In this course we will address two fundamental questions: what does it mean to read a work of literature critically, and could that process be pleasurable? To answer these questions we will read a variety of forms of literature considering how form and content play a crucial role in how we respond to these texts intellectually and emotionally. Central to our discussions will be the ways in which the aesthetic category of the sublime is seen as a particular and specific variety of aesthetic pleasure, both in the grandeur of language and thought within a text, as well as deriving pleasure from the feelings of terror and horror--a desire the movie industry has traded on rather successfully for nearly a century.

To this end we will read works by, but not limited to, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Seamus Deane. We will also be reading a short selection of critical works that explore (and challenge) the notions and definitions of “text,” “author,” and “reader,” in an effort to further our inquiry into the nature and critical practice of reading literature.

This class offers a "W" credit. This means that course participants will be expected to produce a total of 10-15 pages of formal, academic writing which has gone through a cycle of instructor feedback and revision. We will cover some formal academic writing technique in this class, but please keep in mind that this is not fundamentally a writing course. Though prior composition credits are not prerequisite, such experience will be to your distinct advantage.

Course Texts:

Hamlet, William Shakespeare (ISBN-10: 0393956636/ ISBN-13: 978-0393956634)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (ISBN-10: 0393964582/ISBN-13: 978-0393964585)
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (ISBN-10: 039395904X /ISBN-13: 978-0393959048)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (ISBN-10: 0393926362 / ISBN-13: 978-0393926361)
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane (ISBN-10: 0375700234ISBN-13: 978-0375700231)
*Additional readings will be available via course packet or through library e-reserves

“Victorian Zombie” will emphasize the pleasures of critical inquiry into mid-to-late nineteenth-century texts that articulate human experience – particularly the macabre, monstrous encounter with the living dead. We will read novels, short stories, and poetry, and consider film and ballet about zombies in Victorian culture. This context is useful for situating larger questions about race, gender, and nationality, as we will emphasize the role of the zombie body in literature. Close reading practices, argumentation skills, exploratory discussion, and academic-level composition will aide students in their development as interesting writers, critical thinkers, and epicureans who glut themselves on the multifarious pleasures of literature. This course satisfies the writing requirement (W) at the University of Washington, as students will compose two 5-page academic essays.

This course will draw material from 19th, 20th, and 21st-century texts, primarily poetry and
fiction. The texts will range from more traditional to more experimental. Classwork will address approaches to close reading and criticism. With the poems, we will look at different poetic forms and their effects. With the fiction, we will examine diversity in narrative form - in other words, how stories are told, and why. Possible authors include Dickinson, Rimbaud, Platonov, Beckett, Marquez, Lowry, and Bernadette Mayer.

The course satisfies the university's W requirement. Students will write one final, 10-12 page paper, which they will have an opportunity to revise in consultation with the instructor.

This course will introduce you to the practice of reading literature. Although we’ll read texts that span a time period of a century and a half, and although we’ll address a variety of cultural forms, the texts that we’ll explore share preoccupations that will allow us to put them into conversation. Specifically, this course will treat texts within which monsters and monstrosities abound.

As we work to develop our close reading skills, we will learn to read a variety of cultural forms in relation to their particular social and historical context, not as artifacts, but as full participants in the making and meaning of that context called modernity. What’s modernity? This course will acquaint you with some of the central historical developments that have conventionally been cited in answer to this question, even as the focus will be on literary mediations of these developments. The transition from a feudal economy to capitalist relations of production, the rise of the nation-state and the public sphere, the proliferation of innovations in science and technology - these are just a few of the defining historical characteristics of “modernization” that our literary archive will address. Modernity is a monster of a concept. There are additional reasons for pairing monsters and modernity within a single course theme, however. To begin, the processes of modernization sketched above have had their monstrous manifestations: relationships of domination and subordination, methods of exploitation and expropriation, and histories of violence. Furthermore, these historical developments have often unleashed what have been felt to be monstrous changes in the experience of everyday life. Finally, new identities and social practices have emerged within modernity that you may find as fortunate as frightening, but that nonetheless haunt institutions of power. These are just a few of the monsters and monstrosities of modernity that we’ll explore through reading monsters in literature and culture.

This course meets the university “W” requirement, which means students will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out of class writing. The most likely form this writing will take would be two 5-7 page papers. Additional class assignments may include informal response writing, quizzes, group presentations, etc. This course will also entail a hefty, if enjoyable, amount of reading. The literary forms that we’ll address include: fiction; poetry; and literary non-fiction, in particular, the slave narrative. We’ll also discuss how we might treat film, manifestos, and even theoretical essays as literary forms: James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and/or other film adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein; Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”; and Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” are possible selections of additional texts that evidence how form informs content. The poetry we’ll read will most likely include nineteenth and early twentieth poets such as Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot. Poetry will be included in your coursepack, in addition to shorter prose works. The longer prose works that you will have to purchase will most likely include:

English 200 is designed to offer techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature as a source of pleasure and knowledge about human experience. Our class will focus on texts that test the boundary between the world of lived experience and the aesthetic representation of that experience. What responsibility does literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, have to the "real world" that it represents? What stake do we, as readers, have in the relationship between the two?

We will explore these questions by looking at a variety of texts and genres. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to building a critical vocabulary for talking about literature. We will read a number of poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before turning to Oscar Wilde's bizarre The Picture of Dorian Gray, which tests the limits of the relationship between life and art. In the second half, we will turn to two longer works that seem to have a closer relationship to what we might consider "reality": Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Dave Eggers' What is the What, an autobiographical novel of another person's life (!). Throughout, we will also consider other kinds of texts, which may include essays, short stories, memoirs, documentary films, and reality TV.

This course meets the University’s “W” requirement, which means you will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. You will satisfy this requirement by writing two 5-7 page papers, due at the middle and at the end of the quarter. Both papers will be read and commented on with revision in mind.

