English 200, "The Modern Woman"

How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity?    ---Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (1995)

This class is invested in tracing the emergence of a novel figure known as "The New Woman" or the "modern woman" through modernist literature and print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will ask how “the culture of modernity” finds particular definition with respect to this figure--not only in representing her in art and culture but also debating her significance and investing her with broader symbolic meanings related to individuality, sensibility, independence, and autonomy from convention. Focused on female authors, the course gives particular attention to the significance of artistic expression to exemplars of the "New Woman" type.

In this project we necessarily orbit another principal feature of the period: the city, which for women in particular constituted a space of profound intellectual, social, and sexual freedom but also a center of alienation, power, and potential violence. Taking London and New York as our principal locales, we will examine representations of women and urban experience in a range of poems, non-fiction pieces, short stories, and novels.

As these works attest, what was known as "the woman question" was in fact multiple questions, encompassing issues of mobility, individuality, political representation, sexuality, economics, race, and globalization. Throughout the quarter we'll be asking how each of our texts poses, and potentially answers, a woman question of its own. 

Authors may include Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Grand, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, and Mina Loy. Assessment 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.

English 200, "The Modern Woman"

How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity?    ---Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (1995)

This class is invested in tracing the emergence of a novel figure known as "The New Woman" or the "modern woman" through modernist literature and print culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will ask how “the culture of modernity” finds particular definition with respect to this figure--not only in representing her in art and culture but also debating her significance and investing her with broader symbolic meanings related to individuality, sensibility, independence, and autonomy from convention. Focused on female authors, the course gives particular attention to the significance of artistic expression to exemplars of the "New Woman" type.

In this project we necessarily orbit another principal feature of the period: the city, which for women in particular constituted a space of profound intellectual, social, and sexual freedom but also a center of alienation, power, and potential violence. Taking London and New York as our principal locales, we will examine representations of women and urban experience in a range of poems, non-fiction pieces, short stories, and novels.

As these works attest, what was known as "the woman question" was in fact multiple questions, encompassing issues of mobility, individuality, political representation, sexuality, economics, race, and globalization. Throughout the quarter we'll be asking how each of our texts poses, and potentially answers, a woman question of its own. 

Authors may include Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Grand, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, and Mina Loy. Assessment 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.

ENGL 200 D: Feminist Dystopias

This course will examine feminist dystopian fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at how these texts grapple with questions of gender, sexuality, and contemporary social, political, and cultural issues. Throughout, we will focus on how different kinds of dystopian narratives critique the societies they present as well as contemporary culture; we will also explore the larger question of why authors write dystopian and speculative fiction. Texts will include: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road, Hillary Jordan, When She Woke, Louise O’Neill, Only Ever Yours, and two Janelle Monae albums; we will also watch one film.

Re-visioning English Literary Classics

In this course, we will read two canonical English literary works, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest, and examine the transformations they have undergone through revisions by authors from different historical, geographic and cultural locations.  In the process, we will address the global permutations of English literary works, why and how Shakespeare's two plays have been revised, and the relationship between the works and their revisions. Our goal in the course will be to open up Shakespeare’s plays in all their textual complexity and to think through practices of re-visioning. The main questions shaping our discussions will be: what does the process of re-visioning tell us about the work being appropriated? What does it tell about who does the re-visioning? What pressures does the process of re-visioning exert on the English literary canon? Why have Shakespeare’s plays retained such a dominant trans-national presence so many centuries after their composition?

Required texts: William Shakespeare, Othello (1603)and The Tempest (1610-11); Aime Cesaire, A Tempest (1969); Gloria Naylor, Mama Day, (1966); Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1978) and Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Story about a Handkerchief (1994).

