Course: English 200 A
Instructor: Tyler Babbie

Modernism in Magazines: Literature Before WWI

In the years before World War One, artists working in many genres such as, poetry, fiction, drama, music, criticism, and visual art were talking about a new kind of art called modernism. This class will survey the conversation where it happened: the literary magazines. English modernism emerged in London roughly one hundred years ago. Debates about innovative forms in painting, music, poetry, fiction, and drama all took place in the literary reviews, which have since been digitized and are housed in a public online archive. Students will explore this archive and experience modern literature in its original context. Poets like H.D., Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore, and W.B. Yeats shared space with authors of fiction like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West. They took inspiration from painters and sculptors, who responded with works of their own. New art appeared in journals like The Egoistand Poetry. Radical politics emerged in journals like The Masses, The New Age, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis. Intense debates about the future of art took place in the context of new feminist movements, fights against racial injustice, and the ominous immanence of World War One. Students will enter this period through its texts, and take part in the conversation themselves. This course is writing intensive and satisfies the "W" requirement.

All course texts will be drawn from the public domain, and in particular The Modernist Journals Project archive at http://modjourn.org/.

English 200 B: Narrative Experiments with Time

While all storytellers must represent time in a particular way, some experiment with narrative time in order to draw readers’ attention to time itself, rendering it suddenly strange and unstable. The narratives selected for this class attempt to wrestle with the unclockable dynamics of temporal experience, from the interplay between memory and anticipation to the sense of time racing or crawling. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, the disordering of linear time plays a central role in narrating the irrational violence of WWII. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” an interval of several seconds is stretched to span eight pages, allowing Bierce to unpack the minute impressions of a man’s consciousness as he prepares to be hanged. Such texts encourage us to ask, “To what ends do narratives challenge our assumptions about how time works?” And from a literary standpoint, “How is time involved in the ways we experience different forms of narrative, from short stories to films?”

Do note that this course fulfills the “W” requirement. In addition to the assigned reading, there will be several short, informal writing assignments which build toward two formal (5-7-page) essays.

Texts likely to include:

Short fiction: Ambrose Bierce, Tobias Wolff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jack Finney, Jennifer Egan, Haruki Murakami, Sherman Alexie

Novels: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and selections from Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine

Graphic Novel: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Films: Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

Course Description:

This class will examine literary and other cultural texts from the past and present to historicize and contextualize the long history of struggles against anti-black racial state violence in the U.S., and to consider the role of what we will loosely term “protest literatures” play in illuminating and challenging forms of anti-black racial state violence. While the contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement seeks to address and eliminate various forms of state violence against black communities—poverty, mass incarceration, continued inequality in schools, housing, and employment sectors—the hashtag that now serves as an umbrella for a diverse set of issues, organizations, and tactics was originally coined by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Our course will take up a selection of texts that exemplifies the longer history of this struggle against the “extra”-legal murder of black men and women in the U.S., though as Jacqueline Goldsby’s work will remind us, if we consider “extralegal” forms of violence such as lynching as something isolated to a specific geographic location (the “South”) in another time (the “past”) we overlook the various ways in which black death is normalized and has persisted in American society and culture. As such, we will specifically be examining literary and other cultural texts that protest and critique these patterns of anti-black racial state violence within the U.S. state to develop an understanding of (dis)continuities in patterns of racial state violence in the U.S. over time by looking at the strategies that authors, artists, activists, individuals, and organizations have used to illuminate and protest patterns of anti-black racial state violence. We will trace these patterns of state violence and political protest in newsprint, political pamphlets, non-fiction essays, periodicals, short stories, poetry, plays, song, film, official state reports, multi-media video and other social media from anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th century to the present day struggles against police brutality. When examining these texts, we will consider not only what kinds of political arguments are being made in and through these texts, but also how these texts employ specific strategies and appeals in order to produce politicized subjectivities within their forms as a means to encourage certain forms of individual and collective identification and action, both at the time and site of their original production and reception and as we read them “out of their original context,” say, in university classrooms of the present day. Broadly speaking, this class will ask students to consider “the politics” of these texts and the forms of knowing they can/do encourage and enable, as well the politics of our own reading practices.

