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.

The focus in this class will be on works of prose fiction, set in cities, in which the idea of the city is central to the development of both issues and narrative techniques. Through these works we will examine how the city, including our very own metropolis of Seattle, inhabits the consciousness of those who inhabit it. This course is designed to increase understanding and enjoyment of literary texts, and to enhance the ability to read, write and think creatively about issues related to everyday experience.

Works include Seattle author Jim Lynch's 2012 Truth Like The Sun, set in both the present and during the 1962 Seattle World's Fair; Teju Co! le's Open City, in which a young Nigerian doctor navigates physical, social and personal landscapes as he walks through Manhattan; selections from Paul Auster's postmodern meta-detective-fiction novellas in The New York Trilogy; and National Book Award finalist Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, set in present day Los Angeles. Class discussion and small group collaborations will provide the basis and support for both formal and informal writing.

Heather: “It's just like Hamlet said, ‘To thine own self, be true.’”

Cher: “Ah, no, uh, Hamlet didn't say that.”

Heather: “I think that I remember Hamlet accurately.”

Cher: “Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did.”

Amy Heckerling, Clueless

Cher Horowitz’s Gibson quotation attests to the way many people encounter Shakespeare’s tragedy: via film. In English 200, not only will we examine cinematic and novelistic interpretations, revisions, and expansions of Hamlet, but we will also analyze the play itself. By doing so, we will develop strategies for reading and writing about fictional texts. Throughout the term, we will focus on several approaches to literature and film: close reading, structural and thematic analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. During the first week, we will develop our own interpretations of Hamlet before moving to other “readings” of the play, including Aki Kaurismäki’s 1987 film Hamlet Goes Business, Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film Hamlet, and John Updike’s recent novel, Gertrude and Claudius. As we explore the ways other artists have interpreted, recreated, and expanded upon the original text, we will reconsider and revise our own understanding of the play.

English 200 is computer-integrated, with students moving between a wired seminar room and a computer lab during most class meetings. The lab setting allows students to view and offer feedback on their peers' work, collaborate on group activities, and conduct online research. However, technical savvy is not a course prerequisite; students will receive instruction in all technical tools used in the classroom.
Course Goals and Methodology

Students in the course work toward several goals: learning how to closely analyze the characters, language, structure and themes of fictional texts, using theoretical concepts to interpret literature and developing as critical thinkers and writers who can formulate substantive arguments and explore those arguments with evidence. Course activities promote active learning, with most class sessions incorporating a mix of mini-lectures, discussion, and group work. The course design—which includes frequent non-graded and graded writing—reflects the importance of writing as a means of learning. Students will write to think through particular questions or passages as well as to articulate what they already know. My role is to provide the tools and resources you will need to advance your own thinking and writing. I will pose questions, design activities to help you think through these questions, and respond to your ideas. Your role is to do the hard work—the critical reading, discussion, and writing. You will analyze texts, generate ideas via writing as well as electronic and face-to-face discussions, develop presentations with your peers, construct written arguments, and use feedback to revise those arguments.

Ursula K. Le guin asks, in a now famous eponymous speech and essay, “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?” Central to her question and her argument about the reading, enjoyment, understanding, and analysis of literature, particularly fantasy and science fiction, is an engagement with the imagination, with other worlds, with our own world, with recovering the value of these things, and with growing up but not outgrowing our desire for the fantastic. She says, “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.” This class will take up Le Guin’s fascinating and provocative question and explore a long yet often dismissed or narrowly defined tradition of “fantastic” literature (and other media) including in whole or in excerpt Homer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Albert Einstein, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Delany, William Gibson, Maureen McHugh, Octavia Butler, and J.K. Rowling.

In other words, what is fantastic literature? Is it more than just children’s stories or mythologies or flights of fancy? Is it important? How do we read and understand fantasy or science fiction? What might the literature of the fantastic, in all of its incarnations, reveal to us and reveal about us? A requirement for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. Lister and Wells, authors of “Seeing Beyond Belief,” argue for just this kind of curiosity, a methodology for unpacking cultural productions, such as poetry or novels or images or film; they say, “Cultural Studies allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption of [a text] through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift” (459). They argue that our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various fantastic literatures and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in. We will try to answer Le Guin’s proposition that “fantasy is true” and the question, “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?”

FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts—from verse to prose to visual and digital—and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience.

> This course will explore the relationship between literature and society, or the multiple ways in which short stories and novels express or engage social and political realities. We will focus in particular on the representation of “conscience,” or how histories of colonialism shape the representation of human self-consciousness in the twentieth century. We will focus in particular on how histories of colonialism shape the representation of human consciousness in the twentieth century. Our primary texts are likely to include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians alongside short fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Junot Diaz and poetry by C.P. Cavafy, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Claude McKay, and Lynn Emanuel. In addition to introducing strategies for interpreting literature in relationship to their social and historical context, this course will provide practice in close reading techniques, group discussion, and academic writing tasks. While this course aims to acquaint students with some of the common conventions of reading and discussing fiction within an academic context, fostering a general enjoyment of reading is likewise a central objective. This course satisfies the University’s W requirement by requiring 10-12 pages of graded out of class writing.
>
> Required texts will include:
> Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
> Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
> Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
> J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
> Course Reader with short fiction and poetry

This introduction to cultural studies enlists science fiction and cultural critique in an examination of new information and bio technologies and the larger networks within which they are embedded. The latter include governmental institutions, capitalism, and culture. Four questions will direct our study: 1. how are these technologies, their access and use shaped by the networks within which they exist; 2. what new forms of being in the world have these technologies introduced; 3. what opportunities for domination and resistance do they open up; 4. what futures do they portend. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions, generate short critical responses to assigned readings, contribute to a group project, and produce a final (7-8 page) cultural studies essay or an alternative to it. We’ll begin our investigation by putting a few critical works on our present condition in conversation with the classic 1980’s science fiction film, Bladerunner. There are three versions of this film, a topic worth discussing in itself, but we will focus on the “final cut”. Seeing comparing all three is worthwhile, but for this class I strongly recommend previewing the final cut.

Required Texts in the order that we’ll take them up are a course packet (to be available at Ave Copy) and the following novels: William Gibson, Neuromancer, Octavia Butler, Dawn; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.

The course will provide a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the literature of the Middle Ages, in a survey that will attempt to place texts remote from our modern era in their social and historical contexts. For this offering of the course, an emphasis will be placed on the fictional "universes" implicit in various medieval conceptions of the Otherworld, as well as theoretical analyses of boundary-crossing and "liminality." We will read and discuss important works of prose and poetry from the early Middle Ages and the Middle English periods, including works by a range of Anglo-Saxon poets and prose authors; neglected Middle English works including, _The Owl and the Nightingale_ and treatments of the _Morte Arthure_ theme written before the time of Malory; and a selection of non-canonical items. There will be a mid-term, final, and major term paper.

This course introduces the dramatic works of William Shakespeare by placing them back in the historical contexts in which they first emerged in Renaissance England. We will survey works from each of the major genres: an early comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream; a history play, Henry V; two tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth; and a late-career "romance," The Tempest. Throughout, our emphasis will be on the social and political conditions of early playwriting, the economics and geography of the new public theaters, the raw materials of plots and characters, and the remarkable malleability of Shakespeare's language. Evaluation will be based on several short writing assignments and an exam.

This course is an introduction to various ways of reading “serious” fictions, imaginative prose narratives that challenge cultural norms, vs. reading popular fictions, which often pander to convention. We will look at the differences initially and briefly but concentrate thereafter on serious fiction, reading and analyzing it, as well as formulating interpretations about what O’Connor would term “startling” fictions. Employing various critical approaches to what we read, we’ll critique why we or others are startled.

This five-week course is designed to broaden your fictional reading repertoire, expose you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and historical/cultural movements, enhance your critical expression, and convince you that the critical reading of fiction can help in the critical reading of life. Requirements for this intensive 5-week course include daily readings, critical researched writing, frequent quizzes, an essay midterm and final exam of 10 pp. each, and critically thoughtful, daily vocal participation in each class session. This is not a “distance learning” online course, and no “extra credit” is possible, so please do not enroll in this course if it conflicts with your summer work or personal schedules in June/July. We will read shorter as well as longer fictions in verbal as well as audiovisual formats.



