In this course, we will investigate the politics of storytelling by examining how stories circulate: how they’re told and retold, appropriated and authorized, cited and invoked. We’ll look in particular at what it means to define a text as “literature” and how texts are included and excluded from “literary” status. How are literary texts defined against other types of cultural work? What are the politics of defining a national canon? What are we looking for when we read “literature”? The approach we will take to answering these questions will involve close reading and analysis that is attentive to histories of imperialism, colonization, and nation building. Primary texts will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Additional texts will be available in a course packet and may include work by George Lamming, Henry David Thoreau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Paulo Freire, among others. We might also take a look at the debates surrounding the Arizona ban of ethnic studies courses and the restriction of specific literary texts (including some of the texts we will read in class).

Class sessions will include a combination of lecture, discussion, group work, and writing assignments. This course counts as a “W” credit and will require the completion of two 5-7 page papers.

The theme of this section of English 200 is "Power and Its Perversions." We will be investigating works that deal with the central thematic of power, that cross time, space, and different sociocultural settings, and that span genres and forms as diverse as theatrical dialogues, cultural theory, political satire, relationship guides, autobiography, and film. Throughout the course we will investigate the many meanings and uses of this seemingly simple term "power," trying to understand: how is it understood variously by our different authors? What is it, who gets to use it, how, why, under what circumstances, for what, on whom?

This course satisfies the University's W-requirement; it will include 10-20 pages of graded, out-of-class writing that will be collaboratively workshopped and individually revised, requiring also out-of-class consultations with the instructor. The class will also include in-class quizzes, daily writing, and group work. Students unprepared to read, write, and speak daily would be advised to contact the instructor before signing up for the course.

Texts for the course include Albert Camus' The Stranger, Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.

In this section of English 200, we will look at representations of the “cyborg” (cybernetic organism) in 20th and 21st century science fiction in order to examine humans’ changing relationships with our techno-scientific creations. The selection of course texts will survey novels, short stories, films, and graphic novels that represent blurred boundaries between human and machine. Text selection may include: He, She, and It by Marge Piercy, Ghost in the Shell by Mamoru Oshii, "Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson, “Many Moons” by Janelle Monae, We3 by Grant Morrison, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree Jr.,“The Ship Who Sang” by Anne McCaffrey, and “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore. These texts will allow us to focus particularly on how the cyborg demands that we reassess our definitions of gender, race, ability, and species.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing. You will learn the skill of “close reading” in order to critically analyze literature. You will write up to two claim-driven essays that interpret course texts; in these essays you will support your interpretation through analyzed and well-reasoned evidence.
The course will also likely include a in-class quizzes, presentations, and short writing assignments.

This class will explore the relationship between the individual and the group in British and American literature from 1840 to 1940. As we read novels, short stories, and poems of the period, we’ll assess formulations of the one and the many, of individuality in relation to various kinds of aggregation and systematization. We’ll examine groups that range from crowd menace and democratic mean to politicized solidarity and idealized community. In each text we’ll consider what kind of group is portrayed, what conditions for membership or possibilities for autonomy exist, what status and particularity the individual has in relation to the group, and how individuals might participate in, resist, or be refused inclusion in the group. At the same time, we’ll consider how form—especially narrative perspective and lyric voice—complicates the text’s ideas about individuals and groups. Nonfiction and theoretical writings from the period will provide historical and cultural contexts against which to read transformations in the literary portrayal of individuality. Rather than settling on a single answer or a linear trajectory, we’ll encounter complex and evolving ways of representing the one and the many.

The course will begin in the nineteenth century but focus on modernism (for our purposes, 1900 to 1940). Authors are likely to include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, T. S. Elliot, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Muriel Rukeyser, and W. H. Auden.

Required writing will include two 5-7 page papers (one of which can be revised), as well as informal writing assignments throughout the quarter. This course fulfills the university’s “W” requirement.

In ordinary reading, the book becomes almost invisible—we read the language inside rather than the book itself. In this course, we will read several literary texts that challenge this way of reading by foregrounding the visual surface of the page and the material object of the book. As we encounter these texts, our primary question will be: how do the visual and material features of this text affect the possible literary meanings? Because these particular texts blur the boundaries between poetry, fiction, autobiography, we’ll also explore some of the ways in which genre expectations inform our reading practices.

We’ll begin with the illuminated books of William Blake and the handwritten, handbound fascicles of Emily Dickinson before moving to more contemporary texts, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Anne Carson’s Nox, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. As the quarter progresses we will also draw on the UW Libraries’ considerable collection of twentieth-century artists’ books. We will use an array of secondary sources to place the authorship, production, distribution, and reception of these texts in historical context. Our ultimate goal will be to become informed, careful, engaged readers, and to deepen our understanding of these texts through class discussions and written responses.