Autumn Quarter 2015
Course: ENGL 200 D
Instructor: UNGSAN KIM
Queer Mobility in Contemporary Film and Literature

What happens, when queer sexuality, queer culture, and queer people migrate through different spaces and sometimes through different times? And why and how do queer bodies move either nationally or transnationally? In this course, we will explore the different modes of queer mobility in contemporary film and literature. As the commonly used terms such as coming out, outing, or cruising already connote the movement or transformation of bodies or ideas, the issue of mobility is one of the most interesting topics in queer literary and cinema studies.

By reading and watching contemporary queer canons, we could for instance investigate how the formation of modern metropolitan culture (in contrast to that of a small town) has both nurtured and criminalized queer lives, how mobility has re-conceptualized queer experience, how the experiences of immigrants have contributed to the alternative queer cultures, and how literary and cinematic works of art have responded to this queer mobility. We could also discuss the concept of queerness by exploring these questions: what exactly are queer literature and queer cinema?; how do they differ from more commonly called Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender literature and film?; and what critical potentiality does our "queer" viewpoint on both literature and cinema have?

In addition, we will also practice how to analyze film. Cinema has its own language and style, and we will learn to appreciate the cinematic aesthetics through viewing and analyzing a film scene by scene, or sequence by sequence. Basic terminology for film analysis and its proper usage will be taught in the middle of the quarter.

This course fulfills the "W" requirements, and thus requires students to read and write intensively. Along with two main projects (midterm and final), there will be other short writing assignments.

Readings will include:
Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (Required / ISBN: 978-0140149043)
Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Required / ISBN: 978-1559363846)
Jeanette Winterson's "All I Know about Gertrude Stein"
Yiyun Li's "The Princess of Nebraska"

Tentative Film list is as follows:
Happy Together (1997 / dir. Wong Kar-wai)
3 Needles (2005 / dir. Thom Fitzgerald)
Stateless Things (2011 / dir. Kim Kyung-mook)
Appropriate Behavior (2014 / dir. Desiree Akhavan)

Note 1: Students should be prepared to spend additional two hours biweekly watching the assigned films. Most films will be affordable through the UW library course reserve or Netflix. For some Asian queer films, I will arrange an extra screening session.

Note 2: This class does not require students to have prior knowledge of queer theory, or LGBT, gender and sexuality studies.

While the genre of dystopian literature did not enter the cultural lexicon until the 1950s, 19th century realist works and speculative fiction spawned a unique group of early 20th century anti-utopian texts. Unlike today’s batch of prodigious Young Adult dystopian fiction, turn of the century writers heavily emphasized the probability of their worlds coming to fruition. In doing so, such writers provide pointed, articulate social criticism that aimed to balance the fantastical with the probable. Through this course we will explore the early genre characteristics of dystopian literature before the publication of George Orwell’s seminal work, 1984 (1948). In doing so, the course will tract the development of the dystopian novel before WWII and the surprising commonalities such works often share with the existing genre of utopian literature.

Course texts will touch on diverse and controversial subjects including class-warfare, immersive technology, gender equality, eugenics and Fascism. The course grade will be based on participation, close reading assignments, a midterm and a final.

English 200 — Truth and Lies in Victorian Literature
MW 1:30-3:20
(Will be added to the online Time Schedule soon)


“We must cultivate the lost art of lying.” –Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

The Victorian period in England (1837-1901) was the heyday of the realist novel, but writers during the time also produced a great deal of fanciful, sensationalist, and speculative literature. In writing realist fiction, authors strove to expose societal problems and articulate human psychology in ordinary situations. But while some writers sought to convey unadorned truth in order to improve society, others insisted on the importance of inventiveness and “art for art’s sake.” Through this course, we will look at a variety of Victorian works of and about literature, realist and otherwise, that explicitly consider questions of truth, realism, storytelling, and outright lying. What were the values and dangers of telling stories? We will read serious and humorous texts, including nonfiction essays, short stories, poems, a play, and a novel.

