Autumn 2004 400-level ENGL courses

(Last updated: 10 September 2004)

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
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 (400-level) creative writing courses
Admission to 400-level creative writing courses is by instructor permission. To receive an add code, prospective students must fill out an information form available in the Creative Writing office (B-25 PDL), present copies of their transcripts verifying that they have taken the appropriate prerequisite classes, and turn in a writing sample for instructor screening.

Senior Seminars
ENGL 497 (Honors Senior Seminar) and ENGL 498 (Senior Seminar) are joint-listed courses; students choose which number to sign up for depending on their individual status. ENGL 497 is restricted to senior honors English majors taking the additional senior seminar required for the departmental honors program. Add codes for ENGL 497 are available in the English Advising office, A-2B Padelford. All other senior English majors should sign up for ENGL 498. Neither ENGL 497 nor ENGL 498 can be taken more than once for credit.

471 A (The Composition Process)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Dillon
dillon@u.washington.edu
Once the rallying cry of radical reform in the teaching of writing, “Process, Not Product” is now the official line of SPS and many other public school systems. As an official doctrine, it is ripe for analysis and critique, especially since there are other, strong winds of “reform” now blowing both from the State (Legislature – OSPI) and a large private corporation called ETS. We will consider and evaluate a range of pedagogies including formulaic writing (aka 5 paragraph/Jane Schafer method) and multigenre writing. In addition, we are beginning to think of writing as something that does not require paper and that can include components of several media. We begin this review and critique with the writing process, moving then to the kinds and purpose of Language Arts writing, the role of the teacher, and the issues of standards and of inclusion/exclusion. Prerequisites: ability to rapidly decode and use acronyms. Writing: lots! 2-page response journals, group project report, midterm and final. Add codes available in English Advising, A-2B PDL. Text: photocopied course packet.

474 A (Special Topics in English for Teachers)
MW 2:30-4:20
Peck
peckl@u.washington.edu
Writing Center Tutor Training. This class presents an opportunity for students to expand their writing abilities and learn how to help others with their writing while getting paid. The Dept. of English Writing Center is looking for experienced student to enroll for this Autumn. Students will have the opportunity both to read and write about various approaches to tutoring writing, as well as to practice tutoring through conferencing and observation. Then, starting in November, students will have the chance to get hands-on experience tutoring in the English Writing Center. Students will be paid for this tutoring. N.B.: ENGL 474 does not satisfy ENGL major requirements; it functions purely as a general elective toward the 180 total credits required for graduation.

491 A (Internship)
*arrange*
Supervised experience in local businesses and other agencies. Open only to upper-division English majors. Credit/no credit only. Add codes in English Advising office, A-2B PDL.

492 A (Advanced Expository Writing Conference)
*arrange*
Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken. Instructor codes in English Advising office, A-2B PDL.

493 A (Advanced Creative Writing Conference)
*arrange*
Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken. Instructor codes in Creative Writing office, B-25 PDL.

494 A (Honors Seminar)
MW 1:30-3:20
Coldewey
jcjc@u.washington.edu
Medieval to Renaissance English Literature: From Script to Print, from Orality to Literacy. In this class we will be examining English literature as it evolves out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, and we will focus on two main cultural events: first, the shift from orality to literacy that began taking place during the Anglo Saxon period; and second, the invention of printing as an important technological agent that supercharged textual production. Early English texts are to an extraordinary degree both witnesses and children of their own age, and we will consider how literary texts evolve out of an oral to a literate culture, and out of a manuscript culture to a print culture. As this process takes place, the ground rules of textual production, dissemination, and consumption themselves change. Coursework: Three quizzes (15% each, class discussion (15%, a class presentation (15%), and a 7-11 page paper (25%). Readings will include the following and perhaps others: Primary: The Battle of Maldon and other Old English poetry, in translation; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale"; The Bible of the Poor; Malory’s Morte Darthur; The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play; The York Play of the Crucifixion; Everyman; Dr. Faustus; sonnets from Petrarch to Shakespeare; secondary: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolutin in Early Modern Europe; Walter Ong, Oralitiy and Literacy; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge. Department Honors majors only. Add codes in A-2B PDL.

495 A (Major Conference for Honors in Creative Writing)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Bierds
lbierds@u.washington.edu
[Special projects available to honors students in creative writing. Required of, and limited to, honors students in creative writing.] Add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL. No texts.

496 A (Major Conference for Honors)
*arrange*
Individual study (reading, papers) by arrangement with the instructor. Required of, and limited to, honors seniors in English. Add codes in English Advising office, A-2B PDL.

