Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature. Examines some of the best works in English and American literature and considers such features of literary meaning as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. Emphasis on literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience.

The overall goal of this course is to equip you with techniques for and practice in reading and responding critically to a variety of forms of literature. We will read a wide variety of literary texts, ranging from poetry to prose to drama, and from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. The texts that we will read are all in some way or another concerned with the idea of change. Thus, modernization, alienation and dislocation will be key themes for our course. While we will seek to appreciate these novels on their own terms, we will also attempt to put them into conversation with one another along the way. We will begin with E.M. Forster's novel Howard's End, and from there we will move on to novels by Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, stopping along the way to read prose selections by or about some of these authors. After having spent a good deal of time with these novels, we will read poetry and prose selections from Eliot, Pound and Stein. Finally, we will end the quarter with plays by Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. This course satisfies the University's W-requirement and as such, students will be responsible for writing and revising two 5-7 page papers. Additionally, students will be responsible for one group presentation.

E.M. Forster - Howard's End
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Thomas Hardy- Jude the Obscure
T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock*
Ezra Pound - The Cantos -- selections*
Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons -- selections*
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

*A (required) course pack will be available at Ave Copy.

Nineteenth-century England was characterized by paradoxes of every cultural and political shade: the rapid industrialization of the nation was encouraged yet feared for its impact on social relations; reform movements were met by intense distrust of bureaucratization; imperial expansion was seen as both a necessity and right as it also engendered insecurity; the proliferation of novels was heralded as both beneficial for a reading nation as well as detrimental in its ability to shape its readers, perhaps undesirably. Central to many of these concerns is the woman and question of her role in a swiftly modernizing world. The doctrine of separate spheres is a key paradox of the Victorian age: women were seen as instrumental to social stability, but only within a limited domestic space. Where earlier literature might portray women as heroines, it does so in the confines of love, marriage, and social order, and if a woman transgressed these boundaries, she could only be a madwoman, a monster, or fallen beyond the help of moral and social reform. This course will look at women in literature, women writing literature, and women as constituted by literature, in order to examine how the figure of the woman was being actively constructed as well as contested through literature.

We will begin with Austen to provide an example of a quintessential female heroine as commonly portrayed in much domestic fiction, paying attention to how Austen constructs the domestic domain of her women. From there we will move into Lady Audley’s Secret, which, written deep in the nineteenth century, seeks to question the neat constructions of a woman as domestic angel or madwoman, throwing those categories into flux as it does so. *Trilby* and *She* will provide fin-de-siécle interpretations on the woman question. We will end with a famous play dealing with shaping women into proper “ladies,” George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The course pack will include secondary criticism as well as poetry selections on the topic, including poetry from D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Browning, and others.

Because the course is discussion-based, a good portion of your grade is based on class participation. Per W-course requirements, students will also write two short response papers (3-4 pages each), and one longer essay (5-7 pages), all with required revisions. The workload also includes a presentation, discussion-leading, Go Post responsibilities, quizzes, and a heavy reading schedule.

*Book List*:
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. (978-0141439518)
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862. (978-0140435849)
Haggard, H. Rider. She. 1887. (978-0192835505)
Du Maurier, George. Trilby. 1894. (978-1551115740)
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. 1913. (978-0486282220)
Course Pack, available at Ave Copy (4141 University Way)

“Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; / Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d” (Macbeth III.iv)

“…you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?” (Dracula)

“CLOV: There are so many terrible things.
HAMM: No, no, there are not so many now.” (Endgame)

English 200 is designed to offer techniques and practice in the reading and enjoyment of literature as a source of both pleasure and knowledge about human experience; our specific course readings will focus on representations of strange things in literature—bloody murder, goblins, vampires, labyrinthine houses—and how these presences (and their modes of literary representation, including but not limited to the course description’s suggestions of imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense) affect our understanding and appreciation of texts.
There are several things that are of particular interest in the study of the literature of strangeness. One is the fascinating alchemy, described by theorists from Aristotle to Edmund Burke and beyond, whereby that which is terrifying or distressing in reality becomes pleasurable or delightful through the various processes of representation. Literature that deals with unusual things also tends to be an intriguing indicator of the particular anxieties of its context of production, so that reading Dracula shows us that while vampires are scary, many other things, such as technology, foreigners, and female sexuality and intellect, are as well in late Victorian England. These tendencies in our subject of study allow for an ideal convergence of the ideas of literature as pleasurable, and as representative of human experience. Our course readings will span four hundred years of strangeness, beginning with Macbeth and its climate of incessant unease, moving from there to the Romantic writers, for whom to be “unusual” was an aesthetic ideal, and eventually to the Victorians, who were as strange as the romantics longed to be. The course will close in the bleak landscape of modernity with Beckett, and the spiraling void of the postmodern House of Leaves. By covering this generically and temporally expansive range of works, we’ll trace the legacy of the strange into our own time, and give attention to the question of the specific ways literature works to offer pleasurable insight into (sometimes unnerving) human experience.
This course meets the university “W” requirement, which means that students must produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. (For more specific W-course criteria, please see http://www.washington.edu/uaa/gateway/advising/degreeplanning/writreqs.php). Besides these papers (multiple shorter papers of 5-7 pages or fewer), course work may include discussion leading, electronic postings, reading quizzes and exams, response papers, research work, presentations, etc.

Course Readings:
Course pack, with both primary and secondary readings (including works by Shakespeare, Coleridge, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Freud, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and others.)
Dracula, Bram Stoker - 978-0-141-43984-6
Endgame, Samuel Beckett. 0802150241
House of Leaves, 978-0375703768

Our course theme will focus on the gift and threat of mobility as it is configured in a range of travel narratives from the 19th and 20th centuries. To put it plainly, we will ask how tales of travel, migration, adventure, and the "open road" explore the freedoms and coercions of modern life. Our readings will carry us from the Happy Hobo's steel rails at the turn of the century to the post-apocalyptic superhighway and beyond. As a part of this inquiry, we will ask how regional difference is imagined and produced in the context of the allegedly world-shrinking, culturally-homogenizing forces of global trade, communications, and travel. We will contextualize our readings using a number of relevant essays, films, and short stories--including, keeping our fingers crossed, the October theatre release of the film adaptation of McCarthy's The Road.

