The primary aim of this course is to introduce students to the practice and pleasure of critically reading literature. To do so, we will engage with contemporary re-tellings and re-imaginings of fairy tales in various genres including short story, music album, visual texts, and film.

Through the course of the quarter we will examine the enduring appeal of fairy tales and especially the irresistibility of telling and re-telling them to authors and artists of our own era. Course texts will include Philip Pullman’s new 'Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm', Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber', an anthology of contemporary re-interpretations of fairy tales, the rock-operaesque Decemberists album 'The Hazards of Love', and other interpretations of fairy tales in visual media such as visual art and film.

Texts:
Philip Pullman, 'Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm'
Angela Carter, 'The Bloody Chamber'
Kate Bernheimer, ed. 'My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales'

This class will introduce students to critical reading strategies across a variety of genres, including novels, drama, short stories, film, television, and experimental writing. Each of texts in this class shares a common focus on the human body. By reading, discussing, and writing about our texts, we will inquire into the representation of the body and its connection to writing. In what ways are bodies “written”? How do we understand the body in writing? What happens when we write on a body or with a body?

Texts will include: Gray’s Anatomy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, Neil La Bute’s The Shape of Things, Franz Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, Shelley Jackson’s “Skin” and Melancholy of Anatomy, Doug Wright’s Quills, episodes of House and Bones, The Twisted Twin’s film American Mary, and the Peter Greenaway film The Pillow Book

This course satisfies the “W” requirement, which means that students will be required to produce 10-15 pages of graded writing throughout the quarter. This will take the form of several short response papers and two 5-7 page papers (one due at mid-term, one due at the end of the term). Other assignments may include small research assignments, short writing assignments, and reading quizzes.

Required Texts:

Henry T. Gray, Gray’s Anatomy (ISBN: 978-0914294085)

Sarah Hall, The Electric Michaelangelo (ISBN: 0060817240)

Neil La Bute, The Shape of Things (ISBN: 978-0881452228)

Doug Wright, Quills (ISBN: 978-0571211807)

Shelly Jackson, The Melancholy of Anatomy (ISBN: 978-0385721202)

This course will focus on a variety of genres across 20^th Century African-American Literature. Through readings, in-class discussions, and writing tasks students will learn how to read across a variety of genres and write critically about the ways different writers represent concepts such as race, gender, politics, and class across the 20^th Century. This course satisfies the W requirement, meaning students will be expected to complete and revise several short response papers and a final paper of 6-8 pages.

The Victorian era saw the development of the detective story – a genre that flourished with the spread of literacy among the British working class, and owed some of its popularity to serial publishing and railway novels. While Sherlock Holmes has become synonymous with the Victorian detective, we will spend much of this class looking at lesser-known works in multiple genres before turning to Holmes. Our concern will be to trace the character of the detective and his or her actions that lead to the resolution of the crime – in other words, who solves the puzzle, and how?

At the end of the quarter we will look at Neo-Sherlockiana and the afterlife of the Victorian detective, and discuss the ways in which the detective and his methods changes for contemporary audiences.

This course satisfies the University of Washington's W requirement: students will submit two papers with revisions during the quarter. This course will also satisfy the pre-1900 requirement for English majors.

This course will examine representations of urban unrest through literary forms. Specifically we will study the representational politics of urban politics, space, and urban inhabitants in dystopian, Science Fiction, and documentary narratives. We will explore the ways in which are represented through literary fiction in ways that reproduce, regulate, and/or contest normative notions of racialization, sexuality, gender, and class in Los Angeles. We will read novels, short stories, public policy reports, documentary photography, music, and films. Texts might include some of the following: Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love, John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood, Rusty Cundieff’s Tales from the Hood, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People, T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Mary Helen Ponce’s The Wedding, LA Riots Commission Report, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Luis Rodriguez’ The Republic of East Los Angeles, Hector Tobar’s Tatooed Soldier, Paula Woods’ Inner City Blues, and Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden.

Catalog Description: Examines ideas of method and imagination in a variety of texts, in literature, philosophy, and science. Particularly concerned with intellectual backgrounds and methods of inquiry that have shaped modern Western literature.

Cherniavsky
English 207
Introduction to Cultural Studies
Winter 2014

Topic: Vampire Romance

In the last fifteen or so years, paranormal romance has emerged as a major rubric of mass-market fiction; major booksellers now have entire sections devoted to the category and its proliferating subgenres (e.g., zombie romance). This course will focus in particular on the fusion of two established genres, the romance and the vampire novel (the latter historically allied with horror and the gothic), as it unfolds in twenty-first-century vampire romance. How does romance and its defining preoccupation with exclusive affection and emotional reciprocity come to interface with vampire fiction, conventionally focused on themes of domination and promiscuous desire? What emerge as the organizing motifs of vampire romance and why does this genre take off at this particular historical moment? In order to engage these questions, we will consider a few different critical approaches to genre fiction and what these offer for understanding both the conventions of vampire romance and the heterogeneous ways specific novels inhabit those conventions. We will remain attentive throughout the quarter, as well, to the complex relations between the novels, the publishing industry, and the readers (especially those active or involved in fan culture).

Required texts will include Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories,
Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, Robin McKinley, Sunshine, Bram Stoker, Dracula, and
J.R. Ward, Dark Lover.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

As Britons traveled and Britain shifted from “empire of the seas” to the “empire on which the sun never sets,” writers experimented with and argued over writing, knowledge, and the Britain's role in global politics and economics. We will read a variety of texts focused on travel. Questions we will address include: What did Britons write about the places they traveled to? What did they think of other lands and people? How did other lands and people influence and shape Britain? How was knowledge learned abroad conveyed in writing? What does travel have to do with British life, politics, and economics? How are travel and British life portrayed in novels, discussed in poems, or developed in philosophy?

