In the course we’ll read several works of prose and poetry from New England, ranging from
some of the earliest American poets to contemporary experimentalists; from the philosophical writings of Emerson and Thoreau to the grim tales of Edgar Allen Poe. We’ll explore what preoccupations have run through the literature of this region, and how they’ve been In the course we’ll read several works of prose and poetry from New England, ranging from reformulated. Through reading, class discussion, five short writing assignments (one typed, double-spaced page in length) and a final paper, the aim is to develop close reading skills as well as skills and strategies for writing about literature. We’ll also touch on different critical approaches, look at a few secondary sources, and discuss how to include criticism in your own writing.

Required texts: Henry David Throeau Walden, Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville Moby Dick, Bernadette Mayer Midwinter Morning, and a course reader prepared by the instructor.


The course satisfies the university's W requirement. Students will write one final, 10-12 page paper, which they will have an opportunity to revise in consultation with the instructor.

The overall goal of ENGL 200 is to equip students with techniques for critically reading, responding, analyzing, and hopefully enjoying various kinds of literature. In this course, we will focus on how the idea of “home” and “belonging” is constructed in different historical moments and through different literary forms. We will ask questions such as: how is home situated in relation to national, racial, and gendered discourses? How is the concept of home conditioned by structures of capitalism, globalization, and post-colonialism? What is the relationship between literature and its cultural and historical moment of production? In what ways does literature participate in, challenge, or reflect dominant conceptions of home?

Books may include: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth (1903), Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet (2005), Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2006), and selections from Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Lisa Lowe, Edward Said and others.

With each text we read, we will focus on developing close-reading practices that help us engage in and reflect on the reading process. We will also read accompanying works of literary theory and criticism in order to better situate our critical responses within existing conversations. In this course, students will develop their own method for “reading literature,” and have good practice engaging literary works (and, by association, other kinds of texts) on a complex, thoughtful, and critical level. As this is a “W” class, course requirements include a demanding reading schedule, several short reading responses, active in-class participation, a group presentation, writing workshops with peer feedback, and a final paper.

“Diaspora,” which literally means “scattering of seeds,” is used to define migrant groups who sustain their history, memory and tradition even after dispersal from the homeland. In the U.S. context, “diaspora” has represented a way of viewing migrant communities without expecting them to assimilate within U.S. culture. “Diaspora” thus represents both an alternative to assimilation, and a set of new problems. How does a diaspora represent a homeland they have been separated from? Does being in a diaspora make a migrant group less American? What is the diaspora’s relationship to the homeland and the host country?

This course will explore these questions by examining how “diaspora” has been historically and theoretically constituted within Asian migrant literature. We will attempt to discover and define a growing body of diasporic writing that includes migrant histories, memories of exile, and narratives of traveling back to an imagined homeland. We will examine these writings against their historic, political, economic, geographic and social backdrops, focusing on themes regarding gender, class, national origins, transnational identities, and sexuality.

The texts in this course come from a variety of forms and genres. We will read novels, short stories, poetry, and film, to invoke questions of genre and form as well as questions concerning themes and character. These literatures will be paired with critical essays.

The work for the course is designed to keep you reading and writing daily. There will be weekly reading responses and 2-3 page short papers due every two weeks. There will also be one group presentation every week, and a final digital group project. This course satisfies the W credit and the VLPA credit.

Required Reading List:
Sionil Jose, Viajero
Lawrence Chua, Gold by the Inch
Yamashita, Karen. Brazil-Maru
UW Course Pack

Course Description: This course explores the ways in which “race” have been defined in select cultural texts in various forms, including literary fiction, films, isual art, and critical theoretical essays. We will examine how the definitions of race that emerge from each text rely on or critique (implicitly or explicitly) 20th-century American legal, scientific, economic, and aesthetic logics or theories. We will also explore how knowledge about race and its social order is shaped by
the form or medium of expression—how is the “medium” related to the “message”? In short, our approach to reading and viewing texts will trace how the definition of race, the definition of social structures, and its formal expressions are co-dependent.

To analyze course texts, we will focus the on the practice of close reading through writing of essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two 5-7 page papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

Book List: Fiction will include Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928); George Schuyler, Black No More (1931); and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). All other materials will be in the course reader or posted to the class website.

This class is a very reading and writing intensive course. We will focus on the practice of close reading, particularly as it relates to the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the literature. Students will improve their writing skills with regard to writing about literature and culture, fulfilling the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of two 4-6 page papers and three 1-page response papers. The course will also include a small group discussion-led component as well as in-class debates.

Through literary fiction, film, and critical theoretical essays, our readings will explore middle-class women’s effects on shaping reform to the social, political, and religious culture of Victorian England. Readings will be drawn from the works of Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), George Eliot (Middlemarch), and Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford). We will take up questions of imagery/characterization/narrative while comparing the novel as a literary form to sections of the later BBC movie representations. We will also examine how contemporary feminist critics including Deirdre D’Albertis, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Suzanne Graver, and Elizabeth Langland question the feminism of Brontë, Eliot, and Gaskell through their various female characters.

