Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

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: 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: Introductory rhetoric course that examines the strategic use of and situated means through which images, texts, objects, and symbols inform, persuade, and shape social practices in various contexts. Topics focus on education, public policy, politics, law, journalism, media, digital cultural, globalization, popular culture, and the arts.

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 Middle Ages and the Age of Shakespeare, focusing on major works that have shaped the development of literary and intellectual traditions of these periods.

Catalog Description: Introduction to twentieth-century literature from a broadly cultural point of view, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900.

Catalog Description: Survey of Shakespeare's career as dramatist. Study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.

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

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

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

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in plays, representing a variety of types and periods.

Catalog Description: Introduces American culture through a careful reading of a variety of representative texts in their historical contexts.

Catalog Description: Introduction to various genres of African American literature from its beginnings to the present. Emphasizes the cultural and historical context of African American literary expression and its aesthetics criteria. Explores key issues and debates, such as race and racism, inequality, literary form, and canonical acceptance. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 214.

Catalog Description: Literary texts are important evidence for social difference (gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, sexuality, ability) in contemporary and historical contexts. Examines texts that encourage and provoke us to ask larger questions about identity, power, privilege, society, and the role of culture in present-day or historical settings.

Catalog Description: ntroduces the study of the environment through literature, culture, and history. Topics include changing ideas about nature, wilderness, ecology, pollution, climate, and human/animal relations, with particular emphasis on environmental justice and the unequal distribution of environmental crises, both globally and along class, race and gender lines.

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, Ted Chiang, Suzette Haden Elgin, Richard Adams, 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.

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: Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes--words, images, sound, design, and gesture--and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.

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: Equivalency for 200-level English courses taken on UW study abroad programs or direct exchanges. May not apply to major requirements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified 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: Intensive examination of one or a few major works of literature. Classroom work to develop skills of careful and critical reading. Book selection varies, but reading consists of major works by important authors and of selected supplementary materials.

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.

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.

Catalog Description: Introduces and explores African literatures from a range of regions. Pays particular attention to writings connected with the historical experiences of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and decolonization. Considers the operations of race, gender, nationhood, neocolonialism, and globalization within and across these writings.

Catalog Description: Literary culture of Middle Ages in England, as seen in selected works from earlier and later periods, ages of Beowulf and of Geoffrey Chaucer. Read in translation, except for a few later works, which are read in Middle English.

Catalog Description: Explores Shakespeare's later works. Focuses on the mature tragedies and late-career romances, by may include selected comedies and histories.

Catalog Description: Examines literary works from Victorian Britain and its empire (1837-1901), paired with contemporary social, scientific, and historical developments such as industrialization; urbanization; child labor; imperial expansion; scientific ideas of evolution and geologic time; changing ideas of gender/sexuality; mass education and mass literacy; and the popularization of print media.

Catalog Description: Principal writers in English of the modern Irish literary movement -- Yeats, Joyce, Synge, Gregory, and O'Casey among them -- with attention to traditions of Irish culture and history.

Catalog Description: The study of the development of and specific debates in the related genres of fantasy and science fiction literatures.

Catalog Description: Explores American fiction, poetry, and prose during the latter half of the nineteenth century. May include such representative authors of the period as Twain, Dickinson, DuBois, Crane, Wharton and Chopin, along with supplementary study of the broader cultural and political milieu.

Catalog Description: Explores American fiction, poetry, and prose during the latter half of the nineteenth century. May include such representative authors of the period as Twain, Dickinson, DuBois, Crane, Wharton and Chopin, along with supplementary study of the broader cultural and political milieu.

Catalog Description: Selected writings, novels, short stories, plays, and poems by African American and African-descended writers in or from the United States. Study of the historical, cultural, and intellectual context for the development of literary work by such writers, including attention to identity, power, and inequality. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 358.

Catalog Description: Addresses selected contemporary and historical works by United States Latino/a authors from the nineteenth century to the present, tracing their genealogy from a foundational triad of communities - Mexican, American, Puerto Rico, and Cuban American. Engages with issues of power, inequality, and marginality stemming from ethnic, linguistic, and racial experience.

Catalog Description: Investigates how perceptions of "woman writer" shape understandings of women's literary works and the forms in which they compose. Examines texts by women writers with attention to sociocultural, economic, and political context. Considers gender as a form of social difference as well as power relationships structured around gender inequality.

English Language Study introduces students to the most extraordinary thing we human beings do: speak. Indeed, this fact of human behavior is so central to our lives that we take it for granted. We speak our words so much, so easily, and so automatically that we hardly even think about what we are doing when we do it.

But even if we are not thinking much about what we do when we speak English, in fact we are doing a lot. We look for words to fit our thoughts, and we judge them for how well they fit the context in which we use them. We put together the sounds of the words we select in carefully articulated ways, and we slot the resulting words into different structures, each of which creates different meanings even when we are using the very same words. And we do all these things at speed, not even noticing our actions.

How do we do it? How can all the tweaks, moans and pops that human beings so easily cast out into the air cause others to laugh or grow angry or reach out to take a hand?

It is actually all pretty amazing, and it sets us the problem: how can we capture even the basic facts of this extraordinarily ability to communicate?

