This course positions literature as an artistic space where questions about humanity can be explored through the mediums of character, setting, plot, and narration. Specifically, the course will take an embattled character—the devil of Christianity—and examine how authors have used the character to make statements about mankind’s value, basic nature, and capacity for redemption. Looking across genres and across centuries at favorable descriptions of the devil will provide students with a comprehensive understanding of this figure, as well as prepare them to grapple with the question of why this supposed embodiment of evil is so often depicted as humorous, likeable, or sympathetic to mankind.

Students of the course will be asked to focus their careful reading practices with argumentative writing. At the conclusion of the course, students will be expected to make their own highly-polished, well-researched arguments regarding the nature of the devil in the texts the course has read. Because of its intense focus on wide-ranging texts and writing ability, this course fulfills the W credit and the VLPA credit for the University of Washington. Students will be expected to write 4 short papers (2-3 pages) and one longer paper (5-7 pages) in order to acquire the W credit.

Texts
Course Reader
Benet, Stephen Vincent. The Devil and Daniel Webster. ISBDN: 978-0822203032
Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman Volume 4: Season of Mists ISBDN: 978-1563890413
Milton, John. Paradise Lost (Norton Critical ed.) ISBDN: 978-0393924282
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Lolly Willowes. ISBDN: 978-0940322165

Children are strange, aren’t they? In every historical moment of the Western world, children have been re-imagined in fascinating ways that reflect the social and cultural fantasies of adults. Plato argued that the sexual love of little boys was the only way to recognize the true Forms of philosophical thought. Lewis Carroll and John Everett Millais were among the many artists who reveled in the prepubescent, naked body. Henry James enraged readers with his portrayals of sexualized children. On the other hand, poets such as William Blake and Charles Lamb described children as the heavenly embodiment of innocence. William Wordsworth believed they were the nexus of creative thinking. The contradiction of the sexual/innocent child in nineteenth-century English literature has spawned numerous Jungian archetypes – including Mary Shelley’s ultimate child-creature and Thomas Hardy’s murderous “Father Time” – that articulate the child as a monstrous hybrid of adult sin and adolescent wonder.

In this general literature course we will consider nineteenth-century English novels, essays, poems, photographs, and paintings that confront the sexual/innocent child archetype in sometimes disconcerting but always intriguing ways. Students will participate in discussions about the texts that refine their critical thinking skills, and will compose ten pages of academic writing to satisfy the University of Washington writing requirement (W).

This course is designed to critically examine the changing role of women and their reproductive labor in literature. Through reading a variety of literary texts such as Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” (1975), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), we will investigate how women across class and color lines negotiate and redefine their feminine subjectivities through the discourse of domesticity and the practice of housework. In this reading and writing intensive class, students are required to actively participate in class activities and discussions. Assignments include presentations, weekly in-class writing, GoPost reading responses, and three 5-page research papers (revisions required).

*This course satisfies the University of Washington’s “W” requirement.

Required Texts:
Ann Petry, The Street
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Course Pack (available at the AVE copy center)

This class will explore a variety of literary genres in order to gain a greater understanding of how sexuality, religion and violence play a role in the development and popularity of the Gothic novel. Throughout the course we will gain a greater understanding of the Gothic by asking not only how these three main issues are represented in different genres, but also how the Gothic adopts and uses them for its own purposes. How do the three work together and influence each other? What aspects of sexuality, religion and violence are highlighted and which are deemphasized in the Gothic novel and why?

We will explore these questions by reading novels, poems, short stories and plays. Our readings will span several hundred years, the oldest being a Greek tragedy from the 5th century B.C.E. (Euripides’ Medea), the most recent Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In between we will examine some Shakespearean Drama (Titus Andronicus), as well as selections from the poetry of John Donne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Blake and Robert Browning, among others. We will also read some selected short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis De Sade, and we will discuss some pivotal Gothic novels, which include Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, Denis Diderot’s The Nun and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, all of which deal with the intermingling of religion and sexuality as well as death and violence.

This is a very reading and writing intensive course. Although not a prerequisite, prior completion of a composition course is highly recommended. In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to complete ten to fifteen pages of out of class writing, with revision.

Required Course Texts:
Course Pack, Available at The Ave. Copy Center. 4141 University Way NE.
Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (Broadview) ISBN: 978-1551112275
Denis Diderot, The Nun (Penguin) ISBN: 978-0140443004
Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya (Broadview) ISBN: 978-1551111469
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Norton) ISBN: 978-039397012-8

The primary aim of this course is to introduce students to the practice and pleasure of critically reading literature. Our course theme is “The Monstrous Feminine” and our course texts track this theme throughout the 19th century utilizing both American and European literature.

To ground our thinking about ‘monstrosity’ we will read two critical pieces: an excerpt from Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996) and Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919). Other course texts include Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Wilke Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella” (1835). The three novels listed (Dracula, Frankenstein and The Woman in White) are available at the University Bookstore. The other shorter texts are compiled in a course pack located at the Ave Copy Center (4141 University Way NE # 103).
By taking on the theme of monstrosity, and specifically that of femininity, this course enables us to consider at least these key questions: What makes a monster? More specifically, what makes the women in these texts “monstrous”? What knowledge about human experience is potentially enabled/disabled by the label “monstrosity”? Our course theme also allows us to situate larger 19th century questions about gender, sexuality, and race.
Throughout this course we will use literature to hone our close reading skills, practice our composition, and improve upon our argumentation (both orally via class discussion and written through assigned essays). To that end, students will write two 5-7 page papers with the opportunity to revise based on instructor comments.* Additionally, I will assign quizzes, discussion questions, and reflective in-class and take-home writings in order to support critical reading, thinking, and writing.
*This course satisfies the University of Washington’s “W” requirement.

This course introduces students to the key concepts and interpretative methods of cultural studies. While keeping in mind that cultural studies is a discipline which does not allow an easy and clear categorization, the course will begin with a brief survey of the historical origin of the field and its key terms by studying a few foundational works before moving onto examples of interdisciplinary approaches and practices emerged onwards.

