Theorists of literacy and textuality often distinguish four main types of textual culture: (1) oral or "memory" culture, which has existed since antiquity and survives in some parts of the world to the present day; (2) early literary or "scribal" culture, emerging with the invention of writing; (3) "print culture," enabled by the power of the press; and, most recently, (4) the culture of "electronic texts" (or of "hypertext" and “hypermedia”), now expanding with the proliferation of texts and data on the Internet, among other technologies of mass communication. The present course is a component in a series of graduate seminars addressing these topics, and addressing theoretical and critical issues in Textual Studies generally. Individual sessions will involve several special presentations by guest lecturers from several institutions. The "Oral Tradition and Scribal Texts" seminar will mainly address the first two areas noted above, oral and scribal cultures, but this will nevertheless provide an opportunity to demonstrate some of the most recent uses of hypertext for the study of texts as well. Invited speakers will make use of handouts, slides, color plates, and other visual materials depicting the history of writing, manuscript illumination, and various cultural aspects of the ancient writing-hall (or scriptorium). The series has been developed by the campus-wide Textual Studies Program, and all seminars are cross-listed among the offerings of English and Comparative Literature. Course credit may count toward the Critical Theory concentration in Comparative Literature.

The early modern period has been traditionally viewed as marking a radical re-orientation in how human beings think about their place in the world. Starting with Burckhardt’s highly influential study of the Renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century, the problem of subjectivity has become one of the signature concepts through which the literary manifestations of this historical development have been understood. This course will undertake a distinctly historicist approach to this topic. After a brief look at some important classical and medieval texts, we will proceed to examine a series of early modern writings from a variety of genres in order to gain a fuller appreciation for this key concept of subjectivity. Extracts from more contemporary literary criticism will round out our reading list, allowing us to consider some of the more recent paradigms for interpreting this material.

Readings for the class will include the following:

Plato, Ion; Republic (selections)

Aristotle, Poetics

Horace, Ars poetica

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

Augustine, The Confessions

Petrarch, “Ascent of Mont Ventoux”

Dante, Inferno

Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (selections)

Montaigne, Essays (selections)

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Cervantes, Exemplary Novels

Góngora, The Solitudes

Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (selections)

Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (selections)

Foucault, The Order of Things (selections)

Maravall, Culture of the Baroque (selections)

The Anthropocene, a proposed new geologic epoch defined by the legibility of human action in the stratigraphic record, has proven a stimulating, engaging, and at times incendiary concept in the humanities, forcing historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary scholars to re-think their objects of study and the connections between human and natural history. In this course, we will consider the implications of the Anthropocene from (and for) an earlier moment in intellectual history that forced thinkers, artists, scientists, and authors to confront a similar breach between humans an nonhuman nature: Darwinian evolution. Many of the key debates raised by the Anthropocene, most notably the problematic necessity of thinking the human as a species, but also the encounter with deep time, world-altering technology, capital accumulation, environmental pollution, and extinction, re-visit and re-figure Victorian debates around the same questions. Thus, our inquiry will take up not only the question of what insights Victorian evolutionary debates offer us as inhabitants of the Anthropocene, but also the methodological challenges raised by such retrospective reading practices. In the process, we will engage current debates in Victorian studies, literary studies, and the humanities more broadly about presentism, form, and the work of history.

Readings will include selections from the writings of Victorian scientists such Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes, Victorian authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Ella Hepworth-Dixon, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alice Meynell, and H. G. Wells, and contemporary critics, theorists and scientists such as Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Terrance Deacon, Manuel De Landa, Elizabeth Grocsz, Caroline Levine, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Jason Moore, Rob Nixon, and Jan Zalasiewicz.

The focus of this seminar will be an major 19th Century novels, in light of 'World Systems Theory,' as reflected in the work of Fernand Braudel, Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others.  The particular issues of most immediate relevance pertain to the increasingly familiar concept of the Long Durée, or the Long Century, but with quite specific focus on the historiographical underpinnings and theoretical implications of work particularly by Braudel and Arrighi, to bring longer historical durations, integrating (among other things) economic history, and a broad consideration of social sciences in intellectual formulations concerning historical processes and cultural practices. It should be noted that we will refer only briefly to preliminary work by Franco Maretti, to examine more particular historiographical questions that pertain specifically to 19th century novels.

