Course Description

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

English 200
Instructor: Sam Hushagen
samhus85@uw.edu
Office Hours Autumn Quarter: M/W 1-2 and by appointment

Astride the Divide: Poetry and Science in Early Modernity

The disciplinary divide between literary study and the sciences, between knowledge of making (or poesis) and speculative knowledge seems inevitable from our contemporary vantage. After all, the dispute between poetry and philosophy was old enough that Plato in The Republic could refer to it as an “ancient quarrel.” And while recently some have tried to make STEM into STEAM by smuggling in the arts between engineering and mathematics, the disaggregation of aesthetic and scientific education appears to us natural, even inevitable. But what is the history of this separation? By what modes of speciation were poetic and scientific knowledge distinguished from one another, and how did the contemporary understanding of these “two cultures,” emerge?

These are just a few of the questions that this course will explore as we study the history of the divide between science and poetry, taking its historical emergence in early modernity as our test case. Through readings in the history and philosophy of science, primary scientific research, and poetry we will explore continuities between scientific and poetic knowledge, and study what makes them different. While studying an earlier historical period we will pay special attention to the ways that contemporary disciplinary training reinforces Plato’s “ancient quarrel” by inducing students into disciplinary forms and habits of research. Consequently, questions of method and inquiry figure prominently in course readings. I will ask you to reflect in informal written assignments on your own disciplinary training as we go.

This course meets a writing requirement (a "W" course) and consequently you will be asked to write multiple 400-500 word paragraph commentaries in addition to a midterm and final of 4-6 pages. The shorter writing assignments are designed to lead into the longer papers and afford opportunities to practice the skills of slow, deliberate and focused reading and writing that will be essential to successful longer papers. No previous knowledge of philosophy of science or of poetry is required.

Autumn Quarter 2016

Course: 200 (Acts of God: Natural Disaster in Hemispheric American Cultures)

Instructor: Stephanie Hankinson

Course Description:

“I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect between the disaster and the atrocity.”
-Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

This course is organized around representations of disaster in U.S. and Caribbean writing and focuses on three specific disaster sites: plantation sugar production in 18th century Jamaica, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and U.S. gulf coast, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This course will examine the treatment of disaster in a variety of ways, from the ecological and the cultural to the political and historical. Contemporary discourses of disaster are often related to past historical representations (e.g. the Haitian Revolution as disaster). These same discourses also help to generate speculative fictions about the apocalyptic future of humanity in post-disaster environments.

We will address questions like what qualifies a disaster as a “natural” disaster? What is the role of human agency in bringing about and responding to disaster events? What types of narratives, experiences and voices are allowed to bear witness to disaster? How do we produce and consume disaster as a commodity? Are natural disaster events the great social equalizer or necessary ruptures through which we can explore unequal distributions of power? We will explore the intersections of race, politics, and environment in each disaster site: sugar, hurricane, and earthquake.

This class counts for "W" credit, and will require students to write two 5-7 page papers. Students can also expect to write semi-formal reading responses and to participate in a group presentation. We will be reading three novels as well as supplemental poetry, essays, and viewing at least one feature film: Behn Zietlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). **Please note that students are expected to keep up with the daily reading and are expected to come to class prepared to discuss and engage with the texts**

Required Texts:
Marlon James: The Book of Night Women (2009) – ISBN 1594484368 Dimitry Elias Léger: God Loves Haiti (2015) – ISBN 0062348132
Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones (2014) - ISBN 1608196267

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

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: Introduces students to the study of popular culture, possibly including print or visual media, understood as sites of critical reflection. Particular attention to dynamics of production and reception, aesthetics and technique, and cultural politics. Topics may foreground genres (science fiction; romance) or forms (comics; graffiti

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: Introduces literature from the Age of Shakespeare to the American and French Revolutions, focusing on major works that have shaped the development of literary and intellectual traditions in these centuries. Topics include: The Renaissance, religious and political reforms, exploration and colonialism, vernacular cultures, and scientific thought.

Catalog Description: Introduction to twentieth-century literature from a broadly cultural point of view, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900.

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

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

Catalog Description: Introduces American culture through a careful reading of a variety of representative texts in their historical contexts.

Catalog Description: ntroduces the study of the environment through literature, culture, and history. Topics include changing ideas about nature, wilderness, ecology, pollution, climate, and human/animal relations, with particular emphasis on environmental justice and the unequal distribution of environmental crises, both globally and along class, race and gender lines.

Catalog Description: Survey of the assumptions, methodologies, and major issues of English in its cultural settings. Designed to connect English Language study with the study of literature, orality and literacy, education, ethnicity, gender, and public policy.

