In this course we will investigate what it means to read traditional – and nontraditional – texts in the 21st century to experience “difficult pleasure” – however different that meaning might be from what Harold Bloom intended. Some of what we read will be pleasurable, some frustrating, some even painful. We will read canonical and non-canonical texts in traditional hard copy, but much of our reading will be online and on-screen, against the conventional grain. We will make use of extensive audiovisual capabilities of our English department’s wired classrooms to investigate changes in our textual/sensual engagement and the depth of our cognitive and emotional reactions. We will, for example, listen to narrative texts almost as much as we look at them, and we will test standard reading practices against nonstandard reading experiments, some solo and others communal. In essence ours will be a class that critiques ways of reading in the twenty-first century – in mind, body, spirit. Course methods and requirements include curiosity about reading theory and practice; conducting primary and secondary research about reading literature, both online and off, together as a class and individually in non-classroom locales; writing reflective online journals and sharing results in discussion; attending class regularly – this is not a distance-learning course, despite its in-class experimentation with computer technology. Written requirements include the reflective critical journal, short papers, and a final exam. Texts: Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age; photocopied course packet.

497/498E
MW 3:30-5:20
Veronica Browning

James Joyce’s Ulysses. James Joyce once described the “enormous bulk and the more than enormous complexity of my damned monster-novel” as an “epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).” This senior seminar will spend the quarter closely examining the single day which makes up Ulysses. Students should use the holiday break to familiarize themselves with Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Odyssey. Texts: James Joyce, Ulysses (Gobler Edition); Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

497/948F
TTh 9:30-11:20
Blake

kblake@u.washington.edu

Self-Help and Inheritance. “Self-Help” is the title of a best selling book from 1859 by Samuel Smiles, prototype of “self-help” books of our own day. It serves in the title for a course exploring literature in English from the 19th-20th C, a period that has sharply promoted self-making through “self-help.” But with this has also come a complication in thinking about inheritance. “Inheritance” fills out the title of the course and sets questions about the extent to which we are “made” by what has gone before, whether by family, gender, race, class, national/imperial legacy, or cultural/literary tradition. The class is designed as an appropriate capstone for seniors completing an English major given its theme, its seminar format, and significant writing component. It provides a forum for reflection on your own educational experience as an interplay between self-help and inheritance. Primary readings drawn from: John Stuart Mill, short selection “Of Individuality” from “On Liberty,” Jane Austen, Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Rudyard Kipling, Kim, Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas. Secondary historical/critical/theoretical material (short selections, not read by all, covered by presentations) drawn from: Samuel Smiles, a current “Self-Help” book, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Homi Bhabha, criticism on Naipaul). Requirements: on-going seminar discussion plus 2 in-class responsibilities (whether leading discussion of a primary text or reporting on a secondary text); @5 pp. paper; @10 pp. paper treating more than a single text. If you choose these can be related, so that the second paper revises and expands upon the first. The above requirements count 25%, 25%, 50%. No final. I am open to adapt assignments to your purposes as you conclude your undergraduate work. Research, discussion, oral presentation, and critical writing (in tight-focus and wider-scope formats) are practical skills you can enhance and lay claim to in this course. Past senior seminars of mine have proved helpful to students for providing the basis of letters of recommendation and writing samples for purposes of graduate school or other training, or employment.

497/498G
TTh 10:30-12:20
Walker

If I Can Get a Word In: Narrative Interruptions in Fiction, Poetry, and Beyond. What happens when a writer makes an unexpected appearance in his own work? Sometimes the entrance creates a hiccup, a frisson; other times it breaks open the work (and our hearts) completely. We’ll study such moments in the works of Milan Kundera, Michael Ondaatje, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Sei Shonagon, A. J. Liebling, Richard Pryor, the Anglo-Saxon poet Deor, and others. Texts: Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II.

497/498I
TTh 12:30-2:20
Easterling

Order, Disorder, and Civility in the English Renaissance. This senior seminar will read some of the most significant English Renaissance literary texts and consider their recurrent thematizing of order, disorder, and civility. Each text considers, or explores, “how to deal,” how best to order and discipline society and individuals. Beginning with More’s Utopia, we will trace a range of literary responses to a pressing 16th-century concern for ordering society amid changing times. Weekly writing assignments, several short papers, final project. Texts: Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing; Henry IV, Part 1; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; Thomas More, Utopia; Sigmunc Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books I-III.