The three required novels are Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 1847; Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, 1851; and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, 1871. All other materials will be available on-line or in the course reader.

This introduction to cultural studies enlists science fiction and cultural critique in an examination of new information and bio technologies and the larger networks within which they are embedded. The latter include governmental institutions, capitalism, and culture. Four questions will direct our study: 1. how are these technologies, their access and use shaped by the networks within which they exist; 2. what new forms of being in the world have these technologies introduced; 3. what opportunities for domination and resistance do they open up; 4. what futures do they portend. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, generate short critical responses to assigned readings, contribute to a group project, and produce a final (7-8 page) cultural studies essay.

Required Texts: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; a course packet and two science fiction films. (We will start with Bladerunner, which I recommend viewing before class begins.)

This course provides an introduction to literary modernism and postmodernism. The terms modernism and postmodernism have been the source of much debate. In order to clarify these terms, we will read texts whose modernist and postmodernist features are produced by their engagement with the U.S.-Mexico border. In general, modernism and postmodernism are understood as demonstrating an experimental set of narrative practices. We will therefore begin our investigation of modernism and postmodernism by examining the ways in which historical and technological developments along the U.S.-Mexico border have influenced formal experiments such as narrative flashback, stream of consciousness and multilingualism. We will read novels by Américo Paredes, John Dos Passos, Malcolm Lowry, Ana Castillo and Brianda Domecq, as well as use a course reader.

The novels are: George Washington Gómez (ISBN 978-1—55885-012-5), The Big Money (ISBN 0-618-05683-1), Under the Volcano (ISBN 0-06-095522-8), So Far From God (ISBN 0-393-32693-4), and The Astonishing Story of the Saint of Cabora (ISBN 0-927-53478-9).

Introduces Shakespeare' s career as dramatist, with study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.
We will use Bevington, ed. Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th edition. Earlier editions of this work are acceptable. Other editions are not.

Our analysis will focus on different dystopias of governmental control, how evolutions in mass-market media and technology either reinforce or inhibit their development, and finally how these mechanisms manifest themselves among different social classes and immigrant populations. It includes both classic texts as well as recent additions to the genre that will certainly become classics: Bradbury’s elucidation on the potential effects of literary censorship in Fahrenheit 451, Huxley’s chilling portrait of an almost unrecognizable repression in the form of a society drugged into perpetual happiness in Brave New World, and Orwell’s dystopian vision of a government that uses fear to control the masses in Nineteen Eighty-Four are all timeless. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tail portrays similar abhorrent conditions but in a current context, while simultaneously addressing the lack of female agency in contemporary society. Moore’s V for Vendetta, which was brilliantly adapted for film, bridges multiple literary barriers by portraying the historically oldest tale of control and rebellion in the form of a graphic novel. Once we have surveyed these chilling tales of control, the class will turn its attention to¬ the recent rise of state-sponsored technologies of surveillance and application. Postman’s Technopoly charts the technology’s historical progression through three defined periods; in the current and final stage, technology overtakes culture and replaces many of the established fabrics of society: interpersonal communications, religion, education, and various social institutions. DeLillo’s White Noise centers on the media and advertising, claiming that its presence predominates to such an extent that people have become oblivious, mindless corporate-dictated consumption robots.


“W” CREDIT:
English-200 is a “W” credit meaning that you’ll receive your writing credit in addition to the VLPA general education credit. As a “W” credit, this course requires that you produce 10-15 pages of writing for which you will receive feedback regarding both your ideas and your composition. This writing requirement is broken up into 3 assignments, two short papers (3-4 pages) due on weeks four and seven, respectively, and a final paper due on the Monday of finals week. The goal for each is to start from something small, a sentence or even a word, and use tight and careful textual focus to think about something big. For the most part, you will be on your own to decide on your topic, but I’ll ask you to lead with a short quotation. You will UNPACK the significance of your passage, and then SITUATE it within the larger text in order to GENERALIZE about the text as a whole. Again, a prompt with specifics will be posted on the course website closer to the due date of the first paper.


TEXTS:
o Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1849) (Del Ray 50th Anniversary, 1987; 0345342968)
o Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harper Perennial Classics, 1998; 0060929871)
o George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Plume Centennial Ed, 2003; ISBN: 0452284236)
o Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (Vertigo, 1995; ISBN: 0930289528)
o Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tail (Anchor, 1998; ISBN: 038549081x)
o Neil Postman, Technopoly (Vintage, 1993; ISBN: 0679745408)
o Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin, 1986; ISBN: 0140077022)
* Engl-242 Course Reader—@ Ave Copy: 4141 University Way NE #103; 206-633-1837.
o (recommended): Everyday Writer or MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th Ed.

