Autumn 2003 300-level ENGL courses

(Descriptions last updated: 19 August 2003)

Notes of Interest

Course Descriptions
The following course descriptions have been written by individual instructors to provide more detailed information on specific section sthan that found in the General Catalog. When individual descriptions are not available, the General Catalog descriptions [in brackets] are used. (Although we try to have as accurate and complete information as possible, this schedule remains subject to change.)

Add Codes
All English classes, 300-level and above, require instructor permission for registration during Registration Period 3 (beginning the first day of classes). If students have not registered for a class prior to the first day, they should attend the first class meetings and/or contact the instructor to obtain the necessary add codes.

First Week Attendance
Because of heavy demand for many English classes, students who do not attend all reguarly-scheduled meetings during the first week of the quarter may be dropped from their classes by the department. If students are unable to attend at any point during the first week, they should contact their instructors ahead of time. The Department requests that instructors make reasonable accommodations for students with legitimate reasons for being absent; HOWEVER, THE FINAL DECISION RESTS WITH THE INSTRUCTOR AND SPACE IS NOT GUARANTEED FOR ABSENT STUDENTS EVEN IF THEY CONTACT THE INSTRUCTOR IN ADVANCE. (Instructors' phone numbers and e-mail addresses can be obtained by calling the Main English Office, (206) 543-2690 or the Undergraduate Advising Office, (206) 543-2634.)

Upper Division (300-level) creative writing courses
Students who have completed the prerequisites to 300-level creative writing classes as listed in the Time Schedule may register via MyUW during Registration Periods 1 and 2 (during Registration Period 3, admission is by instructor permission only, and any add codes available may be obtained from the instructors at that time). Students who believe they have met the prerequisite requirements but are unable to register through MyUW should contact the Creative Writing office (B-25 PDL) or the English Advising office (A-2-B Padelford) for further information.

304 A (History of Literary Criticism & Theory II)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Shaviro
shaviro@u.washington.edu
This class is an introduction to recent (post-structuralist) literary theory. We start with a look at some important precursors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure) against the background of the traditional assumptions of modern Western philosophy (Descartes). We then take a look at some of the major poststructuralist theorists of the 1960s and 1970s (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Irigarey, and Baudrillard) and end with a consideration of the legacy that these thinkers have left us today. Books ordered with be supplemented by a course packet of additional readings from Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, and Baudrillard. Texts: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (tr. Cress); Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (tr. Large); Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (tr. Strachey); Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (tr. Miller); Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader.

315 A (Literary Modernism)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Staten
hstaten@u.washington.edu
[Various modern authors, from Wordsworth to the present, in relation to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, who have helped create the context and the content of modern literature.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

321 A (Chaucer)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Coldewey
jcjc@u.washington.edu
[Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other poetry, with attention to Chaucer’s social, historical, and intellectual milieu.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

322 A (English Literature: The Age of Queen Elizabeth)
Dy 10:30
C. Frey
cfrey@u.washington.edu
A survey of important writings from the period. Major authors include Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakesepare, and Thomas Dekker. Texts will include The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1B, and Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday. This is a useful course for those wanting an overview of sixteenth-century English literature and issues it raises. Useful also for those who may someday take the Graduate Record Exam in English literature. Participation (including attendance) is required; there will be short papers and in-class midterm and final exams. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

323 A (Shakespeare to 1603)
Dy 8:30
C. Frey
cfrey@u.washington.edu
Study of Shakespeare’s poems and plays to 1603 with emphasis upon meter, rhythm, imagery, tone, explication, interpretation, reader-response, critical issues, and student performance. All students are required to perform memorized parts in a small performance group that meets for most of the quarter (one or two days/week during class time); final performance is in last week before whole class. Also required: participation/ attendance/ discussion, written exercises, midterm, and two-hour, cumulative, in-class final (short-answer and essay questions). Meets five days a week (total of about 50 class meetings; participation/attendance carefully graded for both full-class and small-group meetings). A demanding course. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Shakespeare, The Poems; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Romeo and Juliet; Twelfth Night; Hamlet; Henry V.

