Spring 2006 300-level ENGL courses

Course Descriptions (as of March 2, 2006)
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.)

To Spring Quarter 200-level courses
To Spring Quarter 400-level courses
To 2005-2006 Senior Seminars

302 A (Critical Practice)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Simpson
csimpson@u.washington.edu
Critical Practice: American Studies and Its Critiques. This course will introduce you to the critical practices or approaches generally defined as “American Studies.” American Studies may be broadly defined as an interdisciplinary, generalist approach to the study of American culture, including primarily a concern with its written or literary expressions. In its early practice, American Studies sought to produce a sense of what was ‘exceptional’ or unique about the American perspectives demonstrated in such expressions, but later work done under the rubric of American Studies often prioritized a vigorous critique of the parochialism of exceptionalist views of America. We will read and analyze the evolution of American Studies approaches from the Cold War period, which was guided by a New Critical urge to separate aesthetic concerns and formations from social and political ones, to the late 1960s era, when revisionist historians argued for the necessity of a political critique of the contradictions of America’s democratic nationalist culture, and the present era in which scholars, impressed by post-colonial scholarship, feminist and queer scholarship, ethnic studies, and the visible emergence of neo-colonial globalization, seem to be re-appraising altogether the usefulness and long-term future of American Studies as such. Given that American Studies has for some time now turned away from its foundational, Cold War and New Critical origins, we will focus most of our attention on the arguments and changes in American Studies work in the later part of the 20th and early part of the 21st centuries.

This course will also ask you to write, on an almost daily basis. Most of the writing will be 1 page, informal and exploratory in nature, but it will be sharply focused on getting you to think through very specific problems or questions. Taken as a whole, this kind of writing will ask you to learn by articulating in writing your understanding of key ideas and questions the course poses. All will be shared in class in some way, and most of them will be taken up, holistically graded and returned to you. You must select at least one of these 1 page pieces to re-draft into a 3 page paper to be turned in for a grade before the midterm point. These papers will be xeroxed into a packet for the class to read just after the midterm. The point is to create a sense of ourselves as a writing and thinking community so that no one is writing in isolation. The course will conclude with a rigorous, deeply-focused analysis of the political effects and historical arguments at stake in a particular literary work. This analysis will involve the following: supplemental reading; broad-based discussions; group work on particular questions; informal writing exercises to express and compare our positions and arguments; workshopping of a longer written draft of some particular idea; individual revision work on that workshopped draft; and, finally, a finished longer final paper to be turned in at the end of the quarter. Course readings will be available in a course packet, available about a week before class starts from The Ave Copy Center. A novel will also likely be assigned for reading later in the quarter.

304 A (History of Literary Criticism & Theory II)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Chrisman
lhc3@u.washington.edu
Colonialism, Race, and Resistance. This course aims to expand student understanding of the ways that racial and national identities inform literary productions. It outlines some of the key topics in postcolonial and critical race studies. The course considers US 'minority' literary-cultural theories as well as anti-colonial and postcolonial theoretical debates from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Topics under consideration may include: colonial discourse; literature as tool of domination; literature as a tool of opposition; 'orientalism'; sexual difference and empire; primitivism; nationalist cultures; language politics; psychological oppression and emancipation; diasporic cultures; black and third world feminisms; neo-colonialism and globalization. The course seeks to further multicultural awareness as an academic and social resource. In addition it seeks to develop critical reasoning, close reading skills, and to expand comparative historical and geographical knowledge. Students will be expected to keep up a rigorous reading schedule, and to participate consistently during class discussions. Text: photocopied course packet.

310 A (The Bible as Literature)
MW 2:30-4:20
LaPorte
laporte@u.washington.edu
The Bible is among the world's most influential works, and has contributed immeasurably to the literary traditions of the English language. This course will consider the Bible as itself a work of literature, with certain recognizable tropes and genres. No previous exposure to the Bible is needed; the only requirement is a willingness to engage with the Bible as a literary text. Texts: Coogan & Newsom, eds., New Oxford Annotated Bible, with Apocrypha; Johnson (intro), Proverbs.