Course Readings:
Course pack, including shorter readings and critical texts (available the first week of the quarter at Ave Copy, 4141 University Way)
Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Faflak (Broadview). 978-1551114354
Dave Eggers. What is the What (Vintage). 978-0307385901
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Page (Broadview). 978-1551111261

I often find myself reflecting on the above phrase whenever I am faced with a work of literature, a poem, painting, piece of music, or film that appears to foil my preconceived expectations of what art is supposed to be. Certainly there is a kind of “pleasure” in seeing a film and having your expectations fulfilled, for example; identifying closely with the main character; vicariously watching that character overcome an impossible obstacle; and sharing in that character’s gradual resolving of the main conflict in the story. But, perhaps there is a different kind of pleasure involved in being “tricked” by a work of art and not receiving what you expected? Is this a perverse kind of pleasure? Imagine being able to discover new pleasures while developing the critical and analytical habits of mind that would allow you to appreciate literature or a film that escapes your preconceived expectations. Encountering challenging works of literature, music, and film (as we will in this class) will provide you with a dare. Can you think on the level that these texts are thinking? Will you, in doing so, reach a richer and more complex level of understanding and appreciation of the human condition? If we can agree that art is somehow “beyond human”—that it attempts to widen our perceptions and sensations and expose us to new ways of understanding, seeing, and feeling the world around us—then shouldn’t we all strive to become more than human? This will be our goal in English 200—to think beyond our current abilities and to become more than human by absorbing the lessons of these challenging texts.

One of the key ways to achieve the above goal will be to read texts that attempt to explicitly expose the act of reading for what it is: an active, frustrating, pleasurable, push-and-pull exercise that ultimately resists a final definition of itself. What is reading? What is this “thing” we do and more importantly, what is our role and what are our responsibilities upon opening a book? This course will challenge preconceived notions and definitions of the terms “reader,” “text,” and “author.” Often these terms are accepted at face value and as self-evident. However, as we investigate their possible roles during the act of reading literature we might find that they fail to maintain their popular definitions. However, whatever anxiety resulting from such an investigation will productively fuel our class discussions and your own writing. And, if we go about it effectively, the anxiety itself will become pleasurable and we’ll no longer see anxiety and pleasure as polar opposites.

To this end we will read Italo Calvino’s uncannily self-referential novel “If on a winter’s night a traveler”; Mark Z. Danielewski’s encyclopedic and labyrinthine “House of Leaves”; and Thomas Pynchon’s unresolved and postmodern short novel “The Crying of Lot 49,” as well as short stories by Shelley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. We will also be reading short critical work that explores the act of reading. In order to further our inquiry into the nature of reading literature and enrich our discussion of literature we will also consider film (Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”) and music (Miles Davis, J.S. Bach, Steve Reich, John Cage) that, like the above literary texts, invites engaged and active participation and challenges our expectations.

The assigned writing for this class will take the form of various short writing assignments, and 2 short papers that together fall within the scope of 10-15 pages (with required revisions). There will also be opportunities to peer-review one another’s work. Participation in class discussion is absolutely necessary. Please be prepared to be challenged in this class. The readings are difficult but infinitely rewarding. Since this is a “W” course we will also spend some time on composition and revision. Each paper will be read and commented on with revision in mind.

Books:
Mark Z. Danielewski, “House of Leaves,”
Italo Calvino, “If on a winter’s night a traveler,”
Thomas Pynchon, “The Crying of Lot 49”
Shelley Jackson, “My Body,” (available online)

Film:
Quentin Tarantino, “Pulp Fiction”

Course Packet:
“The Big Money” (short excerpt), John Dos Passos
“The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,” Thomas Ligotti
“The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges
“What is an Author?” Michel Foucault
“Inhabiting House of Leaves,” N. Katherine Hayles
“Liminal Terror and Collective Identity,” Matt Cardin

This course focuses on print culture from 1850 to 1950, a period that saw tremendous changes in the production and consumption of reading materials. We will begin the quarter with a brief introduction to cultural studies. For the remainder of our time, we will examine novels, short stories, and poems in conversation with popular newspapers, little magazines, advertisements, and other texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accordingly, we will work closely with digital and print archives, including the London Times, the Modernist Journals Project, and UW Special Collections. Collectively, these texts offer us a survey of important cultural issues from the period: discussions of art and work, compulsory education, the rise of female clerical labor and the emergence of the typist as a cultural icon, World War I and the circulation of political rhetoric, the class tensions that arose in tandem with mass literacy, and the industrial production of cheap and increasingly accessible reading materials. In presentations and essays, students will have the opportunity to pursue specific interests as they pertain to this period.

Selected writers may include Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, Olive Pratt Rayner, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. This course is reading-intensive and requires regular and active participation in class, essays, presentations, and exams.

This course is intended to introduce students to some of the ways “cultural studies” is practiced (and contested) as an interdisciplinary form of knowledge production. Rather than attempting to nail down a fixed definition of this notoriously complex field, we will familiarize ourselves with some key theories, methods and practices that emerge from thinkers associated with the Birmingham School (such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams) and from some anti-racist, marxist and feminist practitioners working in the US. These thinkers will give us a working set of terms for talking about culture, race and racism, and a framework for engaging with our course theme, “Race and Violence in US Modernity.” Instead of just focusing on the violence we encounter every day in popular culture—in films, music, TV, video games, etc.—we will try to think critically about forms of “systemic” violence. Specifically, we will focus on ongoing histories of racialized and gendered violence in the US, and we will ask what it means in our allegedly “post-racial” or “colorblind” moment that peoples' basic life chances continue to be produced along the lines of race (and gender, sexuality and class). We will understand “culture” as the site in which violences are lived (or experienced), represented and always struggled over, so our primary task will be to explore the work of cultural texts and cultural politics in helping to create and contest the violences of our present.