Main texts:
NOVELS:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or Education
Goethe: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Charlotte Bronte: Shirley
Flaubert: Sentimental Education
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Henry James: The Ambassadors

WORLD SYSTEMS THEORY
Fernand Braudel: An Introduction to Civilizations
Immanuel Wallerstein: Introduction to World Systems Theory
Giovanni Arrighi: The Long Twentieth Century
Arrighi, Terrence Hopkins, Immanuel Wallterstein, Anti-Systemic Movements

This course takes up a significant area of concern in American Studies, which are the contradictions embedded within liberal notions of the subject, along with the seemingly neutral conditions and domains through which freedom, equality, and property are conferred to him. While some feminist theorists have pointed out how the social category “gender” reveals the contradictions of liberal humanism, this course will consider how women of color and black feminist thought has critiqued the orthodoxy of liberalism by addressing multiple categories of social dispossession. Such a critique considers alternative subjectivities—often expressed through the key analytical term “intersectionality”—and deconstructs the ideologically gendered separation of the “public” (economy, the state) and the “private” (family, the home). We will consider how the rise of “neoliberalism”—which produced an intensified interest in autonomous individuality, personal responsibility, and the neutrality of the law, free markets, and contractual agreements—has prompted black feminist analyses of the governance and cultural politics that rise in the second half of the twentieth century. For subjects who have been deemed to be objects, what are the imagined alternatives to liberalism’s contradictory notions of freedom? We are likely to consider the works of Angela Davis, Grace Hong, Katherine McKittrick, Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter.      

REQUIRED BOOKS (ALL AT U BOOKSTORE):

NABOKOV:
PNIN (VINTAGE)
LOLITA (VINTAGE),
PALE FIRE (VINTAGE),
SPEAK, MEMORY (VINTAGE)
THE STORIES (VINTAGE)

CRITICISM:
PNINIAD (DIMENT)
APPROACHES TO READING LOLITA (KUZMANOVICH AND DIMENT)
A READER’S GUIDE TO NABOKOV’S LOLITA (CONNOLLY)
NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE (BOYD)

RECOMMENDED BOOKS:
CHECK THE RESERVE LIST FOR RUSS 240

This course is primarily intended for students interested in designing research projects on topics in popular culture, though it can also serve as a more general introduction to the methods and conceptual frameworks of cultural studies, specifically the Birmingham school and Stuart Hall’s work. The course will focus on a particular tendency within cultural studies, what Richard Johnson calls its object-driven dimension, which emphasizes how the study of popular objects and the tracing of their movement across the boundaries of institutional knowledge formations produces self-reflection on and critique of disciplinary concepts and their limitations. Our particular focus will be on how key concepts of literary studies get reworked in popular contexts, including such categories as the author, the text, the reader and the reading process, literary value and value hierarchies (high and low, art and mass or commercial culture, originality and formula or banality), and literary language or the relation between literature and rhetoric.  

This approach stands in partial contrast to the definition of cultural studies as a theoretical formation (primarily a synthesis of Marxism and structuralism/post-structuralism [i.e., Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”]), or the association of cultural studies with cultural politics and ideology critique – that is, with multiculturalism or “new” social movements, as highlighted within the history of the reception of the Birmingham school within the U.S. This course’s approach to the significance of studying popular objects also stands in partial tension with the Foucauldian emphasis on how we construct our objects of analysis and the power/knowledge relations involved in such constructions; instead, we will be pursuing more of a negative dialectic, in Adorno’s sense of privileging the position of the object over the subject of knowledge. What kind of materiality do objects of analysis have, within the critical traditions of cultural studies? We will necessarily have to consider how the emphasis on popular culture overlaps with these other ways of defining cultural studies, of course.

The course will combine some theoretical readings with a focus on case studies or touchstones in the history of cultural studies work on popular culture objects, along with some selection of primary works. The objects we will consider, or which will be considered by the critics we read, will include genre fiction (especially science fiction, fantasy, and romance, though possibly also some detective fiction); fan fiction and other forms of fan culture; visual culture, including film, but especially television and comics or graphic novels; music, subcultural style, and fashion; and new media and internet culture, especially interactive fiction, with some gestures toward gaming. We will be interested in how to negotiate the tension between general, transmedia forms of textual, narrative, or ideological analysis and the specificity of the formal apparatuses of different media and genre formations. We will also discuss the theoretical and methodological significance of specific practices of popular cultural production, such as varieties of realism and anti-realist narrative disruptions; collaborative or “shared-world” authorship; fan fiction or “textual poaching”; ret-conning or retroactive continuity; and the textuality of “vast narratives,” including serial publication or broadcast, the comics’ model of the “shared universe,” and hypertext linkages.

