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.

English 200A, which fulfills both VLPA and W requirements, is designed to introduce students to techniques and practices for reading and enjoying literature.

The course texts -- three very readable, engaging recent novels set in Seattle -- will allow us to witness the shift from the nuclear age to the information age as the city transformed itself from a regional backwater to what one character calls “a true metropolis.” From the depths of the Cold War to the height of the tech bubble, these novels trace how the forces of globalization changed the city’s self-image, and the way those who live in Seattle experienced it.

There will be class discussions, short essays, and opportunities to venture beyond the page and off campus as some assignment options take place in the city itself.


Course texts:
Truth Like the Sun by Jim Lynch
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
Waxwings by Jonathan Raban

Questions? Contact the instructor, John O’Neill: joneill@uw.edu

This course covers poetry, drama, fiction, and film. That’s a lot. Our theme will be love—ideal, adulterous, romantic, erotic, marital, theistic—which, while not mutually exclusive, is also a lot. The goals will be to (1) examine the ways that the various forms engage the presentation of the experience; (2) discuss the texts in their own right; and (3) have the student emerge with some sense of the distinctiveness of literary forms, as well as ways of talking about literature as a whole. We will examine questions that the texts present, overtly or otherwise: is it better to be the lover or the beloved? What is the relation between love and other forms of passion? Hence our course title: “Love’s Forms.”

Texts are likely to include: a selection of short stories to get us off and running the first week; Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, poems by Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, John Donne, Rita Dove, Robert Lowell, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Tony Kushner’s play and the film adaptation Angels in America (Part One: Millennium Approaches).

The class is discussion-based, with 5 two-page response papers—framed around the presentation of a question—due each week.

From "Bates Motel" to "Hannibal," "Celebrity Ghost Story" to "American Horror Story," contemporary American culture is rife with the uncanny, the unnatural, and the undead. This introductory literature class will seek to frame this apparent cultural obsession through an investigation of literature of the American gothic. Texts read will include stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Dorothy Allison, and Joyce Carol Oates, and perhaps a film or two. Students will be responsible for three short essays (for "W" credit), a midterm and final exam, and a group presentation.

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 21st century U.S. Our studies will focus on the production and distribution of food, workplace safety, environmental hazards and the promise of new biotechnologies. Particular attention will be paid to the workers who produce what the rest of us consume, the conditions under which they labor, and the environment in which they, their families, and those not employed by these industries live. Course readings encompass fiction, film, scholarly essays and investigative journalism. A course packet and these novels are required: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats; Ann Pancake, Strange As the Weather Has Been; and Octavia Butler, Dawn.

Catalog Description: Introduces literature from the Middle Ages and the Age of Shakespeare, focusing on major works that have shaped the development of literary and intellectual traditions of these periods.

English literature, it would appear, has a designated writer. It may not be our job to account for that designation, but his status gives us an opportunity in one quarter with four plays and several poems to begin to figure out what makes Shakespeare tick. The plays vary enormously: light-hearted comedy, tragi-comedy, pure fantasy, and downright tragedy. That might suggest at least four playwrights behind the name of Shakespeare, but we will find, in fact, elements of each kind of play lurking in the others. We’ll frame two great tragedies—King Lear and Hamlet—between an early comedy, Twelfth Night, and a final play that defies all category, The Tempest. We will watch recent, innovative productions to see what’s become of Shakespeare in our time and do our best to study—and imagine—what happened on the theatrical scaffolding in London around 1600. Lecture, discussion, and short essays written in and out of class.

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

This five-week course is designed to broaden your reading of fiction, expose you to a variety of authors, genres, styles, and historical/cultural movements, and enhance your written critical expression. We will read the assigned fictional works with the question of madness as part of our exploration. By comparing and contrasting the presentation of madness in our different literary works, we will develop some understanding how conceptions and values about madness have changed. We won't be learning the "truth" of madness, nor anything systematic about medical and psychiatric practice, but instead using these literary examples to start thinking about the questions involved when we (society or a civilization) label individuals or groups mad.

We will begin with the precept that madness is often an allegory for other outcast conditions. We will examine how writers have used the allegory of madness to examine how madness has been used to define who does and does not fit (due to race, gender, class, flights of intelligence/ imagination, etc) and how people who don’t firmly fit in have described their precarious situation as one akin to madness.

