This course is interested in exploring representations of different imaginations of utopia and dystopia in the near future through primarily what China Miéville calls, “Weird Fiction.” Drawing from works often categorized as science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy, this class considers how these texts differently imagine both spaces of future radical liberation and of continued inequality and dispossession. More specifically, we will focus on the works of writers often not considered part of the science fiction tradition that often depart from and critique dominant imaginations of the future. We will follow how these writers of “weird fiction” differently conceptualize and imagine the near future with special attention to how forms of inequality and categories of race, gender, class and sexuality are represented. We will work on close reading skills and practice developing strong claims in our writing through reading and discussing novels, short stories and films. Course goals include 1) a student-driven exploration of the course content; 2) connecting issues explored in the historical texts to the novels, short stories and films; and 3) individual and collective experimentation with practices of reading, reception, discussion and critical writing. As a “W” course, students will take class themes, in class writing assignments, and ideas that emerge in class discussion, and produce a 5-7 page paper mid-quarter that more deeply explores some of the animating questions of this course. Students will have the opportunity to practice multiple kinds of revision (including meeting with me in conferences and peer-review) in order to eventually expand their midterm into a 10-12 page final paper that is due at the end of the quarter.

Novels and short stories may include works by Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Karen Tei Yamashita, Philip K. Dick, China Miéville, Nisi Shawl, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson and Cory Doctorow.

ENGL 200 covers techniques and practice in reading, writing about, and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, and film. In this class we will learn effective methods and skills for reading and understanding literature, including poetry, drama, short stories, novels, and philosophical and critical texts. Readings will be drawn from periods ranging from the early seventeenth century to the contemporary era so that students can develop an understanding of and appreciation for the interrelationships between literature, society, and culture. The overall course goals are to hone your: 1) critical thinking skills; 2) ability to analyze literary texts; and 3) ability to write about literature. Student responsibilities include daily attendance, active participation in discussions and activities, two brief online posts, two short paper proposals, and two 5-7 page papers with revisions that satisfy the university “W” credit.

Required Texts:
? Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Peter Holland. New York: Penguin, 1991. ISBN: 0140714855
? Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Norton, 1995. ISBN: 0393964582
? James, Henry. Daisy Miller. Eds. David Lodge and Philip Horne. New York: Penguin, 2007. ISBN: 0141441348
? Maugham, W. Somerset. The Razor’s Edge. New York: Vintage, 2003. ISBN: 1400034205
? Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood. New York: Vintage, 2000. ISBN: 0375704027
? Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th Ed.). New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. ISBN: 0873529863
? Course Reader, which will include short stories, journal articles, and other short readings

From the ingenuity of detective Auguste Dupin to the shenanigans of Sam Spade, crime fiction has enjoyed immense popularity, creativity and criticism in the 19th and 20th century. As print media expanded over Britain and the US, crime fiction became the prominent readers-choice genre by 1900. In time, the genre has experienced much development with offshoot categories like Detective fiction, the whodunit, psychological thrillers, locked room mysteries, and forensic science narratives. This course explores the construction of the genre and prominent crime writers of both British and American fiction in the 19th and 20th century.

Specifically, the class will consider the historical, cultural and political shifts occurring during the rise of crime fiction. Students will be asked to think critically about central concepts in the genre such as truth, justice, criminality, victim and villain. How are these terms redefined over time? Furthermore, the class will look at the cultural implications of authority and consider the ways in which the social problems of the time find solution with the help of the genre. How does the genre (re)establish social malaise? Was there a need for monikers of authority when detective fiction became popular? If so, what are the origins of such necessities? What does the onset of crime noir suggest about the population and politics of the mid-20th century? Does the genre pose literary merit?

The course demands a lot of reading of both primary and secondary sources. Required texts include, but are not limited to, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. We will also be considering works by Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie and a few others. Also, since 200 is a “W” course, students will be required to write and revise 10-15 pages (in the form of two papers) and participate in a group presentation.

For Victorian writer John Ruskin, home “is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home.” The notion of a domestic sanctuary that could and would protect its inhabitants from the anxieties of the outside world was a powerful structuring myth in the Victorian era. However, luckily for the student of nineteenth century literature, the Victorian home was rather more porous than Ruskin’s description would lead us to believe: the worries and struggles of the factory, the poorhouse, the brothel, the public house, the teeming streets, etc., all found their way across the threshold to bask in the glow of the Victorian hearth. The novels and short stories we will read in this course all meditate on the concept of home just as fervently as Ruskin does, but with one key difference: All of the homes in them will open wide the doors to “terror, doubt and division,” and will give us all the fodder we need to talk about hauntings, ghosts, crypts, prisons, insanity, murder, vampires, and decadence.

Readings will include introductory material by John Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Isabella Beeton, and from there, we will move on to works by the Brontës, Hardy, Austen and Stoker. Our texts are mainly British, but we will also look to Poe and Melville as masters of these sorts of representations. This course satisfies the University’s W-requirement, and thus students will be responsible for writing and revising two 5-7 page papers, as well as writing weekly 300-500 word response postings on our Go-Post site.

Household Gods and Domestic Angels: Framing the Home
John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865; selections)
Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House” (1854; selections)
Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s Guide to Household Management (selections)

Novels and Short Stories:
Thomas Hardy, “Barbara of the House of Grebe”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Herman Melville, “My Kinsman Major Molineux”

English 200 is intended to encourage and develop practices of critical interpretation in the reading of literature. The environmental justice movement will operate as a critical framework for our reading, discussions and writing this quarter. Students will be expected to develop a firm grasp of the main problems, tensions, and questions that exist within this political and cultural tradition, and then enter into this critical discussion in their own writing.

In recent years (with issues of global warming, the energy crisis, etc. receiving attention in mainstream culture and within the university), there has been a growing interest in thinking the relationships between environment and culture. Consequently, a critical movement termed ‘ecocriticism’ is a growing and active field within English departments around the country. With this in mind, our main focus in this course will be on the ways in which non-fiction writing, fiction, and poetry of the 20th century depicts the relationship between environmentalism and other movements calling for social justice and racial equality.

Note: This course fulfills a ‘W’ credit. Students will write two 5-7 page papers over the course of the quarter, and will be required to revise their writing based on instructor and peer feedback. This class is primarily discussion based and daily participation will constitute a significant amount of the total grade.

Possible primary texts include:
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierras
Chesnutt, Charles W. , The Conjure Woman Tales
Silko, Leslie Marmon, Ceremony
Yamashita, Karen Tai, Through the Arc of the Rainforest
Williams, Terry Tempest, Refuge
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Days of Rain

In his essay, “Discourse and the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin wrote: “literary language becomes a dialogue of languages that both know about and understand each other.” Often described as a quintessential product of modernity, the novel reflects in its form the various processes of cultural integration. Emerging out of a nation of immigrants, American literature provides many rich examples through which to examine how different genres interact within the category of fiction as a way of producing national narratives. As Benedict Anderson points out, it is no coincidence that the rise of modern nationalism occurred simultaneously with the rise of the novel as a dominant literary form during the 18th and 19th centuries; the ability of fiction to amalgamate a number of seemingly disparate cultural perspectives into a singular form is part of what made it possible to create a coherent national identity out of such a diverse population.

The goal of this course is to examine a few examples of influential novels and short fiction that reflect some of the different cultural dialogues apparent in American culture during the 18th and 19th centuries. We will read these works alongside other forms, such as drama, poetry and ethnography, to discern how different discourses function in the American novel and, subsequently, how these various works function to create various national narratives. Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie will offer some examples of how “natives” and Europeans are imagined in an idealized American landscape. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Wilson’s Our Nig will offer a few different social commentaries on slavery, segregation and class, while Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Chopin’s The Awakening will continue discussions of class along with issues of womanhood in American culture. These core readings will be supplemented by a number of critical secondary works, as well as other works of literature by John Winthrop, Mary Jemison, Herman Melville, Royall Tyler, and others.
In this W (writing) course, students will be expected to write and revise a 10-15 page paper, along with a number of assignments that will include GoPost weekly responses, presentations, quizzes, and grammar exercises. Because this is a seminar course, students should also prepare for a heavy reading schedule and to participate every day in class.