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: 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: Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes--words, images, sound, design, and gesture--and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.

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: 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 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: 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.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

Catalog Description: Investigates what it means to be a reader. Centers on authorial and reading challenges, shifting cultural and theoretical norms, and changes in the public's reading standards.

Catalog Description: Covers selected fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction (diaries, manifestos, etc.) in translation by European writers from the mid-19th century to the present. Considers questions of aesthetics, history, and form. Writers may include Bachmann, Baudelaire, Brecht, Celan, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Ferrante, Flaubert, Ibsen, Jelinek, Kafka, Perec, Proust, Rilke, Tsvetaeva, and Undset.

Catalog Description: Introduces the genealogy, character, and consequences, of modernism/modernity. Topics may include: preoccupations with novelty/the new; narratives of historical development; temporality; constructions of high and low culture; intersections between aesthetics and politics; transnationalism; and philosophical influences upon literary modernism.

Catalog Description: Considers how generic forms and conventions have been discussed and distributed in the larger context of African American, or other African diasporic literary studies. Links the relationship between generic forms to questions of power within social, cultural, and historical contexts. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 318; AWSp.

Catalog Description: Introduces and explores African literatures from a range of regions. Pays particular attention to writings connected with the historical experiences of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and decolonization. Considers the operations of race, gender, nationhood, neocolonialism, and globalization within and across these writings.

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

Catalog Description: Explores Shakespeare's early drama and poetry. May include the sonnets, narrative poems, and selected comedies, histories, or tragedies.

Catalog Description: Traces the development of a major and popular modern literary genre - the novel. Readings survey forms of fiction including the picaresque, the gothic, the epistolary novel, and the romance. Authors range from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen and beyond.

Catalog Description: Explores the novel in English from the first half of the twentieth century. May include such writers as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, E.M. Forster, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bowen, Raja Rao, William Faulkner, Jean Rhys, and Edith Wharton. Includes history and changing aesthetics of the novel as form, alongside the sociohistorical context.

Catalog Description: Study of recent fiction by diverse writers with attention to contemporary ideas in all kinds of forms.

Catalog Description: Explores the workings and historical development of theartrical practices, including performance and spectatorship more broadly. Possible topics include genres of drama (tragedy, mystery play, melodrama, agitprop); histories of drama (Elizabethan theater, Theater of the Absurd, the Mbari Mbayo Club, In-Your-Face Theater); and theorists of performance and dramaturgy.

Catalog Description: Examines writings from the earliest explorations of America, encounters with, and responses from, indigenous peoples, and colorization, through the early period of the United States. Readings may include a variety of genres from histories, captivity narratives, autobiographies, to the first novels and poetry of the republic.

Catalog Description: Explores American fiction, poetry, and prose from the early nineteenth century through the Civil War. May include such representative authors of the period as Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Douglass and fuller, along with supplementary study of the broader cultural and political milieu.

Catalog Description: Explores American fiction, poetry, and prose during the latter half of the nineteenth century. May include such representative authors of the period as Twain, Dickinson, DuBois, Crane, Wharton and Chopin, along with supplementary study of the broader cultural and political milieu.

Catalog Description: Examines the literary and cultural production of American Jews from the colonial period to the present time. Considers ways in which American Jews assimilate and resist assimilation while Jewish writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and graphic novelists imitate and alter American life and literature.

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

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

This course offers students in a variety of disciplines--humanities, business, arts, sciences, engineering, etc.--an opportunity to learn and practice skills in writing and communicating across media. The course provides a creative, collaborative space for students to work on projects connected to their interests and to share communicative, cultural, disciplinary, and technical resources. Over a series of weekly studio sessions, students will learn and apply ethical, empathetic strategies for research and design, for prototyping and usability testing, and for encountering failure and being accountable. At the end of the quarter, students will present on and submit a final project. This course satisfies the UW composition (C) or writing (W) credit.

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: Advanced work in cultural studies.

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

Catalog Description: Concentrates in alternate years on either prose or poetry of the Pacific Northwest. Prose works examine early exploration, conflicts of native and settlement cultures, various social and economic conflicts. Pacific Northwest poetry includes consideration of its sources, formative influences, and emergence into national prominence.

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: Survey of current issues confronting literary critics today, based on revolving themes and topics. Focuses on debates and developments affecting English language and literatures, including questions about: the relationship of culture and history; the effect of emergent technologies on literary study; the rise of interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Autumn Quarter 2016 — Undergraduate Course Descriptions