This course is designed to cover techniques and practices in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms and to examine such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. In order to consider how literature “works,” we will be focusing on a specific period of literature and thinking about the various ways that literary meaning is both produced by as well as produces its historical and cultural moment. The period of American history and literature which we will be focusing on, the “antebellum” or pre-Civil War period, offers a great opportunity for
thinking through what it means to read literature, as writers of this period were themselves grappling with the role of literature in the still new nation. Of particular concern in this class will be the ways in which authors of the antebellum period attempted to self-consciously articulate their own sense of a national, American identity in the face of the social and cultural pressures of westward expansion, slavery, colonization, Indian removal, Manifest Destiny, and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. We will also be considering what these interpretations reveal about our own contemporary understandings of history and identity.

Our readings will cover short stories, novels, sensational fiction, poetry, autobiography, and essays. Our primary authors will likely include Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Rollin Ridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fanny Fern, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, among others. Because this class satisfies the “W” credit, the course will also be writing intensive, with 10-15 pages of writing and required revision. There will also be reading quizzes, tests, group presentations, and in-class activities.

Required Texts:

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume
B, 1820-1865.
ISBN: 978-0-393-92740-5

Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,
Celebrated California Bandit.
ISBN: 9780906114293

This course examines both the idea of modernity and the aesthetic practice of modernism as they appear in border spaces. In 1890, the U.S. census declares the disappearance of the American frontier, one of the U.S.’s most conflicted border spaces, despite continued U.S. imperialist efforts to redraw border lines and inhabit border lands. Moreover, the U.S. enters the 20th century precisely through such ambivalent engagement with borders. The aesthetic practice known as modernism coincides, and also engages with, this historical moment of border conflict. In fact, modernism in this class provides a mode for reading beyond limited North-South conceptions of the border, as will be clear in our selected texts.

As a way to trace the relationships among borders, modernity, and modernism, students of this course read across genres, including selections from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, John Dos Passos’s The Big Money, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Students in the class write two 5-7 page papers, participate in class discussions, as well as regularly submit writing-intensive homework assignments. The consistent focus on reading and writing in this course satisfies the University of Washington’s writing requirement (W).

Text information: Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. ISBN: 0393974960. Paredes, Américo. George Washington Gómez. ISBN: 9781558850125. Dos Passos, John. The Big Money. ISBN: 9780618056835. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. ISBN: 9780811216715 0811216713.

Literary texts offer modes through which writers and readers experience and understand what is outside
the U.S., especially through the seeming confines of generic and formal conventions. In this course, we
will read and write about literature that challenges and builds the coherence of “U.S. Literature” in
ways that are dependent on what is foreign to it. In particular, our readings include literature by
foreign figures writing in and from the U.S, but whose work reflects and refracts difference (racial,
sexual, and otherwise), and in doing so, negotiates the requirements for inclusion in the nation.



These big questions will be brought into sharper focus through our concentrated study of the the
relationship between the U.S. and literature. We will ask after what is means to be included in the
canon of U.S. literature, and what is lost and gained in grouping literary texts according to
nationality, especially when many of the writers we will read are considered or consider themselves part
of a diaspora.

Since this is a “W” course, reading tasks will be coupled with a good deal of writing, workshopping your
writing, and responding to classmates’ writing. Much of the course will be given to practicing close
reading techniques and constructing well argued, engaging literary analyses. Assignments will include
weekly blog posts and responses, a few short papers, and two longer, 5–7 page essays.

Readings will include texts by Frank Norris, Anzia Yezierska, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and
Junot Diaz, as well as excerpts from critical and secondary work.

“Qui regarde au fond de Paris a le vertige.”—Victor Hugo
[He who looks into the heart of Paris has vertigo.]

. . . and somehow that vertigo is intoxicating and inspiring. With it comes the promise of history and culture, an abiding cosmopolitanism, a feeling of possibility. Or isn’t it pretty to think so? There is also an inescapability of loss and the inevitability of wasting decay.

Paris has inspired the work of more than two centuries of American artists and intellectuals. From Thomas Jefferson to James Baldwin these figures have chronicled the attraction and conflict between European and American social and cultural values.

This class will examine the relationship between a group of expatriate American writers and the city that inspired them. We will pay particular attention to what Gertrude Stein labeled “the lost generation,’ reading works by Hemingway, James, Fitzgerald, Pound, and others as we attempt to understand how the shared experience of living in Paris, with its feeling of liberation and limitation, shaped some of the most important American literature of the early twentieth century.

In addition to focusing on analytic and reading practices, as a “W” course, Americans in Paris will also help students develop and improve their writing. Students will be asked to submit weekly written responses to readings as well as two 5-6 page papers during the quarter. As a class we will also be producing a literary “magazine,” which will include book reviews, brief biographies, textual analysis, and more. The research, writing, and editing requirements for this project will be shared among group members.

James McLaverty once paraphrased F. W. Bateson in order to draw our attention to the difference between permanent and fleeting works of art:

“If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas?”

This paradoxical question asks us to consider that if the physical object that is the Mona Lisa exists spatially, where do non-material performance-based art like Hamlet or Lycidas exist? Is “Hamlet” located in each performance, in the copies of the stageplay, in the earliest known surviving exemplars, or in a hypothetical “ideal”? In this class we will discuss the nature of text, of authority, and of editions. We will critically engage with the source material by looking at multiple versions of works of art.

What Is Textual Studies?