Required Texts:
James Fenimore Cooper- The Prairie
Harriet Wilson- Our Nig
Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn
Susannah Rowson- Charlotte Temple
Kate Chopin- The Awakening
Course Pack, available at the Ave Copy Center

As the novel emerged in the eighteenth century, numerous authors and critics of the time period debated not only its literary potential, but its practical utility. And, it seems that for many one of the novel's most "useful" qualities could be found in its capacity to both teach and entertain. In his Rambler No. 4, Samuel Johnson notes that "these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions." Yet, behind this enthusiasm for the novel's didactic potential lies an anxiety about achieving a perfectly exact blend of entertainment and instruction, for to supplement one's didactic agenda with too egregious an addition of entertainment value could potentially provoke unintended results and aberrant behavior. Thus, Johnson qualifies his praise of the novel with a disclaimer, cautioning authors to censure their portrayal of reality, narrating only the "best examples" of human experience as "these books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle to whom they serve as lectures of conduct and introductions into life."

Johnson's analysis of the educational potential of the novel form as seen in his Rambler No. 4 will be our jumping off point for this course. Keeping Johnson's prescription for socially responsible novels in mind, we will examine a sampling of novels written in the mid to late eighteenth century and ask not only what sort of curriculum their fiction offers, but how this curriculum is communicated and how each author negotiates her text's precarious balance between the demands of education and entertainment. We will also contrast the novelist’s didactic practices with those of the eighteenth-century journalist. What similarities, both formal and topical, exist between these genres? Also, how does the novelist attempt to rework the journalist’s treatment of education? This framework will allow us to refine our close reading skills, practice posing critical questions that will inform our writing, and examine the novel form as an active participant in the eighteenth-century debate concerning female education.

To fulfill the W-Course criteria, all students will write two 5 – 7 page papers that will be revised at the end of the quarter

Secondary Sources, Available in Course Pack (subject to change)

* Defoe, Daniel. The Review. 1704 – 1713. (excerpts).

* Haywood, Eliza. Fantomina. Popular Fiction By Women, 1660 – 1730. Eds. Paula R. Backscheider and John Richetti. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996

Texts:

• Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 2002. [9781551114798]
• Burney, Frances. Evelina. Ed. Susan Kubica Howard. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, Ltd., 2000. [9781551112374]
• Fielding, Sarah. The Governess. Ed. Candice Ward. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, Ltd., 2005. [9781551114125]
• Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. [9780192829603]

Catalog Description: Examines ideas of method and imagination in a variety of texts, in literature, philosophy, and science. Particularly concerned with intellectual backgrounds and methods of inquiry that have shaped modern Western literature.

CHID 205 / English 205 Professor Leroy Searle Winter Quarter, 2010 Hitchcock Hall 132 1:30-2:20 M-F This course is part of the core curriculum of the Comparative History of Ideas program, offered in two concurrent sections: CHID 205 and ENGL 205. It makes absolutely no difference the section in which you are enrolled. The course pursues an intensive and demanding series of readings in Western intellectual and cultural history, with primary texts drawn from philosophy, literature, and the history and philosophy of science. The sequence of readings is precisely ordered, where problems that arise in one text are pursued and elaborated in the text or texts which follow. The title of the course reflects its organizing premise: that the primary focus of Western intellectual culture is sustained inquiry, in which method and imagination are constantly intertwined. In many ways, this course is offered as a fundamental introduction to authors and ideas that have shaped Western thought and culture. It is designed to open pathways to study in many other programs and departments, and its intent is to involve you directly with the examination of fundamental conceptions that are implicated in virtually everything else you think.

This course will introduce students to the practice of cultural studies through an examination of texts that identify, evaluate and in both cases construct a cultural history of the US from the late 1940’s into the 1960’s. We will pay particular attention to representations of those subjects and events that worked to define the post war years for Americans who lived them and for future generations. Collectively, they address: ongoing efforts to identify and contain communism abroad and at home; the emergence of growth of the Civil Rights movement; the formation of homophile organizations; Kinsey’s “sexual continuum”; narrow definitions of femininity, masculinity and sexuality, along with the policing of sexual deviance; the nuclear family as a lynch pin in national security and a toxic formation; white surburban flight and urban decay; youth culture and juvenile delinquency; homogenization and imperiled individualism. Because the practice of cultural studies demands attention to how texts are composed, the historical conversations that they engage, and the material consequences of the realities that they construct, this course requires close reading in and across such fields as: literature, film, journalism, social science, government, and criticism. A course packet and films supplement required novels: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Students are expected to actively engage in class discussions, participate in a group presentation, produce 6 page-length critical responses to assigned readings, and a final paper or project.

This course offers an introduction to cultural studies as an interdisciplinary form of knowledge production, one arising out of what Chela Sandoval has called “the global decolonizing processes of the 19th and 20th centuries.” In this sense, this course will pursue an investigation of the ways in which cultural studies methods of knowledge production interact with histories of political contestation and racialized domination.

In order to address these concerns, this course will firstly introduce students to key concepts and terms within the British cultural studies tradition with a particular emphasis on the relationship between racialization and cultural production. We will then resituate our lines of inquiry into a US context, where we will work through the different and related ways in which African American and Chicana/o histories of political struggle interact with cultural productions and engender critical studies of culture. In these terms, this course will ask students to consider the relationship between culture, nationalism, social movements, state power, and colonial histories of racialization. And it will think these connections through a variety of cultural sites and texts—from novels and film to short stories and hip hop, to name a few.

Book List:
Nella Larsen. Passing (1929)
Américo Paredes. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad & its Hero (1958)
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian. The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum: Critical and Ethnographic Practices (2007)

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.

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 space, time, and the self engendered by modernity and postmodernity. We will also pay attention to literary interrogations into the nature of narrative, history and memory.

Books

Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway
T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land
Jean Toomer. Cane
Don DeLillo. White Noise
Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Violent Cases
Ishmael Reed. Mumbo Jumbo
Shelley Jackson. My Body
Xeroxed course pack.

Our lives could easily be defined by our intercourse with others. “Modernist literature” might be described as a representation and reaction to the alienation, or the increasing lack of intercourse, instigated by industrial capital’s contortions of social relations in the 19C and 20C. “Postmodernism literature” might be described as a representation and reaction to the ever-increasing (even hyper-) mediation of those social relations and the hyper-commodification of the other (often constituted as the embrace of diversity and multiculturalism). This class will trace some of the negotiations of this shifting intercourse with others, primarily by unpacking the cultural representations of the “other” we call stereotypes, as we read through the literature of the 20C. This class will think through the role of literature in negotiating, reinforcing, and challenging how we are defined and how we define others through social categories. Because race is the salient social category through which “America” is lived and sexuality is a salient way that race is constituted, this class will focus on reading representations of the negotiation of the intersection of these two modalities of power. To this end, we will mark the temporal and epistemological turn from “modernism” to “postmodernism” by asking how literary representations of the experience with this intersection change as these aesthetic, political, socio-cultural, interpretive, and theoretical shifts take place. We will read literature as one among many multiple, shifting discourses within the broader discursive formations of modernism and postmodernism. That is, we will read literary texts intertextually in and through the intercourse that deploys sexuality to define racial categories (and vice versa) in U.S racial/sexual formation.

Texts may include James Baldwin’s Another Country, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices. Other potential texts include the poetry of John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, Langston Hughes and/or Allen Ginsburg, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and writings by William Burroughs, Gloria Anzaldúa, Samuel Delaney, and Fae Myenne Ng. We will temper our literary readings with literary criticism on selected readings, critical/theoretical essays (by Sander Gilman, Scott Pickering, Homi Bhabha, José Muñoz, Eileen Boris), and primary historical texts (such as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma).

A decent grade will depend heavily on class participation and engaged interrogation of each day’s reading as well as weekly response postings, a mid term and final project.