324 A (Shakespeare after 1603)
MW 10:30-12:20
LaGuardia
ehl@u.washington.edu
Shakespeare’s career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Shakespeare, Measure for Measure; Macbeth; Othello; Antony and Cleopatra; King Lear; The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest.

324 B (Shakespeare after 1603)
MW 1:30-3:20
Ettari
[Shakespeare’s career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

326 A (Milton)
MW 1:30-3:20
LaGuardia
ehl@u.washington.edu
Milton’s early poems and the prose; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, with attention to the religious, intellectual, and literary contexts. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Orgel & Goldberg, eds., John Milton (Oxford authors).

329 A (Rise of the English Novel)
MW 10:30-12:20
Popov
nikolai_popov@hotmail.com
This course will introduce you to four exemplary eighteenth-century novels: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; in addition, you’ll read extensive excerpts from the works of Bunyan, Richardson, Cervantes, Rabelais, and others. Discussions will focus on the poetics of the novel as a literary genre and the critical issues associated with the emergence of the novel. This is an upper-level English course with a heavy reading load: you should have read the first part of Don Quixote for the first meeting. Requirements and grading: you will write brief assignments on each novel (25% of your course grade), work on a research project/report (25%), and take a final examination (50%). Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Cervantes, Don Quixote; Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Fielding, Joseph Andrews & Shamela; Sterne, Tristram Shandy.

330 TS/U (English Literature: The Romantic Age)
MW 4:30-6:20 pm
Webster
cicero@u.washington.edu
Just imagine-a world in which you see enormous change, that seems to offer a new intellectual and political freedom and empowerment, that has finally figured out both exactly what is wrong and how to rebel against it. All around you things are in flux. In America the colonists seized their chance to throw out the English; in Europe the people of France have similarly risen in rebellion and thrown off the yoke of their aristocrats' oppression as well. Everything, for a while, offers the heady promise of new beginnings.

What can poets do in a world so new, so dynamic, so changing? What new powers do they feel? What new boundaries will they cross? Whether in the poetically revolutionary work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, or in the far more ironically distanced work of Keats and Byron, these poets test limits, look for new ways of thinking and writing. In this class we'll read these and other major English poets of the romantic age, and we'll
look to find where and how their poetry records both their aspirations for a new world order and their disappointments when their hopes are dashed.

As you think about whether to enroll, know that a big part of what we’ll do here is poetry. I know many students haven’t had much experience as readers of poetry – but this stuff really is fun to read, and if you haven’t much experience, it’s a great place to become a reader of poetry. In lots of ways, in fact, much of what our culture thinks poetry is was developed by these poets, and we’ll take this opportunity to think about that as well!

For the Romantic Age in some ways has never ended – we still have movies and novels and poems that do their best to continue its themes. And that, finally, will be the other major focus of the course: Where does the Romantic Age still survive, and what are its new guises? (NOTE: ENGL 330TS is available only to Evening Degree and non-matriculated students; for information contact UW Educational Outreach, (206) 543-2320. ENGL 330U represents spaces in this class that may be available for regularly-enrolled UW day students during Registration Period 3, the first week of classes; add codes will be required for 330U, available from the instructor.)
Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2A; Breunig, The Age of Revolution, 3rd ed.; photocopied course packet.

331 A (Romantic Poetry I)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Modiano
modiano@u.washington.edu
The course will offer a broad overview of the literary and intellectual history of the Romantic period, focusing on the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth. We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism and the emergence of transcendental philosophy), aesthetics (the popularity of the aesthetics of the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime, science (the attack on Newtonic science), and art (the prevalence of landscape painting). After two weeks on the general topics specified above, we will study Blake’s poetry and illustrations and move on to the literary collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth and their unusual dependence on each other, personal as well as literary, beneficial as well as disabling. Majors only, Registration Pd. 1. Texts: Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs; Songs of Innocence and Experience; America: A Prophecy; Europe: A Prophecy; Coleridge, Selected Poems; Wordsworth, Selected Poetry; Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy; photocopied course packet.

