Seven 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: Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore) on cultural analytics and data mining, Daniel Shore (Georgetown) on cyberformalism, Jentery Sayers (Victoria) on DH maker movements, and local faculty members on digitization and DH archiving, digital editing, media archaeology, and the future of digital scholarship. 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. 

This seminar, offered in both Comparative Literature and English, is designed to address a connected series of issues with a bearing on contemporary trends, issues, and choices in Ph.D. literature and humanities programs. The point of immediate interest is emerging evidence and increased speculation concerning professional futures. There is virtually no one not concerned in some way with the apparent condition of the job market for professional positions, the status and purpose of the Ph.D. degree, the ambiguous evidence of declining enrollments and the not so ambiguous evidence of diminished university budgets in the humanities.

The focus of the seminar, however, will emphatically not be to review and rehearse bad news, nor will it be organized to increase a sense of competition in a time of apparent scarcity.

The main premise is that current uncertainties can be clarified, starting from a direct effort to consider, as a point of theory, what has happened to ‘theory,’ as an organizing professional motif, leading directly to a reconsideration, again as a point of theory, of current issues in the teaching of literature. The practical issue, accordingly, is to carry out a down to earth conversation about the shape--and of course, the shaping--of contemporary professional careers in literature and the humanities.

The seminar will follow, topically, the title of the seminar:

Part I: Theory: Dilemmas on the left.  A review of the inheritance of Enlightenment and Romantic philosophical foundations, with emphasis on Kant’s 3rd critique, and recent work on the problematic history of ‘Post Kantian’ German Idealism. ‘Theory’ is clearly not the enterprise of 20 years ago: what counts now as ‘theory’, and how is it related to concrete practice? The political context will be developed primarily through Anti-Systemic Movements, by Arrighi, Wallerstein, and Hopkins, with related historiographic and economic work from a ‘World Systems Theory’ perspective.

Part II: Literature: Canons and Cannons.  We will focus on two monster novels of the 19th century: George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The central issues here will be a reconsideration, from a Pragmaticist view (via Charles Sanders Peirce and Coleridge) of the sense in which our notion of ‘canonical’ literature may fall seriously short of understanding major works as themselves already being theoretical.

Part III: The Shape of Careers.  This will be the main focus for the seminar, to examine as clearly possible concrete practical, political, and theoretical changes that appear already well advanced. The way we have imagined professional careers has a deep and tangled history, which is unmistakably changing in fundamental ways. Assumptions about the ‘field,’ the ‘profession,’ and concrete prospects in a very different demographic and political environments stand in need of open, critical discussion. Throughout the quarter, we will collectively assemble materials, and develop examples, in the effort to make visible and discussable emerging changes in how a professional career can be imagined and actually pursued.

Texts available at the University Bookstore. There will be a course reader at E-Z Copy and Print on University Way, directly north of University Bookstore.

Arrighi, et al, Anti-Systemic Movements, Verso

Peirce, C. S. Essential Writings, Vol. 1 Indiana

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Dover Thrift edition

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Dover Thrift edition

Recommended:

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge

Karl Americs, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism

ENGL 544 w/ CLCM 502

Originating in 17th-century Europe as the official style of Absolutism and the Counter-Reformation and born as an interartistic expression, the baroque traveled around the world in the wake of empire. In the New World as well as other overseas colonies of Catholic nations such as Spain and Portugal, it was gradually transculturated by indigenous and mestizo artisans whose labor produced the monuments of the colonial baroque in the Americas (known as the New World baroque). The 20th and 21st centuries have seen multiple series of cycles of baroque revivals (the so-called neobaroque) in Europe, across Latin and North America and beyond, which extend across forms usually considered separately, such as modernism and postmodernism. From today’s vantage point, the baroque is no longer European or an early modern historical period, but rather a distributed transhistorical, transnational, and interartistic expression that has been profoundly transformed and refracted as it circulated farther from home and further through time. Even as it is claimed under identitarian paradigms (the baroque as a uniquely Spanish or Latin American sensibility), it remains at the same time resolutely non-identitarian and cosmopolitan, closely linked to the problem of modernity, in other words, globalization.