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

We will likely read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Freud’s Dora, short pieces by Poe, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cisneros, Rodriguez, Baldwin, Alexie. There will be a course packet.

This course is a “W: course so I must require at least 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, with the opportunity for you to revise. Revisions do not count in the total number of pages of writing that the UW requires for a “W” course.
In-class participation is required and will make up a substantial portion of your final grade, so attendance is critical. Class time will mostly be comprised of focused discussions and classroom activities with some short lecture. Expect weekly 2 page response papers.

In this section of English 242, we will look at historic and contemporary representations of future humans through science fiction. We will examine the spectrum of future humans, ranging from evolved posthumans to devolved degenerates. We will study the difference between posthumans, transhumans, cyborgs, and other visions of “improved” future humans. Through the figure of the “cyborg” in particular, these texts enable us to examine our changing relationship with science and technology. Overall, we will examine how representations and visions of future humans have evolved in science fiction between the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first century.

This course will meet daily, Monday through Thursday, and will consist of seminar-style discussion and lecture. In-class participation is mandatory, so please do not enroll if our meeting schedule interferes with your summer travel plans. 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. Additional assignments may include: peer facilitation, discussion board posts, and quizzes.

Because the summer quarter is truncated, we will read course texts at a brisk pace. Be prepared to read 30-60 pages of fiction per night. Course texts may include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Anne McCaffrey’s “The Ship Who Sang,” Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, and Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Fiction will be supplemented with nonfiction readings. You may also be asked to watch films outside of class, such as Wall-E, Bladerunner, and Ghost in the Shell.


No prior knowledge of science fiction is required.

This course will provide an introduction to studies of the novel. Our specific focus throughout will be on “family romances,” fictions that narrate social, political, and economic conflicts as family dramas. Together we will ask: why did emergence of the novel occur alongside the emergence of the nuclear family in the West? What is a “novel,” and which media are included or excluded from it at different times? What is a “family,” and which forms of intimate and domestic life are included or excluded from it at different times? To provide a broad introduction, we will read a range of writing from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Novelistic media for this class will include realist and minimalist fiction and short stories. The course content will include a focus on race, gender, and sexuality.

This is a “W” course and will include 10-15 pages of graded out of class writing with an opportunity for revision.

We will read five 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 ghost, 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. 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 20th century 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.

This course is for anyone curious about poetry and willing to
experiment with ways of reading and writing poems. We will mull over
questions ranging from "What, exactly, is a
sonnet?" to "What does it mean to use the form of a classic
Petrarchan love sonnet to write an anti-love poem lamenting being tied
down to a wife?" and "What choices confront a writer translating an
8th-century classical Chinese poem for a 21st-century Anglophone
audience?"

English 243 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. Those of you with some knowledge of a
language other than English will have the opportunity to translate a
poem and reflect on that process; everyone will try their hand at
imitating poems or a few lines from a poem.


Our Goals:

Learn to enjoy reading poetry (if you don't already)

Understand some of the most famous, most common, and most interesting
poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, calligrammes, and prose poems

Develop a technical vocabulary for reading poetry and experience using
those terms in analyzing poems

Learn about poems from the inside out by writing your own poems as
well as imitations and/or translations of others' poems

This seminar will explore the genre of comedy.

Its main objectives are (1) to read closely some famous ancient and modern comedies, and see a few taped stage performances; (2) to grasp the esthetics of major writers such as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, and Beckett; (3) to develop an overall sense of the traditions and cultural contexts of comedy, how comedy has changed over time, and which features have remained constant. Specific topics include: the origins of comedy; the forms and features of “high” and “low” comedy; the conventions and techniques of romantic and satirical comedy; types and functions of laughter; tragicomedy, travesty, and farce. Texts: Aristophanes, Four Plays by Aristophanes (The Clouds, The Birds, Lysistrata, The Frogs), tr. Dudley Fitts (Harvest). Plautus, Four Comedies (The Braggart Soldier, The Brothers Menaechmus, The Haunted House, The Pot of Gold), tr. Erich Segal (Oxford World’s Classics). Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (Dover Thrift). Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Signet). Molière, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, tr. Richard Wilbur (Harvest). Wycherley, The Country Wife (Cambridge ppb). Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift.). Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove). The above are editions I recommend; you can use other editions so long as they contain the full text we’ll be reading. There will be several brief assignments on individual authors and a final.