497/498J
TTh 1:30-3:20
Taranath
Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice. How do we learn about social differences? What are ways social difference issues are taught in various diverse classrooms? As a class we will engage with numerous recent texts (memoir, educational theory, literature, pedagogy and teaching manuals, film, etc.) that speak to such issues, as well as organize individual and group pedagogical projects. Strongly recommended: previous academic coursework on issues of power and privilege and social difference. Texts: Ira Shor, When Students Have Power; Adams, et al., eds., Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice; hooks, Teaching Community; Goodman, World, Class, Women: Global Literatures, Education, and Feminisim; Naples & Bojar, eds., Teaching Feminist Activism.

497/498A
MW 8:30—10:20
Frey
Classics of Young Adult Literature. While fiction addressed to general readers has often depicted adolescence, only in the past few decades has such fiction addressed to young readers come into its own. With the publication of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Young Adult Literature came of age as a serious forum for adolescent study of its own anxieties, desires, conflicts, and joys. Since then, gifted writers such as Francesca Lia Block, Sue Ellen Bridgers, Bruce Brooks, Paula Fox, Rosa Guy, Virginia Hamilton, M. E. Kerr, Robert Lipsyte, Norma Fox Mazer, Walter Dean Myers, Richard Peck, William Sleator, Cynthia Voigt and others have brilliantly explored lives of contemporary youths. Works by such writers are taught in many English Departments. They have been neglected in ours. This seminar will introduce students to rewards of studying and teaching young adult literature. Requirements: class attendance/participation, written answers to study questions, small group presentations, research essay, and mid-term and final exams (short-answer and essay questions). Text: Frey and Rollin, Classics of Young Adult Literature (includes Malaeska, Ragged Dick, Anne of Green Gables, Seventeenth Summer, The Outsiders, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, The Chocolate War, Forever, Homecoming, Hatchet, and Parrot in the Ove: Mi Vida).

497/498B
MW 12:30-2:20
Reed
Twenty-First Century Literature. What are authors up to these days? Have current events – above all, September 11th and the war in Iraq – changed what people read, write, and value? We will begin by reading recent work by some of the most prominent authors of the late twentieth century – among them John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Toni Morrison – in order to see whether the “old guard” has been successful at adapting the postmodern aesthetics of the 1980s and 90s to suit the needs and dreams of a new century. Subsequently, we will be reading a variety of ambitious, innovative, celebrated texts from the last five years, including fiction (Chabon, Danielewski); poetry (Mullen, Young); nonfiction (Vollman); drama (Parks); and less classifiable, trans- or intergeneric writing (Bök, Carson). Texts: Christian Bök, Eunola; Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos; Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves; Toni Morrison, Love; Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary; Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog / Underdog; Wiliam T. Vollman, Rising Up and Rising Down; Kevin Young, To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor.

497/498C
MW 1:30-3:20
Vaughan
Medieval Legends of Good Women. At the end of the fourteenth century, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer produced, among his last works, a collection of narratives he called “Seintes Legende of Cupide,” (i.e., “The Legends of Cupid’s Saints": Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale). Alternatively titled The Legend of Good Women, the collection contains stories about a dozen ancient women (and their men), e.g., Cleopatra, Dido, Thisbe, Medea, to mention a few. A close reading of the Legend reveals how Chaucer’s late-medieval narratives about these classical heroines have been influenced by genres like the Christian saint’s life and the traditions of so-called “courtly love,” The tensions between the ideals of Christian hagiography and courtly romance lend a lively complexity to his stories, and to their interpretation. This course will attempt to define these competing ideals by discussing literary examples from ancient times – in the Old Testament (e.g., the books of Ruth, Judith, and Esther) and Ovid’s Heroides -- through the Middle ages, with its rich range of saints lives, retellings of Ovid, and classic works like the Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Boccaccio’s Famous Women. After Chaucer’s Legend (and some of his other works), we will discuss his near-contemporary, Christine de Pizan, esp. her Book of the City of Ladies, and conclude with a discussion of the mid-fifteenth-century Legends of Hooly Wommen by the English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham. Requirements for the course will include active participation in seminar discussions, weekly short writing contributions (response papers), individual leading of seminar discussion on at least one text, and a substantial term paper. (Meets with ENGL 516A) Texts: Ovid, Heroides (tr. Isbell); Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose (tr. Horgan); Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (tr. Musa); Cazelles, The Lady as Saint; Chaucer, Love Visions (tr. Stone); Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies; Osbern Bokenham, A Legend of Holy Women (tr. Delany); Boccaccio, Famous Women (tr. Brown).