A selection of texts written in the 18th and 19th centuries will be assigned, including 2-3 novels, several poems, excerpts from collected letters, philosophical treatises, and other writings. We will also read a limited number of scholarly articles on the time period and literature.

This course fulfills the VLPA general requirement.

Grades will be based on regular 1-page response papers, an in-class presentation, an in-class midterm and a take-home final exam.

Class time will be divided between short lectures on topics pertinent to course material, large group discussion, and small group discussion.

Note that University of Washington expects approximately 15 hours per week spent on a 5 credit course. Nightly reading assignments will vary in length and difficulty. We will discuss reading strategies in class.

The literary works of the twentieth century frequently grapple with the social and cultural concerns of the age, such as war, racial prejudice, technological progress, and urbanization. But these works are also marked by a spirit of experimentation and sometimes a conscious effort to do things differently than the ways in which they’d been done before. Thus, in modernist and postmodernist literature, we often see writers questioning accepted notions of form, genre, subject matter, and style. What, after all, makes a story worthy of being told? What should a poem look like? What constitutes a character? Are stories made up of events that happen to us, or are they about the ways in which we think or feel about these things?

This class will explore these questions and more, through a range of literary works from the twentieth century and just beyond. We will consider characteristics, such as fragmentation, complexity, and a resistance to linearity, which are considered indicative of modernism and postmodernism, and we will also discuss the difficulties of definitively categorizing something as “modernist” or “postmodernist.”

Readings will include the following novels: Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), Sula (Toni Morrison), Cane (Jean Toomer), City of Glass (Paul Auster), and Sexing the Cherry (Jeanette Winterson). The course packet will include excerpts from longer works by theorists of modernism and postmodernism, some poetry (though we will spend most of our time on prose fiction), and a number of short stories by authors such as Ishmael Reed, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, John Barth, and Helena María Viramontes.

This is a survey course and will involve quite a bit of reading, some of it difficult. On the upside, much of it will be interesting. This course will also emphasize close reading and critical thinking, as well as the development of well-supported arguments. Course requirements will include maintaining a Reading Journal, making a Class Presentation, and engaging in on-going Peer Reviews. As a writing-credit (W-credit) course, you will write and revise two 5-7 page papers.

English literature, it would appear, has a designated writer. It may not be our job to account for that designation, but his status gives us an opportunity in one quarter with four plays and several poems to begin to figure out what makes Shakespeare tick. The plays vary enormously: light-hearted comedy, tragi-comedy, pure fantasy, and downright tragedy. That might suggest at least four playwrights behind the name of Shakespeare, but we will find, in fact, elements of each kind of play lurking in the others. We’ll frame three great tragedies—Hamlet, Othello and King Lear —between an early comedy, Twelfth Night, and a final play that defies all category, The Tempest. We will watch recent, innovative productions to see what’s become of Shakespeare in our time and do our best to study—and imagine—what happened on the theatrical scaffolding in London around 1600. Lecture, discussion, and short essays written in and out of class.

Texts:
Twelfth Night
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
The Tempest

A warrior, one who engages in combat, is typically conceived of as male. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a warrior as “a fighting man” and “a valiant or an experienced man of war.” When a warrior breaks from this male default, she is not merely a warrior, but a woman warrior, a virago, an Amazon, or a G.I. Jane. Despite being thought of as uncommon, women have fought as long as there has been war, and legends of such warriors have been with us since antiquity.

In this class, we will study how these women have been represented in literature, including myth, novels, short stories, film, epic poetry, opera, comics, and television. We will supplement this literature with nonfiction essays, historic documents, and documentary film. Unsurprisingly, we will approach these texts through the lens of gender and women’s studies, meaning that we will both analyze the depiction of gender roles in these texts as well as put the histories and experiences of women in the center of our studies.

Topics pursued will likely include: superhero(ine)s, sword maidens, amazons, female-separatist societies, cross-dressing, cyborg razor girls, valkyries, women martyrs, and the history of women in combat. Readings may include or excerpt: The Aeneid by Virgil, The Book of Judith and the epic poem “Judith,” A Narrative of Mrs. Charlotte Clarke, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Ring Cycle by Richard Wagnar, “The Black God’s Kiss” by C.L. Moore, The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong, Amazons of Black Sparta, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Alana: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce, Mulan, The Bandit Queen of India by Phoolan Devi, episodes of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Wonder Woman, and The Invisible War.

Because this is a W-credit course, you should expect to write 10-15 pages of graded out-of-class writing. This will likely be met through three short papers, one of which you will revise and expand into a 5-7 page final paper. Other assignments may include: discussion board posts, peer facilitation, peer review, and in-class quizzes. Because class meetings will be student-centered and discussion-based, in-class participation will be a significant portion of the grade.

It’s been said that American culture moves quickly and has a reluctant sense of debt to its past – DeTocqueville first noted it, as have many historians since. This course observes American fiction from the past twenty years which deliberately tackles memories, whether from nostalgic or regretful perspectives. One text is concerned with the Vietnam war – Tim O’Brien’s genre-bending The Things They Carried – while another attempts to reconstruct fractured lives after 9/11 (Don DeLillo’s Falling Man). We will also read Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (an experimental debt to the 1960’s counterculture) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (a dynamic and humorous portrait of a Dominican-American family’s history). These short novels, in addition to several short-stories, will explore questions of memory and nostalgia from personal and societal perspectives, in addition to investigating the basis of what makes “good” fiction work: how narration and description and setting and plot and character add up to powerful and realistic evocations of feeling in contemporary American culture.
In addition to some in-class writing and a high expectation of class participation, this is a “W” credit, with 10-15 pages of writing (three papers), and revisions.

