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.

As Fox TV casts for a new “reality” series to be titled “Utopia,” a recent article in The Seattle Times chronicles “the current craze for post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories.” What accounts for this interest, evident in both popular culture and literature, in alternative communities or societies, whether these are anarchic or authoritarian, reminiscent of the state of nature or suggestive of a surveillance state?

In this class we will read three recent novels, alternately set in the recent past, a recognizable present, or the near future, that experiment with different mixes of utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian elements. As much as we will focus on the literary elements of these novels, we will also explore some of the political and social implications of this dystopian turn in contemporary culture.

Novels by Dave Eggers, Chang-Rae Lee, and Lauren Groff.

Three short essays, group work, and class discussion.

This class will think about the function of sex, primarily in the gendered production of race in America. Sex is had, used, and exchanged for many reasons – for reproduction, for pleasure, for building intimacy, and for securing financial and other forms of well-being. Sex is also used as a source of control and manipulation, of moralizing and shaming, and as a form of violence and a legitimization of other violences. Sex and sexuality have also come to mean many things as part of our socialization, as forms of identity, as ways of evaluating people, and as indicators of normativity and even rationality. Sex and sexuality are also the modalities through which race and gender are (re)produced and lived in America. We will inquire into the sexualization of race and the racialization of sex/uality and the various ways these are gendered.

For these reasons and more, sex has also been the subject, whether explicitly or implicitly, of many (if not most) literary narratives. This class will analyze the representations of sex in many American cultural forms – including fiction, drama, poetry, film, and the graphic novel – over a wide range of time – 1850s to the present. We will investigate what sex does in literature and how it is used, including the way it is deployed to theorize, challenge, and reinforce U.S. racial and gender formation at particular historical moments. We will question what sex does in and to the narratives we read and the ways different cultural forms represent and engage the subject of sex to make claims about the social world and to intervene in the hegemonic and stereotypical definitions that label people. We will sometimes read literary texts against the grain, looking for the ways that the repression of sex in some narratives results in ruptures and contortions of form and content as the unspoken makes itself known and for the assumptions texts make about the functions of sex in relation to the production of race and gender in America.

All of our critical and literary readings will engage the intersection of sex, race, and gender. Our literary and cultural texts will include William Wells Brown’s Clotel, James Baldwin’s Another Country, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, and Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole and may include poetry and short fiction by Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, R. Zamora Linmark, Richard Wright, and others. These will be reading alongside critical essays/readings, which may include Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Gail Bederman, Roderick Ferguson, Hazel Carby, and literary criticism on select cultural texts. We will think about how the critical essays shape our readings of cultural texts as well as what our cultural texts have to say about the concepts in our critical essays.

There will be a quarter’s worth of reading in these 4 weeks; each week will be centered on one longer text coupled with shorter literary reading and critical texts. Students should be prepared to come to every class not only having done the readings but also ready to discuss and present their thoughts on them. Assessment will be based on engaged class participation, contextualizing presentations, and various writing assignments that engage close readings and application of our course texts.

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.

Recent scholarship on the many forms of belief in our contemporary world suggests that the terms “secular” and “religious” are more complicated than they first appear. How can we better understand these terms as they relate to our deepest convictions – whether these are informed by atheism, religious faith, or something in between – by reading literature? In this course, we will discuss texts from many different genres and consider the ways in which writers represent questions of faith and doubt. Our goals will be to respectfully and critically engage with texts that do not provide easy answers; learn about an array of literary forms (novel, short story, poetry, drama, film); and develop a deeper appreciation of literature, reading, and writing.

Required texts (available at the University Bookstore): Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor; Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin; The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday; Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Additionally, a course pack will be available at Ave Copy on University Way.

Course requirements include timely completion of assigned readings, discussion facilitation, and active class participation. This class counts for “W” credit. Students will be asked to write, and revise, two 5-7 page papers.