Course requirements: Your final grade will be based on your demonstration of your completion and comprehension of reading assignments through your regular contribution to class discussion, GoPost reflections, and a number of writing assignments. Note that this is a "W" course, and as such will require you to produce 10-15 pages of polished, out-of-class writing, in the form of a longer paper with a required revision OR two or more short papers, likewise with revisions.

Required texts:

• Reitman, Dr. Ben L. Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha.
• Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man
• Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America
• McCarthy, Cormac. The Road
• A small selection of short stories which will be on reserve at the UW libraries.

This course will provide an introduction to cultural studies within the field of English and literary studies, by focusing on the topic of comics. The course is intended to provide a historical introduction to the generic diversity of the American comic book as a hybrid medium of visual art and print fiction, as well as to discuss in detail specific examples of the medium and its potential, using Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, an essay on the nature of the comics medium written as a graphic novel. The course will use this topic to raise questions about the methodological implications for literary studies of analyzing non-literary objects of study. How do comics challenge our assumptions about literature and literary analysis? To what extent are literary methods of textual analysis applicable to comics? We will also use our discussions of comics to consider key concepts or questions within cultural studies, such as ideology, the status of authorship in the production of meaning, and the role of the reader and processes of reception or consumption in constructing meaning. Comics, moreover, are a privileged site for considering the relation of literary culture to visual culture in contemporary American society.

We will begin by reading McCloud’s book in relation to some examples of early newspaper comic strips, probably including Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, with particular attention to the relation between newspaper comics as a mass medium and formal experimentation in modernist art, to exemplify the ways in which the value hierarchy of high art and mass culture has been challenged in the comics medium. We will then consider the origins of the comic book in the superhero genre, with particular attention to early Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, and Spirit comics, along with the history of later superhero revisionism. We will do some reading in non-superhero genres in the later 40s and 50s, possibly including romance, war, western, science fiction, horror, and true crime comics, along with some example of the contemporary resurgence of one or more of these genres. We will end the course with some readings in the development of what are called alternative comics, which are generally less commercial, more experimental, more literary, and more aimed at an adult audience than either superhero or genre comics. Readings for the course will include some works available through library reserve, as well as works chosen from the following list (we will not read all of these books): Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics; Grant Geissman, Foul Play!: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics; Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen or Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns; Alan Moore and Gene Ha, Top 10, vol. 1, or Warren Ellis and John Casaday, Planetary or David Mack, Kabuki: Metamorphosis or Paul Chadwick, Concrete or Reginald Hudlin and John Romita Jr., Who Is the Black Panther; Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben, The Saga of the Swamp Thing (vol. 1) or Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life (vol. 2); Jaime Hernandez, The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.; Roberta Gregory, Life’s a Bitch; Kyle Baker, Nat Turner or Gene Yuen Lang, American Born Chinese.

Assignments for the course will probably include two formal essays, and some shorter informal writing.

Introduction to Cultural Studies: Narratives of Social Movements in 20th Century Cultural Texts

This course is interested in thinking about “culture” as a site where imaginations of liberation and social change are both organized and contested. It considers the role literature and other cultural texts have played historically in relation to the development of social movement practices, analytics and imaginations of alternative social formations. Broadly, we will use the methods, theories and practices championed by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others from the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies to explore and problematize the theorization of the relationship between social mobilization and cultural imaginaries throughout the 20th century. The primary questions animating this course include: What is the value of literature and cultural texts for social movements? What is the relationship between the political and the cultural? How has literature, art and music shaped social movements, historically? What are the possibilities and limitations of culture as a site for radical politics for subjects in differing social movements?

We will work from a selection of texts from thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Michael Denning, Paula Rabinowitz, Hazel Carby, and Walter Benjamin. Possible cultural texts include Salome of the Tenements, Quicksand, The Ways of White Folks, Caucausia, White Boy Shuffle, Corregidora, and Filter House.
There will be 2 final project options: 1) a more traditional research paper that deeply explores the animating themes and texts of the course; or 2) a cultural organizing project or “action.”

This course will provide an introduction to literature of the medieval and Renaissance periods, spanning roughly a millennium between 700-1700. As the course will expose, obsessing over the accuracy of historical periods is less productive and exciting than diving directly into the literature, which will cover themes both ancient and contemporary. Topics ranging from mythology, folklore, love, violence, philosophy, natural science, religion and technology will present a broad argument for the continuing vitality of literature from these periods; and the value of engaging primary texts from writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, Marie de France, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Andreas Capellanus, and William Shakespeare should become clear from rigorous class discussions, group projects, and solitary meditations.

Expectations for the course include one research paper, a group presentation, small writing assignments, and a final examination. The reading load will be significant and you are expected to come to class prepared for required participation.

Required Texts
Note: It is strongly recommended that you purchase the following editions. (ISBN in parenthesis.)

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. (0140714901)
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. (0199540543)
Alighieri, Dante. The New Life. (0940322870)
Marie de France. The Lais. (080102031x)
Armitage, Simon (translator). Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. (0393334155)
Course Packet. (Available at the Ave Copy Center.)

Between the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 in England and the bloody revolutions in America and in France a century later the world turned, some would say, upside down. We live with the results of the real and imagined transformations of the world in that period. In this course we will examine the fantasies and realities that helped to define our brave new world, along with the optimism and pessimism expressed in major documents that include Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, down the uncertain future envisioned by President Lincoln, Thomas Carlyle and Walt Whitman in the wake of the American Civil War. Lecture and discussion and a series of short essays written in and out of class.

Selections from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man; Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara—and After” and Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas—all on Electronic Reserve.

Texts:

• John Locke. The Second Treatise of Government. Dover Thrift Editions. [486-42464-2]
• Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (ed. De Maria). Penguin Classics. [9780141439495]
• Voltaire. Candide. Dover Thrift Edition. [0-486-26689-3]
• T. Jefferson et al. The Declaration of Independence and other Great Documents of American History (ed. J. Grafton). Dover Thrift Editions. [0-486-41124-9]

This course will examine the ruptures and continuities of Euro-American literature over the course if the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to how the literary and cultural legacy of the past century continues to inform (and to influence) twenty-first century life. Does the advent of postmodernism close the chapter on the modernist? Is the postmodern similarly wrapped up with . . . whatever came after it? Or do these movements, though perhaps no longer center stage, continue to shout obscenities from the wings?