332 A (Romantic Poetry II)
MW 12:30-2:20
Halmi
nh2@u.washington.edu
An examination of poetry and some prose by selected writers of the "second generation" of English Romantics. The focus will be on the two most popular English poets of the early nineteenth century, Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans, and their contrasting tones and themes. Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and others will also be studied. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Byron, The Major Works.

333 A (English Novel: Early & Middle 19th C.)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Alexander
eaengl@u.washington.edu
Six novels, three from the Romantic period, three from the Victorian, will be studied. Attention will be given to the way that novelists convey ideas, and to the relation between form and content in these books. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Shelley, Frankenstein; C. Brontë, Jane Eyre; E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Oliver Twist.

334 A (English Novel: Later 19th C.)
TTh 1:30-3:20
E. Alexander
eaengl@u.washington.edu
This course offers a modest sampling of the rich abundance of the Victorian novel. Attention will be given to the historical and philosophical backgrounds against which the novels appeared, as well as to the lives of their authors. But the major emphasis will be on the aesthetic relation between content and form. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Anthony Trollope, The Warden; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.

335 A (English Literature: The Age of Victoria)
MW 9:30-11:20
Dunn
dickd@u.washington.edu
Readings for this class will range across the poets and essayists represented in the anthology; there will be additional attention to Victorian painting and photography, and throughout the quarter we will be considering Oliver Twist as a text posing values, issues, and problems, both literary and social, that resonate during the rest of the nineteenth century. The objective of this course is to sample the variety of Victorian literature and art, to read it critically, and to consider how and why it remains informative and entertaining for 21st-century readers. There will be several short papers and an examination. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Abrams, et al., eds., Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 2B: The Victorian Age; Dickens, Oliver Twist.

336 A (English Literature: The Early Modern Period)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Burstein
jb2@u.washington.edu
This class does three things: establish a rubric for understanding English literary modernism, engage individual texts, both poetry and prose, on sustained analytical levels, and work toward making the student a better reader, which is to say thinker. Some themes will include: the role of gender, forms of embodiment, the status of the narrator in relation to the story (and vice versa), and sexuality. Methodologies consist of close reading and historical interpretation. If you don’t know what close reading is, you wil. Authors include Conrad, Ford, Loy, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Woolf. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; James Joyce, Dubliners; Ezra Pound, Selected Poems; T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room.

337 A (The Modern Novel)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Kaplan
sydneyk@u.washington.edu
This quarter we will read English, Irish and American novels published between 1913 and 1937. They include some of the major texts of literary modernism, and as such may prove difficult reading for students unfamiliar with technical experimentation. Some of the novels may require reading more than once. Class requirements include active participation in class discussions, oral and written assignments, midterm and final exams. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

337 B (The Modern Novel)
TTh 3:30-5:20
Byron
msb27@u.washington.edu
Added 6/11; sln: 9035
Identity and Its Discontents. In this course we will be reading a variety of novels composed from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. During this time, the novel form underwent radical experiment, and this is reflected in the treatment of theme, structure, character, and narrative voice. Reading a range of novels, we will be asking questions about how they reflect, or challenge, the predicaments and self-consciousness of the identities they reveal to the reader. Is the modern novel a riddle, or is it, at its bet, the solution to a riddle? How do modern novels construct the identities of their characters and narrators? How are characters and narrators shaped by the action in which they are immersed, or over which they appear to preside? Can modern novels successfully say the unsayable? Or to put it another way, can they explore topics otherwise taboo in polite discourse? Is the pre-modern hero displaced by the modern anti-hero? What kinds of feeling and thoughts do these changes in narrative identity arouse in the reader: laughter, sadness, sympathy, inspiration? And just what is modern about the modern novel? Texts: Henry James, The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Samuel Beckett, Murphy; Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf.

