This seminar is one the four core courses developed by the campus-wide Textual Studies Program. Course credit will count toward the Textual Studies Ph. D. track in all participating departments and is open to all graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Students completing this course will develop basic skills of literary scholarship (the use of literary archives; aspects of physical bibliography and the printing and production of books; scholarly editing; manuscript-based textual criticism) which will be of help for other courses.

The goal of this course is to challenge the assumption that textual theory and practice occupy a domain separate from literary
theory and criticism, and from other disciplines such as art history, architecture, music or film studies. Confronting this territorial fallacy, the course will show that developments in contemporary theory have influenced, and at times radically altered, the direction of textual studies; and conversely, that textual scholars have often anticipated and conceptualized the speculations of theorists in intellectually provocative ways. The first part of the course will familiarize students with major theories of textual criticism and editorial traditions that address the concepts of authorship and authorial intention; the distinction between document, text, work and the physical book; "ideal" texts and transcendental hermeneutics; the relationship of biographical and sociological contexts to texts, and of creators to producers of literature; and the functions of readerships. It will also document contemporary controversies in textual editing (such as the challenge posed by Jerome McGann to established canons of editing), as well as debates about the editing of particular texts in Renaissance (especially Shakespeare), romantic (especially Keats and Mary Shelley) and modern literature (especially Joyce's Ulysses). Students completing this course will learn to scrutinize the texts they are using and develop awareness of the editorial and cultural ideologies that inform them.

The second part of the course will explore the relevance of textual theory to the study of paintings and film adaptations of
literary works (including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). The course will involve the participation of librarians and visiting faculty who will offer seminars and lectures on various topics concerned with textual studies. We will also have the privilege of a one week visit by the prestigious art historian Ricardo de Mambro Santos, the author of numerous books and essays on the art of the Italian and Northern Renaissance, translator of art books from Flemish into Italian and from Italian into Portuguese and curator of 16 art exhibits, including one for the University of Washington on Federico Fellini’s drawings in 2003.

Assignments include a final paper on one of the following topics: an essay on a particular aspect of textual theory; a critical
edition reading text (with editorial rationale) of a poem or short story; a review of an existing edition and of controversies surrounding it; the history, transmission and alteration of a given literary or artistic work.

Introduction to Graduate Studies
Topic: “(Un)thinking the Discipline”


This course is intended as a critical and historical orientation to the discipline for students beginning graduate study in the field we call “English.” The course will be organized around four nodal questions: (1) What are some of the central conceptualizations of “literature” and “culture” (as practices, domains, and objects of study) within modernity? (2) How do norms of literary and cultural value articulate historically with the emergence and development of the modern nation-state to generate what has been, until recently, a prevailing model of “nationalized” literary and cultural study? Relatedly, what alternative models (e.g, diasporic; post- or transnational) have emerged in recent decades and what are their implications for the organization of the discipline (and our understanding of field specializations and expertise)? (3) How are the issues and methods of literary and cultural study grounded in broader theories of language and meaning? How do these theories map the relation between writing (texuality), literary forms, and the social formation? How have these theories (and the analytic approaches they sustain) displaced one another as “dominant” forces in the discipline, at the same time as the more or less full range of these theories (and approaches) remain operative within most departments of English? (4) What are the stakes in the kind of critical work we produce? How do we understand the value of our scholarship in the academy and within in broader social and institutional contexts? Because these questions are complexly interrelated, they are meant to indicate interwoven “strands” in our reading and conversation, rather than discrete units of investigation. The reading will include both theoretical pieces and a range of literary and cultural studies scholarship; in reading the latter, we will pay particular attention to the design of the project (the framing of the inquiry and the selection of relevant objects and archives).

The syllabus remains very much under construction. Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice will be a touchstone, and course materials will likely include work by Benedict Anderson, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Rita Felski, Henry Louis Gates, John Guillory, Phillip Brian Harper, Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Hall, Chris Newfield, Bill Reddings, Eve Sedgwick, Edward Said, Michael Warner, and Raymond Williams. Course expectations will include regular, engaged participation in class discussion; an in-class presentation; two short reflection papers (each one a critical annotation of one assigned reading), and a longer, synthetic final essay. Students interested in the selection of readings are welcome to contact me for more details after mid-August. I will post the finalized syllabus to the course Canvas site by mid-September.

This course will present a compendious overview of the major transition that took place in the 60s and 70s from “humanist” to “structuralist” and “contextualist” approaches of various sorts. Humanism, in the loose, large sense intended here, refers to the notion that individual consciousness is the prime source of agency. By contrast, structuralism and contextualism analyze agency in terms of forces and structures that give form to individual consciousness itself, and are therefore in crucial ways behind its intendings. There are difficult conceptual issues that arise around the dichotomy between these two approaches, and in this class we will work through these issues in rigorous detail. All of this will be brought to bear on the fundamental issues of reading and interpretation, and particularly on the question of what constitutes valid interpretation.

