In her 1997 book, Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon describes haunting as that which appears “to be not there,” yet also a “seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.” She further elaborates: “The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted drawn us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.” This course will investigate a number of literary and visual materials concerning ghosts and the phenomenon of haunting as a means of registering historical and material consequences of trauma on individual and collective consciousness. Our encounter with the ghostly presence opens up two primary avenues for critical interpretation: in the first instance, haunting provides a conceptual framework to approach the formal characteristics of 20th-century American literature, namely the ways in which repetition, fragmentation, and redaction function in the narratives as means of coping with and working through traumatic events. The second, and perhaps more productive avenue for critique, is to use the presence of ghosts as a strategy to undo the coherence of narrativization—to question not only what produces haunting but what is produced by it. From these conditions emerge the questions of what it means for literature to register the marks of trauma: Is the goal of narrativization to bear witness to the conditions and legacy of violence? Is it to reclaim the primacy of historically marginalized individuals against dominant discourses that legitimize only the perpetrators? Does the narrative provide a means of reconstructing coherence amidst systematic violence? Or, to echo David Eng and David Kazanjian, does the presence of the ghost gesture at new creative possibilities because “abject and unlivable bodies” do not simply disappear or lose intelligibility but persist through volatile and material remains, transforming these instances of haunting into possible sites of countermemory, articulation, and identification?

This class fulfills the University of Washington’s “W” requirement, which means that you may apply the course towards the additional 7-10 writing credits required by the university. Writing is a critical component of this class, and you will be expected to complete 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of two major papers. You will have an opportunity to submit rough drafts, meet with me to discuss your essay, and complete substantive revisions prior to turning in the two major papers.

Required Texts:
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, Norton, ISBN 9780393959048
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Norton, ISBN 9780393931389
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, Vintage, ISBN 9780679721888


Additional Materials:
• Course Packet (Available from The Ave Photocopy)
• The Others (2001), dir. Alejandro Amenábar
• Jacob’s Ladder (1990), dir. Adrian Lyne

The Victorian era saw the development of the detective story – a genre that flourished with the spread of literacy among the British working class, and owed some of its popularity to serial publishing and railway novels. While Sherlock Holmes has become synonymous with the Victorian detective, we will spend much of this class looking at lesser-known works in multiple genres before turning to Holmes. Our concern will be to trace the character of the detective and his or her actions that lead to the resolution of the crime – in other words, who solves the puzzle, and how?



At the end of the quarter we will look at Neo-Sherlockiana and the afterlife of the Victorian detective, and discuss the ways in which the detective and his methods changes for contemporary audiences.

This course satisfies the University of Washington's W requirement: students will submit two papers with revisions during the quarter. This course will also satisfy the pre-1900 requirement for English majors.


Wilkie Collins, /The Moonstone/, 9781551112435

Course Reader available at the Ave Copy Center, 4141 University Way

In this course we will read literary narratives about individuals whose lives have been irreparably changed by the deterioration in global health and the environment. These narratives range from stories about the long-term health effects of testing nuclear bombs to the immediate health effects of the use of chemicals in corporate agricultural production. We will read both fiction and non-fiction to investigate choices of genre, figurative language, and themes to narrate how the local is connected to the global, the past with the present, and individuals with one another around the globe. In our search through narratives about the personal and collective crises precipitated by widespread damage to global health, we will consider ways to narrate our own responses to these crises.
To this end, in our reading and writing, we will identify the strategies of writing deployed in different forms of literary expression. We will refine what it means to close-read and analyze complex literary texts. And we will consider each text in the broader context of historical, medical, and philosophical considerations.
To complement the primary texts listed below, the Course Reader includes short stories and essays from a variety of literary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including Susan Sontag, Paul Farmer, John Murray, Alphonso Lingis, Bruno Latour, Vandana Shiva, and Ben E. Aigbokhan.

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:
Available at University Bookstore:
Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams ISBN 0-679-74024-4
Under the Feet of Jesus by Helen Maria Viramontes ISBN 0-452-27387-0
What is the What by Dave Eggers ISBN 978-0-307-38590-1
Available at Ave Copy Center, 4141 University Way NE, Suite 103:
Course Reader

This course introduces students to nineteenth-century American history through a survey of its fiction. Short-stories and selections of novels will be read alongside a few poems, speeches, works of philosophy and occasionally memoir. The class focuses upon the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, among others. Moving in rough chronology through the century, we will touch upon some of the main themes of the morphing era – industrialism, transcendentalism, the Civil War, westward migration, pragmatism, naturalism, colonialism, among others. Students interested in History as well as English are encouraged to take this course. This is a “W” credit, with 10-15 pages of writing (three papers), and revisions.

