Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

Catalog Description: Study and practice of good writing: topics derived from a variety of personal, academic, and public subjects.

This course "covers techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, and film. [It] examines such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense." And how will we accomplish this? We will learn to focus on key details and relevant contexts by practicing close reading and contextualizing techniques. The goal of such work is not to "pick apart" literature, but to approach its content meaningfully and intelligently in order to read its cultural and aesthetic engagement to the fullest.

This class offers a "W" credit. This means that course participants will be expected to produce a total of 10-15 pages of formal, academic writing which has gone through a cycle of instructor feedback and revision. We will cover some formal academic writing technique in this class, but please keep in mind that this is not fundamentally a writing course. Though prior
composition credits are not prerequisite, such experience will be to your distinct advantage.

NOTE: This class is "A-term" only. Though we will have an equivalent number
of class hours as full-term summer courses, there will be less time between
classes for you to complete out of class work. As a result, the writing and
reading load over these four and a half weeks will be very intense and very
fast-paced.

Course readings will likely include the following texts:

Prose: "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Dead," The Sound & the Fury, Apex
Hides the Hurt

Film: Pulp Fiction

Drama: The Importance of Being Ernest, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
or Waiting for Godot

Poetry: "My Last Duchess" & "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

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.

“You think you know who you are?”… “You have no idea.” (Crash)

What all humans have in common is actually what distinguishes them. How we define ourselves is ultimately not up to us because the thing we use for our self-definition is beyond our control. While a variety of literary genres and forms mainly comprise this section of ENGL 200, we will use the conception of identity as the tool to frame our comprehension and interpretation of the selected readings. Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets define identity as “the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person.” Beginning with this fundamental definition of identity, we are going to explore the multiplicity of identities of social subjects or objectified subjects, which are socially, nationally, racially, and sexually constructed. We will examine literary texts, including novels (A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fixer Chao by Han Ong), one novella by Jamaica Kincaid, one drama (M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang), and two films.

Additional readings consist of articles by Stuart Hall, Lionel Trilling, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Eng, and Toni Morrison.

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

As a “W” or writing class, this course will devote effort to writing about literature. The writing assignments will be partly formed by GoPosts. Moreover, you will be required to accomplish four 3-page papers that should be built towards two 5~7-page, and double-spaced papers. But only the major papers will be graded.

REQUIRED READINGS______________________________________________________

A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
Fixer Chao (2001) by Han Ong
Course packet available at the Ave Copy Center (4141 University Way)

Twisted:

--Consisting of two or more threads… twined together
--Wrung out of shape; distorted; contorted; turned or bent awry
--Of a person: neurotic emotionally unbalanced; perverted.

What do twisted love poems and literature of the fantastic have in common? Both of them defy public norms and threaten our conventional structuring of reality. The love poems we’ll examine seem to lack affection or scorn social forms we typically understand to express love: they upend our commonplaces about maternal love, romantic love, friendship, and agape. Fantastical texts suspend us in no man’s land, between the supernatural and the psychological. Do these texts liberate readers from undesirable social confines? Or do they imperil our notions of what is right and good, perhaps our very sanity? Part reading laboratory, part writing workshop, this W course will examine ways in which compact texts—short stories, fables, fragments, poems, prose poems, and parables—challenge social, political, and psychological norms.

We will primarily explore challenging texts “on our own” (collectively), without recourse to literary critics’ interpretations, because this class aims to make you a more skilled, thoughtful, interesting, and independent reader. You will also have the opportunity to try your hand at both creative writing—largely by imitating some of the texts we’ll be reading—and literary criticism.
Texts will include works by Lydia Davis, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Peter Hoeg, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Browning, Kenneth Koch, Sylvia Plath, Phillip Larkin, and Alan Dugan.