We will be reading some standard theoretical texts that you might well have encountered before, but we will read them at a depth that you might well not have previously experienced.

Tentative reading list:

Volosinov, Ch. 3 of Marxist Philosophy of Language

Foucault, “What is an Author”

Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” selections from Of Grammatology

Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”

Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

Lacan, selections from Ecrit

Staten, "Kant Avec Sade, or The Bride Stripped Bare”

The Victorian age represents the final stage of what a number of scholars have come to call "middle modernity": the eighteenth and nineteenth century period that gives birth to mass literacy, ideas of human rights (including women's rights and children's rights), industrialization, imperialism, secularization. This course explores the fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose of the Victorian era in conjunction with historical analysis of this emerging modernity. We will pay special attention to questions of literary value, to evolving hierarchies of literary genres, and to fields of cultural production. You can expect to read from the following authors: Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Mona Caird, Arthur Hugh Clough, Charles Dickens, Toru Dutt, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Alfred Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. We will also look at the nineteenth-century British reception of American literature, such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Course grades will be determined by course participation, a brief presentation on a topic of relevance to course discussion, a short research assignment to familiarize yourself with some of our UW Library databases, and a final paper of 10-12 pages.

In Quest of an American Focal Center: Myths of Community,
Realities of Dissonance, in the 19th Century U.S.


English 532A
Prof. Robert E. Abrams
FQ 2015
M, W: 3:30-5:20

An exploration of the powers--and limits--of cultural mechanisms seeking to impart integrity and focus to a sprawling US society during the nineteenth century. To some degree we’ll study US art and culture in general--maps, Currier and Ives prints, and other cultural artifacts through the lens of which cultural wholeness and identity are imagined--as well as major theorists and critics of the nation-building process such as Homi K Bhabha and Sacvan Bercovitch. But the major focus will be on how the problem of a US focal center plays itself out in literary texts. To what degree does a US national imaginary become persuasive and credible against a backdrop that includes increasingly globalized, trans-national space, racial and class division, Indian removal, immigration, regionalism and civil war? What sort of cultural work do national myths, symbols of unity, and rhetorics fusing American society with utopian aspiration and divine providential will perform–-or fail to perform-–throughout this period? Readings that throw the question of national identity into relief against a troubled backdrop will include “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” Whittier’s SNOWBOUND, Margaret Fuller on her encounter with native tribal peoples of the upper American Midwest, selected fiction by Hawthorne and Poe, selected writings by Frederick Douglass, DuBois’s THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, and Stephen Crane, and, finally a close reading of excerpts from Henry James’s THE AMERICAN SCENE, which from its turn-of-the-century vantage point will help both to sum up and to sharpen our discussion of the problematics of the US national imaginary. Let me add that this should emerge as an excellent course for graduate students whose knowledge of nineteenth-century U.S. culture and literature is thin, and who are interested in a reasonably comprehensive of survey of major texts, albeit conceived through the lens of an overarching theme.

ENGL 537 U.S. Latino Literature and the Problem of Realism (w/ C LIT 549)
Fall 2015

As a mode facilitating the serious treatment of ordinary people and their lifeworlds, realism is associated with the humanist or left-wing democratization of literature and culture. As such, realism has long been the dominant mode of Latino literature, notable for its strong working-class and non-elite, popular orientation. This seminar asks: how have U.S. Latino writers “done” realism from the 19th-century to the present? We will be reading four representative works: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (18885), Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (1930s; 1990), Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman (1997) that examine Latino contributions to the genre, focusing on their unique resolutions of what Fredric Jameson calls the (shifting) “antinomies of realism” at various landmark moments of this literary mode: classical 19th-century realism (realism vs. romance); early 20th-century realism at its dissolution (realism vs. modernism); post-WW II magical realism (the American marvelous real vs. postmodernism); contemporary neo-realism. We will ask questions such as: How do Latino authors come down on the realism-vs-modernism/postmodernism debate over referential function of representation? To what extent can Latino realism be theorized as “peripheral realism” within a literary world-systems framework? What contributions and innovations have Latino writers (a minoritized and racialized population rather than a nation) introduced to this narrative mode originating in the Enlightenment quest for rational knowledge and the rise of the European nation-state?

