In this class we will read texts and view images (paintings and films) in order to discuss representations of the exotic in European literary and visual culture. The course material will allow us to critically examine the imaginary assumptions Europeans made about the exotic: the exotic as distant and foreign, as strangely beautiful and enticing, as wild and primitive, as archaic and original, and as spiritual and authentic. We will focus on the strategies storytellers undertook in order to perpetuate these fantastic beliefs about the exotic, such as the use of particular word choice, tone, and sentence structure, as well as the specific ways in which characters and settings were drawn in exotic tales. Class discussion will unravel the ways in which norms and expectations entrenched in European contexts and traditions prompted readers and audiences to view the exotic in a biased fashion. We will critically compare and contrast exotic representations between media and different historical contexts. The course material includes Frances Sheridan The History of Nourjahad, William Beckford Vathek, E. T. A. Hoffmann “The Golden Pot,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal “The Tale of the 672nd Night,” Somerset Maugham The Moon and Sixpence, examples of European Oriental paintings, and two films: F. W. Murnau’s Tabu and Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra.
Course assignments involve writing activities for each class session, group work and participation in class discussion, and a five-page final analytical paper.

This course will introduce students to reading a range of literary texts—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, film, etc.—for
academic engagement and enjoyment. Throughout the quarter, we will explore “Literary Maps” in order to better understand the
relationship between place, identity, history, and culture. “Mapping” will serve as both an object of literary study and a critical
approach to reading practice in the course. Our goal will be to understand how the course texts chart national culture and history onto geographical space. Furthermore, we will consider what is at stake in the production and interpretation of these literary maps of U.S. sites and landscapes. As we read, we will attend to each work’s historical context as well as the varied social positions that these texts represent in relation to race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will begin our inquiry in the mid-19th century and we will proceed chronologically through a board selection of texts that map and analyze American places and spaces. We will conclude the course by turning to a selection of fiction and poetry centered in Seattle in order to consider the politics of living and circulating in particular places and spaces.



While the course theme establishes an organizational logic for the class, students’ interests and ideas will shape how we read the
course texts as the term develops. Students will be encouraged to raise their own questions about the material throughout the
quarter. Along the way, this class will provide strategies for close reading, analyzing literature, and writing in an academic
context. Students will be expected to think critically about the course materials and to actively participate in class activities,
including lectures, group presentations, group work, and class discussions.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement by requiring 10-12 pages of graded, out-of-class writing.

Modern novelists have drawn deeply on the wellspring of Classical mythology, including the myths of Odysseus, Prometheus, Hercules, and Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, to name a few. While this course acts as an introduction to Greek and Roman mythology through in-depth examinations of several of the most well-known and seminal Greek myths, the majority of the course will be devoted to studying how and why Western authors throughout the ages have used and transformed
them. Sometimes, the myth has been employed as a structuring device; at other times, as artistic embellishment. Often, a mythological parallel is suggested as an analogy or contrast to the world in which the author lived. Students will read excerpts from Greek and Roman myth as well as modernist versions of the same stories.

Texts include: Homer’s Odyssey, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Boffa’s You’re An Animal, Viskovitz!, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Moore’s Promethea, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, amongst others. Moreover, in order to satisfy writing credit, students will be asked to complete several short writing assignments and one longer essay, which will be outlined, edited and revised. Additionally, students may be asked to complete in-class
quizzes or free writes as well as to engage in peer-editing and writing workshops.

"The theme of this section of English 200 is "Power and Its Perversions." We will be investigating works that deal with the central thematic of power, that cross time, space, and different sociocultural settings, and that span genres and forms as diverse as theatrical dialogues, cultural theory, political satire, novels, autobiography, and film. Throughout the course we will investigate the many meanings and uses of this seemingly simple term "power," trying to understand: how is it understood variously by our different authors? What is it, who gets to use it, how, why, under what circumstances, for what, on whom?

The texts for the course have yet to be finalized, but are likely to include authors such as Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Aragon.

This course satisfies the University's W-requirement; it will include 10-20 pages of graded, out-of-class writing that will be collaboratively workshopped and individually revised, requiring also out-of-class consultations with the instructor. The class will also include in-class quizzes, daily writing, and group work."

In this course we will read and critically engage with experimental African American literature as it is produced in multiple forms such as fiction, poetry, and film, and in multiple genres such as science fiction, satire, fantasy, and "street lit." We will consider how/why the texts in question are "experimental" in both form and content. We will not only refine what it means to close read and analyze at a college level, we will question the intentions and stakes underlying the practice of literary analysis as a discipline. To this end, we will identify and develop strategies of reading, writing, thinking about, and discussing different kinds of texts—many of which are provocative and potentially challenging—in order to question the ways such texts both reveal and complicate representations of the anxieties, pleasures, and politics of material existence. As we will be explicitly engaging with difficult and at times problematic issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ideology, it is crucial to bring an open-minded, curious, and respectful attitude to this class in order to foster engaging and productive discussion. Readings may include in whole or in part: Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Ishmael Reed, Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, George Schuyler, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Harriet Mullen, Thomas Glave, Sister Souljah, Jay-Z, Sapphire, Percival Everett, and Baratunde Thurston. We will also watch Marlon Riggs' documentary film Tongues Untied.