In investigating cultural studies and the value of reading the ‘culture’ from a cultural studies perspective, our focus will be the cultural discourse on adoption. Even before Hollywood celebrities recently crowded the mass media with their competitive race for a foreign baby from Third World countries, adoption has been circulated, consumed, and imagined through the generation of typified stories such as abandoned babies, war orphans, ‘waiting’ children, failed parentship of birth parents, infertile couples, and happily constructed adoptive families. Seeing the production of popular discourse on adoption in the contemporary U.S. context as a terrain of a cultural politics, our course texts will be drawn from short stories, memoirs, films, TV shows, newspapers, and websites of adoption agencies.

A selection of reading also may include the work of F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, E. Wayne Carp, Judith Modell, David Eng, Laura Briggs, Karen Dubinksky, Eleana Kim, and Jane Jeong Trenka.
These readings will be available through e-course reserves.

This class will begin with the great intellectual event of the 18th century—the Age of Enlightenment—and the great political event that developed out of it: the French Revolution. These two events and the ideas that emerged from them had a far-reaching impact on the intellectual and artistic scene in Britain. On the one hand, the Enlightenment thinkers foregrounded the primacy of reason and science over superstition and religion; on the other, repercussions from the French Revolution (and it's older cousin, the American Revolution) contributed to redefining the relationship between the individual and the nation.

Our reading will focus especially on the literary movement that came to be called Romanticism—a movement that in many ways provides the strongest and most immediate response to the ideas raised in the preceding centuries. We will approach Romanticism through the major poets of the period—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—and through other, less-famous writers that were equally involved in the artistic projects of Romanticism. We will also look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a novel that characterizes Romanticism's primary concerns even as it critiques them. We will end the quarter by reading Charles Dickens' Hard Times as a different sort of critique—one that deals with the aftermath of Romanticism's successes and failures.

The class will be a combination of lecture and discussion. You should expect to read a good deal of poetry, in addition to fiction and nonfiction prose. Please also expect a midterm and a final exam, a short paper (4-5 pp.), and a group presentation.

Course Readings:
Course pack, including shorter readings and critical texts (available the first week of the quarter at Ave Copy, 4141 University Way)
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Age of Romanticism (Broadview). 978-1551114040
Charles Dickens. Hard Times (Broadview). 978-1551110752
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein (Broadview). 978-1551113081

The concept of “modernity” implies a sense of temporal relativism. Whatever the characteristics of “modernity,” they didn’t exist in the “past”; they are proper to the “present.” As modernism and postmodernism are cultural movements that engage or express features of “modernity” or “post-modernity,” these movements are inevitably preoccupied with the experience of time, the relationship of the past to the present, and the possibilities of a futurity that is “new.”

Thus, in this class we will use temporality as our heuristic device, exploring how modernism and post-modernism variously imagine time -- and modern times. One of our central objectives will be to dismantle the definitional crutch that simplifies both modernism and post-modernism as mere efforts to fly in the face of historical precedent. While certainly, these movements encompass cultural objects that attempt as much, this is not the whole story. Although we’ll examine those efforts to “make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound, we’ll also keep in mind that Pound’s famous motto was purloined from an inscription on a millennia-old bathtub. Less cryptically, in this class we’ll read texts that insist upon various forms of historical relationship as well as texts that explore the possibilities of historical rupture. Although we’ll read texts that celebrate the “advances” of the modern present, we’ll also read texts that call notions of modern “progress” radically into question. We’ll read texts that predict the obsolescence of the future’s past, texts that forecast the endless rehearsal of present circumstance, and texts that suggest that excavating the past is the very means of creating an alternative futurity. In the process, we will hopefully both complicate and clarify our understandings of modernism, post-modernism, and that definitional morass known as (post)modernity.

Speaking of time, the reading for this class will occupy much of yours, so do consider before signing on. The course texts listed below are subject to change. Bookstore editions are recommended, but alternative editions are acceptable. A course pack with additional readings will be required.

Cather, Willa The Professor’s House (1925) 1604595124 / 978-1604595123
DeLillo, Don White Noise (1985) 0143105981 / 978-0143105985
Larsen, Nella Quicksand (1928) 1604599936 / 978-1604599930
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (1987) 1400033411 / 978-1400033416
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse (1927) 0156030470 / 978-0156030472

A course entitled “Shakespeare” carries with it hundreds of years of accumulated cultural baggage; this quarter, in what the course catalog deems an introduction to Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist, we’ll attempt to rifle through that baggage and work towards a holistic understanding of Shakespeare as a playwright from his own time until the present day by coming at “this God of our idolatry” from three distinct but interrelated angles: works, context, and legacy. These approaches will also dictate the goals, structure, and content of the course. We’ll read a selection of plays from varying genres, and critical consideration of the works themselves will be our primary focus, with the main goal of the class being that through close reading and analysis, you’ll be in a position to understand and to enjoy and appreciate (or to explain from an educated, critical, analytical perspective why you dislike) the dramatic works of Shakespeare. We’ll enrich this understanding with attention to the contexts—historical, theatrical, political, literary, and biographical—of the plays and their author, and by looking at various instances of their cultural legacy (reception, performance, criticism, adaptation, allusion, etc.). By considering Shakespeare from these various angles, and through your efforts toward critical thinking, analysis, research, and argumentation, we’ll work towards an interrogation of assumptions about Shakespeare and his work, and take time to enjoy the fun, passion, violence, sexuality, terror, beauty, and endurance of the language of the plays.

Course work will reflect the dynamic approach to the subject (which in turn reflects the inevitable dynamicism of Shakespeare studies), and may include discussion, online postings, research, group presentations, critical article reports, and scene performances, as well as critical writing. This course meets the university “W” requirement, which means that students must produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. (For more specific W-course criteria, please see http://www.washington.edu/uaa/gateway/advising/degreeplanning/writreqs.php).

There are no prerequisites, though a general enthusiasm for the subject can’t hurt. Course texts will include selected plays as well as a course pack. Due to economic and weight-bearing constraints, I am not requiring that you purchase a complete works for this course, though it’s certainly a worthwhile purchase, and they can be found used for very cheap. Whether you get a complete works, or individual texts, you must work with editions that have explanatory and textual notes and have been published in the last ten years, and you may NOT use online editions or No Fear Shakespeare (or any other modern English “translation” edition). We will spend some time in class discussing the process and history of textual editing of Shakespeare, and will therefore have informed opportunities to discuss textual variants that appear in any of your various editions. Some acceptable editions include: Oxford, Arden, Norton, Folger Shakespeare, and New Cambridge (though others could work too). Plays will most likely include but may not be limited to: Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, King Lear, and The Tempest.