In this writing-intensive "W" and "VLPA" course, we will be working with five novels as well as their adaptations as works of musical theater: L. Frank Baum's 1900 The Wizard of Oz, Patrick Dennis's 1955 Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, Edna Ferber's 1926 Show Boat, Anita Loos's 1925 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and E.L. Doctorow's 1975 Ragtime. In working with print-based novels later adapted into works of musical theater on stage and as recorded sound and moving images, we will be thinking about how works of prose fiction change across different media and about the relationship of prose fiction to other art forms such as music and dance.

Work for the course includes short exams on the assigned readings, two papers of approximately 5-pages each (one due in the middle of the quarter, with the option of revision, and the other due at the end of the quarter), and in-class writing assignments and homework writing assignments with which you will prepare to write the two papers.

Class time will be used for short lectures on relevant concepts and history, demonstrations of research and writing techniques useful for the two papers, screenings of film adaptations of the novels, and discussions generated by questions developed in your writing.

4. Book List:

1. Baum, The Wonderful World of Oz (Penguin, 1998), 9780141180854
2. Dennis, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade (Broadway Books, 2001), 9780767908191
3. Ferber, Show Boat (G.K. Hall, 1981), 9780899682815
4. Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Penguin, 1998), 9780141180694
5. Doctorow, Ragtime (Penguin, 2003), 9780812978186

This course is a survey of American “post-apocalyptic fiction” with a special interest in the ways in which “the apocalypse,” as a literary theme, enables writers to interrogate, deconstruct, and re-present their historical realities. We will consider the ways in which different writers negotiate the relationship between destruction and creation inherent in the process of imagining the world’s end, and what their visions for a post-apocalyptic America reveal about their historical realities. To a certain extent, our intellectual inquiries in this class will focus on the following questions: How does prose fiction register the anxieties of shifting technological, social, and political conditions? What do the disjunctions, discontinuities, and fragmentations that exist in these novels reveal about the ideological production, articulation, and repression of certain individual and collective identities? What alternative genealogies, histories, or critical interventions emerge when we focus on the uncertainties—the “gaps in narrative” that cannot be filled—that exist alongside the totality and finality of the world’s end?

This class fulfills the University of Washington’s “W” requirement, which means that you may apply the course towards the additional 7-10 writing credits required by the university. Writing is a critical component of this class, and you will be expected to complete 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of two major papers. You will have an opportunity to submit rough drafts, meet with me to discuss your essay, and complete substantive revisions prior to turning in each of the two major papers.

Required Texts:

• Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Norton Critical ed., ISBN 9780393951370
• George Schuyler, Black No More, Dover, ISBN 978-0486480404
• Ray Bradburry, Fahrenheit 451, Ballantine, ISBN 978-8445074879
• Albert Brooks, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, St. Martin’s, ISBN 0312591292

Additional secondary and critical materials are available electronically through Canvas.

This course is interested in exploring a variety of activist sensibilities imagined in 20th Century black feminist literature. We will begin with a critical consideration of the non-profit and NGO political labor that tends to dominate how we think about activism in the present moment—a moment characterized by scholars and activists as “NGOization” and the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” Reading feminist social science scholarship on NGO activism, we will pay particular attention to the limitations of these political imaginaries, especially their reliance on a certain understanding of “global civil society.” The majority of the course, however, will investigate alternative imaginations of activism that productively challenge our contemporary assumptions about what constitutes proper political labor. More specifically, we will engage the literature of writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker and Octavia Butler to consider how black feminists, in different historical moments, imagine what counts as activism and who is appropriately an activist, as we work towards creatively expanding dominant visions of activism today.

As a “W” course, students will take the course themes, in class writing assignments and ideas that surface in class discussion and produce several short papers, and a final 5-7 page (revised) interdisciplinary research paper. Students will also have the opportunity to practice multiple kinds of revision including conferences and peer-review.

A course reader will be available for purchase at the Ave Copy Center in January.

Possible Texts Include:

Contending Forces by Pauline Hopkins
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Meridian by Alice Walker
Bailey’s Café Gloria Naylor
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

We have the good fortune to live in Seattle, a city with a rich poetic history and an exciting contemporary culture of writing. In this class, we will begin to engage with a number of poets, living and deceased, who have produced and/or are producing work within the city, framing our discussions with the current movement to have Seattle declared a UNESCO city of literature. Towards the goal of considering that framing and poetry's (various) place(s) within Seattle's cultural context, the class will be structured to include a series of short, open-to-the-public seminars, including whenever possible the poets whose works we are reading. Students will also be expected to attend and write about at least one poetry event outside of class during the quarter.

This class will, in the context of its goals, introduce a number of ways of reading and responding to poetry, as well as questions about the generic and canonical qualities thereof; the goal is not to reach definitive conclusions, but to learn and employ ways of considering the questions and the forms in which and about which they are asked.

This is not a class about poetry as a dead thing, a thing living in textbooks or in dusty pages. Rather, it is a class which contends that poetry can exist in more than one state: in voice, in page, in body, in culture. By the end of the quarter, we'll be dealing with all of these states, and many of the liminalities which render them problematic.

NOTE: ENGL 243 is a W class, which means students will, over the course of the quarter, do at least 15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, including some opportunity for revision. This requirement will be satisfied through a series of essay assignments of varying lengths which will be due across the quarter.

It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being
an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken
scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realize our parents,
remember our grandparents, and know ourselves, and our history
is complete.
The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,
that is the story that I mean to tell, for that is what really is and
what I really know.

--Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans


When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

--Flannery O’Connor
“The Fiction Writer and His Country”

The course title and the above quotations define the main objectives of this course: to use the stories of American literature as startling narratives that reflect American history, culture, ideology, and writers’ attitudes about those matters. We will read and reflect on three centuries and four literary periods of American short fiction so as to analytically consider their historical, cultural, aesthetic, and biographical contexts. As we move through these literary time frames, we will attempt to connect American eras and authors with the substance and style of the stories penned such that by the end of the quarter, you should have a sophisticated understanding of what American literature "really is" as well as what more you'd like to read after course completion to "really know" past and present “Americas” that help to configure you in contemporary America.