The course grade will be primarily based on two writing assignments and on class participation. You are required to purchase three texts:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Norton Critical Edition), The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (any edition), and a coursepack.

English 202: Introduction to the study of English Language and Literature

As a “gateway” to the English major, this course is intended to introduce students to contemporary debates in the interpretation of literary works. It will place literary texts in conversation with critical/theoretical works, paying particular attention to the historical contexts in which both literature and criticism emerge and in which our own discussion of them occurs. The emphasis will be on intensive or close reading rather than extensive reading, and on “exemplary” rather than “representative” texts and issues. We will use our close readings of literary works including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to explore some of the big questions at the heart of the English major: Why is close reading the foundational method of literary study? Do we need to know about an author’s life in order to understand his or writing? Does the meaning of a work lie in the text or in the reader? How might the work’s meaning change if we consider the social context in which it was written? What does it mean to deconstruct a text? Course requirements will include midterm and final exams and participation in a discussion section. Students must also enroll in a writing link.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

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.

English 213, Fall 2015, Modern and Postmodern Literature

What did modernism do to us? Has it stopped doing it? What is the “post-” in “postmodernism” doing there? This course introduces the student to both modern and postmodern prose, mostly American and British, but with a few moments hopefully not lost in translation. Moving back and forth between modern and postmodernist fiction, this class will pair a few indubitably modernist literary texts with their later-born literary twins—so for instance we'll begin with Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and read it against the English writer Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation (2002); and pair Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with Cunningham’s The Hours, the title of refers to (one of) Woolf’s “original” titles for what turned into Mrs. Dalloway. The class will pay attention to imitations, forgeries, fragments, and copies (What is the status of the original? Is there an original?); representations of inner experience; and attune the student to matters of literary form. Reading will range from Ford Madox Ford to Italo Calvino, with Lydia Davis and Borges somewhere in between. Other authors are likely to include Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, and Jenny Offill's recent Dpt. of Speculation.

This course doesn't presume prior knowledge about literary history, but it does require that the reader be alert, assiduous—it’s a reading-heavy class—and articulate. There will be papers and an exam.

Shakespeare and the Supernatural

In this course, we will examine magic and the supernatural in four Shakespeare plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. We’ll read these plays with close attention to content (supernatural elements of narrative and character) and form (for example, spells, charms and incantations), as well as historical and cultural context (Early Modern beliefs about witchcraft, good and evil, magic, and the supernatural). We will be using the Oxford texts of these four plays, which are inexpensive and widely available.

Course: ENGL 242 A
Instructor: Szu-Han Sophia Chen
Course Subtitle: House of Leaves

In this course we will be reading Mark Z Danielewski's _House of Leaves_. A labyrinth of a novel, it is a work filled with many stairs, corridors, empty rooms, and occasional snares. Some call it a horror story. Some call it a love story. Some call it one big meta puzzle. What will the House mean to you? Come participate in discussions and argue for your own interpretations!

Although the House can be read in various ways, and the readers may feel (relatively) free to explore in any direction they wish, this novel/House/course is especially recommended for those who enjoy metafiction and/or postmodern literature.

As a W-credit course, students will be expected to compose a few pieces of shorter writings and one longer essay before the end of the quarter. When selecting this course, please take it into consideration that we will spend most of the quarter navigating through -- or trapped in -- the same novel. Therefore, if you have never heard of the House, you may want to look for an introduction or a blurb online beforehand. Just be wary of spoilers!

- Required text: Mark Z Danielewski, _House of Leaves_
- Recommended text: Jorge Luis Borges, _Labyrinths_

Autumn Quarter 2015
Course: ENGL 242B: Afro Asia and US Multiculturalism
Instructor: Alan Williams

When Mao Tse-Tung wrote in support of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, he highlighted how ongoing racial discrimination is a "product of a colonialist and imperialist system." Given that the US state was founded on racism (slavery and genocide), scholars today note how civil rights legislation and the rise of US multiculturalism were not the beginning of the end of this system, but rather the imperial state's adjustment to antiracist and anti-colonial struggles not only in the US but abroad (communism in China, Korea, Vietnam, independence movements in India, pan-Africa, and so on).