497/498D

MW 2:30-4:20

Wooley

Sentimental America. What is the relationship among literature, feeling, and social change? In this course, we will develop an understanding of how nineteenth-century American writers used sentimental narratives to address particular sociopolitical issues. We will look at novels that attempt to criticize the nation by challenging representations of “other”; subjects and government policies based on unjust laws. As a class, we will examine the success of these criticisms and their reliance on the sympathy they produce in their readers. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the ways that these writers engage the relationship between individual actions and political change. We will also read a number of literary critics (including Jane Tompkins, Ann Douglas, Lauren Berlant, Laura Wexler, and Glenn Hendler) who are similarly engaged with this relationship between feelings produced by literature and the possibility of actions that promote social justice. We will then use this work on the sentimental literature of the nineteenth century to develop individual projects on how sentimental narratives remain a potent cultural form in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Our study of nineteenth-century American sentimental narratives will include novels such as Charlotte Temple, Hope Leslie, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Women and Iola Leroy. At times the reading load will be heavy. Students should expect to write a number of response papers, to lead discussion, and to make an in-class presentation on their final paper topic. If you have any questions about the structure of the class, please feel free to email the instructor at cwooley@u.washington.edu

Texts: Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Catharine Maria Sedgwick,Hope Leslie; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy; Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Thomas Dixon, The Clansman.

497/498E
TTh 8:30-10:20
Walker

Festina Lente: Calvino, the Butterfly, and the Crab. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes, “From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, Festina lente, hurry slowly.” This class will hurry slowly over a number of works (novels, plays, poems, essays), always keeping in mind the qualities that Calvino identifies as essential to great literature: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. We’ll read works by Calvino, Ovid, Lucretius, Eugenio Montale, Franz Kafka, P. G. Wodehouse, Amy Hempel, Joe Wenderoth, Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, Milan Kundera, Elizabeth Bishop, Wislawa Szymborska, Philip Larkin, Jack Gilbert, Joan Didion, Sei Shonagon, Alan Lightman, Annie Dillard, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Walt Whitman, Anto Chekhov, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver. Writing and conversation will follow. Texts: Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium; Invisible Cities; Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters; Johnson, Jesus’ Son; Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams; Nabokov, Pale Fire.

497/498F
TTh 9:30-11:20
Harkins
Common Sense: Desire and Domination in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. In this course we will explore the notion of “common sense” as it shapes contemporary U.S. fiction. We will begin by asking how popular discourses about the United States often assume that common sense is simple, immediate, and shared across a broad field of social groups. To contest these recent efforts to produce a shared ethos of national belonging, this course will provide a brief genealogy of common sense as a physical, intellectual, and emotional repository of broader political, social and economic forces. We will read key Marxist, feminist, queer, anti-racist, and psychoanalytic critics to examine the development and critique of common sense as a key component of modern nationalism. Following this opening discussion, we will read a series of novels and short fiction that offer alternate accounts of common sense, exploring the relation between desire and domination in fictions of national belonging. Texts: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature; Junot Diaz, Drown; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; Gayl Jones, Corredgidora; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Nella Larsen, Quicksand.

497/498G
TTh 10:30-12:20
Chaudhary
Violence and the Modern: Postcolonial Literature and Theory. This course takes up the question of violence as a way to explore a genealogy of our present moment. From an understanding of violence as an institutional form, we will branch out to consider its emancipatory and irrational forms across the postcolonial landscapes of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. How does violence bind and break apart communities? What is the relation between violence and the founding of a nation? How do various forms of violence legitimize themselves? We will consider these questions within the broader themes of the translation, identity formation, national consciousness, sexuality an dhistorical narration. Texts will include essays by Benjamin, Fanon, Marx, Said, Spivak, Zizek, and fiction by Coetzee, Djebar, Gordimer, Rushdie, Sembene, Salih, and Shammas. Students will prepare one class presentation, a short paper (4 pp.), and a research paper (7 pp.). Some background in literary theory is recommended, but not required. Texts: Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment; Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh; J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Anton Shammas, Arabesques; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; photocopied course packet (from Ave Copy Center).