This class counts for "W" credit, and will require students to write two 5-7 page revisable papers. Students can also expect to write several informal reading responses and to participate in a group presentation. **Please note that students are expected to keep up with the weekly reading and are expected to come to class prepared to discuss and engage with the texts**

Required Texts:
**PLEASE NOTE: ALL REQUIRED TEXTS ARE AVAILABLE AT THE UW BOOKSTORE. PLEASE PURCHASE THE REQUIRED EDITION OF EACH TEXT. THE COURSE PACK IS AVAILABLE AT AVE COPY**

The primary aim of this course is to introduce students to the practice and pleasure of critically reading literature. To do so, we
will engage with contemporary re-tellings and re-imaginings of fairy tales in various genres: short story, graphic novel, novella, and music album, as well as visual media.

Through the course of the quarter we will examine the enduring appeal of fairy tales and especially the irresistibility of
“re-telling” them to authors and artists of our own era. Course texts will include Philip Pullman’s new Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, a recent reissue in graphic novel form of Neil Gaiman’s Dream Hunters, Shane Jones’ brilliantly innovative novella Light Boxes, the rock-operaesque Decemberists album The Hazards of Love, and other interpretations of fairy tales in visual media such as visual art and film.

Note that this course fulfills the UW’s “W” requirement and as such is writing intensive. We'll devote some of our class time to
writing instruction, but this course assumes rhetorical awareness and a familiarity with the fundamentals of academic writing taught in "C" courses. It is strongly recommended that you complete the university's "C" requirement before enrolling in this class. As a "W" credit course you will complete two 5-page papers with the opportunity for revision as well as smaller in- and out-of-class writing assignments.

Please note also that this class is in Condon Hall, which is quite far from the center of campus. You are expected to be on time, so please do not schedule this class back-to-back with a class that ends at 1:20 unless you can travel from that classroom to our classroom by 1:30.

This class will engage cultural studies as one way to study culture as a process of meaning making through which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. This class will proceed from foundational readings in social theory and cultural studies to engage more specific readings about the intersection of race with gender and sexuality in the context of 20C America. Using critical and cultural texts we will trace some ways that culture is a site of struggle over the signifying practices we use to represent ourselves and others, with a focus on some of the ways that constantly contested social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality intersect to define the bodies and practices of ourselves and others.

The stereotype will be a conceptual path through which we will explore the way social categories define social figures. We will explore how stereotypes are structures of knowledge that become embedded into social formations as the salient way of knowing and determining the actions, attitudes, and behaviors of the figures they represent. This class will also unpack the role of cultural texts (including popular culture, literature, film, and visual culture) in negotiating, reinforcing, and challenging how the cultural representations we call stereotypes define us, as we also think about how stereotypes mold our very reading process.

We will read each critical text not only to understand and apply their key concepts but also rhetorically to understand how their claims are built and intertextually to find conceptual commonalities between texts and to build critical lenses to apply to our reading of cultural texts. To accomplish these reading goals, this class will rely heavily on reading and on participation in whole class and small group discussions of the critical and cultural texts we read. This class will require voracious intellectual curiosity and eager engagement with new ways of thinking about race, gender, and sexuality we will encounter. Coursework may include presentations, weekly reading quizzes/short comprehension writings, and longer writing assignments in which you apply the ideas of or critical texts to readings of cultural texts (or vice versa). Readings may include: cultural studies/criticism by Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Foucault, Adorno, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Lisa Lowe, Hortense Spillers, Judith Butler, Kobena Mercer, Evelyn Hammonds, Gloria Anzaldua, Roderick Ferguson, and José Muñoz. Cultural texts may include James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, poetry by Paul Beatty and Gwendolyn Brooks, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and the artwork of Coco Fusco/ Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Roger Shimomura, and Kara Keeling and more.

Book list
• Baldwin, James. Another Country. 1960. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1993.
ISBN 0679744711
• Course Packet

“Modernism, Postmodernism, and the City” will introduce students to twentieth century literature through an exploration of modern and postmodern cultural genres in the context of urban growth, (im)migration, and capitalism in the U.S. We will begin by investigating the term “genre.” What is a “genre”? How do specific strategies of representation, like pastiche or fragmentation, come to be associated with generic categories like “modern” and “postmodern”? For the rest of the quarter, we will continue exploring genres of modernism and postmodernism by paying close attention to how they represent processes of urbanization. How does the “city” appear across the texts we read and what strategies do writers use to represent it? How do representations of the city link up with ideas about freedom and social control, past and future, economic innovation and waste? This course is designed to enhance your critical thinking skills by exploring these questions through close readings of prose fiction, poetry, critical essays, and manifestoes as well as art, architecture, and film. Texts you will need to purchase include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman. Additional texts will be collected in a course reader and will likely include selections from T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Mina Loy, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Anzia Yezierska, Maria Helena Viramontes, and others.