313 A (Modern European Literature in Translation)
MWF 11:30-12:20
Prutti
triest@u.washington.edu
Classics of German Literature and Thought. This course introduces students to major writers in the German cultural tradition and it makes a case for their significance to an American readership today. We will perform close readings of mostly literary texts that were written over a span of two hundred years. They include a wide range of themes, styles, and intellectual concerns. Among them are such famous stories as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as well as the first internationally successful German pop-novel from the late eighteenth century, Goethe’s acclaimed Sorrows of Young Werther. The reading list also contains texts by Brecht, Kleist, E.T.A Hoffmann, Freud, Bachmann and others. We will focus on shorter prose fiction along with some plays, essays and poetry. Students can expect to sharpen their critical skills and to broaden their understanding of German-speaking culture. Course requirements include brief written assignments, midterm and a final. Cross-listed with GERM 210A, CHID 270B. Frankenstein read Goethe. Shouldn’t you?

315 A (Literary Modernism)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Burstein
jb2@u.washington.edu
The Picture of Modernism. In reading Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, we will look at related contemporary (to Wilde, to us) episodes in, theories of, and contexts for modernism. Examples will include bits by Baudelaire, Huysman’s novel Against Nature, Max Nordau’s treatise, “Degeneration, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, Henri Bergson’s On Laughter, Poe on the crowd --- and the philosophy of furniture – and finally the issue of imitation and copies; the class ends with the 2004 novel by the studiously bizarre Will Self, Dorian: An Imitation. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

320 B (English Literature: The Middle Ages)
MW 7-8:50 pm
Remley
remley@u.washington.edu
(Evening Degree)
[Literary culture of the Middle Ages in England, as seen in selected works from earlier and later periods, ages of Beowulf and of Geoffrey Chaucer. Read in translation, except for a few later works, which are read in Middle English.] Evening Degree students only. Texts: Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (dual-language edition); James Winny, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (dual language edition); Gantz, Jevvrey, Early Irish Myths and Sagas; Marcelle Theibaux, ed., The Writings of Medieval Women: An Anthology.

323 A (Shakespeare to 1603)
TTh 10:30-12:20
LaGuardia
ehl@u.washington.edu
Shakespeare’s career as dramatist before 1603 (including Hamlet). Study of history plays, comedies, and tragedies. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: Shakespeare, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Twelfth Night.

326 A (Milton)
MW 12:30-2:20
Olsen
elenao@u.washington.edu
The poetry and prose of John Milton, one of the most radical and controversial English writers of the late seventeenth century. Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of intellectual incompatibility, condemned censorship (albeit to a limited degree) and produced some of the most beautiful and innovative poetry of any century, not least his great epic, Paradise Lost. In this course, we will pay particular attention to the early poetry and political writings, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and the divorce tracts. Reading and discussion will include a variety of contemporary critical contexts for the study of Milton, including political and feminist theory (especially regarding marriage, and the role of Eve in Paradise Lost), but we will also explore Milton’s poetics on their own terms. Fairly heavy reading load, short and longer essays, midterm and/or final exam, and group presentation. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

334 B (English Novel: Later 19th C.)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Dalley
ldalley@u.washington.edu
Love, Marriage, and the Woman Question. In this course, we’ll explore the growing significance of “the woman question” as it comes to bear on the marriage plots of late-Victorian novels. The course begins with what many have argued is the period’s greatest realist novel, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We’ll spend a few weeks here, in a quiet provincial English town, before moving on to fictional worlds occupied by female seductresses, murderesses, and (gasp!) intellectuals! The course reading load is heavy; expect about 250 pages a week. In addition, requirements will be a reading journal, a midterm, and a final paper. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Texts: George Eliot, Middlemarch; George Gissing, The Odd Women; M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Sarah Grand, Heavenly Twins.