342 A (Contemporary Novel)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Emmerson
cemmerso@u.washington.edu
Art and the “Sixth Sense”: Six Studies in Contemporary Fiction. How does art sharpen, expand, or destroy the capacity for sensation? Does contemporary society deaden or invigorate the senses? The course explores six experiments with the creation of a “sixth sense,” a form of experience outside the range of “normal” human feelings. In keeping with the spirit of the strain of mental and physical expansion, the novels are always difficult, frequently bizarre, and sometimes offensive. Be prepared for a challenge. The texts are listed below; I recommend reading White Noise before the quarter begins. Assignments: three papers, oral presentation, oral final exam, graded group discussions. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Don Delillo, White Noise; Nicholson Baker, Mezzanine; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist; Thomas Bernhard, The Loser; Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish; Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senses.

351 A (American Literature: The Colonial Period)
Dy 10:30
Griffith
jgriff@u.washington.edu
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels, memoirs, sermons, journals, treatises and other writings by American authors of the Colonial and early national periods. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussions. Written work will consist entirely of between five and ten brief in-class essays, done in response to study questions handed out in advance. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: John Tanner, The Falcon: A Narrative of the Captivity & Adventures of John Tanner; Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings; Michael Kammen, ed., The Origins of the American Constitution; Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple & Lucy Temple; Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of 18th-Cnetury American Life; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

352 A (American Literature: The Early Nation)
MW 11:30-1:20
Mower
Leiren@aol.com
19th-Century Masculinities and the Nation. [Conflicting visions of the national destiny and the individual identity in the early years of America’s nationhood. Works by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and such other writers as Poe, Cooper, Irving, Whitman, Dickinson, and Douglass.] Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood; Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life…; Frank Norris, McTeague; Nathanial Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Edith Wahrton, Ethan Frome.

353 A (American Literature: Later 19th C.)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Shulman
rshulman@u.washington.edu
Under the stimulus of immigration, industrialization, and the centralizing tendencies of the Civil War, between 1865 and 1914 the old village-oriented agrarian America changed into an increasingly urban society characterized by large corporations, an expansionist or imperialistic foreign policy, and intense conflicts between capital and labor. The Jim Crow laws of the 1880s and 1890s and the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) are reminders that the promise of Emancipation was not fulfilled. A vital women’s movement laid the foundations for the Twentieth Amendment. Our writers were actively engaged in the ideological conflicts of this formative period in American culture. With an eye both on the past and present, during the course we will examine our writers’ contribution to American cultural history. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts:   Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, James, The Bostonians, Du Bois, Writings, Dixon, Thomas, Reconstruction Trilogy, Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Bellamy, Looking Backward, Norris, McTeague, Zinn, People’s History, Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, Optional: Wiebe, Search for Order.

353 TS/U (American Literature: Later 19th C.)
MW 7-8:50 pm
Abrams
rabrams@u.washington.edu
We will concentrate on major American writers and their efforts to create satisfying art during an especially interesting period in American history. How these authors responded to a variety of traumas, jolts, and anxieties--the Civil War, the accelerating rate of growth and technological change, the rise of commercialism, the waning of old values, the new discoveries of science--will be the subject of the course. Probably two papers of reasonable length and a final exam.   (NOTE: ENGL 353TS is available only to Evening Degree and non-matriculated students; for information contact UW Educational Outreach, (206) 543-2320. ENGL 353U represents spaces in this class that may be available for regularly-enrolled UW day students during Registration Period 3, the first week of classes; add codes will be required for 353U, available from the instructor.) Texts: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Henry James, The Portable Henry James; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories; Stephen Crane, The Portable Stephen Crane; Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories.

354 A (American Literature: The Early Modern Period)
Dy 8:30
Griffith
jgriff@u.washington.edu
We’ll read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories by American authors writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussion. Written work will consist entirely of from five to ten brief in-class essays done in response to study questions handed out in advance. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories; John Steinbeck, East of Eden; Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses.