This course fulfills the university’s “W” requirement and as such is writing intensive. You will write two 5-page papers with the opportunity to revise the first of these papers; brief writing assignments (graded on completion) will also be used as preparation for in-class discussions. We’ll devote some of our class time to writing instruction, but this course assumes rhetorical awareness and a familiarity with the fundamentals of academic writing taught in “C” courses. It is strongly recommended that you complete the university’s “C” requirement before enrolling in this class.

The Victorians’ fascination with artistic creation produced an impressive number of works in all genres, particularly in literature and the visual arts. The literary output ranges across poetry and drama, fiction and non-fiction. In this class we will read a selection of Victorian poems (Tennyson, the Brownings and the Rossettis), novels (Anthony Trollope and George Gissing), and one comedy (W. S. Gilbert). We will also look at illustrations and paintings that deal with related topics. While we will analyze different representations of the process of artistic creation, we will also examine how different literary genres shaped the representation of artistic endeavor. We will complete our interpretations of texts and artworks with criticism that will give us a better understanding of Victorian compositional strategies and their contextual meaning.

This is a course in the politics of modern graffiti culture, from its emergence as a kind of criminal mischief or gang-related boundary keeping to its current acclaim in art, fashion, and film, from Cope 2’s bombed-out subway cars to Shepard Fairey’s mass-marketed Obey T-shirts. Which is another way of saying that while graffiti is often viewed as a critique and refusal of the conditions of urban existence, corporate crime, the military state, the death of the public sphere, and the inequality of property laws, it is also increasingly becoming big and mainstream business. The aim of this course is to show how Cultural Studies work may be useful to developing a political analysis of the everyday culture around us, using the fortunes of
graffiti sub-cultural practice as a case study of sorts.

We will begin by simply familiarizing ourselves with the general history of modern graffiti as we develop a foundational sense of what it was or is that makes graffiti or street art (these terms, sometime interchangeable, are also the subject of some debate) seem like a distinctive form of writing or expression. Then we’ll move on to consider various forms of graffiti, including paste-ups and knit bombing, as well as the different political and national contexts that impact the approach to and meaning of graffiti writing. At this stage, a few key theories of urban spaces and sub-culture style may prove useful to unpacking the specific effects of graffiti. Finally, we will try to assess in what ways the myriad of graffiti practices has been useful for contesting social and political inequalities, as well as the ways graffiti might exclude or obscure certain questions of inequality.

Note: While the work we will discuss in class is not local, I am always open to considering local sites and cases too.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

This course will survey poetry in English from late Middle English lyrics through the early Romantics, including but not limited to Early Modern ballads,
metaphysical poetry, Shakespeare's sonnets, and women poets. Students will gain experience in analyzing Early Modern poetry in terms of both form and content.
Course activities may include: scansion, discussion of poetry in thematic terms (religion, the natural world, science, desire) and memorization/performance.
Final grade will be based on participation and a final, 10-15 page paper."

Patrick Cheney, et al., eds, Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion 978-0195153873
Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England 9781421400426
Colin Burrow, ed, Metaphysical Poetry 9780140424447
W. H. Auden, ed. The Portable Romantic Poets 9780140150520

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain were a period of rapid expansion on all fronts: The 1707 Acts of Union brought Scotland and England together
as the United Kingdom, and the railway boom in the mid-nineteenth century allowed citizens and, perhaps more importantly, information to go from one end of
Great Britain to the other in a matter of hours. Simultaneously, the Empire itself was expanding, and individual business owners increasingly turned to the
financial safety of limited liability companies. As their world became simultaneously bigger and smaller, citizens of Great Britain increasingly sought ways
to order the potential overabundance of information by fitting it into schematized networks. In this class, we will look at the literature of the
Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian eras through the lens of how these texts are used as a way of bringing order to the chaos of pure information, both
through narrative structure and an obsession with counting and categorizing.

Texts may include Frankenstein, The Moonstone, Dracula, and the Haunted House, as well as excerpts from other novels, poetry, and treatises on science,
economics, and political theory. Students should expect a heavy reading load, as we will be attempting to fit 200 years into 11 weeks. Assignments and
evaluation will consist of a midterm and final exam, periodic reading quizzes, class presentations, and one 5-7 page paper. Please also note that this course
will rely heavily on discussion - be prepared to contribute in class every day!

Course Objectives:
1. To understand both books and readers as culturally-situated and contextualized.
2. To develop and understanding of the cultural contexts of 18th and 19th century literature.
3. To develop familiarity with and an appreciation of a broad range of 18th and 19th century texts.
4. To begin to understand how to make an intervention in critical conversations surrounding works of art.

