This seminar grapples with an ongoing critical conversation whose starting points are Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Much as Freud, for example, returns to and departs from Nietzsche and Marx in inaugurating psychoanalysis, so also do subsequent theorists respond to their predecessors, supplementing, revising or contesting their critiques. These theorists are likely to include: Foucault, Balibar, Spillers, Hartman, Butler, Bhabha, Rubin and Lowe.

This course will be on Plato and Aristotle. We will spend considerable time on the key texts about literature of these two authors, especially Aristotle’s Poetics, but, since what is called ‘literary theory’ involves a great deal more than literary criticism, we will also spend a lot of time on the larger projects of Plato and Aristotle of which their literary criticism forms a part: questions of the nature of human beings and of human society, the definition of the good life, the the relation of pleasure to ethics, the nature of the real and how the human mind knows the real, and so forth. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle on these topics form the indispensable background to the contemporary discussion of the ‘ethicopolitical’ that has come to dominate literary studies. All of this background will be brought to a focus on the question of what art, techne, meant to the Greeks. Techne is a much broader concept than our ‘art’; it includes shoemaking and politics as well as the art of poetry; and, as you will see, the concept of techne is fundamental to the way in which the original concepts of Platonic metaphysics were evolved.

Readings from Plato:
Sept 30-Ion
Oct 2, 7, 9--Phaedo
Oct. 14, 16, 23--Phaedrus
Oct. 28, 30; Nov. 4, 6--Republic
Readings from Aristotle:
Nov.13, 18, 20, 25, Dec. 2, 4—Poetics
Dec. 2, 4—Selections from Metaphysics, Physics, and Nichomachaean Ethics

Modernity and the Crisis of Representation

This course will not focus narrowly on the history of literary criticism, but rather will offer glimpses, in part through the lenses of competing interpretations, of the landscape which gave rise to national, vernacular cultures in Europe, and hence to the institutions of modern literary scholarship and criticism—in short, the intellectual world of which we are products and members. Though it will deliberately eschew a single genealogical account of modernity in the West, the course will follow a chronological trajectory from the disintegration of the so-called medieval "model" or "culture of the sign" to the development of an Enlightenment "philosophy of the sign" and its troubled legacy of dualism. To the extent that I have a story to tell in this course, it might be titled "Subjectivism and its discontents"; but there will be other stories too, told by poets and philosophers ranging from Dante to Kant, and by current (or recent) theorists and historians such as Blumenberg, Foucault, and Habermas.
A course reader will be available in Sept. at the Ave Copy Shop, 4141 University Way.
Written assignments will include a conference-length paper and some exercises to be determined in consultation will class participants.
Note: the first class will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 30.

English 524: Race, Religion, and Empire 1660-1830

This course will examine how writers of the long eighteenth century represented the relationships between race and religion at a time when the primary definition of “ethnic” was “heathen” or “non-Christian.” As a largely Protestant and Anglo-Saxon Britain expanded its empire to include North America, Ireland, India, and the West Indies, British writers devised various strategies for accommodating—or eradicating—racial and religious difference. In doing so, they explored the distinctions between savage and civilized, British and foreign, human and monstrous. By placing a range of eighteenth-century texts (captivity and travel narratives, autobiography, poetry, and novels) in dialogue with recent theories of racial difference and accounts of British imperial expansion, we’ll begin to pose some answers to the following questions: Why did literary representations of race gradually place less emphasis on moral traits and more on physical traits over the course of the eighteenth century? How did religious rhetoric both promote and prevent racial assimilation? How did global exploration contribute to the development of secular understandings of race? And how did perceived racial and religious differences influence Britain’s colonial agenda?

No prior knowledge of eighteenth-century literature is required for the course. Primary readings may include: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of Captivity and Restoration, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee, and selections from works by Edmund Burke, Phyllis Wheatley, Hannah More, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Adam Smith.