This course is designed to introduce students to the practice and value of cultural studies through the examination of diverse representations of public health in the 20th and twenty-first century US. Our studies will zero-in on the production and distribution of food, workplace safety, environmental hazards, and the health care delivery system. Primary texts include fiction, film, government documents, and investigative reporting. Active class participation, short responses to assigned readings, and a final 7-8 page essay or alternative project are required.
Texts: Sinclair Lewis, The Jungle; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats; Helena Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Ann Pancake, Strange As the Weather Has Been; and course packet

This course will survey medieval England’s literary tradition and a few of its continental influences/sources from the 8th through the 14th centuries (buckle your seatbelts), all while keeping the following sets of questions in mind: What makes early English literature specifically "English"? Is it satisfactory to categorize literature by its location of origin alone? What are we to do with the fact that the literary tradition was constantly shifting, being heavily influenced, and sometimes supplanted altogether, by the literary traditions of non-English visitors/conquerors/missionaries? We will be reading texts that were originally composed in Latin, Old English, Old French, Italian, and Middle English (all but the Middle English in translation, of course). As we examine the cultural and political context of this transnational hodge-podge we call medieval English, we will also discuss how the texts were physically transmitted: the production and dissemination of manuscripts! , literacy and readers, and the movement from an oral/aural culture to a literary one. Because this is a Summer A-term course, the reading load will be intense; however, you will find this to be a fascinating period in literary history with some very fun texts! Added bonus: the room assigned to us (as of April 12) has air conditioning. Huzzah!

This course draws from José David Saldivar’s call for reading practices that “articulate a new, trans-geographical conception of American culture—one more responsive to the hemisphere’s geographical ties and political crosscurrents than to narrow national ideologies.”

With this in mind, this course is organized around a selection of US ethnic literary and cultural texts that question and interrogate a singular notion of “America.” We will read texts that depict the varied geographies, histories, and peoples who constitute multiple forms of “America” and reveal the term to be more of a site of struggle rather than common place.

By analyzing US ethnic literary productions as sites of struggle over the identity, history, and territory of “America,” this course will engage with the following questions: How do literary and cultural texts represent and destabilize geographic and political borders? How do political borders organize forms of social identity, historical memory, and geographical space? How do literary productions represent historical formations of race, gender, and sexuality? What historical knowledges are released when we read fiction as a form of history writing, and how can we read history writing as a form of narrative?


Possible Primary texts:
• George Washington Gómez by Américo Paredes
• Corregidora by Gayl Jones
• Through the Arc of the Rainforest by Karen Tei Yamashita
• Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by Gerald Vizenor

Reading fiction from different periods we will develop the necessary interpretive skills based on close attention to detail and an appreciation of the work's historical context. Through critical reading and analytical writing, we will identify themes and test theories to engage with the production, reception, and interpretation of fiction. Works include Melville, Conrad, Mengestu, Zadie Smith, and assorted short pieces.

“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”

--Jessamyn West

This is a course on the methods of critically reading and interpreting serious fiction. In 4.5 weeks, students will be introduced to and practice various critical and theoretical approaches to interpreting fictional narratives--most in print, but some electronic. Students will use those approaches when reading and interpreting shorter and longer narrative fictions. We will review some online novels, and given adequate time in such a condensed quarter, I may add a short print novel for us to read and analyze toward the end of the quarter.

Requirements include: willingness to perceive connections and differences between fact and fiction; practice in various methods of reading fiction so as to identify writers’ imaginative crafts; demonstrated ability to read, discuss, and critically write about a variety of fictions. Essential to course success is weekly course attendance and engaged participation, as this course meets weekdays for 2+ hours for almost 5 weeks.

Other course requirements include written and oral weekly quizzes and conferences, a midterm, as well as a final exam, all of which include objective definitions of fictional terminology as well as essay analyses.

The course syllabus will be distributed and discussed on the first day of the quarter, and all details of the course as well as questions about it will be discussed with enrolled students that day.

