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.

English 200 SU 2015 A Term Professor Butwin
Hero and Clown: Poetry, Music, Fiction and Film

Prepare for five weeks of close reading, listening and viewing of poetry, music, fiction and film. Poets and musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries will include W. H. Auden, James Wright, Philip Levine, Louis Asekoff and Eamon Grennan; Bob Dylan, the Clash, Billy Bragg, Coldplay, The Decembrists, Arcade Fire and Beirut. We will read short fiction by Raymond Carver including his story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” which, along with Batman with Michael Keaton(1989) is the basis for the recent Academy Award winning film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), starring Michael Keaton (again), directed by Alexandro Inárritu. We’ll read Carver and watch Batman and Birdman. We will conclude with one exquisite novel which, like Batman and Birdman either supports or undermines the ancient ideal of the hero, a theme that fades in and out of all of our reading, listening and viewing.

English 200B: Utopian/Dystopian societies in contemporary fiction Summer (A term) 2015 (VLPA and W)

As Fox TV cast a "reality" series titled "Utopia," an article in the Seattle Times chronicled "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 very readable recent novels -- Lauren Groff's Arcadia, set in the recent past; Dave Eggers' The Circle, set in a recognizable present; and Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, set in the near future. All three experiment with different mixes of utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian elements. We will engage with the literary elements of these novels, and explore some of the political and social implications of this turn in contemporary culture. Assignment include short essays and class discussion.

Forms of Horror

The eighteenth century is known as the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, but this course will focus on the darker side of this time period and its influence on modern horror. From moldering castles, murderous monks, virtuous maidens, and depraved desires to demonic children, serial killers, and the walking dead, this course will trace continuities and shifts of horror in its various forms. What is the distinction between terror and horror? How do these texts indicate discontent with cultural boundaries? And how does horror, with its focus on the human psyche, reflect larger concerns about social dynamics? We will begin with the Gothic and theories of terror and the sublime by Anna Laeticia Barbauld and Edmund Burke. With this grounding, we will spend some time with Mary Shelley’s (arguably) Gothic novel Frankenstein and some film adaptations of it.

After reading some poetry and short stories of horror, we will move on to American nightmares depicted in film. The course will end on postmodern depictions of dread in film and/or J-Horror.

Some of the films we will examine will contain graphic and disturbing subject matter.

Sherlock Holmes and His World

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most recognizable literary character ever created. The Holmes stories have spawned innumerable adaptations for the stage, radio, television, and film. The fame of detective himself has long since outstripped that of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes’s iconic image with deerstalker hat and pipe appears in advertisements, neighborhood watch signs, political cartoons, and the tiles of the Baker Street stop on the London Underground. Many people continue to believe he was real.

Holmes's London was capital of the world's first industrial society, heart of a vast empire, and arguably the first instance of an environment in which even the weather was a product of human action. The great detective emerged at a time when the bounds between nature and culture, human and animal, science and religion were being challenged, and that the changes wrought upon the physical environment by industrial modernity were becoming increasingly clear. Holmes’s cases deal explicitly with the dazzling new complexities of modern existence: dark secrets are brought home from distant lands, strange animals and foreign substances are loosed upon the metropolis, technological inventions from the telegraph to the military submarine to the automobile make their appearances alongside Holmes’s invariably “malodorous” chemical experiments. Above all, the Holmes stories reveal the city of London itself––its teeming millions, its secrets, “outré” occurrences, its opaque complexities, shrouded in the “dun-coloured fogs” curling at the windows of 221b Baker Street.

Reading many of the original Holmes stories as well as examining more recent adaptations, this course will examine both the late-Victorian era in which Holmes emerged as well as his ongoing relevance and appeal. In the process, this course will help us think about the way literary studies rubs against an array of fields, from urban studies to the history of science and technology, empire, and cosmopolitanism. Reading detective fiction in this context is particularly productive because the cases not only reveal so many of the cultural anxieties prevalent in the late-Victorian era, but also dramatize Holmes’s “reading” of the situation and weighing of evidence. Thus, they offer a paradigm for the methods of literary and historical inquiry.

English 207 Summer 2015 Course Description: It’s Your Health

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. Required fictions are likely to include: The Jungle, My Year of Meats, and Oryx and Crake.

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.

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.

Class: ENGL 225 A
M-TH 9:40-11:50 Staten FTR 106
B-term
This class is an introduction to Shakespeare, mostly by way of some of his most fascinating and, at times, disturbing plays: the Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, and Troilus and Cressida. We will read one play per week, and I will ask you write a 3-4 page paper on each play. I will drop your lowest grade (which means that if you choose to, you can write only three of the papers, without penalty; but then I won't drop the lowest grade). In addition, there will be a one hour final in which I will simply ask you objective questions about the characters and plot of the four plays. You may use any text of the plays, or take them off the internet.