Grades will be calculated based on weekly reading responses, active classroom participation, exams, and a final paper.

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

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 literature 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 revisiting literature commonly taught in high school curricula in the US, literature needing rescue and revivification from this-is-so-boring mindsets, from the constraints of teaching-for-the-tests, and from the too easy themes and summaries of notes by Cliff and Spark. This is not your usual high school novel class. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Nella Larsen, J.D. Salinger, Ray Bradbury, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Art Spiegelman, and Suzanne Collins.

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. Martin Lister and Liz Wells, authors of “Seeing Beyond Belief,” argue for just this kind of curiosity, a methodology for unpacking cultural productions, such as novels or images or websites or film; they say, “Cultural Studies allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption of [a text] through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift” (Reading Contexts 459). They argue that 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 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.

Ancient Greek and Roman myths often emphasized notions of the transformation of the human body—whether these bodies turned into other human bodies, animals, plants, or objects such as statues.However, with the exception of fairy tales and stories inherited from folkloric traditions, this theme of the human physical body in flux appeared relatively little during the rise of Western prose fiction. Instead, early works of prose often emphasized personal transformation based upon personality and/or circumstance, in terms of moral, social, and intellectual improvement (or the regression/decay of those things).But
the literary prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently exhibits a renewed interest in physical transformation, and many novels and short stories of this period foreground transformation of the body, whether these be transformations in terms of the size, shape and/or sex of the human body, or transformations from human into monster, human into animal, or human into machine or technological hybrid.

This course will explore a number of different types of bodily transformations within literary works, from Ovid’s mythical
metamorphoses to the monsters of the Victorian age to the “posthuman” bodies found in more recent stories and novels.The changes in physical form within these works may take place via scientific/technological advancement, unexplained occurrence, magic, death, or simple body modification, and may be the result of choice, force, or chance. We will discuss these transformations, and the purposes of these transformations within the literary works in which they are found, examining the ways in which, in later works, these transformations may reflect the anxieties regarding specific social and cultural developments and issues within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and beyond), as well as the ways in which such transformations speak to common human concerns about identity, change, agency, and the often complicated relationship between what we think of as the human mind/heart/soul and the appearance and capabilities of the human body.

Readings will include the following novels/novellas:Bram Stoker’s /Dracula/, David Garnett’s /Lady into Fox/, Franz Kafka’s /The
Metamorphosis/, Robert Louis Stevenson’s /The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/, H.G. Wells’s /The Island of Dr. Moreau/, and James Tiptree, Jr.’s (Alice Sheldon’s) “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” There will also be a course packet which will include readings such as various tales from Ovid’s /Metamorphoses/, a version of the fairy tale “Beauty
and the Beast,” and likely excerpts from at least one of J.K. Rowling’s /Harry Potter/ books, Lewis Carroll’s /Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/, and Scott Westerfeld’s /Uglies/.It will also likely include short stories from such authors as Rudyard Kipling, Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, George Saunders, Karen Russell, and more.

This course will emphasize close reading and critical thinking, as well as the development of complex and well-supported written arguments. This course also 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 or two shorter papers and one longer paper. The course may also include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

4.Book List:

Kafka, Franz./The Metamorphosis/.ISBN:0486290301 (Dover Thrift Edition)

Stevenson, Robert Louis. /The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde/.ISBN:0486266885 (Dover Thrift Edition)

Stoker, Bram./Dracula/.ISBN:0393970124 (Norton Critical Edition)

Wells, H.G./The Island of Dr. Moreau/.ISBN:0486290271 (Dover Thrift Edition)

*There will also be a photocopied course pack in which many of the
readings will be located.

This class will be an introduction to the critical reading and analysis of prose fiction, focused on the genre of the Southern Gothic. In particular, we’ll investigate the ways in which the characters of Southern Gothic form and frame their individual and social identities through memory, vision, and prophesy. Novels read will include Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Grades will be based on exams, daily participation, a group presentation, and a 12-page final essay. This is a W-Credit class.

“The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness.” – Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996)


“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness . . .” – W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)


What defines the monstrous? Cohen regards the monster as an ambiguous figure, arising from the collapse of boundaries. His sentiments echo Du Bois’s description of the uncertain position of African Americans in post-slavery America, which suggests a correlation between race and monstrosity in the post-Civil War era. Monsters, then, are not born, but made.


This class will inquire into the cultural understandings of the monstrous in 19th and 20th century American literature. By reading a range of novels and short stories about monsters, freaks, hybrids, and other curious subjects, we will come to know what kinds of bodies count as “monstrous,” and how monsters are “made” at different points in American history.


Course texts will include: selections from The Life and Times of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (P.T. Barnum), “Blind Tom” (Rebecca Harding Davis), The Monster (Stephen Crane), “Desiree’s Baby” (Kate Chopin), Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson), “The Only a Mother” (Judith Merrill), The Girl Who Was Plugged In (James Tiptree, Jr/Alice Sheldon), Geek Love (Katherine Dunn), Half Life (Shelley Jackson), among others. In addition to these primary texts, there will also be an electronic course packet of related theory and criticism.