This course is a survey of literature in times of ‘endless war’. While the texts often do not take place on the battlefield, the backdrop and discourse of war shapes all of the fictional and non-fictional happenings. The course locates and divides, though not very neatly, through space, time, and event: we begin with Algeria during the anti-colonial revolution of the early 1960s, move to Palestine and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in the early 1980s, and conclude with the present Global War on Terror. Through practices of reading, discussing, and writing on assigned texts, we will consider colonial and anti-colonial violence, the work of women in the ‘endless war’, modes of resistance, changing definitions of freedom, the unknowable terrorist figure, and the representations of warring subjects.

Furthermore, we will focus primarily on the novel, though films, visual art, theoretical writing, and critical thought will be considered. Our tentative list of works includes: on Algeria--Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; on Palestine--Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun; and on the Global War on Terror—Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, the visual art of Daisy Rockwell and Fernando Botero, and the critical writing of Jasbir Puar and Junaid Rana.

This class will focus on the practice of close reading, and the subsequent translation of our analyses into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page term papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

Texts to be purchased:
Assia Djebar, Children of the New World
Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

Anglophone Philippine writing saw its fraught emergence during the U.S. colonial venture there at the turn of the 20th century, the events of which haunt the accounting and continuing production of Anglophone Filipino literature. The dissemination of English through U.S. colonial apparatuses (namely, a more widespread public education system) enabled both the formation of a Philippine Anglophone canon and also a critical sphere that continues to debate the politics of Philippine writing in English.

This course will examine both Philippine Anglophone writing produced in the Philippines and that produced in the United States, working against the national canon-bound impulse to quarantine them. We will ask how acts of writing in English has lent itself as a platform for expressing and negotiating Filipino and Filipino American identity, while also being a problematic site for Philippine politics. To that end, we will look closely at the short story and novel forms in particular, to ask questions about how these forms and their conventions have been deployed by Filipino writers and have given particular shape to political critique.

Since this is a “W” course, reading tasks will be coupled with a good deal of writing, workshopping your writing, and responding to classmates’ writing. Much of the course will be given to practicing close reading techniques and constructing well-argued, engaging literary analyses. Assignments will include weekly online posts and responses, one short paper, and one long essay.

Primary readings will include the novels Dogeaters and State of War (by Jessica Hagedorn and Ninotchka Rosca, respectively), and a coursepack of short fiction and essays by Jose Garcia Villa, Salvador Lopez, Paz Marquez Benitez, Loreto Paras Sulit, and Manuel Arguilla. Secondary readings will include excerpts from the work of Allan Isaac, Caroline Hau, and E. San Juan.

In this class we will read, in translation, fictions from medieval England. Since “fiction” in our modern sense of the term does not apply to medieval texts, we will broaden our scope to include narrative poems and hagiography (accounts of saints). Students will work to engage with early English fictions through close reading and analysis and with an eye towards significant historical events surrounding these texts.

Our literary time-line will be almost nine-hundred years, beginning just after the withdrawal of the Romans from England and ending with the death of Chaucer in 1400. What that means is that our course will be primed to engage closely with texts that paint with broad strokes an England in the midst of civil and moral strife. We will engage with well-known texts like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Canterbury Tales, but we will also focus on the lesser-read texts from this period, including Felix's Life of Guthlac and the lays of Marie de France. Furthermore, by taking some verse and mythological-based histories with other prose fiction, we can pose the broader question: what constitutes the boundaries of narrative fictions in early English society?

Techniques of reading literature we will employ: textual criticism, New Historicism, and close reading. While this is a literature course that takes history as it's way to evaluate and synchronize cultural and textual events, this is not a historical survey course. The overall goal of ENGL 242 is to equip students with techniques for critically reading, responding, analyzing, and hopefully enjoying various kinds of literature.

Literature we will likely read: Caedmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song, Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, Wulf and Eadwacer, Ruin, Wanderer, Seafarer, Husband’s Message, Wife’s Lament, Maxims I; Maxims II, Soul and Body I, Riddles (selection); Felix’s Life of Guthlac (selection), Cynewulf and Cyneheard, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (selection); Dream of the Rood; Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of Aethelwold, Beowulf, Battle of Maldon, The Canterbury Tales (selection), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, possibly others.

The reading load of this class will be rigorous, and the content difficult, but rewarding. Attentiveness to the literature and criticism (when asked) is a requirement. Students will be required to write weekly 1-page responses, commenting on critical positions raised in the texts or in class. In addition, each student (with a group of 3 others) will give one 15 minute presentation of a selected text and then lead classroom discussion that day. Since this 200 level literature course is also a W-course, students are required to write two 5-7 page essays over the course of the quarter. One of these papers will be able to be revised. Paper topics must be submitted in writing to me two weeks before the paper is due.

For more information on W-course requirements, see the University of Washington description:


Course Materials – Stuff you’ll need!

Course Reader – You can get this from Ave Copy Center, 4141 University Way NE (below the Jimmy Johns, next to the Starbucks)

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Broadview edition.

