English 504/Comp Lit 554—Colloquium in Digital Culture and the Digital Humanities

Five years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education called the digital humanities “the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Today, DH has arrived. Its domain encompasses research institutes, learned journals, Mellon fellowships, and an NEH mandate. Its language permeates the MLA convention program. It arouses messianic expectations and doom-laden condemnations in seemingly equal measure.

But what is it? The term “digital humanities” applies to a huge range of loosely related enterprises from coding with XML-based TEI standards to the critical study of digital culture and born-digital literature to simply the dissemination of humanistic research in digital form. Rather than following any one path in this seminar, our objective will be to step back and survey the field as it has emerged and in its full institutional complexity. What does a graduate student in the humanities need to know about DH right now? Who are the major thinkers and what are the major debates? How might one situate oneself or one’s project in relation to the digital turn? To answer these questions – and raise new ones – this seminar will meet in a weekly colloquium format with invited experts leading discussion or giving talks on key themes in DH: Laura Mandell (Texas A&M) on reading and visualization, Nicholas Paige (Berkeley) on big/small data in literary studies, Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard) on the remediation of print, Roger Whitson (Washington State U) on media archaeology, and a host of local faculty members on topics such as speculative computing, GIS and mapping, social media ecologies, topic modeling, and quantitative text analysis. Students will attend and engage with a special MLQ symposium, “Scale and Value: New Digital Approaches to Literary History,” which will be held at UW in May. Practical issues of project-based scholarship, web publishing, DH funding opportunities, and digital pedagogy will be covered. No prior technical knowledge or experience is assumed.



English 504 / Comp Lit 554 is one of four core graduate seminars administered by the UW Textual Studies Program. Course credit will count towards the Textual Studies degree track in participating departments and Textual and Digital Studies certificate now in the proposal stages.

American Romance and European Realism. In "The Custom House" Nathaniel Hawthorne writes, "If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances." Such statements begat a critical tradition arguing that American romance was an altogether different genre from the novel. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, prose writers in the tradition of realism aimed to strike a balance between the truth of reality and the interest of romance. Indeed, Hawthorne was a great fan of Nathaniel Trollope--the dreamiest romance writer embracing the plainest realist. In this seminar, expanding beyond the course title, I want to explore American and European writers from throughout the century, mostly in pairs, to examine affinities and distinctions belonging to the normal variations within the realist mode. We'll be reading a lot, fast, so be prepared. It would be best to read Trollope and Zola over the break.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"
Washington Irving, "Rip van Winkle," and Gottfried Keller, "Pankraz the Grumbler"
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, and Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, and Emile Zola, The Debacle
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, and James Joyce, Dubliners

English 537: Topics in American Studies:
American Studies and the Nation Form

In the early to mid-1990s, American studies was transformed by its encounter with post-colonial studies. Amy Kaplan’s essay on the decidedly belated quality of this encounter introduced the landmark anthology on the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1993), which more than any other publication, perhaps, at once announced and exemplified this transformation. What followed was an overdue, as well as extraordinarily generative reorientation of American Studies to the critique of the nation form that was -- as the name “American (sic) studies” implies -- foundational to this cross-disciplinary field. This reorientation entailed new-found attention to the (broadly Marxist) corpus of historiographic and theoretical work on nationalism, modernity, and race (e.g. Fanon, Hobsbawm, Nairn, Anderson, Balibar); a reconceptualization of the U.S. as settler-colonial nation-state (rather than simply emancipated British colony); and an emphasis on the ongoing imbrication of nationalism and imperialism, especially in the (so-called) “American Century.” Together, these elements comprise what is generally dubbed the “transnational turn,” a collective effort to defuse the exceptionalist paradigm, (re)insert the study of the U.S. within a global, comparative matrix, and relatedly, to dislodge this academic field from its implication in the discursive and institutional reproduction of the nation form. Some two decades after the publication of Cultures, however, it appears that “Transnational American Studies” has fostered its own celebratory and suspiciously progressivist narrative: American studies used to be nationalist (exceptionalist and parochial and complicit), but now it is post- or transnational (and no longer enmeshed in the above). This introduction to the field aims to revisit the long history of that turn, with an eye to foregrounding a series of questions that seem especially salient for American studies in the present historical moment:

• How do we think nationalism as a product of political modernity that serves both revolutionary change and the repression of such change?
• What is the historical role of cultural nationalisms in challenging state-sponsored nationalisms?
• If the study of a national culture, however critical, is always also implicated in the reproduction of a nationalist imaginary, does the “transnational turn” resolve this implication?
• Can American Studies as a field ever disburden itself of its organizing relation to the nation? Can we imagine a critical relation grounded in complicity, rather than exteriority?
• Does nationalism continue to be central to forms of state domination? To what extent is the critique of the nation-form within American studies coterminous with transformations in the form and function of the state – in effect, with the divorce of the nation-state couple?