In addition to the critical and theoretical works listed above, we will look at a *small* number of cultural texts drawn from among the following: the novels /White Boy Shuffle/ by Paul Beatty, /Kindred/ or /Parable of the Sower/ by Octavia Butler, and/or /Blood Meridian/ by Cormac McCarthy; the films /Life and Debt/, /Children of Men/, /When the Levees Broke/, and/or /Sin Nombre/; poems by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amber Flame and Suheir Hammad; visual art by Kara Walker, Ashley Hunt, and/or Trevor Paglen; music by Mos Def, Aceyalone, Blue Scholars, and/or M.I.A. We may also sample a few short critical/theoretical works by scholars such as Avery Gordon, Lisa Lowe, Robin Kelley, Jacqueline Goldsby, Michael Taussig, Cornell West, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Assessment will be based on thoughtful, active participation in class and online discussions, four short response papers, a group presentation or performance, and either a project proposal for a cultural studies project or a take-home final exam. (Any of the works listed above that are /not/ assigned for the course may be used as material for the group presentations and/or project proposals.) Required books will be available through the University Bookstore. A small course reader will be available at the Ave Copy Center.

Oppressive religious moralizing. Restrictive gender and social norms. Rigid class-based society. Limits of all kinds are often assumed to be central to everyday life in the Middle Ages. Yet were such limits really so firmly in place? Is that the way things really were in Europe between 400 and 1600? As a challenge to such assumptions, this course will examine the fluidity of boundaries often thought to confine medieval thought, behavior and social practices. By investigating how literature from this period portrays myth, magic, and mayhem, students will gain new insight into how individuals constructed, viewed, and challenged limits on the mind, body, and community. Indeed, some of the most unexpected moments in the texts we will read—fart jokes, cannibalism, incest —reveal attitudes that differ from, run parallel to, and bring into question many of those we hold today. By the end of the course, students will not only have a better sense of medieval literature, but also an understanding of how such works reflect everyday life through the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance and beyond. Texts might include: Andreas, Judith, Juliana, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Play Called the Four PP, Ralph Roister Doister, and Mankind. Also works by: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory, Margery Kemp, and William Shakespeare.

This introductory survey of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century British literature will explore how writers responded to immense social changes in an era of global exploration, religious conflict, and political revolution. Above all, the writers of this period questioned what gives one person or nation the right to govern other people and nations. As we read a range of works including William Shakespeare’s King Lear, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we will explore and evaluate multiple answers to this overarching question. By situating poetry, drama, and prose fiction in its social context, this class will explore the relationship between literature and history while also honing your analytical skills. Course requirements will include active class participation, two short papers, and a final exam.

English literature, it would appear, has a designated writer. It may not be our job to account for that designation, but his status gives us an opportunity in one quarter with five plays and several poems to begin to figure out what makes Shakespeare tick. The plays vary enormously: light-hearted comedy, tragi-comedy, pure fantasy, and downright tragedy. That might suggest at least four playwrights behind the name of Shakespeare, but we will find, in fact, elements of each kind of play lurking in the others. Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, King Lear and The Tempest. Lecture, discussion, short essays and a final exam.

This course will engage texts both historical and modern that feature the internal mapping of a bounded, fantastic alternate world as an essential characteristic of their plots. Because such texts are often seen as simply metaphoric, allegorical, or utopian, in the course we will focus on texts in which the narrative “worlding” is used in the text not as part of a philosophical, moral, or mythological concern. We will therefore engage these worlds—and their creation—as complex units of narrative work in the texts we examine, and attempt to formulate the parameters of that work.

Throughout the course, students should expect to interact with the following concerns and questions, among others:
• What is the narrative purpose of creating an alternate world in fiction?
• To what extent do fantasy worlds coincide with the rules authors follow to create fictional places? To what extent do they transgress the rules of “normal” setting-creation?
• What is the interaction between fantasy worlds and the characters that inhabit them?
• To what extent is fantastic world-making culturally bounded, and to what extent does it separate itself from its historical moment?
In formulating these questions, we will utilize the work done by both narrative and fantasy-genre theorists in order to establish a collective set of terms to address the problem of world-creation in fiction.

W-STATEMENT
As per its status as a Writing elective at the University of Washington, this course will require students to write two short papers (2-3 pages) and one long paper (5-7 papers) relative to the concerns and texts in the course.

TEXTS
Course Reader
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-glass. Norton Critical Edition. (1992) ISBN: 978-0-393-95804-1
Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Penguin Classic. (1994) ISBN: 9780140433722
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Scholastic Paperbacks. (1999) ISBN: 978-0590353427
Shakespeare, William The Tempest. Norton Critical Edition. (2003) ISBN: 978-0-393-97819-3

Megan Miller
English 242 B
Fall 2010

Dirt Road Modernism: Literary modernism is typically associated with urban experience in the first half of the twentieth century, and opposed to the provincial sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Many modernist novels respond to life in big cities, exploring—for example—the influence of consumer culture, new technologies, or the sensory experience of living in close proximity to so many people. In this class, however, we are going to read fiction that looks at modern experience from outside the city. The small towns and rural areas that show up in modernist novels are not stuck in a bygone era. Rather, they are places where the conflicts between old and new ways of life are felt most acutely, and where urbanites dream of gaining access to their own primitive selves. We will read short works by Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, and Marsden Hartley, in addition to Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). We’ll end the quarter with Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves (2008), a recent novel that shares central themes with its modernist predecessors. All of these texts respond to the broad effects of modernization, including uneven development, rootlessness, and contact with people who challenge a stable understanding of progress.

Course Goals: The goals of this course will be (A) to familiarize you with the cultural history of American modernism; (B) to improve your ability to read fiction carefully and analytically; and (C) to improve your ability to write about literature in an academic context.