Historically, critics have considered comics a low?culture form written primarily for children. In the late 2000s, however, the New York Times—a publication aimed at educated adults—added graphic novels to its book review roster. Our class will focus on comics as a complex literary form. Students will learn how to critically read the interaction between text, image and frame. They will also interrogate the distinction between “comics” and “graphic novel” by looking at the industrial and cultural contexts in which the latter label emerged and questioning what type of work is included—and omitted—from each description.

Although we will briefly examine the genre’s history, we will concentrate on contemporary fiction and non?fiction work, including Frank Miller’s and Paul Pope’s reimaginings of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year 100; memoirs from Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) and Ellen Forney (Marbles); young adult fiction from Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese); and historical fiction from Jason Lutes (Berlin). Students will also have the opportunity to tour the bookstore and gallery of Fantagraphics, a Seattle comics publisher, and to attend a class reunion at the March 2016 Emerald City ComiCon.

In addition to reading theories of how comics function as literature, we will explore comics criticism and write some of our own. The course final project will be a comic collaboratively authored by groups of 2?3 students.

English 242: Reading Fiction
Summer 2015
Dr. E. Laurie George

“It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me
vague glimpses of life’s possibilities.”

--Richard Wright
“Reading Fiction”

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

--John Gardner
The Art of Fiction

This intensive 5-week course is an introduction to various theoretical and practical strategies for reading fiction. We will concentrate on reading and interpreting mostly shorter fictional texts in relation to the author, the reader, and the culture at large. We will read and discuss a number of genres, such as realistic fiction, science fiction, and comics/graphic fiction. Primary course goals include enhancing your critical expression and realizing, as Richard Wright notes above, that the critical reading of fiction can help in expanding life’s possibilities.
Requirements include keeping up with and discussing critically in class daily readings, researching biographical and cultural allusions in the fictions to deepen reading experience, writing a midterm and final exam—both will include objective identification sections as well as essay portions.

Students will read a wide range of short fiction (using a course reader) from different countries, in different formats, ranging from traditional storytelling to experimental. The class will also study how other forms of storytelling convey message from film to plays to radio drama. What is the reader's responsibility to a text? What is the writer's responsibility to his or her own text and/or the reader?

Assignments will include weekly response papers to the reading, collaborative group discussion in organizing and leading a discussion of the stories in class, and a longer essay that compares and contrasts literary forms.

Madness, Gender, and Sexuality in Prose Fiction

In this course, we will examine the themes of madness, gender, and sexuality in prose fiction. How does one represent the fractured psyche? How does madness interact with power? Is madness an imaginative source of inspiration or a destructive force? How is it socially constructed? We will discuss the nature of illusion and delusion, and we will look at the roles that gender and sexuality play in the representation of insanity. We will pay close attention to the ways that authors depict the discourse of madness.

This course will be bookended by Mary Shelley. We will begin with her most famous novel, Frankenstein, and explore the ways that desire, obsession, and reproduction are represented. We will end the course on her not-so-famous novella, Mathilda, a tale of a reciprocal incestuous desire between a father and daughter. In between, we will read Nabokov’s depiction of the perverse ramblings of a raving pedophile in Lolita, and a post-colonial novel that interrogates the notion of dangerous female desire in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

Expect to read some visual representation and secondary readings to accompany these texts, and of course, expect to do some writing, as this is a “W” course.

A Short History of the Short Story
English 242 E Summer 2015 B-term W-Course VLPA
Counts toward the English Minor
Instructor:
Norman Wacker nwacker@uw.edu

Overview:

Dating back to the time of Anton Chekov, the short story as a craft and a window on sensibility, personality and society begins to reach audiences made possible as print media, popular literacy, the magazine and book trades created mass and global readerships. The short story and serialized novels began to be freely available, inexpensive and popular, and in the process, they became mirrors which readers held up to themselves and their times.

Key Questions:

What are the impacts of craft and innovation in this medium on its readers, their sensibility, sense of fashion and conduct? How do writers and their approach to character, point-of-view, social convention, plot, use of narration and dialogue frame the inner and the social experience of the reader?

We will use these fundamental questions, informal writing about our reading experience and analysis of the way our writers construct that experience, to document our experience as readers, even as we engage and explore the practice of the writer.

Requirements:

Brief low-stakes homework reading log entries, in-class writes and active sharing in class discussion of our reading experience. Engaged preparation and active participation in each class meeting.

3-short analytical papers on 1) What we see when we read 2) The writer’s hand in what we read, and 3) One work and why it matters in our short history of the short story.