Given the recent hullabaloo over the NewSouth Books' "new and improved" version of _Huckleberry Finn_ and the abridged reading of the _Constitution_ by the House of Representatives majority, we will take up the question and challenge of understanding how reading is a political act. Maya Angelou once said, “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” It is this sense that literature is important, that reading (and by extension writing) can reveal something about ourselves and the world, and that reading is a practice and lifeway maintained and sustained over time that is central to this class. In other words, literature is more than just words on a page, literacy is not a destination or a merit badge, and reading is as much about rereading as writing is as much about revising. This class will take up reading and rereading as critical practice by pointedly embracing literature considered controversial, inappropriate, subversive, or obscene. Many of these texts are commonly taught in high school curricula in the US and subsequently banned, bowdlerized, even burned because they are "dangerous." We will rescue and recatalyze this literature. This is not your usual high school novel class. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt the fiction of Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and J.K. Rowling.

A REQUIREMENT for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. In other words, this class is about reading, critiquing, and analyzing our culture through literature. Our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various fictions and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.

FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts -- from fiction to scholarship to visual and digital -- and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience. The class counts for W credit, requiring you to complete 10-15 pages of revised writing including a set of short response papers culminating in a longer seminar paper project.

What all humans have in common is actually what distinguishes them. How we define ourselves is ultimately not up to us because the thing we use for our self-definition – “identity” – is beyond our control. Exploring a variety of literary genres and forms, we will use the conception of identity as the tool to frame our comprehension and interpretation of the selected readings. We can see the concept of identity and identification change over the course of English and American literary history. What does identity/identification mean in literature that reflects the pre-capitalist era, imperial period, or late-capitalist times? Beginning with this fundamental question of identity, we are going to explore the multiplicity of identities of social subjects or objectified subjects which are socially, nationally, racially, and sexually constructed.

Readings include a film and four novels—A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fixer Chao by Han Ong, and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. Short stories will be selected from Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. One film will be shown for the writing purpose. Additional readings consist of articles by Stuart Hall, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stanley and Derald W. Sue, and Eleanor Ty. A brief introduction to realism and modernism will be provided in class.

In this course, two learning outcomes have been set up for students: first, the ability to develop a reasonable interpretation of a literary text and to support that interpretation with evidence; second, the ability to develop more sophisticated discussion and composition skills in the interest of being better able to construct and defend their own arguments or interpretations.

As a “W” or writing class, this course will require students to devote effort to writing about literature. Two 1–2-page singled-spaced proposals and two 5–7-page major papers should be completed during the course. Students will get feedback from peer review sessions and the instructor. The writing assignments will additionally include frequent free writing in class. Only the final drafts of both major papers will be graded; but the proposals will be taken into consideration for students’ final grades.

REQUIRED READINGS_________________________________________________________

Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
Fixer Chao (2001) by Han Ong
The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood
Course packet available at the Ave Copy Center (4141 University Way)

Crime dramas are the central text of the democratic experiment. Significantly, they're also among the most profitable. Consider television crime fighting, where every form of criminal and social justice is easily achievable with the right amount of pluck, and where no premise is too hackneyed to attract copious numbers of advertisers and less predictably, fans:
-Two hillbillies and their sex-pot sister fight crime in a stock car.
-A slender man and an obese man fight crime
-An elderly woman novelist fights crime
-A good-looking semi-truck driver, a monkey, and some attractive young women truck drivers fight crime
-A handsome white guy in a pricey car, or a talking car, or on a motorcycle, or in a special helicopter fights crime
-A craggy-faced police detective with poor personal hygiene fights crime
-Two tough women cops fight crime
-Any number of victims of botched military experiments fight crime
-An OCD sufferer fights crime
-A funny latino, or black, or Hawaiian, or Cuban American, or Native American man and a handsome white man fight crime
-A handyman fights crime
-Two SoCal studs, a computer nerd, and occasionally, a robot fight crime

Though our class this quarter will not spend much time on Kojack reruns, we *will* be digging into a trunk full of short, mass market crime novels and films to investigate how they configure the relations among political, economic, and sexual power. And unlike TV, which can trend towards the simplistic, our novels try to tell it from both sides: the Righteous Man smoking 'em out of their holes, getting 'em running, and visiting violence on 'em in order to preserve the solidity and harmony of the established order, and the dark-humored outlaws speaking a hip patois and nursing a strong conviction that, in the immortal words of John Rambo, "they drew the first blood, not me".

Required Texts:
Black, Jack. You Can't Win
Le Suer, Meridel. The Girl
Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place
Thompson, Jim. Savage Night
Spillane, Mickey. I, the Jury
Himes, Chester. Blind Man With a Pistol

This course will engage stories of romance from different times and places around the world. While certainly not exhaustive in scope, we will read medieval, British, American, African, and Russian texts in an effort to draw correspondences and contrasts between literary traditions. We will also engage the theme of romance from the perspective of gender, reading both male and female authors and striving to articulate the problems of attraction, love, obsession, betrayal, infidelity, lust, and as many other tropes of the romantic genre as we can find. The course texts are all written in narrative prose, but the styles will vary from what we recognize as the modern novel to forms of the novella and stories with oral dimensions as well. The reading load will be constant and monitored with consistent quizzes, in addition to a midterm and final exam. This course also carries a "W" requirement, which means students are expected to produce 10-12 pages of writing with mandatory revision. This requirement will be met by (three) short topic papers.

Required Texts:

1) Tristan and Isolde (Bedier and Belloc)
2) Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
3) The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
4) The Wedding of Zein (Tayeb Salih)
5) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

Just as the name implies, this course will focus on approaches to poetry, with an emphasis on developing the essential skill of close reading. To do this, the main work of the course will be examining poems in great detail, analyzing the way their formal and thematic elements work together to create constellations of ideas and emotions too complicated to express in any other way. While the class will also consider poetic developments in a larger literary and historical context, our main focus will be on the poems themselves, with the goal of beginning to approach, in a verbal or prose description, an articulation of the complex and multifaceted way a poem works.

Readings will range widely over time, but 20th century American poetry will be the primary focus of our attention. This class meets the requirements for the W (Writing) credit, meaning that there will be a focus on academic writing skills, and that assignments will include at least 10 pages of formal writing, with significant revision. Class participation will also comprise a major component of the final grade.