All of which means: this class will introduce you to a range of language issues, like why grammar is your friend (and not boring at all), or how in spite of the fact that all the words we say in English are made up of only about 40 distinct sounds, speakers can nevertheless say millions of completely different things. You will find out, too, why English spelling is so confusing, and how language change has caused enmity and war, or (with Shakespeare) how making language into poetry is often to take a first step towards making love.

Most important, you will learn something about yourself—about the ways language can control you much more than you control it, and about how knowing more about that control can give you at least some of the power you will need to have in order to fight back.

Catalog Description: Explores the workings and evolution of rhetorical genres as they emerge from and shape recurring social situations. Focuses on the relationship between form and content, and how the typified rhetorical features and linguistic styles of genres are related to specific purposes, activities, relations, and identities.

Catalog Description: Introduces and explores a specific area of theory or method as it has influenced the production, practice, study of literature, language and culture in English

Catalog Description: Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.

Catalog Description: Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.

Catalog Description: Focuses on emerging questions, debates, genres, and methods of multimodal analysis and production. Topics vary but might include transmedia storytelling, digital humanities, audiovisual essays, new media journalism, and performance. Although course has no prerequisites, instructors, assume knowledge of academic argumentation strategies.

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

We are mortal beings. There is as yet no evidence of god. We live in a digital culture. Art is related to the body and to the culture. Art should reflect these things. Brevity rules.

A sustained argument for the excitement and urgency of literary brevity; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity; and a meditation on the brevity of human existence. 

Purchase: LIFE IS SHORT—ART IS SHORTER: IN PRAISE OF BREVITY (edited by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman). Read the entire book—all essays, short stories, and prose-poems. Read the commentaries by the editors. Students will be assigned approximately ten 250-word writing exercises, based on the examples and prompts in the book. In class, students will read aloud their work and critique one another’s work. Students will learn about the virtue of brevity, key principles of literary composition, and the many gestures available to the contemporary writer.

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

Catalog Description: Relates major works of literature, literary theory and criticism, or creative writing to the landscape and activities of their settings for students in UW English Department study abroad programs. Equivalency for upper-division English coursework taken on a UW study abroad program or direct exchange

Catalog Description: Advanced work in cultural studies.

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

Topic: Hardboiled, Noir and the Politics of Style 

 This course will address two cross-pollinated products of  literary and visual culture – the hardboiled detective novel and film noir – that have proven both remarkably durable, persisting from the early 1930s to the present moment, and remarkably hard to specify.   Rather than comprise a genre, hardboiled and noir seem rather, and more elusively, to describe a look, an attitude, a feel – a visual and narrative style – that traverses any number of established genres, including ‘true crime’ fiction, police procedurals, melodramas, and thrillers. The hardboiled/noir ‘style’ appears mobile and plastic in other ways, as well, spanning, as it does, the divide between elite modernisms and mass culture, and a political spectrum marked at the one end by something like the Red Scare thematics of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and at the other by what Mike Davis describes as the quasi-Marxist sensibilities of Hollywood noir directors such as Billy Wilder and Orson Welles.  

 This class will explore the complex articulations of narrative style and cultural politics in hardboiled and noir.   If ‘style’ is inevitably a market phenomenon (a way of branding and selling cultural products), when and for whom might it function critically?  To what extent does the dissemination of a style create possibilities for appropriating and repurposing it – for example, possibilities for women writers to repurpose the expressly misogynist conventions of classic hardboiled fiction?  Conversely, to what extent is there a politics intrinsic to the style – an orientation to sexual and racial difference, for instance -- that is ‘written in’ to the touchstone figures, settings, and organizing motifs of these narrative modes?

 Course materials will include both fiction and film, spanning the 1930s to the present. I am still tinkering with the syllabus, but readings in print fiction will likely include Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place, Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem,  Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Frank Miller’s graphic novel, Sin City.  Likely films are The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1959), Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarentino, 1994), and Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996).   We will also take up  a selection of critical materials on modernism and popular culture (Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benjamin) , the material contexts of hardboiled and noir (Mike Davis, Michael Denning),  and its cultural politics (Sylvia Harvey, Janey Place, Yvonne Tasker, Stephen Heath, Manthia Diawara).  Course expectations include regular and engaged participation, a group presentation, a paper proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final research paper.

Catalog Description: A poetic tradition or group of poems connected by subject matter or poetic technique. Specific topics vary, but might include poetry as a geography of mind, the development of the love lyric, the comic poem.

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

Catalog Description: An examination of books that form a part of the imaginative experience of children, as well as a part of a larger literary heritage, viewed in the light of their social, psychological, political, and moral implications.

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

Catalog Description: Supervised experience in local businesses and other agencies. Open only to upper-division English majors. Credit/no credit only.

Catalog Description: Supervised experience in local businesses and other agencies. Open only to upper-division English majors. Credit/no credit only.

Catalog Description: Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken.

Catalog Description: Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken.

Catalog Description: Survey of current issues confronting literary critics today, based on revolving themes and topics. Focuses on debates and developments affecting English language and literatures, including questions about: the relationship of culture and history; the effect of emergent technologies on literary study; the rise of interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Catalog Description: Survey of current issues confronting literary critics today, based on revolving themes and topics. Focuses on debates and developments affecting English language and literatures, including questions about: the relationship of culture and history; the effect of emergent technologies on literary study; the rise of interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Catalog Description: Seminar study of special topics in language and literary study. Limited to seniors majoring in English.

Catalog Description: Individual study by arrangement with instructor.