This course offers an overview of historical and recent thinking about the “text,” considered as an object of literary and cultural analysis and in light of the text’s materialization, circulation, and reception. We’ll consider historical roots of textual theory in humanism, philology, and 19th-century literary studies; early 20th-century textual criticism and bibliography; formalist notions of aesthetic autonomy and post-structuralist critiques of authorial intention and meaning; book history and the material text; the question of publication and the sociology of texts; readers and publics; networks, media and the role of technology; and new understandings of the text entailed by digitization. The course counts as the required introduction to the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

Catalog Description: Engages ongoing critical conversations that inform English studies, including: language, textual production, disciplinarity, the university, capital, nation formation, postcolonialism, the environment, race, gender, class, and sexuality. The historical focus is contemporary, with attention to foundational modern theorists.

Catalog Description: A study of the major issues in literary criticism and theory since about 1965.

Gift, Sacrifice and the Rites of Literary Exchange: Coleridge and Wordsworth

The literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth constitutes a unique episode in literary history and has been the object of great fascination among critics and biographers, particularly in recent years. As Thomas McFarland accurately states, Coleridge and Wordsworth “not only pervasively influenced one another; they did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessment.” Indeed, it is hard to bring to mind two other writers whose literary careers changed so dramatically under each other’s influence and who appropriated each other’s identity to such an extent that one critic thinks it plausible to regard their poetry as a single work, constituted by two interdependent voices (Paul Magnuson). The myth that Wordsworth was the great poet of nature, as demonstrated by “Tintern Abbey,” and Coleridge was the great poet of the supernatural, as evinced by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” obfuscates the fact that prior to meeting Coleridge, Wordsworth’s primary interest was in Gothic supernaturalism and victims of social injustice with no model of the mind’s relationship with nature in sight, whereas Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry. During their collaboration of the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge began to explore the nightmarish effects of supernaturalism on the psyche, though, ironically enough, just at the time when Wordsworth, under Coleridge’s influence, lost interest in the subject. Such moments of merging and separation are particularly instructive, showing the extent to which Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s literary careers were shaped by what each took to be the identity of the other, often misconceived through the distorting lens of self-projections.

In this course we shall study the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of gift and sacrifice, a richly suggestive model that will shed new light on this remarkably intimate and conflicted friendship and will offer the opportunity of investigating a new theory of literary influence based on the dialectic of contractual exchange.

We will begin with a close examination of Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of the gift and the response to it by Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu, Lewis Hyde, Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida, followed by an analysis of theories of sacrifice, as proposed by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Robertson Smith, Sigmund Freud, Rene Girard and Georges Bataille. Among other topics we will focus on: the principle of over-reciprocation in the gift,
the incommensurability between originary and return gifts; the erasure of the distinction between donors and receivers in gift exchange, and conversely, between sacrificer, victim, priest and deity in sacrifice; the role of intermediaries in sacrifice and the gift, i.e. the sacrificial victim and the person through whom the gift passes; the recuperative nature of gift and sacrifice; and the function of misrecognition in both economies.

In the second half of the course, we will study the successive phases of Coleridge’s literary exchange with Wordsworth, from an early period when they regarded their productions as “one work” in the spirit of gift exchange, to progressive alienation and rivalry.

Requirements: two brief (2-3 pp.) response papers on theories of gift and sacrifice; a final paper on Coleridge and Wordsworth (10 -15 pp.).

Texts:
The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan D. Schrift;
Marcel Mauss, The Gift;
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function;
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred;
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings;
Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (Norton);
Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton).
Additional articles and excerpts from books will be provided in photocopy.

Religion has always had an outsized influence upon anglophone literature, and yet until the recent "religious turn" in literary studies, it was also somewhat neglected. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton does not exaggerate much when he states that, "Almost every cultural theorist today passes over in silence some of the most vital beliefs and activities of billions of ordinary men and women, simply because they happen not to be to their personal taste."