Jonathan Raban (a British writer who now lives in Seattle) claims “living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.” This course will be about the “arts” of urban living, both as literature depicts it and as we inhabitants experience it. In particular, we will be investigating the relationship between the evolution of American literature and the rise of the modern city. From the perspective of Puritan settlers, America was to be a “city on a hill,” a utopian community of true believers. However, it didn’t take long for the realities of urban living to create very different stories. This course will consider some of complex ways in which the actual cities gave rise to the writers and literary forms that mark important moments in our literary history. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s entrance into Philadelphia, we will look at the ways in which the city has shaped the stories and lives of Americans. Among the writers and works in the course, we will consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s urban tales, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Leroi Jones’s Dutchman, and Paul Auster’s postmodern novel, City of Glass.

Texts:
Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
ISBN: 97809611392123 Cheshire CN: Graphics Press

John Berger, Ways of Seeing
ISBN: 97801240135152 London: Penguin

In this short, four week writing course, we will consider the relationships between text and image. Plan to write three papers, two of 4-5 pages and one longer, in which you assess the usefulness, quality, enhancement of the text and image. With a focus on one of the Tufte articles, your first paper will evaluate several particular news souces’ use of graphics, according to Tufte’s principles. In the second paper, you will consider how “art talk” enhances or detracts from your visualization of works of art. In a final, longer paper, you will choose to extend one of the other papers.

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.

“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 introductory class will be on the uses and functions of descriptive detail in poetry, examining how appeals to the five senses create (or choose to forego) ritualistic action in the “event” that is the reading and writing of a poem. By the end of the course, students should be able to recognize the elements of meter, be familiar with the major classical forms, and be able to recognize the major components of a poem’s structure, including but not limited to the use of sound, syntax, diction, metaphor and imagery. Students should also be able, by the end of the term, to demonstrate ease in analyzing the work of other workshop participants as well as in analyzing published authors. Although this class will have a workshop component (25%), the primary focus of class time (75%) will be on the discussion and written critical analysis of literary models from contemporary and modern or pre-modern works.

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.

The course title is intended to signal three stains of inquiry that we will pursue this quarter, each of which pays particular attention to how monsters are defined, the historical conditions in which these figurations or definitions of monstrosity emerge and their legacies. We will begin our investigation in the 19th century focusing on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” as symptomatic of texts that in defining the monster as unnatural and inhuman figure what counts as personhood and, by extension, citizenship, along with the rights and value that attend it. On the one hand, these texts promulgate then hegemonic understandings about race, gender, class, and sexuality which orchestrate what Michel Foucault defines as “state racism”: namely a biopolitical regime that subdivides humanity into “we, the people” whose well being the state is pledged to foster and the less than human whose lives are marketable, disposable, or menacing. On the other hand, the same texts offer a counter vision, that upends this binary and the values that it assigns. A second, late 20th century strain heralds what Donna Haraway calls “the promise of monsters”; we’ll examine what that promise might signal for better and worse in a critically contextualized reading of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. A third, 21st century strain augurs the domestication of monsters. As a case in point, and with an eye to recent social issues (eg. ,color blindness and gay marriage) we will examine the construction of “hot” boy vampires and the girls who” love” them in the Twilight series. We’ll engage this issue of domestication with careful attention to one film—probably the last—as a focal point for discussion of the series and it’s relationship to the literature on monstrosity that we have read.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

A rapid survey of the Old and New Testaments, with emphasis on those parts of most literary interest. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and participate in class discussion. Written work will consist entirely of several in-class papes, written in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Text: The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Though he is most often discussed as a dramatist, William Shakespeare considered himself a poet first and foremost, who turned to play-writing as a way to make money, and as a natural extension of his acting career. In addition to producing the language’s most respected corpus of plays and of poetry, the bard’s work has also been an inspiration to hundreds of artists in genres as diverse as painting, ballet, opera, film-making sculpture, architecture, and many others. This class will consider Shakespeare’s poetry, with an emphasis on the sonnets; we will read descriptive passages and speeches from nearly all the 36 plays, with an ear tuned to his unique language and image-making. We will also consider him as a cultural touchstone, reading adaptations, listening to symphonies, and criticizing paintings inspired by his work. In order to understand his composite gifts of characterization and narrative structure, we will read, in addition to principle selections from the major plays, three in their entirety.
The goal is not to read all the Shakespeare we’ll ever need to read in the span of one class, but to qualify ourselves as readers of his poetry, that we might open any of his plays, at any later date, with appetite and comprehension.