While this course is not a survey of American studies, it is intended to orient participants to (some of) the major issues and methods of the filed since the 1950s. Our reading will encompass critical work on nationalism (Fanon, Anderson, Balibar, Chatterjee); Cold War Era American studies from the 1950s through the 1970s (Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fiedler, Loren Baritz, Richard Slotkin, Sacvan Bercovitch, Carolyn Porter); a unit on American studies in the context of the 1980s “culture wars” (Jan Radway, Michael Warner, George Lipstiz, Eric Lott, Hortense Spillers, Robyn Wiegman); a unit on the work of (un)thinking the nation in the 1990s (selections from Cultures, American Studies Association presidential addresses by Mary Helen Washington and Jan Radway) ; and last but certainly not least, a capstone unit operating (at least for the moment) under the ungainly heading of “(Post)(Trans)National American Studies and its Discontents” (Djelal Kadir, Robyn Wiegman, Don Pease, Brent Edwards, Dilip Gaonkar, Ali Behdad, Jose Saldivar, Lisa Lowe, Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, and Ann Cvetkovich). Along the way, we will pause to rerun some of the critical conversations through the optic of a few, select literary texts: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Robert Kirkman’s/Charlie Adlard’s graphic novel, The Walking Dead.

I envision this course as an opportunity to read as broadly and deeply in the field as the quarter system will allow. Participants’ primary responsibility will be come to class prepared, having completed and reflected on the reading in advance. Written work for the class will be comprised of three, short (4-5 page) reflection papers.

Description of English 540: Late Modernism

This seminar will investigate what happened to British Literature after “High Modernism” had reached its zenith. We tend to forget that Woolf and Eliot continued writing long past 1922, that banner year that saw the publication of The Waste Land, Ulysses, and Jacob’s Room. How did the works of Woolf and Eliot, in particular, change under the impact of the profound social changes brought about by the Depression and the onset of World War II? What happens to the kinds of experimentation associated with literary modernism when we look at their later writings within the context of the younger generation of British writers who were publishing at the same time, such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Orwell? We will especially be concerned with how the breaking-down of the power of the British Empire is manifested in some of the texts we will be reading. Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island, Modernism and National Culture in England will give us a useful framework for questioning, in his view, how “English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture.” The reading for the course will include in addition to Jed Esty, the following: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets and Selected Prose; W. S. Auden, Selected Poems; Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin; Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart; George Orwell, Collection of Essays, and 1984.

[If students have never read any works by Woolf and Eliot, I suggest reading Mrs. Dalloway (or To the Lighthouse) and The Waste Land during Spring Break.]

20th & 21st-Century Favorites

What makes a novel so special that it ends on the “10 Books I Must Have on a Desert Island” list of generations upon generations of readers across the world? We shall look at a few very special novels and at the relationship between their aesthetic excellence and their decades-long global popularity. Writers include Hemingway, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Le Carré, Hrabal, KrleŽa, and Onnepalu.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND JAMES JOYCE

REQUIRED BOOKS (ALL AT UBOOKSTORE):
NABOKOV:

THE GIFT (VINTAGE)
LOLITA (VINTAGE)
THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (VINTAGE)

VN CRITICISM:

APPROACHES TO READING LOLITA (KUZMANOVICH AND
DIMENT)

JOYCE:

DUBLINERS (VIKINGS)
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (VIKINGS)
ULYSSES (VINTAGE)

JJ CRITICISM:

THE NEW BLOOMSDAY BOOK: A GUIDE THROUGH ULYSSES (HARRY BLAMIRES)

SCHEDULE:
Week 1-2:
Nabokov and Joyce as Short Story Writers and Poets
Nabokov’s Russian Stories
Joyce’s Dubliners
Nabokov’s and Joyce’s Poetry
Week 3-4-5:
Nabokov’s and Joyce’s Portraits of Artists
Nabokov, The Gift
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Week 6-7-8-9-10:
Nabokov’s and Joyce’s Banned Masterpieces:
Nabokov’s Lolita
Joyce’s Ulysses

Engl. 555, "Black Feminism and the Rise of Neoliberalism":

Neoliberalism is a term for political economy that emerges after World War II and become more salient from the 1970s onward. Neoliberal policies and ideology advance autonomous individuality, personal responsibility, and the neutrality of apparatuses—the law, free markets, contractual agreements—that enable personal freedom. Intensified national interest in “individualism” and attenuated meanings of “freedom” can be gleaned through the era’s welfare reform, and the espousal of post-racialism. This course will pose the following questions: what does “freedom” mean in the neoliberal age? How is life managed and organized through state power? Our focus will be on the analytics feminist thought offers for interpreting the forms of governance and cultural politics that rise in the second half of the twentieth century.