497/8 A (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
MW 8:30-10:20
S. Browning
(W)
sbrownin@u.washington.edu
The Devil. This course will examine a variety of religious texts, literary works and political discourses which have informed, and been informed by, the Prince of Darkness. Possible topics include the Hebrew, pre-Christian, early Christian, and pagan influences on the evolution of this character, the iconography associated with Satan, treatment of the Devil in works of fiction, and portrayals of the Devil in popular culture. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only.

497/8 B (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
MW 12:30-2:20
Brown
(W)
mbrown@u.washington.edu
Philosophy and Literature. This course will pair five epochal philosophical texts with five literary works or collections that share or reflect on their presuppositions. The aim will not be to “apply” the philosophical works, but to explore the utility of philosophical approaches through comparison and contrast. The readings will be short ito moderate in length, though not easy. Some pertinent critical essays will be assigned as well. Students will be expected to initiate a discussion and to write a 10-15 page essay, with drafts and a bibliography of secondary readings. It is recommended that you pick the focus for your essay and begin reading for it before the quarter begins. The topics and readings are:
Identity: Descartes, “Discourse on Method”; Shakespeare, Hamlet;
Sensation: selections from Locke, “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and from Sterne, Tristram Shandy.
Self-consciousness: Kant, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic”; Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads;
Will: George Eliot, Silas Marner; Nietzsche, “Metaphysics of Morals” (novella first this time);
Being: Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”; Stevens, selected poems. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only.

497/8 C (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
MW 1:30-3:20
Modiano
(W)
modiano@u.washington.edu
Contracts of the Heart: Sacrifice, Gift Economy and Literary Exchange in Coleridge and Wordsworth. In this seminar we will study the literary relationship of Coleridge and Wordsworth who, as one critic remarked, “not only pervasively influenced one another, but did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessments.” We will explore the possibility of deriving from theories of gift exchange and sacrifice a new model of literary influence that would shed light on this remarkably intimate and deeply conflicted relationship.

We will spend the first four weeks of the quarter studying theories of gift exchange and sacrifice as proposed, among others, by Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Georg Simmel, Lewis Hyde and Pierre Bourdieu (on the gift); and by Sigmund Freud, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, René Girard and Georges Bataille (on sacrifice). The next six weeks will be devoted to the study of major poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth in chronological order, showing how the two poets, while desiring to imitate each other, find themselves competing for the same themes and appropriating each other’s subjects. Thus, while early Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry and Wordsworth portrayed moving stories of human suffering in a supernatural setting, after their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth turned to the philosophy of the mind’s relationship with nature, while Coleridge started to explore the effects of supernaturalism on the psyche.

Such moments of merging and separation can be profitably viewed through the lens of gift exchange and sacrifice. The gift, for example, generates a number of paradoxes that are relevant to the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, being at once an altruistic model of social interaction, placing value on human bonds above economic or private interests, while at the same time remaining embedded in a self-interested power structure. Gift exchange often secures the privileged position of the donor at the expense of receivers and yet, as Mauss showed, receivers seem to retain “a sort of proprietary right” over everything that belongs to the donor. The gift thus generates the obfuscation of ownership rights and an erasure of the differences between donors and beneficiaries. We will see how Wordsworth and Coleridge, while collaborating early on a single unauthored volume (Lyrical Ballads) and wanting to write the same poem (“The Wanderings of Cain,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), found themselves increasingly asserting “proprietary rights” over the stock of inventions which they initially passed on to each other according to the law of the gift. Wordsworth continued to use Coleridge’s ideas but tried hard to displace Coleridge as a gift-giving source, turning to nature or his private fund of “possessions,” to “Something within, which yet is shared by none” (“Home at Grasmere”). Assignments: A long paper (10-16 pp.), written in two stages and subject to revision; bi-weekly comments on assigned readings; a final exam. 497: Senior honors majors only (add codes A-2B PDL); 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Marcel Mauss, The Gift; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; S. T. Coleridge, Selected Poetry (ed. Beer); Wordsworth, Selected Poetry.

497/8 D (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
MW 2:30-4:20
Reddy
(W)
ccreddy@u.washington.edu
Imperialism, Neo-Colonialism, and the Politics of U.S. Culture, 1898-1953.
497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; photocopied course packet.

497/8 E (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 8:30-10:20
Olsen
(W)
elenao@u.washington.edu
Letters in Literature. We’ll be reading a few real letters, but mostly epistolary fiction, theory, novels, stories, and other writing that rely on letters in interesting ways but are not strictly “epistolary,” and e-mail and cyber writing. We’ll begin with some background and early epistolary writing, but will move fairly quickly into the twentieth century. The point is to explore interesting examples of the fascination with the letter in literary consciousness and the evolution of this fascination from the late seventeenth century to modern e-mail culture. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; A. S. Byatt, Possession; Michael J. Rosen, Chaser: A Novel in E-Mails; Monica Ali, Brick Lane; Michael Civen, Male, Female, Email: The Struggle for Relationshiops in a Paranoid Society.