This course introduces students to "the religious turn" in literary studies, and it pursues the literary and cultural implications of secularization and religion (especially evangelical religion)as they relate to literature and as they come down to us from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will investigate a new scholarly consensus about the vigor of nineteenth-century religion but will also focus upon religious conflict, especially in the period surrounding Darwin's The Origin of Species.

It further will explore competing paradigms for secularization, such as that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who writes of secularization as a condition of modern life that helps to constitute modern selfhood and that (at least historically) brings about both the destabilization and recomposition of religious forms.

Readings will be drawn chiefly from a British context, but American, European, and imperial parallels will be unmistakable and frequent.

Students need not have a background in religious studies, nor in literary studies (though either would help). Expect primary readings to range widely—from science to philosophy, fiction, and poetry.

During a period preoccupied with the nationalization, the mapping and the settlement of an identifiably “American” space, we’ll be exploring, on the one hand, how sense of space in the 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 imperial politics, and a tendency to view the wilderness through the lens of culturally endorsed schemata all contribute to the nationalization of the American continent and a would-be normalization of sense of space in the era of Manifest Destiny.  But even as sense of space is heavily mediated 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 alternative possibilities of landscape which writers like Thoreau and Fuller grow sensitive to in studying native tribal languages and myths.  At bottom, the most fundamental object-forms (such as a tree) prove surprisingly fluid and in the play of shifting associations and perspectives.  The ostensibly literal is latently interpretative.  The idea of a frontier separating known from unfamiliar, unknown space is reconceived as ubiquitous and diffusive; one can cross such a frontier into strange, unfamiliar spacevirtually anywhere.  Indeed, as writers such as Poe, Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman reveal, passage into an unfamiliar here and now, where governing epistemic paradigms break down, can occur within the precincts of bureaucratic urban offices or even in the confines of the bourgeois home setting. 

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 sense of space becomes an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and interpretative settlement that caters to ideological closure and a nationalism based upon a totalized sense of space. Primary readings in such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Melville and Chief Seattle (the putative author of a “Speech” actually encompassing colliding viewpoints and voices);  secondary readings will include W.J. T. Mitchell on imperial landscape, Angela Miller on nineteenth-century American painting, and chapters from my own book on “landscape and ideology”; extra-literary cultural materials will include maps, paintings, and lithography.

This course does five things: orient the student with an overview of British modernism, 1900-1930s; provide a general background for modernity torqued toward aesthetics; engage some current critical conversations in the field of literary modernism; allow focus on the work of particular authors; and immerse the student in the brass-tacks world of writing a book review and research paper. Loosely organized around two rubrics, minds and matter, the course engages embodiment and materiality, with particular attention to the
status of mind or mindedness on the one hand and the modernist object on the other.

Texts will include prose (Conrad, Ford, West, Waugh, a teensy bit of Woolf), poetry (Loy, Pound, Eliot), and some manifestos. Students will write a 1,000 word book review of a critical *monograph* published 2014-16(chosen by you but approved by me); and a 20 page final research paper. /Students are encouraged to start looking now at advertisements for forthcoming/new books in journals like Modernism/modernity or Critical Inquiry (in both cases see the "Books of Critical Interest" sections), Modernist Cultures; Affirmations: of the modern, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies;Amodern; The Space In Between; or more mainstream journals like the LRB or TLS for books of interest to them in the field—email me for advanceapproval: jb2@uw.edu/
Suggested pre-class reading: A canter through Levenson's _The Genealogy of Modernism_ for theoretical grounding—as in (a wonderfully lucid account of) the philosophy that the modernists were reading—and Ekstein's _Rites of Spring_ for event.
Texts are likely to be:
1. Joseph Conrad, /The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale/ (Oxford World
Classics; Oxford University Press) ISBN: 0192834770
2. Ezra Pound, /Selected Poems/ (New Directions, ISBN 0-811-201-627)
3. Ford Madox Ford, /The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion/ (1927) Ed.
Martin Stannard. (2nd edition; Norton Critical Ed.) ISBN-10: 039392792X;
ISBN-13: 978-0393927924
4. T. S. Eliot, /The Waste Land and Other Writings,/ ed. Mary Karr
Modern Library Classics, ISBN: 0375759344
5. Rebecca West, /The Return of the Soldier/ (1918) Penguin USA (Paper);
ISBN: 014118065X
6. Mina Loy, /The Lost Lunar Baedeker/ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN
0-374-52507-2)
7. Evelyn Waugh /A Handful of Dust/ (Back Bay Books) ISBN-10: 0316216267

What makes a novel so special that it ends up 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 popularity.  Writers include Hemingway, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Le Carre, Hrabal, Krieza and Onnepalu.