497/498H
TTh 11:30-1:20
Haugen
Celebrity Biography: The Early Years. Do we care about the real lives of famous authors? In the case of the poet and critic Samuel Johnson, some clearly do: the monumental and surprising Life of Johnson (1791) by James Boswell, is probably more widely read now than anything Johnson ever wrote himself. In this seminar, we’ll ask how personal reputation became such a powerful category in the eighteenth century – a question directly relevant to the study of literature today, because Johnson and his contemporaries were instrumental in identifying the privileged group of English poets we still think of as “the canon.” We’ll read the Life of Johnson in its astounding totality, alongside the works of other writers Johnson read or knew, including Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Gray, and Frances Burney. We’ll also glance at Samuel Johnson’s own work in establishing the English literary canon, such as his Lives of the Poets, his dictionary of English, and his edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Texts: James Boswell, The Life of Johnson (ed. Chapman); David Fairer & Christine Gerrard, eds., Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd ed.; Samuel Johnson, The Major Works, ed. Greene; optional: John Sitter, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry.

497/498I
TTh 12:30-2:20
Streitberger
Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its historical context before tracing the development of criticism of the play to the present, paying particular attention to post-modern approaches based on Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Deconstructivist, Marxist, and New Historicist theories. Our focus will be on four contemporary film interpretations of the play: Laurence Olivier (1948), Franco Zeffirelli (1989), Kenneth Brannagh (1997), Michael Almereyda (2000). Requirements: research essay (12 pp.), at least two in-class reports (2 pp.), and continuing participation in seminar discussions. Texts: Shakespeare, Hamlet (Woffard, ed.); Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Mulryne, ed.).

497/498J
TTh 1:30-3:20
Falsberg
1200 B.C.E. to D.D.T.: Literary Commentaries on Environmental Degradation and Repair. Taking a cross-periods approach, this seminar’s focus is human-induced environmental degradation as portrayed in substantial and engaging literary works: two epics, one Near Eastern, the other, Central Asian; a Chinese Taoist “classic”; two Platonic dialogues viewed as sources for the enduring “Atlantis” myth; romantic poetry that may proffer a form of urban renewal; and three contemporary American works sympathetic to environmental protection. Aims are more empirical than theoretical, and we will read each text with an eye towards specific instances of damage to the earth. That said, secondary readings bring important questions to our work on the primary texts. Investigations may include: tensions in epic material between conquest and the consumption of resources (trees, local monsters, and the land itself); controversy as to whether strands in Taoist philosophy can be allied with “environmentalism”; and the presence of lyricism in a work whose matter is largely scientific. Discussion will be lively, demanding rigorous preparation, and students should bring relevant secondary materials to the attention of the seminar. Class work includes two shorter essays, one focused on a single text, the other, a meditation on a philosophical or methodological quandary identified in class discussion. The final project is a ten-page review of the secondary literature. This last is expected to demonstrate a hermeneutic competence developed through taking on the primary readings, and will serve as an excellent preparation for graduate school, or for jobs involving reading, research and writing. Texts: Gilgamesh (tr. Gardner); Tao Te Ching (tr. Mitchell); Plato, Critias and Timaeus; Gesar of Ling (tr. Neel); William Blake, Songs of Experience, Milton, Jerusalem; Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

497/498U
MW 4:30-6:20 pm
Popov
Comedy. This seminar will explore the genre of comedy from classical through modern times. The main objectives are (1) to read at least ten representative comedies (where possible we’ll also see taped performances of the respective plays); (2) to develop a critical understanding of the esthetics of major writers such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Beckett; (3) to develop an overall sense of the tradition and cultural contexts of comedy, how comedy has changed over time and which features have remained constant. Specific topics include: the forms and features of “high” and “low” comedy; the conventions and techniques of romantic and satirical comedy; the types and functions of laughter in comedy; the role of music in comedy and the specificity of musical comedy. Requirements: there will be a number of small assignments and presentations on individual authors (40% of the final grade); each seminar participant will work on a research project resulting in a final paper on a major author, period, or genre (60% of the final grade). Please note in order to come up with a good research project and have enough time for its execution it is essential that you read at least three or four of the comedies on the reading list before the beginning of the quarter. Texts: Aristophanes, The Frogs; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Moliere, Tartuffe; Gay, The Beggar’s Opera; Sheridan, The School for Scandal; Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro; Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado; Wilde, The Ideal Husband; Synge, The Playboy of the Western World; Beckett, Happy Days.

UW English Undergraduate Programs
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