355 A (American Literature: Contemporary America)
MW 9:30-11:20
Blake
kblake@u.washington.edu
Contemporary American Literature of Nature: the West. This course explores a field that is developing in English departments and is a relatively new departure for me (as a Western American who loves the region and its writing but usually teaches 19th-century British literature). While English classes offer "acculturation" in language and literature, here you will go "back to nature." But culture is part of nature -- as Gary Snyder says, words are wild. Following initial short readings from the Bible, William Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir that set historical reference points in a tradition of nature writing, the course then directs its main focus to American Literature of Nature in the West from the mid twentieth century to the present. The West here means the West Coast and inland Northwest. Our region has produced writers worthy of the tradition. In registering, you should be aware of the focus on Western Literature of Nature (mostly contemporary), rather than expecting general coverage of Contemporary American Literature. And be aware that the "Western" of story and the silver screen is a subject in itself and beyond our range. Perspectives include: Christian, pastoral, romantic-sublime, Zen, environmentalist, work-oriented, native American, feminine-feminist. We cover essays, history, fiction, poetry, video/film, making for quite a number of works, but many are in slim volumes or short selections. Class format: lecture-discussion. Class participation is expected. Expect two essay exams and a paper (c. 8-9 pp.), counting 30%, 30%, 40%. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts drawn from: In-class handouts of passages from the Bible and Shakespeare; Coursepack: Edmund Burke, "Of the Sublime and the Beautiful," (sel.), with Barry Lopez, "A Presentation of Whales"; Henry David Thoreau, Walden (sel.); John Muir, The Yosemite (sel.); Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums: video viewing of Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert (Part 1); John McPhee, "Los Angeles Against the Mountains"; James Welch, Winter in the Blood; 1 - 2 essays from Victor Davis Hanson, Fields without Dreams; Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (sel.); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; sel. Gary Snyder poems (in-class handouts). Optional: William Cronon, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (sel., esp. essay by former UW historian/environmentalist Richard White); Reisner, Cadillac Desert; Snyder, Mountains and Rivers.

355 TS/U (American Literature: Contemporary America)
TTh 7-8:50 pm
Cummings
ckate@u.washington.edu
Living on the Edge.   This course will examine representations of international, domestic, and personal crisis in recent U.S. novels, short stories, nonfictional documents, film and popular media. We’ll begin with the cold ar emergence of the “national security state” and widespread policing of political and sexual dissidents. We’ll turn to the hot war in VietNam and draw connections between it and contemporary events. We’ll end with portraits of Americans whose life experiences, behavior or identity is at odds with the mainstream. Residing in locales where conformity to church dogma, middle-class standards, traditional family values, established gender roles, and/or sexual norms is strictly enforced, all defy convention. And all live on the edge. Texts are likely to include: Don Delillo, Mao II; Senna, Danzi, Caucasia; Ehrenreich, Barbara, Nickle and Dimed; photocopied course packet. (NOTE: ENGL 355TS is available only to Evening Degree and non-matriculated students; for information contact UW Educational Outreach, (206) 543-2320. ENGL 355U represents spaces in this class that may be available for regularly-enrolled UW day students during Registration Period 3, the first week of classes; add codes will be required for 355U, available from the instructor.)

359 A (Contemporary American Indian Literature)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Million
dianm@u.washington.edu

“Speaking for the sake of the land and the people means speaking for the inextricable relationship and interconnection between them.” --Simon Ortiz from Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing

Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest bring to the table a millennia long tradition of expressive celebration integrally interwoven with life as it is known in this place. Memory, land and the life practiced here have now informed a literature written by at least two generations of American Indian writers in this region. In this class participants will explore contemporary American Indian literature and in particular several Northwest writers where this "inextricable relationship" is most apparent. The goal will be to bring into sharp focus the ways in which Native peoples of our region take the English language and reinvent it to infuse their own specific traditions into the meaning of "place" as we live it here; reinventing and enriching all the possible meanings of the coinheritance of our many histories in this often contested "crossroads of the world." American Indian literature at the cusp of the Twenty-first Century is a literature that demands responsible action towards relation and life, human and non-human. Although many classes draw attention to diversity in literature or to a multicultural focus, this class will examine the position that a "language which radically scrutinizes the social reality from which it rises is bound to alter the consciousness of its readership (Trujillo)." How does language create rather than merely reflect our realities? What links are possible between the everyday and the political and how do our leaps of faith make it possible for us to grow? Guest authors, reading, lectures, discussion groups, audio and visual presentations. Personal and research writing assignments with some spontaneous writing assignments in the classroom Important: Attendance and thoughtful listening and reading in all activities. Offered jointly with AIS 377. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