Student Responsibilities: In order to pass this class you’ll need to attend daily; complete all readings and homework assignments; actively participate in discussions; give an informal class presentation; write two 5-7 page essays; and revise one of your essays at the end of the quarter.

Texts: Jean Toomer, Cane (ISBN: 0871401517); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (ISBN: 9679731806); William Faulkner, Light In August (ISBN: 0679732268); Louise Erdrich, Plague of Doves (ISBN: 0060515139); photocopied course pack.

This course will examine 20th Century Caribbean prose fiction—novels, novellas, and short stories—from the English-, Spanish-, and French-speaking regions of the Caribbean. In focusing on Caribbean fiction, this course will explore how these representations engage with historical, political, economic, and environmental issues in the region and in its global presence. We will examine texts from throughout the century, and all works will be read in English.

Additionally, the course will explore how a U.S.-based readership can engage with Caribbean literature produced in a region important to the history of the Americas. This engagement is three-part: 1) immersing ourselves critically in the texts under study, 2) understanding the cultural and historical context of their production, and 3) engaging with the Caribbean’s literary production in relation to us as readers who inhabit the large next-door neighbor to the region.

In addition, as a "W" course, this one carries a specific writing focus: 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of three short papers (2-3 pages) and one longer paper (5-7 pages).
The purpose of this writing is not to demonstrate mastery—of the region, of its literature—but to help engage with the texts and their and our contexts. Writing for this course has both a formal (as mentioned above) and informal place, but in both cases is a place to explore meanings, connections, and ideas. As such, all of the formal course writing will involve substantial peer and instructor feedback, and substantial revision, and all of the informal writing will help both discussion and development of the formal writing assignments. There will also be a small group presentation required.

4. Book List:

Claude McKay (Jamaica), Banana Bottom (1933), ISBN 978-0156106504
Joseph Zobel (Martinique), Black Shack Alley (1950), ISBN 978-0914478683
Marie Vieux Chauvet (Haiti), Love, Anger, Madness (1968), ISBN 978-081297692-2
Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Crossing the Mangrove (1989), ISBN 978-0385476331
Antonio Benítez-Rojo (Cuba), A View from the Mangrove (1998), ISBN 978-1558492615
Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic-U.S.), Drown (1996), ISBN 978-1573226066

The overall purpose of this class is to teach you to approach, read, and analyze fiction critically, thoughtfully, and intellectually.

This course will cover British literature of the 19th century with a focus on the gothic novel; it takes as its theme the depiction and exploration of “madness,” specifically in women. We will be examining how literature both establishes and challenges social norms. Within this context, what did it mean for a woman to be considered insane, dangerous, immoral, and an unacceptable and unproductive member of society? Were these separate categories or was there overlap between them? What exactly made these women different from their “normal” counterparts? What rules do they break? What are their motivations?

At its inception, the gothic genre was dismissed as idle women’s writing. Instead of focusing on challenging this assessment, we will explore why women (and men) chose this particular genre to give voice to distinctly female issues. What is it that the gothic and its use of certain conventions, such as a very precisely crafted environment, tone, and the prevalence of the supernatural (ghosts, inhuman creatures, etc.) provides these authors that the more realistic novel could not offer?

We will begin with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in addition to our other novels, we will also read secondary criticism to both situate ourselves in the gothic genre, and examine different critical perspectives dealing with the themes raised in the novels. In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to write, and revise, two five to seven page papers.

Required Course Texts:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton Edition (ISBN: 978-0393964585)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Norton Edition (ISBN: 978-0393975420)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, Broadview Edition (ISBN: 978-1551113579)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, Norton Edition (ISBN: 978-0393959048)

The novels listed above will be available at the UW Bookstore, but if you choose to purchase your materials elsewhere, please use the ISBN numbers provided here. It is important that you obtain these editions since they contain required secondary criticism.

The foremost goal of this course is to encourage and develop practices of critical interpretation and meaning in fiction. To that end, this class will read a selection of novels to investigate the varied and shifting meanings of family formation that the fictional literature portrays, focusing on the way that gender is imagined and constructed within late 20th century U.S. literature. In doing so, this course will explore the following questions: How does the literature narrate family formation? How does a narrative of family develop and circulate across family members? What is valued in the name of family? Who is given a chance to narrate and who is left to silence? How does gender intersect with family value? How is gender forged and intervened by family relations? Readings will likely include a novel by Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Ursular K. Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, and Suki Kim.

Course requirements
Note that this is a course that meets the University "W" requirement, which means that students must produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing. In this class the requirement will be met with two 5 to 6 page papers that perform a textual analysis of one or more of the course texts and critical materials with a required revision. The final grade will be also based on the successful completion of various assignments such as a regular contribution to class discussion, discussion-leadings, in-class group activities, weekly GoPostings, and substantial daily reading.

Book List:
Octavia E. Butler Kindred (1979) ISBN 978-0807083109
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) ISBN 9780385490818
Alice Walker Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) ISBN 9781595583642
Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) ISBN 978-0441007318
Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping (1980) ISBN 978-0312424091
Suki Kim The Interpreter (2003) ISBN 978-0312422240

Class description

Consider this course an initiation into the great and ongoing conversation surrounding one of mankind’s oldest and most respected art forms. We propose 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.

Student Learning Goals

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 diverse communities throughout a long and staid history. 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. Over the course of this class, you will develop perspective, confidence, and measurable skill in understanding and in writing about poetry.

General Method of Instruction

This class leans heavily on discussion, both in small and large groups. Be prepared also for public readings and presentations; historic, interpretive and guest-led lectures; field trips to relevant sites, and online participation in class blog.

Recommended Preparation

Purchase the course texts as early as you can. Start skimming around, following your fancy, and making copious marks in the margins.

Class Assignments and Grading

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) four short essays, described in detail in the course syllabus, which must, by the term’s end, undergo significant revision, in keeping with the University’s (W) requirement.

