This course will provide a foundation for the knowledge and skills necessary to deal with manuscripts, their languages, and sources in the medieval period. We will consider the techniques, terminology, and bibliography of manuscript scholarship with a special emphasis on the production of manuscripts from Antiquity through the Renaissance, the evolution of scripts, the rise of literacy, the development of libraries, and the impact of evolving forms in the literary tradition. We will also engage in the scholarly debate regarding centers of production, scribes, type of manuscripts and texts, codicological and palaeographical and linguistic features, sources and theological background. The stress on the practical application of theoretical principles will give students both a solid foundation and also 'hands-on' experience in the cataloguing, transcribing, and editing of original manuscripts. We will look at specific manuscripts held at the UW Special Collections in both print and digital formats, setting the manuscripts in their historical and social contexts. Taught in English.

This course focuses on the broad genre of speculative fiction—which encompasses various subcategories, including afro-futurism, science fiction, and neo-slave narratives—in order to explore its uses for advancing and expounding upon the historical questions and theoretical concerns that currently shape “black studies.” As an interdisciplinary knowledge project in the humanities, scholarship in black studies examines various cultural objects and forms in order to generate knowledge about how and to what effect “blackness” has been constituted as a social category nationally and across the western hemisphere, from early modernity and onward. Over the last thirty years, a dominant concern within this interdisciplinary location has been with thinking new approaches to engaging the historical past, which would supplement conventionally historicist methods for examining the archival records of transatlantic slavery. If the particular challenge that black studies engages is to produce knowledge that exceeds or breaks away from dominant narratives of and about western modernity, then a central question that arises from this challenge is: which objects, interpretive methods, and epistemological presumptions mediate the past and present? Further, if, as David Scott suggests, “time” can be thought to break from the linear schema of “history,” then how do we account for the historical temporalities that result from such breaking? To the degree that black studies can be understood as a speculative project—one that reaches for ways to conceptualize the modern human, “beyond Man’s meanings”—this course examines this aspect of the field by focusing on genres that forefront the question of time. We will engage the work of Frantz Fanon, David Scott, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spiller, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Wright, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Samuel Delany.

“The Architecture of Hurry”:  British Modernists Confronting “Modernity”

This seminar will consider how British writers during the first three decades of the twentieth century responded to the social, cultural, and technological changes that were rapidly transforming their lives. The prevalent belief that modern industrialized society was in a state of crisis intensified during the years leading up to the Great War, which intensified a mood of increasing anxiety about the future of civilization.  Virginia Woolf’s famous remark that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” suggests that the process of modernization had impacted interiority itself.  Significantly, for Woolf and other modernists, this awakening to a new world called for correspondingly new approaches to the writing of fiction and poetry, which we will explore through reading works by T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, and of course, by Woolf, herself.

The emphasis on interiority that characterizes several of these works is paralleled by the growth of psychoanalysis during this period—as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise—and it will be one focus of our attention in this seminar.  Another will be on changing attitudes about class, sexuality, gender roles and family relationships.  Depending upon the interests of members of the seminar, we might also explore other issues in relation to these texts, such as the conflicted history of modernist canon formation, the significance of personal relationships and coteries in literary production, contemporary British politics, .science, anthropology, and popular culture. 

Texts:

E. M. Forster, Howards End; D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point.

Either everything is autobiography or nothing is, so Paul de Man reminds us.  As readers, we insinuate ourselves into every text; what we understand about a text often tells us more about our own interpretive experiences than what is actually written on the page.  And those texts that mean to narrate something other than the author’s life also serve as neat allegories for the author’s experiences.  What further renders the genre questionable is the necessary death of the author, or so Maurice Blanchot warns.  That is, the subject of autobiography must be arrested in time in order to be narrated or, similarly, the author must step outside of their life to speak of it. 

In the first part of this course we will attend to the nagging theoretical questions that plague autobiography and memoirs of any kind: who is writing whom and who is reading whom.  To that end, we will read essays by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida.  We will also read Blanchot’s short text, “The Instant of My Death.”

For most of the course, we will consider how primarily German Jews, lacking any self or identity in a hostile, nascent nation state fashion an autobiographical  subject? What does it mean to write a memoir when traditional markers of that subject’s existence are lacking or questionable?  And what about Jewish women who are prisoners of two traditions, a German and a Jewish one?

To enlarge our perspective, we will conclude with works by James Baldwin and Nella Larsen.  How does the subject of African American autobiography intersect, context, enrich our understanding of German-Jewish writings.

In addition to Baldwin and Larsen, readings also include works by Salomon Maimon, Rahel Varnhagen (Hannah Arendt), Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Fanny Lewald, and Jakob Wassermann.

Readings in German are also available in English.  Discussion in English.

This course will be a quarter-long, intensive introduction to the reading of one of the most influential of 20th-century novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Ulysses rightly has the reputation as one of the most difficult literary texts in all of English or world literature, an experiment in style, language and narrative representation unlike any other book ever written.  Despite (or because of) this, it has had remarkably broad appeal both within and beyond academic settings as one of the most beloved of books as well.  It is, as those who persist in reading it tend to agree, genuinely fun to read.

We’ll take things slowly and patiently.  Our primary goal in the class with be gaining an initial degree of familiarity and comfort with the text; to that end, we’ll be working through a few chapters each week and relying on a couple essential secondary guides to help make our way.  Ulysses, however, has also spawned a veritable industry of scholarship, and we’ll be doing an initial broad survey of recent criticism as well; part of the appeal of Ulysses is that it lends itself so well to almost any theoretical approach.