A central aim of this course will be to think through the rise of US multiculturalism as an extension of the imperial project. In other words, as a class we will aim to rid ourselves of the nationalist "racial progress" narrative. Along with supplemental essays and short stories, we will read two important texts by black internationalists, W.E.B. Du Bois' 1928 fictional "Dark Princess: A Romance" and Richard Wright's creative nonfictional account of the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, "The Color Curtain." We will consider the use of fiction versus nonfiction when grappling with social questions. Both Du Bois and Wright ponder the US racial order on the global scale, are cautiously hopeful for alternatives, yet their texts remain hauntingly relevant today as Black Lives Matter critiques the US police state, as Japan re-militarizes after 70 years of pacifism, and as China invests heavily into developing Africa.

Required reading:

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1928. Dark Princess: A Romance (ISBN-13: 978-0199387434) (2014 edition)

Wright, Richard. 1956. The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference (In the collection: "Black Power: Three Books from Exile" - ISBN-13: 978-0061449451) (2008 edition)

Assignments:

Two 5-page essays, weekly short writing. This course fulfills the "W" requirement.

Autumn Quarter 2015
Course: English 242
Instructor: Tesla Schaeffer
Course Specific Subtitle: Exploring Grief in 20th C North American Literature

Course Description:

In this course, we will explore questions of grief and grievability through the lens of 20th Century writing on suffering and trauma.

In the current social landscape, many questions are emerging not only about which bodies are grievable or visible within the landscape of human suffering, but also about to whom a tragic story actually belongs – and, moreover, about the process whereby a subject’s suffering may become legible in legal discourse as worthy of reparation or political change. Who gets to remember, construct, narrate or testify to trauma? What are the parameters by which he or she is constrained? How are such stories disseminated and consumed, and by whom? What does grief actually feel like, when experienced directly?

We will approach the topic from a variety of different angles, using grief as an entry point into a variety of topics related to contemporary identity formation. We will ground our discussions in a selection of literary works, including novels, works of poetry and memoir by Dionne Brand, Helene Cooper, Joan Didion, Joy Harjo and Chang-Rae Lee.

Please note that since this course fulfills the W requirement, you should expect to do lots of writing (in the form of in-class exercises and formal, graded papers). Class time will be student-centered and discussion-based, so it is very important that you come to class prepared to engage with challenging texts and topics

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

Theme: Why Read Fiction?

Description: Why read fiction? It’s a simple question, but one maybe worth asking since you’ve decided to make the credits for this course a part of the degree that certifies the quality of your education. In discussing our course texts, we will keep in our sights the various ways different perspectives approach prose fiction and the value of reading it. In addition to these questions, our in-class work will often introduce terms from the field of narratology—the area of research that describes and theorizes features of narrative forms; this additional vocabulary is meant to help you talk about the features of these works as crafted pieces. Whether the Harry Potter series is all you’ve ever read cover-to-cover or whether you consider yourself quite the bookworm, this course should help you consider—and then complicate—your own sense of how and why you engage works of fiction. Readings are likely to include primary works by Jane Austen, Jules Verne, Charles W. Chesnutt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ruth Ozeki, as well as occasional critical arguments. The coursework will engage these texts with various papers and a reflective final project to complete the “W” component of the course credit.

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in poems. Different examples of poetry representing a variety of types from the medieval to modern periods.

This class begins circa 1840 with the entrance into the English language of the term individualism to describe a uniquely modern--and American--political institution. "Individualism" persists as a defining mythos of American culture, although its meaning has been subjected to innumerable revisions and critiques. In reading poetry, fiction, and non-fiction essays that engage individualism, we will endeavor to move beyond the binary of the individual versus society in order to figure out: a) how individuality is conceived at different moments in time and according to various authors; and b) what problems, paradoxes, and exclusions the term may contain. In particular, we will examine the implicitly racial and gendered assumptions that have contributed to certain dominant ideals of American individuality, even as we explore the concept's persistent allure.