English 200 I

Caleb Knapp

Introduction to American Literature: Race, Form, and Genre

This survey course introduces students to American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Texts published during this period render cultural processes visible as the U.S. undergoes the massive political and economic shifts that occur with the abolition of slavery, the importation of Chinese “free labor,” Reconstruction, the emergence of Jim Crow laws, and U.S. imperial expansion. For this reason these texts are rich sites for analysis of the “work” that literary forms and genres do at moments when liberal democratic ideals of freedom, individualism, and universal equality come into conflict with forms of racial violence and the exploitation of racialized labor. Through readings of slave narratives, short stories, novels, and essays, we will examine not only literary aesthetics but especially the ways that literary forms and genres enact racial violence. Questions we ask will include: how do certain forms and genres allow and disallow an author to say certain things about slavery, segregation, and colonization? How do certain forms and genres enable some people to write themselves into national narratives of freedom and liberal individualism while excluding others? How do form and genre attempt and often fail to reconcile contradictions between liberal ideals and racial exploitation? How do authors imagine alternatives to national narratives through literary form and genre?

Course authors will likely include Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Carlos Bulosan.

This course fulfills the “W” credit and requires two 5-7 page essays, smaller writing assignments, and participation in class discussions.

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. Finally, we will discuss some of the conflicting interpretive approaches to the literary texts we study.

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 that 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. From the Renaissance we'll jump back to works from the last 150 years (Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart). In this way I will try to give you a coherent sense of the fabric of Western literary and social history in the past 500 years or so, along with the techniques literary scholars use to study literary texts and their contexts.

Poetry, even when it looks simple, requires very slow, very careful reading, and then multiple re-readings. Otherwise you retain practically nothing from it. Thus we will devote a lot of attention to a small number of poems in the first half of the course.

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 20 per cent of your grade. The other 60 per cent will come from four short papers that you will write for your discussion section.

Texts:

Note: 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 volume 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: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

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.

How do the physical spaces that surround us and the material objects that inhabit these spaces influence our thoughts and actions? In this course, we will examine the relationship between rhetoric (the art of persuasion) and the built environments that we move through, around, and/or between. Our readings will focus on public space, city landscapes, college campuses, and more. In the second half of the quarter, we will focus on readings that specifically tackle sociopolitical issues that are often connected to spaces and places (e.g., gentrification). It is my hope that the skills we gain in this course will help us formulate complex arguments and insights regarding these issues.

This course satisfies the University of Washington's "W" requirement."

ENGL 207A: Writing Music, Listening to Culture

This class introduces students to the analysis of literary and cultural politics via music and music writing. It will not specify a particular form of music, nor will it be focused on music appreciation or knowledge; it will instead pay close attention to how writers treat music as topic or influence and how culture itself responds to and deploys music for social and political ends. It is also interested in the idea that music is not only produced in history but that it also can generate distinct ideas about history and about human relations over time.

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: Introduces literature from the Age of Shakespeare to the American and French Revolutions, focusing on major works that have shaped the development of literary and intellectual traditions in these centuries. Topics include: The Renaissance, religious and political reforms, exploration and colonialism, vernacular cultures, and scientific thought.

English 212a: Weird Victorians

The Victorian Age is often associated with social propriety, industrialization, and scientific progress. In literary history, it is often regarded as the golden age of the realist novel. But there is also a stranger, weirder side to Victorian literature. The other side of decorum is sexual repression, scientific progress also sparked anxiety about unnatural over-reach, industrialization generated wealth but it also fed on poverty, Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection also raised the specter of extinction. And, in literary terms, the fat tomes depicting social conditions and everyday, middle class life were juxtaposed against stranger tales slanting into Gothic, science and detective fiction, and the fantastic. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Alice and the White Rabbit, and Sherlock Holmes have stepped beyond the pages that produced them and become a kind of modern mythology. In this course, we will explore this world of the “weird Victorians.” In the process, we will examine the way that literature shapes and responds to social and ecological anxiety, ranging from class difference, to gender and sexuality, to evolution and species being. We will pay particular attention to ways that these strange and fantastical tales construct the conditions of possibility that enable the apparently impossible or unnatural events that they depict to take place. These conversations, in turn, will help shed light on the way that the stories we tell shape our perceptions of reality and our conceptions of the possible.