Required texts:

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Ed. Ramazani, et al., ISBN 978-0393324297

Littered with murderers, cannibals, and rapists the English stage has hosted countless villains. One phase of theatrical history had a particularly strong affinity for heinous characters: the late medieval through the early modern. Not only was the role of the villain the most coveted for actors, but audiences also clamored to see cruel behavior played out before them on the stage. This scenario was often controversial—in social, political, and religious terms—and playwrights could face unpleasant consequences for their writings. Yet, in spite of these obstacles, the time period produced some of the most memorable and horrific stage villains: Richard III and Lady Macbeth to name two famous examples. This course will study the evolution of the role of the villain—from antiquity through more recent works—with an emphasis on the time period that most celebrated this provocative role. We will spend time discussing the historical context out of which late medieval and early modern plays sprang, as well as their lasting influence on later works of drama. The primary playwrights we will be studying include: Sophocles, anonymous medieval playwrights, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster. We will also spend time exploring modern adaptations—on both stage and screen—of these older works.

Please note that in order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to complete ten to fifteen pages of writing with extensive revision.

English 250 is designed to introduce students to some of the basic themes underlying American national literary character. What do I mean by this? As critics like Cathy Davidson and Michael Warner have noted, American national culture has from its inception been a culture of letters, disseminated through pirated novels, black market pamphlets, periodicals, and other literary forms circulating throughout the new nation. Literary texts, as well as film, have been instrumental in institutionalizing themes of American identity with their audiences, thus naturalizing these ideals into American characters.

This course will begin with an examination of basic historical events of American history, paired with some methodological readings of nationalism and mythology. The following nine weeks will take students through five key themes in American culture that can be termed “mythologies of Americana”: liberty, piety, entrepreneurialism, individualism, and agrarianism. We will examine a number of texts ranging from the 17th century through the 21st that take up these themes critically and uncritically, including Rowlandson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Franklin, Ellison, McInerney, Kerouac, and others.



In this course, students will be expected to complete a bibliographic website and a 5-10 page critical paper, along with GoPost weekly responses and quizzes to demonstrate consistent engagement with the required texts. Students should prepare for a heavy reading schedule and to participate every day in class.


Book List:

- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

- Autobiography by Ben Franklin

- Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison

- On the Road by Jack Kerouac

- Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

- Course Pack available at Ave Copy Center

In 2005, when images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina saturated the world's popular media, it seemed to many observers that the supposedly “exceptional” nature of the US—and its promises of freedom, democratic inclusion, mobility and prosperity—had been revealed to be decisively false. Looking back from the “time of Katrina” (which is also the time of Bush and Obama, Iraq, Guantanamo, and financial crisis) to John Winthrop's famous 1630 speech declaring the settler colony that would become the United States a “City on the Hill,” this course will turn to US American literatures and cultures that have helped to produce and powerfully challenge claims about the country's “exceptional” nature—its supposed break from the rest of the world in its path of progress. In interrogating together what scholars call “American Exceptionalism,” we will develop a working knowledge and vocabulary for the study of American literary cultures. We will focus particularly on the ways that race, class, gender and sexuality have shaped and continue to shape the basic life chances and sense of belonging of people living within or in the shadow of the US—and the ways that cultural texts and “cultural workers” have imagined other possibilities and futures.

Although many of our primary texts will include poems, novels, short stories and performance pieces drawn from the 20th century—including works selected from among James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Okada, Suheir Hammad, Adrienne Rich, Paul Beatty, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Gillian Welch and Mos Def—we will also look at earlier works by Winthrop, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Herman Melville. Secondary materials will include documentary films and short critical texts by feminist, anti-racist, and marxian scholars such as Benedict Anderson, Amy Kaplan, Nikhil Pal Singh, Avery Gordon and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Assessment will be based on thoughtful, active and daily participation in class discussions, a group presentation or performance, reading quizzes and two take-home exams. Required books will be available through the University Bookstore. Additional materials will be available through the UW Libraries E-Reserve system.

David Shield’s recent book Reality Hunger manages to revive a long standing tension in American literature, between those for whom fiction—as in “the great American novel”—has a privileged access to representing American reality and those who are committed to the notion that American reality, particularly in politically and culturally tumultuous times, is always in excess of fiction, which is to say, too fantastic to invent. Of course this is an unnecessarily polarization, especially since some of America’s finest novelists have also been its finest non-fiction writers, essayists and journalists. However, in a time when American media has helped blur the line between reality and fiction, between the individually curated fantasies of the internet and an exhaustive chronicling of the world, it is an interesting time to reflect on how American writers have regarded this thing called “reality” in a time when it is less and less something that can be taken for granted. Authors to include James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Denis Johnson, Greil Marcus and, of course, David Shields.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the methods and theories used in the analysis of American culture. Emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to American literature, including history, politics, anthropology, and mass media.

Catalog Description: A chronological survey of Afro-American literature in all genres from its beginnings to the present day. Emphasizes Afro-American writing as a literary art; the cultural and historical context of Afro-American literary expression and the aesthetic criteria of Afro-American literature.

> In this course students will develop their existing composition skills by writing in various genres and modes for diverse audiences while exploring the course theme, participatory culture. According to media scholar Henry Jenkins, participatory culture is a culture in which the public are not only consumers, but also producers of cultural content, a possibility not limited to but clearly facilitated by current affordances of the web. Websites such as Flickr and Vimeo, for instance, have made it easier to share creative expressions while wikis, discussion forums, and consumer reviews have facilitated collaborative knowledge sharing and blogs and online forums have arguably increased possibilities for civic engagement. Rich in participatory potential, these cultural forms also bear ethical challenges that are worth examining as a means of developing new media literacies and critical thinking skills. Viewing these circulations, collaborations, and expressions as scenes of!
writing also grants us interesting opportunities to develop our understanding of rhetoric and genre and thereby grow as expository writers.
>
> With these aims in mind, students in this course will explore and investigate the web, collecting and critically examining participatory media forms and completing writing projects about them. Supporting this work will be course readings by Henry Jenkins, Laurence Lessig, Marshall Poe, Andrew Sullivan, Jurgen Habermas, and others. Students will also be supported by in-class and online discussion as well as peer and instructor feedback throughout the writing process. Please note that, while this course has no formal prerequisite, it 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. Also, while we will pay close attention to the web, this is not a web writing course, although some interest—but not necessarily any expertise—in the web and new media will be assumed.