497/8 F (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 9:30-11:20
Chaudhary
(W)

zahidc@u.washington.edu
Urban Fictions. Cities have figured prominently in much recent literature and film. Though sometimes shown as places for escape and reinvention, cities are also places of despair and alienation. In this course we will analyze experiences of urban environments: the redemptive potential of commodity culture, alienation and depersonalization, the formation of the crowd, tourist culture, and imperialism. We will assume a global context for our discussions, and course material will draw on literature, film, photography, and contemporary art, from around the world. Virginia Woolf, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembene, Anton Shammas, Salman Rushdie, and Cindy Sherman are among the writers and artists we may consider, in addition to exploring a range of critical readings including selections from Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and Laura Mulvey. Texts: Paul Auster, City of Glass; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blog; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; optional: Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City; David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's City of Glass; Cindy Sherman, Film Stills. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only.

497/8 G (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Kaplan
(W)
sydneyk@u.washington.edu
British Writing of the Nineteen Twenties. This seminar will read a variety of works from this turbulent decade of modernist experimentalism and dramatic social change. We’ll read the decade’s most famous poem, “The Waste Land,” and fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley, as well as two notorious novels banned by the censors: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Radcliffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point.

497/8 H (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 11:30-1:20
(W)
--cancelled 8/24/04--

497/8 I (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 12:30-2:20
Easterling
(W)
heasterl@u.washington.edu
Renaissance Desire, Renaissance Discipline. This seminar will consider early modern culture, literary and otherwise, in terms of its figuring of and regulating of desire. Using the framework of some later theories of desire and the disciplining of desire in society, we will turn our attention to a range of 16th- and 17th-century texts which will include poetry, drama, and non-literary prose. How did the Renaissance theorize desire, both male and female desire? How does a focus on discourses of discipline and desire offer us a useful and sophisticated way of reading Renaissance literature? 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Abrams, et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1B; Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing; Thomas Middleton, The Changeling; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

497/8 J (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 1:30-3:20
Allen
(W)
callen@u.washington.edu
Narratives of Emotion in Recent Fiction by Women. What are women writing (and reading) these days? What are their passions What ideas take hold of them and won’t let go? In this seminar we’ll read fiction written recently by a variety of women writers from different national and cultural contexts. Most have won or been listed for prestigious literary prizes, so they have already captured the interests of the publishing world. We’ll focus especially on what emotions figure in their characters and what forms these authors use to “write” emotions in the reader. Students will complete a seminar paper tailored to their own goals, whether that means exploring reading attractions, writing fictional narratives of emotion, or learning critical moves for grad school. Be prepared for discussions and lively differences of opinion. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire; Valerie Martin, Property; Debra Earling, Perma Red; Margot Livesey, Eva Moves the Furniture; Monica Truong, Book of Salt; Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine; Carol Shields, Unless; Ali Smith, Hotel World; Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones.

497/8 K (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 2:30-4:20
Liu
(W)
msmliu@u.washington.edu
Double Consciousness in 20th- and 21st-Century American Culture. Beginninng with the early 20th-century roots of double consciousness in W.E.B. DuBois’ analysis of African American thought, we will then explore how the metaphor of a dual consciousness has manifested in feminist thought, masculinity studies, Chicano and Asian American literary criticism, consumerism, and popular psychology. A sampling of writers and texts to be included are: W.E.B. DuBois, Gloria Anzaldua, Don DeLillo, Frank Chin, The Manchurian Candidate, and Fight Club. 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only. Texts: Nella Larsen, Passing; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil.

497/498 L (Honors Senior Seminar/Senior Seminar)
TTh 10:30-12:20
Dornbush
(W)
{Course to be added; check Time Schedule for SLN when available.}
dornbush@u.washington.edu
Rereading the West. In this seminar we'll explore modern revisions of four classic texts of the Western canon--Shakespeare's The Tempest, Bronte's Jane Eyre, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In addition to the four works, we'll read revisions produced by advocates for colonial and postcolonial cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the cultures of the African diaspora. Readings from postcolonial and feminist criticism will accompany our discussion of the social, political, and interpretive controversies these works have generated. Grades based on participation (class discussion, response papers) and three five-page papers. (Meets w. C LIT 493A; 496A). 497: Honors senior majors only; add codes in English Advising, A-2B PDL; 498: Senior majors only.

499A (Independent Study)
*arrange*
[Individual study by arrangement with instructor.] Add codes in English Advising office, A-2B PDL.

AUTUMN 2004 400-Level Courses

Notes of Interest

AUTUMN 2004
400-Level Courses