335 A (English Literature: the Age of Victoria)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Butwin
joeyb@u.washington.edu
Anxiety and Eccentricity in Victorian England. At the very beginning of the Victorian period, the narrator of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833) was to ask himself—and by extension each of his readers, “What art thou afraid of?” This question and its many answers will set the direction of our study of the Victorian literature. Both the initial question and its many answers should be familiar to anyone who had grown up in the this country at any time during the past 70 years: terror in the imperial hinterlands, the threat of revolution at home (on the streets, in the kitchen, sitting room or bedroom); sex, drink, drugs; deadly epidemics, economic and emotional depression…and more of the national anxiety that appears to spawn some of these very problems. Not Carlyle but two of his sometime disciples, John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens, will be our guides to Victorian anxiety, repression and one curious upshot—personal eccentricity—which we will track from the 1850s down to the end of the period in the 1880s and ‘90s, from the oddities of Lewis Carroll’s “Wonderland” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, to dark interiors of Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde and Wilde’s delightful lunatics. Lecture, discussion, and multiple short essays. Texts: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market; R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; other texts on electronic reserve.

337 A (The Modern Novel)
TTh 7-8:50 pm (Evening Degree)
Popov
(W)
popov@u.washington.edu
Close readings of modern-fiction classics, with special emphasis on artistic method and the transformation of the novel as a genre. Topics include: modernity and the quest for meaning; the crisis of public and private values; authority and point of view; irony and ambiguity; modes of consciousness; temporal and spatial structures; self-reflexive language and stylistic experiment. Texts and Editions (in alphabetical order): Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics); Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (Vintage); Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Norton Critical Edition); Gide, The Immoralist (Vintage); Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Signet); Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest). You can use other editions but you’ll have to read the critical materials (essays, letters, prefaces, introductions, etc.) printed in the editions listed above (copies of them will be placed on reserve). The course has a moderate load: we’ll read six medium-length/short novels all of which require heightened attention to detail and much reflection. Requirements and Grading: attention to detail and much reflection. final = 50% of your grade; short assignments (one on each novel), attendance and participation contribute the remaining 50%. All students should have read Madame Bovary before the first meeting. (Evening Degree students only.)

338 A (Modern Poetry)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Walker
codyw@u.washington.edu
In A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins discusses Ezra Pound’s early years. He writes, “Of all that [Pound] read – whether Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Flaubert, Voltaire, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Arnault Daniel, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Seafarer,’ Sappho, or Homer – he asked, what does it show about writing?” We’ll ask ourselves that same question, as we read Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Hilaire Belloc, Stevie Smith, and Dorothy Parker. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Required texts: photocopied course packet and two anthologies: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (Volume 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker) and The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (Philip Larkin, ed.). The books may be purchased at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, located at 2414 N. 45th St. (Hours: Tuesday to Thursday 12 to 6; Friday and Saturday, 12 to 7.) Open Books is one of only two poetry-only bookstores in the country. If you’re a student of poetry and you live in Seattle, you should feel obligated, I think, to darken its doorstep.

343 A (Contemporary Poetry)
MW 1:30-3:20
Reed
bmreed@u.washington.edu
This course provides an overview of the kinds of poetry published in the United States since World War II. We will be looking at many of the genre's superstars--John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich -- but we will be spending as much or more time with lesser known but no less fascinating figures--Charles Bernstein, Judy Grahn, Lyn Hejinian, and Etheridge Knight. We will be discussing the period's principle movements-the likes of the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, and Language Poetry--as well as concentrating on thematic topics, such as the flurry of anti-Vietnam War verse from the later 1960s. Majors only, Registration Period 1. Text: Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

349 A (Science Fiction & Fantasy)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Robertson
vernr@u.washington.edu
This quarter we will explore current trends in fantasy and science fiction and we will examine the recent popularity of fantasy in blockbuster cinema. Texts: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries; Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys; Keith Miller, The Book of Flying; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Gregory Maguire, Wicked.