Posthumanisms

If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense.
--Judith Butler, Precarious Life (151)

This course will be organized around a set of theoretical questions generally associated with the idea of “posthumanism” – that is, with various, sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping ways of constructing and interrogating the category of the “human.” The course will therefore explore the “boundary confusions,” between human and machine or human and animal, that Donna Haraway (in the “Cyborg Manifesto,” one of the course’s starting points) argues inform contemporary cultural logics. These theoretical questions and critiques will include the modern association of the human with psychic interiority and processes of individualism, problematized by cybernetics and cultures of computer-mediated communication; the association of the human with either sharp species boundaries or with sharp distinctions between nature and culture, problematized by animal rights movements, ecocriticism, and developments in biology and biopower; the assumption that the human body provides a natural ground for human being, also problematized by cybernetics and theories of social constructivism; the related association of the human with humanist claims to universality, problematized by certain versions of evolutionary theory as well as multicultural political movements. As this list suggests, the course is especially interested in forms of posthumanism that emerge from interdisciplinary approaches to culture, technology, and science, as well as the relation between these forms of posthumanist critique and the more directly political critiques of feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies. The course will therefore also be interested in the idea of the human as a basis for defining modes of belonging, connection, or kinship, and the posthuman as a critique of the modes of exclusion these ideas generate. Our readings will therefore also consider alternative forms of family and critiques of heteronormativity as a model for futurity and critiques of nationalism and national community. As time permits, we will discuss the relevance of more directly political ideas about social death (Patterson, on the history of slavery) and bare life (Agamben) to theories of posthumanism, as well as Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Agamben. We will turn to popular culture and genre writing as sites of reflection on these questions, alongside the theoretical readings.

The course will begin with two or three weeks of theoretical readings, along with some short fiction, probably including N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern and/or selections from An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, and Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? We will then 6 or 7 of the following novels: Octavia Butler, Dawn; Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette, Saga of the Swamp Thing, vol. 1; Bruce Sterling, Distraction; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation; Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects; Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief; and Charles Stross, Rule 34. Short fiction may include works by C.L. Moore, Judith Merril, Greg Egan, Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, Bruce Sterling, and Benjamin Rosenbaum. As time permits, may also discuss some short films by Greg Pak (Robot Stories) and Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer). We will read these fictional works in relation to shorter historical, critical, and theoretical readings, by Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Gregory Bateson, Andy Clark, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Neil Badminton, Rosi Braidotti, Slavoj Zizek, Jose Munoz, and David Eng (in addition to Haraway). I will be making final decisions about the schedule of readings in the next few weeks.

The main assignment for the course will be one longer, research paper at the end of the quarter, along with some shorter, more informal writing and possibly an in-class presentation.

In this course, we will examine contemporary rhetorical theory by way of rhetorical genre studies (RGS), which will enable us to examine rhetoric not only as a dimension of all discourse, but also, through its typifications, as integral to complex forms of social participation and organization. We will study how genres, as social and cognitive phenomena, work to organize and generate social practices, relations, and identities within systems of activity. We will begin the course with an intensive introduction to and overview of RGS (spanning 1970s to 2005), first locating it in relation to linguistic and literary genre traditions, and then exploring its claims that genres are not just ways we define, describe, and organize kinds of texts, but also ways we rhetorically define, organize, and generate kinds of social actions. We will examine the implications of that work for rhetorical research, cultural study, and writing pedagogy. The remainder of the course will focus on current and future directions in genre scholarship, including research on genre uptake, genre and knowledge transfer, genre and materiality, and genre and new media/multimodality.

Course texts:
Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy.

Charles Bazerman et al, Genre in a Changing World (available electronically).

Additional readings on ereserve.

Recent 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 emerging literature that focuses on theoretical and pragmatic efforts to reimagine their place in the teaching of writing by reconstituting them as dynamic conceptions that Rosi Braidotti 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 and other 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 orientation and the discursive tools they need to navigate the ever-changing terrain of their everyday lives in and beyond the academy.

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, group support in regular seminars, videotaped microteaching, and analytical lesson reports. 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. The central goal of this class is to support your development as a reflective practitioner. 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 aims to familiarize students with a variety of research methods in the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL, examining epistemologies, and the 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. By the end of this course, students will have an understanding of the basic principles behind academic research. They will become familiar with a variety of research methodologies in applied linguistics with a special focus on qualitative research methodologies. Students will become aware of the various parts of academic research papers. They will be able to understand the rigor required of good research but also the messiness involved in the research process. They will know how to search for the relevant literature on a given topic and write a literature review. They will become more informed consumers of research. A salient aspect of the course is to provide students with practical experience in developing research questions, designing a study, finding research participants, collecting and analyzing data, and writing up a report. Students will ultimately be able to have an original piece of research.

Required text: Paltridge, B. and Phakiti, A. (eds) (2010). Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. New York: Continuum Publishing.

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.

Texts:

• Brown, H. Douglas & Priyanvada, Abeywickrama. Language Assessment: Principles & Classroom Practices. Pearson, 2nd Ed. 2010.
• Lynch, Brian. Language Assessment & Programme Evaluation. Edinburgh Univ Press, 2003.

Catalog Description: Overview of major issues in second-language acquisition, teaching methodology, and classroom practice with special emphasis on links between theories of language learning and practical aspects of teaching English to speakers of other languages.

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 new writing, use the Critical Response Process to comment on each other’s writing, study prose style through grammar exercises and readings of published prose, and thoroughly revise one piece of prose.

Text: course reader