This course examines the Black Arts/Aesthetic Movement of the late 1960s to mid 1970s. The BAM was made up of a diverse group of African-American artists, writers, and musicians committed to creating politically-charged, socially relevant art. They saw themselves as the cultural arm of Black Liberation struggles and other revolutionary movements influential at the time. We’ll engage literature in its various forms through the work of novelists, poets, playwrights, cultural critics, and musicians such as Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Gil Scott-Heron, Ed Bullins, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln and more. We will situate these artists within the political, historical, and cultural context of their time to consider, among other questions, what is the relationship between art and politics? We will also watch films including the 2011 documentary The Black Power Mixtape, and Jules Dassin's 1968 film Uptight.

This class counts for "W" credit, and will require students to write two 5-7 page revisable papers. Students can also expect to write semi-formal 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**

4. Required Texts:

Amiri Baraka Dutchman and The Slave 978-0688210847

Gil Scott Heron: The Vulture 978-1847678836
Sam Greenlee: The Spook Who Sat By the Door 978-0814322468

Ishmael Reed: The Last Days of Louisiana Red 978-1564782366

Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf 978-0553133073

Course Packet

Science fiction (SF) is a genre that can radically transform how we think about gender and sexuality. In this class, we will read SF that challenges the stability of familiar categories such as man/woman and gay/straight. Readings may include The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Female Man by Joanna Russ, One Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, “And Salome Danced” by Kelley Eskridge, “Deep End” by Nisi Shawl, ?oku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga, and “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler.

We will consider how science fiction has opened our understanding of gender and sexuality. We will supplement this literature with scholarly essays. Unsurprisingly, we will approach these texts through the lens of gender, women, and sexuality studies, meaning that we will both analyze the depiction of gender roles in these texts as well as put the histories and experiences of women and LGBT people in the center of our studies.

This course meets daily, Monday through Thursday, and consists of both seminar-style discussion and lecture. In-class participation is mandatory, so please do not take this class if you are unable to attend daily. Because class meetings will be student-centered and discussion-based, in-class participation will be a significant portion of the grade.

Because this course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement, you should expect to write 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing. Assignments should help you improve your writing and critical thinking skills. In your essays, you will also practice the skills of close reading, claim-driven interpretation, and intertextual analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

This Introduction to Cultural Studies puts speculative fiction (print and film) in conversation with contemporary critical theory, journalism, social science and other discourses that extrapolate potential future from the historical present. We’ll take a brief look back to dueling representations of mid twentieth century representations of capitalism, bioscience, technology, and ideal citizens in the post World War II era as a prelude to late 20th and early 21st century depictions of utopian and dystopian futures. What virtually all of these texts share is the conviction that the future is “ours” to shape. They critically diverge in their representation of this collective, their vision of utopia and dystopia, and the ingredients of each. A primary goal of this course will be to engage you in identifying and speculating on the possible futures that make-up our present and to take a stance on them. What is your utopia and how do you imagine us getting there? Required texts are likely to include: 1984, Oryx and Crake, Parable of the Sower.

This course will ground you in the major developments in 18th - and 19th -century British literature. Through reading selected 18th-century poetry and nonfiction, the Gothic novel /The Castle of Otranto/, Jane Austen’s /Sense and Sensibility/, and a selection of Romantic poetry, we will consider historical and philosophical movements including the Enlightenment, the discussion of human rights surrounding the French Revolution, and the relationship between rationalism and Romanticism at the turn to the 19th century. We will then turn to the rise of literary realism and sensationalism and Victorian concerns of imperialism, scientific developments, and the role of women in society; texts for the second half of the course will include /Great Expectations/, /Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/, and other shorter works of poetry and prose. Assessment will be based on a midterm examination, a final examination, in-class participation, and one essay.

Book List

Horace Walpole, /The Castle of Otranto/

Jane Austen, /Sense and Sensibility/, ISBN: 978-0-393-97751-6

Charles Dickens, /Great Expectations/, ISBN: 978-0-393-96069-3

Robert Louis Stevenson, /Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde/, ISBN 978-0-393-97465-2

Other required readings will be included in a coursepack.

This quarter we will be reading novels and short stories, written by British and Irish authors during the twentieth century. We will consider the development of literary modernism early in the century, and the later emergence of post-modernism after World War II in relation to major social, technological, and cultural changes of the times. One particular emphasis of the class will be on the role of art and the artist in modern life; another will be on how the content and structure of many texts reveal anxiety over new attitudes towards sexuality and gender roles.
The reading list for this course includes some texts that are well known for their complexity, daring and innovation. You may find that you need to read some of them more than once in order to grasp their multi-layered structures of meaning.