The course title and the above quotation define the main objectives of this course: to see the stories of American writers in context. This course will introduce you to American literature through a careful reading of a variety of representative short stories viewed in their historical, cultural, and biographical contexts. In the next 10 weeks we will read and reflect on three centuries and five literary periods of American short fiction: (1)1819 to 1860; (2) 1861 - 1899;
(3) 1900 - 1940; (4) 1941 to 1965, and (5) 1966 to the present. As we move through these historical, cultural, and literary time frames, we will attempt to connect American eras and authors with the substance and style of the stories penned.

Requirements include active, consistent, vocal, and critically-informed discussion; essay-focused midterm and final exams; pop quizzes, presentations.

The syllabus will be distributed in person on the first day of the course, and auditing is not an option.

This course is an introduction to some of the historical, cultural and political contexts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literary production. How are concepts that are foundational to American nationhood—citizenship, law, racial differentiation, and gender—related to questions of power? Why is “culture” an especially useful site for investigating how power functions? What questions do African American literary studies allow us to ask about power and liberation, history and society? And when it comes to black producers of culture, what (counter) responses to nationhood do they think into being? Our goal is to understand how the theories and analyses that we cover in this course may bear on our reading of literary texts. Questions about history, experiences of time or temporality, and representation will be central to our inquiry. Texts may include: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

In this class the collective UW Creative Writing faculty, along with other visiting artists, will remember in
public why they do what they do. On ten sequential Tuesdays, they will speak in depth about what interests them most, including the ways and means of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and the joys and vagaries of inspiration,
education, artistic practice, and the writing life. Thursdays will constellate a literary reading series.
Discussion sections will be scheduled in between.

Serious curiosity is the only requirement for admission. Students will be expected to attend all talks, do the
assigned reading, respond to problems and exercises posed by the lecturers, and participate vigorously in the
ongoing conversation. By the end, they will have had a disciplined brush with literate passion, practiced
imaginative methods at the point of the pencil, learned something about books from people who write them, and gained a practical sense of the artist's way of knowing the world.

Conceived as a perpetual work-in-progress, according professors full freedom in designing their respective
contributions, the course will find its coherence in the conversation we leap to make of it. Sample topics: What
Is It? or, Ars Poetica; Forms of Poetry, Forms of Thought; Mythos-Minded Thinking: From Proverbs to Parables,
Stories as Metaphors in Motion; Odd Autobiography; Reading the New; Literary Collage & Blurring Boundaries; The Writing Life; The Revision Process; Closing Words.

No required text. Readings will be posted online or handed out in class. Grading will be based equally on reading
(by quiz and conversation), writing (solutions to assigned prompts), and participation (attendance and
discussion).

Repeat: this course is intended to bring infectious literate passion within earshot of as many people as possible
at the University of Washington. No formal prerequisites. Everyone is invited.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

As a “gateway” to the English major, and hence a preparation for later courses, this course is intended to introduce students to contemporary debates in literary history, literary theory, and the interpretation of literary works. We shall study both literary and critical/theoretical works, paying particular attention to the historical contexts in which they emerge and in which our own discussion of them occurs. The emphasis will be on intensive or close reading rather than extensive reading, “exemplary” rather than “representative” texts and issues. We will explore works such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland through multiple lenses including formalist, historicist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist perspectives. Course requirements will include midterm and final exams and participation in a discussion section. Students must also enroll in a writing link (English 297).

What does literature have to do with things? There’s a famous scarlet letter, a golden bowl, a lighthouse, a cookie (well, a French madeleine) and many other objects (famous or not) that populate poems, novels, and appear as props in plays. When we read, “He pulled out a gun,” we believe in some mysterious way that there really is a gun somewhere, rather than just a bunch of words on a page. Understanding how literature re-presents (that is, makes figuratively present what is literally absent) the world of things is to understand the trickiness of texts and the profound claims that literature makes on us as readers. How literature makes use of objects, that is, what the objectives of literature are or can be, will be the focus of our discussion. We will consider the ways in which literature constructs, represents, and produces the facsimile of our world of objects. We have a number of ways to think of the things that surround us—as commodities, as gifts, or treasures, or as fetishes, and writers are always faced the problem of how to translate the material world into the verbal marks on the page (like what you’re reading right now) that stand in for that materiality. As a follow-up to English 301, which is an introduction to reading texts, this course will be an introduction to reading and writing about theory and texts. For that reason, I will limit the number of literary texts, in order to spend a good deal of our time considering how to read and write about theory. Throughout the quarter we will put a few literary texts (Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own) into conversation with several theoretical takes on objects (Marx on the commodity form, Freud on the fetish, Lewis Hyde on the gift, Bill Brown on the thing). Assignments will include short writing assignments and a longer final project.

Clearly there are many ways to study literature and our understanding of the “best” or “most useful” practice(s) continues to be contested and to change over time. This course focuses in on one of the critical practices that dominates in the contemporary academy and that informs scholarship being done by members of the profession, and by members of the UW department today: Marxist materialism and related critical frameworks that often fall under labels such as “critical theory,” “cultural studies,” “feminist theory,” “critical race theory,” and “postcolonial theory.” By contrast to earlier models of literary criticism, which sought to find in literary texts transcendent messages and universal meanings, Marxist literary theory has sought to situate literary and cultural texts within their historical contexts of production and reception; to understand the power dynamics, including dynamics informed by gender, race, and class conflict, that necessarily shape textual meaning; and to understand how such conflicts impact literary content, genre, style and form.