The year 2012 provides an appropriate occasion to consider the way the intertwined ideas of crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse function within and inform our collective historical imagination. While each of these three concepts can be traced back to antiquity, what they have meant and how their dominant images and lexicons have been used has shifted across various times and places. Therefore, if crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse are events—-moments we can examine—-they also imply a certain vocabulary, a way of critically viewing and interpreting these events. Furthermore, how and why these interpretations take place remains tied to the specific historical frameworks in which they occur. Modern prose fiction, and particularly the narrative novel, works much the same way, both reflecting and challenging the social and cultural conflicts of its historical moment.

This course will examine a wide variety of modern fiction in English which deploys representations of catastrophe and apocalypse as a way of mediating specific moments of social and historical crisis. While we will develop an understanding of what catastrophe fiction is and what it does, we will nonetheless pay strictest attention to how different writers manipulate its conventions for specific purposes. We will investigate how writers have used catastrophe narrative not only as a method of criticizing their taken-for-granted social, historical, and economic norms, but also as a way of intervening in, understanding, and transforming them.

We will likely read a number of short stories by authors such as Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and E.M. Forster, as well as the following novels:
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham
July’s People, by Nadine Gordimer
The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

This class will focus on the practice of close reading, and the subsequent translation of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page term papers or two shorter papers and one longer course paper. The course may also include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

The principal focus will be the examination of longer fictional works are a primary mode of thinking and reasoning, following how imaginative engagement with recurrent and practical questions leads us to increasingly sophisticated and insightful revelations about experience. The novels selected all address, in very different ways, how our lives may be shaped by what, and how, we imagine—particularly when we may not recognize initially the extent to which what we imagine and what we become are connected.

Over the course of the quarter, there will be three writing assignments, each precisely focused on issue of reading. The discussion sections will provide an opportunity to work through issues in reading, and to work in a focused way on writing. There will also be a weekly quiz (brief) on assigned readings for each week.

Texts: All in the UW Bookstore

NOTE: THESE EDITIONS ARE REQUIRED. DO NOT USE BOOKS YOU ALREADY HAVE. ALL ARE READILY AVAILABLE ON THE USED BOOK MARKET.

Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady . Norton Critical Edition ISBN-10: 0393966461
Witold Gombrowicz: Ferdedurke. Yale University Press, ISBN-10: 0300082401
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial ISBN-10: 0061148520
J. M. Coetzee: Foe. Penguin Edition. ISBN-10: 842042496X

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 works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Our class will explore British and American verse beginning with Shakespeare and working into the twentieth-century. The course investigates how poetry develops over the centuries, how movements achieve definition, and how one period replies to its predecessor(s). In other words, we will focus largely on literary history. However, in-class lectures and discussions will often draw on historical contexts and other media so as to demonstrate how an artwork engages with multiple relationships; furthermore, students will encounter formal, historical, and phenomenological strategies for accessing poetry. Some questions the class will consider: How does poetry work? What is the function of poetry? How does the figure of the poet evolve?


Authors, schools, and movements include: Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, Milton, Swift, Pope, Romanticism, Modernism, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School.



Students should be prepared to write one long paper divided into two parts (a 5 page paper revised and extended to 10-12 pages), comparing and contrasting at least two major time periods, movements, or authors. Bi-weekly analyses of the poetry are required as is daily participation during class discussion. While there may be an occasional lecture, class discussion will serve as our primary mode of engagement.

Texts:

• Ferguson, Margaret W, Mary J. Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. [9780393979213]

English 250 A: Introduction to American Literature
“American Cartography”

This course aims to introduce students to the study of “American Literature,” including some of its major writers, modes, and themes. To work toward this aim, students will approach American literature through the course theme of “American Cartography.”

The production of maps, their physicality, and the acts of referring to or reading maps all play a critical role in the American cultural landscape, both past and present. Consequently, in this course we will understand and utilize cartography as both a practical approach to literature and an example of literature. Beginning with the theories and practice of cartography requires that we question what is meant by “literature” and asks students to expand their close-reading practices to include maps from a variety of disciplines (the medical sciences, geography, literature, etc.). With this approach, we will question what “American” means in regards to national borders, as it describes literature, as well as what “American” means as it is attached to bodies, communities, and identities. Some key questions we will use to guide our thinking include: who creates maps and why? What spaces, bodies, objects, and communities are objects of cartographical practice, how and why? Who or what eludes mapping, and what is at stake in these elusions? How are maps read, and what exactly is involved in reading a map? What is at stake in a reading of American literature for its linkages to the theories and practices of American cartography?

Throughout this course we will use literature to hone our close reading skills, practice our composition, and improve upon our argumentation. Students will be evaluated based on reading quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final project that applies our course work with American cartography to a contemporary space, piece of literature, community, etc. In addition, I will assign discussion questions and reflective in-class writing whenever necessary to support critical reading, thinking, and writing.