We’ll begin this inquiry with George Saunders’s 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil in order to establish a twenty-first century context (yes, an admittedly problematic one). We’ll then circle around and read the twentieth century as it evolves. Texts will likely include:

Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914)
Faulkner’s The Sound & the Fury (1929)
Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953)
O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955)
Vonegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
DeLillo’s White Noise (1986)
Everett’s Erasure (2001)

This course will involve a lot of reading, a lot of discussion, and not a few persistent questions. Grades will be based on frequent in-class freewrites, two 3-4 page papers, and a final written exam. Regular attendance and active participation in class discussions will give you all the tools you need to succeed at the writing component of this course.

To read the works of Shakespeare, we must return to the world and words of Early Modern England. Relishing Shakespeare's plays requires us to examine the word-play, the dialect politics, and the general celebration of language that the Early Modern stage encouraged. This class provides an introduction to the plays of Shakespeare in conjunction with the language of late sixteenth-century England. When did one use "thou" or "thee"? Why do "prove" and "love" rhyme? Why does Shakespeare's grammar seem so different than our own? We will consider the sounds and meanings of words, the construction of sentences, and the dialect representation that give such a rich texture to Shakespeare's work. Readings include Twelfth Night, Love's Labor's Lost, Henry V, King Lear, and some accompanying linguistic/cultural material on Early Modern England. No previous experience with Shakespeare or language study is necessary; enthusiasm for the plays is the only prerequisite.

Catalog Description: Survey of Shakespeare's career as dramatist. Study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.

Catalog Description: Survey of Shakespeare's career as dramatist. Study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.

Discussions of fictional literature and the role it plays in human life (both within and without educational institutions, historically and in the contemporary moment) often revolve around how or whether fictional texts generate, reveal, critique, or reinforce values in their readers, and, therefore, change how those readers interact with their "real" worlds outside of the books they read, worlds full of people whose cultural experience is often quite different from their own. So, we tend to try to categorize (often problematically) fictional texts by the conditions that seem to most strongly inform the worlds they imagine--e.g. "Ethnic Fiction," "Environmental Fiction," "Gothic Fiction," "Detective Fiction."

For this class, we'll take up this problem by examining the extremely complex category of "Native American fiction." David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer and critic, has argued that "[Indians] function the way ghosts function in ghost stories," as cultural figures already dead, "admonishing" the living about what they're doing wrong in their lives. He controversially insists that we would be better readers of fiction if we realized that "Native American fiction does not exist," that both Indians and non-Indians "treat Native American fiction as a kind of cultural wish fulfillment" that, in the end, elides the important work that these texts and writers do in the broader culture, focusing more on the "Native" than the "Literature." So, using Treuer's critique as a starting point, we'll read texts written by both Indian and non-Indian writers that somehow represent "Native American" experience and see how our own critical reading might destabilize what we think we know about the !
differences between "real" and "fictional" worlds and the people and histories that inhabit them.

This is a 'W' course, so students will be responsible for producing 10-15 pages of writing (in the form of two 5-7 page essays) subject to instructor feedback and revision. Further responsibilities will include a short small-group presentation, several short writing/journal assignments, and consistent contribution to class and group discussions.

Texts and/or authors may include Helen Hunt Jackson, Black Elk, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Sherman Alexie, Jim Jarmusch, Zacharias Kunuk, and others.

Course Reader available from Ave Copy

Texts:

• Leslie Marmon Silko. Storyteller. [155970005X]
• Louise Erdrich. Love Medicine. [0061787426]
• David Treuer. The Translation of Dr Appelles. [0307386627]
• Sherman Alexie. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. [0316013692]

ENGL 242 courses are designed to provide an introduction to the skills and techniques associated with reading, analyzing, and writing about fictional literature. This particular course will familiarize the student with different periods of literature and the dominant modes of thought that have influenced fiction writers at various historical junctures; to this end, readings will be drawn from the Romantic, Realist, Modern, and Postmodern periods. In addition to improving reading and writing skills, the student should exit the course with a deeper appreciation for fictional literature and the ways in which fiction both reflects and influences society. Student responsibilities include daily attendance, active participation in discussions and activities, two online postings, two short paper proposals, and two 5-7 page papers with revisions.

Course Reader, which will include short stories, journal articles, and other short readings.

Texts:

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Norton, 1995. [0393964582]
• Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick Eds. Herschel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: Norton, 2001. [0393972836]
• James, Henry. Daisy Miller Eds. David Lodge and Philip Horne. New York: Penguin, 2007. [0141441348]
• Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 2005. [0156030357]
• DeLillo, Don. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1998. [ 0140274987]
• Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th Ed.). New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. [1603290249]

Why do we read literature? Because it is through literature—through the eyes of great authors—that an ordinary life can become more large, rich, genuine, veracious, and vital. In this class, your imagination will be provoked by pictures, sounds, images, and facts, leading to self-inquiry and self-realization. In other words, literature can open windows for us, allowing us to gain new perspectives on our world, while in real life these windows are likely to be opaque or closed.

Together, we will read classic literature, mainly of America and Britain. We are about to explore different genres of literature that has been produced during a myriad of historical periods. The selected texts are aware of the sophistication of human nature and reflect varying social concerns. We’ll take a look at a “love story” that happens in early 20th century India under British colonialism in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World; discover the reality of early 20th-century New York society, which is shown by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence; examine the social “discourse” that has shaped classic literature, represented by E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India; investigate colonial abandonment and alienation through both Richard Wright’s rage in his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Toni Morrison’s sorrow in Beloved; and, in the end, query an Orientalist existence in M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.

Secondary materials will probably include excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, which are available in the photocopied course packet. Movie clips are going to be incorporated into class discussions.

The writing assignments for this class will be formed by online discussions and journal entries. In this writing course, you will be required to accomplish EITHER a final paper, which reaches 10-15 pages, OR two short, 5-7-page papers—one for the midterm and the other for the final. Peer reviews and revisions are compulsory.

Book list
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright
Beloved by Toni Morrison
M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

Texts:

This course is organized under the thematic of the US/Mexico borderlands, and will work through a selection of fictional texts that prompt critical reevaluations of the historical formation of the US/Mexico border. Yet rather than taking the US/Mexico border in geographic and historical isolation, this course is anchored in a selection of fictional texts that figure the borderlands as a hemispheric epicenter of the Americas.

By thinking about the US/Mexico borderlands in terms of the history of the Americas as a whole, we will work through texts that employ a variety of fictional genres and techniques in order to think about the relationship between history, narrative, representation, and violence. In doing so, this course will dwell on the following questions: How do fictional texts represent political borders and national histories? What is the relationship between fiction writing, historical knowledge, and social violence? How do some of the contemporary forms of violence that mark the US/Mexico borderlands resonate with earlier historical moments? How are these forms of violence connected to epistemologies of race, gender, sexuality, and class?