Charters, The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Compact 7th edition
Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual, 4th edition

Ovid’s Metamorphoses marks a gathering of transformations into, prepositional, something else, other stories. One myth becomes the next, changing as seasons change, somewhat gradually over time, sometimes all at once. A cold-blast in late-fall to mark the first winter storm, or that first muggy day of summer, the blooms of flowers hot and heavy – our metaphors are mini-myths, telling stories of transformation, how we might see ourselves as something we are not. So. In Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, the story of a boy who takes to the branches, becomes a man in the canopy of wide oaks and elms, bounding in a world part-Peter Pan, part-Huckleberry Finn. Or, in Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan, what becomes of us when we are locked away in our own myth-spinning, working away like some mad weaver at the loom, most of the time completely unawares of what we are doing!

This is a course designed for summer reading of fiction. The books are not always light, as Ovid can be earth-shattering, actually, and both of the other books, also bound by oath to the first rule of fiction: MAKE IT ALIVE. This is not say “real” or “true”, but ALIVE, as in active and invigorating, inventive and abundant. It is Mary Shelley’s Monster as much as it is Harry Potter’s wand, much as I hate to admit it. Because the writing might be trash, but transformation – that’s what moves you.

If this course is designated “W”, that will require 10 pages of writing (MLA) with sincere revision.

Required Texts:

1. Ovid. Metamorpheses.
2. Italo Calvino. The Baron in the Trees.
3. Richard Flanagan. Gould’s Book of Fish

The overall purpose of this class is to teach you to approach, read, and analyze fiction critically, thoughtfully, and intellectually.

Commonly, fiction is understood to be the opposite of fact—where fact is objective, fiction is subjective; where fact is value neutral, fiction is value-laden. Thus, as a class called “Reading Fiction,” this course takes these premises as its starting point in order to challenge their commonsensical status. That is to ask, then, what enables these sharp distinctions between fact and fiction? And to what effect does particular instances of it have? In posing these questions, this course does not seek to reduce one side of the binary to the other, in which fact is nothing but fiction, but rather it will attend to the formal presuppositions and methodological practices that subtend particular historical and disciplinary instances of the fact/fiction dichotomy.

Therefore, the course centers on this problematic of history and fiction through an exploration of forms of reading and reading of forms. Broadly, we will examine how the writing of history and fiction are linked through questions of narrative form and representation. To do so, we will specifically engage with topics like the nation and death, revolution and memory, slavery and the body, war and trauma. And throughout, we focus how such narratives rely upon and make intelligible citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality as the terms by which we come know and feel ourselves. Course texts MAY include: Herman Melville's “Benito Cereno,” Gayle Jones' Corrigedora, E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Alice Walker's Meridian, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

The course workload includes: 10-15 pages of revised writing that satisfies the University "W" requirement, which will come in the form of two 6-7 page academic essays that perform a textual analysis of one or more of the fictional texts and thoroughly engages critical material; group presentations where you begin and facilitate class discussion; weekly pop quizzes on the course readings; daily free-writes; a substantial amount of daily reading; occasional take-home writing assignments; and engaging in daily class discussion and in-class group activities.

Course description: In this course students will work individually and in groups to research Seattle communities such as Capitol Hill, the Chinatown/International District, the Central District and the Pike Market neighborhood. Instructors and UW librarians will train students in a variety of research methods, including observation, census data, local history, local and regional newspapers, web sites and interviews. Moreover, students will write in a range of genres: field notes, researcher’s notebooks, individual research reports, and group projects. Students will receive frequent peer and instructor feedback on their written work. Groups will present their preliminary conclusions during an in-class poster conference. The course concludes with individual students’ reflecting on what they have learned and on how their writing in this class transfers to other writing occasions. The design and topic of this course accommodate a broad range of disciplinary approaches to !
understanding urban communities.

Readings: xerox coursepack

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.

This course will be a workshop for writers. My premise is that there is no better way to improve your writing than to write. Yes, reading helps, grammar helps, talk helps. Assignments and deadlines help. But you must write. I will provide most of the assignments and all of the deadlines. I’ll talk about writing and I’ll assign readings, mostly from The New York Times. Other readings will appear on Catalyst. I’ll refer you to good sources for grammar and spelling. But you must write. And you will, during, before and after every meeting. Five weeks later you’ll be better writers.