Required Course Texts:
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) ISBN: 0140437959
Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron Mills (1861) ISBN: 0935312390
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952) ISBN: 0141184426
Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957) ISBN: 0142437255
Course Pack (see below)

Course Pack:
In addition to the required course texts listed above, we will utilize a course pack* that will include a variety of maps with different aims and modes, a selection of essays from the history of cartography, Thoreau’s “Walking,” Emerson’s “Nature,” “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” selections from Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

*The course pack is available at the Ave Copy Center.

Texts:

• Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). [ 0140437959]
• Ralph Ellison Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. [0141184426]
• Jack Kerouac. On the Road. [0142437255]

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.

The goal for this class is to better understand the ancient, yet still relevant, art of argument. Today’s cultural and political context is flooded with every type and every skill level of argument. Easy access to online social forums and other technologically mediated forms of communication means we can both gather and disseminate information at a dizzying rate. So, in this class, we will work on gaining skills that will help us sift through the good, bad, and the ugly. This means that we will dissect arguments from multiple sides, political perspectives, religious views, etc… Understanding argument does not mean just agreeing with those whose words you find compelling. We all have agendas, and we need to understand how to productively work with others’ and our own biases in order to produce thoughtful arguments and critiques.
The 2nd part of this class has to do with power. Power is all around us in many forms, some obvious and some not. Through theoretical readings, we will explore how power is produced and maintained, as well as what that means for the production and consumption of arguments. We always argue from a certain vantage point that is not entirely of our own making. These discussions will have interesting implications for the self and identity, so be prepared.
As you might have gathered, this class will be dealing with common controversial arguments. It is expected that you attend class willing to discuss these topics in a mature yet engaged manner. An openness to having your views challenged certainly helps.

It is assumed that the student will have taken an introductory level expository writing class (109/110, 111, 121, 131) or has equivalent experience. This is an intermediate level writing class, which means that we will be building on skills begun in those introductory courses. However, just like any other skill, writing is an ongoing process that does not end when the quarter is over. I expect you to be open to constructive challenges and critique given in order to push you as a writer and arguer.
Required Texts: Course Packet (Ave Copy Center)
Readings will include excerpts from Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Laura Micciche, Lloyd Bitzer, James Jasinski, Stephen Toulmin, Richard E. Vatz, and several online sources. This list is subject to change.

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

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

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

Catalog Description: 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 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.

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. In the order taught, they are: E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel; Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina; Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For.

Course Descriptions
Spring 2012
Habiba Ibrahim



302B Critical Practice: Genre Theory and African American Autobiography

Autobiographical writing for African Americans has been a key modality for deliberating on the terms of citizenship and public agency, subjective and collective memory, private experience and political participation. This course will consider why the act of narrating the individual has been such a rich and central approach to remarking and theorizing on matters of public interest. How do the identities crafted in autobiographical accounts reflect or respond to the stakes of these social concerns? In this course, we will examine some of the developments and contributions of “genre theory,” and focus specifically on theories of autobiography in particular. With these contributions in mind, we will consider how, when, and whether the project of self-writing—as demonstrated through slave narratives of the 19th century and African-American narratives of the 20th century—re-conceptualizes the “laws” of autobiography as a genre.

Texts may possibly include: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Jacque Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre,” Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics, Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, An Autobiography.

This course will introduce you to the “critical practice” of the study of literature. One of the ironies of the course’s catalog title is that the term “practice” implies at least two kinds of behavior: on the one hand, to “practice” is to prepare for some kind of “official” performance (e.g., basketball practice comes before the game—but what is the “game” in English?); but on the other, “practice” indicates something more fundamental: the way you do something and why, the particular actions and activities that occur within specific cultural contexts in the hopes of specific results. In the study of literature, “critical practice” is the activity of finding out how different kinds of texts arise, how they function in, circulate in, represent, and/or “shape” culture (and so the world), and how they generate, challenge, or reinforce human values. By closely attending to both poetic and narrative texts, we will “practice” the “practice” of literary criticism. There are numerous ways to perform this practice—and many debates among professionals about which are the “best” practices. In this course we will work our way toward a relatively new critical practice: ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is the critical study and analysis of literary and cultural texts in order to examine how they imagine, construct, and represent environments, and thereby imagine, re-shape, and “mobilize” environmental values.

In order to get there, however, we’ll need to spend some time familiarizing ourselves with some of the theories and critical thinking that preceded ecocriticism (from Plato to post-colonialism) before we get into some of the primary ecocritical theories.

Our literary texts will include British and American poems and narratives from nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Student work will include extensive reading and prepared class discussion, several short critical responses/discussions on a class blog, a presentation, and a 7-9 page critical essay.