Course Pack

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.

In this course we will study the features and functions of poetic
craft elements such as image, line, meter, sound, and structure—in
addition to the wider social and political themes indexed in modern and
contemporary poetry.Through intensive study of published poems, critical analysis, and close reading, we will examine the varied ways in which these devices are used in the tradition(s) of English-language poetry, and how they function not only as artistic and communicative acts, but as signposts of history and culture as well. Students will learn to
approach poetic texts as apprentice writers, then respond in kind with the understanding that every poem is, in some way, a response to the rich literary tradition(s) that shape our contemporary moment. They will also cultivate writing habits such as drafting and revision, regular observation, and craft-based reading of literature that will inform their future growth as creative writers .

Course reader can be purchased at Professional Copy and Print, 4200 University Way N E

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified 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.

This course will focus as much on selected American texts as the act of reading itself. What do we expect out of fiction in an age of declining readerships and the ascendancy of electronic media? We will read Nella Larsen’s Passing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and To Kill a Mockingbird, all books that are routinely hailed in different contexts as being exemplary cultural artifacts. While class time will be devoted to exploring critical readings of these texts, we will spend much time on examining why these texts have been heralded as bastions of literature. What is the relationship of the book to the “real world”? How does a text become “major,” and what effect does this naming have on the interior experience of reading? The final project for this course will involve picking a piece of text from fanfiction.net and thinking through how the issues of cultural weight and reading raised throughout the quarter apply when a story is self-published and self-generates!
its own legacy.

Trauma, mourning and melancholia, memory and its repression, counter-histories and their suppression testify to the ghostly presence of the past. In this class students will grapple with critical practices (theories, fictions and films) that represent such hauntings. How they do so and with what likely effects are the basic questions. Informed participation in class discussion, six short critiques of assigned texts, a final 8-10 page paper, and the purchase of a course packet and three novels are required. Two are Another Country and The Book of Daniel; the third is likely to be Bone or Comfort Woman.

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

This course is designed to provide English majors with an in depth experience of the practice of literary study. Clearly there are many ways to study literature and our understanding of the “best” or “most useful” practice(s) continues to be contested and to change over time. In this course we will focus on one of the more important critical practices that is dominant in the contemporary academy and that informs scholarship done by members of the profession and the UW department, today: Marxist materialism and related forms of cultural theory that often fall under labels such as “critical theory,” “feminist theory,” “critical race theory,” and “postcolonial theory.” By contrast to earlier models of literary criticism, which sought to find in literary texts transcendent messages and universal meanings, Marxist materialism has sought to situate literary and cultural texts within their historical context of production and reception; to understand the power dynamics, including those of gender, race, and class, that necessarily shape textual meaning; and to understand how social and historical conflict impacts literature’s message, genre, style and form. Our study of Marxist theory will involve us in close, intensive reading of dense philosophical arguments about economics (aka: political economy), ideology, and culture. Along the way we will read several key texts by Marx and his collaborator Engels. Among other things, this course examines how a literary critical framework has been developed by literary and cultural theorists out of a body of economic and social theory that was not necessary concerned with literature per se. Over the course of the quarter we will also read several literary texts. We will consider how our understanding of each is shaped by the critical practice the course explores, and how literary texts in turn, reveal the (in)adequacy of this critical practice and/or suggests new ways of thinking about literary production and interpretation. Books will be available through the bookstore and there will be an ample course reader.

This course aims to introduce students to the field of social, historical, and philosophical inquiry commonly aggregated under the umbrella term "critical theory." We will discuss a number of movements including Marxism, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, race studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, and will read key texts by the likes of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and/ or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The focus will be on understanding the theoretical texts, their historical contexts, and their application to 2-3 novels that we will be reading, which will include Ruth Ozeki's "My Year of Meats," Salman Rushdie's "Fury," Toni Morrison's "Sula," and/ or Karen Tei Yamashita's "Through the Arc of the Rainforest." We may also supplement these readings with films including "The Corporation" and "Ethnic Notions."

Rhetoric!?! What exactly is rhetoric and why should anyone care to study it?

This course hopes to answer that question.

In the sparest terms, rhetoric is the strategic use of language and symbols to get things done in the world (and the systemic study of those uses). This course introduces rhetorical theory from the classical period to the present, including an overview of core issues, vocabularies, and concepts in rhetorical theory; a discussion of methods for studying rhetoric; and a consideration of the social importance of studying rhetoric in the contemporary moment.

Class projects will require students to identify, explore, and respond to the rhetorical contours of salient public issues of their choosing. We will consider both the consequences of rhetoric, as well as how rhetoric might be deployed as a tool for social action and intervention. There will be more weight placed on contemporary rhetorical theory, including an emphasis on visual and new media rhetorics.

This course will be particularly beneficial to individuals interested in rhetorical studies, rhetoric and composition, and graduate-level English work, but also to those entering professions such as law, education, business, public relations, and journalism

The central issue in this course will be the idea of MODERNISM. The course will be a reading course, with consistent focus on making sense of texts that have often seemed puzzling to readers. Given the range (and interest) of the assigned reading, considerable emphasis will be put on the discussion sections. There will be extensive guidance for all assignments. The guiding premise is that no one can write well if they do not first attending to reading intelligently. That will be our principal concern. I am not interested in reading papers that merely indulge unsupported opinions or that have been patched together from the internet. Accordingly, all writing assignments will be short and very specifically related to reading the texts assigned. The course is cross listed, with two sections, one in Comparative Literature and the other in English: there is no difference except for department designation, course number and title. The course will carry credit for majors in both departments, as well as distribution credit (VLPA). If one section is full, sign up for the other. Please note that all lectures will be recorded and posted daily on the Web site indicated above, to allow you to review anything presented in class. Attendance is required as the fundamental condition for participation in the course, and will be a factor in your final grade. This is not a course you can take in your pajamas.

We will read works by Shakespeare, John Milton, Immanuel Kant, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Wallace Stevens, Czeslaw Milosz, and Margaret Atwood. Most selections will be short, except as noted below in the list of texts.