Textual studies is often defined as the study of the physicality of an artifact, but what is it really? Is it the study of a text's content and form? Of authority? Of the history of the codex, the papyrus roll? Of versions, editions, and revisions? All of the above? Since the field of study is known to co-opt terms and ideologies from literary theory, numismatics, palaeolography, linguistics, digital photo manipulation and myriad other fields, it has rightly been called, by D. C. Greetham, an “anti-discipline” that “has no definable Fach, or subject matter.” In this definition textual studies sounds very much like an amorphous blob that absorbs and assimilates whatever it touches: think “Trapper Keeper 3000” from South Park.

This class has been designed to give this “anti-discipline” some Fach. We will be covering a great deal of content, spanning multiple cultures, literary movements, genres, and continents, so our theoretical focus (editorial theory) will be our organizing factor. Each theoretical discussion that accompanies the texts has real-world consequences. How do readers interpret texts? Which edition is “best”? Is the text you’re reading the text the author intended (whatever that means)?

Literature we will likely read: (from the Old English period 7-10th centuries) Caedmon's Hymn, Genesis A&B, (the Middle English period, 14th century) Piers Plowman, (19th century) Mary Shelley, Keats, (20th century) Marianne Moore (selected poems), Vladamir Nabokov Pale Fire, Jorge Luis Borges (selected short fiction), (21st century) Judd Morrissey The Jew's Daughter. We will probably also watch a film (TBA) that will be scheduled to be viewed on an as-of-yet unscheduled out-of-class day.

The reading load of this class will be rigorous, and the content difficult, but rewarding. Attentiveness to the literature and criticism is a requirement. Students will be required to write weekly Go-Postings, commenting on critical positions raised in the texts or in class. In addition, each student (with a group of 3 others) will give one 15 minute presentation of a selected text and then lead classroom discussion that day. Since this 200 level literature course is also a W-course, students are required to write two 5-7 page essays over the course of the quarter. Paper topics must be submitted in writing to me two weeks before the paper is due. In preparation for the second paper, students will select a single edition of a work of literature and keep a journal as they go through it. For this second paper, students will be asked to answer this question about their selected edition: “Are there any interpretive consequences to a scholarly edition of the work? What are they?”

For more information on W-course requirements, see the University of Washington description:


http://www.textualtheory200.weebly.com

“Qui regarde au fond de Paris a le vertige.”—Victor Hugo
[He who looks into the heart of Paris has vertigo.]

. . . and somehow that vertigo is intoxicating and inspiring. With it comes the promise of history and culture, an abiding cosmopolitanism, a feeling of possibility. Or isn’t it pretty to think so? There is also an inescapability of loss and the inevitability of wasting decay.

Paris has inspired the work of more than two centuries of American artists and intellectuals. From Thomas Jefferson to James Baldwin these figures have chronicled the attraction and conflict between European and American social and cultural values.

This class will examine the relationship between a group of expatriate American writers and the city that inspired them. We will pay particular attention to what Gertrude Stein labeled “the lost generation,’ reading works by Hemingway, James, Fitzgerald, Pound, and others as we attempt to understand how the shared experience of living in Paris, with its feeling of liberation and limitation, shaped some of the most important American literature of the early twentieth century.

In addition to focusing on analytic and reading practices, as a “W” course, Americans in Paris will also help students develop and improve their writing. Students will be asked to submit weekly written responses to readings as well as two 5-6 page papers during the quarter. As a class we will also be producing a literary “magazine,” which will include book reviews, brief biographies, textual analysis, and more. The research, writing, and editing requirements for this project will be shared among group members.

This is a course in the politics of modern graffiti culture, from its emergence as a kind of juvenile criminal mischief to its current acclaim in art, fashion and film. We will begin by reading what cultural studies has to say about the study of 'texts', material culture, and youth culture. Then we will try to educate ourselves (as much as we can inside a classroom) about the development and conditions of graffiti work, both abroad and in the US. Students will be required to write about theory with some depth of understanding, as well as completing a more creative final project.

In the post-civil rights era, forms of liberal tolerance—such as multiculturalism and diversity—have become ends in themselves, and have often substituted for forms of real social justice. In 1965, the scholar and philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote that “what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” For Marcuse, “false tolerance” goes hand in hand with “free enterprise,” and does the most serious damage in the realm “of business and publicity.” In this class, we will use a cultural studies perspective to investigate the historical, cultural and social implications of multiculturalism and the free market.

Emerging in the 1950s and 60s as a method to consider the political, economic, and social implications of culture at large, cultural studies has offered unique approaches to reading “cultural products” (i.e. literature, films, music, magazines, paintings). Cultural studies proposes that we live enmeshed in a cultural web that influences the way we relate to each other, and that cultural values and beliefs affect us differently depending upon our gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, weight, etc. As a critical practice for engaging with social phenomena, cultural studies allows us to see how cultural products help determine our values, beliefs, and place in the larger world.

Using cultural studies as our critical lens, this class will investigate how forms of multiculturalism and the free market (or neoliberalism) have emerged from the civil rights era, as well as from colonial regimes and immigration studies, to become dominant ideologies in our contemporary moment. We will read novels, films, graphic novels, music videos and video games, to explore how texts interpret the “multiculturalism/free market” bind, and how these texts can offer new ways of seeing the world around us.

This class will demand heavy reading, strict attendance, presentations, three 4-5 page papers, and critical thinking about our everyday social world. The point of this class is not to “process” students into a certain political mindset, but to use cultural studies to invoke difficult political and social questions. Please come with an open and eager mind, bordering perhaps, on agitation and distress.


Required Texts: Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Hwee Hwee Tan’s Mammon Inc., and a UW Coursepack arranged by the instructor.

This class presents a survey of English literature from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is no accident that the tumultuous political changes of these centuries—the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and eventually the Enlightenment and the American Revolution—occurred in the wake of and alongside significant religious upheaval, including the English Reformation (and its continental cousin, the Protestant Reformation) in the sixteenth century, the Puritan movement of the seventeenth, and the emergence of methodism in the eighteenth. At the same time, others began to live without religion altogether by experimenting with a form of secular humanism. These large-scale changes reflect a shifting perspective of what it meant to be an individual subject, no longer under the authority of Church or State.