Texts: D.H. Lawrence, Short Stories; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Short Stories; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Graham Swift, Waterland; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body; Ian McEwan; Saturday

In 1989, writing about the end of the Cold War, historian Francis Fukuyama suggested that history – understood as a series of conflicts between opposing ideologies – was drawing to an end: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Thirteen years later, however, Fukuyama identified a less triumphalist eschatology – another type of historical “end� - in the development of biotechnology and transhumanism; he suggested that the potential for modification of “human nature� posed an existential threat to the continuing existence of the species as such. These are, of course, only two of many possible conceptions of the end of human history, and they occupy two rather extreme poles relative to the vast field of possibilities which has been and continues to be staked out relative to it. In this class, we will read fictional texts written since the beginning of the Cold War that portray a variety of “ends of history� - some apocalyptic, some hopeful, some ambiguous – and pair them with nonfictional contextualizing sources with the goal of investigating a few of the many ways in which our conceptions of this topic have varied (and possibly evolved) in response to and conjunction with shifting political, technological, and social conditions. Note: This will be a reading- and writing-intensive class. Students should expect to do 50+ pages of reading per day, often of fairly dense material. As this is a W class, students will do at least 15 pages of graded writing, most probably in the form of two 7-8 page essays. Trigger warning: Much of the material we will be reading and discussing in this class (as might be expected, given that we'll be talking about various ways in which human history might come to an end) will be dealing with intense and possibly triggering material, including graphic violence and sexuality and intersections of the two. Students will not have to write about these topics, but should be prepared to talk about them in class in a straightforward manner.

Texts: A Canticle for Liebowitz – Walter W. Miller (1960) The Road – Cormac McCarthy (2006) Scorch Atlas – Blake Butler (2012) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (1978) The Children of Men – P.D. James (1992)

Course Packet – essays and short stories

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

The goal of this course is to introduce students to a wide variety of short fiction, spanning from the 19th Century to the contemporary moment. We will be reading three main clusters of short stories with each cluster focusing on various themes and dynamics within short fiction. Beginning with an investigation of the creation and development of the short story, the class will then turn towards more specific issues of race, nationality, and gender across the 20th Century. Reading will include secondary articles and analysis of topics relevant to the course.
This course does fulfill the W general education requirement. As such, students will complete 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-clas writing with an opportunity for revision.

The primary aim of this course is to introduce students to the practice and pleasure of critically reading contemporary short stories. We’ll engage with several new collections of short stories, discussing both individual stories and each book as a whole. We will also devote time to reading (and even writing!) short-shorts/flash fiction.



This course fulfills the “W” general education requirement. As such, students will complete 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing with the opportunity for revision.



Texts:

Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

George Saunders, Tenth of December

Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry

We hear the word “celebrity” and we immediately think of Hollywood – the mass-market, the low-brow, glossy spreads and glossier stars. But the impact of star culture on the 20th century has been far more expansive, and its reach far higher the turn-off-your-brain, turn-on-the-screen mentality we tend to associate with the Hollywood vision. Questions of identity, self-awareness, and of course, the illusion (and disillusionment) of glamor, glitz, and picture-perfection permeate early 20th century literature. By turning to authors like Woolf, Fitzgerald, Stein and Mansfield, we will examine the ways in which literature at the turn of the century are steeped in questions of identity, notoriety, fame, and self-fashioning, whether they deal directly with “celebrity” as we understand it or not. In doing this, we will look at texts that span a variety of genres, from the traditional novel, to the short story, and cinema itself. Above all, we will use texts, both literary and cinematic, to question the divide between “high” and “low” culture, and ask ourselves: why do we assume celebrity to be a mindless enterprise? And do we, even still, consider the authors of “literature” to be somehow above the pursuit of it?

Because this is a W-credit course, you should expect between 10 and 15 pages of graded, out of class writing. This will likely be met with two short, 5-7 page papers, one of which you will have the opportunity to revise. Other assignments may include response papers, group discussion, and in-class quizzes. Because the nature of the class is discussion-based, in-class participation constitutes a significant portion of the final grade.

In English 242: Reading Prose Fiction, we will be reading works such as Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus of 1658, Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian, Virginia Wolff’s 1927 landmark modernist novel, To the Lighthouse and Lawrence Durrell’s 1957 novel Justine. You will note that the above works do not follow the logic of the current convention of “period studies” in which a literary or historical period is defined by very specific beginning and ending dates. Yet each of the works listed above are considered “modern.” Each of these works are modern in the sense that they challenge the accepted status and means of representation, literary or otherwise, along with the received wisdom and commonplaces that had been dominant in literary and historical writings of their given cultural climate. What is generally considered modern is relative to what is considered traditional, ancient, or conventional. The date of publication, or creation, is not what makes a work modern but rather the way in which it distinguishes itself from what came before it. The conceptual, institutional, and cultural implications of this are many and diffuse and this course will only touch on a small portion of them – most notably – how does a work of art pose a question that fundamentally challenges received traditions and practices? If it makes such a challenge isn’t it calling its own purpose or function into question? How does one dissolve a “tradition”? What is it and what does it entail to be “modern,” to be “new”? Is it possible, realistically or conceptually? And finally, have we, as a culture, ever been modern?

Books:
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Thomas Browne - The Major Works
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

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.

In this course, we will be learning ways of describing the structures of different kinds of poetry as we look at how poets from a variety of times and places have thought and re-thought the art of poetry. In addition to reading poems, we will be reading essays, letters, and other writings about poetry from poets such as Aimé Césaire, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Frederico García Lorca, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and William Wordsworth.