“…he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a colossus, and we petty men, / Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves” (Julius Caesar I.ii.135-8)

“…such stuff / As dreams are made on” (The Tempest IV.i.157-8)

A course entitled “Shakespeare” carries with it hundreds of years of accumulated cultural baggage; this quarter, we’ll both perpetuate and interrogate the cultural monolith SHAKESPEARE by pursuing two primary goals. The first is that, through close reading and analysis, you’ll understand and be in a position to enjoy and appreciate (or to explain from an educated, critical, analytical perspective why you dislike) the dramatic works of Shakespeare. We’ll read plays from each genre, treating them as subjects of literary analysis by doing in-depth readings of specific passages both in class discussion and your independent writing, as well as addressing important strategies for reading the plays, including understanding meter and scansion, dramatic structure, sources and contexts, etc. We’ll also try to keep in mind the fact that the plays were written primarily for stage performance, and should be read and considered as such. We may return to certain recurring themes in our selected plays, such as: civilization vs. wildness, theatricality and illusion, family, and the many others that you’ll begin to notice in your reading.

The second goal is that, as scholars and readers, you will learn to interrogate your assumptions about Shakespeare as a cultural god; as a means towards this end, we’ll look at the historical trajectory of how Shakespeare became what he is today. This line of study will address how Shakespeare has been received and treated in various periods—including the liberal adaptations of the eighteenth century, the delightfully derogatory criticism of authors like Tolstoy, Shaw, and T.S. Eliot, children’s Shakespeares, performances of Shakespeare in modern prisons, film adaptations, and more. Other areas which have contributed to the production of modern Shakespeare studies (for example: biography, the authorship debate, critical approaches, textual issues and editing, etc.) will be explored through research projects and presentations. You will also be required to act in a group performance of a scene from one of our course texts, and to attend a performance of a Shakespeare play in the community (or on campus, if applicable).

Through this dynamic approach, and your efforts toward critical thinking, analysis, and argumentation, we’ll work towards rescuing Shakespeare from his own oppressive image of literary domination and the heavy handed readings often imposed on students, and get back to the fun, passion, violence, sexuality, terror, beauty, and endurance of the language of Shakespeare’s plays.

This course meets the university “W” requirement, which means that students must produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, which must be significantly revised. (For more specific W-course criteria, please see http://www.washington.edu/uaa/gateway/advising/degreeplanning/writreqs.php). Besides these papers (probably multiple shorter papers of 5-7 pages or fewer), course work may include discussion leading, electronic postings, reading quizzes and exams, response papers, research work, presentations, scene performances, etc. Plays will include Twelfth Night, or What You Will, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Henry V. There will also be a required course pack.

Though he is most often discussed as a dramatist, William Shakespeare considered himself a poet first and foremost, who turned to playwriting as a way to make money, and as a natural extension of his acting career. In addition to producing the language?s most respected corpus of plays and of poetry, the bard?s work has also been an inspiration to hundreds of artists in genres as diverse as painting, ballet, opera, filmmaking, sculpture, architecture, and many others. This class will consider Shakespeare?s poetry, with a heavy emphasis on the sonnets; we will read descriptive passages and speeches from nearly all the 36 plays, with an ear tuned to his unique language and image-making. We will also consider him as a cultural touchstone, reading adaptations, listening to symphonies, and criticizing paintings inspired by his work. In order to understand his composite gifts of characterization and narrative structure, we will read, in addition to principle selections from all the major plays, three in their entirety.

The goal is not to read all the Shakespeare we?ll ever need to read in the span of one class, but to qualify ourselves as readers of his poetry, that we might open to his language, reading, at any later date, with appetite and comprehension.


The written assignments for this class will involve the following, which total between 17-22 pages, and which should all be revised in response to instructor feedback in accordance with the university's (w) requirements.

1. a response to a critical work which you will have selected, in which you demonstrate your ability to make scholarly use of secondary sources and to engage academic interpretations of the work on its own terms.
2. an interpretive paper wherein you demonstrate your ability to read and understand the material, to make claims about texts, and to support those claims with primary evidence.
3. a group assignment on some aspect of the supplementary topics listed on the syllabus.
4. Optional extra credit: Seattle is full of first-rate Shakespeare productions, and will be especially so during our quarter together. Go see one, and report back from the front lines an analysis of the staging, adaptation, or artistic choices that make up the production.

The edition from which you choose to read can be a "Complete Shakespeare" from any major press (these can be found by the pile in used book shops), so longs as it includes full texts of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Tempest,""King Lear," and the sonnets.

Together, we are about to explore novels that have been written since the early twentieth century. The selected texts are aware of the sophistication of human nature and reflect varying social concerns. We’ll take a look at a “love story” that happens in India under British colonialism in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World; discover the reality of New York high society, which is shown by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence; examine the social “discourse” that has shaped colonial/postcolonial literature, represented by E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India; investigate social abandonment and alienation through both Toni Morrison’s sorrow in Beloved, and finally, Richard Wright’s rage in his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children.

Relevant interpretive, critical articles on the aforementioned novels and certain cultural theory will constitute secondary materials, which are available in the photocopied course packet. Movie clips are going to be incorporated into class discussion.

Being a composition class, this course will devote effort to writing about literature. The writing assignments will be partly formed by journal entries. In addition, you will be required to accomplish a 5~7-page, double-spaced, mid-term paper, and a final paper, which reaches 10~12 pages. Peer reviews and revisions are compulsory.

Book list
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright

The novel is a literary form that assumes a comfortable place in the history of writing; the vast domain of fiction itself is often equated with novel genres: romance novels, mystery novels, bestselling novels, classic novels. This course will begin with a set of questions that seeks to explore and complicate our understanding of the novel as the natural form of fiction. The purpose of this inquiry is not to arrive at a definition of the novel, but on the contrary, to demonstrate that it is a form that resists definition at all, even as "fictional;" its themes, politics, techniques, and concerns are always appropriating and being appropriated by historical and cultural pressures.

Fiction is a particularly vexed genre because historically, it was often defined in opposition to "fact" or "history," and many of the modern assumptions we hold about fiction today stem from these eighteenth- and nineteenth- century attitudes. But is fiction particularly opposed to fact or history? In the case of the novel, this popular form came to be explicitly equated with fiction, but we will see that its function was not so easily categorized. Was it aesthetic or didactic? Would it educate or make idle the character of its readers? Would it critique or affirm imperialist practices and domestic policies? Looking critically at the novel now, is it a vehicle of liberal thought or a form of discipline? Or does it undertake all these functions? And how do these issues get taken up in narratives themselves? We will sample several novels, chosen from different types of nineteenth-century fiction that will help us explore these questions: the domestic novel, the industrial novel, sensation novel, and the imperial romance. Examining these varying novelistic genres, we will pay attention to how they each take up and address issues of economy, industry, and labor, race and imperialism, gender and class, trying to track how each genre uses its narrative to fashion or marginalize representations of these prominent social and political concerns.

Because the course is primarily discussion-based, a significant portion of your grade is based on class participation. Students will also write two short response papers (3-4 pages each), and one longer essay (5-7 pages), with required revisions. The workload also includes a presentation, discussion-leading, a heavy reading schedule, and may include Go Post responsibilities, quizzes, or a midterm.

Course Reader, available at Ave Copy (4141 University Way)

Texts:

• Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. [978-0393975420]
• Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. [978-0393959000]
• Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. [978-0140434088]
• Haggard, Rider H. King Solomon's Mines. [978-0812966299]

Writers on both ends of the political spectrum have long imagined lower class life as a chaotic alternate reality governed by nasty, brutish necessity. The middle class, meanwhile, has long served as the 'normal' world which stands in harmonious contrast to the "gritty realities" of life on the mean streets, the slum, or the menacingly masculine American outback.
Yet if the loose moralities and lawbreaking of the organized criminal, the back-holler yeoman, the factory worker, or the shell-shocked sleuth on the beat in the naked city repel some readers, and reaffirm their own "purpose driven lives," they also attract them with representations of a life full of anarchic possibilities and pleasures. And while middle class life, with its grinning nuclear families, purebred dogs, and big green lawns has long stood as an image of fulfillment for some, it has also represented its opposite for others.
Our class this quarter will track some of these trends across a range of novels which either propose to reveal (and revel in) the hardboiled terrains of underclass underworlds, or which turn the 'unblinking' ethnographic eye back on the middle class--often with profane and hilarious results. We'll also view a number of films which may include Little Caesar, Gang War, Happiness, Deliverance, Dogville, and/or Manda Bala.
Course requirements: Your final grade will be based on your demonstration of you completion and comprehension of reading assignments through your regular contribution to class discussion, GoPost reflections, and a number of writing assignments. Note that this is a "W" course, and as such will require you to produce 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, in the form of a longer paper with a required revision OR two or more short papers, likewise with revisions.