English 242 meets the university “W” requirement, which means that students must produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. This will take the form of two 5-7 page papers.

Primary Texts:
-Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (1991)
-Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashta (1997)
-The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo (1986)
-The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories by Américo Paredes (1994)

There will also be a photocopied reader with theoretical and historical readings available at the Ave. Copy Center

This course proposes to read poems formally: that is, grouped by style rather than by country or age; bodily: we'll pass them through our throats and hands, not merely beneath our eyes; and critically: as in "art critic" i.e. with scrutiny, and as in "critical condition" as though it matters.

We'll paint quickly and with a broad brush, touching the greatest writers in the Western poetic tradition, from figures both major and minor, some of whose work you'll no doubt have encountered, but most of which will be new.
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Attempting to understand this business of poetry, we'll consider the art and its creators from several angles: in addition to the work itself, we'll read letters, criticism, manifestoes, and reviews in order to understand not only what this work means, but what it has meant. To readers in generations past, poetry was not only the queen of the arts, but the very aqua vitae. Our job will be to taste and to develop taste: "to divine" in the old sense: sourcing and mapping poetic springs.

What understanding we manage to form, what inroads to make, will be codified in written responses of the following type and manner. 1) a reading journal featuring informal weekly responses to the work, which will be revised at quarter's end into formal critical engagements. 2) a keepsake book, wherein we'll hand-copy the full text of certain poems as a way to see better the lineation and mechanics of the work. 3) a poetry explication: this is a specific skill through which a writer demonstrates tonal/imagistic/and metrical mastery of a given piece. 4) a free-form essay that demonstrates a unique (or at least personal) interpretive position regarding the art or artist with whose work you find particular resonance.

Critical interpretation of major plays which explore the stories of Don Juan and Faust. Discussion topics include: types of drama (tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, parody); dramatic conventions and effects; major themes, historical contexts, and intertextual connections. Texts: Tirso De Molina, Don Juan (Course Pack); George Etheridge, The Man of Mode (New Mermaids); Max Frisch, Don Juan or the Love of Geometry (Course Pack); Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Signet Classic); Moliere, Don Juan, tr. By Richard Wilbur (Harvest); Goethe, Faust Part I, tr. By David Constantine (Penguin Classics); George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Penguin); John M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover Thrift). Students must read Marlowe’s Faust, the Introduction, and the sources printed in the Signet edition before the first meeting. Numerous quizzes and a final

One of literature’s chief characteristics is its ability to think about itself and the culture and history it is a part of while simultaneously projecting an engaging narrative. When literature reflects on both itself and the surrounding culture, it becomes a particularly rich tool for literary critics and readers to engage history and, more importantly, the present socio-cultural landscape. This can be most glimpsed at in the simple question: how did we get here? The job of readers is to work within an explicit narrative in order to excavate the implicit cultural commentary. This self-reflective characteristic of literature couldn’t be more pronounced in American literature where authors have, not only reflected, but have critiqued, parodied, and even attacked the culture they are writing within. Whether in the quiet contemplation of Thoreau, or the vibrant rhetoric of Anzaldua; whether in the cut ups of Dos Passos representing the industrial revolution, or the parody of consumerism in Fight Club—American literature has regularly interrogated itself and the surrounding culture through both its form and content. In order to engage how literature thinks about itself and its culture as well as its historical moment our course will be split into themes accompanied by appropriate authors. The themes that follow are not the only ones imaginable. However, I’ve selected the themes I feel will help us answer the following questions: How is literature supporting and perpetuating a particular cultural project, such as, for example, nationalism? How is literature critiquing such projects and what forms do these critiques take? Basically, we want to examine how literature thinks and to do so we must carefully examine the reciprocal relationship between American literature and American culture.

Themes will be the following and will appear in this order: “Nation Building” (Benedict Anderson, Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Nathanial Hawthorne); “The Antebellum Period and Slavery” (Frederick Douglass, Octavia E. Butler), “Utopia/Dystopia” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nathaniel Hawthorne); “Reflections on America” (Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Gloria Anzaldua); “American Modernism and Postmodernism” (Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, Chester Himes, Hubert Selby Jr., Jack Kerouac, Pulp Fiction/Tarantino, Thomas Pynchon); “American Consumer Culture” (Bret Easton Ellis, Fight Club/Fincher/Palahniuk, Jean Baudrillard, Don DeLillo). While most of these texts appear in chronological order, we will not allow time to determine the trafficking of these texts. Therefore, I hope that we will be able to discuss, write, and think across these themes and period during the quarter.

Students will compose regular goposts on the course online forum and compose two 5-6 page papers. Students will also participate in group presentations correlating with the above themes.

*Texts and films might shift slightly between now and Fall quarter.

Texts:
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Bartleby, Herman Melville
If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Films:
Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino
Fight Club, David Fincher/Chuck Palahniuk

Course Packet Materials:
Imagined Communities (excerpts), Benedict Anderson
“What is an American?,” Hector St. John De Crevecoeur
“Common Sense” (excerpt), Thomas Paine
“The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” Frederick Douglass
“Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
Walden (excerpt), Henry David Thoreau
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Walt Whitman
“A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg
Borderlands (excerpts), Gloria Anzaldua
The Big Money (excerpt), John Dos Passos
Last Exit to Brooklyn (excerpt), Hubert Selby Jr.
Underworld (excerpt), Don DeLillo
American Psycho (excerpt), Bret Easton Ellis
“Consumer Society,” Jean Baudrillard

This course offers an introduction to the study of U.S. literature. Rather than beginning with the assumption that we already know the canonical works and authors of American literature, this course will ask the question; what constitutes "American" literature? We will explore what it means to define "American" literature and what logics and assumptions are at work in deciding what gets included in an "American" literature survey course. It also poses the question: What is the relationship between a nationalist literature and the political, economic and social elements of U.S. culture? As we read, we will work together to explore the ways literature produces, reflects and at times problematizes the project of the nation itself.

Evaluation will be comprised of in-class participation, several short written papers, one in-class presentation and two exams.

Possible authors may include: Ralph W. Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, Charles W. Chesnutt, Nella Larson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. Hemingway, Emily Dickenson, W. Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy and Karen T. Yamashita.