Students will choose either to write one long final paper or 2-3 shorter papers over the course of the quarter.

Much of our reading will consist of shorter essays or book chapters, but I will probably order the following books, many of which we will only read selections from: Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Cultural Studies; Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture; Anne Jamison, Fic; Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics; Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; and Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.   We are also likely to read essays or selections by such critics as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Richard Johnson, Meaghan Morris, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Darko Suvin, John Ellis, Laura Mulvey, Richard Dyer, Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Mark Anthony Neal, Lev Manovich, and Lisa Nakamura. In addition to the works by Moore and Delany above, primary readings are likely to include some fantasy and Sherlock Holmes detective stories; some interactive fiction (probably Emily Short’s “Galatea”); examples of early newspaper comics, including Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and George Herriman’s Krazy and Ignatz; selections from the television program Person of Interest; some music videos; and examples of fan fiction.

This course will take seriously the idea of American Studies as an Area Studies project. It will introduce students to important debates in current postcolonial and critical area studies, situating the U.S. within those debates. From there we will ask how American studies is re-configured and re-presented for us when compared and connected to other regional modernities. Since the U.S. is not simply a single closed nation-state but also determines the persistence of empire in other regions, we will engage a form of comparative thinking that refuses a national ontology and examines the links and forced separation of the U.S. (as global dominant) from other geopolitical regions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. We will consider contexts such as settler colonialism, slavery, immigration and war as forcing a critique of “comparativism.” The course will predominantly use the object of sexuality to think through these questions. And, students will be required to attend a May 25th, Wed night Stice Lecture on Queer Studies as well as a two-day workshop on Area and Sexuality Studies on May 27-28. Do not enroll in the course if you will be unable to attend these additional events.

This course will work as an introduction to some of the major approaches to studying oral and written texts. Various analytic perspectives will be examined such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, etc. We will examine both the theoretical underpinnings which inform these approaches as well as study how these are applied to the analysis of oral or written data. The (con)texts examined could include mass media and popular culture, conversational and interview data, classroom interactions, legal and policy documents, political speeches, and other texts of special interest to seminar members. Issues of power will be systematically engaged in such analyses. The goals of the seminar are threefold: (1) to acquaint students with approaches to and research in discourse analysis, (2) to provide a forum for evaluating this work, and (3) to provide opportunities to students to engage in discourse analytic methods in relation to texts, sites, and questions of consequence to them.

The story of English tells of the dramatic changes to the English language over the past 1200 years – from an inconsequential offshoot of west Germanic spoken on a little island off of the North Sea to an international language spoken by nearly one and a half billion people. Scholarship on these linguistic shifts examines what are sometimes called "internal" process of change (grammar, sound change) and "external" processes of change (social, cultural), but these categories merge in exciting ways.

This course will investigate the stages in the development of English (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and present-day Englishes) to consider changes in the sound and construction of the language. The goal of this course is to create basic proficiency in the phonological, syntactic, morphological, sociolinguistic and pragmatic evolution of English and to examine the scholarly conversation on historical English language.         Historical language scholarship will be pursued partly as an end in itself, but partly as a methodology for other kinds of research since English language history provides useful tools for cultural studies, literary historical studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, language studies, and the teaching of writing.

No previous experience with language study or linguistics is required, and students will be encouraged to pursue course research that is relevant to their own areas of interest.

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 will introduce both practical and theoretical aspects of designing, administering and evaluating tests and other assessment options for language teaching purposes. The main goals of the course are:

1. to introduce the main considerations, contexts, purposes and techniques related to language assessment and evaluation
2. to practice creating tests
3. to examine challenges and ethical issues related to language assessment and evaluation

More specifically, we will explore the following topics:

* Testing vs. assessment vs. evaluation vs. grading
* Sampling an ongoing learning process -- cf Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
* Positivist vs. interpretivist approaches -- Traditional vs. Alternative assessment
* Assessment types and purposes
* Validity face, construct, predictive, criterion
* Reliability -- test-retest, internal, item analysis, predictive value, rater/interrater, sample sizes, standard deviation
* Testing tests and interpreting test results -- Classical Test Theory/ General Test Theory/ Item Response Theory
* Practical issues in language assessment
* Objective and Subjective assessment
* Washback and teaching to the test
* Holistic vs. Discrete testing Problems of isolating test foci
* Norm referenced vs. criterion referenced vs. ipsative (individual progress) tests
* Behavioral objectives
* Correlations
* Ethics and controversies in language assessment and evaluation