As part of a “W” course, you will be writing and revising two papers of approximately 5-pages each. Shorter in-class writing assignments and homework writing assignments will provide opportunities with which to develop the two papers. Classes will include lectures from the instructor as well as discussions generated from your writing. Over the quarter, there will also be several short exams on key terms and concepts presented in the assigned readings and discussed in class.


Book List:


Jeffrey Wainwright, /Poetry: The Basics/, 2^nd edition, Routledge, 2011, 9780415566162

Melissa Kwasny, editor, /Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950/, Wesleyan University Press, 2004, 9780819566072

Detective Fiction is one of the most popular types of genre fiction; at the same time, since its invention in the mid-19th century by Edgar Allan Poe, it has proven itself capable of combining entertainment with sharp-edged social commentary and critique as well as profound philosophical insights about language and representation. Created by Poe and perfected by Conan Doyle, detective fiction popularizes the modern scientific outlook (forensic science and the hypothetical–deductive method). The “clue puzzle” structure engages the reader’s own powers of detection and ratiocination, inviting the reader to emulate the detective and perform the same activities of mental reasoning. At the same time, detective fiction is also about the relationship between state authority and justice. In classic detective fiction, crime is a transgression of the norms of an essentially just system; the hard-boiled variety of detective fiction was born in the 1920s in the U.S. as disillusionment set in about the equation between justice and the state. The tough, disillusioned U.S. hardboiled detective who takes the law into his own hands and who uncovers crimes within the (corrupt) state (rather than outside the domain of law and order) in turn has inspired the creation of minority detectives—gumshoes of color. Chester Himes’ Cotton Comes to Harlem, for example, traces black-on-black crime in Harlem to structural racism. Finally, postmodern anti-detective fiction, invented by Jorge Luis Borges and perfected by Paul Auster, parodies the rationalist conventions of classic detective fiction, turning the machinery of retrospective clue puzzling inside-out. This course will survey the above-mentioned landmarks of the genre’s development from Poe to the present, as well as more recent Chicana (Corpi) and Cuban (Padura Fuentes) incarnations that use the detective genre to explore U.S. minority history and to memorialize an American cult figure abroad (Hemingway in Cuba). The course overall goal is to demonstrate how far one single genre defined by four ingredients (a mystery, a detective, an investigation, plus the “puzzle element”) can be stretched and how much ground it can cover—while never stopping to provide fun entertainment!


Required Readings:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (Dover Thrift Edition)
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939; Random House/Vintage 1992)
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965; Random House/Vintage 1988)
Lucha Corpi, Cactus Blood (1995; Arte Público Press, 2009)
Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985; Penguin 1987)
Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Adiós, Hemingway (Canongate 2005)
. . . and a course reader with short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Jorge Luis Borges.

This course begins with the premise that art is purposeful. As a manmade product, art is not innocent. It does not simply reflect the world around us, nor is it ideologically neutral—that art exists solely for the sake of aesthetic beauty. Rather, we begin with an understanding that ideology and artistic representation operate in a cyclical relationship. As much as art can capture a particular moment in time, it is also a site where ideological messages are produced and disseminated. This, in turn, fuels how consumers of art will view the world around them. In other words, art can be used as a tool for both oppression and liberation.

Our class will explore this cyclical relationship with a focus on how racial narratives are produced in order fuel imperial projects with particular emphasis on the U.S. as an imperial power. We will analyze a variety of literary, visual, and popular culture texts that produce “savagery” in order to justify colonization built upon systems of racialized labor. While we will focus largely on U.S. racial spectacle, we will frame our analysis of within the broader context of competing European colonialisms. We stand to learn a great deal about how race is produced and inequality is perpetuated by comparing the ways that racial stratification serves state interests.

To this end, we will begin our inquiry with the following questions:

1. How has discourse of benevolence been used to justify the subjugation of peoples of color?
2. What are the identifying markers of civilization versus barbarism as they relate to religion, capital, and visions of social progress?
3. How does the violence espoused through art attempt to conceal itself? How have other artists pushed back through the creation of counter narratives?
4. Where does this messaging persist in the world around us, and how are we situated in relation to it?

Our course readings will cover a variety of topics that address nation-building, normative/non-normative identity constructions, and racial spectacle. Such topics could include the U.S. minstrel show, P.T. Barnum’s museum, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, World’s Fair ethnographic displays. We will also include a number of modern day topics that demonstrate the persistence of spectacles that reproduce normative values. These topics include reality television programming and racial tourism.

This course will examine the historical currents that necessitated the emergence of an Asian Pacific American literary sensibility, in conjunction with a consideration of the difficulties and possibilities inherent to in this categorization. Asian American populations have been deeply impacted by restrictive immigration legislation and American foreign policy, putting its peoples in a unique position for defining Americanness. How do artists with an Asian ancestry challenge a country that ostensibly celebrates diversity yet looks with suspicion on the foreign? We will be reading the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, the essays of Carlos Bulosan, the play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, watching Margaret Cho’s I’m the One that I Want, and novels by Annie Choi and Chang-rae Lee.