(Many of the primary and all secondary critical texts will be available in a course reader.)

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.

English 281 is an intermediate writing course designed to help you develop greater rhetorical sensitivity. A central goal of this course is to assist you to expand the reading and writing skills you possess by cultivating a critical awareness of the ways in which written communication takes place. In this class we will consider writing from a rhetorical framework. That is to say, writing will be understood as serving real purposes for real people under different circumstances. To this end, we will examine how, and why, the uses of writing vary from situation to situation, how writers can successfully recognize these differences, and how they can strategically use different writing forms to achieve distinctive ends.

English 281 will use a method of investigation called genre analysis—a method that enables you to recognize the conditions, attitudes and habits that motivate recurring writing forms, what we often call genres. These include standard compositions like the complaint letter, lab report, research paper, and less academic forms like the sales add. The emphasis in our class will not be on mastering anyone of these genres, but on becoming aware of the contexts that promote them. By understanding how and why specific situations and interactions encourage specific forms of writing, you will be better equipped to make more intelligent, deliberate and effective choices when writing under different circumstances.

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.

John McPhee, Pulitzer Prize winner and grandmaster of literary nonfiction, said about writing, "The first draft [is] an unreadable thing. And you would not want to show it to anybody because it's just full of entrails hanging out with loose ends...You belch it all out on paper. When you've got something on paper, you then have something to work with...and turn into a piece of writing." Writing is all about guts, gas, gross anatomy, and getting down to business. Writing isn't a check mark, a destination vacation, a graduation requirement. Rather, it's a practice, a process, an extreme sport. This course will take up McPhee's writer's heroic journey -- from unreadable thing to piece of writing -- by engaging what it means to be a good writer, reader, and researcher, how to recognize and develop the skills and strategies to write, read, and research, and why good writing, reading, and researching are central to everything you do. Be prepared for a quarter of high-impact, low-stake, high-risk, creativity-freeing, genre-tripping, word-playing, workshop-intensive writing, reading, and thinking. This will be hard, but it will be fun. You will hate it, but you will grow to love it. We will trek, tromp, jump, crunch, sweat, and swear through academic, expository, persuasive, and creative writing challenges. We will set high goals and meet touch benchmarks. We will hone the tools and muscles you already have and push, stretch, and dream till you're one lean, mean writing machine. Are you ready? Let's do this.

Prerequisites:

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

The focus of this class is writing. Good writing does not occur in a vacuum, which is to say that it cannot be pulled off effectively without considering audience, social context, intention, genre, and a whole host of other rhetorical concerns that we will address in this class. Although there is not a heavy duty reading load or a tightly formed “theme,” the secondary focus of this course is on studying the “media” (how to critique and write about various media, how to effectively create content for media, and so on). In particular, we will use contemporary social issues being talked about in the media (broadly defined to include magazines, newspapers, blogs, film, music, art, television) as an entry way, content, and exigency for our writing projects. There will be ample room for students to explore issues key to their own interests, disciplines, career plans, etc.

We will consider what it means to write effectively at all stages of the process, for different audiences and contexts, and in various genres. We will be concerned not only with rhetorical invention (how one comes up with something important to write about in the first place), but also with polish, style, and the consequences of our writing. We will also consider surface-level language choices, organization, use of evidence, and so on.

Students will do short, daily written responses and complete various writing assignments that build up to a larger project. Many of the projects will be in the publicly oriented genres like those we study (news articles, blog entries, etc.). We will spend several class periods in a computer classroom, which will facilitate our investigation of new digital media, as well as our analysis of visual rhetoric.

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

This course, as you may have guessed, is an introduction to the writing of short fiction. Through close readings of both classic and contemporary works, you will study the fundamental topics of writing, including, but not limited to, character, plot, point of view, scene, exposition, setting, theme, and pacing. One component of this class will be the workshop, in which you will bring your work to class and receive valuable feedback from your peers. Much of this class will be devoted to exploration, risk taking, and thought (both creative and analytical). You have stories to tell, and this class intended to provide as many avenues as possible for you to do so. You will be encouraged to experiment with your relationship with ideas and with your own material. There will be frequent short writing assignments, and by the end of the quarter, you will turn in at least twenty pages of revised writing, including at least one complete short story.

Text book: Janet Burroway, /Writing Fiction /ISBN-13: 9780321277367, also using a course pack

Course Description
The only way to become a writer is, quite simply, to write. Of course, this task is deceptively simple: What does it mean to write? What does it mean to be a writer? And, most importantly, how do we do it? How do we go about attending to this unexplainable passion, this need we have to sit down and fill up a blank page with our own made-up stories and wild imaginings, and then (gasp), dare to hope that someone will read them? One answer, it seems, has very much to do with the act of writing as a way of thinking about ourselves, a way of creating ourselves, rather than simply a means of self-expression; the other answers, however, we will stumble upon during this course, day by day, as we sit down together and go about the nitty-gritty, often messy and uncomfortable process of writing.
In this course, we will devote ourselves to the rigorous study and practice of creative writing in a supportive and stimulating community of writers. During class sessions, we will not only study, but practice various elements of fiction writing, including, among others, character development, dialogue, plot, point of view, and pacing, especially as they manifest themselves in the short story form. We will also give thoughtful, meaningful and constructive feedback on each other’s writing during workshop sessions. Throughout the next ten weeks, be prepared to read and engage with published short stories, with particular attention to the craft of writing; study narrative technique through diverse writing exercises; respond to your fellow writers’ work respectfully and thoughtfully; think critically and (more) “objectively” about your own work; and, above all, write. This course is, in large part, about coming to a deeper understanding of writing as a process – but even more, it is about learning to love the process. This course, in other words, is not for the faint of heart; but then again, neither is the writing life.

Book List
Required: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th edition
By Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French
ISBN No.: 978-0321277367 (Softcover)

Recommended: Letters to a Young Poet
By Rainer Maria Rilke

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

This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on six major nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Students will work with key critical concepts associated with the poetics of the novel (story and plot, authorship and modes of narration, reliable and unreliable narrators, framing and embedding, point of view, methods of representing consciousness, irony, defamiliarization, metafiction, intertextuality). Please note: English 302B is an introduction to advanced literary analysis, and the class is reading-intensive. The novels by Balzac, Eliot, and Flaubert (see below) must be read before the first meeting. Books: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet Classic); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Signet Classic); George Eliot, Silas Marner (Oxford World’s Classics (or Signet); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial pack of critical essays. Numerous quizzes and a final.