Our study of Marxist literary theory will involve us in close, intensive reading of dense philosophical arguments about economics (a.k.a political economy), ideology (a term we will unpack as the quarter proceeds), and literature. Along the way we will read several key texts by Marx and his collaborator Engels. Among other things, this course will examine how a literary critical framework such as Marxist materialism has been developed out of a body of philosophical and political thought (Marxism), that is not necessarily concerned with literature (although Marx actually did say a few things about literature and we will consider these carefully).

Over the course of the quarter we will treat two or three literary texts/films. We will consider how our understanding of each is shaped by the critical practices explored in this course, and how these texts, in turn, reveal the (in)adequacy of Marxist theory and/or suggests new and alternative ways of thinking about cultural production and interpretation.

This course approaches the study of literature as a critical practice. The specific focus of this class will be the novel in relation to theory. For as long as the novel has been around, there has been an attempt to explain the particular kind of story it tells, and what happens when readers seek to make sense of it. Students will learn to participate in this discussion by working with a variety of critical perspectives on the matter. We will be concerned with such questions as: does the novel adhere to a particular narrative form (and does that matter)? What is the role of language in the novel? How does the novel function as a cultural artifact that both reflects and perpetuates ideology? The theorists we take up will come from various schools of thought, including those concerned with formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, new historicism, post-colonialism, race, gender and sexuality, but they all seek to account for the novel as a literary and/or cultural object.

Students will develop their own reading and writing practices as they work intensively with both theoretical and literary texts. Course requirements will include extensive reading, class discussion, a presentation, and a series of shorter response papers leading up to a 5-7 page final paper. We will take as our case study three novels, likely to be: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Catalog Description: Overview of Cultural Studies with a focus on reading texts or objects using cultural studies methods and writing analytic essays using cultural studies methods. Focuses on culture as a site of political and social debate and struggle.

This course will introduce students to one of the leading and strongest currents of literary criticism currently practiced in the U.S. and globally: Marxian cultural theory. Based on the philosophical and theoretical interventions to European thought of Karl Marx, Marxian cultural theory attends to the literary, aesthetic and cultural ramifications of Marx’s foundational understanding of the historically distinct emergence of both modernity and urban industrial capitalism.

At the broadest level, Marxian cultural theory produces nothing less than a total re-presentation of the literary and/or cultural object. Beginning with Marx before moving on to his intellectual inheritors, we will ask, firstly: What was unique of about the rise of modernity and industrial capitalism? Why did Marx argue that modernity required a wholesale rethinking of the foundations of European thought? And, lastly what method did Marx innovate and promote as a corrective to the forms of thought he argued were foundationally unsound and critically and practically useless? The second aspect of the course will then present to you a set of methods for understanding and thinking about/theorizing literary production developed by Marxian scholars in the twentieth century. We will pay close attention to both how these methods understand literary and cultural production and also why these scholars ague that under the conditions of capitalist modernity literary and cultural production becomes an essential, foundational and indissociable aspect of modern life and society. By the end of the course we will be able to perform the following action: offering a Marxian interpretation of a literary object.

A rapid study of readings taken from the Old and New Testaments, focusing mainly on those parts of the Bible with the most "literary" interest--narrative, poetic, lyric and philosophical. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and take part in open discussion of those assignments. Written work will consist entirely of a series of between five and ten in-class essays, done in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Text: The New Oxford Annotated Bible

It has become a commonplace that “race is a social construction.” However, just because race is a biological fiction doesn’t mean that racism isn’t real and, worse yet, that people don’t act out because of it. While this course falls under the broad umbrella of “Peoples of the Americas,” the focus of this course will be on different ways that notions of race have been produced over time and in different regions of North America and the Caribbean. Specifically, we will read literary depictions of Latina/o identity formation against the backdrop of the black-white color line.

Primary literary texts are likely to include such authors as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Américo Paredes, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Jose Villareal, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Ameen Rihani in addition to a course reader with contextual background readings

This course introduces African literature, one of the most dynamic and fertile literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries. We explore a variety of literary techniques that draw upon traditional oral cultures as well as European forms, and deploy satiric, realist, and experimental styles to represent African experiences. The course engages with a historical range of literature and considers the political experiences of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and decolonization as contexts for an understanding. As well as examining the specific cultural environments which frame African literary production, we will also chart broad issues such as language, race, gender, nationhood, environment, globalization, which are central to many African writers and critical commentators. Students should come away from the course with an understanding of how ideological struggles about national and postcolonial identities continue to inform global literature, and have insight into the shifting dynamics of colonialism and its aftermath. Students are expected to keep up with an intensive reading schedule.

Catalog Description: Shakespeare's career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances.

This course takes as its focus the work of the major English poets and novelists from 1790-1830. We will look at how these writers engaged with contemporary politics, religion, and aesthetic theory in a spirit of competition and collaboration. Expect to read poetry (mostly short poems) by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. We will also read three novels: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. Contemporary texts will give a glimpse of how other writers—essayists and reviewers who were less famous, perhaps, in the long view of Romanticism—were reading the poets and also weighing in on the issues at stake. Grading will consist of a weekly short informal writing, a formal essay, and midterm and final exams. A good grade in this class requires regular attendance and consistent in–class engagement.

Required texts (I will be working with Broadview to get a package deal in the UW bookstore that should help to keep costs down):
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Age of Romanticism - Second Edition (Broadview), 9781551114040.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Broadview), 9781551111254.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (Broadview), 9781551114163.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview), 9781554811038.

An introduction to the period of American modernism (1900 to WW II), with a focus on fiction. The course places representative works in relation to literary culture and social and historical context. Topics covered include nationalism, migration, race, gender, and the impact of the visual arts on literary modernism, as well as the relation between modernity/ modernization (social, economic, and technological transformation) and modernism (revolution in literary style): to what extent is modernism the emblematic modern style? If this is the case, what motivates the persistence of “obsolete” styles (such as realism) during the so-called modernist period? Guiding concepts will be the idea of alternative modernities, and the significance of location/space as well as history.
Assignments: two short papers, one mid-term.