Course texts will include:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199537150

George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859). Penguin. ISBN: 9780140435177

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Penguin. ISBN: 9780141439761

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Oxford. ISBN:             9780199536221

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Harvard. ISBN: 9780674066311

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). Penguin. 9780141439976

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Penguin. ISBN: 9780140437867

Course: English 242, The Fairy Tale in Literature

Instructor: Jessica Campbell

Description:

In this course, we will study prose fiction by reading fairy tales in both short and long prose genres. Fairy tales have long been a prominent form of literature in addition to being told orally. As tales have been shared over time and over various geographical and cultural spaces, some of their elements have remained the same and others have changed to reflect their new environments. Our reading for this class will consist of versions of various fairy tales, from multiple parts of the world and multiple historical periods, including our own. Some are short, and some are full novels. Some are for children, and some are very definitely for adults. Some are traditional, and some play with conventions. We will also read a number of critical studies of fairy tales, representing the various theoretical lenses that have driven fairy-tale scholarship in recent decades. Since this course carries a W credit, you will be required to write two 5-7-page papers, one of which you will revise and resubmit for your final assignment.

Examines real and metaphoric underworlds in literature and films about the afterlife, the heroic journey, guilt, grief, violence, and redemption. Students learn how the mythic underworld functions not only in art, but in their own lives.

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. You will learn to recognize the mythic underworld and understand how it functions not only in art, but in your own life.

All readings in English.

UNDERWORLDS RUSS120/ C Lit 250A/ CHID 270B Winter 2016 Underworlds are both real and metaphoric: subways and coalmines, Hades and Hell, criminal subcultures, political undergrounds , h orror - 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 an d literature from Russia, the US, and Europe, set in many different underworlds, which intersect with and shape our perceptions of the world around us. You will learn to recognize the mythic underworld and understand how it functions not only in art, but in your own life. All readings in English.

Afro Asia and US Multiculturalism

Course Description

When Mao Zedong wrote in support of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, he highlighted how ongoing racial discrimination is a product of "dual tactics" and "a colonialist and imperialist system."  Given that the US state was founded on racism (slavery and genocide), scholars today note how civil rights legislation and the rise of US multiculturalism were not the beginning of the end of this system, but rather the imperial state's adjustment to antiracist and anti-colonial struggles not only in the US but abroad (communism in China, Korea, Vietnam, independence movements in India, pan-Africa, and so on).

A central aim of this course will be to think through the rise of US multiculturalism as an extension of the imperial project. In other words, as a class we will aim to rid ourselves of the nationalist "racial progress" narrative. The first half of the course will focus on Asian Americanist critique and storytelling to grapple with the rise of such phenomena as the "yellow peril/model minority" binary.  We will use the medium of fiction and the skill of close-reading to develop informed social and historical analysis, which in turn will enhance our reading of both fiction and the world around us.  In the second half, we will read two important texts by black internationalists, W.E.B. Du Bois' 1928 novel "Dark Princess: A Romance" and Richard Wright's "The Color Curtain," a creative nonfictional account of the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, a pivotal meeting of African and Asian nations in the midst of the Cold War.  These texts allow us to explore themes such as the relationship between idealism and realism, and "a color line within the color line" (as Du Bois puts it) in both fictional and nonfictional efforts toward global moral progress.  Both Du Bois and Wright ponder the US racial order on the global scale, are cautiously hopeful for alternatives, yet their texts remain hauntingly relevant today as Black Lives Matter critiques the US police state, as Japan re-militarizes after 70 years of pacifism, and as China invests heavily into developing Africa.

This course will introduce you to the practice of reading fiction.  As we work to develop our close reading skills, we will learn to situate fictional texts in relation to their particular social and historical context -- not as artifacts, but as full participants in the making and meaning of that context called modernity. What’s modernity? This course will acquaint you with some of the central historical developments that have conventionally been cited in answer to this question, even as the focus will be on literary mediations of these developments. The transition from a feudal economy to capitalist relations of production, the rise of the nation-state and the public sphere, the proliferation of innovations in science and technology - these are just a few of the defining historical characteristics of “modernization” that our literary archive will address.

Modernity is a monster of a concept. There are additional reasons for pairing monsters and modernity within a single course theme, however. To begin, the processes of modernization sketched above have had their monstrous manifestations: relationships of domination and subordination, methods of exploitation and expropriation, and histories of violence. These historical developments have often unleashed monstrous changes in the experience of everyday life. Finally, new identities and social practices have emerged within modernity that you may find as fortunate as frightening, but that nonetheless haunt institutions of power. These are just a few of the monsters of modernity that we’ll explore through reading monsters in literature and culture.