Required Texts:
-McTeague
-Red Harvest
-Babbitt
-White Noise
-Disgrace

Commonly, fiction is understood to be the opposite of fact—where fact is objective, fiction is subjective; where fact is value neutral, fiction is value-laden. Thus, as a class called “Reading Fiction,” this course takes these premises as its starting point in order to challenge their commonsensical status. That is to ask, then, what enables these sharp distinctions between fact and fiction? And to what effect does particular instances of it have? In posing these questions, this course does not seek to reduce one side of the binary to the other, in which fact is nothing but fiction, but rather it will attend to the formal presuppositions and methodological practices that subtend particular historical and disciplinary instances of the fact/fiction dichotomy.

To ground these abstract questions and assertions about epistemology, this course will focus on literary and historical accounts of Los Angeles in the latter half of the 20th century. As an urban/global city whose geographical position in Southern California links it up to both the Asian Pacific Rim and the “global south,” Los Angeles is fecund site for the contested visions of a “transnational” and “multicultural” future. Thus, we will examine the way in which these visions of Los Angeles, whether literary or historical, issue from particular socio-political norms of a fact/fiction dichotomy. To do so, we will pay particular attention to the form of each account and the way it comes to index those norms in its articulation of fact and fiction. Texts for the class MAY include: Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Octavia Butler’s Parable of Sower, Anna Deavere Smith’s Twillight: Los Angeles, 1992, Gary Phillip’s Violent Spring, LA 2000: A City for the Future. Films for the class MAY include: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down.

The course workload includes: 10-15 pages of revised writing that satisfies the University "W" requirement, which will come in the form of two 6-7 page academic essays that perform a textual analysis of one or more of the fictional texts and thoroughly engages critical material; group presentations where you begin and facilitate class discussion; weekly pop quizzes on the course readings; daily free-writes; a substantial amount of daily reading; occasional take-home writing assignments; and engaging in daily class discussion and in-class group activities.

How does our reading of literary texts transform our perception of what we do on a daily basis? How does literature bring into focus elements of our common routine, in order to prompt an inquiry into the relationship between our sense of who we are as human beings and the every-day tasks we are used to performing? What about the ways in which literary works represent things or objects as part of our daily life? How do these representations inform our sense of purpose in life as individuals and members of a particular ethnic, cultural or even national community?

We will work towards answering these questions by reading short-stories and a novel from the last five decades: Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” Hari Kunzru’s “Raj, Bohemian,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” John Updike’s “A & P,” Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” and John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. The majority of these texts are first-person narratives, and we will work towards understanding what sets them apart from a story your friend might tell you on the bus on the way to school, or an account of an event you might hear on the news. The assignments in this class are designed to enhance your grasp of the narrative devices employed in literary texts that distinguish them from ordinary stories: use of language, tone, plot, setting, point of view and character development. We will actively practice close reading of fiction. You will be required to write three short papers (3-4 pages) and develop one of them into a longer final paper (6-7 pages). The required books for the class are Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure and the 10th edition of Richard Abcarian’s and Marvin Klotz’s Literature The Human Experience. Please do not purchase earlier editions of Abcarian’s book because some of the stories we will discuss are not included in them. Both books are available at the University Bookstore.

This course will cover British fiction from the mid-18th to 19th centuries, and take as its theme the social outcast – ranging from conniving criminal outlaws to scandalous women. We will ask how the literature produced during this time-period engaged with the formation of cultural norms that ultimately facilitated England’s rise to global superpower by the mid-19th century. Within this context, what did it mean for a person to be figured as too dangerous, morally-problematic, or simply unconventional to be allowed to participate in society? What gender, political, and racial criteria were involved in this transaction? We’ll look at the fate of these outcasts – they are often expelled, reformed, or otherwise taken care of – as instructive, considering to what degree literary representation underwrites ideologies, and whether intervention is possible. Another question we’ll be asking is how the very shape of literature becomes involved in the treatment of these social pariahs; as we’ll see, some genres are more accommodating than others. We’ll therefore work with a variety of genres, including the realistic and gothic novel, Romantic poetry and non-fiction writing. Required texts: Jonathan Wild, The Italian, Frankenstein and Oliver Twist, as well as a course packet. Course requirements will include group presentations, reading quizzes and active class participation. In order to fulfill the University “W” requirement, students will be asked to write, and revise, two five to seven page papers.

As the name "Reading Poetry" 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.

Readings will range widely over time, but 20th century American poetry will be the primary focus of our attention. Requirements for the class will include quizzes, a substantial amount of informal writing, and two formal papers with at least one significant revision to satisfy the 10-15 pages of revised writing for the University "W" requirement. Class participation will also comprise a major component of the final grade.

Reading Poetry is an intensive course in American poetry and poetics from > 1860 to 1960. Reading such poets as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra > Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Theodore
Roethke, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and > Adrienne Rich, students will develop a more detailed understanding of the shifts in American verse amidst larger cultural, political, and historical trajectories. In addition to readings in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (ed. Ramazani, et al., third edition.), students
will become acquainted with primary and secondary sources addressing poems’ composition, circulation, and reception. In addition to quizzes and a midterm exam, the course will include three papers (2, 3, and 5 pages in length), and require a revision of the final paper.

> Book list:
> Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Ed. Ramazani, et al.
> 3rd edition.
> ISBN 978-0393324297
> Course Packet

We'll read and discuss a wide assortment of treatises, sermons, essays, stories and poems written by American authors from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Students will be expected to attend class regularly and write a series of in-class papers in response to study questions handed out in advance.

Texts: Perkins & Perkins, SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN LITERATURE; Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES; John Steinbeck, EAST OF EDEN

Course Description & Objectives

It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being
an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken
scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realize our parents,
remember our grandparents, and know ourselves, and our history
is complete.
The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,
that is the story that I mean to tell, for that is what really is and
what I really know.

--Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans

The course title and the above quotation define the main objectives of this course: to see the story of American writers within their history. This course will introduce you to American literature through a careful reading of a variety of representative short stories viewed in their historical, cultural, and biographical contexts. During the course of the quarter we will read and reflect on three centuries and four literary periods of American short fiction. As we move through these literary timeframes we will attempt to connect American eras and authors with the substance and style of the stories penned.

By the end of the quarter, you should have a sophisticated understanding of what American literature "really is" as well as what more you'd like to read after course completion to "really know" past and present “Americas” that help to configure you in our contemporary American era.

Goals

Surveying American literature through cultural and historical lens
Enhancing your critical reading approaches to American literature
Introducing to you to a variety of American authors, styles and literary movements
Enriching your critical abilities, both in speech and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate American literature

Requirements

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

This course traces the African American literary tradition from its beginnings in the 18th century to the contemporary moment. Our readings span roughly five periods of literary production: the colonial and early national eras; the antislavery era; the post-reconstruction era; the early twentieth century; the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will cover a myriad of genres including poetry, essays, short stories and novels. We will situate each work within its aesthetic, historical and ideological context. This is an ambitious but rewarding undertaking--it requires that you keep up with reading and actively engage with the material in our discussions and class assignments. Even though this class is lecture-sized, we will aim for a seminar environment in which we freely exchange and collaborate upon ideas. Throughout the quarter, we will focus on a range of questions, including:
• What are the ramifications of the shift from oral to written forms of expression within African American culture? With this shift, what artistic innovations take place within African American literature?
• What are the connections between authorship and authority? How does literacy dovetail with freedom, citizenship and power?
• What are the stakes in constituting an African American literary tradition or canon?
• How do African American writers speak to each other and also address dominant myths of race?
• How does the literature discuss race as it intersects with class, gender, sexuality and nationality?
This class aims to make you familiar with this rich and vital body of literature as well as provide you with an interpretive framework with which to guide future reading beyond the course list.