Required Readings:
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Directions)
Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (Arte Publico Press)
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (Bedford edition)
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (Simon & Schuster)
Jean Toomer, Cane (Perennial)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Norton Edition)

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Introduction
This course offers an introduction to the environmental humanities. Literature, culture, and the environment are explored in their interlinkages along five examples: the study of food and consumption, animals and the post-human perspective, waste, climate change, and the question of diversity in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a concept that describes the scale of human impact on the Earth. The term was first pronounced by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen when they measured thin layers of carbon deposit in the Earth around 1800 and consequently announced a new geological epoch in which humankind has a significant influence on the Earth’s atmosphere. The idea is that human impact is growing in the area of land use, ecosystems, biodiversity, climate, and species extinction. We will explore the cultural dimension of the concept of the Anthropocene and how the study of literature and culture can contribute to an understanding of the historical, ethical, and aesthetic dimension of this new era of the human.

Readings (course pack available at Ave Copy Center)
Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Christmas Banquet”
Brothers Grimm, “Little Red Riding Hood”
The Medieval Bestiary
Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”
Conversations with Ian McEwan
The World Café

Streaming Media (available through Odegaard)
Fatih Akin, Polluted Paradise
Balog, Chasing Ice
Emmerich, The Day After Tomorrow

Team Learning
This class is taught in the team learning approach. Students will join groups of 5-7 members and work together as a cohesive learning team throughout the quarter. We will use a variety of interactive formats in class including lecture, class discussion, team debates, and presentation of team projects. Students are expected to attend each class period with all assignments completed by the beginning of class and ready to engage in and do online research about the topic of the day (bring your laptops). At the beginning of each unit, students will undergo a thorough readiness assurance process to insure that they are accountable as individuals. The Readiness assurance Test (RAT) consists of questions about a set of pre-assigned readings. Students will take this test twice, once as individuals, and again as teams. Both tests will be scored as soon as possible for immediate feedback. Class time will be devoted to the discussion of the readings and to task-based assignments that apply the critical concepts from the readings and discussions to projects. At the end of the quarter, team members will evaluate each other’s contributions to the team in a peer assessment process. Each team builds a portfolio with all their project assignments and will showcase their work at the end of each unit. At the end of the quarter, all teams will compete with their portfolios during a student conference to collect a maximum number of points.

Global climate change has been described as the “end of nature.” What does that mean for art? For literature? What is “nature” anyway? This course will explore the implications for reading, enjoying and thinking about imaginative literature and art in the context of global environmental crisis. We will situate current writing about environmental issues within the much longer trajectory of the ecological imagination, reaching back to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and forward to our struggles to come to terms with oil spills, extinction, and anthropogenic climate change in the 21st century. We will read explicitly “environmental” nonfiction alongside “classic” works to think about how environmental concerns frame our reading of the past. We will also read recent imaginative literature that tackles environmental crisis directly, placing novels alongside films and photography in order to think about the various challenges of picturing ecological change, which is often slow and invisible as it is pervasive. In the process, we will think about how literature and art help us to think about humans, nature, and the environment in ways that may not be accessible via scientific, political, or even ethical debate.

Possible readings include: Mary Shelly, Frankenstein; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Bill McKibben, The End of Nature; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, as well as films, photography and other media.

Assignments will include both critical essays and opportunities for students to engage in their own creative work if they choose.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

In this intermediate level prose writing class, we will be reading and writing short fiction through the lens of form. The quarter will start with an exploration of traditional linear narratives, move on to a consideration of more experimental forms of short prose, and culminate with each student creating a physical book in which the text will reflect the specific form of the physical object. No previous art or book-making experience is necessary (I’ll be guiding you through the steps and providing basic supplies), but expect to do a LOT of reading and writing. Weekly short writing assignments, two complete stories, and the final book project.

Text: course reader

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Focus of course: brevity, organization of brief sections into a larger whole, principles of composition. We’ll discuss 14 chapters (intro and 13 chapters) from Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: An Anthology of Very Brief Prose, which I co-edited and co-wrote with former UW MFA student Elizabeth Cooperman and which is being published next year. Get photocopy from Ave Copy Center, 4141 University Way. Several short assignments, modeled on the essays/stories/prose-poems/commentaries in the book.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Medieval romance in its cultural and historical setting, with concentration on the evolution of Arthurian romance.

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most recognizable literary character ever created. The Holmes stories have spawned innumerable adaptations for the stage, radio, television, and film. The fame of detective himself has long since outstripped that of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes’s iconic image with deerstalker hat and pipe appears in advertisements, neighborhood watch signs, political cartoons, and the tiles of the Baker Street stop on the London Underground. Many people continue to believe he was real.

Holmes's London was capital of the world's first industrial society, heart of a vast empire, and arguably the first instance of an environment in which even the weather was a product of human action. The great detective emerged at a time when the bounds between nature and culture, human and animal, science and religion were being challenged, and that the changes wrought upon the physical environment by industrial modernity were becoming increasingly clear. Holmes’s cases deal explicitly with the dazzling new complexities of modern existence: dark secrets are brought home from distant lands, strange animals and foreign substances are loosed upon the metropolis, technological inventions from the telegraph to the military submarine to the automobile make their appearances alongside Holmes’s invariably “malodorous” chemical experiments. Above all, the Holmes stories reveal the city of London itself––its teeming millions, its secrets, “outré” occurrences, its opaque complexities, shrouded in the “dun-coloured fogs” curling at the windows of 221b Baker Street.