The concept of world literature is an attempt to move beyond the dichotomy between old Eurocentric canons of comparative literature and new postcolonial ones. This seminar assesses its usefulness as a hermeneutic for the neobaroque, an expression that straddles the divide between the European and the postcolonial, extending across global hierarchies between first-world centers and (semi)peripheries. We will focus on neobaroque fiction from Cuba (Alejo Carpentier), Germany/England (W.G. Sebald), the U.S. (Djuna Barnes), and Chile (José Donoso), but students are welcome to explore neobaroques from other national or ethnic contexts or other genres (poetry). We will consider baroque theories by Walter Benjamin, Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Irlemar Chiampi, Bolívar Echeverría, and world literature theories by Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Pheng Cheah, Mariano Siskind, and Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih. The (neo)baroque is an aesthetic of excess (not minimalism--“less is more”--but “more is more”), a capacious form that allows for the inclusion of the different and the strange, one reason why few styles have lent themselves to bending so many ways as the (neo)baroque.

Required texts:

Alejo Carpentier, Concierto barroco (1974)

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (1995)

José Donoso, The House in the Country (1978)

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds:

Writing Assignments: 10-12 page research paper

This course will trace the history of utopian writing as one central determining feature of the development of science fiction as a genre. The course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the study of science fiction, but it is also intended for students more generally interested in the place of utopian thought in contemporary criticism, theory, and political culture. We will primarily depend on Claeys and Sargent’s Utopia Reader (2nd editon) to define the historical tradition, which we will supplement with readings in the history of European travel literature and colonialism, as well as feminist and African American utopian narratives. We are likely to read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, with some attention to later responses, appropriations, and rewritings of Bellamy, such as William Morris, but especially African American writers like Edward A. Johnson and Lillian Jones Horace. Other critical readings will include Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible (especially to define the ongoing transformations of the utopian tradition) as well as shorter works by critics that may include John Rieder, Gwyneth Jones, Frances Bartkowski, Ernst Bloch, Sylvia Wynter, Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Alexander Galloway, Jose Munoz, Alexander Weheliye, Nnedi Okorafor, Grace Dillon, Stephen Hong Sohn, Mark Jerng, Jane Bennett, and Pheng Cheah. More contemporary SF novels will include Joanna Russ’s The Female Man; Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Bruce Sterling’s Distraction; and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair; and possibly Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother or Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief. We will also read short stories that may include works by Sofia Samatar, Bruce Sterling, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Ted Chiang, Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Ursula K. LeGuin, Rachel Swirsky, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Gerald Vizenor, Drew Hayden Taylor, Eden Robinson, and Darcie Little Badger. Some of our key critical questions are likely to include the relation between utopia and dystopia and the limits of the utopian/dystopian polarity; how to imagine the future of gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism; alternatives to reproductive futurity; network societies, post-industrial economies, and the social and political implications of computer-mediated communication; the relation of utopian traditions to the projects of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialisms; and the relation of utopian and science fiction to models of “organic fantasy” (Okorafor) and indigenous futurisms (Dillon). The primary assignment will be a final research paper.

Modernist criticism has long considered the impact of expatriation to Europe on American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein and many others. This focus on “the lost generation” has become a cliché of popular treatments of such figures in fiction and film. The escape to Paris, in particular, dominates most of the attention, but many forget that London also was the locus for writers from the United States, and from the Commonwealth as well. In this seminar we will first explore the situation of two such writers: Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand) and T. S. Eliot (U.S.A.), and then reverse our attention to consider the impact of expatriation on British writers who moved to the United States: D. H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. Depending upon the interests of the seminar participants, we may expand our reading to look at additional Americans who came to London (such as Ezra Pound and H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] . and/or other British writers in the United States,( such as Nancy Cunard and Aldous Huxley). We will also consider the networks of artists, writers, and unconventional thinkers who were spreading their various political, spiritual, and sexual theories to particular American locales: Greenwich Village, Harlem, Taos, New Mexico, and Hollywood, for example. In so doing, we will be able to make connections between those activities in the late 1920s and 30s and countercultural movements in the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century.