Student learning goals









General method of instruction


The two methods are primarily (2) short lecture and (2)predominately class discussion--daily, active participation in discussion is essential, as all students will use class discussion to pratice articulating plausible,critical interpretations of fictional elements and contexts

Recommended preparation


critical thinking and writing

Class assignments and grading

Requirements for this intensive 5-week course include daily readings, critical researched writing, frequent quizzes, an essay midterm and final exam of 10 pp. each, and critically thoughtful, daily vocal participation in each class session. This is not a “distance learning” online course, and no “extra credit” is possible, so please do not enroll in this course if it conflicts with your summer work or personal schedules in June/July.

Daily class participation in discussion; quizzes; midterm and final short essay and identification exams

By which I do not mean Adam (“So God created Man in his own image”—Genesis) nor Neil Armstrong (“the first person to set foot upon the Moon”—Wikipedia) but the grammatical construction that begins with the letter “I” and then sets about to tell a story. We’ll call that story “fiction” whether it’s true or not, and we will spend the quarter examining those fictions that build themselves around their very own narrator. And let us subject that first person to an exotic or dangerous environment that will test the resilience and durability of the self—a bit of what you might expect from the Biblical Adam or Neil Armstrong if either of those gents had to account for himself. In effect, the first person almost always encounters new worlds. We will examine the structure and style, the exterior world and the turbulent interiors that constitute fiction by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, George Orwell and Alan Sillitoe. Lecture, discussion, short essays.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Joseph Conrad, “Youth” (1902); Heart of Darkness (1902), and “The Secret Sharer” (1912)
George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and selections from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

From the ingenuity of detective Auguste Dupin to the shenanigans of Sam Spade, crime fiction has enjoyed immense popularity, creativity and criticism in the 19th and 20th century. As print media expanded over Britain and the US, crime fiction became the prominent readers-choice genre by 1900. In time, the genre has experienced much development with offshoot categories like Detective fiction, the whodunit, psychological thrillers, locked room mysteries, and forensic science narratives. This course explores the construction of the genre and prominent crime writers of both British and American fiction in the 19th and 20th century.
Specifically, the class will consider the historical, cultural and political shifts occurring during the rise of crime fiction. Students will be asked to think critically about central concepts in the genre such as truth, justice, criminality, victim and villain. How are these terms redefined over time? Furthermore, the class will look at the cultural implications of authority and consider the ways in which the social problems of the time find solution with the help of the genre. How does the genre (re)establish social malaise? Was there a need for monikers of authority when detective fiction became popular? If so, what are the origins of such necessities? What does the onset of crime noir suggest about the population and politics of the mid-20th century? Does the genre pose literary merit?
The course demands a lot of reading of both primary and secondary sources. Required texts include, but are not limited to, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and stories in the Longman Anthology. We will also be considering works by Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie and a few others. Also, since 242 is a “W” course, students will be required to write and revise 10-15 pages (in the form of two papers) and participate in a group presentation.

Texts: (tentative)

1. The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (2004)
2. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins (1868)
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

Pacharee Sudhinaraset
English 242D

Reading Prose Fiction

Class Description
This course will examine women of color feminist critiques in fictional works. We will explore the proliferation of literary, cultural, and intellectual work by women of color beginning in the 1970s. Rather than treating literature by women of color as providing transparent accounts of their lives, this course will focus on the critiques that grew out of their experiences at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality and emerged in their fiction. This course will look at the ways women of color feminism contributed and altered the conversations around activism, social change, and equality from the 1970s and through the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, we will consider the central role fiction plays in women of color feminist practices and politics. Authors will include Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Octavia Butler, Barbara Christian, and Audre Lorde.

Student Learning Goals
1. To engage with women of color feminist critiques, concepts, and theories through examining fiction.
2. To strengthen writing, critical reading and analytical skills of texts, culture, history and society.
3. To engage with other students in a collaborative way through reading, writing, and discussion.
4. To understand the historical context through which cultural texts emerge.

General Method of Instruction
Small and large group discussion, writing workshops, and a little bit of lecture.

Class Assignments and Grading
As a “W” course, you will be required to write two papers. Together, the two paper assignments will make up 70% of your grade. They will be graded according to the goals listed above. 30% will be based on your class participation, and the completion of assignments.