Course Texts:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 9781554811038
Charles Dickens, et al., The Haunted House. 9781847491015
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, 9781551112435
Bram Stoker, Dracula, 9781551111360
Course pack, TBD

English 213 explores U.S. and British literary modernism and postmodernism as responses to distinct historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of the 20th century. The period witnessed two world wars—and the concomitant development of military technology that brought destruction on an unprecedented scale; economic depression; the refinement of mass production methods; continuing migration from rural to urban areas; civil and women’s rights movements; the development or proliferation of transportation, communication, entertainment and computer technologies; and the effects of globalization. Modern and postmodern literature reflects as well as shapes human perception of these phenomena. As we examine novels and poems of the era, we will focus on how artists experimented with language and form to represent the altered sense of history, space, time, and the self engendered by modernity and postmodernity. We will also pay attention to literary interrogations into the nature of narrative.

Goals and Methodology

Students in the course work toward several goals:



§ Analyzing the language, structure and themes of fictional texts,

§ Explaining the relationship between selected 20th-century literary texts and the political, social, historical and cultural contexts of their production,

§ Defining (and recognizing the limits of defining) literary modernism and postmodernism, and

§ Developing as critical thinkers who can formulate substantive arguments and explore those arguments with evidence.

Course activities promote active learning, with most class sessions incorporating a mix of mini-lectures, discussion, and group work. The course design—which includes frequent non-graded and graded writing—reflects the importance of writing as a means of learning. My role is to provide the tools and resources you will need to advance your own thinking. I will pose questions, design activities to help you think through these questions, and respond to your ideas. Your role is to do the hard work—the close reading, discussion, and writing. You will analyze texts, present your interpretations via class discussion and written assignments, and critically respond to others’ readings.

“Tragedy” is too narrow a term to describe the remarkable variety included in the plays that we commonly designate by that rich but inadequate term. There are elements of comedy, romance, history and farce in Shakespeare’s great. . .well, tragedies. We will try to do justice to the stunning diversity within and between each of the following plays: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and—just for laughs—Coriolanus which you may see as a current and timely movie. Lecture, discussion, short essays and shorter performance (if and as you like it).

This course will provide an opportunity to consider the relationship between fiction and culture through an inquiry into narrative representations of time. For our purposes, “time” will be broadly construed. Our inquiry will take us through novels and short stories that engage time thematically as well as those that engage time through formal innovations. The issues we will consider include, but are not limited to the global standardization of clock-time; time-travel; concepts of “past”, “present”, and “future”; and “official” or “public” methods of marking time as opposed “private” ways of marking time. We will explore how time is both experienced and narrated by attending to each work’s historical context as well as the varied social positions that these texts represent along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

While this course is organized around “time,” our treatment of these texts fits within the larger project of practicing meaningful interpretation of literature both for enjoyment and for academic engagement. Although the course theme provides an organizational logic to this class, students’ interests and ideas will shape the how we read the course texts as the term develops; students will be encouraged to raise their own questions about the material throughout the quarter. Along the way, this class will provide strategies for close reading, interpreting literature, and writing in an academic context. Students will be expected to think critically about the course materials and to actively participate in class activities, including group work and class discussion. Group presentations may also be required.

This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement by requiring 10-12 pages of graded, out-of-class writing.

Our primary texts will likely include:
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (1993)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

A course pack, including short stories, excerpts from novels, and short selections of theory and literary criticism, will also be required.
Short fiction may include work by Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Kate Chopin, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf among others.

We’ve only to consider the extraordinary popularity of recent books/films such as The Hunger Games or the rhetoric of recent political discourse within this country in order to note some of the ways in which our culture is preoccupied with utopian dreams and dystopian threats. Evidence of this preoccupation is not new, and may be traced back to Plato’s Republic, as well as to the origins of most religious traditions. But, around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a particular resurgence of interest in themes of utopia and dystopia within literature and Western culture, as late Victorian and modernist authors began to explore the use of metaphors of utopia and dystopia in order to address shifts within a rapidly-modernizing society. This interest continued throughout the century in American and English literature, with the rise of the sci-fi genre at mid-century, the increasing incorporation of sci-fi elements into mainstream literary fiction, and now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, with the creation of the dystopian YA (Young Adult) novel genre.
This course will examine the ways in which fictional literary works of this period reflect the anxieties of our modern culture, and the ways in which these works provide a space within which to explore contemporary concerns such as: the place of the individual within society, power and control, race/class/gender, consumerism, urbanization, technology and futurism. We will focus primarily on literary works of the twentieth century, beginning with those of the modernist period, but we will also discuss excerpts from a few works written well before this time period, as well as excerpts from a few works written within the twenty-first century.

Readings will include the following novels: Herland (Charlotte Perkins-Gilman), The Children of Men (P.D. James), We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), In the Country of Last Things (Paul Auster), the novella The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) and the graphic novel V for Vendetta (Alan Moore). Readings will also include a number of short stories by authors such as E.M. Forster, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ray Bradbury, Joanna Russ, Harlan Ellison, Chia Miéville, and George Saunders, as well as short excerpts from several recent YA (Young Adult) novels, and short excerpts from longer works by theorists of utopia such as Thomas More and Fredric Jameson.

This course will emphasize close reading and critical thinking, as well as the development of complex and well-supported written arguments. This course also fulfills the University of Washington’s ‘W’ requirement. It will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two, 5-7 page papers or two shorter papers and one longer paper. The course may also include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

In English 242 we will examine the novel from the nineteenth century to the postmodern era, focusing specifically on the theme of postwar life. In her recent book, War at a Distance, Mary Favret considers how “military conflict on a global scale looked and felt to a population whose armies and navies waged war for decades, but always at a distance. For those at home, the task was to find sentient ground for what often appeared a free-floating, impersonal military operation, removed from their immediate sensory perception” (9). The characters in our novels are no longer fighting wars at a distance but re-approaching their everyday lives. For those characters that never left home, they must readjust to ruined houses and finances, changing power dynamics, and a schedule no longer interrupted (or regulated) by the threat of invasion. Structurally, these novels take place after the climactic battle scene. What can we say about a novel that begins at the dénouement? Are these novels stuck in an ironic mode, without direction, hope, or a clear hero? While a postwar novel might sound bleak, such directionless and confusing periods in history might offer the chance for significantly different ways of thinking, living, and art-making.

Students should be prepared to write two 5-7 page papers. In the first section of the course, we will learn how to write an academic literary essay, using Jane Austen’s Persuasion as our text. For the second paper, students can focus on one of the three remaining texts by Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, or Ian McEwan.

Classical literature had a very strong impact on the literature that followed it. In this class we will explore how the 18th and 19th century novel takes up Classical themes and conventions and adapts them. We’ll take a look at a few important Classical texts ranging from Epic, Tragedy and Comedy, and then study a more “recent” work alongside it. Our novels range from Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), an Epic adventure tale, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), a dramatic Tragedy, and Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), a Comedy of Manners. Through the examination of these texts we will get a clearer understanding of why the Classics had such strong influence on literature written hundreds, or even well over a thousand years later. What makes these Classical conventions, themes, ideas, structures, figures, etc. so compelling and fascinating? Further, how have authors helped evolve and shape the genres of Epic, Comedy and Tragedy, from their beginnings in the 9th or 5th century B.C.E.? This course will bring us closer to answering these questions, as well as understanding and appreciating these significant and fascinating works of fiction.

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.

o Course Packet – Available at Ave. Copy Center. 4141 University Way NE.

Texts:

• o Henry Fielding. Joseph Andrews. Norton. [9780393955552]
• o Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. Norton. [9780393972788]
• o Jane Austen. Emma. Norton. [9780393927641]

From True Blood to The Walking Dead, from American Horror Story to Celebrity Ghost Stories, contemporary television is populated by vampires, zombies, and specters of the undead. Meanwhile, as “mature” audiences await the next season of Dexter, the young-adult demographic graduates from the dark wizardry of the Harry Potter series to the mortal combat of The Hunger Games. For critics like Noel Carroll, the current popularity of horror in this “postmodern” age can be attributed to the fact that both horror and postmodernism stand in the same shifting and unstable relationship to empirical, rational knowledge. This class will attempt to further make sense of our contemporary obsession with supernatural terror by surveying a number of the genre’s earlier, canonical texts, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. These novels and novellas will be accompanied by a course pack of short fiction and critical essays by Carroll, Susan Stewart, and others.

Students will be responsible for writing a short 4 page essay on an assigned reading, and for giving an in-class presentation on the contents of that essay. In order to satisfy the “W” requirement, students must also complete one 10-12 page essay, which must be revised in response to feedback from the instructor. Other class requirements include a midterm exam, daily participation in class discussions, and occasional quizzes on the reading material.

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

Just as the name implies, this course will focus on approaches to poetry, with an emphasis on developing the essential skill of close reading. To do this, the main work of the course will be examining poems in great detail, analyzing the way their formal and thematic elements work together to create constellations of ideas and emotions too complicated to express in any other way. While the class will also consider poetic developments in a larger literary and historical context, our main focus will be on the poems themselves, with the goal of beginning to approach, in a verbal or prose description, an articulation of the complex and multifaceted way a poem works.

This class meets the requirements for the W (Writing) credit, meaning that there will be a focus on academic writing skills, and that assignments will include at least 10 pages of formal writing, with significant revision. Class participation will also comprise a major component of the final grade.

Text: The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Ed. Booth, Alison, et al., ISBN 978-0393928570

Just as the name implies, this course will focus on reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry, with an emphasis on developing the essential skill of close reading. To do this, the main work of the course will be examining poems in great detail, analyzing the way their formal and thematic elements work together to create constellations of ideas and emotions too complicated to express in any other way. While the class will also consider poetic developments in a larger literary and historical context, our main focus will be on the poems themselves, with the goal of beginning to approach, in a verbal or prose description, an articulation of the complex and multifaceted way a poem works.

Readings will range widely over time, but 20th century American poetry will be the primary focus of our attention. This class meets the requirements for the W (Writing) credit, meaning that there will be a focus on academic writing skills and that assignments will include at least 10 pages of formal writing, with significant revision. Class participation will also comprise a major component of the final grade.

Required texts:

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Ed. Ramazani, et al., ISBN 978-0393324297

In the aftermath of World War I, the political philosopher Randolph Bourne wrote that America was poised to become "a wholly novel international nation," which had the power to "harmonize" peoples of different cultural backgrounds by accepting their "foreign savor." Though this call for cultural acceptance was controversial in 1916, today, in an era of American military and economic dominance, concepts like "tolerance," "diversity" and "multiculturalism" seem just as accepted in political speeches as they are in advertisements. How did these values become dominant today, and can they carry deeper social or philosophical meanings? Who gets excluded from this discourse, and is there a threshold point, where one's sexuality, cultural attitude, or religious beliefs become "intolerable"?

In this course, we will read American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day, focusing on American attitudes towards immigration, assimilation, empire and diversity. In contrast to the "national harmony" suggested by the concept of e pluribus unum, the literature we read will focus on the ambiguous, tumultuous, and often regressive dimensions of cultural, racial, class and sexual difference.

The work for this course is designed to keep you reading and writing daily. There will be weekly reading responses, two 4-5 page papers, and one group presentation every week. Required texts include Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Cebu by Peter Bacho. We will also have a coursepack with short stories, poetry and essays. This course satisfies the W credit and the VLPA credit.

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.

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.

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.

Engl 300 Course Description AQ 12

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, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood 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.

Please note that I do not get addcodes until the first week of class.

To the world outside, English Studies are about reading and writing—and that’s just about that. But over the past few decades the field itself has become intensely self-conscious of what those two activities actually are. “Reading” and “writing,” we’ve decided, are complex processes, and depending on how you understand them, you will be doing very different things. One kind of reading, for example, has for some critics come to look like a kind of cultural cheer leading; another takes an angle that makes it deeply distrustful of anything—including successful authorship—that looks like the promotion of power or privilege.

In that context, this course will ask you to think carefully about what English Studies-trained people actually do when they do English, particularly as readers. We’ll begin with half a dozen essays that make claims about what work in English actually is or should be, and we’ll go on to read the whole of a short book that seems to argue that you needn’t actually read much at all (but doesn’t actually).

Throughout I will be asking you to think carefully about the reading and writing you do, and how and why you might choose to do either of them differently. You’ll write, too, about your own literacy habits, and in the end I’ll ask you to formulate for the future your own reading/writing plan. What are you doing when you do English, and how and why might you want to modify either?

Students will write short response papers for almost every class; there will also be three formal paper/mid-term assignments and a group project.



Texts

Texts: Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Assorted essays either on-line or on electronic reserve.

This course provides practical training in critical analyses of narrative fiction. We will be reading three canonical novels from three distinct historical 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 are connected by a common central theme: authored by women writers and dealing with the subject of madness, they 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 in a cinema course we would 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, 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 focus on the major developments and directions of contemporary criticism and theory of the twentieth century. We will be taking the title of this class literally, and so this will be very much a “history” of these traditions; consequently, we will not only be interested in what these theorists are arguing, but also in asking questions relating to how these theories emerged out of specific historical contexts. For example, what kinds of questions are they asking, and why might these questions be relevant to the historical moment in which these theorists were writing? In other words, in addition to asking what these major movements can tell us about literature, we will also be investigating what these movements can tell us about the way we think about literature and how these theoretical frameworks are themselves historically produced. In this sense, we will be reading theory as itself a kind of literature, one that can be historicized and analyzed in order to tell us something more broadly about human experience.

We will cover the major schools, movements, and “isms” of contemporary literary theory, including formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity studies, and new historicism, although due to the complexity of the texts and the brevity of the quarter, we will likely spend more time with some of these movements than others as we sketch the critical traditions of the last one hundred years. I say “sketch” rather than some more determined, decisive verb because I think it is important to emphasize, at the outset, the fuzzy, equivocal nature of literary theory, which is both its allure and its challenge. Our readings will consequently consist of many difficult and challenging theoretical texts, which we will work through as class in order to attempt to demystify and to make useful for literary study.

In addition to a midterm and final paper, there will also be group presentations, weekly online discussion board postings, quizzes, and in-class activities.

Everything can be read, every surface and silence, every breath and every vacancy, every eddy and current, every body and its absence, every darkness every light, each cloud and knife, each finger and tree, every backwater, every crevice and hollow, each nostril, tendril and crescent, every whisper, every whimper, each laugh and every blue feather, each stone, each nipple, every thread every color, each woman and her lover, every man and his mother, every river, each of the twelve blue oceans and the moon, every forlorn link, every hope and every ending, each coincidence, the distant call of a loon, light through the high branches of blue pines, the sigh of rain, every estuary, each gesture at parting, every kiss, each wasp's wing, every foghorn and railway whistle, every shadow, every gasp, each glowing silver screen, every web, the smear of starlight, a fingertip, rose whorl, armpit, pearl, every delight and misgiving, every unadorned wish, every daughter, every death, each woven thing, each machine, every ever after.

--Michael Joyce
Twelve Blue



What does it mean to read in the 21st century? Is it different from times past? Are current practices of reading too superficial, too entertainment oriented, such that self-fulfillment can no longer be found within the covers of a book? Alternatively, as spines collapse and dust jackets disappear, does the electronic conveyance of the word better engage the mind, the emotions, the senses—even the soul?

Throughout the quarter, you will attempt to answer these questions, among others, so as to become a more self-aware critical reader and “viewer” of fictional narratives: to think about what social forces shape you and others about narrative norms, and to question what’s at stake in changing those norms. You will read about reading, learn about various reading theories, historically and currently. You will critique and test ways of reading and the pleasures and dangers of the reading experience—intellectual, imaginative, sensual, soulful—in print, in film, and online, and via numerous other media formats.

Course readings include reading theory, reading fiction about acts of reading, reading film adapted from fiction, reading readers’ responses to writing, writing about reading, and discussing reading practices, past and present. Course exams will include a final exam and other writings.

This course explores postcolonialism through current configurations of orientalism and racial discourse. We will examine postcolonial literature and theory through a critique of what Prashad calls the “twin goals of supremacy and liberation”, goals inherent to the logics of the U.S. security state, imperial exploits, and various wars on ‘terror’. In order to explore what I call Orientalism’s afterlife, this course will approach postcolonial material historically through a literary and cultural studies-based examination of colonialism, imperial war, and terror in the modern world. As such, the course locates and divides, though not very neatly: we begin with a short survey and study of the concepts of orientalism, colonialism, and race through literature, art, and theory; move to a study of Algeria during the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of the early 1960s; and conclude with the present Global War on Terror.

This reading-intensive course will introduce students to the field of postcolonial studies. Our goal is not to survey the field of postcolonial studies, though students will learn many of its key concepts, but rather to understand the way in which postcolonial studies speaks to Orientalism, empire, and race. At its core, our task is to consider the following: gendered and sexual dimensions of the colonial project; the concern over revolutionary violence; neo-colonial conceptions of liberation; and the relationship between race and religion in contemporary Orientalist discourse, specifically on Islamophobia.

Furthermore, we will not focus on any one literary or artistic form, rather exploring historical and contemporary Orientalist discourse in the novel, drama, film, visual art, theoretical writing, and critical thought. Our tentative reading/viewing list includes work by: Prashad, Edward Said, Ania Loomba, Benedict Anderson, Gyan Prakash; Frantz Fanon, Gillo Pontecorvo, Jean Genet; Tayeb Saleh; Daisy Rockwell, Patrick Porter, Jasbir Puar, and Junaid Rana.

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.

Shakespeare' s career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances. Requirements: several in class essays and two exams. Text: Bevington's 6th edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. If you cannot afford the $90+ to buy a new one, go on line to find an earlier, cheaper edition. The text will be the same, only the introductions vary from edition to edition. The fourth edition, for example, has been selling on line for as cheap as $2.50 + shipping.

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

TEXTS: William Blake
Blake's Poetry an Designs (Norton)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford UP).
America: A Prophecy & Europe: A Prophecy (Dover).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton)
William Wordsworth
Selected Poetry (Everyman)

This class will focus on the relationship between literature and social change in England during the first three decades of the twentieth-century, which included the struggle for women's suffrage, the First World War, and the Depression. The poems, short stories, and novels that we will be studying this quarter reflect-- both in style and content--the conflicts, discoveries, and social/psychological theories that were current during this period. We will consider the relationship between "modernism" and modernity, the implications of Freudianism for literature, the impact of war and its aftermath, class conflict, changing gender roles, and other topics relevant to our reading.
Texts:
E. M. Forster, Howards End ; D.H. Lawrence, Selected Stories ; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories; World War One British Poets; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart

This course asks what it is to be modern as well as what it means for the novel as a genre to be modern. It does so by looking at one of the oldest institutions, that of adultery, roughly from the 1910s through the early 1940s. The choice of focusing on an institution is deliberate, modernism and the modern is in many ways a mix of tradition and if not revolution then renewal, crisis, or some sense of change. Our texts will take up the issues of sexual relations, marriage, what it is to know, or not to know (or what it is to know you do not know), and with that the issue of character presentation (do all characters have an inner life?), and a relation to one's past—or one's culture's past and, with that, history. The course will stress close reading, literary style, and thematic analysis; and proceed as a mix of discussion and lecture, with the emphasis on the former. (Warning: this class is about what is happening in the novels and critical analysis is our approach; personal experiences will not find their place in our discussions.) Grading is based on participation, a series of short response papers structured around the formulation of a question, formal papers, and possibly quizzes. Authors include Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Anita Loos, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Mary McCarthy.