Text
The New York Times, each Tuesday morning.
No other assigned texts

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.

Course description: In this course students will work individually and in groups to research Seattle communities such as Capitol Hill, the Chinatown/International District, the Central District and the Pike Market neighborhood. Instructors and UW librarians will train students in a variety of research methods, including observation, census data, local history, local and regional newspapers, web sites and interviews. Moreover, students will write in a range of genres: field notes, researcher’s notebooks, individual research reports, and group projects. Students will receive frequent peer and instructor feedback on their written work. Groups will present their preliminary conclusions during an in-class poster conference. The course concludes with individual students’ reflecting on what they have learned and on how their writing in this class transfers to other writing occasions. The design and topic of this course accommodate a broad range of disciplinary approaches to !
understanding urban communities.

Readings: xerox coursepack

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

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

This is an immersion course: for ten weeks, we will soak ourselves in the short story form. Warning: your fingers will get pruny. We’ll be reading as many short stories as we can; some we’ll love, and some we’ll hate. We’ll discover how to create vivid characters, settings, and scenes. We’ll learn the importance of plot, the pros and cons of each point of view, and how to write convincing dialogue. We’ll also experience the “writing workshop,” in which we read and critique each other’s work. Perhaps most importantly, we will learn how to critique and revise our own. At the end of the quarter, everyone will hand in twenty pages of revised writing, including at least one short story. If this appeals to you, then sign up and dive in!

This course will focus students on one essay by one critic, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” by Walter Benjamin. It is often referred to simply as “the Artwork essay,” thus the title of this course. In his 1936 essay, Benjamin argues that the function and experience of “art” is radically altered after the advent of new visual technologies, and that this revolution in the artwork’s status has far reaching political and social implications that must change the way artists produce and critics analyze art. We will unpack his argument with care, making sure we understand the myriad points from which he attempts to assess this revolution. Next, we will read a few essays by contemporary cultural critics who have used parts of Benjamin’s argument to understand some further manifestation of this phenomenon in the later twentieth century. That’s it. My hope is that the very limited scope of this summer course will give us time to realize the essential goal of any English 302: to improve students’ ability to explain, discuss and draw on arguments in theory, both in conversation and in written work. Course grade will be based on regular class attendance and participation; impromptu in-class exercises; and two typed papers, with the first paper providing a foundation for the second. A course packet of our readings will be available at The Ave Copy Center.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger says, “every image implies a way of seeing.” This course will start from his claim and extend it to different modes of reading. We will focus on theorists who are also very good readers, that is, who offer us not only useful interpretations of texts but also help us think about the very practice of reading and the assumptions that go into it. Although the theorists that we’ll be considering are not always focused on literary texts, they will serve as models for developing and complicated our own reading practices. Included in the course are Freud’s reading of the uncanny, Clifford Geertz’s cultural interpretation, “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing,” and Michel de Certeau’s “Reading as Poaching.” We will use these essays to read Louisa May Alcott’s “Whisper in the Dark,” Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

Catalog Description: Survey of theories of imagination since the seventeenth century. Focuses on the uses of the concept in literature, criticism, science, and society.

A rapid study of readings from both the Old and New Testaments, focusing primarily on those parts of the Bible with the most literary interest--narratives, poems and philosophy. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussion. Written work will consist entirely of a series of in-class essays done in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Text: New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael Coogan

We will read a variety of poems and fictional works from France, Germany, England, and the U.S. in order to get a sense of the complex phenomenon called “modernism,” a style or cluster of styles of writing that flourished from roughly 1910-1930, but the beginnings of which can be traced to France in the mid-19th century. There is no simple definition of what “modernism” means; like other period terms in literary theory (e.g., “romanticism” or “realism”), it refers not to any single quality of literary works but to a diverse set of stylistic characteristics, which get mixed and matched differently by different authors. The only way to get a sense of how the term works is to read a number of texts that are labeled with it and see how they are similar and how they are different.