Required Texts

??The Longman Anthology of Poetry ed. Averille Curdy
??Choose one full-length poetry book of the eight on reserve at UW Bookstore
??A Blank Journal

This course provides an introduction to the study of American literature and culture. The class will focus on exploring how reality—or the concept of the real—is depicted in American literature, and the changing artistic strategies deployed throughout U.S. history to respond to the rapidly and radically changing nature of the reality of the American political, social, and cultural scene. Focusing on this issue of the real and realism in American literature will allow us to examine a wide range of themes, texts, and materials. These will likely range from the idealism of antebellum romantic fiction to the supposed objectivity of turn of the century realism to the fracturing of traditional modes of representation in twentieth century modernism. This focus will allow us to interrogate some fundamental questions regarding the role of art and society: how (and why) does fiction portray reality? how does literature respond to historical flux, and how is this a reciprocal process? what role does art and literature play in the national cultural imagination? Our primary authors will likely include Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens. Short stories, poetry, and secondary material will be available through a course pack.

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

In the twentieth century, documentary photography has shaped the collective perception of social problems in the US. In this course, we will analyze key historical contexts for the development of documentary photography: the early twentieth century concern with racial reform and immigrant mobility; the migrant worker crisis in the 1930s; and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. We will read a range of texts, including theoretical articles on photography, historical analyses of the uses of documentary photography, and photographic essays. Writers include: Roland Barthes; Jacob Riis; James Agee and Walker Evans; Richard Wright; Susan Sontag; Laura Wexler; John Tagg; Jacqueline Goldsby. Students will be expected to write two short papers (5-7 pages), to write in-class from time to time, and to participate in class presentations/group work. Most of your required reading will be included in a course packet available from The Ave Copy Center. A couple of other texts will be available from the UW Bookstore: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and 12 Million Black Voices.

This is a research-based writing course based around the broad, interdisciplinary topic of community. In a world marked by dynamic, complex global and local interconnections, the idea of /community/ has been transformed. The social networking site Facebook, for instance, has recently announced that the number of its worldwide users has exceeded 400 million while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, new work-sharing micro-communities have sprung up in locales across the country in response to rising joblessness and the current economic crisis. But as new forms of community emerge, our understanding of what it means to belong to a community also changes. So, in this course, students will work individually and in groups to investigate what it means to belong to a variety of communities—local, global, academic, social, virtual, traditional, and others—in contemporary life. In doing so, they will develop their research-based writing skills as well as the ability to collaborate on multi-stage projects. Students will write in a variety of genres, including project proposals, researcher’s notes, individual reports, and group projects, receiving peer and instructor feedback throughout the research and writing process. Students’ writing will also be supported by class readings and discussions chosen to support critical thinking on the topic and, where possible, according to student interest. Groups will present their research during an in-class poster conference and in a final written project. This is a computer-integrated (CIC) course.

*Booklist*
Barrios, B. (2010). /Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers/. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. ISBN-13: 978-0-312-47444-7

Course Pack

Prerequisites:

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

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

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

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.

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.

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

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

Inspiration can be strange, coming from any number of sources: our lives, our surroundings, our imaginations, other writers’ stories, and other forms of art. In this course, we’ll learn how to harvest inspiration and how to craft from that inspiration short stories. This harvesting will necessarily be paired with a close look at how the literary short story works. We’ll read and examine a range of published short fiction with an eye toward understanding essential concepts of narrative craft: character, voice, point of view, plot, imagery, theme, dialogue and more. Brief lectures on each topic, alongside in-class and at-home writing exercises aimed at particular techniques, will prepare us to write with intention. Using these techniques, you will write a short story of your own and, in a workshop setting, give and receive feedback on your short stories.

4. Book List:
Burroway, Janet and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 8th edition.
ISBN 978-0-205-75034-4

Plus a course pack available from the Ave Copy Center.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

In this course we’ll read several crucial books by Virginia Woolf and end the quarter with playful fiction by one of Woolf’s recent editors, British “bad girl” novelist, Jeanette Winterson. Discussion will focus on portrayals of characters’ interior selves, understandings of modernism and post-modernism, and connections between readers and the stories they create from the novels they read. The course meets the “theories and methods” requirement for English majors and is also open to all who are fascinated by Woolf or Winterson (or their notoriety).

Students will choose between writing two shorter or one longer paper, and will give 2 class presentations. Come expecting lively discussion, differences of opinion and a chance to read some wonderful writing. Books will probably include Moments of Being,, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando (Woolf) and Sexing the Cherry, The Passion and Written on the Body (Winterson).

Technically, this is a Gateway Course, designed for the English pre-major. Logistically, this course will introduce the student to the study of English literature. Specifically, this course will give the student some sense of different literary genres—prose and poetry—and how to approach those genres critically. Methodologically, this course will focus on early 20th century texts in order to play through some different critical approaches. Pragmatically, we'll be reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; some poems by Marianne Moore; and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which Edith Wharton—no slouch herself—called "the great American novel." The student will learn to read closely and critically, and by the end of the quarter you will never again not have noticed that the preceding five sentences begin with adverbs. Sadly, there will be a midterm and a final. Necessarily, all students taking 301 must sign up for the 297 writing link, as well as a 301 quiz section.

This course will introduce students to Marxian cultural criticism, a major strain of comparative literary studies. Marxian cultural criticism builds on the work and intellectual method of Karl Marx, who argued that any "society" is but a reflection of its mode of self-sustenance and social reproduction. Hence, modern European and American societies are for Marx merely a reflection of the capitalist mode of sustenance, what he terms its mode of production and consumption. From this perspective literature, like law, philosophy, and social customs, is inextricably tied to and controlled by the demands of and on societies dependent upon the capitalist mode of daily sustenance. And yet, literature for Marx is also a resource or archive for diagnosing and revealing how one is socialized to a capitalist mode or way of life. Besides Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps no other 19th century European intellectual has been so constitutive of contemporary literary studies as Karl Marx. Hence this course will introduce you to the work of Marx, specifically as it pertains to literary and cultural criticism, and to some of the major Marxian thinkers of literature in the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Lisa Lowe.