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

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

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

Catalog Description: 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 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.

This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on five major 19/20th-century novels: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet or any edn); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford Worlds Classics); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Signet or any edn); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); and David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction (Penguin), a study of how fiction works. Students will work with key critical concepts associated with the poetics of the novel (story and plot, authorship and modes of narration, reliable and unreliable narrators, framing and embedding, point of view, methods of representing consciousness, irony, defamiliarization, metafiction, intertextuality). Please note: English 302B is an introduction to advanced literary studies, and the class is reading-intensive. There will be a substantial course-reserve of critical essays. Several short assignments and a final exam/paper (last day of class).

Our analytical focus for this course will be upon how literature deals with the environment, i.e., how literary texts represent nature and how they present environmental issues, and why it matters that these issues be represented in this form. How, that is, do the ways we imagine ourselves within the places where we live affect who we are? How do literary texts impact this understanding? What kinds of social, cultural and political work do literary texts and forms perform? This will not be a course on nature writing or on social science/public policy issues, although our concerns will intersect with both of those perspectives. Instead, we will be studying how particular aesthetic and rhetorical elements get used by different authors to shape our attitudes toward nature and the environment —with “environment” broadly construed as a category that encompasses the whole set of interactions that we as individuals and members of groups have with the physical and social landscapes around us.

English 302 is a course with a focus upon methodology as well, meant as a second-stage introduction to the English major. We will be analyzing a set of fictional and non-fictional texts, many of them narratives—so we’ll be taking up general issues of narrative theory. We will also be reading some theoretical texts that provide context for contemporary discussion of the environment, including scientific texts, ecocriticism, environmental ethics and environmental history.

Texts: John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (ISBN 0-374-51431-3); Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (ISBN 0-345-32649-0); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (ISBN 978-1-55111-935-9); Philip Appleman, Darwin: Norton Critical Edition (ISBN 0-393-95849-3); Octavia Butler, Wild Seed (ISBN 978-0-446-67697-7); William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (ISBN 0-679-73217-9); Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (ISBN 0-375-72748-5); plus photocopy reading packet

This course provides an introduction to critical practice, which entails the ability to read literary and cultural texts through a broad variety of interpretive lenses. We will examine a group of texts from British Romanticism (spanning the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries), loosely arranged around the theme of the Outcast Hero (or Anti-Hero). More specifically, the class will examine four texts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. This limited group of primary texts will allow us to consider how critics, invested in asking different kinds of questions, highlight certain parts of a text more than others as they participate in larger conversations about how literature reflects and affects readers, writers, and cultures. Our secondary texts reflect dominant trends in criticism over the past century, including—to list a few—formalism, structuralism, old and new historicism, reader-response criticism, deconstruction, cultural materialism, psychoanalytic criticism, orientalism, gender studies, and textual criticism.

As suggested by the word “practice” in our course title, criticism isn’t something that just happens. It is something we do (practice) as English scholars, and getting good at it takes work (also practice)—which means writing, refining, and rewriting. You will have frequent opportunities to develop and flex your critical muscle, through frequent short, informal writing assignments. Formal writing will consist of a short mini-conference paper, a longer research essay (which also includes exploratory assignments), and a final exam. The rest of your grade will come from your active participation in the classroom.

Textbooks:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Bedford/St. Martin’s), 978-0312112233.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Bedford/St. Martin’s), 978-0312191269.
George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine (Norton), 978-0393925609.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Broadview), 978-1551114354.

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This course is interested in thinking about “culture” as a site where imaginations of activism and social change are both organized and contested. More specifically, we will explore how social change is theorized in speculative fictions where the persistence of racial, economic, gender, and sexual violence is commonplace though, perhaps, defamiliarized. We will consider how the narratives differently mark the continuation of historically grounded inequalities, exploitations and dispossessions while, at the same time, point us to new spaces and practices for social change within their particular political landscapes. Using the methods, theories and practices championed by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others from the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, our main focus will be to explore the relationship between cultural production (poetry, music and visual art) and social movement struggles in dystopian narratives. These considerations will be organized to engage a more critical understanding of the many forms of violence that animate the present moment as we work to inspire new imaginations of social change rooted in cultural production.

Animating Questions:

• What are the contours of the political landscapes imagined in the texts—the social, political, economic and cultural norms?
• What are the possibilities for creating social change in these contexts, or what counts as activism?
• How do our writers imagine the value of cultural texts and creative, magical, or non-realistic forms of knowledge for social movement struggles within these worlds?
• What are the possibilities and limitations of culture as a site for social change for subjects in differing dystopian landscapes?
• What does speculative fiction teach us about systems of domination and social change practices in our present moment?