This course will focus on two perhaps seemingly contrary approaches to analyzing literature, formalism and feminist theory/gender & sexuality studies. We will read different genres of literature and discuss the difference between, as well as the overlap in, these interpretive practices.

This course will offer an in-depth survey of modern literary and cultural theory. Students will be guided to discover the deep links between modern theories of liberty and literary production, consumption and meaning. The diverse and incongruent thinkers that we will encounter during the quarter share nonetheless a foundational axiom of critique: each in different ways interrogates the modern liberal premise of individual liberty that otherwise undergird modern theories of individual and collective agency. We will begin with the most important late-nineteenth century critics of modern liberalism: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. From there we will study some of the most important literary scholars of the 20th century who have pursued, transformed and amplified the critical methods initiated by the aforementioned critics of modernity. Our investigations will reveal literary theory as centrally preoccupied with the limits of the liberal tradition in comprehending questions of authorship, literary form, originality, value, aesthetics and language.

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

Although the course requires the words “in translation” in order to accommodate the many languages adopted by Jewish writers after 1880, I have expanded the list to include several works that do not require translation because they were written originally in America and in the English language. Yet even for these stories written in English I would retain the notion of “translation” which comes to us from the Latin past participle—translatum—of the verb transferre which describes a journey, a crossing of rivers, borders, and oceans, to transport oneself or to carry baggage from one domain to another. Language and literature become an important part of that baggage. In this course we will trace the migration of Jewish literature between 1880 and 1940 from the Yiddish language commonly spoken in the shtetl and the ghetto of Eastern Europe to its re-emergence in various languages from Tel Aviv to Odessa and New York. Our readings include the Yiddish of Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and I. B. Singer, the Hebrew of Dvora Baron and S.Y. Agnon, the Russian of Isaac Babel, and the first phase of a Jewish-American literature written in English with a heavy inflection of Yiddish by Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth. I will also appeal to film, painting, and song throughout the period. Although the focus of the course is Jewish writers before the Holocaust, we will conclude with several stories (and films) from the post-War period that bear the imprint of the tradition that we will have just studied.

Stories by Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz and I. B. Singer (Electronic Reserve)
Dvora Baron [1887-1956] (H & Y) The First Day
Isaac Babel [1894-1941] (R) Collected Stories
Abraham Cahan [1860-1951] (E) Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom
Henry Roth [1906-1995] (E), Call it Sleep
Stories by Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth (Electronic Reserve)

Course Description: This course explores poetry and prose written during the early 20th Century. We will focus specifically on the literary developments of modernism in Europe and the United States. Modernism does not have a single clear meaning in that it developed across a variety of fields and styles in reaction to cultural and political changes during the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century. Applicable to either or both content and form, it reflects a sense of cultural crisis before and during the turn of the century and the two World Wars. This period, which was also marked by major developments in technology, was both exciting and disquieting, opening up a whole new sense of possibility while also promoting the destruction of old values and the dissolution of the belief in absolute knowledge and ideological certainty.
Literary reactions to this sense of dissolution were varied and thus engendered the development of a new aesthetics of experimentation, fragmentation, ambiguity, and nihilism.

Course Readings: We will read poetry by Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Stein;
prose by Woolf, Proust, Kafka and Hemingway; and philosophical excerpts by Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, Benjamin and Wittgenstein. Texts will be available at the UW Bookstore and a course
packet.

n this course we will be considering how literary works reflect the changing cultural conditions surrounding their production. We will track the rise of literate works out of an oral culture, and look at some of the ways that the printing press transformed literature forever. Work will include 4 short tests, a 5-8 page paper, participation in a Team Presentation, and postings to our discussion site.

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

See catalog description above. In this course on Shakespeare’s later works, the focus will be mostly on the great Bard’s tragedies, and a couple of his Romances. Texts include: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest (and perhaps Anthony and Cleopatra, if time permits).

The course will offer a broad overview of the political, intellectual and literary history of the Romantic period (1789-1850), focusing on the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments during this period in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism), aesthetics (the prevailing interest in the sublime and the emergence of the aesthetics of the picturesque), art (the change from the tradition of portrait paintings or paintings on historical subjects to landscape paintings in which the main subject is represented by nature as the human figure diminishes in size and significance), and gardening (the change from the formal garden to a landscape that more nearly resembles the uncultivated look of the wilderness, according to standards set forth by picturesque aesthetics). After three weeks on these introductory topics, we will turn to an in-depth study of Blake's poetry and art work, and move on to the literary collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth. We will focus on Coleridge's and Wordsworth's unusual dependence on each other, personal as well as literary, beneficial as well as disabling, and their appropriation of each other's themes and poetic genres.

TEXTS: William Blake
Blake's Poetry an Designs (Norton)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford UP).
America: A Prophecy & Europe: A Prophecy (Dover).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton)
William Wordsworth
Selected Poetry (Everyman)
Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy
(Cambridge UP).

This course examines a set of central themes that emerge from Sigmund Freud’s theories of the dream, the nature of literary creativity, the operation of the human psyche, and the substance of human culture. We will take as our starting point the hypothesis that Freud conceives the psyche as a kind of writing machine, an “author” that produces fictional narratives that share many properties with the prose fiction generated by creative writers. For this reason, our focus throughout the quarter will be restricted to prose narratives. The course will concentrate on literature produced in the wake of Freud’s theories, that is, on texts that consciously or unconsciously develop Freudian ideas. The class is structured around a set of themes that will be developed on the basis of paired readings: in each case we will examine a text or excerpt from Freud’s psychological works in conjunction with the reading of a literary text that exemplifies the issue or issues highlighted in Freud’s theory. Literary works treated include writings by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and others. Course requirements: regular attendance at lecture and discussion sessions; weekly short writing assignments; 2 short interpretive papers.

Book list:
Sigtmund Freud, The Freud Reader
Arthur Schnitzler, Lieutenant Gustl
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and selected short stories
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Robert Musil, Young Torless
Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza

Students who would like more information about the course structure are encouraged to consult the course Web site: http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

Catalog Description: Relationships between literature and other arts, such as painting, photography, architecture, and music, or between literature and other disciplines, such as science.

This course prioritizes texts by women of color activists and scholars. These writers use their craft to recreate an image of a more just society, influence public opinion, tell untold stories, and challenge prevailing assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, privilege, class, and power. The writings we will examine this quarter are written by a heterogeneous mix of international scholars and writers, and speak to issues of social justice in various global locations. Literature, memoir, biography, cinema, theory and manifesto are some of the genres with which we will engage.