This section of English 281 will engage a variety of controversies which fall under the rubric of “the commons.” The definition of what is considered “common,” or “public property”—from open spaces to public domain art to water and air to the genome itself—is neither stable nor guaranteed. This course will explore the terrain of the “commons” debate and ask course participants to delineate and defend in writing a specific critical position.

Course readings will include selections from Garrett Hardin, David Bollier, Hardt & Negri, and Howard Rheingold (among others). Course work will consist of in-class discussion and presentations, a number of exploratory, responsive, and critical short papers, and a two-part longer paper of approximately ten pages. This is a computer integrated class, which means that class meetings will alternate between a computer integrated classroom and a traditional seminar room.

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.

In this section of English 281 we will read a diverse collection of critical and analytical writing. The goal of this class is to develop our own critical and analytical reading and writing skills so that the very culture we find ourselves participating in each day becomes rich with ideas, concepts, and provocative questions. The art of thinking and the art of writing should not be understood as merely academic exercises practiced within the university, but should both be seen as fundamental tools for making sense of a world that often bares little sense. To this end we will be reading both philosophy texts and watching key episodes of South Park. We’ll consider contemporary editorials from Time magazine and watch independent documentary cinema. The fundamental claim of this class is that analysis and arguments happen everywhere and everyday and make a significant mark on our lives whether we are aware of it or not. It is time to become aware of the meanings made everyday in our world and actively participate in making them ourselves.

Part of our inquiry into “thinking the everyday” will include thinking about audience and how to effectively pitch one’s argument to a specific audience. Obviously, as we’ll see, the audience for a South Park episode is different from that of a Time magazine editorial. The course readings are diverse because they are speaking to specific, we might even say “imagined,” audiences. Therefore, our course will be attentive to other disciplines besides English and will consider how best to articulate arguments in a variety of contexts.

You will be writing regularly during the course in the form of in-class writing, small papers, GoPosts and two major papers (each with a rough draft preceding it) and a final portfolio that highlights your analytical writing and thinking development over the quarter. Your final grade will be determined by participation, the two major papers, and the portfolio.

Readings may include some (but not all) of the following selections: Michel Foucault (“Panopticism”), Louis Althusser (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”), Slavoj Zizek (Welcome to the desert of the real!), Don DeLillo (excerpts from Underworld), Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and/or selections from The Arcades Project), Gloria Anzaldua (“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”), Michel De Certeau (selections from The Practice of Everyday Life), Henry David Thoreau (excerpt from Walden), Susan Bordo (“Beauty [Re]discovers the Male Body”), the films Bowling for Columbine, and This is Nowhere, and various episodes of South Park. All texts will be available in a course packet.

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.

When CNN correspondent Ralitsa Vassileva described Barack Obama as winning the election as a post-racial candidate, Cornel West responded by stating that “[t]he term post racial needs to be examined in the sense that it really doesn’t exist…The challenge now is to move from symbol to substance” (4 November 2008). This course deconstructs the complicated imaginings of America as “post-racial” and explores how social change might be engaged through productive racial critiques. As such, the course examines three fundamental questions: How might important conceptions generated from the study of rhetoric and language be placed in dialogue with race studies to deconstruct contemporary post-racial ideologies? At this crucial juncture in American political and social life, how might we translate such knowledge into academic and public scholarship for different audiences? What multilingual narrative and visual sources provide counter-public models that both challenge and reconstruct monolithic notions of post-racial identity and ethnicity?

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.

This course will introduce students to the tools of poetry. Coursework will involve critical and theoretical readings as well as many poems, and critical writing as well as creative writing. Our focus will be on writing with the reader in mind, and reading to discern how poems work. Our approach will be one of experimentation and exploration. While students will compose, share, and revise poems, the emphasis is not on polishing such pieces, but on learning about poetry through the process of writing.

Students will be required to purchase a course reader and an anthology of poetry from a list of suggested titles.

Course pack, Anthology of student's choice from an approved list

In this course, we will devote ourselves to the rigorous study and practice of creative writing in a supportive and stimulating community of writers. During class sessions, we will not only study, but practice various elements of fiction writing, including, among others, character development, dialogue, plot, point of view, and pacing, especially as they manifest themselves in the short story form. Throughout the next ten weeks, be prepared to read and engage with published short stories, with particular attention to the craft of writing; to study narrative technique and other elements through writing exercises; to respond to your fellow writers’ work respectfully and thoughtfully; to think critically and (more) “objectively” about your own work; and, above all, to write. This course is, in large part, about coming to a deeper understanding of writing as a process – but even more, it is about learning to appreciate and, yes, to love the process. This course, in other words, is not for the faint of heart; but then again, neither is the writing life.

The only way to become a writer is, quite simply, to write. Of course, this task is deceptively simple: What does it mean to write? What does it mean to be a writer? And, most importantly, how do we do it? How do we go about attending to this unexplainable passion, this need we have to sit down and fill up a blank page with our own made-up stories and
wild imaginings, and then (gasp), dare to hope that someone will read them? One answer, it seems, has very much to do with the act of writing as a way of thinking about ourselves, a way of creating ourselves, rather than simply a means of self-expression; the other answers, however, we will stumble upon during this course, day by day, as we sit down together and go about the nitty-gritty, often messy and uncomfortable, process of writing.

Texts:

• Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-french. Writing Fiction: A Guide To Narrative Craft. [9780321277367]
• Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters To A Young Poet. [9781607960263]

This is an immersion course: for ten weeks, we will soak ourselves in the short story form. Warning: your fingers will get pruny. We’ll be reading as many short stories as we can; some we’ll love, and some we’ll hate. We’ll discover how to create vivid characters, settings, and scenes. We’ll learn the importance of plot, the pros and cons of each point of view, and how to write convincing dialogue. We’ll also experience the “writing workshop,” in which we read and critique each other’s work. Perhaps most importantly, we will learn how to critique and revise our own. At the end of the quarter, everyone will hand in twenty pages of revised writing, including at least one short story. If this appeals to you, then sign up and dive in!

Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th ed.

ISBN: 0-321-27736-8

Also, a course packet.

For the first time in a large-format class, the collective UW Creative Writing faculty, along with other visiting artists, will remember in public why they do what they do. On ten sequential Tuesdays, they will speak in depth about what interests them most, including the ways and means of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and the joys and vagaries of inspiration, education, artistic practice, and the writing life. Thursdays will constellate a literary reading series. Discussion sections will be scheduled in between.

Serious curiosity is the only requirement for admission. Students will be expected to attend all talks, do the assigned reading, respond to problems and exercises posed by the lecturers, and participate vigorously in the ongoing conversation. By the end, they will have had a disciplined brush with literate passion, practiced imaginative methods at the point of the pencil, learned something about books from people who write them, and gained a practical sense of the artist's way of knowing the world.

Conceived as a perpetual work-in-progress, according professors full freedom in designing their respective contributions, the course will find its coherence in the conversation we leap to make of it. Sample topics: What Is It? or, Ars Poetica; Forms of Poetry, Forms of Thought; Mythos-Minded Thinking: From Proverbs to Parables, Stories as Metaphors in Motion; Odd Autobiography; Reading the New; Literary Collage & Blurring Boundaries; The Writing Life; The Revision Process; Closing Words.

No required text. Readings will be posted online or handed out in class. Grading will be based equally on reading (by quiz and conversation), writing (solutions to assigned prompts), and participation (attendance and discussion).

Repeat: this course is intended to bring infectious literate passion within earshot of as many people as possible at the University of Washington. No formal prerequisites. Everyone is invited.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

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.

his course will focus as much on selected American texts as the act of reading itself. What do we expect out of fiction in an age of declining readerships and the ascendancy of television and electronic media? We will start with the controversies surrounding Nella Larsen’s Passing, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. We will then use the discussions generated from these books to frame our reading of such texts as David Shields’ Reality Hunger and the essays of Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age. While class time will be devoted to exploring critical readings of these texts, we will spend much time on connecting these texts to considering the relationship of reading to a culture dominated by the sound byte and the visual. Some of the questions we will ask: what is the relationship of fiction to the “real world”? Is it Oprah’s world and are we merely living in it? How (and even if!) is reading still relevant?