You will notice that the list of readings does not follow the current convention of so-called “period courses,� in which, for example, a literary “period� is defined by beginning and ending dates. In the first days of the course, the conceptual, institutional, cultural and political issues that touch this matter will be discussed directly. Here, it is important to note that what counts as “modern� has always been relative to something viewed as “traditional,� or “conventional� or “ancient.� What makes something modern, that is to say, is never entirely determined by its date of publication—nor even by its use of certain formal devices or strategies. More generally, virtually all proposed “periods� qualified in their own times as “modern� inasmuch as they presented challenges to what had come before.

In a more fundamental sense, all of the works assigned in this course count as modern in the sense that they present a challenge to the status quo, to the commonplace, to received wisdom—and in that respect, their literary and cultural function is exceptionally important by posing, repeatedly, the question of the purpose or function of literary writing. Note also that the readings are not restricted to single cultural traditions (though for practical reasons, all the readings are available in English versions).

Texts:

Please note that YOU MUST USE THE ASSIGNED EDITIONS. You can realize very significant savings by buying most of these books on line, though the editions will all be available in the University Bookstore. The course reader is required and will be available at Professional Copy and Print (42nd and University Way). A PDF version will be posted on-line.

In U Bookstore: William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida(Pelican) ISBN 0140714863 John Milton: Samson Agonistes (Crofts Classics edition) ISBN 0882950584 T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Harcourt) ISBN 0151189781 William Carlos Williams: Imaginations (New Directions) ISBN 0811202291 Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (Oxford World Classics) ISBN 0199536619 James Joyce: Dubliners (Viking Revised, ed. Scholes & Litz) ISBN 0140247742

In the Course Reader: (Professional Copy and Print) (also on-line) The Book of Ecclesiastes (from the King James Bible) Clement Greenberg : “Modernist Painting� Dieter Henrich: sel. from Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World. Jean Jacques Rousseau: selection from Emile Immanuel Kant : sel. from Critique of the Power of Judgment William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd edition) Walt Whitman: Democratic Vistas Franz Kafka: “Metamorphosis�, “In the Penal Colony� and selected parables Jorge Luis Borges: “Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius,� and “The Circular Ruins� Selected poetry & prose by Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Czeslaw Milosz, and Margaret Atwood.

Catalog Description: Explores literatures and cultures produced in the Atlantic world. Emphasizes historical lines of communication and exchange among Atlantic cultures and their literatures.

Catalog Description: Explores literatures and cultures produced in the Atlantic world. Emphasizes historical lines of communication and exchange among Atlantic cultures and their literatures.

Catalog Description: Explores literatures and cultures produced in the Atlantic world. Emphasizes historical lines of communication and exchange among Atlantic cultures and their literatures.

Post-WWII world history could easily be called the "Age of Postcoloniality," the period in which the European powers which controlled till then 85% of the world's land mass lost their colonies due to the freedom struggles across the non-western world. Though postcoloniality indicates the legal identity of the former colonies, as independent political states, globalization better describes the economic system that emerged in this period. This class will ask if there is an aesthetic or set of aesthetics that corresponds to the economic phenomenon of globalization. How do western and non-western writers since the 1970s represent globalization? Why is there an attempt to produce a global aesthetic as well as the numerous counter-aesthetics that have emerged in the wake of that attempt? Do aesthetics enable or inhibit a deeper ethical and political relationship to globalization?

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

This course will serve as a general introduction to Romanticism in British literature between 1765 and 1830. It will focus on two particular literary responses to the Enlightenment: the emergence of Gothic fiction and the Romantic cult of Nature. Please expect to read four novels as well as healthy amounts of poetry and nonfiction prose.

In this course we will study a number of texts that constitute early British modernism, moving from the impressionist narratives of the late 19th-century to the high modernist trilogy of works published in1922: James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. As you can tell from this list, our approach will be necessarily international and comparative: Joyce was from Dublin; Eliot, from St. Louis. Joseph Conrad, who we’ll also read, was born in Poland. We will also examine key philosophical texts from the period to trace their influence on the literary world. In other words, our focus is national, but our approach will be interdisciplinary and comparative.

As we read, we will pay particular attention to artistic experimentation and the way those formal developments result in a number of paradoxes. These paradoxes largely turn on the problem of “modernism” itself. Simply put, what does it mean to be modern? How does one, in Ezra Pound’s words, “make it new”? And what happens when your new thing becomes old, or, as this class’s very existence attests, institutionalized and canonical? Does modernism necessarily destroy itself?

Exact readings to be determined, but you can expect to see some formally, conceptually, and philosophically demanding works. Unfortunately, we will not have the time to read Ulysses in its entirety. Students should be prepared to actively discuss the readings, write two short papers, develop those papers into a final essay, collaborate on a group project, and, if required, take reading quizzes

This course is a general introduction to modern Irish literature. After a brief survey of early modern works and authors, we'll focus on the Irish Literary Revival and its aftermath (1880-1940). The reading list includes works of visionary intensity and stark realism, passion and irreverence, humor and high drama. We'll be paying special attention to the role of literature in forging a distinct national and personal identity, and to the unique contributions of Irish writers to modern British literary culture. The course will be especially useful to students who wish to study further the Irish masters of British modernism (Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett) or contemporaries such as recent Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney.

Requirements include:

memorizing (and reciting) one longer poem (or several shorter ones) by Yeats (one grade unit); attendance, quizzes, short written assignments (one grade unit); final (two grade units). Texts: Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford, World's Classics); W. B. Yeats, Early Poems (Dover Thrift); J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover Thrift); James Joyce, Dubliners (Dover Thrift); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Flann O'Brien, The Poor Mouth (Dalkey Archive Press); Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland (Plume); The Tain, Kinsella translation (Oxford ppb: OPTIONAL!); course pack.

What constitutes “independent film” in an era when independent distributors have merged with Hollywood studios? English 345 addresses this question by examining the narrative, stylistic, and industrial aspects of contemporary U.S. independent film. While we will briefly investigate the history of independent film in the U.S., beginning with the industry’s earliest days, we will concentrate on the burgeoning of independent cinema that began in the mid 1980s. In addition to viewing films in class, students will attend selected screenings at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Texts:
Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art.
Xeroxed course packet.

Investigation of one of the major types of drama: tragedy or comedy. Emphasis on drama prior to the twentieth century.

We'll read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories written by American authors in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to keep up with reading assignments, attend class regularly, take part in class-discussion, and write a series of in-class essays done in answer to study questions handed out in advance.