W/ RUSSIAN 120  19572 A 5

OPTIONAL WRITING COURSE

Reading Fiction of the Pacific Northwest

Frances McCue

MW 12.30-2.30 Winter 2016

frances@francesmccue.com

Office: MGH 297 

Set in the mythic landscape of deep forests, twisting waterways and the open plains, fiction from this region is, by turns, stark and lush, urban and wild. In this course, we’ll read short stories and novels set in Washington, Idaho and Montana and along the way, we’ll visit the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, mountain towns in Idaho, the Flathead Valley of Montana and the city of Seattle. 

We’ll approach reading as writers do, asking “How might this have been made?” Our time in class will simulate a lively artists’ studio where we will test out fiction writing strategies to illuminate our reading and we’ll work in groups to convene deep reading methods and discussions. Together, we’ll celebrate some of the great stories about this place. In the end, students will write a culminating essay as part of a group project, a mini-conference on Pacific Northwest Fiction. 

Our texts will include: Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie and The Other by David Guterson.

Winter Quarter 2016

Class: English 250A—MW 1:30-3:20

Instructor: Robert Abrams

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,” Dickinson’s poems (sent by email); also for purchase at the U Bookstore: Hawthorne, THE PORTABLE HAWTHORNE; Frederick Douglass, NARRATIVE; 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 take a historical, political, and critical look at Asian American writing from the late 19th century to the present. The goal of the class is to give students the ability to read almost any Asian American literary work published in the past and in the future and understand the historical imperatives that are at the foundation of each work from the social history of the particular Asian ethnic community to institutionalized racism to the literary life of the author. The class will read works by Fae Myenne Ng, Joy Kogawa, John Okada, Louis Chu, and many others.

A chronological survey of African American literature in all genres from its beginnings to the present day. Emphasizes African American writing as a literary art; the cultural and historical context of African American literary expression and the aesthetic criteria of African American literature. Offered: jointly with ENGL 258.

“Margins and Centers: who's in, who's out, and why that matters for all of us”

This class focuses on literature that will help us think about how people categorize each other on the basis of various social and biological features, including gender, race, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, sexuality, and ability. In all societies around the globe, some are part of the Center--often with status and the power to make and enforce rules--and some are relegated to the Margin--often with less power and subject to the rules and regulations that the Center dictates. These dynamics play out in terms of international relations between countries on the world stage, as well as in our own seemingly smaller lives with family and friends. What's going on? Why does this keep happening? And what does this have to do with you and me? The novels we read this term will help us imagine people who might seem different from us, and provoke us to ask larger questions about identity, power, privilege, society and the role of culture in our lives.

This is a special class associated with University of Washington in the High School:

What is UWHS? A program in which high school students can take UW courses and earn UW credit at their own school. “Margins and Centers” will be taught concurrently at 4 area high schools in 2016: Franklin HS, Eastlake HS, Kentlake HS and Roosevelt HS. The 5 high school teachers and your professor have extensively collaborated on this course for the past two years through the Texts and Teachers Program, and are thrilled to be teaching and learning together in this way. Throughout the quarter, we will interact with high school teachers and students from all 4 schools.

ENGL 265 w/GERMAN 298A: Cultures of Extinction

This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding one of the more wicked problems of the 21st century: mass species extinction, or Th e Sixth Extinction, as it is often known. Rather than approaching this event as a discrete biological phenomenon, this course looks at how current t hreats to bio-diversity are implicated in, and connected to, threats to cultural diversity, in particular language loss. We will seek to understand how discourses of extinction, beginning from its “discovery” in the 18th century, are related to fraught histories of colonialism and imperialism, w hose ecological and cultural effects extend into the present and threaten to shape the future.

While the course seeks to grasp the scale of the Sixth Extinction, it will also critically reflect upon, and propose alternatives to, the dominant a pocalyptic narratives in which extinction is framed in the popular imagination. Course readings and critical texts drawn from across the humanities and social sciences will explore and critique various framings of “the end” in literature, art, music, and film.