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 cheerleading; 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 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). Finally, we’ll also read/watch some of the texts that that book looks at as part of its argument—like Montaigne’s essay “On Reading.”

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

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.

This course will introduce students to a variety of theoretical and literary works that are frequently used by literary and cultural studies scholars to interpret historical and contemporary cultural production. In particular we will focus on those theories that have attempted to comprehend transformations in the meaning “life” in the modern period--a period dubbed by one theorist as “the age of human sacrifice”--and to understand the forms of power (physical, discursive, moral, juridical, economic, racialized, gendered, and statist) that have been developed to exert control over life, and therefore also over death. Topics that we will treat include social death, slavery and colonialism, “biopower,” “necropolitics,” and “disposability.” Emphasis in this course will be placed on learning how to read dense theoretical, philosophical texts; on understanding the dialogue among theorists and how they build upon and depart from each other in creating their theories; on writing about theoretical texts in a concise manner; and, not least, on using the theories that we will read to better understand the various forms of cultural production that surround us. To this end, theoretical texts will be juxtaposed with literary and filmic texts that we will use to “test out” the theory and to understand its pitfalls and possibilities.

Is there such a thing as a Literature of the Americas? Are there works of fiction that transcend the scope of conventional nation-based frameworks of meaning—such as American literature, Cuban literature, Mexican literature, and so on? If so, how are the fictional worlds of such transnational—or specifically, hemispheric American—literary works constructed, and what social and economic developments underpin them? This course examines exemplary modern and contemporary hemispheric American literary works, works that, for varying reasons, just don’t fit any single nation-based category, texts that embed an inter-American dimension, crossing national boundaries between Latin America and the U.S. Socio-cultural foundations of hemispheric American works include: 20th- and 21st-century mass migration from Latin America to the U.S., legal and undocumented (Goldman, Alvarez); violent displacement through exile and state terror (Alvarez, Arenas); the local impact of expatriate writers, such as Hemingway in Cuba (Padura); finally, the shared history of European exploration, conquest and colonization of the Americas, South and North (William Carlos Williams).

Required texts:
Leonardo Padura, Adiós, Hemingway (2006)
Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman (1997)
Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1992)
Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925)
a small course reader with short fiction

Queen Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Though born a princess, she was declared illegitimate after her father took a liking to Jane Seymour and had her mother beheaded. When Elizabeth took the throne in 1599, she inherited a nation close to collapse, with its people deeply split over issues of religion. In order to provide stability for England, she chose not to marry, thus famously becoming “The Virgin Queen.” One might ask, in a time so burdened by political instability and religious controversy, what’s love go to do with it? From the frustrated desire of English love lyrics, to the sexiness to of the sonnet, to the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s plays, this course will focus on the erotics in Elizabethan literature.

We will read sonnet sequences by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, dramas by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, excerpts from Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and other poetry by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and many more. And of course, we will read some writings by Good Queen Bess herself.

Shakespeare's career as dramatist after 1603. Study of comedies, tragedies, and romances.

Texts:

• Bevington. ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (any edition).

The course will offer a broad overview of the political,
philosophical and literary history of the Romantic period
(1789-1850), focusing on the works of the second generation
of Romantic writers. We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments during this period in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism), aesthetics (the prevailing interest in the sublime and the picturesque) and art (the change from portrait to landscape painting). We will then turn to an in-depth study of the work of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and George Gordon Byron, focusing on their different representations of transcendence, the sublime, transgression and the Promethean hero.

Art, society and culture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is often characterized as “modern.” What does this mean? In what ways do we understand the dramatic changes in technological and mass production that altered how the world was seen and, in turn, how a new aesthetic of the modern world was created? Through a survey of literary works from France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States this course explores these questions.
Some of the key issues to be discussed include: the metropolis and the experience of the landscape of the city; the aesthetics of shock, fragmentation, discontinuity and montage; the transparency and opacity of language; and the modernist critique of civilization, technology and enlightenment. For each of the works considered in this course, we will examine their interrelationships and their formal and conceptual inventiveness. We will also consider the wider implications (artistic, social, political and cultural) of our findings.

Readings will include: Yeats, Baudelaire, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Eliot, Kafka, Joyce, Stein, Williams, H.D., Mansfield, Stevens and Beckett. This course will include a reader as well as the following books:
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I: Swann's Way
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

In this course we will read five novels illustrating the unparalleled creativity and complexity of the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh presents the opportunity to explore formal distinctions, the dynamics of place, and the psychological impact of the First World War. In Ireland and the British midlands, we will address artistic production and the changing character of modernity in the novels of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Finally, we will travel to India with E. M. Forster to investigate national identity and the British Empire. Addressing the novels’ relations to larger artistic, political, and cultural trajectories, we will also become acquainted with primary and secondary sources addressing texts’ composition, reception, and historical contexts.

Course Packet

Texts:

• Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. [0156030359]
• Evelyn WaughEvelyn Waugh. A Handful of Dust. [0316926058]
• James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. [0393926796]
• D.H. Lawrence. Women in Love. [0141441542]
• E.M. Forster. A Passage to India. [0141441160]

This course is a general introduction to modern Irish literature. After a brief survey of medieval 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 include: memorizing (and reciting) one longer or several shorter poems by Yeats (minimum 60 lines); attendance, quizzes, short written assignments; final (two grade units).

Texts: Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (Oxford, World's Classics); W. B. Yeats, The Yeats Reader, ed. Finneran (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); The Tain, Thomas Kinsella tr. (Oxford UP. OPTIONAL!); Course Pack.

“Good prose is like a window-pane.”

--George Orwell

“They shut me up in prose— / As when a little girl / They put me in the closet— / Because they liked me ‘still.’”

--Emily Dickinson

“. . .the form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns of verse. Prose has as its minimum requirement some degree of continuous coherence beyond that of a mere list. The adjectives prosaic and prosy have a derogatory meaning of dullness and ordinariness; the neutral adjective is simply ‘prose.’
--Christopher Baldick
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Prose as a genre has been controversial, conventionally downgraded as “factual,” “straightforward,” “less than poetic,” and “intellectually unimaginative.” Although any number of poets and playwrights practice the “art” of prose and laud it, not many are consistently commended for that effort because traditional cultural hierarchies of literary genres.
We’ll question that reservation, analyze some of the reasons why other readers resist challenging genre assumptions, and we’ll do both by reading and analyzing a variety of prose subgenres, some written in traditional print, and others fusing print and graphics media to stretch innovatively the formerly paned boundaries of traditional prose narratives.
Goals

acquainting or reacquainting you with a variety of prose genres, traditional and experimental, possibly including multimedia formats
increasing your reading pleasure and understanding of the composition of prose texts
exposing you to a variety of authors, styles and literary movements
enhancing your critical abilities, both in speech and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate prose, which includes searching reliable critical databases

Requirements

Engaged, prepared, in-person participation of in-class prose analyses, individually and in small groups; short analytical writings; a midterm and a final examination

Course Texts

Modern and/or contemporary prose fiction and nonfiction, shorter and longer, including essays, articles, travel narratives

Three Theban Plays (Penguin)
Four Tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth (Bantam Classics)
Ibsen, Four Major Plays (Oxford)
Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding
Williams, Glass Menagerie
Miller, Death of a Salesman
Soyinka, The Strong Breed
Beckett, Endgame

This version of this course is designed to provide a historical introduction to print science fiction as a genre, with a strong but not exclusive emphasis on the development of the genre in the U.S. during the 20th century. The course will be organized around debates over the definition of science fiction that are internal to the science fiction field. We will therefore read examples of pulp adventure narratives; the hard SF tradition promoted by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding (later Analog); alternative forms that begin to emerge in the 1950s, including the more self-consciously literary narratives associated with Anthony Boucher's Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as the traditions of social satire and political SF associated with H.L. Gold's magazine Galaxy, and early feminist science fiction; the "New Wave" movement of the 1960s and 70s; and cyberpunk fiction and responses to it. In addition to this historical narrative, the critical concerns that we will consider include the historical and ideological contexts for science fiction narratives, such as the traditions of travel writing and utopian/dystopian speculation, and the formal tension between science fiction's tendency toward a realist aesthetic and its simultaneous commitment to the fantastic and to imagining departures from realism that often have the effect of defamiliarizing our assumptions about what is normal. Primary readings for the course may include such texts as: Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars; James Gunn, ed., The Road to Science Fiction, vol. 3; Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man; Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17; Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration; James M. Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Her Smoke Rose Up Forever; Pat Cadigan, ed., The Ultimate Cyberpunk; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Bruce Sterling, Distraction; Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life; Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars; Cory Doctorow, Little Brother; Nisi Shawl, Filter House; Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.