This course satisfies the “W” requirement, which means that students can expect to produce 10-15 pages of writing on the above texts over the course of the quarter.

Book List:

Crane, Stephen. The Monster and Other Stories. (ISBN: 978-1479179329)
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. (ISBN: 978-0486282695)
Dunn, Katherine. Geek Love. (ISBN: 978-0375713347)
Jackson, Shelley. Half Life. (ISBN: 978-0060882365)

The course is devoted to the greatest American novels by Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire. We will also read some of his stories of this period, as well as his autobiographical writings. All readings, discussions, and papers are in English.

As a chance to think about how "reading" and "poetry" and "reading poetry" change, this course will focus on the multisensory qualities of forms of poetry invented in the early 20th century through new technologies (like radio & cinema) and transformed cities (like Paris & Moscow). The innovations of metropolitan modernity will provide a vantage point from which to view the vast history of forms of poetry.

We will conclude the course by shopping for books of poetry and interacting with contemporary networks of poetry publication & distribution. Throughout the course, we will construct a vocabulary with which to describe the sound effects and visual effects of various instances of poetry and to track changes in the meanings of words like "poem" and "poet" and "poetry." As a "W" course, the required writing for the course includes two papers (of approximately 5 pages each & with the opportunity for revision).

4. Required Books:

-- Rasula & Conley, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity,
Action Books, 2012, 9780983148029.

-- Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics, Routledge, 2011, 9780415566162.

-- A recently published book of poetry chosen individually by each
student, selected during the course from the Small Press Distribution
catalog (spdbooks.org).

In his recent talk, "Why Live," Herbert Blau, a theorist and theater director responsible for some of the country's first performances of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, asks "what is liveness; what, indeed, is presence?" an especially germane concern in an increasingly digitized and mediated world. "Virtual reality," may seem like a modern concept (or an out-moded early gaming platform) but the theater has always been a version thereof, balked at as long ago as Aristotle for its pretense to real presence. What happens though, when a play can't be performed, was written without performers in mind, or is otherwise intentionally un-stage-able? Does the theater then become one of the mind? But wasn't it always that anyways?

In this course, we will seek to expand our notions of what constitutes a play, what constitutes "play," and how we can tell the difference through reading a range of playwrights across 2000 years of theatrical history and several languages and continents. What's more, we'll begin to stage our own responses (performances of a kind as well) to these texts in light of the critical traditions that inform them, and to inhabit the various attendant roles, reading from actoral, directorial, and literary-poetic positions.

Student Learning Goals:

During the quarter, we will learn to feel the forms of genre: how the mechanics of play-making inform or disinvite performance; we will learn the craft of literary exegesis as practiced on slippery productions that involve a whole host of human concern: what is a play to the sound designer?, and how do we talk about that? We will also gain familiarity with the various periods and places from which our texts spring: for Sophocles, a play is a different sort of instrument than it is for August Wilson; but not so different as to be unrecognizable in ambition. Finally, we'll practice registering our responses in written form to drama wherever it plays out, in both live/"real" and impossible theaters.

General Method of Instruction:

Expect to attend performances, to stage scenes, to hear and to give research presentations, and to engage your fellows both inside and outside class in a continual dialogue: interpersonal, academic, theoretical, real.

Recommended Preparation:

See all the plays you can between now and then. This is a good city; they abound. Especially recommended are productions by New Century Theater, Book-it Reparatory Theatre, Washington Ensemble Theater, The Balagan, and anything you find on campus.

Class Assignments and Grading:

The basic indexes on which your mastery of this material will be measured are a series of quizzes, creative projects, short essays, theatrical reviews (of the written sort), and group-research tasks.

Course Texts:

Wm. Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra

Anne Carson Sophokles' Antigonick

Michael and Matthew Dickman 50 American Plays

Percy Shelley The Cenci

Alexander Smith A Life-Drama

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

+theoretical readings accessed individually

English 250 is a survey course that introduces you to a diverse selection of ?American? literature. In this section, we read and analyze diverse texts by and about working class people. Themes of this literature include: poverty, physical labor, labor organizing and strikes, globalization, and unemployment. Questions we will address include: (1) What is ?working class?? (2) What features make up working class literature, if there even is such a thing? (3) How might working class literature be included and excluded from what we typically thought of as ?canonical? (must-read) American literature? (4) How d does working class identity intersect with gender, race, and immigration status?

Texts in this course may includes novels, films, short stories, memoirs, academic articles, and song. We will look at writing by some of the following authors: Carlos Bulosan, John Steinbeck, William Attaway, Denise Giardina, Jack London, Joanna Kadi, Chester Himes, Howard Zinn, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Stephen Crane, Studs Terkel and others.*

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

Think of this class not as “for beginners” but, rather, as about beginning.Throughout the quarter we will explore many ways of
approaching the task of writing (and reading) the short story in hopes of beginning to recognize and/or refine your own unique voice—arguably, one of the most important steps in a writing career—and to better recognize and describe the voices you read.