This course is open to majors across the university. English is the language of instruction and course readings. This course satisfies the diversity requirement (DIV) as well as VPLA.

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: 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.

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 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 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.

English 302: The Object(ive)s of Literature. Literature needs objects. There’s a famous scarlet letter, a golden bowl, a lighthouse, a cookie (well, a French madeleine), a red chicken beside a wheelbarrow, and many other objects (famous or not) that populate poems, novels, and appear as props in plays. 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. 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. But what is the gun? Is it a gift, a weapon, a commodity, or something else entirely? This course will explore different theories of objects in order to understand how they function in texts to ground the reader in a fictional world and shape the reader’s sense of significance. How literature makes use of objects, that is, what the objectives of literature are will be our focus. In order to understand this process of representation, we will consider Lewis Hyde’s theory of the gift, Marx’s commodity, Freud’s fetish, and Bill Brown’s thing theory. And we will put these theories to work by reading two novels, Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.

Engl 302 B: pain, creativity, and theory

This course is designed to tackle the two main complaints about theory: one, that it is alienatingly abstract; and two, that theory doesn’t make sense to people outside the English major. How to make theory an extension of self-making, and remove it from the role of merciless taskmaster? And is it possible to communicate theoretical ideas in “plain English”?

The general theme for the quarter circles around the issue of pain, which is so viscerally real and rooted in the body that it seems the antithesis of cerebral and intangible theory. We’ll use a chapter from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain as our root text; read essays by Kevin Kelly and Nicholas Carr on the interrelation between human need, creativity, and technology; and end with Mimi Baird and Eve Claxton’s biography He Wanted the Moon, as well as a yet-to-be-determined text. All these works examine how bodily feeling translates into the impulse to narrate, and then how these narrations create cultural systems of feeling that regulate the distribution of who is recognized as fully human. Work will include 2 short papers (4-5 pages) and a review (4-6 pages), as well as informal exploratory writing. All assignment will be geared towards giving you practice in working theoretical language into a grammar and syntax that makes sense to you, and to understand the relationship between self and critical practice.

Please note: no addcodes are available before the first week of the class.

The Bible is among the world's most influential works and has contributed immeasurably to the literary traditions of the English language. This course will consider the Bible as itself a work of literature, with certain recognizable tropes and genres.

No previous exposure to the Bible is needed; the only requirement is a willingness to engage with the Bible as a literary text.

The text we will use is David Bevington, ed., The Compete Works of Shakespeare, 7th ed. (Pearson, 2014).

Older editions of Bevington's text are acceptable.

Requirements include essays and exams.

ENGL 347 A: Race and Nonfiction

This class focuses on non-fiction writing as a primary way to engage our various contemporary cultural and social “crises” from multiple perspectives. Ranging from memoir to reportage, criticism to political punditry, these works not only demonstrate the range of possibilities available in non-fiction but also provide an ongoing narrative of our changing racial realities and our rapidly transforming notions of “the real.”

Tom Foster

English 349A

Winter 2016

Fantasy and Science Fiction: Introduction to Science Fiction

This version of this course is designed to provide a historical introduction to print science fiction as a genre, with a strong but not exclusive emphasis on the development of the genre in the U.S. during the 20th century. The course will be organized around debates over the definition of science fiction that are internal to the science fiction field. We will therefore read examples of pulp adventure narratives; the hard SF tradition promoted by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding (later Analog); alternative forms that begin to emerge in the 1950s, including the more self-consciously literary narratives associated with Anthony Boucher's Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as the traditions of social satire and political SF associated with H.L. Gold's magazine Galaxy, and early feminist science fiction; the "New Wave" movement of the 1960s and 70s; cyberpunk fiction and responses to it; and the interventions of SFF writers of color. In addition to this historical narrative, the critical concerns that we will consider include the historical and ideological contexts for science fiction narratives, such as the traditions of travel writing and utopian/dystopian speculation, and the formal tension between science fiction's tendency toward a realist aesthetic and its simultaneous commitment to the fantastic and to imagining departures from realism that often have the effect of defamiliarizing our assumptions about what is normal.  