349B (Science Fiction and Fantasy
TTh 2:30-4:20
Rivera
lysar@u.washington.edu
Added March 2; sln: 9535
Black to the Future..This course introduces students to African-American science fiction, a genre that has been around, but largely unnoticed, since the early 1900s. The fusion of science fiction and black artistic expression is particularly vibrant in black popular culture. Musicians as diverse as Digital Underground, DJ Spooky, Parliament, and Sun Ra, for instance, demonstrate how the motifs of science fiction -- including its aliens, spaceships, and cyborgs -- have been germane for a black aesthetic that remixes the conventions of the dominant culture for its own transformative, often political purposes. In this course we will explore this exciting universe, going where few students have gone before, to trace the presence of black voices in science fiction. Students will study the genre in its literary, cinematic, and musical modes. Texts to include: Steven Barnes, Far Beyond the Stars; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science; and a course packet. Films include John Sayles's "Brother from Another Planet," and John Akomfrah's "Last Angel of History."

351 A (American Literature: The Colonial Period)
M-Th 9:30
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 discussion. 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 and 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 and Lucy Temple; Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of 19th-Centry American Life; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories).

352 A (American Literature: The Early Nation)
MW 8:30-10:20
Dean
gnodean@u.washington.edu
Haunting the Republic. Ghost stories, tales of terror, circulating secrets, scary rumors: what place did these illicit forms of discourse have in the new American nation, dedicated to Republican virtues like rationality, enlightenment and hard work? In this course, we will investigate the literary contradictions of the first half of the nineteenth century, noting how the effort to produce a sturdy national literature instead repeatedly reveals features of the nation that contradict its public face -- namely, its desire for Gothic, melodramatic and sentimental elements, and its contradictory definitions of democracy. We will read Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and additional texts by Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

353 A (American Literature: Later 19th C.)
MW 12:30-2:20
Dean
gnodean@u.washington.edu
American Hometowns. In the wake of the Civil War, Americans went home. Soldiers went home to heal and resume their lives; emancipated slaves, without the promised “forty acres and a mule,” went back to work on the former plantations as sharecroppers or migrated to Northern cities in search of jobs. But the return to the hearth was a metaphorical undertaking as well. The hometown—whether it was a busy city, a sleepy village, a cluster of backwoods cabins, a pioneer outpost or even a mining camp—became the new locus of “authentic” American life: a place where public space and private space intersected, and were equally familiar, visible and available to emotional mapping. In this course, we will look at a variety of representations of hometowns in the period from Reconstruction to World War I. Our investigation, tracking the literary establishment’s emphasis on realism and regionalism, will show that this literary turn towards the hometown was part of and essential to a broader cultural trend in which the domestic values of the sentimental merged with the nation’s industrial development and international reach. Majors only, Registration Period 1.Texts: Henry James, Washington Square; Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; and Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.

354 A (American Literature: The Early Modern Period)
TTh 4:30-6:20 pm (Evening Degree)
Kaup
(W)
mkaup@u.washington.edu
Literary responses to modernity in American literature between the wars. We’ll read selected novels and short stories, focusing on experiments in form and the development of new cultural identities by American writers as they negotiate the ambivalent (disruptive and liberating) impact of forces of modernity with the disappearing traditions of the past. The use of the plural (modernisms and traditions) is crucial; the course will juxtapose canonical modernisms (i.e. that of the post-war expatriate “lost generation”) to alternative modernisms emerging in the work of women and non-Anglo American writers. Texts: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926); Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1936); Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (written 1930s; 1990); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929); Black Elk and John Neilhardt, Black Elk Speaks (1932). (Evening Degree students only)

