How has feminism changed historically in the post-1965 era? What new debates have emerged in our contemporary moment, where public figures like Beyoncé and Chimamanda Adichie both claim feminism as an ideological standpoint while others claim #WeDon’tNeedFeminism? How do these standpoints shape contemporary feminism? How have the public discussions of feminism shaped the dynamics of feminism in the academy and the public? What are the stakes of this movement in the here and now and how does this in turn motivate new publics to (re)engage with feminism and its social justice cause? Finally, what stakes might students have in these conversations about feminism? In this course, we will employ a variety of primary and secondary sources to generate thoughtful conversation and pursue intellectually driven lines of inquiry into feminism as a social justice movement. The course will be divided between two sequences. The first sequence will involve foundational texts from the end of second-wave feminism into third-wave feminism; this first sequence will serve as a frame for reading texts in sequence two. Texts for Sequence One will include selections from Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class (1981), bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman (1981), and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). In Sequence Two, we will jump to the contemporary moment and look at current publications that take up the question of feminism in what many are calling the ‘fourth wave’. These texts will include selections from Michelle Cliff's If I Could Write This in Fire (2008), Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black (2011), Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013), and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (2014).

Students are expected to come to class and intellectually engage with the material as well as engage with their peers in the form of small and large group discussions. Please note: This course is a “W” class, which means it is both a reading and writing intensive class. Thus, students should expect reading a reasonable amount of primary texts. Three papers will be assigned: 1 academic paper, 1 creative project with a critical academic writing component, and an in-class written critical reflection essay.

4. Book List:

Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (1981) ISBN: 978-0394713519

bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman? (1981) ISBN: 978-0896081291

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) ISBN: 978-0895941220

Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write This In Fire (2008) ISBN: 978-0816654741

Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black (2011) ISBN: 978-0385523394

Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013) ISBN: 978-1608197651

Roxana Gay, Bad Feminist (2014) ISBN: 978-0062282712

How would you write your life story? Where would you begin? How would you paint the people in your life as characters? Would your tone be formal, personal, dramatic, sarcastic, comical? What events would you highlight? What would you choose to leave out? Consider the most emotionally heightened experiences—positive and negative—you’ve ever had. How might your friends or family write about those same events in different ways? Telling a story about actual lived experience demands a writer to make deliberate choices, and sacrifices, in each and every sentence. This course will explore these challenges in diverse texts by women writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Course texts focus especially on place, displacement, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and identity.

The dizzying list of critical terms falling under the umbrella concept of “life writing” goes on and on: autobiography, autofiction, memoir, literary biography, biographical fiction, autobiographical fiction, graphic memoir, autoethnography. What drives the desire to categorize and qualify such specific genres when it comes to writing about life experiences? Are these labels helpful or limiting? What does it mean to obsessively pursue truth, fact, and history in a document of subjective narrative? How do we understand the relationship between individual and cultural memory through these genres? In what ways do documentation and artistic expression converge in various forms of life writing? How do different forms—prose fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, spoken word, comics—allow authors to write their lives in different ways?

Readings will include works by Zitkala-Ša, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Michelle Cliff, Marjane Satrapi, Azar Nafisi, and selections from The Moth: True Stories Told Live podcast.

Course Objectives:
This course will develop students’ critical reading, thinking, and writing skills through class discussions; low-stakes writing in weekly blogging and in-class writing assignments; and formal writing in a creative multimodal project, and a final essay that will expand on and revise material generated in previous assignments. Students will also learn to articulate an understanding of their own reading and writing processes, and how these processes shape the original lines of inquiry students choose to explore in their essays.

Required Materials:
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976)
Michelle Cliff, Abeng (1984), and If I Could Write this in Fire (2008)
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2000)
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003)

Other materials will be made available electronically.



Assessment:
Participation 30%
Weekly Blogging 20%
Midterm Project 25%
Final Paper 25%

This course fulfills the University’s W (writing) requirement, as well as the VLPA (visual, literary, and performing arts) requirement.

Please note that this course requires a heavy reading load and meets at 8:30am. Participation in every single class period is crucial to your success in this course. If you fall behind in the reading, just come talk to me. Do not miss class. If you think making it to every session at 8:30am will be a problem for you, you may want to consider finding another course.

Texts for the course will largely consist of short fiction, but poetry, a novella, theory, literary criticism, & a film screening will also be assigned.