Reading List (in Progress):

Anton Chekov, “The Lady with the Pet Dog;” W. Sumerset Sommerset Maugham, "Appointment in Samarra;" James Joyce, “The Dead;” Ivo Andri?, “Letter from 1920;” Danilo Kiš, “Encyclopedia of the Dead;” Drago, Jan?ar,“Joyce’s Pupil;” Muharem Bazdulj, “Another Letter;” Dubravka Ugreši? from "Museum of Unconditional Surrender;" Phillip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews,” Alice Munro, “The View from Castle Rock;” Lydia Davis, “Five Stories;” Haruki Murakami, "Yesterday."

Class: English 243, "Poetry, Form, and Personae"

Instructor: Carrie Matthews

Course Texts: Handbook of Poetic Forms (Editor: Ron Padgett) and Joker Joker Deuce (by Paul Beatty) at UW Bookstore; Course Reader at Ram Copy on the Ave

Course Description:

This is a course for anyone curious about poetry. If you've never really read any poems, no worries. If you read poetry regularly, great. If you can read another language in addition to English, even better. The point is that this course should work well for you if you have genuine questions about what poems are or what they do. (If not, there are other English courses.)

English 243, "Poetry, Form, and Personae" examines lyric poetry as a place where personal and collective expression converge. We begin with love poetry and perhaps the most conventional of forms, the sonnet, to think about how the voice of the single speaker merges (supposedly?) personal expressions of love with collectively authorized forms of romantic expression. We'll examine both classical and 'twisted' love poems, noting where they overlap.

This course has two emphases, poetic form and personae (the masks the speakers of poems put on). While there's no strict separation between the two, the first two weeks or so of class will be more focused on form, the second two+ weeks on personae. The forms we'll examine include the villanelle, sestina, and prose poem, in addition to the sonnet.

As we think about personae, I'll ask you to move beyond learning about a poet's biography and their intentions (proclaimed or surmised) and instead think about the freedom lyric poetry grants to imagine different voices. To help you engage deeply with issues of form and personae, I'll ask you to write in the forms we study and to invent personae as you do that. We will also spend some time reading Paul Beatty's Joker, Joker, Deuce to think about how persona/ae in lyric poetry can take on a larger social or political role.

Learning Goals:
• To appreciate (and enjoy!!!) poems, if you don't already
• To be able to think intelligently about formal dimensions of poems and how they contribute to what a poem does/means
• To gain some sense of the dynamics between individual and social context in lyric poetry
• To identify the specific features of a poem sufficiently to imitate it or translate it into another language
• To use writing as a tool for learning and for expressing your thinking about specific poems

Assignments:
A few rule-bound poem writing exercises
One 3-4 page poem explication
50-minute Midterm Exam
One poem imitation or translation accompanied with your commentary
1.5 hour Final Exam

City on a Hill. In 1630, as the ship Arbella was carrying the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to their new home in America, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon when he described this new future home and land as a “city on a hill.” While this phrase has resonated in American culture for almost 400 years, what it actually means hasn’t always been fully understood or appreciated. This course will consider the history of American literature and culture from the perspective of John Winthrop’s city—that is, of the cities “on the hill” (as utopian constructions) and cities in their much more gritty realities. Over the next few weeks we will look at a variety of texts that emerge from, and help construct, the kinds of urban spaces that Americans have experienced. In each century, the city has played a key role in helping shape both the American psyche and American literature.
What is it like to live in a city? Jonathan Raban says that “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. We will consider the city from two perspectives. First, we will read a variety of literary texts that emerge from the city. These will be stories about the new meanings produced by the city (Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”), the new forms of the urban novel (Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Paul Auster’s City of Glass), and the new ways that people interact there (LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman and Nella Larson’s Passing). These narratives will be accompanied by readings about the city’s rise and its manifold meanings: Georg Simmel on the “stranger,” Michel de Certeau on walking in the city, etc. This focus on the literary representations of the city will depend on what I consider to be the second aspect of the course, which will depend on the students’ own negotiations with, and understandings of, the city.

Science Writing and Society
English 281 A Summer 2015 B-term C-Course
Counts toward the English Minor
Instructor: Norman Wacker nwacker@uw.edu
Objectives:

The primary objective of this course is to establish an interactive classroom community to engage recent scientific research papers and science reporting that have important consequences for contemporary social issues, including global health, the nature of aggression and warfare, genetic engineering, climate change and the neurology of writing, learning and creativity.

We will look hard at recent science papers that have also been reported beyond the science community to a larger audience. We will examine how Individual science papers contribute to new and flexible portfolios of knowledge and technical innovation, an open-ended process of knowledge use and knowledge making central to research universities like ours and professional fields as various as medicine, resource management, finance, business and social and mass media.

