image manipulation. We will look closely at Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images to consider whether and in what ways it is useful to speak of a grammar of visual design. And we will look at different claims about 'visual literacy'.

We then move from signification to power, reading.the Hariman and Lucaites book on iconic photographs and a portion of Benedikt Feldges' book on iconic figures created in American TV. This will also engage us in issues of witnessing, documentary, and the ethics of viewing.

Written work for the seminar will include collecting and analyzing images and a seminar paper addressing one of the controversial issues touched on in the course.

WARNING! The word icon is used–differently– in almost everything we read.

Texts:

Carolyn Handa. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Bedford-St. Martins. 2004. ISBN: 0312409753

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006. ISBN: 0-415-31915-3

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.
University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 0-226-31612-2

Texts:

In recent years, debates about the role of language, culture and identity in the teaching of writing—especially as these factors inform how we approach difference and diversity—have simultaneously enriched and complicated our ideas about how we can make productive use of them in our curricular and pedagogical practices. This course will review emergent literature that focuses on theoretical and pragmatic efforts to reimagine their place in the teaching of writing by reconstituting them as dynamic conceptions that RosiBraidotti calls figurations: languages-in-motion, cultures-in-transition and identities-in-practice. Our analysis and discussion of writing across difference will be further enhanced by introducing a fourth dynamic concept, citizens-in-the-making, to the mix. These figurations will frame our conversations about ways to create conditions in the writing classroom under which disenfranchised students can empower themselves by acquiring the rhetorical and discursive tools they need to navigate the ever-changing terrain of their everyday lives in and beyond the academy. You’ll be required to write three short critical response essays (3-to-4 pages each) during the quarter, as well as a longer scholarly essay (12-to-15 pages) on a topic of your choice due at the end of the quarter.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

• Goldblatt, Eli. Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College
Curriculum. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.

• Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 2008.

• Feldman, Ann M. Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.

• A collection of essays on writing across communities, language, culture, identity and citizenship will be made available through the UW Library’s course reserves.

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 becomeevident 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.

Required readings will be made available electronically on the course website.

This course aims to familiarize students with a variety of research methods in the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL, examining epistemologies, strengths, and weaknesses of various approaches. Students will draw on knowledge generated in the context of the class to conduct a small piece of original research. In addition, they will read and critique selected research in second language acquisition and become more sophisticated “consumers” of research in our field.

COURSE GOALS:
• You will have an understanding of the basic principles behind academic research.
• You will become familiar with a variety of research methodologies in applied linguistics.
• You will become familiar with various parts of academic research papers.
• You will understand the rigor required of good research but also the messiness involved in the research process.
• You will become a more informed consumer of research.
• You will know how to search for the relevant literature on a given topic and write a literature review.
• You will gain practical experience developing research questions, designing a study, finding research participants, collecting and analyzing data, and writing up a report.
• You will have an original piece of research in your hand!

REQUIRED READINGS

Textbook: McKay, S. L. (2006). Researching Second Language Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Additional class readings available electronically from the course website (use your MyUW account).

Evaluation and testing of English language proficiency, including testing theory, types of tests, and teacher-preparation of classroom tests. Prerequisite: ENGL 571 and ENGL 572 or permission of instructor.

This course will cover the key concepts and current issues insecond/foreign language testing and assessment. We will discuss standardized high-stakes language tests and their impact, but the bulk of the course will focus ondeveloping your skills in test creation and quality assurance. Our work on classroom-based assessment will be conducted within the context of the English Language Program at UW. In groups, you will write test specifications for creating tests for one of the UW ELP courses and actually create a test. You may be able to pilot your test in the ELP and then statistically analyze how well it worked to achieve the goals of the specifications. Along the way, you will learn about developmental feedback using rubrics and other instruments as well as non-test based assessment including the use of portfolios.

Student learning goals:
To learn some basic principles and procedures of language assessment.
To encourage reflection, critique and awareness of current issues in language assessment.
To gain basic skills for developing fair and effective tests and giving pedagogically sound developmental feedback in the classroom context.
To gain basic statistical skills in analyzing test data for validity, reliability and item analysis.

General method of instruction:
The primary method of instruction will be peer instruction. There will be some up-front teacher talk but more often you will become specialists in certain areas, and you will share your expertise with your peers.

Recommended preparation:
Reflect on your prior experiences with language testing and assessment as a student and teacher or administrator.
Pay attention to how assessments are created and used in UW ELP classes if you are currently in practicum or TA-ship.
Develop basic familiarity with Microsoft Excel if you do not already feel comfortable with it.

Class assignments and grading:
In addition to weekly readings and written responses to the course topics, we will have a few small essay or presentation assignments and a number of assignments making up the focal, final project of test creation and analysis for the ELP. Grades will be based on assignments and class participation in the form of group work, peer teaching, presentations and other in-class tasks.

This graduate prose workshop is a place to generate new work, take risks, and question yourself and others about your writing. As you do so, you should be developing a good sense of your own passions, obsessions, and fears as writers. In order to achieve these goals, you will generate at least 40 pages of prose, use the Critical Response Process to comment on each other’s writing, experiment with creative responses to each other’s writing, and study prose style through grammar exercises and readings of published prose.

This graduate poetry workshop will focus on generating new student work, and on orienting that work within a literary historical and contemporary tradition. Toward that end we will consider various essays which attempt to characterize relatively recent poetic movements, including but not limited to the so-called elliptical, post-avant, post-language, and new sincerity poetries. However, we’ll look to these accounts less as foreground than background to the discussion of student creative work. Students will also be invited to develop various techniques of revision, both through exercises and class discussion.