The course will provide students with three different axes to approach the reading of literature: 1) close reading of language & structure v. distant reading’s appraisal of genre & historical development 2) symptomatic reading for political & psychological ramifications in a text v. reparative reading for aesthetic & emotional pleasures 3) approaches focused on time & narrative v. approaches focused on space & setting

The genres in question will be ghost and detective fictions. Both arose at similar points during 19th century modernity. Both are pleasurable sources of reading. Both favor as settings bourgeois domiciles under perceived sieges. Both pose doubled narratives, whether the story of the crime & the story of the detection of the crime or the story of the haunting & the origin of the ghost.

The course satisfies UW’s W (writing) requirement: students will submit two 5-7 page papers with revisions (one due at mid-term, one due at the end of the term). Other assignments may include small research assignments, short in-class or homework writing assignments, or a presentation. The course also satisfies the VLPA (visual, literary, and performing arts) requirement as well as English majors' pre-1900 requirement.

Required texts: Course packet

A Century of Detection: Twenty Great Mystery Stories, 1841–1940 Ed. John Cullen Gruesser (0786446501)

The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Gaskell to Bierce Ed. Michael Newton (0141442360)

Ghost Stories of Henry James Ed. Martin Scofield (1840220708)

This class will use literature from the early twentieth century to explore the distinctive possibilities and risks that urban environments presented to women. In particular, cities represented spaces of intellectual, social, and sexual freedom but also focused centers of alienation, imbalanced power, and potential violence. Taking London and New York as our principal locales, we’ll examine poetry, non-fiction, short stories, and novels by authors who may include Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, Anita Loos, Sarah Grand, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rebecca West, and Mina Loy. In order to put these authors in conversation with contemporary commentary on the city and effects of urbanization, we’ll read literary works alongside short pieces of journalism and sociology.

This material will provide opportunities for developing academic writing and revision skills. Grading will be based on participation, short assignments, and formal papers, and students can expect to be reading and writing in preparation for every class meeting. Class time will be divided between large- and small-group discussions and short lectures.

The goal of this course will be to, from a variety of angles, examine texts that investigate the role of surveillance and observation in modern culture. This theme has become even timelier in the wake of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks—a confirmation of our lingering fears of a massive network of domestic and international surveillance. Apart from the obvious intrusions of personal privacy and the, at best, iffy information this level of surveillance provides, what are the stakes of living in a culture of surveillance and control? How does this reorient how an individual knows their world, other people, and themselves? How does this control manifest itself in the knowledge of our bodies, or the policing of them? We will be looking at texts in this course that engage in some way with those anxieties, whether from a personal, academic, or literary perspective. As well, this course is multimodal, incorporating film, graphic novels, and various types of literature and writing into our exploration of this theme.

Novels:
Little Brother, Doctorow
Neuromancer, Gibson
The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood
White Noise, DeLillo

Films:
The Conversation
Gattaca

Graphic Novels:
Pyongyang, Guy DeLisle
City of Glass, Karasik & Auster

Poetry:
Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics
Automaton Biographies, Larissa Lai

Critical Work:
Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
The Politics of Life Itself, Nikolas Rose

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.

We don’t usually think of “Rhetoric” and “Science” as two words that belong in the same sentence. “Rhetoric” is often used to describe language practices that are showy but intentionally deceptive (as in “empty rhetoric”). Meanwhile, scientific argument is all about the transparent communication of facts. So, there’s no rhetoric in science… right? Right? This course will introduce you to a scholarly field that believes otherwise: the “Rhetoric of Science.” We will learn some basics about rhetoric, which we will define as any strategic use of language and symbols to get things done in the world. Then each week, we will use a different rhetorical strategy to look at a contemporary scientific issue, including topics such as genetics and global warming.

Class projects will require students to identify, explore, and respond to the rhetorical aspects of a scientific topic of their choosing. We will consider both the consequences of scientific rhetoric, as well as how rhetoric might be deployed as a tool for social action and intervention. This course meets the University’s W-credit requirement and will include an in-class presentation, a 7-10 page final paper, and informal weekly writing.

No background in rhetoric or in science is necessary to take this course. This course will be particularly beneficial to individuals interested in professions in the sciences as well as law, education, business, public relations, and journalism.