Reading all the major Holmes stories alongside a selection of theoretical and contextual materials and a sampling of related fiction, this course will the late-Victorian era in which Holmes emerged as well as his ongoing relevance and appeal. In the process, this course will help us think about the way literary studies rubs against an array of fields, from urban studies to the history of science and technology, empire, postcolonial studies, and cosmopolitanism. Reading detective fiction in this context is particularly productive because the cases not only reveal so many of the cultural anxieties prevalent in the late-Victorian era, but also dramatize Holmes’s “reading” of the situation and weighing of evidence. Thus, they offer a paradigm for the methods of literary and historical inquiry.

I’ve borrowed the title from a series of fictions later produced as a television series about queer life in 1970’s San Francisco. This course is unlikely to return to that place and time, but I invoke the title to foreground what this capstone course will examine and to flag its approach. During the quarter we’ll read a number of urban fictions alongside visual media (eg., film and telelvision) and social theory that examine the city. A number of these texts explicitly or implicitly represent urban life as the model of national community; many home in on the disparity between the poor and the relatively well to do and/or the differential impacts of urban renewal. We’ll start our examination of the city with a flash back to the turn of the twentieth century representations of the city, briefly touch down on mid twentieth century representations of it, and fast forward to the present on which we will spend most of our time and which will include an examination of Seattle. Active participation in class, short responses to assigned readings, a group project, and 7-8 page final paper are required. Expect to read short fiction, essays and social theory—all collected in a course pack—in relation to visual media (for starters, Bladerunner and excerpts from The Wire) a few novels and one book length journalistic expose on New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. Books we’ll definitely read are Wideman’s Two Cities; Eggers Zeitoun

Diaries, murders, weddings, and houses: this class focuses on American and British novels featuring strong female characters. The novels are written starting in the 1920s and through the 1960s—and then we jump forward in time to a 2013 novel in order to see where we stand today. We will 1. engage some under-read writers like E. M. Delafield, Gladys Mitchell, Dorothy Baker, and Barbara Pym (whose excellent novel gives this course its title), 2. focus on issues of privacy and forms of the public that attend them. 3. engage the country house novel as a genre, both in terms of how funny it can be (Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm) and how scary (Du Maurier's Rebecca); in keeping with the scary, or at least the pseudo-scary, we'll have a section on "Minds and Murder" where we stay at home with Miss Marple and go to the opera with Dame Bradley—the former a well-known spinster and the latter a forgotten (but not repressed) female psychoanalyst, two of the foremost fictional detectives of the so-called Golden Age of Mystery. We will conclude with Claire Messud’s 2013 The Woman Upstairs, which recently raised a demi-brouhaha about the issue of likeability in regard to female characters. We read a novel a week—that’s a lot—and you will need to have read the hilarious Gentlemen Prefer Blondes before the course begins. It flies by, believe me.

In addition to wanting to read some good novels, there are several other reasons you might take this class: 1. an interest in novels about and by women; 2. an interest in so-called middlebrow writing and a desire to interrogate the term; 3. an interest the psychological and philosophical issues that go along with privacy: solipsism, sexuality, and the construction of identity. 4. An interest in thinking critically about the issue of, as the critic Blakey Vermeule puts it, “why we care about literary characters”—and we will be reading words by her too.

The class is discussion based, and students will write brief response papers and two papers.

Texts may include: Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925); E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1931); Gladys Mitchell, Death at the Opera (1934); Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage (1930); Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932); Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938); Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952); Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding (1962); Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs (2013)

Catalog Description: Reviews the research, core debates, and politics tht have shaped the practice, teaching and study of writing. Introduces theoretical and methodological approaches that inform the teaching and learning of writing

This course is an introduction to linguistic and rhetorical study of the law. Rather than taking literature as our object of study, we will take the documents created and used in the legal world. Our focus will be on written texts, and on learning to analyze some of those texts. We’ll begin by becoming familiar with appellate decisions, a prototypical legal text, and one that travels beyond the legal world into other settings. We’ll also learn something about precedent and why it’s important in law and legal interpretation. Then we’ll learn something about how to use legal resources. These tools will be necessary for all of your assignments in this course.

We’ll examine both civil and criminal law. We will study how language figures into both criminal prosecutions and civil trial. We will then spend some time learning how lawyers learn the language of the law in law school. No prior legal knowledge is expected.

Catalog Description: Intensive verse workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student poetry.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This advanced workshop allows you to focus on your own passions as writers. Over the quarter, you’ll write two long-ish stories or works of literary nonfiction (12-15 pages) and revise one at the end of the quarter. You’ll also each do a presentation to the class on a favorite short story or piece of literary nonfiction. Class time will focus on workshopping, presentations, and discussions of revision.

No required texts. Students will post the stories they’ll present online.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Prof. Alys Eve Weinbaum
English 494A
Winter 2014

Biopower in Literature and Theory

In recent discussions about the shape, scope, and formation of power in the context of economic globalization and neoliberalism the idea of biopower (first developed by Michel Foucault) has gained primacy. In this course we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of biopower as a description and analysis of power in the contemporary moment as well as its relevance to our understanding the deployment of power over “life itself” at several key points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which, of course, witnessed not only colonization and industrialization, but also racial slavery and its demise. In so doing we will construct a genealogy of the term within Foucault’s work and across a variety of philosophical and theoretical texts that directly engage with Foucault. We will also explore recent scholarship that implicitly supplements or in other ways “corrects” Foucault’s theory through engagement with questions of incarceration, sexuality, race, slavery, human reproduction, and the ascendance of the genome. The aim of the course is thus threefold: 1) to excavate a genealogy of the concept of biopower in Foucault’s work; 2) to explore the various ways in which this concept has been set to work by other thinkers; and 3) to collectively expand and refine the concept of biopower with the goal of making the concept useful for our own literary critical purposes. To this end roughly half of the course will be devoted to analysis of carefully selected literary and filmic texts that in some way treat biopower and/or enable us to theorize it further. In this sense we will read literature/film as theory, and, in turn, we will explore the relevance of biopolitical theory to various forms of literary and cultural study.