We will read six fairly short (only one over a hundred pages) prose narratives that give us a taste of how prose fiction began and how it developed up to the point that Kafka enters the scene. We begin with a very funny Spanish narrative from the 16th century, Lazarillo de Tormes, which is about a poor beggar boy who gets into a variety of comical scrapes trying to get enough to eat, but winds up prosperous at the end. This is the first “picaresque” narrative (a “picaro” is a clever rogue who uses his wits to survive). Next is the 18th century Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic romance: an old castle, a dark family secret, a vengeful coast, a beautiful young woman trapped by an evil-hearted older man. This is the ancestor of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, among many other later “Gothics.” The Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing, from the early 19th century, is a whimsical tale of fiddle-playing peasant boy who works for a noble family and falls in love with the daughter of the nobleman, then goes through a series of exotic adventures before winning her love. These first three works are all “romances”; Silas Marner, from later in the 19th century, exemplifies the new “realist” mode of writing that was dominant at that time. Then in 1899 was published Heart of Darkness, which mixes romance and realism in a striking new way. Finally, Kafka’s Metamorphosis takes us into the strange new world of “fantastic” fiction.

We will compare the different ways these texts are put together in order to get a sense of the conventional nature of fiction—that is, of the way in which fiction is determined, not so much by some reality that it “represents,” but by the rules of fiction-making, rules that differ from one genre to another, and from one historical period to another.

This is a “W” course. I will ask you to write three essays analyzing the works studied, for a total of 10-15 pages. Your entire course grade will be determined by these essays.

Lazarillo de Tormes
The Castle of Otranto
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
Silas Marner
Heart of Darkness
The Metamorphosis

This course will introduce you to a variety of poetic forms and ways of reading them. We will explore some love poems, twisted love poems, and poems featuring corpses, as well as poems that have nothing to do with love or death. You will also practice writing in a few poetic forms yourself (to learn about poems from the inside out) through rule-bound poem assignments. Finally, we will reflect on some of the aesthetic and ethical possibilities that poetry as a genre may offer.

This course will introduce you to the study of texts that fall into the category American literature. American literature is, to be sure, an awfully broad category—the texts that might qualify seem almost limitless. What critera do and should scholars (and/or the reading public) use to establish which texts exemplify American literature? This is a complex and thorny question; there are hundreds of ways to go about answering it. For our attempt, we’ll examine several texts that scholars and readers have considered representative of American literature, asking questions both about how those texts operate in their special ways, and which of their characteristics and might—or might not!—make them particularly “American.” We’ll likely find that the category “American” turns out to be a troublesome one, with a set of assumptions about what it means to be “American” or what cultural values shape the idea of “Americanness.” We’ll study one novel, a couple short stories, a handful poems, and a film. Student work will consist of regular reading responses, a short collaborative essay, and a mid-length critical essay.

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

“Life is bewildering, and what’s interesting, it seems to me, about coming to new places, as well as about coming to writing, is that you get to feel things that are altogether strange and unfamiliar to you. One mark of a novice traveler is his impulse to attribute qualities to places that then allow him to feel at home. By insisting that places conform to the truth he already knows, he is imposing upon them a whole series of expectations, untenable and invariable, that the locations cannot accommodate. . . .The real story lurks underneath—in history, in the environment itself, and in the people living there now.”—Frances McCue. The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010. 4.



In this course students will work individually and in groups to research Seattle communities in the Chinatown/International District and the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We will focus on what we see when we arrive in these new places, and what we discover as we bring together various ways of knowing where “the real story lurks.” The instructor and UW librarians will train students in a variety of research methods, including observation, census data, local history, local and regional newspapers, mapping, community web sites and interviews. Throughout the research process, students studying the same neighborhood will share information and respond to each other’s ideas-in-progress. Students will write in a range of genres: unobtrusive observations, field notes, researcher’s notebook entries, posters, individual research reports, exploratory reflections and co-authored projects. Writers will receive frequent peer and instructor feedback on their work. 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.



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 writing course before enrolling in English 281.