This course will turn to American popular culture as a source of reflection on the idea of the superhuman. We will consider how this concept has been gendered, so we will examine examples of both the superman and the superwoman. The course will begin with some readings in science-fictional representation of this concept in order to define some of the problems associated with representations and narratives of the superhuman. While I have not yet made final decisions about the reading list, in this section of the course we will probably read Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator (1930), an acknowledged influence on the first successful comic-book superhero, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s Superman (1938), along with Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), and short stories by C.L. Moore, Philip K. Dick, and Ted Chiang. We will then turn to the earliest comic-book superheroes, from the WWII period, with a focus on Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and possibly Captain America. In this period, the concept of the superman was potentially politically problematic, given its association with fascist rhetorics of the master race. We may use the book The Superhero Reader to clarify the historical debates about the superhero figure.
The course will then turn to more contemporary graphic novels that reevaluate and reimagine the figure of the superhero. Examples may include Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen; Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels; Warren Ellis and John Casaday’s Planetary; Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman; Alan Moore and Gene Ha’s Top 10; either Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Sleeper or Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon’s Powers; Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero; and G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel. I expect to end the course by reading some recent attempts to narrate superheroes in print fiction, probably using the story collection Super Stories of Heroes & Villains, ed. Claude Lalumiere. As time permits, we might read another superhero novel by Austin Grossman, Samit Basu, Ayize Jama-Everett, or Carrie Vaughn. Again as time permits, we will probably consider some examples of cinematic and televisual narratives, including The Avengers or Arrow.
In addition to consideration of the historical development of the superhero and the superhuman, some of the topics we will discuss will include the ways in which superhero narratives encode cultural and historical fantasies; the generic nature of the superhero narrative, especially its incorporation and hybridization of multiple genres, most notable in the emergence of the superhero “universe”; formal innovation in the comics medium associated with superhero narratives; social and cultural diversity, including feminist, African American, and Asian American appropriations of the superhero genre; and transmedia adaptations and crossovers.
Assignments for the course will include a midterm and a final exam, both including a take-home essay as well as an in-class component, as well as a participation grade to be determined through the discussion sections.

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.

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.

The course will provide a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the literature of the Middle Ages, in a survey that will attempt to place texts remote from our modern era in their social and historical contexts. For this offering of the course, an emphasis will be placed on the fictional "universes" implicit in various medieval conceptions of the Otherworld, as well as theoretical analyses of boundary-crossing and "liminality." We will read and discuss important works of prose and poetry from the early Middle Ages and the Middle English periods, including works by a range of Anglo-Saxon poets and prose authors; neglected Middle English works including, _The Owl and the Nightingale_ and treatments of the _Morte Arthure_ theme written before the time of Malory; and a selection of non-canonical items. There will be a mid-term, final, and major term paper.

This course provides a survey of British literature from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries with a special emphasis on gothic literature. Before audiences went to the movies to delight in the terror of horror films, readers indulged similar impulses when they read gothic literature, a literary form filled with ghosts, monsters, creaking hallways, and mysterious moanings meant to instill fear in its readers. So, one of the questions we will ask throughout this course will be: why is it that we not only choose, but enjoy, being frightened? Further, why is it that this fearful enjoyment provided by the gothic rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, and remained one of the most popular literary forms through the nineteenth century (and beyond)? We will be reading gothic novels, poetry, and critical essays as a means of understanding not only the literature of this period, but also the social, economic, and political forces that shape this time of radical historical changes. Though our reading material comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will think together about how and why the fascination with fear introduced in the gothic is something we still feel today.

Texts may include The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe), The Monk (Lewis), selections of romantic poetry by Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), and others.

This course fulfills the University’s W (writing) requirement, as well as the VPLA (visual, performing, and literary arts) requirement.

This quarter we will be reading novels and short stories written by British authors over the during the twentieth century. We will consider the development of literary modernism early in the century, and the later emergence of post-modernism after World War II in relation to major social, technological, and cultural changes of the times. One particular emphasis of the class will be on the role of art and the artist in modern life; another will be on how the content and structure of many texts reveal anxiety over new attitudes towards sexuality and gender roles. Reading for the class will include fiction by D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan.

Introduces Shakespeare's career as dramatist, with study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.

The United States has been described as a “nation of immigrants” and a “melting pot” of multiculturalism. These conceptions of American nationhood seem in tension with some US immigration policies, including the construction of fence line on the Mexico-U.S. border and the practice of holding non-criminal immigrants indefinitely in detention centers.


This course investigates how Caribbean-American writers conceive of migration to the United States. We will read several novels by these writers alongside theoretical and cultural works that aim to define and/or chronicle the migration experience. We will ask questions such as: how do narratives and theories of migration work within and/or move beyond the contradictions outlined above? What conceptions of migration and immigration are most helpful, and which are most limiting? We will explore these questions through close reading of prose fiction, where we look closely at imagery, language, form, characterization, and narration. We will attempt to connect these works to the broader cultural and historical context of the Caribbean and of immigration to the United States. In other words, we will try to discover why migration narratives matter in real life.