Authors to be considered will include a selection of the following: Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Enzo Traverso, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Michelle Alexander, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Nikolas Rose, Paul Gilroy, Loic Wacquant, Dorothy Roberts, Herman Melville, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Michael Bay, Lars Von Trier, Alfonso Curson, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Requirements: During the course of the quarter students will participate in group presentations, will contribute on a regular basis to reading journals (which will be handed in), and will produce a final research paper of 10-12 pages (including abstract and bibliography).

I'm Not OK, You're OK
I'm Not OK, You're Not OK
I'm OK, You're Not OK
I'm OK, You're OK

-- Four Life Positions from Thomas Anthony Harris, I’m OK, You’re OK (1969)

I’m OK, You’re a Drone

-- Bookshelf Title from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999)

This class will explore the rise of “sensation” as a category of social, cultural, economic, and political experience. Sensation has been variously associated with feeling, emotion, viscerality, embodiment, touch, smell, and sight. Coupled with the category of “reason,” sensation has historically been used to organize relations among those caught up in the wide net of European Enlightenment. European colonial expansion and domestic industrialization used specific criteria of Enlightenment “reason” and “sensation” to distribute recognition and punishment across patterns of racialization, indigeneity, differential modes of gendering and sexing bodies, and the making of distinct “cultures” of class and region. At one end of the spectrum, the categories rational and reasonable were reserved for those at the top of aristocratic/capitalist, Christian/European supremacist, and masculinist/heteropatriarchal hierarchies of European Enlightenment. At the other end of the spectrum, the categories emotional and sensual were used to describe any formation of knowledge and experience not articulated to the top of this hierarchy. And yet, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and its white settler colonies, the category of “sensation” was used as a mode of articulation that connected these two ends of the spectrum without closing the gap between them. Sensation, carefully cultivated and properly experienced, would create a bond between new national communities and would enable emergent social groups to name a shared experience: bourgeois, “white,” democratic, familial. In the wrong hands, however, sensation threatened to become merely “sensational,” seeking cheap effects rather than high value participation in elite regimes of aesthetics and politics. Hence the sensational also came to denote the excessive – that which exceeds conventional approaches to the socio-political, that which is simply too
much body or soul and not enough reason, judgment or critique.

These two categories – reason and sensation—continue to structure life in the twentieth century, although their operation across and through race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and region is increasingly confusing and difficult to map. The once explicitly politicized category of “sensation” has become more strongly associated with the category of “feeling,” which continues to mobilize new social formations of belonging and exclusion while at the same time modifying the meaning of the “political” as such. Feelings are moralized and normalized, rather than politicized, and we are caught up in networks of allegedly good and bad feelings, normal and abnormal sensations, right and wrong visceral reactions. This changing framework for reason and sensation is most familiar in the rise of “self-help” referenced in the epigraphs for this class, where feelings are linked to personal –rather than political--health and well-being, while political health and well-being is increasingly linked to personal feeling and the management of life itself (see Alys Weinbaum’s concurrent Honors Seminar on “Biopower”). These two epigraphs remind us that our own age of self-help, and its current impasse in the rationales of pharmacology and warfare as “cure,” is a relatively recent phenomena best understood in relation to a longer genealogy of reason and sensation. Thus our class will begin in the nineteenth century but move quickly into key flashpoints of the twentieth, exploring the changing technologies and practices of capitalism and governance relating sensation and the socio-political. Our focus throughout will be on what theorist Fred Moten calls “fugitives of the Enlightenment,” those lives that slip through the yoke of categories yet remain semi-recognizable in relation to them. While all of our primary texts are published in the United States, each text is fundamentally international in orientation and provides an opportunity to think about sensation in a transnational frame. FYI: There is a good deal of queer sex in this reading, meaning not just same-sex sexual practice but also confusing or uncategorizable practices of bodies, pleasures, and unpleasures. We will create shared practices for discussion in relation to this material.

Authors to be considered include a selection of the following: Thomas Paine, Toussaint Louverture, C.L.R James, Herman Melville, Karl Marx, Djuna Barnes, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Robin Kelley, Hortense Spillers, Rabih Alameddine, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Povinelli, Cindy Patton, Lars von Trier, Katherine Hayles, Arthur Longworth, Samuel Delaney.

Requirements: During the course of the quarter students will participate in group presentations, will contribute on a regular basis to reading journals (which will be handed in), and will produce a final research paper of 10-12 pages in stages (including abstract and bibliography).

English 498A + English 491C = a capstone service-learning seminar for English majors taught by English Department faculty member and Community Literacy Program Director Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill. This linked pair of courses offers an opportunity for English Majors interested in public education to gain crucial school-based experience, serves as a bridge between undergraduate and Teacher Education Program curriculum, and gives you an opportunity to work in partnership with public school students and teachers as you complete your undergraduate degree.

In English 498A students will meet twice weekly on campus (MW 11:30-1:20) in a writing-intensive capstone seminar focused on learning effective methods of working with public school students, exploring some central challenges and opportunities for public education, and using writing and presentation to inquire into, develop and communicate your thinking about these issues. English 498A includes research instruction and revision conferences with the instructor, and writing projects focused on education-related careers and graduate school applications offered in partnership with the UW Career Center.

In English 491C (C/NC; 1-3 credits) you put what you learn on campus into action, volunteering (4-5 hours a week, on a schedule you arrange) at our partner public school in north Seattle. English 491C will appear on your transcript as an internship. English 491 may be used toward the field work requirement or as an elective in the Education, Learning and Society Minor, and provides documentation of school-based experience needed for application to Teacher Education programs.

For add codes and with questions: contact instructor Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill, esoneill@uw.edu