Our reading and discussion will focus on texts that attempt to come to terms with these changes—texts that ask questions such as: What does it mean for the writer to truly “know” him– or herself? What responsibility does the writer have to his readers? To tradition? To authority? To God? Our major texts will be a play (Hamlet) and two works of fiction, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Henry Fielding’s comic novel Joseph Andrews. Other texts will include essays, devotional writing, short– and long-form poetry.

The class will be a combination of lecture and discussion. You should expect quite a bit of reading, including a good deal of poetry, fiction and nonfiction prose—also, be aware that the dates of our texts mean that our reading will be, in some ways, substantially different from the kind of writing with which most of us are familiar and will thus pose difficulties for some. You should also be prepared to participate regularly in discussion. Please expect a midterm and a final exam, and short paper (5 pp.).

Note for current and prospective English majors: this class will satisfy your pre-1900 requirement. Please keep in mind, however, that as a 200-level class it will be geared primarily toward non-majors.

Course Readings (please try to get the editions listed, as we will also be using the supplementary readings in the editions):
Shakespeare. Hamlet, (Norton). 978-0393929584
John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress, (Norton). 978-0393927719
Henry Fielding. Joseph Andrews, (Broadview). 978-1551112206
Course pack, including shorter readings and critical texts (available the first week of the quarter at Ave Copy, 4141 University Way)

English 212 will explore the complementary relationships between technology, science, and mediation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Writing itself is a kind of mediation so by reading literature we’re already exploring one of our themes. But through a series of secondary readings, lectures, group work, and in-class discussions, we will conduct a more critical inquiry into the various ways art, technology, and science evolve. Through such an investigation, we will attempt to confirm whether or not these spheres are in fact interdependent, or autonomous.

English 212 will investigate texts through two hundred years of literature. We will begin with the Enlightenment period (Swift and Pope), moving into the preromantic (Sterne and Blake), followed by two romantic novels (Austen and Shelley), and we’ll close with a look at the Victorian novel (Eliot). Our final thoughts will be guided by Matthew Arnold’s lecture, “Literature and Science.” So not only should we ask ourselves how the early modern period interacts with the shifting technological landscape, we might consider what Enlightenment, Romantic, or Victorian ideas, if any, can help inform our technological situation today.

Course Materials:

Required*:

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. (ISBN: 0-19-280534-7)
Pope, Alexander. Alexander Pope: The Major Works. Ed. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953761-7)
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Ed. Joan New. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. (ISBN: 0141439777)
Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Eds. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: W&W Norton, 2007. Print. (ISBN: 039392498X)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism). Ed. Johanna Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. Print. (ISBN: 031219126X)
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. James Kinsley and Deidre Shauna Lynch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. (ISBN: 9780199535552)
Eliot, George. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. Ed. Terrance Cave. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print. (ISBN: 0199536775)
Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2010. Print. (ISBN: 9780495898023)
*You will need to purchase the exact edition of Frankenstein for the essay we’ll be reading with it. Otherwise, you are not required to buy these editions; however, for the sake of convenience I highly recommend these editions. Shop early and shop used—many of these books are under ten dollars on Amazon. For the recommended glossary feel free to buy a slightly earlier edition. The 2004 edition can be purchased for less than a dollar online.

There are plenty of ways to describe and categorize the literary developments that we label “modern and/or post-modern” during the twentieth century and into the present. A lot of what writers and artists were doing (or, perhaps more appropriately, re-doing) during the period has had to do with frustrating our assumptions about what reading and writing are. What are we “supposed to” pay attention to while reading? What, really, does literature “express”? Or is that even the right question? So much of literature reveals an urge to reconsider things “we” thought “we” knew, to explore the basement, as it were, as if for the first time: to unsettle the foundation of our very thought, to ask about where, exactly, we get our cultural identities. Not surprisingly, then, a lot of “modern and postmodern” literature is awfully difficult to read. While we may be tempted to hunt for “the moral of the story,” it’s very likely missing. If we find ourselves searching for “deeper meaning,” we’re likely to be disappointed. If we’re after a surefooted ending, a conclusion, a resolution, we’d best turn back now. But the experience can help us ask questions about what literature does: it can help us think, or it can itself become a way of thinking.

The reading load for this course will be intense and heavy. If you’re looking for a lighter load or a set of clear goals with measurable “payoff,” consider looking elsewhere. But if you’re compelled by texts and ideas that shake things up, that get a little uncomfortable, questions that might seem silly or strange at first, and you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading, reflecting, and writing, we’ll have a productive and exciting quarter. Writers may include William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, A. R. Ammons, Leslie Silko, David Treuer, Susan Howe, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and others, as well as some short pieces by philosophers and theorists. You will be responsible for several short writings, ranging from single paragraphs to formal commentaries to blog posts, a small group presentation, and an essay of 6-8 pages.

Texts (subject to change):
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
A. R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
David Treuer, The Translation of Dr Apelles
Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man [film]
Course Packet

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.

English 242 endeavors to critically examine the popularized binary between fact and fiction, and between objective history and subjective experience. Our task will be to question the widely held belief that novels are simply works of personal or private imagination, whereas the writing of history pertains to true events. How do we know what is “true” or “objective”? Can novels be “real” or “true”? In fact, many scholars have argued that certain novels fill in or speak for what dominant history cannot account for, or what history silences. How and why does literature perform this task? How do literature and history tell stories? What kinds of stories are being told? How is storytelling a political act? Rather than perpetuate the truth vs. fiction binary, we will re-conceptualize these terms by tracing a connection between the writing of history and the writing of fiction.