My classroom and course are built around my high expectations for students. This course is reading- and writing-intensive and fulfills the "W" requirement. We will examine these texts deeply and critically. This course will help you to read “between the lines”—more critically and deeply—to better understand the works as well as the literary forms of the forms they inhabit. The classroom will provide a forum for dynamic discussions that will require a high level of thinking and participation from all students.

The Harlem Renaissance is often conceptualized as a period of cultural production reflecting the vibrancy and celebration of African-American culture within Harlem. As African-Americans throughout the country migrated to Harlem to participate in this artistic movement, writers within Harlem simultaneously began to imagine the position of the “New Negro” in both the United States and in the black diasporic world more broadly. In this class, we will read a variety of fiction produced in this era to explore the relationship between the critiques of American racial politics and the explorations of diasporic thought that emerge in this era. Primary texts may include fiction by James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Schuyler. We will also read several theoretical and scholarly texts to help inform in-class discussion and writing assignments.


This course counts as a “W” credit and will require the completion of two 2-4 page papers and a 5-8 page research paper. Class sessions will include a combination of lecture, discussion, group work, and writing assignments.

By the end of Victoria’s reign, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population was governed, in various forms, by Britain--hence the famous adage: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” This expansive empire made Britain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth in the nineteenth century, but it also produced an imperial culture beset with ambivalence, conflict, and fear. This class will explore certain overarching themes (e.g. empire, national/imperial/colonial identity) in connection with various potentially problematic issues and concepts (e.g. freedom, citizenship, race) as they are taken up in thee exciting Victorian novels: Wilkie Collins’ /The Moonstone/, Bram Stoker’s /Dracula/, and Joseph Conrad’s /Heart of Darkness/. Students will be expected to engage critically with course topics and readings, both in class and through the composition of academic papers.

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Underworlds are both real and metaphoric: subways and coalmines, Hades and Hell, criminal subcultures, political undergrounds, horror-movie basements and windowless office cubicles. Stories of these underworlds address the most profound questions of our lives: what happens after we die? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are our responsibilities to our world, each other, ourselves? This class looks at works of art and literature from Russia, the US, and Europe, set in many different underworlds, which intersect with and shape our perceptions of the world around us today. You will learn to recognize the mythic underworld and understand how it functions not only in art, but in your own life.

>
> This course is for anyone curious about poetry and willing to experiment with ways of close reading poems! Some questions we will wrestle with throughout the quarter include: how can we “enter” a poem? What formal techniques do poets employ (or break) and why? What is the relationship between form and content? What are the stakes of poetry today?

> In addition to reading poems, we will engage essays on poetics, including essays and letters from poets such as Aimé Césaire, John Keats, Frederico García Lorca, Marianne Moore, Claudia Rankine, and others. This course also seeks to consider poetry not as a dusty old book, but as something /alive, current, /and/ full of potential/. Students will be required to attend and reflect on at least one poetry reading in the local Seattle literary community.
>
> As part of a “W” course, students will be writing and revising two substantial papers. In-class discussions, short response papers, paper proposals, and presentations will provide opportunities with which to develop these two longer papers.
>

Course Description: We’ll be reading a wide range of American literary texts, from poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to novels by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison. Students in this course should expect to do lots of reading, and they should come prepared to record their responses to all reading assignments through detailed journal entries keyed to each session of the course. Several papers will also be required. Two major issues that we’ll be grappling with are the challenges that these text pose to: 1) the often unexamined American concept of e pluribus unum—one indivisible national whole emerging out of many strands; 2) the tendency to think of American time as progressing forward into a future that displaces the past, makes historical memory largely irrelevant, validates youth over age, and directs attention away from current disappointments toward forthcoming promise and hope. In contrast to the concept of e pluribus unum, the focus in this course will be on how shifting voices and perspectives from disparate dimensions of U.S. culture often collide to the point of ambiguity, friction, and dissonance; they resist easy synthesis, although their collisions often prove to be considerably more fascinating, and far less dismal, than naïve dismissals of dissonance sometimes assume. We’ll also be exploring challenges to the glib assumption that time inevitably progresses forward in the U.S.A. As Ralph Ellison writes in Invisible Man, he has learned that history often moves like a “boomerang” rather than an “arrow.”