In this course we will look at various theories of tragedy for purposes of distinguishing it from the German mourning play and its depiction of what Walter Benjamin considered the specifically modern predicament of absolute immanence.  In a post-Reformation world in which deeds don’t matter, tragedy is no longer up to the mimetic task prescribed by Aristotle.  Instead, the mourning play, in which the sovereign has no access to an absolute to legitimate his decisions, makes of the hero an anti-hero, of the world a valley of tears.  In that respect, we will also read Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play as a diagnosis of modernity and its ailments. 

We will begin, however, with Plato’s Ion in which ontology is juxtaposed with the constant becoming that goes nowhere or an  “Iontology.”  We will then interrogate Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly for its understanding of catharsis and mimesis.  What assumptions about the world underlie the Aristotelian notion of tragedy?  After reading Antigone we will jump to Hegel’s reflections on that play and tragedy overall in The Aesthetics: How does Hegel come to think of tragedy as something that has been overcome or rendered obsolete?  Next, we will turn to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to understand how Nietzsche rethinks the Greeks to wrest it from the delicacies that framed its appropriation by the German classics. 

More important, we will identify those aspects of Nietzsche’s text that underwrite Benjamin’s Mourning Play.  How does Benjamin refute the ahistorical claims of Nietzsche?  What distinguishes the mourning play from tragedy, the German mourning play from Calderon? To prepare ourselves for Benjamin’s work, we will read  Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius along with Pedro Calderon’s Life is a Dream.  We will conclude the course by questioning what is it that allows for the sudden dialectical reversal at the end of Benjamin’s text.  Has the project succeeded in rupturing the immanence of modernity; has that constellation finally exhausted itself; is it possible now to imagine with Heine a time when capitalism is finally over?

Readings in German (translations of all texts will be available).  Discussion in English.

This course will be an introduction into practical ecocriticism, focusing on narrative as a genre, the 18th-20th centuries as a time span, and the global lineages of Euro-American environmental thought. Although we will be reading some basic texts in narrative theory (likely from a reader) and dealing with issues of narrative representation (what it means to represent the world as story), most of our time will be spent upon primary literary and philosophical texts drawn from three distinct historical moments: 1) the Romantic era (Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth); 2) the Victorian period (Darwin, Nietzsche); 3) the contemporary epoch (let’s call it the Anthropocene), fabulations of various kinds that deal with how to represent nature upon a global, endangered planet (Animal’s Children from India, The Swan Book from Australia, and a third novel to be determined by class consensus).  Two required class presentations (with written hand-outs); two options for writing: a series of single-spaced, one-page, no-margin papers or a single final paper on a topic selected in consultation with the instructor.

Catalog Description: Readings in composition theory and discussion of practical classroom applications.

Catalog Description: Readings in composition theory and discussion of practical classroom applications.

Catalog Description: Discussion and practice of second-language teaching techniques. Three hours per week teaching required in addition to regular class meetings. Credit/no credit only.

Catalog Description: Topics include second language reading, aural/oral skills, critical pedagogy, program administration, and language policy.

Digital Historical Practices is a graduate-level survey of technologies for historically-minded humanists and social scientists.

This course has three main goals: 1) to introduce you to technology relevant to your research; 2) to introduce you to technology that you can use to enrich the undergraduate learning experience; 3) to acquaint you with digital practices adaptable to tasks beyond the academy (alt.ac).

Over the course of the quarter we will learn about human and machine transcription, text indexing, content management, close reading and “distant” reading, as well as visualization, mapping, and spatial analysis.

For registration information please contact the History Graduate Office.