Taking the question “what does it mean to be modern?” as its guiding refrain, this course will explore the aesthetic practices and epistemologies through which Americans came to understand themselves as “modern” during the inter-war years. Addressing the aesthetic, economic and technological innovations often said characterize American modernism, we will consider how writers of the time located the concepts “the modern” and “modernity” in relation to notions of innovation, newness, originality and progress. But we will be equally interested in considering how “the modern” came to be naturalized as a universal human aspiration over and against formations of the “non-modern”—formations, we will find, often racialized, sexualized, and gendered as dissident and perverse.

Reading will include novels by Barnes, Dos Passos, Larsen and McKay; stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, Nugent, Paredes, and Wright; and poems by Crane, Eliot, Hughes, Pound, and Williams.

This course explores a field that is developing in English departments: literature of nature and the environment, here with emphasis on the American West. While English classes offer acculturation in language and literature, in this class you will go "back to nature." But culture is part of nature--as Gary Snyder says, words are wild. Following initial short readings that set historical reference points

--Genesis in the Bible, Edmund Burke on "the sublime," Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and John Muir, The Yosemite, with a video segment from Ken Burns, The National Parks—the course directs main focus to American Literature of Nature in the West from the mid 20th C. to the present, drawn from Barry Lopez, “A Presentation of Whales,” Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, sel. Poems of Gary Snyder, a video segment from Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, The American West and Its Disappearing Water, John McPhee, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” James Welch, Winter in the Blood, Gretel Ehrlich, sel. From The Solace of Open Spaces, Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain," with clips from the recent film, and other sel. Stories from Close Range, Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, sel. From William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. The West here means the West Coast and inland Northwest. Our region has produced writers worthy of the tradition. Note: be aware that the "Western" of story and the silver screen is a subject in itself and beyond our range. Perspectives or paradigms include: Christian, pastoral, sublime, Zen, environmentalist, Native American, work-oriented, gender/sexuality-oriented. We cover essays, fiction, and poetry, making for quite a number of works, but many are in slim volumes and short selections, and some are available via coursepak, class handouts, or video.

Lecture-discussion. Class participation is expected (standout participation can count up to +/- .3 on course grade). In-class Essay Midterm (30%); Final (30%); Paper (@8-9pp. 40%). All required work must be completed according to the schedule.

The course provides the understanding necessary to teach English language in the schools. It focuses on the basic grammatical forms and structures of English and several approaches to describing and representing them. We will cover

* lexical categories (Parts of Speech), * syntactic categories (such as phrases, clauses, tense, and aspect), * grammatical relations, * dependency relations, * constituent structure, * loosely integrated strings of words in the sentence. * connective links between sentences. We will use some of the on-line tools for automated POS tagging and graphing ("diagramming"). By the end of the course, students will be able to describe most of the syntactic structures of English in several ways. In addition, students will be able analyze the cohesion of sentences in connected text.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 370

This class will be conducted as a reading-and-writing workshop. Using just two textbooks, THE ART OF SYNTAX, by Ellen Bryant Voigt and the Robert Hass anthology, NOW & THEN, we will study--and practice in our own poetry--"the alluring shape of poetic language."

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

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

Not your typical fiction workshop. Instead, a course in the first-person pronoun, using guided reading—models from fiction and nonfiction. Many short assignments the first-person pronoun, fiction and nonfiction. Fall 2009. Grading criteria: Attendance, participation, contribution, effort, engagement, improvement. No book purchases; a course packet available from Ave Copy on University Way.\

Homepage URL: www.davidshields.com

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

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

We will read 5 recently published memoirs together this term in order to investigate several questions: what exactly is this genre of memoir? What is at stake when one ‘writes ones life’ this way, for both the writer and reader? The range of texts we will read encourage conversation on issues of eviction, leaving, notions of home and homeland, belonging, returning, journey, community and memory. We will discuss how these ideas speak to and help define ‘the postcolonial’ as a theory of learning about the world, and additionally, analyze race, gender, feminism, queerness, class, and other axes of identity that speak to power and privilege. The texts for this course travel through various parts of the globe (Jamaica, England, Laos, Ghana, US, Egypt, and Palestine) and will help us think about the connections between the particular and universal.

The Other Side of Paradise—Staceyann Chin
The Latehomecomers—Kao Kalia Yang
Out of Place—Edward Said
Lose Your Mother—Saidiya Hartman
A Border Passage from Cairo to America—Leila Ahmed

This quarter will be all about you—or rather, why “you” have become the symbol of an electronic democratic culture. How did this celebration of the individual come about, and how is it different from the past? What are the implications for thinking about “you” as the ultimate arbiter in matters of taste, social trends, and policy? And what is the relationship between “you,” as the vaunted savvy user of electronic media, and the United States’ military entanglements abroad? Topics to be covered: celebrity culture, spectacle, travel literature, and blogging. Expect to complete your own project about the place of “you” in American culture by quarter’s end. Some of the books we will be reading this quarter are: David Shields’ Remote; Miranda July’s Nobody Belongs Here More Than You; Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love; and Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).

This seminar offers a cross-section of some of the key works of, and debates surrounding, modernism in literature, film and painting. Some of the key issues to be discussed include: ekphrasis, the transparency/opacity of language, disillusionment and isolation, perspectivism, cultural instability, psychology and the self, spectatorship, questioning of traditional modes, representations of reality, pessimism/nihilism/existentialism and mass culture. We will cover the following writers, artists and movements:
Literature - Balzac, Huysmans, Stein, Kafka, Moore, Woolf, Williams, Dos Passos, Rhys, Miller
Art - Alfred Stieglitz circle, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, New York School
Film - Wiene, Keaton, Léger, Man Ray, Dreyer, Vertov, Buñuel, Chaplin, Chuck Jones

This course will include a reader, in-class film screenings as well as the following books:
Huysmans – Against the Grain
Dos Passos – Manhattan Transfer

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

Catalog Description: Consideration of psychological and formal elements basic to writing and related forms of nonverbal expression and the critical principles that apply to evaluation.

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

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Not your typical fiction workshop. Instead, a course in the first-person pronoun, using guided reading—models from fiction and nonfiction. Many short assignments. Grading criteria: Attendance, participation, contribution, effort, engagement, improvement. No book purchases; a course packet available from Ave Copy on University Way.

Homepage URL: www.davidshields.com

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

This is not a course for beginning fiction writers. Just as one should never attempt a marathon before training at shorter distances, it is not wise to attempt a novella or novel without extensive experience in short fiction. It is presumed, then, that students are familiar with the fundamentals of fiction writing, of dramatizing experience, and creating a 'fictional moment'. For although we will pay attention to all dimensions of fiction, emphasis will be placed on those problems which arise from length -- how one orders a longer sequence of events, how one manipulates a larger cast of characters, how one retains a sense of unity and identity within the diversity which characterizes most novels.

Text: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383 or 484

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 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 Mickey Spillane’s McCarthyite Mike Hammer and at the other, perhaps. By what Mike Davis describes the quasi-Marxist sensibilities of Hollywood noir directors such as Billy Wilder and Orson Welles.