Long before the spectacles of the digital age, Victorians experienced a technology boom in 19th-century Britain that revolutionized their culture. Innovations including rail travel, the telegraph, and factories seemed to collapse time and space. Steam engines powered everything from printing presses to the ships that crossed the vast reaches of the British Empire. This class will examine the ways Victorian writers struggled to make sense of the dizzying array of changes produced by these new technologies, including the sudden creation of a middle class, shifting gender roles, abusive factory conditions, and ever-expanding imperialist projects. Novels will include Charles Dickens' Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskells' North and South, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Reading selections will also include the short story "The Telegraph Girl" by Anthony Trollope, poems by Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Rudyard Kipling and Lord Alfred Tennyson, as well as non-fiction by prominent essayists like Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Course requirements include timely completion of assigned readings, group presentations, reading quizzes and active class participation. Students will be asked to write, and revise, two five to seven page papers.

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, the promise of new biotechnologies and their potential perils. 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. The questions that drive this inquiry are: whose well being do these different industries (i.e. agribusiness, energy and biotech) enhance; at what cost to other living beings; is this trade off acceptable; if not, how might we reconceptualize health? Course readings encompass fiction, film, scientific studies, scholarly essays, and investigative journalism.

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.

Catalog Description: Introduction to twentieth-century literature from a broadly cultural point of view, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900.

In Hamlet the pompous counselor Polonius—famous for advice to his college-age son (“Neither a borrower nor a lender…”)—announces the advent of some actors at the court in Elsinore, “the best actors in the world,” he says, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral. . .” Polonius is a fool, but he seems to know his drama; he did a little acting himself in college. His prodigious list suggests that these actors—like Shakespeare himself—can do anything; meanwhile, his hyphens tend to undermine the distinctions that he means to make. Pastoral fantasy penetrates comedy; history penetrates pastoral. Comedy contains elements of tragedy; tragedy seems to require a clown. En route to the dignity of kingship, the little prince may pause for some fun at a pub. Hamlet, like Polonius, has a weakness for the theatre. “The play’s the thing,” he says, as he launches an attack on the King, his uncle. We will focus on the porous boundaries of comedy, tragedy, and history in a close reading and viewing of four plays. Twelfth Night, I Henry IV, Hamlet and Othello with the added attraction that Othello will be performed in the parks of Seattle during our session. Lecture, discussion, short essays written in and out of class.

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

English 242 introduces students to the discipline of English through the reading and critical interpretation of prose fiction. We will read both short- and long fiction and consider the problems and advantages of narrative voice and perspective, plot, setting, character, and archetypes, in order to practice and develop the reading and writing skills that are typical of academic approaches of fiction. This course will take for its theme Baseball Fiction, which, despite appearing a quintessentially American art form, provides a lens through which we can explore larger human (even epic) themes including, among others, desire, success, failure, the existence of God, fate and free will, national and racial identity, and the nature and decay of society. Likely texts will include John R. Tunis’s The Kids from Tomkinsville, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, and Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall. The course presumes no interest or familiarity with baseball, but its goal is to look at baseball as a context through which we can understand the nature of reading fiction and of thinking critically about how—and what—we read.

Note: This course satisfies the university’s “W” requirement, which means you will produce 10-15 pp. of writing and will have the opportunity to revise some of your work. Given the amount of writing you will produce, combined with the already quick pace of the A-Term, you can expect a relatively heavy homework load for this class.

In this course, we will read works of long and short prose fiction that feature Doppelgängers. Across different texts, we will see physical lookalikes, imagined second selves, a body divided into two parts, and mechanical representatives of human bodies. Comparing these texts, we will consider the various functions of doubles in literary works – to explore characters’ psyches, to show contrasting possibilities, to reveal something hidden about a character or the society from which the text emerged. We will also read works of criticism. Since this is a W course, you will be required to write two 5-7-page essays, one of which you will revise and resubmit for your final assignment.

A required coursepack will likely include Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Poe’s “William Wilson,” Maupassant’s “The Horla,” Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” Gogol’s “The Nose,” de Morgan’s “A Toy Princess,” and various critical works. You must also purchase the Norton Critical Edition of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nabokov’s The Annotated Lolita (edited by Alfred Appel, Jr.) – these particular editions are required.