Books:
Required Texts:

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto
Peter Osborne, How To Read Marx
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Toni Morrison, Bluest Eye
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters
Fae Ng Bone

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 practical training in critical analyses of narrative fiction. We will be reading three novels from three distinct periods—a nineteenth-century novel, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a modernist novel, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and a contemporary postcolonial novel, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). These texts—all by women writers and dealing with the subject of madness—are linked thematically via gendered and racialized critiques of cultural constructs of insanity and madness.

We will analyze these narratives by placing equal emphasis on narrative form and cultural themes. Ideas and cultural materials can be transposed into different media (think about the countless film adaptations of literature, for example), but the medium is always part of the message: we must learn how novels signify (as media of communication), just as we must learn how cinema signifies differently, in order to fully understand the message. It won’t do to leap past the poetics of the novel straight to the topic. Thus, we will introduce ourselves to major elements of narrative fiction (such as the distinction between discourse [text] and story [plot], levels and voices of narration, etc.) studied by the discipline of narratology. In addition, we will also familiarize ourselves with some major paradigms of cultural criticism (such as feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, postcolonialism) that are relevant to the three assigned novels.

Formalist analysis (How does fictional narrative signify?) and cultural criticism (What is the novel’s ideology of gender, race, class, etc.?) are inseparable, even though I have presented them here as distinct for the sake of clarity. As we shall see, questions of What? (themes, ideas, ideologies) impinge on and shape the How? (narrative form), and vice versa. Exploring how this happens means to embark on the adventure of critical analysis.

Required Readings:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Norton Critical Edition, ed. Richard Dunn: 3rd ed. ISBN 0-393-975-42-8
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Annotated Edition, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. ISBN 978-0-15-603035-9
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Norton Critical Edition, ed. Judith Raiskin ISBN 0-393-96012-9
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Routledge) ISBN 0-415-28022-2

This course will map the contours of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism. As you will discover, the term “theory and criticism” has come to designate many different intellectual activities. By closely reading some of the most influential thinkers, texts, and trajectories, we will try to get a sense for this diversity, as well as an appreciation for the many intersecting problems and recurring concerns. Although the specific readings are still to be determined, you can expect to see the major traditions covered, including varieties of formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism and gender studies, postcolonialism, critical race theory, new historicism, and maybe (if we have time) recent developments in cognitive approaches.

Clearly, we will be covering a good deal of dense (but rich) material, so you should expect to devote substantial study time to the readings. Students will also be responsible for one formal presentation, active classroom participation, two exams, a short proposal, and a final paper. You will need to buy one large and expensive textbook, and additional materials will be posted on e-reserve.

This course will examine the intersections of race, class, and sexuality as they are constellated around rhetorics of inclusion and exclusion in the conceptualization of "home." We will read well-known texts of post-colonial and queer theory, and also discuss their shortcomings (like the elision of race and class). These readings will probably include work by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner. Using these shortcomings as bridges to ask critical questions, we shall seek to track the ways in which queer peoples of color, at various cultural sites, have produced cultural texts in the wake of decolonization that resist dominant discourses of exclusion. These hegemonic discourses of exclusion include racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, xenophobia, and English-language supremacy. To assist us in this endeavor, we will then read the work of Roderick Ferguson, Gayatri Gopanath, Judith Halberstam, Chandan Reddy, Staurt Hall, and others.

Against the grain of these minoritizing discourses, we will explore how queer of color cultural productions subvert exclusive delineations of "home" and belonging. In other words, we shall look at how queer people of color in particular re-shape the notion of "home" as a strategy for resisting exclusionary rhetorics that surface after World War II and extend the logics of cultural imperialism and epistemological colonialism. These cultural producers, in this case of African and Asian diasporas, offer ways to re-imagine "home" and spaces for belonging that are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and non-heteronormative. We will examine these alternative verisons of "home" transnationally (between and amongst nations rather than confined to a single one) as a strategy for tracking the emergence of critical resistance at multiple sites with shared political enthusiasms. We will view the historical tracking of these sites as a strategy for building solidarity between African and Asian diasporas in re-thinking "home."

Among the cultural texts we will examine are Michelle Cliff's "Abeng," Jessica Hagedorn's "Dogeaters," Jackie Kay's "Trumpet," and the films of Hanif Kureishi. Grading will be completely focused on engaged participation and a single final paper that students will begin writing early on and will continue to revise and expand into a 10pp paper whose goal is to demonstrate sustained meditation on a research topic of interest. My hope is that the final paper will be one you will be proud of, and which will metamorphose into a longer thesis paper and/ or writing sample for another endeavor.

Catalog Description: Literary culture of Middle Ages in England, as seen in selected works from earlier and later periods, ages of Beowulf and of Geoffrey Chaucer. Read in translation, except for a few later works, which are read in Middle English.

Catalog Description: Literary culture of Middle Ages in England, as seen in selected works from earlier and later periods, ages of Beowulf and of Geoffrey Chaucer. Read in translation, except for a few later works, which are read in Middle English.

This course will introduce you to a range of Chaucer’s works, focusing particularly on the Troilus and Criseyde and selections from The Canterbury Tales. We will begin, however, with a couple of his shorter, earlier texts (Book of the Duchess and Parliament of Fowls) and will take up the Legend of Good Women after the Troilus
The aims of the course will be to develop our competence in the reading and understanding Chaucer’s Middle English so that we can appreciate the variety and liveliness of his poetry. To help inform the latter, we will look at some of the sources he drew from (and altered) for his narratives; consider a variety of critical approaches to his works; and examine aspects of medieval culture which may illuminate his complex social and artistic sensibilities.

My classroom preference is for discussion, but in its absence (or in attempts to stimulate it) I will resort to (more or less informal) lecturing.

Requirements for the course will include – in addition to attendance and participation in class discussions – weekly response papers, some translation exercises and quizzes, a few longer (3-5, 5-8 pp.) critical papers, and a final exam.

Recommended:

Bisson, Lillian M. Chaucer and the Late Medieval World. New York: Macmillan, 2000. ISBN: 978-0-312-22466-0,

Texts:

• Geoffrey Chaucer. Dream Visions and Other Poems. Ed. Kathryn L. Lynch. New York: Norton, 2007. [9780393925883]
• Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson 2nd Edition. New York: Norton, 2005. [9780393925876]
• Geoffrey Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Stephen A. Barney. New York: Norton, 2006. [9780393927559]

This course will focus on the tragedies of Shakespeare, including Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth . The course will end with a Romance play, The Tempest. We will be focusing much of our discussions on the themes of desire and sexuality as offered in Shakespeare’s works. We will also work with modes of production, including film and art. The main goals of the course are to help you learn to “decode” the language of Shakespeare through close readings and to make you more confident readers of the Great Bard. In addition, we will negotiate the difference between how the works might have been understood in Shakespeare’s own culture and how they have been understood since. Issues of gender and sexuality will continue to arise.

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the explosive growth of London and other English cities and the unprecedented outpouring of popular literature directed specifically at city-dwellers. This course will examine how urban growth changed literary representations of femininity and masculinity and transformed the concept of personal identity. While some writers celebrated the city as a vibrant site of general debauchery (gambling, prostitution, drinking, masquerades), others suggested that literature could provide a moral antidote to the corruption that urban living engendered. We’ll explore the relationships between the city and the country, and between men and women, by surveying a variety of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century drama, poetry, and fiction including Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. In addition to active class participation, course requirements will include several reading responses, a research project, and a final exam.

The course will offer a broad overview of the political, philosophical and literary history of the Romantic period (1789-1850), focusing on the works of the second generation of Romantic writers. 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 picturesque) and art (the change from portrait to landscape painting). We will then turn to an in-depth study of the work of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and George Gordon Byron, focusing on their different representations of transcendence, the sublime, transgression and the Promethean hero.

Catalog Description: Experiments in fiction and poetry. Novels by Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and others; poetry by Eliot and Yeats and others.

This course will explore the aesthetic practices and epistemologies through which Americans came to understand themselves as “modern” during the inter-war years. Addressing the aesthetic, economic and technological innovations often said to characterize American modernity, we will consider how writers of the time framed “the modern” and “modernity” (and the attendant ideologies of innovation, newness, originality and progress) in and through logics of gender, sexuality, race, class and migration. In the process, we will also pinpoint how and the extent to which “American modernity” gathered ideological coherence through a production of the “non-modern” as a domain of dissident and “perverse” sexual, racial and gender formations.

Students should expect to read works by W.E.B. DuBois, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Nathanael West, Richard Bruce Nugent, John Dos Passos, Robert Park, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederic Winslow Taylor, Ernest Hemmingway and Jean Toomer, and a handful of critical essays by figures such as Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Huston Baker, Raymond Williams, Siobhan Somerville, Roderick Ferguson and Nayan Shah. Grades will be based on engaged participation, several short essays, and an 8 page final paper.

When Irving Howe persuaded Saul Bellow to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Gimpel the Fool” for his anthology of Yiddish fiction in 1953, none of these men can have guessed that two of them—Bellow (1976) and Singer (1978)—would become Nobel laureates within the next 25 years or that Howe’s anthology would stay in print into the next century. This convergence of the scholar/critic with the Yiddish writer and the American novelist in the immediate aftermath of World War II is a capsule of the course in which we will track the migration of Jewish American literary culture from the work of pre-World War II immigrants to the American-born writers (comedians, songsters and movie makers) whose curious obsessions would do so much to define American popular and literary culture in the post-War period. Although I divide the syllabus between what I am calling “Immigrants” before the War and “Americans” after, we will focus as much on what binds the generations as on what divides them. Indeed, Singer’s “Gimpel”, written in Yiddish and in New York City by a recent immigrant at the very end of the War, is an excellent emblem of continuity and change in Jewish American writing. The pre-War generation will be represented by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anja Yezierska, Henry Roth, Clifford Odets and Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer (1927), the first “talkie.” The post-War period will include Singer and Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Chabon and the recent Coen Brothers’ film, A Serious Man (2009). Lecture, discussion, short essays.

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.

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

In this course, we will examine literary narratives about health and illness, considering the body’s complicity in what Susan Sontag terms the “punitive and sentimental fantasies concocted” about illness. After some selected critical accounts of illness by Virginia Woolf and Sontag, we turn to fictional accounts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Alongside these literary texts, we may also examine selected historical case studies: hysteria, tuberculosis, shell shock, cholera, neurasthenia, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and others. In addition to a demanding reading schedule, this course requires regular
class participation, writing in and out of class, quizzes, and exams.

This course investigates the ways that literary texts structure and use language. Employing tools from linguistics and stylistics, we will analyze aspects of literary texts: sound, meter, lexicon, discourse structure, style, pragmatic strategies, varieties of English, and narrative orientation. Texts will be drawn from several literary genres: fiction, poetry, and drama. Over the term, we will develop and use this linguistic “toolbox” to construct sophisticated perspectives and arguments about literary texts. Course expectations include two papers, short writing assignments, and several quizzes.

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

In this intermediate level prose writing class, we will be reading and writing short fiction through the lens of form. The quarter will start with an exploration of traditional plotted narratives, move on to a consideration of more experimental forms of short fiction, and culminate with each student creating a physical book in which the text will reflect the specific form of the physical object. No previous art or book-making experience is necessary (I’ll be guiding you through the steps and providing basic supplies), but expect to do a LOT of reading and writing. Weekly short writing assignments, two complete stories, and the final book project.