The course will develop over 3 phases: in the first, you will immerse yourself in the literary short story form by reading a lot and practice using a critical vocabulary for discussion, as well as complete writing exercises to practice craft (various uses of the tools and materials stories are built with); in the second, you will create a first draft of your own short story and workshop the stories of your peers; and in the third, you will revise your own work to complete a final draft of your short story to handed in for a grade at the end of the quarter.Throughout the course there will be short readings on craft for you to read and writing exercises for you to complete in addition to the short stories discussed in class that week.



The required text is:

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, 2nd Edition


Reading list:

Some of the stories we'll be reading from the anthology and available online will include works from David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, and Denis Johnson.

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 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 natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

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

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

Technically, this is a Gateway Course, designed for the English pre-major. Logistically, this course will introduce the student to the study of English literature. Specifically, this course will give the student some sense of different literary genres—prose and poetry—and how to approach those genres critically. Methodologically, this course will focus on early 20th century texts in order to play through some different critical approaches. Pragmatically, we'll be reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; some poems by Marianne Moore; and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which Edith Wharton—no slouch herself—called "the great American novel." The student will learn to read closely and critically, and by the end of the quarter you will never again not have noticed that the preceding five sentences begin with adverbs. Sadly, there will be a midterm and a final. Necessarily, all students taking 301 must sign up for the 297 writing link, as well as a 301 quiz section.

This course will focus on the interdisciplinary formation of American Studies, and draw our attention to a few key theories and methods that have shaped this field. “Temporality,” or theoretical notions about time and how we experience time, will serve as our analytical entryway into thinking about national belonging and accounts of history. Two key theorists for this task of exploring the utility of thinking about (and through) time are Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. In addition to granting careful consideration to how these theorists treat the matter of historical consciousness, we will move onto methods from disciplines such as legal studies and sociology, which also provide us with opportunities for thinking about various forms of temporality. For instance, how is the “time” of family and reproduction related to the nation? How do narratives about a national “past” bear on notions of the “present” and “future”? We will account for the role of social movements—and specifically, their contributions to serious thinking about race, gender, and sexuality—to reading literature. Our goal is to understand how the theories and analyses that we cover in this course may bear on our reading of literary texts. In a word, within the purview of American Studies, what are the practices for reading literature and culture? Literary texts may possibly include: Toni Morrison, Sula (1973); Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men (1983); Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle (1996).

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 antithesis of cerebral and intangible theory. Selected texts by Stephen Greenblatt, Elaine Scarry, and Eric Hayot examine how bodily feeling translates into the impulse to narrate, and then how these narrations create cultural systems of feeling that regulate the distribution of who is recognized as fully human. 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 to give you practice in working theoretical language into a grammar and syntax that makes sense to you, and to understand the relations!
hip between identity and critical practice.

Please note: 1) all texts for this course will be available on .pdf; and 2) no addcodes are available before the first week of the class.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN, in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, insists and argues, "I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meanings of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them...As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical" (xiv). This course will decidedly not believe the author's intentions, rather we will draw on the broad archive of Tolkien's novels, Peter Jackson's films, and scholarship as occasions to identify and explore the key concepts, moves, and terms of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.

CENTRAL QUESTIONS AND ENGAGEMENTS INCLUDE: What are the different critical practices and methodologies of cultural studies? How might we employ different cultural studies approaches and lenses to Tolkien, film adaptations, and fantasy literature more generally? Why study fantasy, how is this oft dismissed "genre" important, and what values, ideals, and norms does it have? In this course, we will look at and analyze Tolkien through the lenses of cultural studies and deploy literature as theories about and dramatizations of different social relationships and realities, to unpack and analyze the intersections of cultural formations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, particularly in the US context. Ursula K. Le Guin in "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" argues, "For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy." This class will spend the quarter reading, watching, thinking, and writing about how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in. In other words, we will try to challenge Tolkien's denials above and to answer Le Guin's proposition about fantasy

Catalog Description: Introduction to the development of the religious ideas and institutions of ancient Israel, with selected readings from the Old Testament and New Testament. Emphasis on reading The Bible with literary and historical understanding.

This course will focus primarily on Modern literature of the North Atlantic countries—England, America, France, and Germany—from about the turn of the 20th century to the 1940s. We will concentrate primarily on novels, with some poetry. This will be a course devoted mainly to reading, treating literature as a primary form of reasoning about people, culture, and political forces. The selected texts, listed below, are not only great reading, they are important documents in learning how to deal with a world rapidly expanding and transforming itself.

There will be a number of short written exercises (one page, single spaced), a short in class midterm, and a final paper, 5-10 pages, on assigned topics.

Please check the ISBN designation for the texts: you must use the assigned text.

Texts:

Henry James. The Ambassadors. Norton Critical Edition, ISBN-13: 978-0393963144
Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness Modern Library, ISBN-13: 978-0375753770
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse Harvest Books, ASIN: B009CRPDSQ
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Oxford U Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199238552
Albert Camus: The Stranger Vintage Books/ Mass Market, ASIN: B00333IA1M
Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum Houghton Mifflin, ASIN: B005DI8T3Y
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0060932145
Poems by Stephen Mallarme, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke

Set on and/or crossing the border between two nations, borderlands fiction is a unique, trans-national type of literature whose meaning derives from de-centering nation-based imagined communities, identities, geographies, histories. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the centuries of mass migrations and intensifying modernization and globalization, such narratives have been proliferating. This course will examine selected works of borderlands fiction from the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1920s to the present. We will examine the following questions: if borderlands fiction is about living between two worlds, is it possible to belong to both sides or does one have to choose? What are the differences between borderlands fiction from the U.S. and northern Mexico? What different identity and narrative scripts arise from voluntary migration to the U.S. vs involuntary incorporation (by way of colonialism)? Why do borderlands create their own saints and cults of saints? How is U.S. immigrant fiction changed when migrants decide to return to Mexico? What is the difference between borderlands fiction written by natives of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and that written by migrants to the area? How has the rise of drug-related violence changed borderlands fiction?


Required texts:
Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Paul Flores, Along the Border Lies
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Ana Castillo, The Guardians
Daniel Venegas, The Adventures of Don Chipote; or, when Parrots Breastfeed
selected short stories by Rosina Conde and Rosario SanMiguel

Together, we're building an archive of creative and critical responses to Shakespeare through the generations since his death. There is hardly an area of humanistic concern which has not been affected by his thought: music, dance, painting, and film owe to him debts almost as sizable as does literature itself. Alongside careful reading of the plays themselves, our task in this course will be to gather these reverberations and to consider their interpretive usefulness.

The principal assignments then, gleaned from individual and group research, will be annotated bibliography, book review, and weekly work logs. The class format is hands-on: be prepared for archival research, presentations of same, lectures, special collections, and net-based mixed media.

Principal Texts:

Anthony and Cleopatra

The Tempest

Macbeth

The Winter's Tale

All's Well that Ends Well

The Sea and the Mirror by W.H. Auden

[get any copies of these that you like; try the used bookstores around the city for sturdy editions]

Catalog Description: Literary, intellectual, and historical ferment of the period from the French Revolution to the 1830s. Readings from major authors in different literary forms; discussions of critical and philosophical issues in a time of change.

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.

Texts and Editions: Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (Oxford World’s Classics). Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics). James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dover Thrift). Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Harvest). Franz Kafka, The Trial (Schoecken).

Recent work by female directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Nora Ephron and Lucrecia Martel has appeared on critics’ best-of-year lists and garnered award nominations. Moreover, Bigelow became the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America award and an Academy Award for directing. Despite the surge in female-directed films, contemporary women filmmakers represent a minority in their industry.

English 345 examines the work of female directors from around the globe, beginning with silent-era director Alice Guy Blachè and concluding with films from the 2013 Seattle International Film Festival. A study of women directors’ work not only allows us to analyze cinematic narrative and style, but also provides a unique perspective on film history. Furthermore, course films raise questions about the relationship between an individual filmmaker’s work and concurrent cinematic traditions, critical discussions and cultural contexts. Throughout the term, we will address the following questions:

What, if anything, distinguishes the work of women directors?

How does an investigation of women directors change our conception of film history, genre, national cinema or film movements?

How does feminist film criticism help us to interpret films made by women? What challenges do particular directors pose to critics?

How do historical, cultural, and industrial factors shape the work of women directors?

How do films made by women engage local ideologies of gender, race, class, and sexuality?

The first part of the course investigates how women directors rework “the woman’s film.” The second focuses on cinematic portrayals of politics, history, and war, and the third examines films that explore identity in the postmodern era.
Goals and Methology

Students in the course work toward several goals: learning how to read film formally, contextually and ideologically and developing as critical thinkers and writers. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

Identify films’ narrative, visual, and sound techniques, using vocabulary specific to cinema studies.
Analyze how women filmmakers use artistic strategies to achieve a range of effects.
Evaluate how films made by women respond to and shape existing cultural contexts and cinematic conventions.
Develop complex written arguments and support those arguments with sufficient and appropriate evidence.
Engage the work of film scholars, critically responding to their ideas in discussion and writing.

Course activities promote active learning, with most class sessions including a mix of mini-lectures, discussion, and group work. My role is to provide the tools and resources you need to advance your own thinking and writing. I will pose questions, design activities to help you think through these questions, and respond to your ideas. Your role is to do the hard work—the critical reading, discussion, and writing. You will analyze films, generate ideas in electronic and face-to-face discussions, analyze film clips, and construct written arguments.


Books

Bordwell and Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction

Online course packet

The lack of a counter-part to the term “women scientists” in the course title suggests “scientists” is covertly gendered. But make no mistake--this course is not a feminist study of scientists or science. Rather, this course means to go beyond feminist theory even though it concerns writing about women scientists. The reading includes the biographies of the Polish physicist Marie Curie, American geneticist Barbara McClintock, British biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, as well as the memoir of the American (male) geneticist James Watson, in which he candidly describes the ways in which male scientists perceived and talked about their female colleagues in his time and milieu. These representatives of three generations of women scientists made significant contributions to science. Curie was awarded two Nobel Prizes; McClintock, one; and one of the research programs in which Franklin was the major contributor was also awarded a Nobel. Shifts can be observed in the literary treatments of these women scientists from scientific hero to scientific heroine, from feminist hero to anti-feminist heroine. The focus of discussion is the gain and loss in treating these scientists first as women and then scientists, or first as scientists then women, or simply as scientists. At the end of the quarter, when you are equipped with sufficient knowledge, the discussion takes up the objectivity of scientific practice and whether scientific knowledge has a gender, as the notable rhetorician of science Evelyn Fox-Keller claims

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

Primary readings for the course will include essays and stories available on electronic reserve, as well as the following set of books: Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars; Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Nalo Hopkinson, Report from Planet Midnight; Nisi Shawl, Filter House; and Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life. Assignments for the course will probably include two essays, and some shorter, informal writing assignments.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

The culture of the Silver Age in Russia, from the 1880s to the Revolution, was described by its detractors as “Decadence,” and many of the figures involved accepted the label. This was not just a thoughtless enjoyment of scandal: the Russian Symbolists were a seriously philosophical group, and all of these S-words had a place in their world-view. This course looks at prose and poetry, painting and music, both naughty and nice but always in some sense serious, in the three decades before the Russian
Revolution.

The material covered will include prose by Leonid Andreev (The Thought, 1902), Andrei Belyi (Petersburg, 1911-21), Artsybashev (Sanin, 1904-07), Sologub (The Petty Demon, 1902-05), poetry by Blok, Balmont, Briusov,
Ivanov and others, selections from the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdiaev and Viacheslav Ivanov, paintings of Vrubel, Roerich and Bakst, and music of Stravinsky and Skriabin. Readings are in English, but students who can read the Russian originals are encouraged to do so, and students familiar with the contemporary culture of Europe are particularly
welcome.

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, McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid; Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Robinson Crusoe; Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Appleman, Darwin; Butler, Wild Seed; Silko, Ceremony; and a reading packet.

Catalog Description: Description of sentence, phrase, and word structures in present-day English.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 370

This course investigates the ways that literary texts structure and use language. Employing tools from linguistics and stylistics, we will analyze aspects of literary texts: sound, meter, lexicon, discourse structure, style, pragmatic strategies, varieties of English, and narrative orientation. Texts will be drawn from several literary genres: fiction, poetry, and drama. Over the term, we will develop and use this linguistic "toolbox" to construct sophisticated perspectives and arguments about literary texts. Course expectations include two papers, short writing assignments, and several quizzes.

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

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

Conventional wisdom tells us to turn to psychotherapy or philosophy or religion or history rather than to literature and film for words of wisdom, for insights into the human mind and heart. This course would widen that lens, focusing upon a source of salvation given only marginal attention in contemporary culture: fictional characterization. In particular, this course tests the benefits of analyzing characterization in our age of multimedia, when the person silently printed on the page is also embodied and enacted on radio or screen. In tandem, contemporary literary characterizations might combine forces to "save our lives."

Our primary means of investigating this theory to gain insightful, critical revelations will be in-depth, multi-genre studies of literary characterization in print and in audio/film adaptations of fictional narratives.

Some central questions for research and discussion over the course of the quarter:

? What constitutes “character” in life and in literature, both in the past but particularly in the present?

? Are we in contemporary society more or less likely to flatten existing traits of “character” into “caricature,” shaped as we can be by conventional cultural norms and relying on vague or conflicting notions about what it means to “have character”?

? Can the study of literary characterizations broaden and deepen our study of actual people while enriching our own moral and mental selves--while saving our lives?

? Do audio and visual adaptations flesh out character profiles, fusing words in print with resonant-voiced actors so as to allow readers richer insights into literary characters and conflicts?

? Should we adjust our aesthetic values, viewing multimedia and traditional print literatures as literary complements rather than competitors as a means of enhancing our own lives, our own characters?





Course work includes a willingness to challenge one's current aesthetic values about film and literature; weekly engaged, in-person critical discussion; online research of literary and film terms via UW databases; critical written analysis of stories and films, as well as published reviews and critiques of those stories and films; a midterm and final examination. Course texts to purchase at the University Bookstore include "The Reader"; I will add stories and critical film texts to this list according to availability and cost, so please attend class before you purchase the books.

I will also make available short stories that cannot be found online.

Film adaptations will be screened in class for course discussion, and class attendance for these screenings is required. For review of films for the midterms and final examinations, you will be expected to rent or otherwise check out from libraries these same films. Again, please attend class before buying any books, as DVD availability might affect the textbook orders before the first day of the quarter.