TEXTS: William Faulkner, GO DOWN, MOSES; Zora Neale Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; Ernest Hemingway, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS; Sherwood Anderson, WINESBURG, OHIO; THIRTEEN STORIES BY EUDORA WELTY; John Steinbeck, THE LONG VALLEY; Sinclair Lewis, BABBITT; and Richard Wright, UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN.

Learn how we narrate and depict nature scenes in a team-based learning approach. Classroom projects will range from analyzing mountains, polar environments, plants and animals, to tropical and colonial nature in literature, film, and art. Students work as teams to complete hands-on projects.

The course covers all the grammatical forms and structures of English and several ways to describe and represent (graph, diagram) them. We will cover

* lexical categories (Parts of Speech), * syntactic categories (such as phrases, clauses, tense, and aspect), * grammatical relations, * dependency relations, * constituent structure, * loosely integrated strings of words in the sentence. * connective links between sentences. We will use some of the on-line tools for automated POS tagging and graphing ("diagramming"). By the end of the course, students will be able to describe most of the syntactic structures of English in several ways. In addition, students will be able analyze the cohesion of sentences in connected text.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 370

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

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

For the past two centuries, the romance genre has been a mainstay of both literary and mass market fiction. Reduced to its bare bones, the romance attends to the emergence of its female heroine from social and psychological trials into the fulfillment of companionate marriage and domesticity. Because it foregrounds female experience, the modern romance is often framed as a “women’s genre,” even though the romance is no less preoccupied with elaborating the complementary masculine identity of the woman’s romantic objects (those she rejects, as well as the one she accepts) – and even though, historically, the romance novel has attracted male and female readers in roughly equal proportions. In most feminist critical accounts, to be sure, romance reads as something like a narrative machine for the production of a normative (conventional) gender imaginary – in which romantic fulfillment through marriage appears not simply as women’s only option, but as the apex o!
f their desires. At the same time, as these accounts often explore, the difficulty of securing the relation to the romantic hero marks the psychic costs and fragility of this gendered fantasy. From its inception, however, the romance has been cross-pollinated (so to speak) with the paranormal, a thematics of vampirism, haunting, possession, and over-consumption. Indeed, many of these elements can be found in the paradigmatic fictions of the genre, those most dedicated, we might say, to the production of gendered social normality, even as the paranormal romance also constitutes a sort of fringe subgenre.

This course will take up the paranormal romance as a way to interrogate the cultural work of the modern romance genre. What is the relation between romance narratives and gender norms – between literary and social conventions? If genres operate according to certain narrative rules, or formula, what is it these rules guarantee – and, conversely, what practices of rule-breaking do they invite? How does the genre morph historically, in relation to changing gender norms, as well as changing conceptions of queer sexualities and interracial intimacy? How should we understand the status of the paranormal as simultaneously a central and a peripheral motif?

Reading for the class will likely include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Edgar Allen Poe’s short fictions “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark (on which the HBO television series Trueblood is loosely based). Required critical reading will include Jan Radway’s Reading the Romance, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (vol 1), as well as essays by Inderpal Grewal, Joan Dayan, Angela Carter, and Judith Butler. Written work for the course will consist of numerous short assignments, and an option to choose between two shorter essays (5-6 pp), or one longer, final project (10-12 pp).

This course is designed as an introduction to the environmental humanities, focusing on ecocriticism as a approach, but also dealing with works from environmental history, ethics, economics, epidemiology, climatology and other areas. Ecocriticism grows in part out of a longstanding critical interest in the topic of nature and its representation in literary texts; it differs in adopting a more contemporary sense of the ecological relation between human beings and the environments they inhabit. We will be surveying some of the critical literature in this field, beginning with selections from two collections of essays that attempt to define the field (The Ecocriticism Reader and Uncommon Ground), then looking at several topical areas (economics, religion, evolution, ecology, toxicity and climate), both through the lens of critical analyses and “literary” sorts of texts: Robinson Crusoe, On the Origin of Species, A Sand County Almanac, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Arctic Dreams. Coursework will include individual papers on the primary texts, as well as a pair of group research projects (one small, one larger).

This course addresses the literature and culture of the 1920s, also known as the Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age, or the era of the Lost Generation. We will mostly focus on the 1920s in English literature, with a few selected excursions across the Atlantic. Our central readings will likely include novels by Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh; short stories by Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce; and poems by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Mina Loy. In addition to these readings, we will consider the decade’s many developments in modernism: art, photography, cinema, and music. Our readings, presentations, and daily discussion will also attend to the period’s historical and cultural atmosphere, including such topics as World War I and its aftermath, women’s suffrage, city life, new technologies, and political changes. Each student will investigate and then present to the class materials from the University of Washington’s print and digital archives. In addition to presentations, this course requires in-class participation, essays, quizzes, and exams.

Crome Yellow (1921) by Aldous Huxley
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh
Course Pack

This course will query the extent to which contemporary U.S. literatures “theorize” a historical moment where both political and individual sovereignty are undergoing considerable transformations in light of the ongoing expansion of transnational capital and the attendant reorganization of the U.S. nation-state. After opening with an introduction to the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and engaging with critical responses to this archive from theorists such as Arendt, Schmitt and Foucault, we will focus on how a handful of novels written in the past thirty or so years represent the relation between and non-coherence of sovereignty as “absolute rule” and as “freedom and autonomy.” Expect to read Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Fae Myenne Ng’s Steer Toward Rock, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, the critical material marked above and several additional short critical pieces. Grades will be based on participation, weekly written responses, and a final 10-12-page paper.