In order to address these questions, we will be reading Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, along with various critical and theoretical articles. As this is a “W” course, there will be three major writing assignments throughout the quarter (each 5-6 pages in length), as well as in-class peer critiques and online discussion board assignments.

This course is a survey of modern and contemporary fiction, primarily considering several works in the context of major social and political upheavals of the twentieth century. We will trace the fate of modernity across the century, considering formal innovations in the novel and short story against the background of migration, colonialism, industrialization, fascism, the World Wars, racism, class conflict, and shifts in the meaning of gender and sexuality. The course focuses in particular on the relationship between violence and subjectivity and on questions of memory, trauma, and history: we will read these novels as responses to a set of disorienting and disturbing historical events. Our tentative reading schedule will include works by Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Tayeb Saleh, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, and Mohsin Hamid.

This class will focus on the practice of close reading, and the subsequent translation of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read. Daily attendance, active participation, and a clear engagement with class materials are vital for your success in this course.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement and VLPA requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page term papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

Course Title: The Very True Confessions of Justified Sinners: Scotland’s Contemporary Fictions

Since its 1707 union with England, Scotland has functioned as something of an anomaly in Anglo-American political and cultural theory. In many ways its primary oddness derives from the fact that, unlike the many modern European nations which emerged out of the breakdown of the old dynastic orders from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Scotland has remained a nation without a state and, for some, a culture without a coherent, continuous, and conscious tradition. Scholars such as Tom Nairn have read Scotland’s cultural legacy as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, trapped somewhere between dueling myths of an ancestral highland past and an industrial working class modernity. Such a view situates Scottish cultural identity as stunted, backwards, or even non-existent in comparison to similar categories of Britishness or Englishness. However, the last 30 years have witnessed an enormous surge in Scottish writing, as well as writing about Scotland’s political, social, and cultural heritage that explicitly argues against indictments such as Nairn’s. Prose fiction, and especially the novel, has played a central role in this debate. One of the things this class will ask you to do is intervene in this debate (to a small extent) and to examine how various contemporary authors have used (and abused) narrative fiction as a means to imagine Scotland and, in so doing, to challenge the relationship between nation, narrative, and identity. Questions guiding the course will include how we come to link ideas of nation and identity to certain concepts (race, for example) through fiction, how these concepts are challenged or reworked by fiction writers, how language girds or subverts links between narrative and national identity, and to what extent we can view prose narrative as complicit with, or resistant to, narratives of national belonging.
We will cover a number of major authors from this period as a way to engage with the issues of nation and empire, social class, language, gender, race, and sexuality which continue to inform contemporary debates on Scottish (and British) identity. The first few weeks will be devoted to establishing a context in which to situate our later discussion of contemporary Scottish writing. In this period we will read selections from Walter Scott, J.M. Barrie, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and William McIlvanney. Our main contemporary sources may include, but are not limited to work by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Jackie Kay, and Luke Sutherland. Though we will probably not have time during class, I also hope to hold at least two optional film screenings, probably of Trainspotting (Dir. Danny Boyle, 1996) and Morvern Callar (Dir. Lynn Ramsay, 2002).
Our class will focus first on the practice of close reading, and then upon the transference of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read.
This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement and VLPA requirement. As such it will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two to three short papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

Book List:
There will be a course pack +
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Alan Warner, Morvern Callar
Jackie Kay, Trumpet
Luke Sutherland, Venus as a Boy (I may drop either Trumpet or Venus as a Boy).

Why do we read literature? The Roman poet Horace states that the purpose of art is to “delight and instruct.” We read novels not only to be entertained, but also to learn about our world. Throughout their history, novels have often served as warnings against inappropriate behavior. Not surprisingly, then, social transgression is a common theme in literature; characters break boundaries, they push the envelope, they lie, they cheat, they challenge. People are constantly questioning their role and status in society. Our course texts will look at scandals and outsiders. What do we learn by studying and analyzing these aspects in novels? How does this not only delight but also instruct?

Our novels range from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; this is a period of slightly over 200 years. By looking at this lengthy time span in literary history we will not only survey different historical periods and social constructs, but also follow the novel as a genre from its inception to the Modern Era, and see how writers themselves break boundaries, challenge rules and establish new ones. We will look at experimentation in narrative style and the subtle shifts in the genre that contribute to our understanding of what a “novel” should be.

This is a very reading and writing intensive course. Although not a prerequisite, prior completion of a composition course is highly recommended. In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to complete ten to fifteen pages of out of class writing, with revision.

Required Course Texts:
Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders, Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-97862-9
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice, Penguin, ISBN: 978-0-141-43951-8
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Norton, ISBN: 978-0-393-97917-6
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence, Broadview, ISBN: 978-1-551-11336-4
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway, Harvest, ISBN: 0156628708

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.