Goals and Methodology

Students in the course work toward several goals:



1. Employing a variety of research methods (observation, interview, video recording, photography, library research of newspapers, maps and government documents) to investigate a selected Seattle community and evaluating the effective uses and limitations of research methods;

2. Independently developing research questions informed by course readings and activities;

3. Synthesizing, analyzing and drawing connections among research data;

4. Formulating and revising conclusions throughout the research and writing process;

5. Producing complex written, oral and/or multimedia work that demonstrates awareness of audience, purpose and specific genre conventions and strategically incorporates appropriate evidence;

6. Using writing to reflect on learning; and

7. Working collaboratively with teachers, librarians and peers.



English 281 is computer-integrated, with students moving between a wired seminar room and a computer lab during most class meetings. The lab setting allows students to view and offer feedback on their peers' work, collaborate on group activities, and conduct online research. However, technical savvy is not a course prerequisite; students will receive instruction in all technical tools used in the classroom.

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.

The focus of this class is on writing and on understanding writing as a tool for social action. Good writing does not occur in a vacuum, which is to say that it cannot be pulled off effectively without considering audience, social context, language, genre, and a whole host of other rhetorical concerns that we will address in this class. We will consider what it means to write effectively at all stages of the process, for different audiences and contexts, and in various genres. We will be concerned not only with rhetorical invention (how one comes up with something salient to write about in the first place), but also with polish, style, and the consequences of our writing. We will consider surface-level language choices, organization, use of evidence, and so on.

This summer, we will ground our work on writing within collective research we do on the upcoming U.S. Election. This work will include gaining a deeper understanding of the election process, the candidates, their positions, and public discourse on these candidates; investigating the hot button issues that drive and define the election; and analyzing the rhetoric surrounding salient contemporary social issues within public discourse, public policy, and the media as an entry way, content, and exigency for our writing projects. There will be ample room for students to explore issues key to their own interests, disciplines, career plans, etc.?? For example, there will be flexibility to dig into specific topics of interest or to explore electoral processes in other countries.

Students will do short, daily written responses and complete various writing assignments in different genres that build up to a larger project.

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.

This class will start with an intensive study of the traditional elements of the craft of poetry: meter, line, stanza, form, the poetic conceit, metaphor, etc. We will then move on to study the elements of the craft of free verse, which we’ll find isn’t as free as one might think. This class will also progress in historical time: we’ll start working with some of the earliest English poetic forms and continue on to a study of contemporary poetry.

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 course will introduce you to the literary culture of the early eighteenth-century. We’ll read exemplary works of prose fiction, drama and poetry, and study how major writers in different genres responded to the social and intellectual challenges of early modernity, interacted with tradition, and invented new styles and genres. Texts and Recommended Editions: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Dover Thrift); Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford World’s Classics); Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (Dover Thrift); John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (Dover Thrift); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Dover Thrift).

Midterm and final.

Trauma, mourning and melancholia, memory and its repression, counter-histories and their suppression testify to the ghostly presence of the past. In this class students will grapple with critical practices (theories and fictions) that represent such hauntings. How they do so and with what likely effects are the basic questions. We’ll begin our investigation by examining different conceptualizations of history and their impact on how we understand the world in which we live; from these diverse and often oppositional vantage points we will examine what does and does not count, as loss. This question asks you to ponder the stakes of the histories to which we are exposed and to take a stance on them.

The course is designed to provide students with: 1. a solid foundation in critical practices that take up the question of history and its impact on everyday life; 2. training in reading literary works historically, as rich cultural documents whose aesthetic strategies are always also political; 3. enhanced critical reading and writing skills; 4. a keener awareness of current directions in American Studies/Cultural Studies. It demands active and informed participation in class discussion. Its required texst are: a course packet, E .L Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Thuy’s The Gangster We’re All Looking For.

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 expected to attend class regularly, take part in oral discussions, and write a series of in-class papers in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Text: Michael Coogan, ed., NEW OXFORD ANNOTATED BIBLE

English 315/C Lit 320: European Modernism
Professor Staten
Padelford Hall B409
hstaten@u.washington.edu

Baudelaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Woolf, and Camus: these are the modernist authors we will study in this course. Modernist writers explored areas of experience that literature had formerly neglected (extreme or even pathological states of mind, commonplace things and people, sexuality and other corporeal processes, and so forth), and in the course of this exploration they moved away from traditional literary forms, inventing radically new forms (of which the most familiar are free verse and stream of consciousness).
The first half of the course will be on poetry, the second half on fiction. There will be an intensive focus on “how to read poetry.”