Required work: weekly quizzes, group project on secondary criticism, final paper (10-12 pp. for undergraduates; 15 pp. for graduate)

Required texts: Ulysses: The Corrected Text (Gabler edition); Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book;Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices; Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated

This course will focus on theories of posthumanism and speculative fiction about posthumanist transformations and modes of existence.  We will be especially interested in reading posthumanist critical and fictional narratives through the lens of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of technicity, as a new ontological condition embodied by technical objects.  Critics like David Tomas and Isiah Lavender III have applied this concept of technicity to science fiction and especially to the rethinking of race and ethnicity within post-cyberpunk fiction.  In particular, these critics identify a tension between traditional modes of belonging, community, or differentiation and exclusion (ethnicity) and their displacement by or articulation with new technologically-mediated forms of recognition and self-identification (technicity).  These new technicities can be equally problematic (color-blind or reductively post-racial) and productive of new critical perspectives on histories of racialization.  The fictional texts we will read are intended to represent examples of three overlapping critical concerns within this framework: the status of embodiment in high-tech cultures (including gender and sexuality as well as race); metamorphoses of kinship and interrogations of the limits of belonging; and techno-social formations and the emergence of network societies.    

Primary texts will be chosen from this tentative list:

• Octavia Butler, Dawn
• Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
• Ted Chiang, The Life Cycle of Software Objects and Stories of Your Life and Others
• Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
• Bruce Sterling, Distraction
• Cory Doctorow, Walkaway
• Malka Older, Infomocracy
• Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief
• Lavie Tidhar, Central Station
• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
• Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
• N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
• Stephen Graham Jones, Mapping the Interior
• Short fiction possibly including work by Rachel Swirsky, Aliette de Bodard, Nisi Shawl, Eugie Foster, Ian McDonald, David Walton, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Sofia Samatar
• Critical writing by authors possibly including Gilbert Simondon, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, David Tomas, Isiah Lavender III, Alexander Weheliye, David Eng, Jane Bennett, Rachel Lee, N. Katherine Hayles, Jasbir Puar, Paul Gilroy, Manuel Castells, Alexander Galloway, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,  Lisa Nakamura, Mark Jerng, and Ramesh Srinavasan.

Assignments for the course will involve choosing from three options for written work, depending on whether you wish to use the class primarily as a readings course (in which case you will write a set of short critical reflections and probably do some extra reading), a research seminar (in which case you will be expected to revise and develop previous work into a longer research paper), or something in-between those two (in which case you will produce a shorter final essay, something like a conference paper).

Caribbean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon was one of the 20th century’s foremost anti-colonial theorists. His mid-century writing addresses many of the issues that concern late 20th-century  postcolonial studies, including racial subject-formation, the semantics of colonial space, the relation between aesthetic culture and national liberation, the function of capitalism in colonialism and vice versa, the uses and abuses of nationalism, the dynamics of gender in decolonization, the role of intellectuals and cosmopolitans in political movements, the cultural and material operations of neo-colonialism, and the socially transformative potential of sonic and visual technology. This course focuses on Fanon’s major books: Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth, Studies in a Dying Colonialism, and Toward the African Revolution. We situate these works in the anti-colonial context of their production, and through rigorous close reading work towards a fuller understanding of Fanon’s political vision. We additionally consider a variety of ways that intellectuals have applied and debated his thought. 

The drive to control and regularize the English language has made it possible for us to read texts from four centuries ago and texts from across the world.  It has also created a culture of anxiety about proper usage and a culture of condemnation of English varieties deemed to be non-standard.  This course will examine the social, economic, and linguistic factors that promoted and policed standardization in English language history (and the factors that resisted it).  We will consider some theorists of comparative standardization (Benedict Anderson, Einar Haugen) and investigate emerging standardizing in premodern English (Winchester standard, Chancery English), on the way to examining the rise of current practices of standard English in the eighteenth century.  Ideas about correctness in English are often expressed in moral terms ­– good, bad, right, wrong, pure, corrupt – we will examine the history of these ideological discourses and the ways that they have shaped conversations on education, national language policy, and social attitudes.  Along the way, we will interrogate dictionaries, grammar books, and style guides in order to examine the nature of language authority and the relationship between language and social power.  Readings will include texts by Jonathan Swift, Robert Lowth, Noah Webster, and James A. H. Murray, as well as contemporary scholars of standardization (Tony Bex, Richard Watts, Laura Wright, John Hurt Fisher), language ideology (Deborah Cameron), creolization (Mervyn Alleyne, Suzanne Romaine), and education (Geneva Smitherman, John Baugh).  Course requirements include several brief response papers and one seminar paper.

This credit/noncredit course aims to extend student teachers’ understanding of the technical, personal, and practical elements involved in effective language teaching by bringing together multiple tools. These include 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 a cornerstone of well-crafted teaching practice, some facets of teaching can emerge only through the experience of being a teacher in an actual classroom context. 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. This is an opportunity for you to learn and further develop your own style and philosophy of language teaching—a place in which you 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, 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.

The following are goals of this course:

• 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 both the rigor required of good research and 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!

This theme-based creative course examines the writer’s relationship with memory through the examination of a variety of novels and short stories. Students will discuss assorted aesthetic approaches to the act of memory as seen in such works as Liliana Hecker’s The End of the Story, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and others. Students will also generate and revise their own creative work throughout the course—not only as a way to develop their writing skills, but also as a broader experiment in positioning themselves at multiple points within this complex literary landscape.

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 

Catalog Description: Research and writing project under the close supervision of a faculty member expert and with the consultation of a second faculty reader. The field of study is chosen by the student. Work is independent and varies. The model is an article in a scholarly journal.

Catalog Description: Research and writing project under the close supervision of a faculty member expert in the field of study chosen by the student within the MAT degree orientation toward the teaching of English, and with the consultation of a second faculty reader. The model is an article in a scholarly journal.

Catalog Description: Intensive reading in literature or criticism, directed by members of doctoral supervisory committee.