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

13 ways of looking at a piece of paper. Prose gestures from allegory to collage to list. Lectures, discussion, packet, writing, revision, critiques. Goal: open up work.

URL: www.davidshields.com)

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

What cultural, theoretical and political trends inform black literary production at the end of the twentieth century, or in the eras through out the civil rights movement, the black cultural nationalist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, and integration? In this seminar, we will consider the political and institutional demands of formalizing the discipline of black literary studies in the academy, and the manner in which interdisciplinary approaches have transformed methods for reading black literature and culture. A consistent concern will be the stakes and criteria for producing, evaluating, and critiquing various forms and genres of black literary expression. Many of the critical and literary texts to be considered make self-conscious efforts to define the intellectual and political stakes for black cultural production, the meaning of black identity, and the conditions of community. Texts might include: Burgett and Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies; Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism, Winston Napier, African American Literary Theory: A Reader; Chester Himes, The End of a Primitive; James Baldwin, Another Country; Alice Walker, Meridian; Octavia Butler, Kindred; August Wilson, Fences; Lorene Cary, Black Ice; Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father.

Catalog Description: Themes and topics offering special approaches to literature.

Throughout the 19th century, and continuing into the 20th, frontiers and borderlands have represented imaginative spaces charged with both problems and possibility in the Americas. Our capstone will consider the different ways such borderland stories, which frequently revolve around conflict, have shaped national, international, indigenous, and multi-national allegiances and ways of imagining community. Paradoxical mirages, frontiers have represented both the dream of a classless society and the possibility of new forms of capital accumulation; the proving ground for Anglo-masculinity and spaces marked by chicano and chicana resistance and emergent subjectivities; a contact zone facilitating cross-cultural exchange and a zone marked by racial violence. Rather than trying to resolve these apparently contradictory framings, our seminar will examine the shifting ways borderland representations have shaped, and continue to shape, community in the Americas. To this end we will take up a number of cultural forms: history, social theory, short stories, novels and film.

As an advanced seminar, your grade will largely be based on active and committed engagement to both our materials and our critical conversations.

Authors will likely include (but are not limited to): George Lippard, Americo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldua, Thomas King, Helena María Viramontes, William Gibson

Relevant scholars will likely include (but are not limited to): Philip Deloria, José David Saldívar, Richard Slotkin, Richard White, Amy Kaplan, Shelley Streeby, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

In 1955, Chloe Anthony Wofford (later known as Toni Morrison) wrote part of her MA thesis on “Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the alienated.” What might have drawn Morrison to make a study of some of Woolf’s fiction? Do the novels Morrison went on to write have ideas similar to those in Woolf? Or did she work against Woolf’s fiction in devising her own characters and situations? What, if anything, do these two famous twentieth-century writers, so different in class, nation, and ethnic background share? In this course we will read novels (and some non-fiction) by both writers in order to address these and other questions. Come expecting lively discussion, differences of opinion and a chance to read some wonderful writing.

This course provides an overview of the key theories and methods that have informed writing instruction, assessment, and curricular design since the emergence of the process movement in the late-1960s. The “process” approach shifted focus from the formal features of a finished writing product to the process writers undergo to produce effective writing. The movement opened space, furthermore, for conversations about student voice, self-expression, political resistance, and exclusion.

We will explore and challenge composition theories that have evolved out of and in response to the process movement. The breadth of such work, among other things, pays greater attention to the challenges of teaching within “diverse” classrooms, to the social dimension of writing in various genres and contexts; and to the possibilities of service learning and community-based writing initiatives.

Please note that this is a service learning course, and you will be expected to work three to four hours each week in a local classroom, for which you will receive two hours of course credit by enrolling in Education 401. This work will culminate in a curricular design project. (There will be an alternative research option available for students who are unable to participate in the service learning component.) The service learning in this course will fulfill 30-40 of the observation hours that you are required to complete prior to applying to the UW Masters in Teaching program.

In practical terms, students will be expected to write weekly position papers in response to course readings, complete a curricular design project, facilitate a teaching forum discussion, and develop a teaching philosophy statement. We will further ground our theoretical work by examining the Washington state mandates for student learning and assessment in secondary education, including the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) and the Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs).

This course encourages lively dialogue about the teaching of writing with the hope of collectively clarifying and enriching our teaching practices (or aspiring practices) in relation to the history of composition theory and practice, within the constraints of our various institutions, within the political climate of classrooms, schools and communities, and with respect to our personal convictions about what it means to teach writing to real students in a specific time and place.

Texts

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing.
Dean, Deborah. Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being.
A course pack of selected readings.

If you come across people saying or writing things like these, you may well wonder who they are, what they are saying, and what language they are speaking:

1.(from newspaper)
Health and environment him all big-fellow something all woman along
country today he got big-fellow worry along him.

2. ...which-one principal came here, she's just cheeky like the other one

3. (from newspaper apropos Sonja Gandhi)
What's more we should respect her for being a layak Indian bahu who stayed on to do her duty by her husband's family, she reared her children and instilled in them the best Indian values, she took care of her mother-in-law and husband's legacy.

4. A: How come you borrow my shirt now got hole one?!
B: Borrow that time already like that, wut!
A: Then why you never say first?
B: You never ask, wut!

5. (ten year old child to another child who said something in Igbo)
Tokam for inglish na, a no de hyar di ting we yu de tok.

There's a range of difference here, but all have a major component of what we call English. We would not call all of them New Englishes. (1) and (5) are from pidgins (at least originally)but the others do illustrate the term. New/World/Global/Post Colonial Englishes have been developing and increasing in use in former colonies very rapidly and they have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention recently.

In this course, we will study a handful of these New Englishes, exploring Mesthrie and Bhatt's claim that New English departures from the standard in accent, grammar, vocabulary, discourse markers, and speech acts cluster rather closely together. We will also be grappling with issues of history and politicswith issues of the Standard, cultural identity and exclusion, and the heritage of colonialism, and with Edgar Schneider's model of stages of emergence of a New English, which makes American English the oldest and most mature New English.

ENGL 478 Language and Social Policy (5) I&S/VLPA
Examines the relationship between language policy and social organization; the impact of language policy on immigration, education, and access to resources and political institutions; language policy and revolutionary change; language rights.