Realism is both a literary style and a critical problematic. Developments in literary production and critical theory during the last decades have demonstrated that realism has not been rendered obsolete by modernism and its sequel postmodernism; instead, realism has proven to be resilient. Contemporary neo-realist fiction after modernism and postmodernism has been a feature of the publishing landscape for some time. This development has recently been matched by a “new realist” turn in critical theory after poststructuralism, and a renaissance of “new realist” interests in ontology that exceed the problem of epistemology. As poststructuralism and postmodernism have in turn entered their own phases of dissolution, poststructuralist/postmodern dismissals of realism as “naïve” have been reconsidered, supporting critics such as Jameson arguing that realism is a much broader and more flexible category than has been assumed. From the wide panoply of new realisms, we will select theorists who embrace ecological realisms of complex wholes, ecologies, and actor-networks (Bruno Latour, Paula Moya and Paula Bennett) rather than realisms of isolated things or relapses into scientific reductivisms.
This course is loosely affiliated with my current research project on “What Comes After Poststructuralism? New Ecological Realisms in Contemporary Theory and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.” I also welcome students interested in this topic.
Assignments: student presentations on critical readings and a research paper.

Required readings:
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don; Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez;
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima; Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman; Pam Morris, Realism (Routledge)
. . . and a course reader with essays by Paula Moya, Marcial González, Ramón Saldívar, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, George Lukács, Franco Moretti, Joe Cleary and Jed Esty, Rita Felski, Guenther Leypoldt, Robert Rebein, Alejo Carpentier, Doris Sommer, Christopher Warnes.

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

English 556: Queers That Matter
I’ve ripped this title from Judith Butler’s study, Bodies That Matter, in order to pose a different, though related, set of questions that we’ll take up in our examination of queer subject formation. Chief among them are: what are the intellectual and socio-political consequences of understanding queerness as embodied and bodies as irreducibly social, caught up within materio-discursive networks that determine how different bodies are regarded and the treatment they are thus accorded; what are the promises and pitfalls of queer as an analytic, an organizational rubric, a “world making” strategy. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s Gender Trouble are seminar prerequisites. Expect heavy reading in diverse iterations of queer theory, a couple of novels (Delany’s Dahlgren is a likely candidate), and some film.

English 567 A and B:

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.)

Course reader available on e-reserve.

English 567 A and B:

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.)

Course reader available on e-reserve.

TEXTS:

Johnson, Language Policy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Canagarajah, Resisting English Imperialism in English Teaching (Oxford: OUP, 1999)

Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (New York and London: Routledge [OrientBlackSwan], 2009)

Stygall Partial Manuscript, Small Print (2 chapters)

Ramanathan, ed., Language Policies, and (Dis)Citizenship (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2013

Tollefson, ed., Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2013.

U.S. LEGAL CASES

Martin Luther King Junior Elciteentary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District, 473 F. Supp. 1371 (1979)

Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974)

Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971)

Davis v. U. S., 512 U.S. 452

Asian American Business Group v. City of Pomona, 716 F. Supp. 1328 (1989)

Pavlenko, Aneta. “’I’m Very Not about the Law Part’: Nonnative Speakers of English and the Miranda Warnings.” TESOLQ 42.1 (2008): 1-30.

Walters v. Reno, 145 F. 3d (1998)

RECOMMENDED TEXTS:

Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: OUP, 1992)

Ricento, ed. An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method (Malden, MA and London: Blackwell, 2006)

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Focused initially on conventional language policy, we will learn the basics from Johnson. I would strongly recommend reading the recommended texts for a head-start on the quarter. We’ll read and discuss two books on education and language policy (Canagarajah and Tollefson). We’’ look at Phillipson’s most recent criticism of linguistic imperialism. Then we’ll shift gears. I have come to understand that language policy is closely related to studies in law and language, not just formal, statutory or formal government rules. Instead, legal cases often set the agenda for actual language policy. We will read key cases and two chapters from my book (to be published by Oxford). We will focus primarily on the United States.

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 daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, a video teaching demonstration, and seminar discussion. There are weekly writing assignments and a final project. No required texts. Only open to MATESOL students.

This introductory class to the MATESOL program is designed to familiarize students with key concepts and theories in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and their implications for classroom teaching. What is language and how is it acquired? What does it mean to learn a language? What are some of the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that shape that learning? What is the nature of bilingualism? Multicompetence? Translanguaging? These are just some of the questions that we will be exploring in this course, an introduction to the rich complexities surrounding language acquisition.
We will open the semester learning about some foundational concepts within second language acquisition (SLA) theory, for instance universal grammar (UG), the monitor model, and critical period hypotheses. We will then examine some of the key epistemological issues and theoretical tensions and debates that have emerged historically within the field, approaching our exploration from linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and critical perspectives. Later on in the course, we will examine how understandings about second language acquisition have been shaped by recent influences from disciplines other than linguistics and psychology, most notably education, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, and we will reflect critically on how we use language in teaching, in learning, and in negotiating who we are in various contexts. In all topics we discuss, we will consider how these ideas inform our beliefs about language teaching and shape our images of the teachers we want to be.

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.

Textbooks: 'The Teacher's Grammar of English,' by Ron Cowan, and 'How to Teach Grammar,' by Scott Thornbury.