A reader will be available for purchase at the AVE COPY CENTER

Possible Texts:

Darko Suvin “Cognition and Estrangement”
Samuel Delaney “About 5,750 Words” and “Empire Star”
China Mieville “Marxism and Fantasy”
Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower and “Amnesty”
Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Gloria Naylor Bailey’s Café
Karen Tei Yamashita Tropic of Orange
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland
Ana Castillo So Far from God
Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood

This is a course in the problematics of reading, by which I mean attention to the fascinations, affects, processes, identifications, and mysteries that happen when we read. We'll ask such questions as: What forms do the weird pleasures, wild emotions, and secret seductions of reading fiction take as texts and as psychic structures? How, exactly, do we "take in" fiction? How much control does the author have over how the reader feels while reading? Do we read differently when we're reading across gender or sexuality or ethnicity? Why do some readers choose puzzle novels while others prefer love stories? Can we love novels if they are about things we hate? Do we identify with characters who seem in many ways to be our opposites?

Because this course meets the "Theories and Methodologies" requirement for English majors, we will have a course packet of readings to try to get some tentative answers to these questions. We will also read some modern and contemporary fiction to take up the ideas in those essays. Discussion will be at the heart of what we do, so come each session expecting lots of talk and lively differences of opinion. Reading for the course will likely include: David Mitchell, _Cloud Atlas_, Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier_, Marilynne Robinson, _Housekeeping_ and Nami Mun, _Miles from Nowhere_.

From Homer’s Iliad to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (and beyond) the siege of Troy has been treated as the result of and the background for a number of love stories. In the European Middle Ages, the story of Troilus and Cressida, a late invention, came in for particularly interesting treatments at the hands of major writers of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, and William Shakespeare.

After setting the stage for the medieval (and early modern) developments by reading Homer and selections from Ovid, we’ll concentrate on the variations in the characters and treatment of the Troilus and Cressida story and see what it may show us about love in a time of war and how that theme changes over the centuries.

Requirements for the course will include active participation in discussions, weekly short writing contributions, and two longer (4-5pp) papers.

Books ordered:

Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, trans. Rev. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2011. (ISBN13: 9780226470498)

Ovid. Heroides. Trans. Harold Isbell. London/New York: Penguin, 1990 (ISBN13: 9780140423556)

Gordon, R. K., ed. The Story of Troilus. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1978. (ISBN13: 9780802063687)

Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Oxford World Classic. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1982. (ISBN 9780199536535)

Catalog Description: Shakespeare's career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances.

The writers and literature of England from 1660 to 1750. We will be reading plays, prose, and poetry, chosen to illustrate the variety as well as the creative force of the written word in this period, bringing to life (for example) the urban horrors of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the aristocratic dreamworld of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, the cheerful crooks and whores of The Beggar’s Opera, or the big people and little people of Gulliver’s Travels. Major authors covered include Dryden, Congreve, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Gay, and Fielding, with emphasis on careful reading for understanding and enjoyment of this literature in its social and cultural context. Response papers, two exams. Questions? Write me at tlock@uw.edu

The modern novel in English was a global phenomenon. It owed much to the British empire, which had colonized over a quarter of the world by the 20th century, a process involving cultural as well as political-economic domination. Across Britain’s imperial orbit, novelists critically engaged with the colonial modernity of which they were a product. This course takes a global and comparative approach, exploring writing from countries that may include England, Ireland, Scotland, the Caribbean, and India. We will consider the ways in which the novel form contributes to national culture and what kinds of identities emerge in the violent matrix of empire. Writers may include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Flann O’Brien, Raja Rao, CLR James.

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

“Novel, a, short story padded.”

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”

--Flannery O’Connor
“The Fiction Writer and His Country”


“Each writer's prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend
to limit the kinds of characters, actions, and settings he can honestly
care about, since by nature of our mortality we care about what we
know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which
threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has
no visible bearing on the safety of the people and things we love.”

--John Gardner
The Art of Fiction


This class in fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it. Ambrose Bierce will be one of the “unpadded” writers we read with the above quotations in mind; that is, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and assorted other writers cared about and thought they might lose, just as we’ll analyze their narrative styles that often shocked reading publics—both then and now. Primary goals of the course include:

increasing your reading enjoyment of the short story by sophisticating your reading practices and your awareness of how you interpret and assess fiction
exposing you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and literary movements
enhancing your critical abilities, both orally and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate responses to stories and their film adaptations
convincing you that the critical reading of fiction can help in the critical reading of life


Course Texts

Ann Charters, The Story and Its Writer, Compact 8th Edition (available now at U Bookstore)

Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual (available at UW Bookstore)

Course Requirements: weekly class attendance and active, thoughtful, vocal participation in class discussions centered on critical interpretation and analysis of stories; research of secondary criticism; objective quizzes on literary elements in short stories, essay exams--final and possible midterm essay exams that you compose out of class--please note that this is not a composition course; it is a course in which you will be expected to articulate oral analyses of stories and write critical analyses of stories, too. There is no extra credit and you cannot repeat essay exams for better grades.

No auditors.

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.