Authors may include: Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, John Dewey, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Allen Ginsberg, David Foster Wallace, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This will be a reading intensive class: students should be prepared to devote substantial time and effort each week to careful reading of course texts. Assessment will be based on a combination of: participation in class discussion and small group work; frequent, brief written responses to assigned readings; take-home exams; and formal academic writing.

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: Introduces the writing of nonfiction narrative and expository pieces for publication on the Web. Analysis and criticism of on-line work.

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 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 natural 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 natural 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 natural 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 natural 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 15

This course is framed by two sets of questions. One set is focused on examining the cultural value assigned to fictional narratives. Why are some texts deemed “major” and others not? Who decides what is major (besides Oprah)? How does knowing that a text is “major” change what we notice in a text? And how has does the value of literature change in an electronic era?
The other set of questions is focused on the relationship between reading and self-making. How does reading shape how we see ourselves? In what ways does reading both foster and foil the compassion we feel for others?
We will read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, David Shield’s How Literature Saved My Life, and a third book that will be announced later, supplemented by selected theory on narrative, genre, and aesthetics. In order to best develop answers to the 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 open 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.

Catalog Description: Intensive examination of one or a few major works of literature. Classroom work to develop skills of careful and critical reading. Book selection varies, but reading consists of major works by important authors and of selected supplementary materials.

How Does Fiction Work?
What makes literary fiction different from a fictional movie or a play? What is asked of you as a reader while you’re reading? What is backstory and where is it embedded in the story? What is story structure? How do characters drive a plot?

Students will read short stories, watch films and/or plays adapted from short stories to see how people working in different genres “read” fiction.

Readings will include the following: James Joyce, Tobias Wolfe, Raymond Carver, David Mamet, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Hisaye Yamamoto, Al Young, Ishmael Reed, and others.

Fall 2015
ENGL 302
Professor Monika Kaup

Critical Practice:
Theme & Narrative Form: How to Combine Cultural Criticism and Formalist Analysis

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

Introduction to Cultural Studies: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination

This class will introduce you to the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Students will acquaint themselves with some of the defining critical frameworks and methods of cultural studies from the Birmingham School and beyond. In so doing, they will deepen their understanding of how the complicated workings of cultural representation shape our social and political realities.
While one central objective of the class is the development of methodological aptitudes, we will pursue this objective by taking “the post-apocalyptic imagination” as our unifying theme. We may encounter politico-religious understandings of the apocalypse from a number of traditions, but we will focus primarily on secular imaginings of the end of the world as we know it – and what comes after the end – in the contemporary moment. As we explore cultural representations of cataclysmic events that range from the outbreak of zoontological disease to alien invasion to environmental disasters to nuclear war – and let’s not forget the zombie apocalypse! – we will explore a number of cultural anxieties engaged and expressed by the post-apocalyptic imagination. In so doing, we will explore how the post-apocalyptic imagination is keyed to contemporary debates about climate change, genetic manipulation, immigration, policing, and the list goes on. We will position cultural representations of the end of the world as a primary site for the production of difference – race, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, species, and so forth – as well as the configuration of relations across lines of difference and between forms of difference. We will interrogate how the post-apocalyptic imagination can both endorse political apathy and foment political resistance to seek something more than survival. And of course, we will beef up our zombie apocalypse kits.

Course texts are yet to be determined, but they will include theoretical readings as well as cultural texts that range from films such as World War Z, Children of Men, Twelve Monkeys, Interstellar, 28 Days Later; novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and H.B. Wells The War of the Worlds; and other cultural artifacts that may include video games such as Fallout and The Last of Us as well as graphic novels such as The Walking Dead.