Required Texts:

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (Course Pack); also for purchase at the U Bookstore: Hawthorne, THE PORTABLE HAWTHORNE; Frederick Douglass, NARRATIVE; Emily Dickinson, THE COMPLETE POEMS; Rebecca Harding Davis, LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS AND OTHER STORIES; Twain, HUCKLEBERRY FINN; Kate Chopin, THE AWAKENING; Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY; Ralph Ellison, INVISIBLE MAN

This course will examine the historical currents that necessitated the emergence of an Asian Pacific American literary sensibility, in conjunction with a consideration of the difficulties and possibilities inherent to in this categorization. Asian American populations have been deeply impacted by restrictive immigration legislation and American foreign policy, putting its peoples in a unique position for defining Americanness. How do artists with an Asian ancestry challenge a country that ostensibly celebrates diversity yet looks with suspicion on the foreign? We will read the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, the essays of Carlos Bulosan and Alex Tizon, and novels by Annie Choi and Chang-rae Lee, as well as watch Margaret Cho’s I’m the One that I Want.

Annie Choi (required). Estimated enrollment 40
Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (April 3, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 0641986696
• ISBN-13: 978-0641986697

Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (required) Estimated enrollment 40
• Paperback: 349 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade; First Edition edition (March 1, 1996)
• ISBN-10: 1573225312
• ISBN-13: 978-1573225311


***


Bich Minh Nguyen, Pioneer Girl: a novel (required). Estimated enrollment 40
• Publisher: Viking Adult (February 6, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670025097
• ISBN-13: 978-0670025091

Alex Tizon, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (June 10, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547450486
• ISBN-13: 978-0547450483

The creative force of language is nowhere so apparent as in the fictional languages that we invent. The earliest constructed language (or conlang) that we have records of is by a twelfth century nun, and people have been crafting languages ever since: to create community, to solve social problems, and to tell a good story. This course will give you an introduction to the tools for approaching invented languages analytically: the study of sound systems in language (phonology), and the study of the way that words and sentences are put together (morphosyntax). We will then examine invented languages as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

We will read Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, with its account of auxiliary languages like Esperanto, and we will consider speculative fictional depictions of conlangs by J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Burgess, Richard Adams, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Cathy Park Hong, as well as the screen depictions of Klingon, Na'vi, and Dothraki. We will also look at the role of the internet in the recent explosion of interest in and circulation of invented language; this is, according the Guardian newpaper, a "golden age of fictional languages."
This course satisfies the university "W" requirement for intensive writing. No background in linguistics or literature is necessary, only enthusiasm.

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.

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.

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: 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 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.

This course is a general introduction to the study of English literature. By focusing on some key texts from the English Renaissance, Romanticism, and the modern period, I will try to give you a sense of the shape of the history of literature written in English. I will also keep generally in view the context of social history within which literature evolves over this period.

We will start with what I consider to be the pivotal period in modern history, around 1800, when European civilization (note: this includes the U.S.) began its final, fateful movement toward the world as we know it today. Science, industrialization, globalization, urbanization, democratic revolution, skepticism about Christianity: all of these forces are gathering around 1800. We will approach our discussion of these large historical forces through the spiritual and literary reaction to them, which is called Romanticism. We will study a few paragraphs of prose and a few poems by the English poet Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a sample of the most fundamental concerns of the Romantics.

Then we will go back in time to the English Renaissance (around 1600). I’m not starting with this period, even though it’s earlier, because I want you to have the Romantic texts already in mind as something with which to compare and contrast the Renaissance texts.

We will be devoting a lot of attention to poetry in the first half of the course. Poetry, even when it looks simple, requires very slow, very careful reading, and then multiple re-readings. Otherwise it just slides right past you; you retain practically nothing from it.

Important: you should bring to class whatever text we’re studying, and you should follow along in your own text when I read from it. Most students find it helpful to mark the passages being discussed, and to make marginal notes. When you speak in class about a text, and especially when you write about one, you will be expected to make frequent, precise reference to the exact wording of that text as the basis for your remarks or questions. Vagueness is your worst enemy, and mine.

Your grade in 301:

There will be a mid-term exam and a final. The mid-term will be given at your regular discussion section hour during the fifth week of the quarter, your final during your final discussion section meeting. No early exams will be given.
The exams will each count for 30 per cent of your grade. The other 40 per cent will come from five 2 page papers that you will write for your discussion section. Each of these papers will concentrate on one or a few paragraphs of a prose work, or on a single short poem or crucial passage of a longer literary work. I will give you precise instructions on the writing of each of these papers as it comes up, every two weeks.