This course examines the notion of the hero throughout many genres of film, from silent and western to action and horror. In our discussion of these films, we will question what it means to be a big?screen hero, and how that definition varies from
one genre to another, as well as from one decade to another. Moreover, we will analyze the techniques and strategies employed by filmmakers to indicate the presence and development of the hero, including sound, editing, cinematography,
and narrative.

Each week, we will watch one film. Mondays are designated for screenings and Wednesdays for discussion and analysis. Wednesday classes may include minilectures about the subject, in?class writing assignments, small?group work, and
discussion. Students will be asked to complete a variety of small assignments as well as one longer essay, due in the second half of the quarter.

Texts:
Readings for this class will include excerpts from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: In Introduction and Pramaggiore and Wallis’s Film: A Critical Introduction, as well as selected articles and journal entries regarding the works. All readings will
be made available on a course webpage, so there is no need to purchase texts at the bookstore.

Films:
1. The Silent Hero: Sherlock Jr. (Keaton, 1924) 45 mins
2. The Noir Hero: The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) 100 mins
3. The Western Hero: High Noon (Zinneman, 1952) 85 mins
4. The Romantic Hero: To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock, 1955) 106 mins
5. The Dystopian Hero: Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990) 113 mins
6. The Heroine: Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998) 81 mins
7. The Mythic Hero: O Brother Where Art Thou (Coen brothers, 2000) 106 mins
8. The Action Hero: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Tarantino, 2003) 111 mins
9. The Horror Hero: Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004) 99 mins
10. The Animated Hero: The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson, 2009) 87 min

The short story was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. (Surprised? Look it up in the OED.) Many kinds of short fiction preceded it, including anecdote, parable, jest, fable, novella, fairy tale, and others, but the short story, focusing on atmosphere rather than plot or moral, was a novelty. In the decades before and after 1900 there was a tremendous output of short stories in most of the Western countries, with a prominence rarely equaled since. In this course we will survey the output of major figures of the era, considering the special qualities, the aims, the themes, and the local and national significance of these small forms. With a few stories from Boccaccio and the Arabian Nights as background, we will read a selection of these authors: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Maupassant, Conan Doyle, Verga, Alas, Chekhov.

In January 1938 Benny Goodman brought jazz to Carnegie Hall; later that summer the great Hank Greenberg hit 58 homeruns for the Detroit Tigers, just two behind Babe Ruth. In 1945 Bess Myerson, a Jewish girl from the Bronx, became Miss America. It would appear that after the rigors of immigration American Jews had finally—in the metaphoric sense—“arrived” in the new world. The enormous success of a several generations of Jewish writers and independent movie makers in the post-War period would seem to confirm that sense of cultural integration. But it is precisely the persistence of old—that is, old-world and immigrant—obsessions that would be the signature of this apparent success. The earlier experience of downright aliens would continue to nourish less tangible forms of alienation in the work of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Edward Lewis Wallant, Grace Paley, Francine Prose, Allen Ginsberg, David Shields, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers… Selected readings and viewings. Lecture, discussion, short essays.

Marco Polo and Mark Twain are just a couple examples of travel writers who, through their rendition of faraway locations in persuasive prose, radically altered how readers pictured the world. Through descriptions of people encountered and landscapes traversed, travel writers familiarize, exoticize, or destabilize the unknown in order to transform places into cultural significant landmarks in the imagination of their armchair readers. As a genre, travel writing is an excellent illustration of the immediate power of prose and lends itself well to the study of the effective use of words. In this class, we will analyze some signature pieces of this genre as a way to develop our own prose styles. Classwork will consist of discussion of various essays and peer critiques of student writing. Assigned texts: The Best Travel Writing 2010 ed. James O’Reilly, Larry Habetter, and Sean O’Reilly (required) and The Travel Writer’s Handbook by Louise Purwin Zobel (optional).

Texts: David Kadavy, Design Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty, Wiley, 2011
Laura Franz, Typographic Web Design: How to think like a typographer
in HTML and CSS. Wiley, 2011.

The course will focus on the design of web pages to achieve various “looks” as well as some of the newer HTML5 functionalities. We will work on reading source and stylesheets of exemplary pages and will emulate and modify them. We will introduce some basic Javascript, mostly via jquery modules, and will use the HTML 5 syntax to include visual and audio clips.