What do all these items have in common? Global English, testing kindergarten readiness, U.S. English, laws about what can be on signs, interpreters in hospitals, the MLA Guide, French and English laws in Canada, and the New York Times style manual are all related to language policy in the United States and elsewhere. This course is an introduction to language policy. Each of the items in the list itself is part of a language policy. We'll examine how language policy works its way into many parts of our daily lives in the U.S. and we’ll also examine language policy internationally. In addition to reading an overview of the field, we'll read articles, legal cases, examples of language tests, and style guides as examples of language policy. Each individual class member will carry out a research project on a current U.S. language policy, reporting to the class and writing a paper on the results of the research.

This workshop will help students continue to develop their skills as poets both by writing poetry and by preparing critiques of the poetry of others. We will look carefully at how our choices within a poem--for instance, those concerning lineation, point of view, or the use of traditional and non-traditional constraints--influence the reader's experience of our poems. Students will write seven poems during the quarter and submit a final manuscript of revised work.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This course considers aesthetic strategies often explicitly disassociated with political crisis: representations of romantic love and family life. Stories of love and family, whether celebratory or critical, are often presented as if they have little to do with broader political and economic conditions. This means that such stories are treated as if they are independent of the forces of nationalism, empire, capitalism, racism, or structural hierarchies of sex and gender. Even when they appear connected to these forces, love and family are often read as transcending them or revealing the ultimate power and dignity of human choice. This course explores the aesthetics and politics of one dominant genre within this field, “family romance,” in order to examine the intimate linkage of sexuality, domesticity, and political economy. This exploration will historicize family romance in relation to colonial and anti-colonial struggles over self-representation, arguments about the allegorical forms of nationalism, and debates concerning the political legitimacy of realism. It will also seek to unsettle historical progress narratives and disentangle aesthetic practices from their presumed political agendas, asking how specific aesthetic practices can be used for divergent political aims. Our main literary texts will focus on the United States and may include work by Charles Brockdon Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Sa, Junot Diaz, Fae Myenne Ng, and Toni Morrison (final authors and time period to be determined), but we will work to situate these texts within broader transnational circuits. Our approach will be infused with aesthetic and political questions derived from studies of romance, realism, and post-modernism as well as feminist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonial, and anti-capitalist critique.

This course considers aesthetic strategies associated with political crisis. It focuses on South Africa whose system of rigid racial segregation erupted into open confrontation during the 1980s, as anti-racist, communist and black community activists coalesced to challenge the racist state. The government responded by declaring a state of emergency and authorizing extreme force. Accompanying political agitation was an explosion of literary creativity and fervent critical debate about aesthetics, among academics, activists and creative writers. This course engages with these debates and considers them within a broader context of Marxist, nationalist and postcolonial approaches to literary production, social domination and resistance. Four major and contrasting novels, by black, white and ‘Coloured’ writers Mongane Serote, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Zoe Wicomb, published during this turbulent decade, provide the literary components of the course and serve to anchor the aesthetic-political debates. Among questions to be explored are: does realist fiction reinforce the politics of liberal reformism, or can it promote social revolution? Does metafictional experimentation promote individualism at the expense of collective values and agendas? What types of racial ideology are embedded within these aesthetic strategies? What kinds of anti-colonial resistance and solidarity become possible to imagine during a state of emergency? Do black and white writers differ in their deployment of narrative forms?

This course examines contemporary and historical works by U.S. Latino authors, a pan-ethnic umbrella term that refers to an imagined community whose members share a common Latin American descent without necessarily sharing a concrete national background. Since its emergence in the 19th century from a foundational triad of ethnic communities (Mexican American, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican), Latino literature in the U.S. has been fuelled by a “dialectics of difference” (Ramón Saldívar) between minority and dominant cultures, including a quest for identity-formation as well as an assertion of difference within the anglophone U.S. literary tradition.

We will explore how these multiple and contradictory forces in the making of Latino literature are mediated through textual and formal patterns. The course is organized around paradigmatic debates and issues concerning Latino literature, and we will ask questions such as: In representing their minority histories of conquest and internal colonialism, how have Chicano and Puerto Rican authors adapted and transformed the Western genres of the historical novel and the historical romance? In protesting against their racialization and proletarianization after 1848, how have Chicano authors exposed the universalism of liberal individualism as a fiction, consequently pushing literary character-classification beyond the individual toward the collective? In articulating their bilingualism and biculturalism, how have Latino authors created a unique blend of anglophone and hispanophone literature—Spanglish American literature? In transposing the U.S. American story of immigration from transatlantic into hemispheric American trajectories, how have Latino authors reinvented the U.S. genre of ethnic autobiography and adapted the Latin American genre of magical realism? How has the literature of Latino exiles published by Cubans and other Latin Americans in the U.S. for more than two centuries deterritorialized fictional space by mapping a spatial dialectic between home and exile, and by addressing transnational imagined communities? During the civil rights era of the 1960s, how have Chicano and Puerto Rican authors forged militant aesthetics in literature akin to, but distinct from, the black arts movement?


Course texts: Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez; Giannina Braschi, Yo-Yo Boeing; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Tomás Rivera, . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra / . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Ana Castillo, So Far from God; Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (selections), and a Course Reader with secondary literature.

‘Get thee a wife, get thee a wife. There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.’ So Benedick cheerfully encourages Don Pedro to marry, just as he will, by re-imagining the inevitability of infidelity in reverential terms. We’ll take this as a point of entry into the worlds of Shakespeare’s middle comedies and look back at how he got here and forward at least as far as the problem comedies, from his plot structure, his sense of verbal play, his idea of gender relations and social concerns to the assumptions underlying the qualified optimism of his endings. We’ll consider a number of the comedies. In addition to Much Ado About Nothing we will give attention to The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, I and II Henry IV, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure.. There will be some forays into theory: Frey, Barber, Bakhtin, etc., and some other readings--Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and a selection of the sonnets, for example. We’ll be interested in contemporary approaches to the plays from the margins as well as from the middle. Requirements: collaborate with seminar colleagues in leading the discussion on one of the scheduled topics. Write a critical paper or complete a project (an editing project, a bibliographical study, a website, a lesson plan) of medium length on any course related subject of interest.

At the University Bookstore:
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (1965; rpt. Columbia University Press,1995)
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Princeton, 1972)
Ave At the Copy Center (4141 University Way NE)
A packet (CP)

Texts: