The broad aim of this course is to enhance the way you can study and interpret language, literature, and culture: to introduce you to the exploration of these subjects in a disciplined, informed way, with a firm understanding of what is at stake when specific critical practices are selected as your interpretative lens. Toward that larger end, this particular course will focus, in the interest of intellectual intensity, on one particular way in which this can all play out. In other words, rather than sampling a multitude of critical practices in a necessarily hasty way, we will explore, much more intensely, related theories of literary ambiguity and how they result in specific critical procedures for illuminating literary works. To further enable us to work selectively and intensely, the works chosen are all American. But the larger aim is to develop your appetite for and skill in the deliberative, theoretically informed deployment of recognizable critical practices in your study of literary, cultural, and linguistic subject matter. The assumption is that the specific skills and habits cultivated in this course close reading of complex theory, and elaborate study, critique, and employment of specific critical practices endorsed by such theory will be transferable to other courses, and to other theoretical and critical contexts. Let me add that theories and practices of literary ambiguity selected for this course are in fact quite fascinating, and enable us to explore, in our practical criticism and scholarship, such issues as how poems operate on multiple levels of understanding, or how novels can exist at the intersection of different cultures, several different verbal styles, and antagonistic points of view. During the course, you will be asked to keep elaborate journals recording your reading of a wide range of theoretical, critical, and literary readings, and to write essays that specifically explore literary texts according to deliberately adopted critical practices. Secondary readings will include such texts as Susan Stewart=s NONSENSE, Geoffrey Harpham=s ON THE GROTESQUE, and Mikhail Bakhtin=s RABELAIS AND HIS WORD. Primary literary readings will include writings by Whitman, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Henry James, Ralph Ellison and a host of other American authors. The great majority of these readings will be available in the course pack which you will purchase at the University of Washington Bookstore. A few larger texts for the course will also be available at the University of Washington Bookstore

The great majority of these readings will be available in the course pack which you will purchase at the University of Washington Bookstore. A few larger texts for the course will also be available at the University of Washington Bookstore