Primary readings for the course will include essays and stories available on electronic reserve, as well as the following set of books: Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars; Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human; Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration; James M. Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), Her Smoke Rose Up Forever; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Nisi Shawl, Filter House; and Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life. Assignments for the course will probably include two essays, and some shorter, informal writing assignments.

This course examines a set of central themes that emerge from Sigmund Freud’s theories of the dream, the nature of literary creativity, the operation of the human psyche, and the substance of human culture. We will take as our starting point the hypothesis that Freud conceives the psyche as a kind of writing machine, an “author” that produces fictional narratives that share many properties with the prose fictions generated by creative writers. For this reason, our focus throughout the quarter will be restricted to prose narratives. The course will concentrate on literature produced in the wake of Freud’s theories, that is, on texts that consciously or unconsciously develop Freudian ideas. The class is structured around a set of themes that will be developed on the basis of paired readings: 1) The Psyche as Writing Machine, Dreams as Texts; 2) Freud’s Understanding of Literary Creativity; 3) The Oedipus Complex; 4) Eros and Thanatos, the Union of Love and Death; 5) Repression and Social Disorder; 6) The Uncanny and the Literary Fantastic; 7) Freud and Women: Neurosis and Sexuality. In each case we will examine a text or excerpt from Freud’s psychological works in conjunction with the reading of a literary text that exemplifies the issue or issues highlighted in Freud’s theory. Literary works treated include writings by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and others. Course requirements: regular attendance at lecture and discussion sessions; weekly short writing assignments; 2 short interpretive papers. English is the language of instruction and course readings.

Book list:

Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader

Arthur Schnitzler, Lieutenant Gustl

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and selected short stories

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Robert Musil, Young Torless

Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza

Students who would like more information about the course structure are encouraged to consult the course Web site: http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit

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.

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.

The culture of the Silver Age in Russia, from the 1880s to the Revolution, was described by its detractors as “Decadence,” and many of the figures involved accepted the label. This was not just a thoughtless enjoyment of scandal: the Russian Symbolists were a seriously philosophical group, and all of these S-words had a place in their world-view. This course looks at prose and poetry, painting and music, both naughty and nice but always in some sense serious, in the three decades before the Russian Revolution. The material covered will include prose by Leonid Andreev (The Thought, 1902), Andrei Belyi (Petersburg, 1911-21), Artsybashev (Sanin, 1904-07), Sologub (The Petty Demon, 1902-05), poetry by Blok, Balmont, Briusov, Ivanov and others, selections from the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdiaev and Viacheslav Ivanov, paintings of Vrubel, Roerich and Bakst, and music of Stravinsky and Skriabin. Readings are in English, but students who can read the Russian originals are encouraged to do so, and students familiar with the contemporary culture of Europe are particularly welcome.

Course Description

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 science fiction literature and feminist theories of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will consider feminist critiques of imagined futures that reify contemporary inequities. However, science fiction works that denaturalize--and thus encourage us to critically analyze--social systems of power and notions of identity constitute our main focus.

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

Goals and Methodology

Students in the course work toward several goals:

*Analyzing the language, structure and themes of fictional texts, *Explicating the relationship between feminist science fiction and feminist theory, *Identifying the historical, cultural, and industrial contexts informing and informed by selected works of science fiction, and *Developing as critical thinkers who can formulate substantive arguments and explore those arguments with evidence.

Course activities promote active learning, with most class sessions incorporating a mix of mini-lectures, discussion, and group work. The course design—which includes frequent non-graded and graded writing—reflects the importance of writing as a means of learning. My role is to provide the tools and resources you will need to advance your own thinking. I will pose questions, design activities to help you think through these questions, and respond to your ideas. Your role is to do the hard work—the close reading, discussion, and writing. You will analyze texts, present your interpretations via class discussion and written assignments, and critically respond to others’ readings.

ENGL 379

Dear Reader: Narrative Intimacy and the Limits of Genre

Nobody reads! Print is dead! What happened to the novel? Why is James Franco publishing poetry? Where in the world is le mot juste?