English 309: Theories of Reading

Reading is at once the most familiar and the strangest thing we do. Once we learn to read we do it automatically, indeed obsessively, but we rarely pay attention to the process or dynamics of reading. In fact, we read in lots of different ways and under many different conditions. This is a course about different theories of reading and about how books have come to create the conditions and problems of this process. This course will use a single text, Mark Danielewski’s postmodern novel, House of Leaves, to consider the state of the book and of the various practices of reading at the present moment. House of Leaves is a novel that requires us to reconsider the material and social facts of the book—how it feels and looks, and how it functions as an object—along with the reading practices it both requires and complicates. Understanding how we have learned to read—the practices of reading books, websites, and others texts—and how reading has changed over time will require us to enter into the labyrinth of theory. We will look at a variety of theories, including the current debate between “close-reading,” that (in)famous English Department term, and “surface-reading.” Requirements for the course will short essays, in-class reflections, and a longer final project.

"Postcolonial Pakistani Literatures"
Autumn 2015
ENGL 316A/CHID 250C

Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, focus on Pakistan and South Asia
Instructor: Dr. Anu Taranath (anu@uw.edu) Class Time: T, TH 8:30-10:20


Once part of the global British Empire and now officially independent, countries like Kenya, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Jamaica, India and Barbados have performed and negotiated their break from colonialism in sometimes different, sometimes similar ways. Our investigation of postcolonial literatures and theory will help us better understand:

--historical colonial power and anticolonial conflict --present day cultural legacies of imperialism in the recently independent postcolony --who has power and privilege over others and why --the role of travel, diaspora and globalization.

We will read literature from Pakistan to glean insight on that country?s cultural and literary scene, and to discuss how emblematic Pakistani and South Asian literature more generally might be to larger postcolonial concerns. Additionally, we will screen films, dabble in theory, and try to piece together how our world works now and how that came to be. This class will engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, feminism, patriarchy, globalization, religious nationalism, westernization, class, privilege, power and representation.

Interested in learning about and discussing these issues? Come join us. This is an introductory class, with no prerequisites or expectations of prior familiarity with the issues. Our one requirement: an openness and willingness to engage in productive and collegial conversations.

Catalog Description: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poetry, with attention to Chaucer's social, historical, and intellectual milieu.

DESCRIPTION:
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 four 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 Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth (Oxford)

This course is a general introduction to modern Irish literature. After a brief survey of ancient and early modern works and authors, we'll focus on the Irish Literary Revival and its aftermath (1880-1940). The reading list includes works of visionary intensity and stark realism, passion and irreverence, humor and high drama. We'll be paying special attention to the role of literature in forging a distinct national and personal identity, and to the unique contributions of Irish writers to modern British literary culture. The course will be especially useful to students who wish to study further the Irish masters of British modernism (Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett) or contemporaries such as recent Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney.

Requirements and grading:
--memorize (and recite) 50 (or more) lines of poetry by W. B. Yeats: this task is the midterm and must be completed by 11/17 (one grade unit); --attendance, quizzes, short written assignments (one grade unit); --final (two grade units).

Texts: The Tain, Ciaran Carson tr. (Penguin) or Thomas Kinsella tr. (Oxford ppb). Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford, World's Classics). W. B. Yeats, The Yeats Reader (Scribner). J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Dover Thrift); James Joyce, Dubliners (Dover Thrift); Flann O'Brien, The Poor Mouth (Dalkey Archive Press). Look for inexpensive used/online purchases!

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

Catalog Description: Wide-range introduction to the study of written and spoken English. The nature of language; ways of describing language; the use of language study as an approach to English literature and the teaching of English.

Engl 381 AQ 15


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, composition, and peer critiques of student writing. Required textbook: Best American Travel Writing 2013, edited by Elizabeth Gilbert and Jason Wilson.