Required Texts:

A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Tempest
King Lear
Sonnets

I have ordered some copies of the above plays at the UW bookstore, as well as a Complete Shakespeare, should you rather have them altogether. Be advised though, you may do just as well in used bookstores around the city: any copy you find will suit our purposes.

Required Work:

Weekly blogging
Two short papers
Memorization

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.

Depictions of human interactions with other beings can be a window to another world or worldview—and also a potential mirror—especially designed to help readers see the world and ourselves in a new way. Popular values and genre expectations help most readers identify with the protagonist and vilify the antagonist, yet when contemporary American Indian writers re-imagine the vampire or post-apocalyptic landscapes, villains are almost universally formed though colonialist beliefs, practices, or influences. That is, in American Indian fiction, monstrosity emerges from social and environmental transgressions against Indigenous values and relationships.

In reading for this course, we’ll examine depictions of villains, dystopias, monstrous technologies, the undead and otherwise voracious beings; the relationships that “evil” attempts to disrupt; and the means by which protagonists fight their demons.  Through short stories, novels, and a film or two, this course will examine how American Indian authors continue a long-established practice of social and environmental intervention through storytelling and story-writing.

Some of the works under consideration for this class:

“Distances” and “The Sin Eaters,” both short stories by Sherman Alexie

The Dreams of Jesse Brown by Joseph Bruchac

Eye Killers by A.A. Carr

Tracks by Louise Erdrich

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (excerpts) by Jack Forbes

Mending Skins by Eric Gansworth

Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe

Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones

Kynship by Daniel Heath Justice

Tambien la lluvia, a film written by Paul Laverty and directed by Icíar Bollain

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith

The Night Wanderer by Drew Hayden Taylor

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of teaching writing, focused on practices in high school. We will start with an examination of best practices in teaching writing. Because you may not have experienced for yourself many of these practices, we will enact them as we read. Then we will turn to what teachers are actually doing, especially with diverse student populations found in almost every school district in the Puget Sound area. We will take that a step further with a group project designing unit plans based on the group’s research into a particular school and school district’s student population. In the final section, we will take up the issues of assessment of writing, especially as they are relevant to teachers in Washington. At the same time we consider barrier assessments, we’ll also examine the assessments specific students will face in the move to college–what so-called writing tests do community college students take? How relevant are the AP English tests to what colleges expect? What kind of writing do students do in first year composition?

Service-Learning Seminar for Future Teachers VLPA; optional W available; may be used toward Education, Learning and Society field work or elective requirements

This service-learning course will combine on-campus seminar meetings with work in a summer school literacy program at Olympic Hills Elementary, a "high needs" public school in the Lake City neighborhood in north
seattle. Required volunteer work will take place during class meeting times, with the option of additional volunteer work outside of class time for those who would like more experience or additional credit.
Our work on campus will include consideration of some reasons students struggle with reading and writing, strategies and skills for understanding and supporting students' development as readers and writers, and
focused attention on both the literacy curriculum at Olympic Hills, and on ourselves as teachers, community members and writers.

Questions? Contact the instructor, Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill, esoneill@uw.edu (no add codes required)
Texts: coursepack

We will read and discuss an assortment of classic stories for children, drawn from American and European sources. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and participate in class discussion. Written work will consist entirely of several in-class papers, written in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Texts: Rowling, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE; Stevenson, TREASURE ISLAND; Grahame, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS; Kipling, THE JUNGLE BOOKS; Alcott, LITTLE WOMEN; Montgomery, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES; Carroll, ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND; Barrie, PETER PAN; Meeks, THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES; Milne, WINNIE THE POOH; White, CHARLOTTE'S WEB

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