-- Tori Telfer, “Michael Archer, Editor-in-Chief of Guernica Magazine, Talks Paying Writers, MFA Culture, and Editing for Free,” Bustle.com (August 1, 2014)

This class will explore recent challenges to genre as a way of organizing literary texts. Genre has often been used not just to organize writing into specific categories – novel, poem, gothic, romance – but also to classify writing into specific systems of value. Literary writing is often distinguished from non-literary writing through the use of genre and its tacit value distinctions. This class will focus on recent redefinitions of genre by reading writing published in the United States over the last twenty years or so. Our primary texts revise boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, and journalism and essay by challenging the systems of value assigned through these boundaries. Because this is such a broad topic, the class will focus in particular on writings that open up questions of narrative address. Each of our texts asks how narration – first-person, third-person, collective, and inhuman – shapes the way readers become intimate with !

systems of value and knowledge. The majority of our texts are critical of those systems of racial, gendered, sexual, and national classification that have historically organized narrative values and seek to establish the conditions of readerly intimacy on other grounds.

This class will focus centrally on issues of power, race, gender, and sexuality. Our writers are likely to include: Lynn Emmanuel, Walter Benjamin, Renee Gladman, Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Diaz, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Justin Torres, Karen Tei Yamashita, Claudia Rankine, Alexander Chee, Cathy Park Hong, Maggie Nelson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Advanced Composition: Writing About Film

A characteristic of advanced writers is their ability to adjust to the demands of various writing situations and various genres. Our primary texts for the course will be films—films that belong to several sub-genres but all derive from the traditional fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty.” We will examine how filmmakers from different historical and geographical contexts interpret the same story in vastly different ways. For some films, we will also study trailers and posters in order to interrogate the relationship between the films themselves and the ways they are advertised. Meanwhile, we will read and write texts that are all about these films but are otherwise very different: reviews, academic articles, summaries, opinion pieces, and even DVD blurbs. Because this course fulfills the “C” (composition) requirement, you will produce 25-30 pages of writing, some of which will undergo a revision process. The course grade will be based on writing assignments and in-class participation.

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

Winter 2016

ENGL 384A: Craft of Prose (Force Follows Form)

MW 10:30-11:50

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

Tom Foster

English 440A

Winter 2016

Topic: The Literature of Cyberspace

This course will track the literary development of the trope of “cyberspace,” as a way of narrating computer networks as sites or “spaces” of social interaction. That trope originated in the cyberpunk science fiction of William Gibson, and this course will focus on reading cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk novels as a set of intertextual dialogues and debates over the meaning of cyberspace and on a set of related terms, concepts, cultural fantasies, and speculative fictions, including virtual realities, immersive simulations, direct neural interfaces, prosthetic subjectivities, digitized or uploaded personalities, the disarticulation and possible rearticulation of minds and bodies, the relation of the virtual and the physical, the future of gender and race in high-tech cultures, and the emergence of network and/or surveillance societies. The focus will be on considering this body of fiction’s value in elaborating the possible cultural, political, and philosophical implications of new computer interface and communications technologies.

Primary texts will be William Gibson, Neuromancer; Pat Cadigan, Synners; Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Greg Egan, Diaspora; Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief; and Cory Doctorow, Little Brother; as well as some selection of short stories, possibly including work by Rudy Rucker, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Aliete de Bodard, Maureen McHugh, Catherynne Valente, Charles Stross, Eugie Foster, and Nisi Shawl. We will also read some set of critical essays, possibly including work by John Walker, N. Katherine Hayles, Anne Balsamo, Hans Moravec, Fredric Jameson, Manuel Castells, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Lisa Nakamura, and Paul Gilroy.

The primary assignment for the course will be one longer, research paper, along with some preliminary, informal writing and possibly a class presentation.

Catalog Description: Readings may be English or American and drawn from different periods, or they may concentrate on different types -- gothic, experimental, novel of consciousness, realistic novel. Special attention to the novel as a distinct literary form.

Memory, land and the magic of language deeply intertwine with life in the Native communities of the Pacific North and Northwest. American Indian literature attends to a particular experience in North America. While contemporary American Indian literatures are not synonymous with any oral traditions that inform them, they honor those traditions.