We will also be concerned with the /methodology/ of the study of literature and specifically with the method called /formalism. /Formalism in criticism developed in close contact with modernism in literature (for example, T.S. Eliot is both one of the central modernist poets and one of the fathers of formalism); formalism could thus be called “modernist literary criticism.” *In my class lectures I will continually stress formalist methods of reading, and in the papers you write you will be expected to develop skill in these methods.*

There will be a 2-3 page paper on Baudelaire due the third week, followed by a 4-5 page mid-term paper on Rilke and Eliot, and a final paper, 4-5 pages, on modernist fiction.

For Summer 2010 we will focus on the Shakespeare’s tragedies. If time allows we will also read a Romance play, perhaps The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale. We will be focusing much of our discussions on the issues of desire, gender, and sexuality as offered in Shakespeare’s works. We will also be working with modes of production, including film and art, and will be seeing a stage performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The main goals of the course are to help you learn to “decode” the language of Shakespeare through close readings and to make you more confident readers of the great Bard. In addition, we will negotiate the difference between the works as they perhaps might have been understood in Shakespeare’s own culture and how they have been understood since

Close readings of modern-fiction classics, 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. Texts and Editions (in alphabetical order): Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics); Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (Vintage); Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Norton Critical Edition); Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Signet); Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dover Thrift). You can use other editions but you’ll have to you read the critical materials (essays, letters, prefaces, introductions, etc.) printed in the editions listed above (copies of them will be placed on reserve). The course has a moderate load: we’ll read five medium-length/short novels all of which require heightened attention to detail and much reflection. Requirements and Grading: final = 50% of your grade; short assignments (one on each novel), attendance and participation contribute the remaining 50%. All students should have read Madame Bovary before the first meeting.

“In the twentieth century the short story in the United States continues to serve the insatiable appetite of the American reader for tales of the marginalized.”

--Joseph Urgo, Studies in Short Fiction


This intensive 4.5 week course will focus on modern and contemporary writers of serious short fiction whose tales question conventional narrative themes and formats. Stories read and discussed will be approached from a variety of critical and theoretical viewpoints, and students will be expected to learn and practice those approaches.

Essential to course success is weekly course attendance and engaged participation, as this course meets weekdays for 2+ hours for almost 5 weeks. Weekly oral and written assignments, as well as objective and essay examinations are the other bases for the overall course grade.

The course syllabus will be distributed and discussed on the first day of the quarter, and all details of the course as well as questions about it will be discussed with enrolled students that day.

Charters, The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Compact 7th edition
Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual, 4th edition

Catalog Description: Creative writings -- novels, short stories, poems -- of contemporary Indian authors; traditions out of which they evolved. Differences between Indian writers and writers of the dominant European/American mainstream.

• This course will address American poetry and culture from 1945 to 1970. In addition to becoming more skillful readers of poetry, students will develop a more detailed understanding of shifts in American verse amidst larger cultural, political, and historical trajectories. Central themes in our analysis of post-war poetry will include the roles of poetic form, visual art, gender, race, academic institutions, and confessional strategies. In addition, this course will shed light on the creative practices of the poets we will read and the poetic and intellectual circles in which they moved. We will read such poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Hayden. The course includes discussions, presentations, essays, and quizzes.

Texts:
• Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2008) ISBN: 0061558893
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) ISBN: 0374530963
• Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2006) ISBN: 0060882964
• Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Mariner Books, 1999) ISBN: 0395957761
• Robert Hayden, Collected Poems (Liveright Publishing Company, 2007) ISBN: 0871401592
• Course packet available at the Ave Copy Center

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

We'll read and discuss an assortment of fairy tales, other stories and novels for children. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, keep up with reading assignments, and take part in open discussion. Written work will consist entirely of a series of in-class essays done in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Texts: The Twelve Dancing Princes and Other Fairy Tales, ed. Alfred and Mary Meek; Treasure Island; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Alice in Wonderland; The Wind in the Willows; Peter Pan; Charlotte's Web; Anne of Green Gables; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone; The Jungle Books; Little Women; and Winnie-the-Pooh