The course assumes some familiarity with HTML and the web. If you have ANY idea what the previous paragraph is talking about, you will be ok. If not, the course will be a scramble to catch up. The prerequisite can be waived for the self-taught and for other compelling cases. (contact dillon@uw.edu).

Prerequisites:

ENGL 282

This class will be provide a solid grounding in the craft, techniques, forms and subject matter of contemporary poetry. We will examine the function of poetry and of poetic language, and seek to find ways to make our experience of the world alive and interesting to others. There will be a strong emphasis on revision and on the craft elements of tone, syntax and line.

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

Intensive study of various aspects of the craft and art of fiction and nonfiction. Readings in modern prose that serve as models for student assignments.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Modernism and Myth. This seminar will explore the uses of myth in James Joyce and modernist aesthetics. Most of the quarter will be devoted to a parallel reading of Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses, the summit of literary modernism. We’ll test T. S. Eliot’s famous dictum that Joyce’s method is “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” After a brief look at Joyce’s applications of Ovid in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we’ll tackle Ulysses 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). Texts: Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey (Harper Perennial Classics); Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler; any edition of A Portrait of the Artist.

Requirements and Grading: attendance, weekly assignments, participation in one team-presentation (40% of final grade), and a course project involving independent research and resulting in a 9-10 page final paper (60% of final grade). Team-job and course project may focus on the same material. Please note: Ulysses is a delightful but very demanding book: contact instructor in person to receive reading recommendations for the summer.

Selected classics of postmodern fiction from the 1960s to the 1990s. Postmodernism is a style characterized by strategies of de-realization, the deliberate unmasking of the fictionality and artificiality of representation that undermines confidence in the referential function of literature as a reliable copy of reality. We will discuss important postmodern sub-genres and stylistic devices, such as metafiction (self-reflexive fiction that exposes its narrative devices); the mise-en-abime (infinite regress); the hyperrreal (the idea of simulated realities); irony, pastiche and the flattening of historicity; postmodern detective fiction. We’ll also review some influential theories of postmodernism, such as the idea that postmodernism is a ‘late’ style arising from the “used-up” nature of literary forms (Barth), or that it is an expression of the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson).

Required Readings:
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Paul Auster, City of Glass
Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
Jeannette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Bran Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction, and a small course reader.

Catalog Description: An examination of books that form a part of the imaginative experience of children, as well as a part of a larger literary heritage, viewed in the light of their social, psychological, political, and moral implications.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Intensive prose workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student fiction and/or creative nonfiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Experience in planning, writing, and revising a work of long fiction, whether from the outset, in progress, or in already completed draft.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

In the past couple of years, the Middle East and North Africa have experienced a series of revolutionary protests and uprisings aimed at democratizing government. While these movements are notable and inspiring, they are not unprecedented. The late eighteenth century also witnessed a series of revolutions that aimed to democratize government—most notably the American and French Revolutions, but also lesser uprisings in places as distant as the Caribbean and Ireland. In this class, we’ll explore some of the literature that inspired and was inspired by the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolution.
By pairing selections from political treatises including Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, with poetry including Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and fiction including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein we will begin to pose some answers to the following questions: What literary genres and techniques did various authors choose to persuade readers of the pros and cons of political revolution? In what ways did literature not simply reflect social change, but participate in various revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century? How did the spread of democracy affect disempowered groups like women and slaves? How does the literature of the Age of Revolution continue to inform our understanding of democracy today?

In addition to active participation, course requirements will include several short response papers, a longer paper, and a presentation

This course will explore the relationship between cultural forms and social change by focusing on the representation of human self-consciousness and or “conscience” in twentieth-century short story, poem, novel, and documentary film. We will explore in particular the ways in which ethics, morality, responsibility, and justice are attributed to the human psyche in representations of imperial/colonial and neo-imperial/post-colonial subjectivity. These texts all question how humans can come to perceive the role of “history” in their day-to-day experience and how they might become agents of social change in relation to specifically colonial/imperial histories they often do not fully recognize or understand. Our focus across these texts will be on the rise of the U.S. as a global force in the twentieth century.

Our primary texts will include one nineteenth century precursor, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, followed by Joseph Conrad’s turn of the century Heart of Darkness and later 20th century texts such as Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Theresa Hak Kyng Cha's Dictee, and J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. These texts will be read alongside poetry by Lynn Emanuel, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Claude McKay, William Wordsworth, and C.P. Cavafy, the documentary film Life and Debt, and contemporary essays about life inside U.S. prisons. Each primary text will also be read in a cluster of secondary readings intended to foster critical inquiry and research practice. This course will introduce students to academic research methods in cultural and literary studies and require a final research paper of 12-15 pages.