There will be a 2-3 page paper on Baudelaire due the second week (worth 20% of your grade); a 4-5 page mid-term paper on Rilke and Eliot (40 %); and a final, 4-5 page, paper on modernist fiction (40%). Your entire grade will be based on these three papers.

Poems:
Baudelaire, poems (xerox)
Rilke, poems (xerox)
Eliot, Selected Poems
Fictional works:
Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Camus, The Stranger

The work of Baudelaire and Rilke will be available in a course packet from the Ave. Copy Center, 4141 University Way (known as “the Ave.”). It’s below street level, located beneath the University Credit Union. The other texts (Metamorphosis, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Stranger) will be available at the University Bookstore. I strongly recommend you buy the editions that I’ve ordered for you; otherwise you won’t have the same page numbers, and it will be hard for you to follow class discussion of the text.

This course is a basic introduction to the issues and assumptions of a loose body of literature described as Post-colonial due to those literatures emerging from or in relationship to areas of the world that were once formally colonized by European powers and/or American cultural and political interests. Though focused primarily on twentieth and twenty-first century texts, we will explore the entire history of such literature as complex manifestations of changing power and cultural relationships. We will also explore them as distinct attempts at idiosyncratic style, vision and political possibility I a world where due to colonization and various empires cultures, languages and ideas have become brutally mixed and gloriously mangled. This is a class about our contemporary moment as the fallout of centuries of crisscrossing empires. Authors may include, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Edwidge Danticat, R.K. Narayan, Wole Soyinka, Pauline Melville, Samuel Selvon or Ama Ata Aidoo.

In this class we will read two modern British novels that engage with the sensory experience of London as a metropolitan city at the beginning of the twentieth century: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Our focus will be on the innovations both in literary form and language with which Conrad and Woolf experiment in order to fictionally render what it feels like to be subjected to the dynamically changing material and social reality of London. Reading and discussing excerpts from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852) would allow us to establish how Woolf’s and Conrad’s modern London has evolved away from the Victorian London of Dickens. We will also discuss the differences between the modern and Victorian novel. Along with the literary texts, we will read selected criticism on urban experience and the language of the novel in Conrad and Woolf. Assignments for the class will include two-page response papers for almost every class session, an Internet project on the social, political and material reality of London around 1907 and 1925, and one five-page paper. Course participants are strongly encouraged to read The Secret Agent and Mrs. Dalloway before the beginning of the course.


NOTE: There will be a Catalyst course webpage where those who are registered for the course will be able to access scholarly articles and assignments.

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 whose fiction we will read first. Bierce’s stories are particularly fascinating, especially framed within the contexts of Flannery O’Connor’s and John Gardner’s assumptions about fiction. Over the course quarter, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and others cared about and thought they might lose or have lost, and we'll analyze how they crafted "unpadded" narratives with themes and styles that shocked the reading publics--both then and now.

All of the stories we'll read are modern and contemporary, stylistically conventional or experimental. We'll talk about why.

My primary goals of the course include:

*increasing your reading enjoyment of the short story and sophisticating your reading practices

*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

*convincing you that the critical reading of fiction can help immensely in the practical reading and plotting of life

Course print texts include Ann Charters' _The Story and Its Writer_ as well as one or two stories online or otherwise distributed to you.

Student learning goals




General method of instruction


lecture, but primarily discussion--it is essential for you to be in class daily and to participate actively, thoughtfully, and vocally.

It was with a difficult awe that Americans witnessed the capabilities of human ingenuity and technological development after World War I—difficult because while it facilitated labor, powered cities, and moved people and goods great distances with ease, it also demonstrated humanity’s power to kill in unprecedented numbers (which, of course, would only later be surpassed by the bomb). All this contributed to a shift in American habitation toward burgeoning cities, leaving the rural scene nonplussed. These rapid changes led photographer Paul Strand to declare that mechanistic science had become the new God. Perceiving that the scientist had thus supplanted the artist as society’s favored child, Strand wrote in 1922 that the scientist “has made possible the present critical condition of Western Civilization, faced as it is with the alternatives of being quickly ground to pieces under the heel of the new God or with the tremendous task of controlling the heel.” Literary responses to this critical condition ranged considerably, as the unflinching newness—confounded not least by the Great Depression—dizzied the American intellect. Out of the vortex emerged some of the more persistent and challenging literary innovations of twentieth century America.