Contemporary Native literatures have sprung up like new growth after a forest fire. While some of the featured writers draw from older traditions, others show extensive global influences and write exclusively for the text. We will read, discuss and analyze a variety of literatures from traditional oral storytelling transposed into written form to contemporary hybrid forms like spoken word, rap and hip-hop. We will contemplate, discuss and write about the issues of race, gender and nationalism that these writers grappled with as they created creative and critical space through their works.

English 471: The Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing - Bawarshi

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

ENGL 479

Language Variation in North America

Gail Stygall

Required Books:

Finegan and Rickford, Language in the USA

Lippi-Green. English with an Accent, 2nd edition

Packet (all articles but one available online)

Recommended Book:

Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism

This course is a survey and overview of language communities, language structures, and language policies in North America. The course satisfies VLPA, I&S, and Diversity requirements and may also satisfy the Writing requirement. Language in the USA and English with an Accent will provide the backbone of the course, but each week, there will be an additional article or legal case to read and a short writing assignment to complete, based on the week’s readings, either a response to reading questions or a reaction paper. We’ll study perceptions of language differences, types of Spanish-English variations, African American English, bilingualism in Canada, U.S. legal cases about language, the range of Native American languages, and the impact of Asian languages. We’ll also carefully examine issues such as Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 and various proposals for English as a national language. You will also select one of two options for a final: either take a final examination or read Jane Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism and conduct a study and write a paper on the topic.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Maya Sonenberg

ENGL 484A, Winter 2016

Course Description

In this advanced workshop, you will take a single longer story or piece of creative nonfiction from initial idea to finished product—or as close as you can get in 10 weeks.

Focusing on one longer piece (15-20 pages) will enable you to explore complex issues or forms, fully build characters or plot, and thoroughly investigate one of your passions. It will require you to be ambitious and ultimately to commit to the writerly decisions you make. Developing a revision process will help you acquire or improve one of a writer’s most valuable skills. While we will leave some time at the end of the quarter for copy editing (the final, fine-tuning stage of revision), we will devote most of the quarter to earlier stages of composition and revision, discovering ways to generate and deepen material.

Expect to write 2-3 short exercises at the start of the quarter and then 3 complete drafts of your longer story or essay.

Texts

Ron Carlson Writes a Story (required)

Draft: A Journal of Process, Issue IV (required)

The 3 A. M. Epiphany (optional)

The 4 A. M. Breakthrough (optional)

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

English 494: Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets are at once the most argued-over lyrics in the English language and vivid documents in the history of sexuality, gender, and race. As a sequence, they form one of the strangest love stories ever told: an aging, melancholic poet with a penchant for finance metaphors courts a young man first by trying to convince him that he is too good-looking not to have a wife and children (?) and second by professing love for him against the competing advances of a rival poet; the speaker then abruptly turns his attention to a “dark lady” whom he finds repellant but with whom he yearns to have sex, and when they accomplish this task he brings the sequence to a close in a heap of guilt. The speaker may or may not be Shakespeare. The Sonnets may or may not have been released in an unauthorized edition. Later editors may or may not have changed the male pronouns to female ones in order to make Shakespeare “seem straight.”

 This course will move through Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) in its entirety, a few poems a day over the course of the term. Each session we will spend some time fine-tuning our close reading skills with individual selections. We will then work toward a rich, contextual understanding of both the sonnet form and its Shakespearean variation using classic models from the Renaissance (Petrarch, John Donne), adaptations by later poets (John Keats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rita Dove), theories of love and discourse (Foucault, Barthes), and related works by Shakespeare that pushed back against the tradition (Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet). Evaluation will be based on two special projects and a seminar paper. This class will count toward the pre-1900 requirement for the English major.

'Revisiting History: Modern Black Narratives of Slavery and Resistance'
 This course examines how black American and African writers, from the 20th- and 21st centuries, have adapted the 19th-century genres of the historical novel and the slave narrative. Possible texts include  Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder; Zora Neale Hurston's Moses. Man of the Mountain; Zakes Mda's Cion, and Yvette Christianse's Unconfessed.