Overview:

Dating back to the times of Charles Darwin, observation and experimental research have been mobilized to identify the forces that produce the natural world, turning points that triggered both scientific and social revolutions. His concept of evolution lead to a vision of time and life as defined by change and progress, driven by highly selective processes of fitness, adaptation and competition, concepts introduced to Darwin’s enormous readership virtually overnight. The resulting transformation of biology proper has been so pervasive, that the geneticist Theodosious Dobzhansky remarked, “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.”

Key Questions:

How are science papers organized? What do we learn as we read about research, scientific reasoning, and experimentation? What are the larger stakes of the results reported in these often quite specialized studies? What debates and conversations accompanied publication of these papers? How do these papers compare to science writing for a general audience? What are some common assumptions about scientific writing and scientific knowledge? How should we evaluate and revise those assumptions as we work closely with this kind of writing in this class?

Requirements:

Brief low-stakes homework reading log entries, in-class writes and active sharing in class discussion of our reading experience designed to build collaboratively our comprehension and engagement of science papers and their context. Engaged preparation and active participation in each class meeting.

3-short analytical papers on 1) One science paper, its context and stakes 2) One science paper and ensuing discussion and debate 3) Three state of the moment papers and their contribution to advancing a thread of inquiry.

Reading List (in Progress):

Origin of the Species (selections);” “Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice;” “Chimpanzee Adenovirus Vector Ebola Vaccine—Preliminary Report;” “Investigating the zoonotic origin of the West African Ebola epidemic;” “A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance;” ““Bees at War: Interspecific Battles and Nest Usurpation in Stingless Bees;” “Designing Tomorrow’s Vaccines;” “Genomic Engineering and the Future of Medicine:” “Neural correlates of verbal creativity: differences in resting-state functional connectivity associated with expertise in creative writing;” “An Empirical Test of the Theory of Gamified Learning”

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.

Prerequisites:

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

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

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

English 300
Reading Major Texts
This course will introduce you to the literary culture of the early eighteenth-century. We’ll read exemplary works of poetry, drama, and prose fiction, studying how major writers 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 (Oxford World’s Classics); 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); Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (Oxford World’s Classics); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Dover Thrift), and a Course Pack. (You can use any other new/used edition. Most of the literature we’ll read is available online at Gutenberg.org and other websites.) Midterm and final.

English 302: “Monsters R Us”

The course title is intended to signal two strands 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 that 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 critically contextualized readings of recent texts. Among them will be Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; plan on in class viewing and discussion of visual media (eg., film and t.v.) as well.

Requirements: active classroom participation; 5 short (1 page, single-spaced) critical responses to assigned texts; a final 7-8 page essay on monsters (double-spaced).

Objectives: The course is designed to provide students with: 1. a solid foundation in critical practices that take up the question of monstrosity 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 Critical Cultural Studies.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the development of the religious ideas and institutions of ancient Israel, with selected readings from the Old Testament and New Testament. Emphasis on reading The Bible with literary and historical understanding.

English 346
Summer—A term; 2015
Dr. Laurie George
Course Definition & Goals


“Novel, a, short story padded.”

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

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

--John Gardner
The Art of Fiction

This class in fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it, but some of our readings will be novellas, short novels. Ambrose Bierce will be one of the “unpadded” writers whose fiction we read with the above quotations in mind; that is, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and assorted other writers cared about and thought they might lose, just as we’ll analyze their narrative styles that often shocked reading publics —both then and now. Primary goals of the course include: increasing your reading enjoyment of the short fiction by sophisticating your reading practices and your awareness of how you interpret and assess fiction; exposing you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and literary movements; enhancing your critical abilities, both orally and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate responses to stories.

Television Studies

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is not alone in proclaiming that we are in a new golden age of television. Critically acclaimed shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men tell stories that could only be told in the medium of television. A proliferation of cable networks and streaming services such as Netflix mean we have more content than ever before. But how did we get to this point? Because of the everyday place of television in our lives, it can be easy to forget that this medium has a specific history.

In this class, we will explore such history of one the most popular and accessible forms of entertainment. What is the relationship between the medium, producers, and audience? What interpretive practices might we utilize to make critical sense of television? What does television tell us about American identities? At what point does a viewer become a fan, and join a fandom community devoted to a particular show? These are just a few of the questions we will consider in this course. We will use television to approach the broader methodologies practiced in popular culture studies, considering television as both an art form and a producer of ideology. This class will primarily focus on US television.

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

Catalog Description: Special topics in queer theory and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) studies. Examination of ways lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer histories and cultures are represented in criticism, literature, film, performance, and popular culture.

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.