A paradox lies at the heart of most national narratives. Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. The term nation derives from natio: to be born … In this way despite their myriad differences, nations are symbolically figured as domestic genealogies. Yet since the mid-nineteenth century in the West, at least, the family itself has been figured as the antithesis of history.

-- Anne McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven”


This course will provide an introduction to narrative fiction. 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 the “novel,” and which media are included or excluded from it at different times? What is the “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. Discussions will focus on intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in narratives of the family. This course satisfies the University of Washington "W" requirement and includes 10-15 pages of graded, out of class writing with an opportunity for revision.

Primary texts are likely to include: Charles Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth”; Henry James, “The Marriages”; Nella Larsen, Passing; Junot Diaz, Drown; Fae Myenne Ng, Bone; and other short fiction.

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.

Student learning 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

General method of instruction

a little lecture, a lot of seminar discussion and small group work

Recommended preparation

Nothing. I don't expect anyone in the class to have expertise--or even experience--reading poetry. I do expect you to come with an open mind, curiosity, and willingness to experiment with your reading and writing practices.

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.

“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.

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. The instructor and UW librarians will train students in using a variety of research methods and resources including observation, census data, local history, local and regional newspapers, interviews and mapping. Students will write in a range of genres inluding ethnographic field notes, individual research reports, group projects and reflective analyses. Students will receive frequent peer and instructor feedback on their written work, and groups will present their preliminary conclusions during an in-class Research Conference. The design and topic of this course support students in developing critical awareness and skill as collaborative researchers and writers, and accommodate a broad range of disciplinary approaches to understanding! urban communities.

Readings: available electronically

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 a Composition course in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program or Expository Writing Program before enrolling in English 281.

Questions? Contact the instructor: Elizabeth Simmons-O'Neill, esoneill@uw.edu

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

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

Catalog Description: 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.

English 309 introduces students to questions of what it means to read. At the root of the course is a series of questions: How do a series of ink marks, arranged on sheets of flattened wood pulp that are glued or sewn together—in other words, writing and books—become the kinds of things that transform individuals and cultures? What do we bring to the act of reading—as cultures and individuals—that transforms what and how we read? And, what does it mean to think critically about the possibilities and limits of reading? With these questions in mind, our class will read a handful of literary texts (Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Thomas De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple) and theoretical texts to investigate issues including the materiality of books; the physical, intellectual, and emotional acts of reading; the relationships between readers and writers; the difference between reading academically and for “pleasure;” and how the development of film and television and the shift to digital formats influences the ways we think about reading. Course work will consist of regular short informal writing assignments, a longer formal essay, exams, and regular course involvement.

Course Texts:
Shakespeare, King Lear (Norton): 978-0393926644.
Sterne, Tristram Shady (Norton): 978-0393950342.
De Quincey, On Murder (Oxford): 978-0199539048.
Walker, The Color Purple (Harcourt): 978-0156028356.

Catalog Description: Investigates what it means to be a reader. Centers on authorial and reading challenges, shifting cultural and theoretical norms, and changes in the public's reading standards.

A rapid survey of the more "literary" parts of the Old and New Testaments--stories, poems, theology, philosophy. Students will be expected to keep up with specific assigned readings, attend class regularly, and take part in open discussions. Written work will consist entirely of several in-class essays written in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Text: The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, Michael D. Coogan, editor

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

Bevington ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ANY edition.

Catalog Description: Explores the workings and evolution of short fiction. Introduces the distinct styles and pruposes of short fiction, such as the realistic, the fantastic, the explicitly instructive, and the non-didactic descriptive, as well as the historical development of the short story from the simple tale and fable to the psychologically complex narrative.

Catalog Description: Explores one or more popular genres (fantasy, romance, myster) or media (comics, television, videogames), with attention to historical development, distinctive formal features, and reading protocols. May include study of audience, reception histories, or fan cultures

Catalog Description: Medieval romance in its cultural and historical setting, with concentration on the evolution of Arthurian romance.

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?

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