All the readings for the first few weeks of the course are contained in the course packet, which will be available at the Ave. Copy Center, 4141 University Way. We will also read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. These texts are available at the University Book Store. You are encouraged to get your hands on the editions I have ordered; the Shakespeare and the Conrad are Norton Critical Editions that contain literary critical essays that you will need to read for this class. The Achebe does not contain such additional readings, but if you don’t have the same edition you will not be able to follow along in class when I discuss specific passages. (You might be able to find used copies of these same editions online.)

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

This course provides a follow up to English 301, the Introduction to the English major. It is a practicum of critical methods. This particular 302 will provide in-depth practice in “cultural studies” approaches to the novel. Our focus on cultural studies will include attention to the following methodological questions: what is the “form” in formalist approaches to the novel? What is “materialism” and why would you use it to read novels? What kinds of critical practices – close reading, archive development, historical research – are important to cultural studies methodologies? Does narratology (the study of narrative form) have a role? What about ethnography or other research methods from anthropology, sociology, or the empirical human sciences? By the end of the course, students should have a grasp of various approaches to the study of culture and narrative forms. Students will also have been exposed to a range of social and political questions rel!
ated to cultural studies methodologies, including theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Required Texts:

Henry James, Daisy Miller (UW Bookstore)
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (UW Bookstore)
Caryl Philips, Crossing the River (UW Bookstore)

Course Reader: Additional course readings will be available on-line.

The course title is intended to signal two strands of inquiry that we will pursue this quarter, each of which pays particular attention to how monsters are defined, the historical conditions in which these figurations or definitions of monstrosity emerge and their legacies. We will begin our investigation in the 19th century focusing on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” as symptomatic of texts that in defining the monster as unnatural and inhuman figure what counts as personhood and, by extension, citizenship, along with the rights and value that attend it. On the one hand, these texts promulgate then hegemonic understandings about race, gender, class, and sexuality which orchestrate what Michel Foucault defines as “state racism”: namely a biopolitical regime that subdivides humanity into “we, the people” whose well being the state is pledged to foster and the less than human whose lives are marketable, disposable, or menacing. On the other hand, the same texts offer a counter vision, that upends this binary and the values that it assigns. A second, late 20th century strain heralds what Donna Haraway calls “the promise of monsters”; we’ll examine what that promise might signal for better and worse in a critically contextualized readings of recent texts. Other required texts will include: Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; plan on in class viewing of a couple of short films of one or two t.v. espsodes from Walking Dead and/or Freaks.

Requirements: active classroom participation; 7 short (1 page, single-spaced) critical responses to assigned texts; a final 7-8 page essay on monsters (double-spaced).
Objectives: The course is designed to provide students with: 1. a solid foundation in critical practices that take up the question of monstrosity and its impact on everyday life; 2. training in reading literary works historically, as rich cultural documents whose aesthetic strategies are always also political; 3. enhanced critical reading and writing skills; 4. a keener awareness of current directions in Critical Cultural Studies.

Catalog Description: Investigates what it means to be a reader. Centers on authorial and reading challenges, shifting cultural and theoretical norms, and changes in the public's reading standards.

“Modernity is a word in search of its meaning” (Octavio Paz). This course will introduce you to celebrated poets, novelists, and playwrights whose works probed the modern condition and defined modern esthetic values in Europe. We’ll search for the meanings of “the modern” and “modernity” across literature, art, and philosophy, from the mid-nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War II. First, we’ll focus on the emergence of a distinctly modern poetic sensibility in Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, modern narrative technique in Flaubert (The Sentimental Education), and modern drama (Ibsen’s Ghosts); next, we’ll explore the sense of crisis informing the vision of modernity in Kafka (“The Metamorphosis” and The Trial), and Beckett’s Endgame; we’ll conclude with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a classic of “socialist realism” exposing the evils of Soviet communism. The goal is (i) to develop a good sense of how major modern writers, artists, and thinkers perceived themselves, their art, and the changing world around them, and (ii) to gain insights into the origins, aspirations, and conflicted progress of “the modern.”

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

We will read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories written by American authors in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to do the reading, attend class regularly, and be ready to write short in-class essays throughout the quarter. Grades will be based on the series of in-class essays--written in answer to questions handed out in advance--and on participation in class-discussion.

TEXTS: William Faulkner, GO DOWN, MOSES; Zora Neale Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; Ernest Hemingway, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS; Sherwood Anderson, WINESBURG, OHIO; Eudora Welty, THIRTEEN STORIES BY EUDORA WELTY; Sinclair Lewis, ELMER GANTRY; Richard Wright, UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES.