Text: course reader

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

In thirty-five productive years Dickens published fourteen novels, a number of shorter works such as A Christmas Carol, two travel books, and considerable journalism. The most popular novelist of his day (1835-1870), he remains second only to Shakespeare among English writers read now around the world, constantly attracting biographical and critical commentary.
Required readings will be A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. Students, individually or in small groups, will develop a research topic ( involving content, theme, or style with the assigned texts as focal points). In addition to material in the four required texts, I will provide bibliographical citations to Dickens criticism and biography, as well as assistance with individual topics. Research can also involve hands-on work with rare Dickens materials in UW special collections. The final 15-20 page paper will be due the last day of class, and for a midterm students will submit prospectus for the longer paper.

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.

This course is devoted to the love poem. We will focus especially upon poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but will strive for a long historical perspective as well. We will also study some poetry in translation, from the Biblical *Song of Songs* to foreign-language poets of the present day.

On the one hand, we’ll study the way sense of space in nineteenth-century America is conceived through the lens of maps and paintings, aesthetic conventions and discourses fraught with latent cultural bias. This portion of the course will explore the would-be assertion of cultural control over landscape and space in the era of Manifest Destiny, when the nationalization of an alien continent, and the so-called spread of “civilization” into “wilderness,” were considered to be nothing less than God-ordained projects The more interesting portion of this course, however, will address the way certain American writers develop a counter-sensitivity to the way sense of landscape and space actually remains unsettled: in the play of maps, paintings, images, and deeply rooted assumptions that can contradict one another, somewhat the way shifting images, based on alternative perspectives, can be projected into an Escher etching or a splatter of spilt milk. Thoreau, for example, discovers that as he learns native tribal languages, he actually learns to see the same forest in an entirely different manner from the way that it is seen through a gaze rooted, so to speak, in Western European cultural assumptions and science. Let me add that I’ve reserved a portion of this course for the study of architecturally organized space and how it is also challenged and subverted by certain authors. That is say, houses as well landscapes can become haunted by the ghost of an elusive, mysterious reality that escapes cultural frameworks and visual illusions. Even as an alien continent seems on the verge of becoming “settled” in the nineteenth-century U.S., a number of American writers suggest the underlying mystery and openness of the here and now, and that’s basically what we’ll explore in literary texts, supplemented a bit by maps, paintings, and other visual materials. Readings in Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Chief Seattle, Whitman, Melville, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; in a number of cases we’ll be exploring texts (such as Thoreau’s Cape Cod) not normally assigned in nineteenth-century American literature classes, but quite interesting in the way that they challenge the culturally biased gaze. As Thoreau writes: “Not till we are lost do we realize where we are.”

I will be using a course pack to supplement course readings.

Available at the UW Bookstore: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne; Henry D. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, Cape Cod; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson; Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd and Other Stories; Edgar Allen Poe, Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

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 associated with the Phoenix Project, and you will be expected to work three to four hours each week in a Seattle area 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, among other things, write weekly position papers in response to course readings, write a teaching-related course paper, and complete a curricular design project.

This course has a service-learning option. We will be working with two local high schools—Shorecrest and Garfield High School. Those who opt to do service learning will register for 3 credit hours of ED 401 and spend 4 hours per week in a classroom starting week 2. Please e-mail your instructor for more information.


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.

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, accent police in Arizona schools, 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.

www.davidshields.com

484A. Advanced Prose.

In this course, students will read about the personal essay and the lyric essay, read several examples of both, and then attempt to write and rewrite their own long essays.
David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
John D’Agata, The Next American Essay

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

An intense workshop for the most committed fiction writers planning a lifetime of work in the field. The focus is on the planning and composition of a novel or novella -- no genre fiction. High expectations for both the quality of the manuscripts and a willingness to assist other writers with their work.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

In his famous 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing proposed a test for whether machines can think, which required machines to imitate social interaction through language. Machines can think when they can, discursively, pass as human. The specific form of the Turing test is a reworking of a party game in which participants try to guess each other’s gender and to confuse the issue by impersonating a member of the opposite sex. This course will focus on the structures of imitation and impersonation, the relations between originals and copies, that are located at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and new technologies. What are the connections between the Turing test and Judith Butler’s argument about gender performativity or subversive forms of repetition, within alternative sexual cultures? How do new technologies make these imitative structures more visible? We will situate these questions of cultural politics in relation to a more general postmodern concern with aesthetic styles and techniques organized around parody, pastiche, simulacra, appropriation, remaking, sampling, remixing, or image scavenging. But we will also consider how Turing and Butler’s imitation games play out differently from the perspective of the racial histories invoked by the metaphor of passing for human, given that one of the legacies of slavery is a tradition of reading African-American literature for evidence of humanity. In addition to this historical and theoretical material, our readings will focus on speculative or science fiction in a variety of media, including print, film, TV, and new media, but as time permits we may also consider the production of fan writing and roleplaying practices, along with some examples of contemporary drama and performance art.

This seminar investigates the range of literary reading theories and practices employed in our time of narrative innovation, with special focus on narrative adaptation and the ideological currents that tend to keep readers anchored tightly to a narrow range of reading formats and secluded theoretical ports out of fear of drifting out into deeper seas and yet unfathomed reading depths and perspectives. The goal of this seminar is to set ourselves to sea but not adrift, to chart reading theories and use them to navigate around various bodies of textual adaptations made buoyant in our time of multimedia innovation. Essays on reading theory, as well as print fiction and nonfiction and their electronic adaptations and targeted audiences, will form the core class texts, just as traditional as well as innovative reading, sophisticated research, and intellectually-engaged discussion will fill class sessions.