This course is interested in how social change is theorized in speculative fictions where the persistence of racial, economic, gender, and sexual violence is commonplace though, perhaps, defamiliarized. We will consider how the narratives differently mark the continuation of historically grounded inequalities, exploitations and dispossessions while, at the same time, point us to new spaces and practices for social change within their particular political landscapes. We will especially focus on the relationship between cultural production (poetry, music and visual art) and social movement struggles in dystopian narratives. These considerations will be organized to engage a more critical understanding of the many forms of violence that animate the present moment as we work to inspire new imaginations of social change.

Animating Questions:

• What are the contours of the political landscapes imagined in the texts—the social, political, economic and cultural norms?
• What are the possibilities for creating social change in these contexts, or what counts as activism?
• How do our writers imagine the value of cultural production and creative, magical, or non-realistic forms of knowledge for social movement struggles within these worlds?
• What are the possibilities and limitations of culture as a site for social change for subjects in differing dystopian landscapes?
• What does speculative fiction teach us about systems of domination and social change practices in our present moment?

A reader will be available for purchase at the AVE COPY CENTER

Possible Texts:

Darko Suvin “Cognition and Estrangement”
Samuel Delaney “About 5,750 Words” and “Empire Star”
China Mieville “Marxism and Fantasy”
Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower and “Amnesty”
Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Gloria Naylor Bailey’s Café
Karen Tei Yamashita Tropic of Orange
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland
Ana Castillo So Far from God
Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood

The class will read and discuss an assortment of novels and short stories written by American authors in the first half of the twentieth century. Students will be expected to read the assignments and come to class ready to write and talk about them. Written work will consist entirely of a series of between five and ten in-class essays written in response to study questions handed out in advance. Participation in class-discussion will count for half the final grade; the essays will count for the other half.

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

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 is fiction and/or creative non-fiction writing class, which means that the bulk of the responsibility for the success of this class is based on the writing students produce for the class and the critique of the writing done by their classmates.

The goal of the class is to prepare students for more independent writing, self-critique, and more advanced levels of fiction writing. The focus on the writing is centered more on revision and understanding craft than producing “publishable” fiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

This seminar is a comprehensive introduction to James Joyce’s Ulysses as the summit of literary modernism. We’ll read the book one episode at a time, tracking the progressive weaving and unweaving of sense. Discussions will address the book’s Irish connections, Joyce's mocking homages to tradition, the exuberant transvaluations of all novelistic values (narrative devices, generic conventions, topics, perspectives, styles and humors), and the book’s affinity with the European avant-garde and experimentation across the arts. A portion of each meeting will be devoted to music in Ulysses. Desiderata: inklings of Joyce's earlier work, intimacy with Homer’s Odyssey, interest in sly uses of language. Text: Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, (available at UW Bookstore and elsewhere). Requirements: weekly tasks/quizzes and a final or an ongoing project involving independent research. Please note that Ulysses is a delightful but very demanding book: contact instructor for additional information and reading suggestions.

> The Faerie Queene. This course will introduce you to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), one of the most influential texts in English literary history. Spenser writes allegorically, hoping to teach readers about God and Queen Elizabeth, but he also writes a strange and fantastical story, about knights, ladies, witches, wizards, King Arthur, dragons, ogres, secret gardens, and magic castles. Come read about Britomart, the invincible woman warrior, as she trounces all the men in the book, and come join the hunt for the monstrous Blatant Beast, sent from Hell to spread scandal throughout the land. “A Gentle knight was pricking on the plaine, / Y cladd in mightie arms and silver shielde . . . .” Readings will include essays and supplemental poems in addition to The Faerie Queene itself, and the primary assignment will likely be a long literary-critical essay due at quarter’s end.

Norbert Elias, a German sociologist of Jewish descent, is best known for his study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, first published in 1939. Elias describes the civilizing process as a process of pacification and rationalization: Out of the contest of numerous rivalling territorial magnates in the late middle ages, a centralized state emerges in early modern times which commands a monopoly in the legitimate use of violence and taxation. This process of state formation goes hand in hand with a change in behavioral standards (refinement of manners) and feelings: While in the earlier stages of the civilizing process, individuals are prone to vio-lence and cooperate only under threat, in the later stages they learn to manage their passions and become socially minded. In Elias's scheme, the democratic state with its highly devel-oped bureaucratic and legal apparatus pre-empts the need for violence establishing ideal conditions for enlightened self-control and peaceful cooperation.

While Elias's sociology has been frequently used to explore the state formation in Europe, it has rarely been invoked in discussions of the nation-building process of the United States. Elias's model of a progressive pacification and rationalization does not seem to square with the American development. In fact, historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner (frontier thesis) have suggested that American democracy is not the product of a gradual amelioration, but the result of regular disruptions of the civilizing process. Many historians would also argue that in the United States, the institution of state has never acquired the authority and power that it has attained in Europe. There have always been areas of American society where the state has not succeeded in upholding its monopoly of violence (the frontier, the Wild West, the ghetto). The question is whether we should consider these 'spaces of decivilization' in the US as an aberration or whether we should assume that civilization in the US proceeds on the basis of a model different from the one suggested by Elias. It is also striking that American literature and culture has always had a fascination with these spaces of decivilization and the violence and disorder that reign there. In fact, genres such as the western, the gothic, the thriller, and the conspiracy tale provide psychological spaces of decivilization which seem to satisfy deep emotional needs.