Nineteenth-century realism counts romance as its defining Other: novels were supposed to be true, but they were also supposed to be interesting. Each writer confronted this crossroads differently and found a distinctive path toward an acceptable balance of forces. In this course we will examine examples of the problems of form and social understanding in long and short fiction ranging throughout the century and from numerous countries. Tentative list: Austen, Emma; Goethe/Scott, Götz von Berlichingen; Pushkin, The Captain's Daughter; Balzac, Preface to the Comédie humaine; Dickens, Bleak House; Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Verga, stories. We will also read a few nineteenth-century programmatic documents and important relevant criticism. Students will give a class report and will write a 5000-6000 word essay on one of the fiction assignments.
A preliminary syllabus is posted at
http://faculty.washington.edu/mbrown/romance.pdf. Students are strongly
encouraged to read Bleak House over the summer.

English 532A
Robert E. Abrams
AQ 2008

The Shifting Landscapes of Mid-Nineteenth-Century America:
Critiquing the Imperial Gaze


On the one hand, a study of the way sense of space in the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. is conceived through the lens of maps and paintings, aesthetic conventions and discourses fraught with latent ideological implications. Pastoralism, the picturesque, and a jingoistic version of the sublime, along with a cartography deeply rooted in capitalistic economics and Western colonialism, and a tendency to view the wilderness itself through the lens of culturally endorsed paradigms and schemata–all contribute to the nationalization and settlement of the American continent in the era of Manifest Destiny. But even as sense of landscape is heavily mediated and settled through such organizing lenses, a counter-sensitivity develops to the way what W.J.T. Mitchell terms the apparent “givenness of sight and site” ultimately remains in the play of culturally mediated truth, falling between, for example, Western cartographical and aesthetic conventions and an alternative sense of landscape that writers like Thoreau and Fuller grow sensitive to in studying native tribal languages and myths. At bottom, the most fundamental object-forms (such as tree) prove surprisingly fluid and in the play of shifting perspectives. The ostensibly literal is latently interpretative. The idea of the frontier is reconceived as a ubiquitous and diffusive rather than a militantly advancing division between settled space and the unknown. In what will remain primarily a literary course supplemented by readings in spatial and epistemological theory and a review of nineteenth-century visual culture, our focus will be on how landscape becomes an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and cartographical settlement. Primary readings in Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Melville and Chief Seattle’s Speech; secondary readings will include W.J. T. Mitchell on imperial landscape, Angela Miller on nineteenth-century American painting, J.B. Harley on the rhetoric of the map, and other such texts; extra-literary cultural materials will include maps, paintings, and lithography.

Low Modernism

This course seeks to move before the great divide, even as it starts with Andreas Huyssen's /After the Great Divide/. We will engage high modernism by reading for various forms of the low. Versions of the low are likely to be the everyday (Woolf's /Jacob's Room/; /Ulysses/); the demotic (/Ulysses/, slang), the profane (the Welsh writer Caradoc Evans "[He] would appear to have raked in the garbage of the countryside for his characters” [/The Western Mail/, 13 November, 1915], /Ulysses/), the obscene: modernism and censorship (Lawrence, /Ulysses/), and the popular (bestsellers like /Trilby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,/ /The Green Hat/). Students are expected to have some sense of (a) modernism, whether in literary or other artistic incarnations. The careful reader will have surmised that reading /Ulysses/ over the summer would not be time ill spent.

English 541A – MW 11:30-1:20
Topic: Science Fiction, Colonialism, and Problems in Racial Representation
Instructor: Tom Foster

Course Description: This course will focus on the relation between science fiction as a popular genre and histories of colonialism and travel writing. British SF writer Gwyneth Jones has pointed to this interconnection as an explanation for the relative success of feminism within science fiction compared to what she sees as the genre’s still rudimentary progress toward decolonizing itself, as measured by the very small numbers of writers of color within the genre, in contrast to women writers. The course will therefore be divided into two parts: first, historical readings intended to foreground the relation of SF narratives to the colonial tradition of the “marvelous journey”; and, second, readings in an emergent body of SF by writers of color, intended to test Jones’s claims. We may spend some time on earlier historical texts, such as More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or captivity narratives (in the American context), but the emphasis in the readings will be on the development of 20th-century science fiction as a mass medium, beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs. The course will therefore provide both an introduction to science fiction and to the formal mechanisms of what Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement,” and a more specific consideration of the cultural politics of race and colonialism within the genre. We will use Pratt’s Imperial Eyes to contextualize SF in relation to conventions of travel writing and colonial representation, and Gilroy’s Against Race to pose a set of questions about the racial politics of speculative fictions and new technologies. Additional recommended reading would include John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. As time permits, we may pay some attention to visual culture, including film (The Matrix, Robot Stories), TV (Battlestar Galactica), or graphic novels (Transmetropolitan). Assignments will probably include one major paper and an oral presentation.