*Course Introduction:*In this course, we will explore both the contradictory roles of Victorian domestic females and female writers, as well as their negotiation of the public/private realms as they maneuver critically through the created spaces of their writings. We will also look at these female writers’ receptions into the “traditional” canon by contemporary feminist critics.Simultaneously, we will read works from two Victorian male writers in order to demonstrate alternative
perspectives of the domestic Victorian female as she navigates through limitations of marriage, career, status, and security, while acquiring agency and choice.Readings will be drawn from the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, and John Stuart Mill.In small groups of varying sizes, you will present on
the works of Deirdre D’Albertis, Deirdre David, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Suzanne Graver, Elizabeth Langland, Mary Poovey, Jenny Sharpe, and Virginia Woolf.
>
> *Requirements:*Because this class is primarily discussion-based, I will briefly introduce each text as well as provide a general summary of our discussion at the conclusion of each novel. As an active participant in this seminar, you are required to present and initiate discussion of a secondary text (read by all) as well as to produce a 1-2 pp. (single-spaced) handout including a summary and analysis, a list of comprehensive questions, and examples from a relevant primary source.Your on-going participation combined with your group presentation as well as turning in your material on time will constitute 1/4 of your
grade, while the remaining 3/4 will be graded on your 4-5 pp. response paper (during week 7) on a novel or article of your choice (1/4) and 12-15 pp. final seminar paper (1/2). You will meet individually with me to discuss your ideas for your final paper. Your final seminar paper can build on your shorter paper, and your final seminar paper must incorporate at least two novels and three secondary sources. During the final week of classes, you will be asked to share in an informal setting
on the topic of your seminar paper.

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

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

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

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

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

The core of this course will be poetry in the English language traditions, from Beowulf to present-day. That said, we will
supplement generously with poetry drawn from various cultures and historical periods, and try to pick up the strands from here and there. Classwork will be mostly dedicated to approaches to close reading. Students will be introduced to terms related to poetic form, and selected critical readings will also be included. The material will be a course reader, assembled by the instructor. We’ll cover numerous authors, too numerous to name, but among them will be: William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Susan Howe 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.

his course offers an introduction of American literature that examines what is “American” about these texts conventionally defined as canonical or classic. What does “America” or the “U.S.” mean according to the canon of American literature? What role does literature play in establishing the nation—how do these texts reveal the relationship between literature and the political, social, and economic elements of American culture? These questions will help us explore what it means to define “American” literature through the canon as well as what logics and assumptions are at work in deciding what gets included in an “American” literature survey course at the university setting. These questions inevitably overlap with questions about the uniqueness of literature: How does the literary form provide specific ways of producing, establishing, and critiquing national projects?

Course readings and assignments are designed to be active learning strategies that allow students to develop analytical skills and a deeper understanding of course materials. Therefore, throughout the quarter we’ll use writing as an opportunity to think through a problem rather than perform mastery or demonstrate knowledge. In this course, the study of literature will help students:
- Develop the ability to perform competent critical close readings of course texts and similar texts.
- Develop an understanding of the investments, contexts, and effects of the kind of critical close reading skills or approaches under study and use.
- Develop sophisticated discussion and presentation skills in the interest of being better able to construct and defend their own arguments or interpretations.

In sum, our goals are to explore definitions of “American” and “literature” by carrying out a critical reading and writing practice.

Texts:
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 1861
Stephen Crane, Maggie, Girl of the Streets 1893
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 1936
John Okada, No No Boy 1957
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 1970
Coursepack

This course is intended to examine American history (cursorily) through its literature and, in doing so, (hopefully) destabilise the common perception of U.S. exceptionalism through the “great experiment” known as democratic capitalism. But what do those terms actually mean, whom do they serve, and how can political and economic systems be mutually exclusive yet so closely interrelated that their independent operation often reinforces the other? We will read and investigate the historical roots America’s founding documents, noting the similarities and important divergences from their European counterparts. What is universal equality (in reality) and what should it be? Where are the boundaries or limitations of individual liberty and America’s collective freedom (if there are any)? We will read a variety of authors across a variety of genres—including fiction, memoirs, and film—in an attempt to define what it means to be “American” and the basic tenets (and traits) of the so-called “middle class” to which almost every citizen supposedly belongs. What is the amorphous “American Dream” and is it achievable (and if so, by whom)? In other words, does the American Dream still exist for the average middle class American?


The first two weeks' readings will be in a course packet so getting books shouldn't be a problem.

· Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

· Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

· F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).

· J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)

· John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

· Upton Sinclair, Oil!

· Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

· Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch (2005) and selections from Nickel and Dimed.

· Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

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.

English 281D: "WTF? (Why The Fangs?)" Our theme this quarter is the enduring popularity of the vampire figure in various cultural artifacts, from stories and novels to TV series and movies. We will pursue the question, how has the figure of the vampire enabled cultural critique since its establishment as a Romantic myth early in the nineteenth century? You can expect to read both academic and non-academic responses to this question. While we may consider Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an originary text, we will also go back further in time to read stories by Polidori, Le Fanu, and Braddon that may have influenced Stoker’s version of the vampire figure. Additional texts under analysis may include Philip Burne-Jones’ painting “The Vampire� And Rudyard Kipling’s poem by the same title, various film adaptations of Dracula, other selected vampire films like Let the Right One In, and episodes from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood.

Prerequisites:

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

This class presents the core of HTML/XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets to students with no background in computing with special reference to the emerging HTML 5 standard. It works to integrate Design and Coding and to develop a sense of the special qualities of multimedia hypertext writing for publication on the Web. The grading is based on exercises and short projects. The criteria for success on these projects is that they work/can be viewed as intended on Firefox and/or Safari, and are intelligent and good-looking. Oh yes, completed and on time. This is a very hands-on course.

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.

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.

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.

This course is framed upon two nesting sets of questions. The innermost set is focused on examining the relative value assigned to fictional narratives. Why are some texts deemed “major” and others not? What counts as a major text? Who decides (besides Oprah)? How does knowing that a text is “major” change what we notice in a text?

These questions about the categorization of “major” texts will be nestled within metaquestions about the act of reading itself. Is there anything special about the creation of meaning in an imaginative work penned by an author for paper publication that cannot be found in any other reading material? And in an age of declining readerships and the ascendancy of electronic media, why focus on reading fiction anyway?