In this course we will study works of American literature from both a sociological and an aes-thetic perspective: 1) How do these works portray the civilizing process in America? How is the sphere of the state rendered? How do they motivate the breakdown of civilized forms of behaviour? 2) How do these works represent the "spaces of decivilization"? Why are these spaces so attractive to enlightened, democratic audiences? Our examples will be taken from different periods of American literature. The following works will be studied: "A Narrative of the Captivity … Of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" (1682); Jean de Crévecoeur, Letters of an Ameri-can Farmer (1782); James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826 ); John Ford (dir.), The Searchers (1956); short stories and essays by Edgar Allan Poe; Quentin Tarantino (dir.), Kill Bill (Part I, 2003); Richard Wright, Native Son (1940); Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996), and Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006).

This course, through reading and fieldwork, introduces students to the various approaches that guide the study and teaching of writing. In it, we will explore the different methods of teaching writing that have emerged in the last fifty years, ranging from methods for teaching students how to produce texts to methods for assessing these texts. We will also examine the research and theories that underscore these methods, starting with the emergence of the process movement in the 1960s and then inquiring into its various manifestations (and critiques of these manifestations) in the years since, including the impact of new media. Along the way, I hope we can begin to think critically about the various approaches that inform the teaching of writing, in particular, what values and assumptions guide these approaches and whose interests they serve, so that we all can become more self-reflective readers, writers, and teachers. Most of all, though, I would like this course to give us all a chance to think about what it means to teach writing, to develop and share our own goals for teaching writing, and to generate and articulate practices that will help us achieve these goals. Coursework will include keeping a reading journal, conducting a brief teaching ethnography, preparing a bibliography and curriculum design presentation, and creating a teaching portfolio.

This course has an optional service-learning component which will bring students into local K-12 classrooms to practice work (three to four hours each week) as tutors, mentors, and writing coaches. Placement sites include Shorecrest and Franklin High Schools as well as other local Pipeline schools. Those who opt to do service learning will have the option to register for additional credit hours of English 491, if they choose. For those who participate, the service learning in this course will fulfill 30-40 of the observation hours that students are required to complete prior to applying to the UW Masters in Teaching program.

Course Text: Susan Miller. The Norton Book of Composition Studies

This course examines various phenomena related to the Serbo-Croatian
> language, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the Bosnian, Croatian,
> Montenegrin, and Serbian languages. Concepts such as language death and
> language birth are explored. The relationship between dialect and
> language is analyzed. Notions of language politics, language
> standardization, and language codification in general and specifically
> in the Balkans are considered. Structures of Bosnian, Croatian,
> Montenegrin, and Serbian are briefly addressed for purposes of making
> linguistic comparisons. No prior knowledge of the language(s) is
> necessary since most readings are general and students may work on any
> language(s) of their choice.

After a brief comparative review of how Canada and Mexico were linguistically colonized, we will establish a working knowledge of the structure and function of language and use it as a lens to examine the social, cultural, and economic forces in the United States that have led to the emergence of language variation based on region, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. We will also explore the ways both informal and institutionalized forms of linguistic discrimination affect the degree of access to education, the labor force, and political institutions available to members of various disenfranchised groups in our society. We will then study the ways with words of poor and working-class Native Americans, African Americans and White Americans who have been linguistically colonized by social, political, and especially educational, institutions designed to serve the needs of upper and middle-class Americans who speak the standard dialect. Finally, in light of the post-1965 immigration of non-European people to this country, we will analyze the multilingual practices of Latino Americans and Asian Americans, paying special attention to the impact of the English Only and the English Plus movements in the process. Throughout the quarter, special interest will also be paid to the practices of code-segregation, code-switching and code-meshing in home, community and school settings.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This is an advanced prose/fiction writing class, which means that the bulk of the responsibility for the success of this class is based on the writing students produce for the class and the critique of the writing done by their classmates.

The goal of the class is to prepare students for more independent writing, self-critique, and more advanced levels of fiction writing such as the examination of various narrative strategies and genre flexibility. The focus on the writing is centered more on revision and understanding craft that may lead to producing publishable fiction.

The class will also prepare students for submitting work for entry into graduate MFA creative writing programs.

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

This writing and research intensive seminar will walk you through the process of producing your honors thesis. During the course of quarter you will produce a thesis abstract, annotated bibliography, thesis outline, and a series of drafts of various lengths. These writings will be work-shopped and reviewed by your colleagues and, at times, by me. You will also have individual conferences with me as the quarter progresses. Emphasis of the seminar will be placed on fine tuning of library research skills, development of writing skills, and acquisition of the fine art of effective, generous, and at once critical peer review of your colleague’s written work—not to mention handing in a great thesis with which you are happy at the end of the quarter!

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

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