355 A (American Literature: Contemporary America)
TTh 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 treating literature, nature, and the environment. Here the emphasis is on the American West. While English classes offer acculturation in language and literature, in this class 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, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir that set historical reference points, the course directs main focus to American Literature of Nature in the West from the mid-20th century to the present, drawn from Barry Lopez, “A Presentation of Whales”; Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums; selected poems of Gary Snyder, Marc Reisner, video segment from Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water; John McPhee, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”; James Welch, Winter in the Blood; Gretel Ehrlich, selected essays from The Solace of Open Spaces; Annie Proulx, selected stories form Close Range – including reference to the current film of the story “Brokeback Mountain”; Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; selections from William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. The West here means the West Coast and inland Northwest. Our region has produced writers worthy of the tradition. You should be aware of the focus on Contemporary Western Literature of Nature 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 or paradigms include: Christian, pastoral, sublime, Zen, environmentalist, Native American, work-oriented, gender/sexuality-oriented. We cover essays, novels, short fiction, and poetry, making for quite a number of works, but many are in slim volumes and short selections, and some are available via coursepak, class handouts, or video. Lecture-discussion. Class participation is expected (standout participation can count up to +/- .3 on course grade). In-class essay midterm (30%); paper (@ 8-9 pp., 40%). All required work must be completed according to the schedule. Majors only, Registration Period 1.

355 B (American Literature: Contemporary America)
TTh 11:30-1:20
Handwerk
handwerk@u.washington.edu
Living in Place: Literature and the Environment. Our focus for this course will be upon how literature deals with the environment, i.e., how literary texts represent environmental issues and why it matters that they be represented in this form. How, that is, does where we live and, even more importantly, how we imagine the place in which we live, affect who we are? How do our relationships to nature and our relationships with other people intersect? We will be considering a range of prose texts, including fictional narratives, non-fictional essays and journalism, primarily texts written or set in the Americas, but with one African novel included for comparative purposes. Course goals include: (1) developing the analytical reading skills appropriate to different kinds of literary texts, (2) working on how to formulate and sustain critical arguments in writing, (3) learning how to uncover the logic and stakes of specific attitudes toward the natural world, (4) understanding how environmental issues are linked to other social and cultural concerns, (5) seeing how these linkages are affected by particular historical and political conditions. The course will contain a significant writing component, both regular informal writing assignments and several medium-length analytical papers; it can count for W-credit (students must specifically request "W" credit from instructor). Majors only, Registration Period 1. (Meets with C LIT 321A, ENVIR 450A) Texts: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid; Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Philip Appleman, Darwin; Octavia Butler, Wild Seed; Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams; Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather.

358 A (Literature of Black Americans)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Saloy
saloy1@u.washington.edu
This survey of African American Literature will attempt to cover a broad sweep of the tradition from its beginnings in Africa, the oral tradition there and in America, the slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, to the Beat era, the Black Arts Movement to the end of the twentieth century with some consideration of the tradition as it is evolving today. Guided by significant historical and cultural events and the intellectual tradition in non-fiction prose, the goal is to gain an overview of the rich semantic tradition of Blacks in America in each genre. Majors only, Registration Period 1. (Offered jointly with AFRAM 358) Texts: Patricia Liggins Hill, ed., Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Classic Slave Narratives; Earnest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying.

359 A (Contemporary American Indian Literature)
MW 4:30-6:20 pm (Evening Degree)
Opitz
aopitz@u.washington.edu
Decolonizing America: Storytelling, self and community, bi-cultural identity, alienation, relationships to place and to the past. In this course we will look at how American Indian writers address these central questions of the Native American literary canon. Also, we will ask a very basic question: What do these texts tell us about the difficulty of telling one's story in a colonial setting? This question then leads us to examine the relationships between American Indians and the U.S. government, and between American Indians and American cultural and national narratives. What questions do these texts ask of race, nation and gender, and of the writing of history? What are some of the formal strategies these writers use to "decolonize America"? Students will write a midterm and longer final paper, a weekly response paper, and give a presentation in collaboration with others. Students should expect to participate actively in small groups and class discussion, and to be respectful toward other points of view. Offered jointly with AIS 377A. (Evening Degree students only.) Texts: Momaday, Way to Rainy Mountain; D’arcy McNickle, The Surrounded; Leslie Silko, Ceremony; Debra Earling, Perma Red; James Welch, Heartsong of Charging Elk; Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water; photocopied course packet.