ENGL 362—Course Description
Melanie Hernandez
Winter 2015

Despite the gains wrested since the early Chicano Movement of the 1960s, many of the spaces forged—whether institutional, private, or imaginative—remain stubbornly male-centered. While the myth of Aztlán fueled enormous sentiment and rallied support for the early movimiento, since its inception Chicana feminists have challenged the masculine nationalism and misogyny produced by Aztlán mythology.

Many of these beliefs linger today through an anti-feminist, often homophobic backlash—an attempt to defend traditional values as defined by an imagined “authentic core” of Chicano culture. As a result, women continue to be blamed for splitting apart the movement simply by demanding equal inclusion within it.

While this course provides a survey of literature by peoples of Mexican descent living in the U.S., we will attend primarily to gendered critiques of hetero-normative patriarchy and question how cultural production can function simultaneously as an instrument of domination and liberation.

Texts will include: Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Americo Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans; Helena Viramontes, The Moths and Other Stories; Ana Castillo, So Far From God; and a course reader of additional fiction and secondary readings

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. 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. Over the quarter, we will trace an arc from early environmentalism in the founding of the U.S. National Park system and the “wilderness” movement in the American west, through more recent our struggles to come to terms with oil spills, extinction, and anthropogenic climate change in the 21st century. We will place particular emphasis on environmental justice, the unequal distribution of environmental crises along class, race and gender lines, and the intersections between environmental issues and global health, while also focusing on the ways in which environmentalism intersects with ideas of beauty, religion, and cultural value. Please note: This is an interdisciplinary course. Students from all majors are welcome. No prior English courses required.

Required Texts:

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Harper Collins. 978-0061129766

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. Anchor. 978-0385721677

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People. Simon & Schuster. 978-1416578796

As Veronica Hollinger observes, "feminist theory contests the hegemonic representations of a patriarchal culture that does not recognize its ‘others.' Like other critical discourses, it works to create a critical distance between observer and observed, to defamiliarize certain taken-for-granted aspects of ordinary human reality, ‘denaturalizing’ situations of historical inequity and/or oppression that otherwise may appear inevitable to us, if indeed we notice them at all. The concept of defamiliarization–of making strange–has also, of course, long been associated with [science fiction]" (The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction 129). This course examines the relationship between feminist theories of gender and science fiction literature, film, and graphica. We will consider feminist critiques of imagined futures that reify contemporary inequities of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will also read science fiction works that denaturalize--and thus encourage u!
s to critically analyze--social systems of power and notions of identity.

English 367 satisfies the university's VLPA and DIV requirements.

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

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Coming of Age stories are among the staples of popular fiction and undoubtedly you’ve read many such stories long before you began to study literature at the university. You might have read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, or you became entranced with the Harry Potter novels, (and the films made from them), but you might not have been aware that these books were representatives of an important literary genre: the bildungsroman (a German term for fiction that focuses on the developmental process: the growth of an individual from youth to adulthood.) The bildungsroman has a long history, beginning in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The genre became immensely popular and spread rapidly to other countries, including Britain. This class will consider how some of the major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England and Ireland transformed the bildungsroman and used it to investigate a wide range of issues, such as industrialization, nationalism, feminism, sexuality, and the role of the artist in modern society. We also will investigate how the genre became a vehicle for formal experimentation, as exemplified in novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Other authors to be included are Charlotte Bronte, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, and Jeannette Winterson.

Then suddenly another outburst of laughter. Strange laughter, frightening laughter, the laughter of hysteria, in which were mingled shame and pangs of conscience, and perhaps not the tears that follow laughter but the laughter that follows tears.

-- Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts

This capstone asks how “humor” structures diverse literary forms and styles, from satire and parody to irony, caricature, and mockery. While this course might sound like fun – and hopefully will be — we will undertake our study in a rather serious way, reading literature alongside critical studies of race, gender, sexuality, and power. In particular, the class will actively deconstruct the ways in which racial and sex/gender hierarchies have often been used to organize the structure of humor, focusing as we move through our readings on the relation between racial and sexual satire and structural racism and hetero-sexism. Our historical focus will be on the recent past: the 1990s and 2000s. We will read novels that use humor to treat changing structures of race, gender and sexuality in relation to globalization, transnationalism, and new ecologies. In our class discussions, we will pay close attention to how humor combines rhetorical style and material context to describe, critique, or affirm existing relations of power. A fifteen page research paper or equivalent project will be required.

Required Texts:

Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Zadie Smith, White Teeth

On-Line Materials: You will be required to access on-line materials through your UW catalyst account.