Texts for the course will include selections from this list:
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Culture Beyond the Color Line
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
James Gunn, ed., The Road to Science Fiction, vol. 3
George Schuyler, Black No More
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration
Paul Di Filippo, Ribofunk
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
Ian MacDonald, River of Gods
Octavia Butler, Dawn and Bloodchild
Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Nisi Shawl, Filter House
Steven Barnes, Lion’s Blood
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science (book and CD)
Ernest Hogan, Smoking Mirror Blues
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The New World Border
Alexandro Morales, The Rag Doll Plagues
Stories (some from the Gunn anthology) by Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, Arthur C.
Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, James Blish, Frederik Pohl, Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Gwyneth Jones, C.L. Moore, Katherine MacLean, R.A. Lafferty, James M. Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon), John Varley, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Soon Lee, Tobias Buckell, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Gerald Vizenor, and William Sanders

English 551A--Metaphysical Poetry:
Early Modern to the Millennium
(Mon./Wed. 3:30-5:20)

“The heart,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the Capital of the Mind.” But Dickinson is elusive, and in her “ecstatic Nation,” where you’re asked to seek “Yourself,” that capitalized single word may be unsettling too. Meanwhile, when love, death, human frailty, faith or disbelief, often suffused with sexuality, take possession of poetry, through a conscious derangement of language at the edge of impossibility, who can tell what’s in the mind. The problems are beguiling, if confounding, but if you stay with the intricacy of them, and are willing to pursue a thought beyond what you thought you could think, you may very well take heart from that. Whether with irony, paradox, or mind-blowing metaphor, the poems we’ll be reading are passionate, but passionate as thought—so deeply felt, indeed, that as we think about such poetry, viscerally, in the body, it appears to be thinking us.

That’s what T. S. Eliot had in mind when, writing of the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, he described its perceptual power—sometimes elliptical or circuitous, but the way it saw feelingly—as “the sensuous apprehension of thought.” As he was defining what poetry should be in the twentieth century, critically and in practice, he gave a retrospective status to a poetry of ambiguity. Even at this historical distance, one of the most compelling things about reading John Donne or George Herbert is that, if you’re engaged with any intimacy, you may—as Freud said we must in modernity—learn to live in doubt. Given the dubious state of the world after the millennium, no less after 9/11, there seems no alternative to that. But, if you think about it, it’s doubt that prompts questioning, which unsettles the “certain certainties” of any ”subject position.” There is, of course, a subjectivity to poetry, but as premised on the belief that precision is next to godliness, it may even serve politics by cultivating the reflex for reading between the lines.

The readings for the seminar will move across history from the period we once called the late Renaissance (now “early modern”), to the Eliotic modern, or that of Wallace Stevens, its witty accretions of high intelligence, through the visionary poetics of Harte Crane or Robert Hayden to the linguistic deposits of Susan Howe, who thinks of herself today, as in her writing on Dickinson, as a metaphysical poet. As for the reading between the lines, the lines themselves will change considerably as we move into regions of the mind where, where with signs of divinity as dubious as the notion of a soul, poets will be struggling with ideas in a material world that seems to defy transcendence. And then our task—as in the quirky concentration of Marianne Moore, seemingly engaged with trivia and inconsequence—will be to discern the metaphysical when it sneaks up on us, or with paradox and ambiguity maybe leaves us behind. So, too, with the exquisite indirection and luminous eye of Elizabeth Bishop as it brings a “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” to a “pool of bilge,” in an otherwise mere semblance of a potentially redeemable world—where the metaphysics, to be sure, is something other than theological.