363 A (Literature and the Other Arts & Disciplines)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Robertson
vernr@u.washington.edu
What’s a nice theorem like you doing in a place like this? What do mathematics, physics, or computing have to do with literature? This quarter we will read works by authors whose storytelling borrows techniques and ideas from disciplines outside of the humanities. Texts: Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook; Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams; Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

367 B (Gender Studies and Literature)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Kaup
mkaup@u.washington.edu
Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Women’s Writing. This course focuses on constructions of madness as the “female malady” (Elaine Showalter) in 19th and 20th-century women’s writing. Women’s continuing interest in insanity and mental illness derives from their insight into cultural associations of femininity with irrationality in Western thought. We will trace the numerous transformations and migrations of the figure of the madwoman: the most major one is the shift from the margins to the center of women’s narratives as the 19th-century figure of “the madwoman in the attic” (Jane Eyre) is reconfigured in modernism (Mrs. Dalloway) to reappear as “madwomen protagonists” in confessional and experiential narratives of the 60s and beyond (Plath, Rhys, Morrison)—including post-colonial adaptations of the Victorian madwoman (Rhys). We end with the discussion of newer developments towards “visionary madness” and the reinterpretation of madness as “spiritual quest” (not breakdown, but renewal) (Atwood, Head). Texts: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Margaret Atwood, Surfacing; Bessie Head, A Question of Power.

370 A (English Language Study)
TTh 10:30-12:20
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 phonetics 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 on language in the United States. Knowing something about linguistics will help you understand important issues about language variation in this country. 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’ll better understand how the English language works. There are homework exercises for each class and passing performance on the exams requires that you have done the homework. There are also written assignments so that you can demonstrate your understanding in prose as well. Evaluation will be through weekly homework problems, short reading responses, a midterm, a final, and a paper.

381 A (Advanced Expository Writing)
MW 2:30-4:20
Liu
msmliu@u.washington.edu
Marco Polo and Mark Twain are just a couple examples of travel writers who, through their rendition of faraway locations in persuasive prose, radically altered how readers pictured the world. Through descriptions of people encountered and landscapes traversed, travel writers familiarize, exoticize or destabilize the unknown in order to transform places into cultural significant landmarks in the imagination of their armchair readers. As a genre, travel writing is an excellent illustration of the immediate power of prose and lends itself well to the study of the effective use of words. In this class, we will analyze some signature pieces of this genre as a way to develop our own prose styles. Classwork will consist of discussion of various essays and peer critiques of student writing. Texts: Jamaica Kincaid, Best American Travel Writing, 2005; optional: Jack Rawlins, The Writer’s Way.

381 B (Advanced Expository Writing)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Dalley
ldalley@u.washington.edu
In this course you will move beyond the argumentative essay you practiced in ENGL 131 and 281 and, using the skills you acquired in these courses, you will try your hand at persona narratives, cultural commentary, movie reviews, etc. In other words, you will practice writing several different types of essays in order to further develop your proficiency and diversity as a writer. While the reading load in this course isn’t particularly heavy, you will be expected to read several essays throughout the quarter. Expect frequent (though not necessarily long) writing assignments and peer review work. Texts: Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative; Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwon, eds., Best American Essays of the Century.

382 A (Writing for the Web)
MW 11:30-1:20
Dillon
dillon@u.washington.edu
In this class students can expect to learn 1) how to design a web page (or set of pages) using DIVs and style sheets for layout; 2) how to analyze and evaluate a page/site for design, navigation, and content; 3) how to write multimedia documents in HTML using images and sound; 4) how to use secondary windows; 5) how to use several of the new features of Internet Explorer 7. This is a studio course in computer lab. All work is electronic, posted to student's web site at dante. Some familiarity with Cascading Style Sheets and HTML markup is recommended. Assignments will include exercises and design problems, a group project, web site evaluation, and final project. Additional information at http://courses.washington.edu/englhtml/engl382/. Texts: Musciano and Kennedy, HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide. 5th ed.; recommended: David Shea & Molly Holzschlag, The Zen of CSS Design.