In the late nineteenth century, nearly all artists recognized that the major cultural, economic, and political changes brought on by the conclusion to the Civil War and the birth of the modern industrial United States would also demand a corresponding change in literary and artistic production. However, although there is little debate that the post-Civil War decades saw an increasingly “realistic” style of art—in contrast, for example, to antebellum romanticism—defining two of the major genres which appeared during this period—American realism and naturalism—has long proved a difficult task, in no small part because artists of this period had wildly different views of the direction art should take as they approached the twentieth century. In some ways, the texts of these genres have many similarities: a focus on the negative effects of urbanization (the "dirty"); a fascination with gender roles and sexual relationships (the "sexy"); and an emphasis on commodities and consumer culture (the "money"). At the same time, the goals of these texts and their treatment of these subjects vary greatly, often hardly appearing to be coherent genres at all. The focus of our class, then, will be these two late-nineteenth-century literary movements of American realism and naturalism, with a particular interest in defining and understanding these two genres against their historical and cultural backgrounds, as well as thinking through larger questions about the value of genre classification in the context of literary scholarship.

Our primary authors are likely to include Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jack London, and James Weldon Johnson. In addition to readings covering primarily short stories, novels, and essays, we will also draw on a number of other archival and secondary materials, including music, paintings, and films from the period as well as more recent secondary criticism. Grading will be based on participation in discussion, weekly online discussion board postings, reading quizzes, group presentations and projects, and two essays.

Required Texts:

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford; ISBN: 9780312133603)

Crane, Stephen. Maggie (Broadview; ISBN: 9781551115979)

Norris, Frank. McTeague (Norton Critical Edition; ISBN: 9780393970135)

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth (Broadview; ISBN: 9781551115672)

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie (Norton Critical Edition; ISBN: 9780393927733)

Dunbar, Paul Lawrence. The Sport of the Gods (Signet Classics; ISBN 9780451531773)

London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf (Oxford; IBSN: 9780199554942)

Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Hill and Wang; ISBN: 9780809000326)

Although teaching writing might seem like a fairly straightforward endeavor, the field of composition was and is marked by vigorous debate about proper methodologies and pedagogies. We will start with a historical overview of how composition as a method has been viewed and taught at the secondary and university level. With that contextualization in mind, we will then explore the dominant composition theories that have developed over the past sixty years (or so).

Teaching someone how to write is not a neutral act. We will discuss how these different perspectives on teaching writing reveal political and sociocultural assumptions, situations where these assumptions are/are not problematic, and places of strategy for circumventing deleterious effects.

Throughout the course, we will consider how the above applies to teaching writing in a theoretical sense as well as what these considerations look like in high school and university writing situations. In short, the aim is for you to leave this class with theoretical attitudes and pedagogical strategies that will help you be a successful writing teacher.

Class Assignments:

You will write and produce short response papers, a take home midterm essay, an ethnographic observation, a group project based in one of the theories of composition we study in class, and a teaching portfolio.

Class participation is also a factor in your grade and will be key for keeping up with the many theories we will be studying.

Required Books:

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader; 3rd Edition – ed. Victor Villanueva

ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-8141-0977-9

Other readings will be available online.

The issue of how to define a child, and how to educate one, became widespread questions in the eighteenth through to the nineteenth century as mass education became more of a possibility, and as the Victorians inherited, then appropriated, the Romantic conception of childhood, with its investment in innocence and spirituality. This course will explore the ways in which literature for children developed intersectionally in nineteenth-century England 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, Wordsworth, and others.

Because this course is an 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 exam. Significant and engaged participation is a required component for successful evaluation.

Texts:

Kingsley, Charles. The Water Babies: A Fairy-Tale for a Land Baby. 1863. (Broadview: 978-1551117737)
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865. (Norton: 978-0393958041)
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1883. (Broadview: 978-1551114095)
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. 1905. (Penguin: 978-0142437018)
Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty. 1877. (Oxford: 978-0199608522)

During this course we will examine various phenomena related to the language known as Serbo-Croatian, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the languages known as Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. In connection with this, concepts such as language death and language birth are explored. A brief history of Serbo-Croatian will be provided and compared to an even more brief history of the peoples who spoke the language. The relation between dialect and language is analyzed and then specifically applied to the region in question. Notions of language politics, language standardization, and language codification in the Balkans are necessarily analyzed. Also, certain elements of the structures of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are briefly addressed for purposes of making linguistic comparisons.

There is no textbook for the course. Students will be required to purchase a course pack (at the RAMS COPY CENTER, 4144 University Way Northeast Seattle, WA 98105).

Catalog Description: Individual projects in various types of nonfictional prose, such as biographical sketches, informational reports, literary reviews, and essays.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This advanced workshop will demand you approach one story or essay in a variety of ways: different lengths, different voices, different forms, different degrees of “done-ness.” The assignments and prompts will foster creativity and innovation, and—I hope—result in stronger and more interesting pieces of writing.
You MUST come to class on the first day with a story, scenario, situation, or idea that you want to spend the entire quarter exploring, as your first version will be due within the first couple of weeks

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

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

This course will help students with the process of writing the senior honors thesis. Through a combination of in-class workshops and individual conferences with the instructor, it will assist you in formulating a topic, developing a bibliography, organizing your ideas, and revising your drafts. No one can write your thesis for you, but this class makes the undertaking a little easier by providing structure, feedback, and intellectual community along the way.