360 A ((American Political Culture: After 1865)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Shulman
rshulman@u.washington.edu
We will combine literary works and contemporary studies of American history and politics to develop insights into American political culture from our colonial origins through the Civil War. After exploring such topics as “Winthrop and the City on the Hill,” “Challenges to Puritan Authority,” “Captivity Narratives and their Implications,” “The Declaration, the Constitution, and American Republicanism,” “Jefferson on Liberty, Race, and Slavery,” and “Empire as a Way of Life,” we will move into the nineteenth century. Works by Whitman, Melville, Douglass, Stowe, and Lincoln not only speak to each other but also to still vital contemporary concerns. Lincoln aside, these writers develop powerful alternatives to and criticisms of the dominant culture. During the course I hope we can use our writers and class discussion to bring into the open our own assumptions about literature and politics. We can then use the inevitable disagreements as an intellectual resource to help us in our study of the ways the past continues to inform the present. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Lauter, ed., Heath Anthology, vol 1; Zinn, People’s History; optional: Greven, Protestant Temperament; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Sobel, The World They Made Together; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Wills, Inventing America; Shulman, Social Criticism.

367 A (Women and the Literary Imagination)
MW 11:30-1:20
Taranath
anu@u.washington.edu
Activist Women, Activist Writings. This course will prioritize texts by women activists and scholars. These writers use their craft to recreate an image of a more just society, influence public opinion, tell untold stories, and challenge prevailing assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, privilege, class, and power. The writings we will examine this quarter are written by a heterogeneous mix of international authors, and speak to issues of social justice in various global locations. Students who enroll in this course must be willing to rigorously engage with issues of power and privilege along axes of social difference. Texts: Hernandez & Rehman, Colonize This!; Anzaldua & Keeting, eds., This Bridge We Call Home; Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders; Kum-Kum Bhavnani, ed., Feminism and “Race.”

368 A (Women Writers)
MW 1:30-3:20
Mandaville
amandavi@u.washington.edu
African American Women Writers. African American women writers make up no small part of what is a vast field of women writers in English. This quarter we consider a selection of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays by writers as diverse as Phillis Wheatley, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Lorraine Hansberry, June Jordan, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy West, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and others. We will focus on lesser-read texts by well-known authors (Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Walker’s Meridian) as well as texts by less well-known and emerging authors (Senna’s Caucasia, Mullen’s S*Perm**K*T). Historical, social, political, economic, as well as artistic contexts will enrich and pattern our study of this varied literature of the past three centuries. In addition to closely reading and enjoying these texts, we will explore how these multiple contexts (history, etc.) have affected the ebb and flow of African American and women’s literature in general. In turn, we will consider the impact of these writers on the broader field of American “lettesr.” Class assignments will include weekly critical response papers/questions, a creative project, and a critical essay and presentation. Please read Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl before the first class.

370 A (English Language Study)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Stygall
stygall@u.washington.edu
This course is an introduction to the formal and empirical study of language, with an emphasis on English. We’ll study the sound system through phonetic and phonology, how words are formed through morphology, how we build words and phrases into clauses and more in syntax, meaning through semantics, and then turn to the social side with the history of the English language, sociolinguistics and U.S. dialects, and social interaction in discourse. With each linguistic level, we’ll begin with the formal analysis and then we’ll also read an article or two in which the importance of knowing something about the language is illustrated. That there are right and wrong answers in this course is often a surprise to English students, but once you get the hang of it, you and your future students will have fun with it. Evaluation will be through weekly homework problems, a midterm, a final, and a paper. No textbook: we’ll be using a readings packet with both exercises and articles. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

381 A (Advanced Expository Writing)
MW 8:30-9:50
Browning
sbrownin@u.washington.edu
[Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.] Computer-Integrated section. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: photocopied course packet.