383 A (The Craft of Verse)
Mon 3:30-6:20 pm
Shoemaker
shoefits@u.washington.edu
The basic philosophy of this course is to give creative writing students the chance to learn their craft through emulation and imitation. To this end, the course is designed with equal focus on reading and writing. We’ll read widely in an examination of the contemporary lyric. In direct response to these readings, you’ll write your own poems, many of which will receive comments from classmates in workshop. Both in-class and at-home writing assignments are designed to encourage you to write in ways that might be new to you. Prerequisites: ENGL 283 and 284. (ENGL majors only, Registration Period 1. Students who have not taken both prerequisites should contact an English adviser in A-2B PDL, (206) 543-2634.) Text: photocopied course packet.

383 B (The Craft of Verse)
TTh 10:30-11:50
Saloy
saloy1@u.washington.edu
This class provides guided practice in the study and writing of verse. We will review and examine the development of some forms, read and discuss great poets, and practice the discipline of the form in weekly writing and review of the work of classmates. The course will focus on the study of classical to contemporary verse, and producing poetry that reflects knowledge of the elements of verse, and developing critical acumen necessary to discuss the poems of classmates. Students will be evaluated and analyzed according to the originality of approach, interpretation, technique, etc.; demonstration of poetic standards and conventions, being able to recognize the major component of a poem’s structure, and demonstration of the best writing possible. Prerequisites: ENGL 283, 284. (ENGL majors only, Registration Period 1. Students who have not taken both prerequisites should contact an English adviser in A-2B PDL, (206) 543-2634.) Texts: Finch & Varnes, eds., An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art; Harmon, et al., A Handbook to Literature, 10th ed.

384 A (The Craft of Prose)
TTh 2:30-3:50
Strelow
estrelow@u.washington.edu
This course is designed as a jumping off point for students who have already experienced a short story workshop and who, with their acquired skills from the beginning course, will now have the opportunity to read fiction from a writer’s point of view. Delving deeper into structure, characterization and dialogue, students will observe the style of various authors and attempt to emulate their skills through both in-class and out-of-class exercises. The objective of a class based on emulation is to closely examine the way authors use lyricism, syntax, plot, tone, and characterization, and in this examination to develop further the individual voice of each student writer. Over the course of the quarter, students will read and discuss published short stories and major writing topics, turn in a series of interlocking prompts and exercises, and peer workshop two stories. Prerequisites: ENGL 283 and 284. (Students who have not taken both prerequisites should contact an English adviser in A-2B PDL, (206) 543-2634.) Text: photocopied course packet.

384 B (The Craft of Prose)
TTh 9:30-10:50
Strelow
estrelow@u.washington.edu
This course is designed as a jumping off point for students who have already experienced a short story workshop and who, with their acquired skills from the beginning course, will now have the opportunity to read fiction from a writer’s point of view. Delving deeper into structure, characterization and dialogue, students will observe the style of various authors and attempt to emulate their skills through both in-class and out-of-class exercises. The objective of a class based on emulation is to closely examine the way authors use lyricism, syntax, plot, tone, and characterization, and in this examination to develop further the individual voice of each student writer. Over the course of the quarter, students will read and discuss published short stories and major writing topics, turn in a series of interlocking prompts and exercises, and peer workshop two stories. Prerequisites: ENGL 283 and 284. (Students who have not taken both prerequisites should contact an English adviser in A-2B PDL, (206) 543-2634.) Text: photocopied course packet.

SPRING 2006 300-level Courses

SPRING 2006
300-level Courses