We will be reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and David Shields' Reality Hunger at a relatively leisurely pace, supplemented by selected theory on narrative and essays on reading. In order to best develop answers to the slew of questions in the previous two paragraphs, I will be asking you to practice some different forms of analytical writing this quarter. Some writing will be of the kind expected in traditional English class analyses, but others will use more imaginative formats to better access the deep and myriad ways that reading affects our imagining of ourselves and our culture.

This course will provide an introduction to a range of historical contexts that have defined literature as an object of analysis and organized literary study as an approach to that object. The first section of the course, "What is Literature? National Vernaculars, the Printed Book, and Modern Culture,” will consider what distinguishes literature from other forms of writing, and explore how our present understandings of literature and authorship are linked to the rise of capitalism and of nationalism, to the development of new print technologies, and to concepts of "civilization" and "humanity" forged in the contexts of modern imperial expansion and colonial rule. We will be especially concerned with the historical roles of literature and print culture more generally in defining the concepts of the modern individual, private or expressive subjectivity, and public life or citizenship. We will also be concerned with the relation of literature to the large social, political, and cultural changes referred to as “modernity,” while on the level of literary history we will focus on the transition to romanticism and historical alternatives to that definition of literature. In the second section of the course, "What is Literary Study? Theories of Reading, Writing, and Meaning," we will chart how the establishment of literary study within the modern university, especially the creation of English departments and curricula, has shaped the understanding and reception of literature. In this regard, we will consider some of the main approaches that have organized academic literary study, including New Criticism, reader response, deconstruction, and ideology critique. One of the key issues that will emerge in the course of these readings is the relation of literary studies to linguistic theory as well as the relation of the aesthetic functions of language to the social functions. In the third and final section of the course, "'Writable’ Texts and the Cultural Politics of Reading," we will build on the first two units of the class in order to develop a perspective on literature as a practice, rather than a product.

Along with additional readings available online or on electronic reserve, required texts will include:
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised edition)
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (2nd edition)
Octavia Butler, Dawn (Aspect/Warner)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Norton Critical Edition)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin Classics Edition)

Work for the course will include a midterm exam (30%) and a final exam (40%), both involving both take-home and in-class components. Participation and additional short writing assignments in the discussion sections will comprise the remaining (30%) portion of your grade.

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 studies, 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); George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford World’s Classics); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Vintage); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial pack of critical essays. Several short assignments and a final exam/paper (last day of class).

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 offer an advanced introduction to marxist cultural theory. Following closely the work of Walter Benjamin we will ask what the relationship is between culture and capitalism. Does capitalism have a specific cultural form or logic? What kind of culture does capitalism emphasize? Are there "cultures" that are defunct or dis-functional for capitalism? Moreover, are struggles over culture-- struggles around taste, high and low culture, gentrification, educational content, etc-- merely a distraction from problems of real social inequality or are they its most complicated expresssions? Lastly, how has capitalism's development over two millennia changed the meaning and experience of "culture" for the modern person? We will read Marx to understand the materialist method and then Benjamin to grasp the study of culture in modernity. Our readings will be supplemented with literary works and filmic texts.

A rapid survey of the Old and New Testaments, with emphasis on selections with the most literary interest: stories, songs, theology, wisdom instruction. Students will be expected to keep up with assigned readings, attend class regularly, take part in class-discussion, and write a series of in-class essays in response to questions handed out in advance.

Text: Michael Coogan, ed., The Oxford Annotated Bible

Poetry in the nineteenth century enjoyed a popularity and a breadth of readership unimaginable today. The most successful poets, moreover, enjoyed very large readerships outside of their home countries (e.g. Longfellow in Britain, Tennyson and the Brownings in America, Poe in France). This course will discuss mid-nineteenth-century British and American poetry in the context of transatlantic exchanges. Among other topics, we will address the politics of sentimental poetics, the connections between poetry and nationalism, the material conditions that enabled transatlantic literary exchanges (printing presses, transatlantic steamship voyages, new technologies for communicating), the ongoing importance of human and animal rights in the nineteenth century (especially in relation to American slavery), and evolving theories (often understood in national contexts) of poetic form. And, naturally, the class will discuss poetry: some of the most influential poetry and poetic theory written in the nineteenth century.

--

The golden age of English poetry, with poems by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, and others; drama by Marlowe and other early rivals to Shakespeare; prose by Sir Thomas More and the great Elizabethan translators.


Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin)
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (Oxford)
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1b, The Sixteenth and
Early Seventeenth Century

Bookworms, book-learning, bookishness. It’s a commonplace that books make us smarter, but did you know that these expressions originated in the age of Shakespeare? This course will explore the first great book culture in England – the Renaissance – from Montaigne’s historic translation into English in 1603 through the revolutionary poetry and prose of Milton, on the eve of Civil War. Along the way, we will encounter themes of travel and exploration, the rise of newspapers and the revolution of print, bookish depression and melancholy, and darker themes of sex, violence, and political unrest. Class will meet in the university’s Special Collections department, and will involve frequent hands-on experience with rare books. In addition to regular writing assignments, participants will contribute to two special projects: a student-edited anthology of poems and a student-curated exhibit of early printed materials at Allen Library.

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 an essay.

English 332: British Romantic Writers
(Keats, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Byron)
(Winter 2011)

Professor Raimonda Modiano
Office: 4l9B Padelford


COURSE DESCRIPTION: 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 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 is 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 four weeks on these introductory topics, 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, narcissism, transgression and the Promethean hero.

BOOKS: John Keats. Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Required
Houghton Mifflin, 1959. LCCN 59003635/L

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002)
ISBN: 0-393-97752-8 Required

George Gordon Byron. Byron’s Poetry. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978)
ISBN: 0-393-09152-X Required

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, Required
1992. ISBN: 0-312-04469-0

This course will center on English romantic poetry and fiction by Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, and John Keats, with additional material on romanticism, theories and practices of poetry, and background and critical material about these writers and their works. Midterm and final, each with study questions provided in advance. The syllabus will be available soon after the end of pre-registration in Spring Quarter.