In this course, we will approach the literature of the period by attending to writers’ constructions of human habitations, with some special emphasis on the American West, attending to representions—mainly textual and photographic—of the shifting modes of living and their affects on American consciousness and (conflicting) senses of identity.

Expect readings by Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, as well as photographic works by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others (list subject to revision).

This course will focus on contemporary novels written by Native American authors. At the time of contact, Native people’s stories were handed down through the oral tradition, but the influence of non-Native culture has had a profound impact on Native storytelling. As we examine novels, we will consider recurring characteristics, including structural innovations, especially those involving the manipulation of time; familial and tribal relationships; ties to the land; and humor. Reading list: Winter in the Blood by James Welch, Tracks by Louise Erdrich, The Grass Dancer by Susan Power, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (a novel-in-stories, perhaps).

This class will be provide a solid grounding in the craft, techniques, forms and subject matter of contemporary poetry. We will examine the function of poetry and of poetic language, and seek to find ways to make our experience of the world alive and interesting to others. There will be a strong emphasis on revision and on the craft elements of tone, syntax and line.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

The course will explore a diverse group of texts recounting the fictive exploits of the women and men of Arthur's court. Students will read and discuss a range of important works (in prose and verse) treating these legends, including works by a range of neglected early British writers who were active before the codification of the Arthurian "universe"; works composed by and for medieval women; _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_; episodes from Malory; and a selection of non-canonical items. Course requirements will include a mid-term, final, and major term paper.

What do the bawd, the jilt, the rouge, and the coxcomb have to say about true love, just laws, and the rightful influence of decorum? This course will examine several raucous 18th century novels to track how these problematically-moral morality tales paved the way for Romantic-era authors to construct desire, as Richard Sha argues, as “a potential, if problematic, site of social liberation.” Readings will include: The London Jilt (Anonymous), Roxana (Daniel Defoe), Memoirs of a Coxcomb (John Cleland), Henrietta (Charlotte Lenox), and The Dangers of Coquetry (Amelia Opie). Assignments: short responses, annotated bibliography, research paper, and final exam.

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.

nstructor: Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill
Meets: M-Th 9:40-11:50 (with some class time set aside for service-learning)
SLN: 13957
Requirements met: VLPA

English 474A is a 5-credit service-learning course open to any UW student interested in learning more about public education, with a focus on working with ELL/multilingual, immigrant and refugee populations. This course is part of the Phoenix Project, a partnership between UW's Dept. of English and College of Education, Seattle and Shoreline public schools and literacy organizations; the Phoenix Project is designed both to support P-12 students and to provide experiential learning opportunities for UW students interested in teaching careers.

All students in English 474 will put what they learn on campus into practice through service-learning in summer literacy (elementary and mi! ddle school) and mentoring (high school) programs offered through Seattle Housing Authority. Some class time will be allocated for the service-learning. Volunteer opportunities include late afternoon/evening hours (4:00-7:00 pm) M-Th. Students will volunteer a minimum of 3 hours per week. Text: coursepack.

Questions? Contact the instructor: esoneill@uw.edu

We'll read and discuss an assortment of fairy tales, other stories and noveLS for children. Students will be expected to attend class regularly, take part in in-class discussions, and write a series of between five and ten in-class papers in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Texts: Robert Louis Stevenson, TREASURE ISLAND; Mark Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER; Lewis Carroll, ALICE IN WONDERLAND; Kenneth Grahame, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS; James Barrie, PETER PAN; E. B. White, CHARLOTTE'S WEB; L. M. Montgomery, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES; J. K. Rowling, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE; Rudyard Kipling, THE JUNGLE BOOKS; Louisa May Alcott, LITTLE WOMEN; A. A. Milne, WINNIE-THE-POOH; and Alfred and Mary Meeks, eds., THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES AND OTHER FAIRY TALES.

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