Required texts:

Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Christopher Ricks (Penguin Classics, 2006)

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, eds.
Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair (Norton, 2003)

Early American Poetry, ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein (Univ of Wisconsin
Press, 1978)

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007; earlier edition,
published by North Atlantic Books, also ok)

English 556

Marx and Marxist Theory

This course will introduce students to key works by Marx and Engels and to the debates that have grown up around them. The course will be organized into three units that treat several of the problematics that have been repeatedly returned to by readers of Marx and Marxist theorists, historians, and cultural critics today and in the past: 1) History and Class; 2) Capital and Labor; and 3) Culture and Ideology. In addition to Marx and Engels, thinkers we will consider include Balibar, Wallerstein, Chakrabarty, Lukacs, Fraad et al, Goldman, Pietz, Althusser, Williams, Eagleton, Benjamin, Spivak, Butler, Denning, Jameson, Rajan, Hardt and Negri. Emphasis will be placed on close reading of texts and on animation, elaboration and analysis of the dialogues emergent amongst them. Previous work in philosophy or critical theory will be helpful, but is not required as a prerequisite.

ENGL 560: The Nature of Language
Fall 2008


Language, as the term is used around departments of language and literature, usually occurs with a specifier (Dickens' language, the language of advertising) and thinks of it as the style, or register, of particular users or communities of use. The linguistics of the past half century have not been of much use to us, focusing as it does/did on languages as systems of formal rules, some of them universal. Today, in the climate of Post Generative Grammar (PGG!--pass it on) schools and approaches such as Cognitive Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics offer concepts and tools that are much more useful to our purposes.

We will begin with a look at the treatment of genre and register in Systemic Functional Lings. using Susanne Eggins' survey and then take up Cognitive Linguistics, focusing via Croft and Cruse's Introduction on the construal of word and phrase meaning in contexts and testing the viability of their guiding maxim: all differences of form are differences of meaning. Finally we will work with Corpus Linguistics as a group of tools for making patterns of usage visible that we would not otherwise see or be able to pin down. Certain articles applying corpus techniques to questions of meaning in cognitive linguistics will make a key bridge between the approaches. Considerable hands-on instruction in constructing and analyzing corpora will be provided.



Topics for the seminar paper can range from an application of these tools to address particular texts or issues to critical examinations of the theories and ideas presented.


Written work will consist of numerous Study Questions applying certain concepts and the final paper.
Texts:

Svenja Adolphs, Introducing electronic text analysis. Routledge, 2006 Key phrases
William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2004. (C&C) Key phrases
Suzanne Eggins, An introduction to systemic functionial linguistics, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2004.

Certain on-line articles (class web page (URL:courses.washington.edu/englhtml/engl560) and in packet.

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career. (Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career. (Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESOL teaching. The course involves regular observations of ESOL classes, daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, microteaching, seminar discussion, and written projects. No required texts. This Practicum is only open to MAT(ESOL) students; the Fall Practicum is only open to TAs.

As one of the first courses MATESOL students take in the program, this course aims to familiarize them with key concepts and theories in the field of TESOL as well as their implications in classroom teaching. The first few classes provide a basic foundation in second language acquisition (SLA)—things you definitely need to know in order to be an effective language educator, such as Universal Grammar, Monitor Model, Output Hypothesis, and Focus on Form. The rest of the course explores topics that have become increasingly important in TESOL in recent years. Issues such as language and identity, bilingualism, bilingual education, nonnative professionals, imagined communities, and critical applied linguistics will be discussed. TESOL is becoming a richly interdisciplinary field, incorporating ideas not only from linguistics and psychology, but also from education, sociology, and anthropology. In all topics we discuss, I strongly encourage you to reflect critically on how these ideas inform your beliefs about language teaching and the image of the teacher you want to be.

English 575, Fall 2008. Pedagogical Grammar.
This course covers the basic syntactic structures of English. Students develop a working knowledge of those grammatical structures most crucial in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. They also practice relating and applying the structures studied to classroom situations (i.e., student errors, student questions, lesson planning, adapting textbooks, etc.). There is a strong focus on grammar in use as students analyze authentic discourse and design teaching materials that emphasize form, meaning, and use of grammar. Coursework includes grammar quizzes, analysis projects, class presentations, materials development, and daily homework.

The students of English 581 will sit as a kind of court of judgment while individual classmates, one at a time, bring a poem by an American poet, written since WWII, and describe its virtues and possible shortcomings. Students will be put in the position of editors of a literary magazine, choosing what should be published and what should not. Each will compile an individual anthology of 25-30 such poems with their assessments as a form of term paper.