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

This course covers American literature written and published roughly between the two major world wars, 1914 - 1945, thus focusing on themes of modern war-torn America: alienation, absurdity of humane existence, mechanization, social and psychological fragmentation, indeterminacy of life, disenfranchisement. These themes "modernist" writers incorporated into texts implementing experimental techniques, verbally, visually, theoretically.
Students will practice using various critical approaches rooted in historical and cultural contexts to move well beyond impressionistic interpretation and evaluation of texts. Experimental fictional and prose writers and works likely to be covered in the course include those by Faulkner, Wright, Wharton, Hurston, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Evans, as will be various modernist poets and playwrights.
Important to course success is familiarity with basic literary genres and elements, various critical approaches to literature, beyond the merely impressionistic and formal and including cultural and historical contexts, reader-response and reception theories. Familiarity and practice using secondary sources found online in UW English scholarly discipline databases include those here: http://guides.lib.washington.edu/english
Assignments and grading will be based on weekly quizzes, objective and short out-of-class essay on readings; midterm and final essays and identification of terms; discussion reparation, thoughtful vocal participation in interpretive and evaluative debate, and class presentations.

Main course text: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D

This course will track the migration of Jewish American literature and 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. Fiction from the 1890s down to the first decade of the 21st century—Abe Cahan to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Michael Chabon and Art Spiegelman—films from The Jazz Singer (1927) to the Coen Brothers’ Serious Man (2010), music from Benny Goodman and Bob Dylan and a glance at Hank Greenberg who in 1938 almost matched Babe Ruth’s best season at the plate. Lecture, discussion, short essays.

In the last century, the reliance on reading and writing texts in order to form or express ideas has been largely replaced by mass viewing and visual recordings of our experiences. Or so the argument goes. Rather than jumping to any dire judgments about this shift, or trying to explore the entire field of visual culture, this course will focus instead on the particular ways in which writers and critics debated or understood the effects of an increasing reliance on photography to shape perceptions. We will need to grasp both the history of the development of photographic practice and circulation, as well as how the development of photography’s social usefulness set off provocative claims about photography’s effects on, among other things: traditional social relations; political culture; and, of course, the uses and value of writing and reading. Most readings will be collected in a course packet, including, among other things: short works by Henry James, Edgar Allen Poe, John Dos Passos, and James Agee and Walker Evans; criticism by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Shawn Smith, Martha Rosler, and John Tagg. In addition to the course packet, we’ll read two novels, the graphic novel Palestine by Joe Sacco, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Catalog Description: Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.

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

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

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose 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

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

This seminar is a comprehensive introduction to the work of James Joyce. We’ll start with a quick survey of Joyce’s early prose fiction and poetry (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and Chamber Music), and spend most of the quarter exploring Ulysses, the summit of literary modernism. To dispel fear of Ulysses, we’ll read the book one episode at a time, tracking the progressive weaving and unweaving of sense. Discussions will address the book’s Irish and European contexts and influences, and Joyce's exuberant transvaluations of all novelistic values (narrative devices, generic conventions, topics, perspectives, styles and humors). A portion of each meeting will be devoted to music in Ulysses, from Palestrina, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner to Irish street ballads and turn-of-the-century music-hall favorites. We’ll conclude with a reading of selected passages from Finnegans Wake. Desiderata: familiarity with Homer’s Odyssey and interest in sly uses of language. Text: Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, (available at UW Bookstore and elsewhere). Requirements: weekly assignments and a course project involving independent research and resulting in a longer final paper (15-20 pages). Please note: Ulysses is a delightful but very demanding book: contact instructor in person to receive reading recommendations for the summer: A415 Padelford, W 2-4.

This course focuses on various novels, short stories and films set in the excitingly chaotic and vastly diverse city of Mumbai. Formally known as Bombay, this devastatingly complex city is the commercial and entertainment capital of India and the sixth largest metropolis in the world. Probing the intricacies of Mumbai, from its thriving film industry to its urban slums, students will consider modern developments in politics, religion, crime, society and culture through a pantheon of literature and cinema. Attending to the city’s landscapes and peoples, the course will examine transitions between public and private spaces, the increasing burden of globalization and modernity, expanding class and caste gaps and differences between third world realities and first world mentalities.

Central readings will include: Serious Men by Manu Joseph, Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry, Window Seat: Rush-hour Stories from the City by Janhavi Acharekar, Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra, Breathless in Bombay by Murzban Shroff, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash, among others.

Films include: Dhobi Ghat, Salaam Bombay, Satya and Slumdog Millionaire,

General Method of Instruction: Discussion.

Student Responsibilities and Evaluation: Course work includes a willingness to challenge one's current aesthetic values about film and literature and keep an open mind; weekly engaged, in-person critical discussion; online research of literary and film terms via UW databases; critical written analysis of stories, films and their relevant critical work. Evaluation will include oral presentations, essays, quizzes and exams.

The American Literature of the Fringe: Exploring the Aesthetics of the Grotesque, the Freakish, and the Abnormal in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.