Required Texts: Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories; T. S. Eliot: “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets”; D. H. Lawrence: The Woman Who Rode Away/St. Mawr/The Princess; W. H. Auden: Selected Poems; Christopher Isherwood: [class will decide which of his novels we should read as a group]

This course takes up the question of how feminist thinkers have gone back to their own earlier work and that of other feminist thinkers to revise their understanding of questions of solidarity, coalition, sisterhood, and alliance.  We will explore re/vision as a form of feminist praxis in both theoretical texts and in works by individual authors of fiction by tracking themes, questions, and images as they are articulated and elaborated across time.   The course will be equally concerned with literary fiction and theoretical texts and is especially interested in the dialogue between the two and thus across idioms.  Literary fiction pairings include:  Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy; Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Madd Addam trilogy.  Theoretical inter-texts and pairings may include those by bell hooks, Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Kimberly Crenshaw, Nancy Hartsock, Joan Scott, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.  Students interested in feminist theory will gain from this course a deepened understanding of feminist engagement starting in the 1980s through the present--though this course is not in any way a survey or a genealogy of feminism.  Rather, the course’s aim is to return to particular feminist writings in our current moment of political crisis so as to understand where particular feminist thinkers entered the discussion decades ago, where they today stand, and where feminist writing and thinking in multiple idioms yet might go in future.  Some background in feminist studies (especially Professor Ibrahim’s Winter 2017 course) will be useful but is not required.  

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. 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, interview analysis, narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis, etc. The course readings will explore the theoretical underpinnings which inform these approaches as well as study how these methods are applied to the analysis of oral and/or written data. The (con)texts examined could include classroom interactions, qualitative research interviews, conversational data, mass media and popular culture, political speeches, policy documents, and texts of special interest to seminar members. Multiple data workshops will provide seminar members with ample opportunities to actively engage in varied types of discourse analysis in-class. Seminar members will conceptualize, plan, conduct, analyze, and write-up a discourse analytical research project thereby deepening their understanding of a specific (or combined) discourse analytical approach/es.

Post-graduation, becoming a writing program or second language writing program director is common for graduates who complete course work in language and rhetoric. This course is designed to explicitly take up the broad questions facing writing program administrators. Being a WPA is rarely just about the nuts and bolts of administering a number of courses. What’s in those courses, how it matches the institutional mission of the school, the financial constraints, the ethics of hiring part-time faculty and graduate students—all of these questions are at the forefront of what a WPA does. It is not really a surprise that WPAs often become department chairs, deans, and faculty governance leaders. We’ll read both about the specifics of writing programs and about universities at larger and the contexts in which they exist.

Reiff, et al. Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context. Parlor Press, 2015

               Available as e-book UW Library

Malenczyk, Rita, ed. A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators, 2nd ed. Parlor Press, 2015

               1st ed available as e-book but this book might be a good investment.

Martins, David S., ed. Transnational Writing Program Administration. U Press of CO, 2015

Prendergast, Catherine. Buying into College English. Pittsburgh: U Pitt Press

               Available as e-book UW Library

Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.

               Available as e-book UW Library

Janangelo, Joseph, ed.   A Critical Look at Institutional Mission. Parlor 2016.

Stanley, Jane. The Rhetoric of Remediation. Pittsburgh: U Pitt Press, 2010.

               Available as e-book UW Library

Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University. Boston: Harvard UP, 2008.

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 mentor 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 students’ development as reflective practitioners as they reflect-in-action. Seminar members will be afforded ample opportunities to develop their own style and philosophy of language teaching and to refine their vision of themselves as a teacher.

Open only to MATESOL students.

Catalog Description: Evaluation and testing of English language proficiency, including testing theory, types of tests, and teacher-prepared classroom tests.

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 and, study prose style through grammar exercises and readings of published prose.                                                    

Text: course reader

This is a new 5-credit course/workshop (now in its second year) 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 constructing a vita?  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? 

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 or language, but in other cultural objects or in theory? What if my main interest is in literature or language 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 depend in part in what you'd like to know about, think about, and discuss with others. In addition to our discussions, there will be class presentations so we can teach each other, practice in writing for academic publication, and a final personal reflection paper on your scholarly interests and career goals.  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.

In this course, queer theory is treated as a case study for analyzing the practice of critical theory, its ties to art and activism, its manifestations in sub-fields. We will pair readings from queer thinkers (such as Ahmed, Bersani, Butler, Dean, Edelman, Halberstam, Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Muñoz) with excerpts from their major source texts (from continental philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, gay and lesbian studies, literary studies, marxism).

We will also locate the field of queer theory comparatively, contrasting its ‘local’ (US) history with its international impacts and differences. The course model for this comparison will be Scandinavia, but you will have the opportunity to do research and/or present on an international or subcultural context.

Projects will include response papers, an in-class presentation, and an annotated bibliography on a relevant scholar or concept of your choosing.