This course is designed to tackle the two main complaints about theory: one, that it is alienatingly abstract; and two, that theory doesn’t make sense once you try to explain it to people outside the English major. How to make theory an extension of self-making, and remove it from the role of merciless taskmaster? And is it possible to communicate theoretical ideas in “plain English”?
The general theme for the quarter circles around the issue of pain, which is so viscerally real and rooted in the body that it seems to be the anti-thesis of cerebral and intangible theory. Stephen Greenblatt, Elaine Scarry, and Eric Hayot all examine how bodily feeling translates into the impulse to narrate, and then finally how these narrations pull out into cultural systems of feeling that are the basis of power distribution. The small number of texts for this quarter means that we will have the luxury of time to think about form and motivation, as well as content. Each of the authors selected are not only pondering similar philosophical questions, but (at least to my mind) do better than most in using different approaches to communicate ideas with clarity. We will be doing a lot of exploratory writing this quarter so that you each have the chance to see how you, and others, work theoretical language into a grammar and syntax that makes sense to your own thinking about how identity fits into critical practice.

Plato called it "the art of winning the soul by discourse"; Aristotle practiced it by "discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion";
Cicero theorized it as "one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and ponunciatio"; and Demosthenes trained for it by
speaking with pebbles in his mouth.

Rhetoric is an ancient idea which has animated civic life and scholarly study for more than two dozen centuries. This course introduces rhetorical theory and
practice from the classical period to the present, including an overview of core issues, vocabularies, and concepts in rhetorical theory; a discussion of methods
for teaching and training in rhetoric; opportunities to put rhetorical theory and analysis into practice; and a consideration of the social importance of studying
rhetoric in the contemporary moment.

Because we will consider both the consequences of rhetoric, as well as how rhetoric might be deployed as a tool for social action and intervention, coursework will
ask students to build their own rhetorical toolboxes. We will begin by exploring and experimenting with theories of invention, imitation, elocution,
identification, genre, and visual and new media, to name a few. Students will also have the opportunity to identify, explore, and respond to the rhetorical
contours of salient public issues of their choosing.

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.

This course will introduce you to celebrated novelists, poets, and playwrights whose works probed the modern condition and defined modern esthetic values in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War II. Reading List: Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen. (Dover Thrift) Flaubert, Sentimental Education. (Penguin Classics) Ibsen, Ghosts. (Dover Thrift) Kafka, The Trial. Tr. by Breon Mitchell. (Schoecken) Beckett, Endgame. (Grove) Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (NAL Trade) Requirements and Grading: final = 2 grade units; mid-term = 1 grade unit; quizzes, attendance, and participation = 1 grade unit. All students must read Sentimental Education before the first meeting.

Catalog Description: Various modern authors, from Wordsworth to the present, in relation to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, who have helped create the context and the content of modern literature. Recommended: ENGL 230 or one 300-level course in 19th or 20th century literature.

This course centers around four fabulous novels from South Asia--one from Pakistan, one from Sri Lanka, and two from India. We will investigate numerous themes that have become important to postcolonial studies, including diaspora, migration, transnational, home, return, otherness, and many others. No prior coursework in postcolonial studies is necessary, just an openness to engage with ideas in a course that values classroom discussion and analysis.

required course texts:

Meatless Days-- Sara Suleri
Fasting, Feasting-- Anita Desai
Reef-- Romesh Gunesekera
The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai
Elsewhere Within Here-- Trinh T. Minh-ha

Probably there is no greater booster for John Milton than William Blake, who begins his long poem on Milton with an exclamation asking the Muses to “Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your Realms / Of terror & mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions / Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose / His burning thirst & freezing hunger!” Readings for this course will include Lycidas, Comus, and Paradise Lost. There will be one long paper and several shorter responses.

This class is a study of modern-fiction landmarks, with special emphasis on artistic method and the transformation of the novel as a genre. Topics include: modernity and the quest for meaning; the crisis of public and private values; authority and point of view; irony and ambiguity; modes of consciousness; temporal and spatial structures; self-reflexive language and stylistic experiment. The course has a serious load: we’ll read five medium-length novels all of which require heightened attention to detail and much reflection. Requirements and Grading: final = 2 grade units; mid-term = 1 grade unit; quizzes, attendance, and participation = 1 grade unit. All students must read Sentimental Education before the first meeting. Texts and Editions: Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education. (Oxford World’s Classics) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent. (Oxford World’s Classics) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. (Harvest) Franz Kafka, The Trial. Tr. by Breon Mitchell. (Schoecken) Samuel Beckett, Molloy. (Grove Press)

Catalog Description: Types, techniques, and issues explored by filmmakers. Emphasis on narrative, image, and point of view.

We will read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories by American authors writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to do the assignments, attend class regularly, and take part in class-discussions. Written work will consist of a series of in-class essays, written in response 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; Eudora Welty, THIRTEEN STORIES BY EUDORA WELTY; John Steinbeck, THE LONG VALLEY; Sinclair Lewis, BABBITT; and Richard Wright, UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN

The critic W.J.T. Mitchell once noted that “a verbal representation cannot represent—that is, make present—its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do. Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their objects.” At the heart of this assertion is the assumption that showing and telling function in two fundamentally different ways and that showing is somehow more immediate than telling, more capable of conveying meaning. Yet language and images do not exist isolated from one another. Rather, they share common culturally constructed conventions of narration that converge and, at times, diverge in significant ways. The way we show and the way we tell are more similar than might first appear. This class begins from the simple question: what is the interplay between language and image and what does their interaction tell us about narrative in a visual age? How do we construct narratives in a world awash in images?