This class will explore the complex articulations of aesthetics (‘style’) and politics in hardboiled and noir. If ‘style’ is always a market effect (a way of branding and selling cultural products), when and for whom does it function critically? To what extent does the dissemination of a style (the way the ‘look’ spreads), create possibilities for reappropriating and repurposing it – for example, possibilities for women writers to repurpose the expressly misogynist stylings 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 aesthetic? How do hardboiled and noir figure (aestheticize) the world of commodities and consumption? What relation to their own stylings do they cultivate in the literary (or cinematic) consumer?

I am still tinkering with the syllabus, but reading will likely include Dashiell Hammet, The Continental Op, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Dorothy Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse, Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers, Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only, and Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress, alongside a range 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 (Elizabeth Cowie, Frank Krutnik, Liam Kennedy, Greil Marcus, Manthia Diawara). Films may include Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1986), and Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995).

This course explores neo-slave narratives, contemporary literary texts that return to the historical question of American chattel slavery in order to re-imagine the violent destruction of life itself and to retell a story of dehumanization, accommodation, resistance, resignation, and revolt. In other words, this is a course about aesthetics and politics--a course that seeks to understand how literary production produces politics, responds to political contestation, and mobilizes the authority of genre to stake a claim in a wider social dialogue. This particular course takes as its central concern the production of neo-slave narratives as a response to the variegated history of racial capitalism. Over the course of the quarter we will explore what can and should be included in this genre, and how the genre functions. We will examine the relationship between slave narratives written in the 19th century to neo-slave narratives written in the 20th and 21st centuries, paying particular attention to how contemporary texts construct gendered, raced and sexualized understandings of both bondage and freedom. Narratives that imagine women’s experiences in slavery will be a central concern. Questions that will guide our inquiry throughout include: How and why have neo-slave narratives become a cultural preoccupation in recent decades? How does the representation of motherhood in bondage shed light on the past and the present? How can we understand the relationships between genre and gender, and gender and narrative form? How do neo-slave narratives meditate on life in the context of racial capitalism? How do they weigh in on the all-important question of what it means to be free? Reading for the course will a range of novels and a selection of theoretical and historical texts on literary genre, slavery, race and motherhood.

A seminar reading of two great novelists of the English eighteenth century. The vivid fictional “histories” Richardson and Fielding produced between 1740 and 1750 made those years the most brilliant and decisive decade in the history of the English novel. All this began with Richardson’s strangely ridiculous but compelling story of Pamela, which in turn called forth Fielding’s rude burlesque Shamela and then Joseph Andrews. The same pattern of collaborative antagonism and rivalry appeared in 1747 with Richardson’s great work Clarissa, followed then by Fielding’s Tom Jones. And there is our reading: a lot!—but I have a plan for covering the texts part of the time slowly and intensively, part of the time faster and more swimmingly. We read the whole of the amazing Clarissa: a serious undertaking but a powerfully absorbing experience once you surrender to it, like being abducted by aliens. We will give due consideration also to the critical topic of the so-called rise of the novel, as understood both then and now. Some points of emphasis from the social and cultural period history will be sex, marriage, class relations, and law. No background in the period literature assumed. Please feel free to get in touch with me for more information (tlock@u.washington.edu).

If there were a subtitle to this course, it might very well have been “The Experimental Generation.” with a double meaning to the word generation. For it refers not only to the historical placement of the poets we shall be studying, but also to the persistence of that history, the presentness of the past—T. S. Eliot’s definition of the currency of “tradition”—its generative effect. The poets in question are now canonical, with the tradition itself having been under suspicion, as it was then, differentially, for some of them. Whatever their differences, however, poetry was restless and innovative, as a matter of principle. And there is very little on the scene today, surely not in literature, that is in any way similarly destabilizing, refractory, despite the rhetoric of decentering or subversion that is the promissory note, a virtual reflex, of the critique of modernism.

We shall no doubt rehearse aspects of that critique while focusing on five major poets of high modernism—Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. What is curious about Pound, given his obsession with a recovery of the past, is his commitment to “make it new!”—and in that regard he was, with Williams, a major influence on an alternative tradition that eventually led to a postmodern poetics. As for Moore, she is now being read, through the spidery associations of her cunning quirkiness, as a precursor of “feminist objectivity” and “situated knowledge,” though she might have resisted any such identity politics. For Stevens, poetry is words about things that wouldn’t exist without the words, to which he brings an inexhaustible imagination. As to what makes poetry poetry (and does it matter?), that might be quite another question in our time, though there has been no discernible advance in how it’s written, when it feels like poetry (and thus seems to matter), over the varieties of expression generated by the poets we shall be studying.

Texts: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems; Ezra Pound, Selected Poems; Marianne Moore, Complete Poems; W. C. Williams, Selected Poems; Wallace Stevens, Palm at the End of the Mind.

This class focuses on women writers from the 1920s through the 1950s with an emphasis on the 30s. We read a novel a week. We may begin with an influential 1920s America writer, Anita Loos, and then move over to the superior country of England for the rest of the course. The point is two-fold: 1. to look at some under-read female writers like E. M. Delafield, Barbara Pym, and Gladys Mitchell and 2. to focus on the issues of privacy (we'll have section on fiction that takes the form of diaries) and forms of the public that attend it. We'll have a section on the country house novel as a genre, both in terms of how funny it can be (Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm) and how scary (Du Maurier's Rebecca); in keeping with the scary, or at least the pseudo-scary, we'll have a section on "Minds and Murder" where we stay at home with Miss Marple and go to the opera with Dame Bradley—the former a well-known spinster and the latter a forgotten (but not repressed) female psychoanalyst, two of the foremost fictional detectives of the so-called Golden Age of Mystery.

Students will write a series of brief response papers and a final paper. In total, there are three reasons you might take this class: 1. an interest in women's writing from an understudied period; 2. an interest in so-called middlebrow writing and a desire to interrogate the term; 3. an interest in what might be called the psychological and philosophical issues that go along with privacy: solipsism, sexuality, the construction of identity, I-Thou relations, or even, god help you, Wittgenstein's response to Russell on the issue of private language

Concurrent enrollment required in Education 401C.

English 498D/Education 401C will be taught by English faculty member and Community Literacy Program Director Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill in collaboration with College of Education Language Arts faculty member Karen Mikolasy. This linked pair of courses offers an opportunity for English Majors considering careers in education to gain crucial school-based experience, serves as a bridge between undergraduate and Teacher Education Program language arts curriculum, and gives UW students an opportunity to give back to the community as you complete your undergraduate degree.

In English 498 students will meet twice weekly on campus (MW 10:30-12:20) in a writing-intensive seminar focused on learning effective methods of working with public school students in language arts, exploring some central challenges and opportunities for public education including ethnic and linguistic diversity, and using writing to inquire into, develop and communicate your thinking about these issues. In EDUC 401, you will put what you learn on campus into action, volunteering (4-5 hours a week, on a schedule you arrange) in one of our partner public schools: Olympic Hills Elementary, Garfield High School or Shorecrest High School.

This senior capstone opportunity is offered in partnership with the Phoenix Project, a new initiative including the UW English Department, the UW College of Education, and Shoreline and Seattle Public Schools. The Phoenix Project is designed both to prepare future language arts teachers and to support K-12 language arts students.

Required texts: Coursepack; Diana Hacker A Pocket Style Manual, 5th edition

Caribbean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon was one of the 20th century’s foremost anti-colonial theorists. His mid-century writing addresses many of the issues that concern late 20th -century postcolonial studies, including racial subject-formation, the semantics of colonial space, the relation between aesthetic culture and national liberation, the function of capitalism in colonialism and vice versa, the uses and abuses of nationalism, the dynamics of gender in decolonization, the role of intellectuals and cosmopolitans in political movements, the cultural and material operations of neo-colonialism, and the socially transformative potential of sonic and visual technology. This course focuses on Fanon’s major posthumous works: /The Wretched of the Earth/, /A Dying Colonialism/, and Toward the African Revolution. We situate these works in the anti-colonial context of their production, and through rigorous close reading work towards a fuller understanding of Fanon’s political vision. We additionally consider a variety of ways that intellectuals have applied and debated his thought.