This course will introduce students to major themes situated at the intersection of race, empire, and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), through an exploration into the works of established scholars and contemporary theorists in applied linguistics and TESOL. Using race and empire as our primary analytics, we will interrogate the ways in which the teaching of English overlaps with racial formations, colonization, globalization, language minority rights, representations of English as a lingua franca, evangelism, the supremacy of native speaker identity, and constructions of multiculturalism. What does it mean to become an English teacher in a global context in which English(es) carry tremendous cultural and social capital and economic power? How do we as teachers support our students’ access to privileged forms of English while maintaining a critical eye towards racial inequities of linguistic hierarchies? How can teachers negotiate the racialized nature of the English language as we are teaching it? How does our consciousness of our own identities become salient in our pedagogical practice? How does the recent emergence of the non-native English-speaking teachers (NNEST) movement complicate notions of English language ownership, legitimacy, and nativeness in the TESOL profession? Successful participation in the course will give students a firm grounding in the historiography of English language spread and a critical understanding of present-day debates surrounding the racialization of the profession and the larger implications of English language spread.

Goals:

·       Students will be supported as they reflect on the relationships among racial formations, empire, and the teaching of English

·       Students will extend their understandings of the sociohistorical contexts of English language teaching and of the ways in which historical legacies shape current pedagogical practice and policy

·       Students will reflect on the implications of the profession’s racialized and colonial legacy for their current pedagogical practice

·       Students will explore ways of participating in the broader professional community, including preparing conference proposals and conference papers and chairing and responding to mock conference panels

·       Students will participate in building a community in which exciting ideas can be explored and experimented with in a supportive and stimulating environment

This graduate seminar investigates Vygotskyan Praxis—a fusion of theory and practice in teaching and research—as applied to second/foreign language research and teaching. Along with an overview of sociocultural theory (SCT) this seminar presents research in a neo-Vygotskyan approach to language teaching called “concept-based instruction” (CBI) or “systemic-theoretic instruction,” considering this approach as a merging of theory and practice. Theoretic background for this approach will be considered, along with recent research articles investigating application of CBI to foreign language teaching. Students will investigate areas in their target language(s) of interest that might be appropriate targets for CBI instruction, design materials, and implement a small pilot study, either in a classroom or using a group of volunteer language learners.

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

This is a new 5-credit course/workshop that will provide graduate students:

 1) with as much how-to information as possible about academic life, both as a grad student and after:  how do you find out about conference paper and book reviewing possibilities?  What are the top-tier journals in your field?  How and where should you begin to publish?  What about book reviews?  Grant-getting?  What is public scholarship?  How do you apply for funding from the Simpson Center? How do you do ethnographic research? What about Human Subject review?  What registers as interdisciplinary scholarship? How do you survive graduate school?  How do you balance teaching, scholarship, service and the rest of your life? What do you need to know about the details of exams and dissertation writing?  What if you'd like to teach in a community college?  What's the job search like?

 2) a sense of life and careers after graduate school in professions in addition to college and university teaching:  What is "the versatile Ph.D"? Where and how do you look beyond grad school to careers in fields outside of  teaching? What if you'd like a job in arts administration, high-tech, editing or publishing, non-profits or academic administration?  How do you translate your scholarly knowledge, skills and abilities into a job search?  How do you continue your intellectual life after grad school?  I plan to invite professionals from outside the department to meet with us on some of these issues.

3) a chance to reflect individually on the shape of one's own scholarly work and contexts:  How do I find interesting, relevant contexts for my literary readings?  What if my main interest is not in literature, but in other cultural objects or in theory? What if my main interest is in literature and studying theory/or cultural objects  seems unnecessary to my project?  Is my reading and course work so far coalescing into an exciting project for the future? What am I doing in grad school anyway?  How do I take care of myself and live well in my non-grad-school life?  What about conflicts between academics and other things I want to do?

The course is designed primarily for those in their first or second year in the program, but interested others are welcome to join. Topics and discussions will also depend in part in what you'd like to know about, think about, discuss with others. There will be class presentations so we can teach each other, and short papers meditating on ideas that are important to you individually.  If you have questions, email me at callen@uw.edu. I'd like to include anything you think would be of help to you right now in your current thinking as a grad student.