The class will be organized into four interrelated units: Learning to See/ Learning to Tell; Intermedial Texts; Adaptation; and a New Way of Seeing. We will begin with a brief history of vision in the Western world and trace the evolution of the concept of vision from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century and the advent of mechanical capture. The first unit will juxtapose the explosion of visual technologies in the nineteenth century with the development of realism and its rise to dominance as the narrative form par excellence in the same century. The second unit will focus on two intermedial texts and ask if and how the linguistic and pictorial coexist and amplify one another. The third unit will examine questions of adaptation. For instance, how do two ways of telling approach the same narrative structure? What are the limitations and strengths of each? The final unit will address how the digital age is impacting our assumptions and experience of reality and whether new technologies are creating new ways of telling.

This course is interdisciplinary and will draw its readings from a variety of fields: history of science and technology, literary criticism, art history, geography, criticism and theory, film studies, and literature. Authors will include Barthes, Debord, Crary, Agee and Evans, Conrad and John Berger among others.

Our focus for this course will be upon how literature deals with the environment, i.e., how literary texts represent environmental issues and why it matters that they be represented in this form. How, that is, does where we live and, even more importantly, how we imagine the place in which we live, affect who we are? How do our relationships to nature and our relationships with other people intersect? We will be considering a range of prose texts, including fictional narratives, non-fictional essays and journalism, primarily texts written or set in the Americas. Course goals include: 1) developing the analytical reading skills appropriate to different kinds of literary texts, 2) working on how to formulate and sustain critical arguments in writing, 3) learning how to uncover the supporting logic and stakes of specific attitudes toward the natural world, 4) understanding how environmental issues are linked to other social and cultural concerns, 5) seeing how those linkages are affected by particular historical and political conditions. The course will contain a significant writing component, both regular informal writing assignments and several medium-length analytical papers; it can count for W-credit.

Texts include Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid; Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Appleman, Darwin; Butler, Wild Seed; Silko, Ceremony; Head, When Rain Clouds Gather and a reading packet.

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 verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

This course will aim to foster the discipline necessary to write regularly, to elaborate on the elementary skills of fiction writing (with a special emphasis on metaphor, parable, and allegory) and on the techniques necessary to design a completed story. We will practice as well, through the reading of exemplary stories and fellow students' work, the critical reading skills necessary for any aspiring 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

The issue of how to define a child, and how to educate one, rapidly became widespread questions from the eighteenth through to the nineteenth century as mass education became more of a possibility, and the Victorians inherited, then appropriated, the Romantic interest in innocence and spirituality invested in their conception of childhood. This course will explore the ways in which literature for children developed in nineteenth-century England intersectionally with social movements, articulations of morality, definitions of growth and personhood, approaches to didacticism, evolving ideas of religion, science, and technology, as well as institutional developments in and theoretical approaches to education. As such, we will read our works with historical contexts and social questions in mind, while also asking what, precisely, these texts teach, in order to consider how and why specific notions attached to children may have emerged, and even persisted.

Our course readings will begin with some historical background as well as important criticism addressing the theorization of the modern child, including pieces on Romantic education and Continental attitudes towards children. We will also be reading about the emergence of children’s literature as a genre, focusing on its proliferation in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and the shifts which occur in its content, address, and aims throughout. In addition to the books listed below, we will also be looking at poetry by Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear, and others.

Because this course is designed to be a detailed examination of a context-specific genre, some familiarity with nineteenth-century literature, history, and/or culture, as well as experience with close reading, are strongly recommended.

Requirements include a sizable reading load, research presentation, 2-3 short papers, and a final paper at 8-12 pages. Significant and engaged participation is a required component for successful evaluation.

Course Reader, available at Ave Copy (4141 University Way)

Texts:

• Kingsley, Charles. The Water Babies: A Fairy-Tale for a Land Baby. (Broadview, 1863. [978-1551117737]
• Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Penguin, 1865. [978-0141439761]
• Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Broadview, 1883. [978-1551114095]
• Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. Penguin, 1905. [978-0142437018]
• Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty. Penguin, 1877. [978-0143106470]

This quarter will be all about you—or rather, why “you” have become the symbol of an electronic democratic culture. While the tools of technology offer us unprecedented ways to socially customize and politically organize, at the same time, some literary critics have called ours the era of the “dissolving self,” when the “you” has become so institutionalized as to inhibit an individual’s room for self-creation. We will be examining the how and why of narrative and non-narrative forms common to singing the self in the digital age, as well as reading theory about the self in a post-rationalist age. We will be reading all or selections from: The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem; Nobody Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July; Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner; Jeff, One Lonely Guy: What Happened When a Down-and-Out Comedian Posted a Flyer in Lower Manhattan by Jeff Ragsdale etal.; and Remote by David Shields. Some of the theory for the course: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield; and works by Anna Everett, Lisa Nakamura, and Clay Shirky.