ENGL 587
Topics in the Teaching of Creative Writing

3 credits
This course will explore some of the issues that guide the teaching of creative writing. As there is little theory about this special branch of teaching writing, the course will explore the different ways this field has been written about: the manifesto, the anecdote, the how-to. Reading will include articles that relate the teaching and learning of creative writing to current ideas in literary theory and creativity research, as well as articles “from the trenches”—articles by writers in the midst of teaching. In the process, each student in the class will develop a teaching philosophy and a pedagogy that reflects that teaching philosophy. Discussions and readings will cover topics such as choosing texts and exercises for creative writing classes, the traditional workshop and its alternatives, and responding to and grading students’ creative work. Written work will include a list of learning outcomes; a grading system; an annotated bibliography of anthologies, text books, or how-to books; a group of exercises focusing on a particular issue of technique; and an annotated list of readings to serve as examples for ways of handling that technique. By the end of the quarter, each student will have a refined syllabus that reflects his or her thinking on all these issues and will write a brief paper relating the syllabus to his or her teaching philosophy.

This course is required of MFA students teaching either 283 or 284 at any point during the 2008-2009 academic year. It is also open to other MFA students, priority give to second year students. Students entering the MFA program should contact the Director of Creative Writing about the advisability of taking the course. Other interested graduate students admitted at the instructor’s discretion.

ENGL 593-A. Textual Studies:
Hypertext (w/C Lit 596-B and HUM 523)


This seminar is one the four core courses developed by the Textual Studies Program. Course credit will count toward the Textual Studies Ph. D. track in Comparative Literature and may count toward the Critical Theory concentration.

This class will examine the intersection between new media studies and textual theory. Its first part will be retrospective: we will examine the rise and fall of “hypertext” as a key concept in new media theory. Why was it such a buzz word, and why does it now sound “so 1990s”? Next, we will consider the phenomenological turn in recent discussions of new media, and we will inquire into the challenges to textual theory presented (1) by hybrid visual-verbal genres such as computer games, digital video, and e-poetry and (2) by the contemporary “convergence culture” in which everything from fan fiction to cosplay to “transmediation” has newly destabilized the boundaries of “the text.” Finally, we will take a practical turn. Searchable archival databases have clearly been a godsend for literary scholarship (though, it must be admitted, text-encoding protocols and meta-data do continue to present profound problems). What other kinds of projects have been successful? Where and how have digital environments proved congenial to literature, and to the study of literature?

We will be reading such critics as Espen Aarseth, Joseph Grigely, Mark Hansen, Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, George Landow, Jerome McGann, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Along the way, we will also be reading examples of “electronic literature” such as Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext fiction Victory Garden and Stephanie Strickland’s mixed print and online e-poem V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una. Finally, we will be viewing selections of at least one anime.

Publication colloquium. This will be a workshop to take a course or conference paper or dissertation chapter you have written and revise it with a view to submitting it for publication. We will meet weekly for two hours. In the fall quarter we will read and discuss two essays per week. Two students and I will present written readers' reports on each essay. In winter quarter, each participant will present a revision for discussion together with information about likely target journals.
The colloquium is offered for ungraded credit. It does not count toward your degree, but will appear on your transcript. Enrolling implies a firm commitment to continue for both quarters, potentially at a different time in the winter.
Students who are past the M.A. degree in any field of literary and cultural studies are welcome. Admission is by permission of the instructor. Time constraints limit the group to 14. In the past it has been possible to accommodate just about everyone, and I hope that will again be the case, but I can't promise. To reserve a space, please email the following to mbrown@u.washington.edu: 1) a copy of the paper you wish to revise; 2) a list of courses you have taken, with the topic of the course, instructor, and grade; and 3) a brief description (1/2 page is typical) of where you stand in your studies, the dissertation topic or the focus of your work, and if appropriate an explanation of any anomalies (such as multiple incompletes, low grades, blank quarters) on your transcript. If you already have publications or have presented conference papers, you can also list them or add a CV, but prior public presentation is not a prerequisite. Please send the materials by Sept. 15. Late requests will be honored at my discretion, contingent on space available.
The initial meeting, on Oct. 2, place to be announced, will be a forum on essay publication procedures and strategies, open to all. The colloquium proper will begin the following week.