The phrase “all-American,” as in the “all-American boy” or the “all-American family,” generally summons up wholesome, stereotypic images of national culture and life, providing an ostensible looking-glass within which Americans (or at least many Americans) have sometimes chosen to behold their shared values and norms. Norman Rockwell’s old Saturday Evening Post covers are a case in point: they are meant to be provide a charming, endearing portrait of American life, in which every family seems to have a loyal dog, eyes are blue, father is taller than mother, freckled-faced boys like to play baseball, and picket fences are appropriately white. This avid pursuit of an artificially normalized, standardized America of course overlays an underlying reality of mixed cultural backgrounds, diversity of human faces and features, and shifting ways of speaking and behaving, along with the weird proclivities and strange dreams in the night that sometimes haunt even freckle-faced, “all-American” boys and girls. As Walt Whitman writes: “No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,/ Another self . . . Skulking and hiding it goes/ Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors.” On the one hand, American literary critic Philip Fisher raises a valid point in suggesting that one way in which the American cultural industry has attempt to “solve the problem” of U.S. diversity is through the banalization of imagery and language claiming to represent an “all-American way”; the avid promulgation of mainstream standards based upon the “subtraction of differences,” and the flattening of human potential into stereotypes, becomes for Fisher a major tactic in the establishment of an American cultural identity. In early portions of this course, we’ll explore the way this flattened sense of national identity is asserted in the nineteenth-century U.S. through the stereotypically “anywhere in America” look of Currier and Ives engravings, the rise of national magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, and other cultural forms attempting to invoke and codify an American cultural mainstream. But most of this course will focus on the way nineteenth-century American writers were already busily at work exploring a more comprehensive, generously envisaged, quirkier, and less easily normalized reality, if sometimes against the grain of culturally inculcated allegiances and shames. Our literary readings will be supplemented by a number of theorists and cultural commentators who will provide us with some useful concepts and terms as we explore the collision of the normalized with what it excludes.

Reading List: Whittier, Snowbound; Moore “A Visit from St. Nicholas”; Poe, selected tales and sketches; Dickinson, selected poetry; Hawthorne, selected fiction; Melville, selected fiction; Whitman, selected poetry; Margaret Fuller, selected prose; Rebecca Harding Davis, “Blind Tom,” “Life in the Iron Mills”; Crane, “The Monster”; Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; James, selections from The American Scene and “The Jolly Corner.”

Contemporary poets, authors and short fiction writers who are from the Northern Coast and Pacific Northwest. This is a "Northwest" that will for our purposes include Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Starting with the oral traditions of these writers and their communities, the class addresses the transition made between oral storytelling and the work of contemporary authors, some whose work is nationally and internationally known (Formerly AIS 377: A Northwest Focus).

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; to new media and multimodal compositions; and to the possibilities of service learning and community-based writing initiatives.

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 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 in a specific place and time.

(Please note that this is a service learning course associated with the Phoenix Project. You will have the option to work three to four hours each week in a Seattle-area classroom, and receive two hours of course credit by enrolling in Education 401. Please e-mail your instructor for more information.)

Catalog Description: Intensive verse workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student poetry.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Students will complete several writing mini-assignments, based on readings of dozens of great mini-essays and mini-stories. This is a course focusing on the excitement of very brief work--relevant to contemporary culture--and a course in the very brief story and essay as way to learn DNA for crucial compositional principles.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This is not a course for beginning fiction writers.It is presumed, then, that you are familiar with the fundamentals of fiction writing, of dramatizing experience, and creating a 'fictional moment'. For although we will pay attention to all dimensions of fiction, emphasis will be placed on those problems which arise from length — how one orders a longer sequence of events, how one manipulates a larger cast of characters, how one retains a sense of unity and identity within the diversity which characterizes most novels. Note: no conventional genre novels (fantasy, sci-fi, romance) recapitulating rote formulas or material that has been sitting in a trunk since high school: only your best current work that aims to explore and illuminate the human circumstance.

Other than student mss., the one text that we will using at the start: The Secret Agent by Josef Conrad (Oxford's World Classics series)

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

Literary texts are amazingly flexible: they can travel through time and space within the span of a single sentence (e.g. “Bill Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Bill has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.”) They can also make us, like Gulliver in his famous travels, feel very small or quite large. In other words, narratives create economies of scale, and they use these economies to condense or expand time and space in ways that have come to seem quite realistic, or at least understandable. This course will investigate how they accomplish these remarkable transformations, and so it will consider theories of narratology as one important component of this phenomenon. As well, it will look at why literary texts invoke economies of scale in order to critique, satirize, or to represent the extraordinary possibilities of the ordinary world. In order to understand why, we will consider a number of theorists, including geographers (e.g. David Harvey and others who have thought a good deal about scale), literary theorists (Susan Stewart, et al.), and philosophers (e.g. Edmund Burke on the sublime). Among the texts we will be reading are Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Robert Irwin’s The Limits of Vision, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, John McPhee’s Assembling California, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and maybe even Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five. Like other Honors seminars, this one will require some short writing assignments, an annotated bibliography, and a 20 page final project.

In this course we’ll read recent novels and some theory centered in thinking about the emotions and complications of personal memory. We’ll begin with some broader questions of emotion and fiction: How much of our own lives do we read into a character's life? What does "being moved" by something we read or view involve? How do emotions become a commodity in work and personal environments? What kinds of situations require emotions on demand? How do we account for the bodily responses that sometimes accompany intense emotional responses? What forms do the weird pleasures, wild emotions, and secret seductions of reading fiction take as texts and as psychic structures?

Then we’ll explore these questions in several recent novels of time, space and memory. Here our questions might be: What if you’re haunted by the place you come from? Does nostalgia filter out the painful past? How are shame and guilt related to memory? What happens if you repress your most powerful feelings? Does current joy depend on past sadness? When does memory of love create obsession? Novelists for the course will probably include Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Nami Mun, Jeanette Winterson, Chang-rae Lee and Nicole Krauss.

Come expecting lively conversations and differences of opinion. You’ll do some short exploratory writing, an annotated bibliography, a longer paper, and a class presentation.