Ralph Ellison, the celebrated African-American novelist, writes that “perhaps we” as Americans “shy from confronting our cultural wholeness because it offers no easily recognized points of rest, no facile certainties to who, what, or where (culturally or historically) we are. Instead the whole is always in cacophonic motion. . . . It appears as a vortex of discordant ways of living and tastes, values and traditions. . . . In our intergroup familiarity there is a brooding strangeness, and in our underlying alienation a poignant—although distrusted—sense of fraternity.” No doubt when many people think of “fraternity,” “cultural wholeness,” and other such concepts of social unity, they envisage values in common, a shared way of speaking, a flag for all to salute, and monuments and symbols that firmly register a collective identity and coherent sense of mission. But Ellison suggests that the United States of America adds up, at bottom, not to anything dependably stable, standardized and fixed, but to a whirling “vortex of discordant” vocabularies, traditions, and values, and that if a genuine sense of “fraternity” or “wholeness” lies anywhere in such society, it lies precisely in “confronting”—rather than in masking over—such a dissonant, tumultuous whole. In this course we will explore a multitude of nineteenth-century American texts in which cosmetic, fundamentally unconvincing pretenses at expressing social unity are interrogated, critiqued, and found wanting, and in which what Ellison terms an “intergroup” sense of incongruity and dissonance rises to surface. Is it true that the specter of “intergroup” incongruity inevitably spells social disaster? Or must the promise of community forcibly throw into relief—if it is going to be truly authentic--a troubled social middle, and does it depend upon a capacity to accept and even relish paradox, upon an openness to oddity , surprise, and shock, and upon an ability to see a situation or scene (as in the case of an Escher etching) in several different ways all at once?

Primary Texts: All available at UW Bookstore

Purchase the Course Pack for this course, which contains the following photocopied readings: Whittier, Snowbound; Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Chief Seattle’s Speech; excerpts from Moby-Dick; Gilman, ”The Yellow Wallpaper”; Crane, “The Monster”; James, excerpts from The American Scene.

Also, at the Bookstore:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

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 Garfield 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 ED 401, 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.

Language ideologies inform cultural perceptions, educational philosophies, and public policy, and influence the ways that we think about individuals and their speech. This course examines some present-day ideologies of English – including ideas about a standard English, varieties of English, and the role of English abroad. We will consider the impact of these perspectives and ideas about English and investigate the ways that these ideologies were constructed through and informed by language history. How do present-day usage manuals reveal eighteenth-century cultural ideas about English? How do English dictionaries reveal our cultural values about language? How have English dialect stereotypes reflected social hierarchies over the last five centuries? This course will address these and other questions as we examine the historical development of present-day ideologies of English. Course requirements include two papers and several short response papers. Students are not expected to have previous experience with the history of English or with language study; interest in these questions and enthusiasm for the English language are the only prerequisites.

English 481A/Education 401C will be taught by English faculty member and Community Literacy Program Director Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill in collaboration with College of Education Language Arts faculty member Karen Mikolasy. This linked pair of courses offers an opportunity for English Majors considering careers in education to gain crucial school-based experience, serves as a bridge between undergraduate and Teacher Education Program language arts curriculum, and gives UW students an opportunity to give back to the community as you complete your undergraduate degree.

In English 481 students will meet twice weekly on campus (MW 10:30-12:20) in a writing-intensive seminar focused on learning effective methods of working with public school students in language arts, exploring some central challenges and opportunities for public education including ethnic and linguistic diversity, and using writing to inquire into, develop and communicate your thinking about these issues. In EDUC 401, you will put what you learn on campus into action, volunteering (4-5 hours a week, on a schedule you arrange) in one of our partner public schools: Olympic Hills Elementary, Garfield High School or Shorecrest High School.


Required texts: Coursepack; Diana Hacker A Pocket Style Manual, 5th edition (or another style and citation manual)

This course will provide students with an intensive study of contemporary poetic practices, along with an analysis and discussion of the aesthetic, theoretical and ethical considerations which underlie these practices. There will be a focus on stylistic imitations from a range of sources, along with craft exercises and a study of the essential elements of poetic meaning-making including form, music, syntax, stanza, and argumentation.


Course Texts:

Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology

Course Pack

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This advanced workshop will focus on the process of taking a longer piece of fiction or literary nonfiction (15-20 pages) from inception through revision. You will start the quarter by doing a series of generative exercises, then draft and revise your story or essay several times.
Books:
Ron Carlson, Ron Carlson Tells a Story (Graywolf Press, 2007)
Brian Kiteley, The 3 A.M. Epiphany (Writers Digest Books, 2005) or Brian Kiteley, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough (Writers Digest Books, 2009)
Course reader

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Experience in planning, writing, and revising a work of long fiction, whether from the outset, in progress, or in already completed draft.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

Catalog Description: Special projects available to honors students in creative writing. Required of, and limited to, honors students in creative writing.

This class is organized around the writing of an honors thesis of 20-30 pages on a topic of your choice. You can revise and develop a paper from a previous honors seminar or other class, or undertake an altogether new subject. The result as called for by the Honors Program requirement should be a research-based work of critical analysis, but the relative weight of research and analysis will vary depending on the topic. The class will work together on drafts and peer reviews, and I will meet with you individually as your project develops.

Conference focus is your successful completion of a research-based critical essay, one that meets a level of graduate-level sophistication in English-related disciplines. Given that aim, seminar sessions will focus interactively on various matters and standards of professional essay production and revision. Latter course sessions will include practice in delivering the professional essay in person within a simulated scholarly conference-style setting. As with all 494 Honors courses this year, our 496 sessions will be held in the English Computer-Integrated-Courses (CIC) Program’s suite of wired seminar/lab classrooms, allowing for efficient and collaborative file sharing, in-person and online peer revision and discussion, scholarly database access, and multimedia projection. All will enhance your potential to build community in scholarly enterprise while improving reading and listening audience engagement, necessary steps in the academic publication process.
Course Text: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition
[Note: please purchase this new edition so as to insure personal access to the accompanying Web site: www.mlahandbook.org]

As a product of the last two decades of political instability, radical cultural change and a rush of out-migration on the African continent, an unprecedented number of books have captured the imagination of international readers. These books have attempted in various ways to capture the complexity and pathos of civil wars, genocide, revolutions and individual attempts to survive not a world of formal colonial domination but a world terrorized by violent notions of freedom and the trauma’s of political “independence.” The most harrowing and often best-selling of these are written by or about “child soldiers;” these have become indeed so popular and influential on global politics, policy and patterns of immigration that it is necessary to think of them as a distinct genre. In this class we will read from a selection of these texts. We will explore their broader political and historical contexts but also explore the ways that they fall within certain conventions of narrative; this of course will require we engage with the increasing problem of “authenticity,” since quite a few have been criticized for their exaggeration in the face of admittedly unimaginable trauma. Authors to include, Ishmael Beah, Uzodinma Iweala, Emmanuel Jal, Grace Akallo, Emmanuel Dongala, Chris Abani and Delia Jarrett-Macaulay.