381 B (Advanced Expository Writing)
MW 2:30-3:50
George
elgeorge@u.washington.edu
Fillets of Fiction? Analyzing Film Adaptations of Printed Narratives.(c)

“The novel is a narrative that organizes itself in the world,

while the cinema is a world that organizes itself into a narrative?

-- Jean Mitry

Just as the rise of the novel in centuries past accompanied the surge of verbal literacy throughout common classes, so might technological advancements in our time explain our current cultural passion for tales told not in print but on screen.

“Visual literacy” is definitely in vogue. Although Donald H. Rumsfeld may still sit spellbound reading books in his parked car while enduring a family outing to the local Cineplex, the reading preferences of this aged secretary of defense are certainly no longer the current generational norm. In fact, when George W. Bush retreated to Camp David to confer with Cabinet members about war plans in Afghanistan, his guests kicked off discussion not with a reading but a viewing of Black Hawk Down.

Why is this trend important? What do stories stripped from spines and refashioned for screens signal about writers’ texts, readers’ habits, and cultural contexts? Plenty. That’s what this writing- and analytically-intensive course will investigate: written fictional texts, their film adaptations, and varying cultural responses to both. Enrolled students should expect to read and analyze contemporary written texts, their film adaptations, and critical (secondary reviews) of each. Class members will then share and debate their assessments of the narrative and argumentative shifts in all these media in terms of their rhetorical contexts – in effect, you will critically dissect texts to figure out who is trying to persuade whom of what, how, and why.

General course requirements include an interest in film and literature and their ideological underpinnings, openness to expanding your current viewpoint via secondary research, in-class and online civil debate about sometimes sensitive and controversial issues, and a commitment to discussing and writing regularly about the rhetorical dimensions of fictions and film set within cultural contexts. Required texts may include some of the following, but perhaps not all: Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?; Andre Dubus, “In the Bedroom”; Cornel Woolrich, “Rear Window”; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; John Irving, The Cider House Rules. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Computer-Integrated Course. Texts: Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides; Mark Sanderson, Don’t Look Now; Funk, et al., The Elements of Writing About Literature and Film.
(c) Dr. E. L. George

383 A (Intermediate Verse Writing)
MW 10:30-11:50
Wagoner
renogawd@aol.com
Students learn to revise their own poems with emphasis on meaningful sound, rhythm, and form. Prerequisite: ENGL 283. Majors only, Registration Period 1. No texts.

383 B (Intermediate Verse Writing)
TTh 2:30-3:50
Horton
jwh31@u.washington.edu
[Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem. Further development of fundamental skills. Emphasis on revision. Prerequisite: ENGL 283.] Majors only, Registration Period 1.

384 A (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
MW 12:30-1:50
Sherman
iansage@u.washington.edu
Whereas the 200-level Creative Writing courses concentrate more on fundamentals and basic vocabulary, English 384 presupposes a familiarity with these elements (e.g. plot, setting, and character), and moves to larger discussions of story movement, story pacing, thematic resonance, and aesthetics. Class will include workshopping, discussion of published materials. Students will write three complete stories for the course, revising one for the final assignment. Recommended preparation: continuance of personal writing habits, i.e., maintaining a writing journal, keeping a selection of “seed” stories and ideas. Prerequisite: ENGL 284. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Checkoway, Creating Fiction; Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Course web site (to be up by first day of classes): http://staff.washington.edu/iansage/384/

384 B (Intermediate Short Story Writing)
TTh 1:30-2:50
Fitting
mffiting@u.washington.edu
This course builds on the skills and concepts you learned in ENGL 284 and explores a variety of approaches to writing fiction. We will look at both short stories and essays on writing by established writers as a way to gain insight into the fundamental questions that fiction writers face, as well as the writing process itself. In addition to writing exercises, you will be responsible for two short stories, one of which you will revise as your final work of the quarter. We will devote the majority of class time to workshopping your writing, and you will be expected to provide written and oral critiques of the works of your classmates.. Prerequisite: ENGL 283. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Charters, The Story and Its Writer.

AUTUMN 2003300-Level Courses

Notes of Interest

AUTUMN 2003
300-Level Courses