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

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

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

Cherniavsky
English 440
Fall 2015

Topic: Hardboiled, Noir and the Politics of Style

This course will address two cross-pollinated products of literary and visual culture – the hardboiled detective novel and film noir – that have proven both remarkably durable, persisting from the early 1930s to the present moment, and remarkably hard to specify. Rather than comprise a genre, hardboiled and noir seem rather, and more elusively, to describe a look, an attitude, a feel – a visual and narrative style – that traverses any number of established genres, including ‘true crime’ fiction, police procedurals, melodramas, and thrillers. The hardboiled/noir ‘style’ appears mobile and plastic in other ways, as well, spanning, as it does, the divide between elite modernisms and mass culture, and a political spectrum marked at the one end by something like the Red Scare thematics of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and at the other by what Mike Davis describes as the quasi-Marxist sensibilities of Hollywood noir directors such as Billy Wilder and Orson Welles.

This class will explore the complex articulations of narrative style and cultural politics in hardboiled and noir. If ‘style’ is inevitably a market phenomenon (a way of branding and selling cultural products), when and for whom might it function critically? To what extent does the dissemination of a style create possibilities for appropriating and repurposing it – for example, possibilities for women writers to repurpose the expressly misogynist conventions of classic hardboiled fiction? Conversely, to what extent is there a politics intrinsic to the style – an orientation to sexual and racial difference, for instance -- that is ‘written in’ to the touchstone figures, settings, and organizing motifs of these narrative modes?

Course materials will include both fiction and film: we will read Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place, Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem, Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only, and Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress and view Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Hitchhiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1959), and Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996). We will also take up a selection of critical materials on modernism and popular culture (Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benjamin) , the cultural and material contexts of hardboiled and noir (Mike Davis, Michael Denning, James Naremore), and its cultural politics (Sylvia Harvey, Janey Place, Elizabeth Cowie, Stephen Heath, Manthia Diawara). Course expectations include regular and engaged participation, a group presentation, a paper proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final research paper.

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

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) is one of the most canonized, widely-read, widely-taught works of English literature. It is also one of the most controversial, as hated as it is loved, as often disparaged for its difficulty or decried for its racism as it is celebrated as it is celebrated for its style. It is also one of the most widely adapted, critiqued, re-worked, and re-written works in the language: its plot, its characters, its title and its style resurfacing in numerous other words of fiction, poetry, film, nonfiction prose, video games, and even an opera. In this course, we will read Heart of Darkness alongside both historical documents and scholarly commentary. We will look at how Conrad "adapts" both his own experience in the Congo and prior European writing about Africa such as Henry Morton Stanley’s widely read travel narratives. Then, we will turn to some of the many subsequent adaptations in order to ask: what is it about this book that generates this persistent telling, retelling, and reworking, especially in relation to moments of conflict, violence, and destruction? The "ecology" part of the title comes in both in terms of the adaptive, evolutionary role of storytelling, and also to foreground the degree to which the book itself is an account of extractive industry, wilderness, and the environment—an aspect that many of the subsequent adaptations also address.


Possible readings (in addition to Heart of Darkness itself) include:
Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (19th c. travel narrative, 1878)
Roger Casement, “Congo Report” (Parliamentary Papers, 1904)
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (novel, 1958)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (novel, 1997)
Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (novel, 2003)
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (nonfiction/history, 1998)
Tim Butcher, Blood River (nonfiction/travel, 2009)
Yedda Morrison, “Darkness” (poem, 2012)
Spec Ops—The Line (video game, 2012)
Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo (film, 1982)
Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now Redux (film, 1979/2001)

Coming of Age stories are among the staples of popular fiction and undoubtedly you’ve read many such stories long before you began to study literature at the university. You might have read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, or you became entranced with the Harry Potter novels, (and the films made from them), but you might not have been aware that these books were representatives of an important literary genre: the bildungsroman (a German term for fiction that focuses on the developmental process: the growth of an individual from youth to adulthood.) The bildungsroman has a long history, beginning in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The genre became immensely popular and spread rapidly to other countries, including Britain. This class will consider how some of the major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England and Ireland transformed the bildungsroman and used it to investigate a wide range of issues, such as industrialization, nationalism, feminism, sexuality, and the role of the artist in modern society. We also will investigate how the genre became a vehicle for formal experimentation.

The reading will include novels by Charlotte Bronte, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jeannette Winterson.