This course will explore how the history of chattel slavery has been taken up and reimagined in a variety of contemporary cultural texts. It will examine not only how these texts (re)conceptualize and (re)historicize the experience of slavery, but also how the racial, sexual, gender and economic dynamics set in place by slavery have been commented on and (re)configured within contemporary culture. At the center of the course are thus questions about how contemporary cultural texts about slavery advance arguments about historical continuity (and/or discontinuity)—that is, how they imagine how things have changed and how they have remained the same over time. More specifically, how do texts about slavery allow for comprehension of both changing racial formations and the persistence of particular forms of racial and economic exploitation. Necessarily related issues to be taken up over the course of the quarter include the history of human commodification, the relative power of different cultural forms and genres to narrate the history of slavery, and the special role of literature in the creation of historical memory and cultural critique. Over the course of the quarter we will read several contemporary novels, view one or two recent films, and explore a range of theoretical and historiographical works on slavery and dehumanization.

Concentrates in alternate years on either prose or poetry of the Pacific Northwest. Prose works examine early exploration, conflicts of native and settlement cultures, various social and economic conflicts. Pacific Northwest poetry includes consideration of its sources, formative influences, and emergence into national prominence.
Contemporary poets, authors and short fiction writers who are from the Northern Coast and Pacific Northwest. This is a "Northwest" that will for our purposes include Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Starting with the oral traditions of these writers and their communities, the class addresses the transition made between oral storytelling and the work of contemporary authors, some whose work is nationally and internationally known (Formerly AIS 377: A Northwest Focus).

Catalog Description: Consideration of psychological and formal elements basic to writing and related forms of nonverbal expression and the critical principles that apply to evaluation.

What do all these items have in common? Swearing or no-swearing at the dinner table, Global English, dueling languages, laws about what can be on signs, interpreters in hospitals, the European Union’s languages, and English as a “neutral” language? Each item is an example of language policy. This course is an introduction to language policy. We'll examine how language policy works its way into many parts of our daily lives. In addition to reading an overview of the field, we'll read a collection of articles on theoretical approaches to language policy around the world. In addition, we’ll examine how law sometimes sets language policy through a sample of cases from the United States, which can be used as exemplars for law setting language policy in other countries. Each class member will carry out a research project on a current non-U.S. language policy, reporting to the class and writing a paper on the results of the research.

Textbooks
Ricento, Thomas, ed. An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method
Spolsky, Bernard. Language Maintenance

ENGL 478 Language and Social Policy (5) I&S/VLPA
Examines the relationship between language policy and social organization; the impact of language policy on immigration, education, and access to resources and political institutions; language policy and revolutionary change; language rights.

English 481A (concurrent enrollment required in 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, 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, Aki Kurose Middle School or Shorecrest High School.


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

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. Along the way, you will do a series of exercises, and revise your story or essay several times.
Texts:
Draft: The Journal of Process
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

This course teaches the basics of screenwriting: story, character, dialogue and structure. Students will learn the craft of screenwriting by reading and analyzing screenplays and film treatments, writing short original screenplays adapted from essays, news stories, and published short stories and in the process learn how to tell a story both narratively and visually.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

Catalog Description: Students read screenwriting manuals and screenplays, analyze exemplary films, and write synopses, treatments, and first acts of their own screenplays.

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

Catalog Description: Individual study (reading, papers) by arrangement with the instructor. Required of, and limited to, honors seniors in English.

Catalog Description: Individual study (reading, papers) by arrangement with the instructor. Required of, and limited to, honors seniors in English.

In 1843 Thomas Carlyle characterized the boom and bust economy of laissez-faire capitalism—including its stunning production of unparalleled wealth and appalling poverty, of cure-all opiates and shoddy textiles—as “the condition of England” as if the country suffered from a set of medical symptoms which, given the incidence of cholera, typhoid and typhus, is not mere metaphor. In 1845 the novelist and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli described the division of rich and poor as “the two nations” living side-by-side in what we would normally think of as one nation. The “two nations,” while occupying more or less the same space, scarcely spoke the same language; they knew nothing of the conditions in which the other passed its days and nights, and they lived in mortal fear of each other. “Fear”, “sympathy” and “mystery” and “misery” enrich the vocabulary of an enormous literature in Britain and on the Continent throughout the “Hungry 40s,” the 1850s and beyond. We will study the fiction, journalism, poetry and visual arts of mid-Victorian England that set out to define (and improve) the “Condition” of that country. We will focus on novels by Charles Dickens (Hard Times (1854) which Dickens dedicated to Carlyle) and Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, first published just after Hard Times in Dickens’ influential journal, Household Words, in 1855), along with texts that enlarge the context of these novels, including selections from Carlyle, Disraeli, Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844), Karl Marx (Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)), Henry Mayew’s London Labour and London Poor (1849-51), John Ruskin (Stones of Venice (1851-53) along with the work of more recent historians and critics.