This course, through reading and fieldwork, introduces students to the various approaches that guide the study and teaching of writing. In it, we will explore the different methods of teaching writing that have emerged in the last fifty years, ranging from methods for teaching students how to produce texts to methods for assessing these texts. We will also examine the research and theories that underscore these methods, starting with the emergence of the process movement in the 1960s and then inquiring into its various manifestations (and critiques of these manifestations) in the years since, including the impact of new media. Along the way, I hope we can begin to think critically about the various approaches that inform the teaching of writing, in particular, what values and assumptions guide these approaches and whose interests they serve, so that we all can become more self-reflective readers, writers, and teachers. Most of all, though, I would like this course to give us all a chance to think about what it means to teach writing, to develop and share our own goals for teaching writing, and to generate and articulate practices that will help us achieve these goals. Coursework will include keeping a reading journal, conducting a brief teaching ethnography, preparing a bibliography and curriculum design presentation, and creating a teaching portfolio.

This course has an optional service-learning component which will bring students into local K-12 classrooms to practice work (three to four hours each week) as tutors, mentors, and writing coaches. Placement sites include Shorecrest and Franklin High Schools as well as other local Pipeline schools. Those who opt to do service learning will have the option to register for additional credit hours of English 491, if they choose. For those who participate, the service learning in this course will fulfill 30-40 of the observation hours that students are required to complete prior to applying to the UW Masters in Teaching program.

Course Text: Susan Miller. The Norton Book of Composition Studies

This course explores the close relationship of language, literacy, economy, and power. In doing so, it highlights the dominant and alternative economies of language in the context of current forms of globalization. More specifically, this course examines how, why, and under what conditions certain languages and language practices have acquired great social and economic value, while others have become relegated to a marginal status at best. In this sense, we will be exploring a variety of alternative forms of linguistic and cultural production as tools for active resistance to the status quo and the performance of new identities, forms such as rap music, hip-hop, graffiti writing, ethnic arts, etc. Topics of discussion include but are not limited to: the commodification of language; the spread of glob! Al English(es); the language of hip-hop culture; the complex relation between English, popular culture, identity, and mainstream literacy education; the impact of the globalized economy on linguistic standardization and the patterns of language use worldwide; economies for the production, reception, and distribution of knowledge, etc.

List of Selected Readings
Burbules, Nicholas C., and Carlos Alberto Torres, eds. Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2000.
Prendergast, Catherine. Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Print.
Rubdy, Rani, and Peter K. W. Tan. Language As Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London: Continuum, 2008.

Catalog Description: Examines the relationship between language policy and social organization; the impact of language policy on immigration, education, and access to resources and political institutions; language policy and revolutionary change; language rights.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Intensive prose workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student fiction and/or creative nonfiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

When a novel tells a story, you can sometimes find a different story hidden in the way of the telling—a story disclosed by the method and style of the narration itself. For instance: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Now that’s one story, about money and marriage. But there’s another story there too, buried within the tone and implications of the narrating voice, and that story is about something different. (Wondering where the quotation comes from? Google it!)

In this course we will undertake close readings of three classic novels from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, to see (among other things) how narrative method and style can form meaning, with special attention to the representation of social class. The novels are Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). These novels depict the social experience of their time in brilliant scope and depth, but they also expose the rotting moral infrastructure of that experience. How this happens, and with what result, we will learn from a study of their narrative form and voice. Also: the period covered here is among the very greatest in the history of the British and European novel, with these three examples sitting right at the top. So there’s that to look forward to as well.

Course Description: For this course, we’ll be reading a set of hybrid narrative—narratives, that is, that do not fit easily into any single category (novel, short story, memoir, etc.), but instead intentionally mingle different narrative forms. We’ll consider the formal aspect of this, how and why particular writers combine various forms as they do and what the effects of that are likely to be for readers. But the formal question blends inevitably into key questions about content and about the limits of narrative forms to represent human realities (much less the bigger cosmic realities out there). We’ll read as well a couple short stories (tbd) and some short pieces on narrative theory. There will be frequent response papers, but the primary writing for the course will be a long paper dealing with the reception history of one of the texts we are reading, an assignment designed to prepare students to undertake independent research for their spring honors essays.

Required Texts:

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (ISBN 0-15-678733-4)
The Bible (King James version)
John Milton, Paradise Lost: Norton Critical Edition (ISBN 978-0-393-92428-2)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (ISBN 0-14-008683-8)
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (ISBN 0-375-72748-5)
Reading packet